Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  Finally, the translator let us know that the audience was drawing to a close. At that point, the Dalai Lama leaned toward me and put his hand on my hand. He looked me directly in the eyes. “You’re okay,” he said. That was all he said, but as he spoke I realized it was all I needed to hear. After all those years of searching, after all the attempts to find myself, one of the wisest men in the world was telling me that the search itself was unnecessary.

  * * *

  “I NEED THIS TO BE DONE,” I said. We were in the front hallway of our house, Stephen and I, and I was suddenly disoriented. I couldn’t remember if we were coming or going. All I knew was that I wanted out.

  Stephen’s response was to book us into a Tony Robbins seminar. It was the most advanced program in the entire Tony Robbins arsenal: the six-day Date With Destiny weekend in Palm Springs. “Let’s go to this before we make any decision,” he said. “It’ll help us think our way through things.”

  I didn’t have much experience with Tony Robbins—he was one of the few gurus I hadn’t encountered. I knew a little bit about Date With Destiny from friends: I knew that they divided the five thousand or so participants into teams, maybe twenty-five in all, and that each of those teams participated in a series of exercises designed to maximize achievement and fulfillment. I was terrified that somehow the event would become a referendum on my marriage. I even went so far as to draft a letter to the seminar organizers: “I’m going to attend,” I wrote, “but please don’t make this about reuniting me with my husband.”

  From the first moment we were assigned to a team, I had an uneasy feeling. There was a diagnostic stage, and it was determined that I was “significance-driven” while Stephen was all about love. Everyone else on the team nodded.

  I returned from the Date With Destiny weekend worse than when I had gone. The jury had returned with their verdict, and I had been convicted. The problems in the marriage were my fault. I was the one who had made things untenable. The whole ride home, I apologized to Stephen. And his reaction only made things worse: he just accepted my apology silently. It was like he was finally hearing the things he had wanted to hear for years.

  I gave it another year. It seemed like a lifetime. We went back to therapy. I kept a journal. I tried, in every conversation, not to be too significance-driven. And then, one day, in the front hall of our house again, I turned to Stephen and said what I had said a year before. But this time I meant it. “I’m done,” I said. “For real. I just can’t do this anymore. Maybe I am the problem, but I can’t work it out. It’s beyond me. I’m leaving.”

  Stephen held up his hand. “If you do this, there’s no turning back.”

  I looked at the man I had lived with for twenty-five years, the man who had been by my side for my mother’s death, my sister’s death, my father’s death, the man who I had seen at night and in the morning and in bed and in the hospital for our daughters’ births and in the hospital again for his surgery. I tried not to blink, because I was taking it all in before I gave it all back. “That’s right,” I said.

  Dree was twenty, still studying dance in New York. Langley was a few days away from turning eighteen. We were living in Santa Monica, staying at a house that was way too expensive for the money we were bringing in. We only had a month or two left on the lease, so Stephen and I stayed together for a few weeks—him in the guest room, me in the master bedroom. Dree supported the decision, of a fashion: “I thought you guys should have gotten divorced years ago,” she said. Langley was devastated. I sat on her bed and tried to comfort her. “I totally understand,” I said. “I hope that someday you forgive me. I hope that someday you understand.”

  After a few weeks, Stephen got an apartment with Langley, and I found a little house in Topanga. There was a phase when Dree got angry at Stephen, and the two of them passed through a period of estrangement. There was a period where Langley and Stephen bonded and I was briefly the villain.

  One of my first days in Topanga, I went out to the car and sat in the driver’s seat. I felt both hollow and full, as if someone had pulled all of my insides out and filled the space back in with a substance I couldn’t yet identify. When I backed the car down the driveway, I checked the rearview mirror and saw only my own face. There was no one else in the car. Nobody was going to tell me where to go or what to do. Nobody was going to check in on me every hour. And it wasn’t just that no one was calling for the next hour, or the hour after that: no one would check in on me in that way ever again. It was just time in the driveway, just me and my time, not owned by anyone, not owed to anyone.

  I was so excited. Everything I did had a sharp outline. I went to a yoga class and the grocery store. I went to a restaurant by myself. and I loved it. When I was leaving the restaurant, I saw a woman on crutches moving slowly across the parking lot. I fantasized that she would cast them aside and walk. I remembered when my mother broke her leg. Forty years of habit dissolved. I went back to the car and sat in the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  IN WASHINGTON, a wineglass sailed past my face.

  When Stephen and I split up, I set aside all the unhealthy patterns that had bedeviled me for decades. I vowed that I wouldn’t feel the need to accommodate other people and suppress my own desires. I vowed that I wouldn’t romanticize silent and moody types. I vowed that I wouldn’t get into another relationship too quickly.

