Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  The movie, Falling from Grace, was a semiautobiographical vehicle for Mellencamp: he was playing a rock star named Bud Parks who brings his wife and child back to his hometown for his father’s eightieth birthday. While he’s there, he ends up having an affair with his high school sweetheart. When I heard the plot, I assumed I’d be playing the girl from high school, but in fact they wanted me for the wife, Alice. When I read the script, I was in: it was Larry McMurtry through and through, which meant that it was smart and sharp and emotionally complicated. Alice seemed like a great role: she and Bud were genuinely in love, but he was also being pulled back into his past in ways he couldn’t control. Characters were flawed without being unsympathetic.

  John and I met at someone’s huge house. He hadn’t directed a movie before, so he wasn’t on stable footing, and his attitude was pitched halfway between insecurity and arrogance. “Are you right for this part?” he asked me.

  “I think so,” I said. I felt like I was perfect for it, but I didn’t want to seem overeager. “Hold on,” I said. “Let me call home and make sure my babies are okay. The nanny has been having trouble feeding them.”

  “Your babies?” he said. He frowned. “Are you interested in this?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But I want to make sure that I understand exactly how it’s going to work.”

  “I’m not sure how checking in on your nanny helps with that,” he said.

  We talked more, and he opened up a bit. He planned on filming the movie in Indiana—in fact, in Seymour, the town where he had grown up. “We want it to feel almost like a documentary,” he said. “Or at least to feel like it isn’t some Hollywood idea of Indiana.”

  “That’s what appeals to me,” I said. “I love small towns. I grew up in one too. And I especially like the idea of taking something so artificial, like a movie, and putting it in a place that’s so genuine.”

  “Okay,” he said, standing suddenly. I was struck by how short he was: taller than Woody Allen, but only by a bit. “We’ll talk soon.” I expected him to give me a phone number, either his or an assistant’s, but before I knew it, I was out the door.

  I spent several days worried. Had I seemed too distant? Maybe I had talked too much about other movies and not concentrated enough on his. Or was he bothered by the height difference? Finally, John got in touch with me and told me that he’d like me to be in the movie.

  I had told John that I loved small towns, but even that didn’t prepare me for how I felt arriving in Seymour. The streets were wide and unlined, and you could look down them and see for miles. The land was flat and the sky was huge. I rented a cookie-cutter house in a cookie-cutter neighborhood with cookie-cutter furniture, including a bulky couch that smelled like a new car. Something about the facelessness of the place comforted me immensely. I had a bicycle with a baby carrier behind me, and on days when I wasn’t working, I took the girls into town and we shopped for antique quilts and swing sets. Stephen was still in New York, still extricating himself from the restaurant business.

  Even when the girls weren’t with me, I biked everywhere I could. I loved to feel the burn in my legs after a long day. If I had been a healthy eater after Dree was born, after Langley I went back to my preoccupation with weight and body image. After Delirious, I pledged to myself that I was going to get as thin as possible. I lived on pots of black coffee, Folgers mostly, because that was all they had in Seymour. It wasn’t gourmet, but I came to love the dirty-water taste. As for food, it was a breakfast of oatmeal that I made the night before and cooled in the refrigerator, or steamed vegetables. I ate according to rules and obsessions, and the result was that I ended up skinner than ever, and proud of it. When I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was achieving again: down to fighting weight, away from the madness of Hollywood, and starring in a movie with a rock star.

  And John was quite a rock star. He was royalty in Seymour, of course, but also a local boy. Since we were playing husband and wife, he thought we needed to spend days together away from the set. He picked me up from my house on his motorcycle, and we rode around for hours, zipping along the edges of farms, stopping in small diners where he sopped up gravy with biscuits and I drank more black coffee. On set, we had great chemistry. And even on days when I wasn’t in scenes, he would ask me for my opinion on framing a shot or adding a piece of dialogue.