  In the wake of leaving my marriage, I was good about it. I had a close friend who was also a yoga teacher, and she and I hiked almost every day for months. She had more experience with men—dating, sex, arguing—and she spoke while I listened. I had also spent time in a women’s group, and while I was heading toward my breakup it had been a source of solace, but afterward I started to chafe a bit. The group environment frustrated me. It worked against the idea I had that I needed to be on my own.

  And then, four months later, I worked against that idea too. I started dating a man I met through mutual friends. He was a famous writer, wealthy and decorated. He knew everyone in the political world. He was very smart, had well-formed opinions on everything, and seemed to want to listen to my opinions too. I’m sure that dating a Hemingway was a factor for him. And most important, he was attracted to me—for the first time in years, I felt desirable again.

  One morning, we woke up, had breakfast, and then I went to the bathroom to wash my face. I caught sight of my face in the mirror. I looked good. I looked happy. Maybe I got it right this time, I thought. Maybe we’ll get married. My face frowned before my brain could catch up to it. It was my twenty-two-year-old self, sneaking out, filled with naïve optimism, incapable of wisdom or self-protection.

  When I slowed down and took a more honest look at the relationship, I saw that my new boyfriend had some issues. He wasn’t a terrible person, but he had a strange set of criticisms: he told me that I laughed too often and that it didn’t sound authentic. He had stretches when he was alone and cold, hard to reach and not very rewarding once you reached him. The more I looked, the more I saw that he was Stephen all over again: distant, brooding, never really present in the way I needed, uninterested in really challenging me or engaging with me. Once I saw the problem, it didn’t take me very long to walk away from it. We started to fight. I made fewer and fewer concessions. When I said good-bye to him, we were in DC. He was jumping rope, badly, in a hotel room, and I laughed at him. That wounded him so deeply that he threw a glass at me. It just missed. “I think I’m going,” I said.

  When I got back to California, I wrote him a cordial letter. He wasn’t to blame anymore than I was. I thanked him for the time we had spent together but was clear about the fact that we would never see each other again. And so it was back to hiking with my friend, and back to hearing about her sexual experiences and her romantic theories.

  One day, she told me that she had a new boyfriend, a guy who had come to see her teach a yoga class and subsequently pursued her. “We actually met years ago on a river trip,” she said, “but at the time we were just
friends. He’s like an extreme macho form of you.”

  “Meaning what?” I said. I wasn’t offended—just curious. What did that mean to her?

  “You know,” she said. “Attractive, strong, into fitness and mindful living. You should meet him.”

  I picked her up and we went to meet her new boyfriend at a trail in the Santa Monica mountains. We got to the site, and he was already there, sitting in a truck with a custom MTNMN license plate, for “mountain man.” He hopped out of the truck and came to greet us. “Mariel,” my friend said, “this is Bobby Bobby, Mariel.”

  We hiked. Bobby was very protective of my friend: she was the least experienced hiker, and he wanted to make sure that she could handle it. At some point, she started to lag a bit, and the two of us started talking. The conversation began with mountains—it seemed like the obvious choice—and wandered through a variety of topics: food, meditation, medication, modern living, mindful living. When he started to ask about my parents and my marriage, it didn’t feel intrusive at all, even though he was still a total stranger. My friend had caught up with us at that point, and the discussion shifted into the relative merits of city and country. “I’m not sure I could live anywhere other than a city,” she said. “I need that kind of environment. I need to be surrounded by ideas.” I loved cities, but I needed to spend time away from them too, to move more deeply into the natural world and discover my own thoughts. Other people’s ideas could seem like a static museum or even a prison if you weren’t connecting with your own. I was starting to say something to that effect when I noticed that Bobby was making the same point.

  A few weeks later, Bobby called and asked if he could take me climbing. “Sure,” I said, remembering the rock by the lake in Ketchum. But real climbing was far more arduous, which I proved by falling and coming out muddy and soaked. When I finally got the hang of it, Bobby beamed at me, and a moment of electricity passed between us. I was definitely interested in him, but he was already spoken for, so we became friends instead. Over the next few months, we talked on the telephone, hung out occasionally, always finding our way into long conversations about things I had never discussed with a man: ethics, philosophy, my family’s sometimes difficult history. When those moments of electricity recurred, I used them to power the discussions.

  One day my friend called me. “We broke up,” she said.

  “You and Bobby?” I tried not to sound too interested.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I liked him fine, but it wasn’t working out the way I wanted.” I waited two weeks and then invited Bobby to visit me in Idaho. We both knew that he wouldn’t be making the trip as a friend. It was June 2009, and we have been together ever since.

  * * *

  The November after we met, Bobby took me up to Ojai for my birthday. The first place we went to after the drive was a big health-food store, and we walked through all the aisles, filling up our shopping cart. The second place we went to was a hiking area; we climbed and ate. The day wasn’t elaborate. There was no surprise party and no expensive presents. But when we got back in the car, I turned to him suddenly. “This was the best birthday I’ve ever had,” I said.