  After about a week, I found myself thinking about him when he wasn’t around. I may have even dreamed about his motorcycle. One day, as I was hitching the baby carrier to my bicycle, it hit me: I was falling in love. The movie was so free of problems that it took me back to a time when my opinion was valued and I could get as close as I wanted to the heart of the creative process. And I felt that kind of thing distinctly lacking in my dealings with Stephen. When I talked to him on the phone, in fact, I would test him, interject my opinion about the restaurant to see how he would take it. He didn’t take it well.

  During the third week of shooting, John and I had to do a scene in which we were walking somewhere. It was simple, just fake husband and wife, hand in hand. It was nothing that I would have thought twice about. But the whole time we shot, I was vibrating with excitement. During a break, he took me to a corner of the set and kissed me, and I kissed him back. The next morning, when he picked me up on his motorcycle at the house, he was a little cold. Uh-oh, I thought. Is this going to be the end of my fantasy romance?

  But it was only the beginning. He would stop the motorcycle out in farmland and pull me to him and kiss me more. During scenes, he would botch a line, and then, when everyone was setting up the next take, wink at me. It didn’t get especially physical—there was nothing that would have been out of place in a high school—but the secrecy made it as exciting as if it were a full-blown affair.

  Stephen was scheduled to make his first visit to Indiana. As that weekend approached, I decided that I needed to come clean. I was going to tell him everything. I was going to tell him that I was in love with John. I was going to tell him that I wasn’t sure our marriage could survive. I was going to tell him that I didn’t know what to do, but that I had to be honest about what I was feeling.

  And so, that first afternoon of his trip, I brewed a big pot of Folgers and sat on the new-car couch and prayed that the girls would wake up from their naps so that I could avoid the conversation we were about to have. But they slept soundly. “Stephen,” I said.

  “What?” He looked at me. My expression must have been panicked. “What’s the matt —”

  I didn’t even let him finish. “I’m in love with John,” I said. “We’ve gotten very close during the shoot, and we even kissed a few times. I need to tell you before I cross a more serious line.”

  I was looking at Stephen the whole time, but I couldn’t see his face: it was like a blind spot in my field of vision. I couldn’t bear to think that I was hurting him. When I was done, I waited. The next thing I heard was the sound of him laughing. Was that good news? Maybe he understood something I didn’t. He was older, after all. Then his face came into focus. It was ashen and angry. He wasn’t saying a word. It didn’t seem like good news anymore. Finally, he spoke. “You made a mistake,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But…”

  This time he interrupted me. “You should have fucked him and not said a word to me. That way you would have just gotten over it.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I think it’s real.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t understand. This is what happens in a marriage. Sometimes you get your head turned, and you let it play out because you know deep down it’s not real.” He paused.

  I couldn’t sleep at all that night. I didn’t like the idea that getting close to someone else might just be a passing thing, or that the marriage I was committed to was a sham. It all seemed dirty and depressing and useless.

  In the morning, Stephen flew back to New York. “We’ll deal with this after the movie,” he said. “You do what you need to do.”

/>   I cried on the way back from the airport. But then I started to think about the possibility of my own freedom. I had confessed my feelings for John. Stephen had basically given me permission to act on them. Maybe that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I made sure I looked good, and I went to set.

  That day, though, something was off. I was rushing things.

  I started to see that I had created a work fantasy. John was hugely talented. He was nice to me. I think he genuinely connected with me. But he was a rock star, which meant that he wasn’t going to change his life for me. When the movie ended, I wasn’t going to end up special to him. If I wanted to be with him, it would be as a supporting player.

  I tried. I winked at him and smiled when he winked back. But I couldn’t find the exhilaration of those earlier weeks. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I didn’t see someone who was energized or in love. All I saw was a scared, lonely woman who had jeopardized the safety of her marriage for a pointless fling that it turned out she didn’t even want.

  I called Stephen and asked him to fly back. I told him that I regretted saying anything, and that the situation with John was probably more about my own issues.

  I had the day off, so we went to a movie. We didn’t really watch it: we stared across the armrests at each other. When it was over, we sat in the empty theater for an hour, and I apologized for my behavior.

  “I’ll still take care of you,” he said.

  I squeezed his arm.

  “But listen,” he said. “It’s like I said. You should have just fucked him and not said anything.”

  I was confused.

  Stephen slid his arm away from my hand. “That’s what I did.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I’ve been seeing someone else for a few months,” he said. “I have feelings for her, but I have stronger feelings for you. That’s the way it goes. Other things fall away, and the marriage lasts.”

  I gripped the armrests. Was that why he had been so cold with me? When he was making business calls at night, was he calling her?

  The next day, when I went to work, I couldn’t look at things the same way. I felt like I was living the story of the film. Alice, my character, had a husband who cheated because he needed to feel a jolt of life apart from the marriage that nurtured but no longer excited him. Every scene with John was suddenly leaden and sad. In New York, Stephen and I were careful to be kind. We acknowledged that we had been bruised by circumstance, and that made us tender—and tender toward each other. But it hurts to step carefully in your own home.

  * * *

  “I JUST WANT SOMEONE I can have a decent conversation with,” Sam Baldwin said. “A conversation that doesn’t end in weepy tears over some movie.”

  He was talking about me. I knew it. I sobbed and dabbed under my eyes with a Kleenex.

  Sam Baldwin, of course, was Tom Hanks—or rather, the role that Tom Hanks was playing in Sleepless in Seattle. He was with me constantly in the period after Falling From Grace. At home in New York, in a marriage whose fault lines had been violently exposed, I did what any woman would do in my situation—I watched romantic comedies. That was a glory period for the genre: Ghost, Pretty Woman, The Bodyguard, Four Weddings and a Funeral. I didn’t go to the theater. It was a private, intimate experience. If there was a romantic comedy on TV, I would watch it from start to finish. I would go to the video store and rent a stack of them. And then I would sit down on the couch and cry the entire time. Sometimes, Stephen would be in the kitchen, pouring himself a drink. Sometimes, he’d be in the bedroom, sleeping. But sometimes he’d be right beside me, watching the same movie, the two of us a foot apart but also a world apart.

  My relationship with romantic comedies was complicated. On the one hand, I got lost in them: the improbable coincidences, the swelling music, the way the hand of fate brought two hearts together. Was that what I had felt with John on the motorcycle? I reached for another Kleenex. But just as the plot drew me in, the casting pushed me out. It seemed like every actress in the world who was within a decade of my age got a starring role in a major romantic comedy. Michelle Pfeiffer did. Julia Roberts did. Meg Ryan did. In my mind, I got the lead in every movie I watched, but nobody ever called. I had been up for the lead in About Last Night, but it had gone to Demi Moore instead and launched her career.

  I was drifting in Hollywood, and I knew it. In the early nineties, there was a script going around town about a policeman who got involved in a destructive sexual relationship with a murder suspect. It found its way to Paul Verhoeven, who was best known in the United States for big-budget action movies like Total Recall and Robocop but who had started off his career in the Netherlands as a director of adult thrillers. The movie, which was called Basic Instinct, was going to be a return to Verhoeven’s roots.

  Verhoeven already had his leading man, Michael Douglas, and the two of them were deciding who would play the murder suspect. They auditioned a bunch of actresses, including me. I knew I could play the role—and, furthermore, it was exactly the kind of part that made sense for my career. It would put me firmly into adult territory and show that I could hold my ground in a darker, more dangerous film.

  Michael, apparently, was impressed with my audition and tried to convince Paul to cast me. Paul was less certain. He wanted an actress named Sharon Stone, who had done mostly television up until that point.

  The two of them went back and forth on casting. For days, I’d hear nothing, and then the Hollywood rumor mill would start up again, and I’d get calls from people in the business congratulating me on landing the part. And then, all of a sudden, Sharon was cast. I heard all kinds of things, none verifiable: that she had seduced Michael, that she had seduced Paul, that she had seduced someone at the studio. On the one hand, that kind of gossip is insulting. Is that the only way that women can get parts? On the other hand, those kinds of things sometimes happen, especially when the prize is a career-defining role.

  I was devastated when I lost out on the part. I went down that road in my mind for so many years. People tried to console me, especially after the movie came out. “You wouldn’t want to do that scene,” they would say. “The one where she uncrosses her legs. You’re a nice girl.” I would smile and nod quickly and go off on my own where I could fume. Acting wasn’t about being a nice girl. It was about taking risks, pushing yourself in the business, finding out more about your depths and limits. Sharon got the opportunity, and she ran with it. More important, it helped her become better at her job. When I saw the movie, I was a little critical of her performance. I didn’t think she was a great actress. But Basic Instinct gave her the chance to work with the directors of her choice, to pick the best scripts—and over the years, she became not only a movie star but a good actress. The woman who starred in Casino was worlds away from the woman who starred in Basic Instinct. Luck can create skill.

  * * *

  AND THEN, SOME LUCK OF MY OWN: “I have a TV project you might be interested in.” In the early eighties, when I heard those words, I passed on The Executioner’s Song. In the early nineties, I heard those words and went to work for Steven Bochco.

  Bochco was one of the real heavyweights in the industry—he had started as a story editor on many of the seventies’ cop shows that my mom and I loved to watch and went on to create Hill Street Blues. He was executive producing a courtroom drama about Manhattan divorce lawyers called Civil Wars. My character on the show, Sydney Guilford, was one of two hotshot divorce lawyers; the other one, Charlie Howell, was played by Peter Onorati, a handsome TV actor who had briefly been a professional football player.

  “This will be a much better situation,” I told Stephen after one of the first weeks on set. “The show shoots at Fox Studios right over here. It’s not like a movie set at all. I can go to work and then come right back here to be with you and the girls.”

  And yet, the television series was the hardest work I had ever done. For starters, there was the simple fact of produ
ction demands. We had to get a show done each week, which meant long hours every day and then, when time started to run out, truly horrendous hours. Sometimes we put in twenty-hour days. The set was like visiting a new country: or, more to the point, a new kind of country. Series sets provided a stable family, the one that was always there. Week after week, I saw the same faces, had the same deadlines, sat in the same meetings.

  Slowly but surely, I remade myself in the image of television. I became more efficient as an actress, more aware of schedules and process. Again, I was a good student. Dree and Langley were still babies, and they would come to the set a handful of times during the week, but mostly they would have to wait until the weekend. Stephen preferred the television-star version of me. I was around more, for him and for the kids. And I was also suddenly paying the bills, which was something that he loved.

  * * *

  THE SHOW WAS A SUCCESS, though not a huge one. It was on the air for two years and was peacefully put out to pasture. But I stayed on the small screen long enough to kiss Roseanne.

  When I try to reconstruct how I got the guest spot on Roseanne, I can’t. Maybe the offer came through John Goodman. I had worked with him on a play in Dallas right after Star 80, and we had gotten along great, and then he had rocketed to stardom. Maybe it was Bruce Helford, the show’s executive producer and writer. Maybe it was Roseanne Barr herself, flipping channels one night and running across a showing of Personal Best. Hey, she might have thought, that lady can really play a lesbian like nobody’s business.

  Whoever thought of me, I want to thank them. It was one of the easiest jobs in the world. All I had to do was play Sharon, the girlfriend of Sandra Bernhard’s character, and kiss Roseanne’s character in a gay bar. Done and done. I didn’t think much of it, other than it was fun and that Roseanne was lovely to work with. She was with Tom Arnold at the time, and that meant that even if you were just a guest star in the show, you could hear them screaming at the tops of their lungs. But she was a pleasure in every respect: smart and aware of others and determined not to make formulaic garbage in a medium full of it.