  “I know what you like,” he said.

  I blinked back tears—of joy, of relief. It was so simple but so true. In my whole life, I had never felt that clean connection between the events around me and my own inner desires. In many—maybe even most—cases, it was my own fault. Since childhood, when I had tiptoed downstairs to clean up evidence of parental discord, I had spent much of my time and energy doing what I thought would make situations better. Those same habits had carried through into my marriage. I tried to keep the peace, did my best to limit tension, and everyone around me let me. This didn’t mean that they were bad people, only that they had decided that it was in their interests to encourage that part of my personality. Suddenly, with Bobby, I could do what I wanted, and—more important—I could understand why it was my obligation to figure out exactly what that was. I started to investigate every aspect of my life. I kept more organized journal notes. I retraced my steps through life, trying to look more honestly at the events of my childhood. I sketched out a broad philosophy of exercise, diet, and nontraditional spirituality. For the first time in my life, I truly began to take control of my food and body image issues. I wasn’t finished with them, by any means—I don’t know if I’ll ever be finished with them—but I understood them as part of a broader set of issues.

  The effort paid off when Bobby and I cowrote a book called Running with Nature: Stepping Into the Life You Were Meant to Live. It was a self-help book, with some of the limits of the genre, but it gave me a newfound appreciation for my own voice. When I saw my words on the page, I knew how far I had come since those days when a confused and frightened little girl pressed herself into the sheets of her bed and tried to become invisible. It wasn’t that Bobby was the solution to my problems so much as that he came along at a time when I was ready to be the solution to my own problems.

  21

  THE LIFE IN THE MOVIE

  WHEN MY MANAGER, Tracy, called to tell me about the Emmy nomination, I was clearer on the concept than I had been when my agent called me about the Oscar nomination thirty-five years before. “Thanks,” I said, and went to tell Bobby the news. This time, I was nominated not as an actress but as a producer, for a movie about my family I had made with the documentarian Barbara Kopple.

  For years, I had resisted the idea of a film about my family. It seemed too difficult, too intrusive, with too much risk of misrepresenting those who could no longer speak for themselves. My friend Lisa disagreed. And Lisa, a round-faced blonde who could have been a fourth Hemingway sister, wasn’t just speaking as a friend—she worked for Oprah Winfrey, first for Oprah’s talk show and then for the OWN Network, and her job involved finding compelling personal narratives to share with Oprah’s audience. “There are so many issues in your family, from suicide to mental illness to alcoholism,” Lisa said. “Think of how many people can relate to at least some part of your story.”

  I demurred. Lisa persisted. Eventually, she did more than persist. “Barbara Kopple is interested,” she said.

  That changed everything. Barbara, of course, was one of the country’s premier documentarians; her work had covered everything from complex socioeconomics (Harlan County U.S.A., about a Kentucky miners’ strike) to celebrity portraiture (Wild Man Blues, one of the most intimate and respectful looks at Woody Allen), winning her a pair of Oscars in the process. I agreed to meet with her in person. Barbara was clear about her interest in my story without being aggressive. “These are subjects that are universal,” she said. “But the particulars of your story give people a foothold and a way of understanding them.” Barbara addressed the concerns I raised and—even more important—the concerns I was afraid to raise. “You’ll be safe,” she told me. “We’ll make this together. This is our film.” Whether by luck or by design, she had directly addressed my two most pressing anxieties: first, that I wouldn’t be protected during the process; second, that my ideas wouldn’t be valued. I went home from the meeting, reread some of my journal entries, and meditated on the process of making a film. I don’t even think I spoke to Bobby about it immediately. I wanted to make sure that the overall idea of documenting my family made sense, psychologically and emotionally. Would reliving the difficult events of my childhood be traumatic or liberating? Had I come to terms, in any real way, with Muffet’s mental illness, with my father’s alcoholism, with my mother’s cancer, with Margaux’s suicide? I didn’t know for certain, but the work I had done on myself in the final years of my marriage and my first years with Bobby were optimistic signs. I could start stories about my past, in my own mind, without a sudden urge to take flight. I was also thinking of the film as a dress rehearsal for an autobiographical project over which I would have full control: in the back of my mind, the notion of a book-length memoir was starting to take shape. I called Barbara. “I’m in,” I said.

  Making th
e documentary, Running from Crazy, was the hardest thing I had ever done. It was exhilarating but also exhausting, in part because it precisely upended everything I knew about movies. As a young actress, film sets provided me with the stable family I didn’t have at home. My relationships with other actors and crew members were temporary, of course, but that was part of the appeal—just as people got more complicated or difficult, the shoot was over. Easy. Running from Crazy was the opposite. Barbara and I agreed that to tell the story fully, my actual family members, including my daughters and my ex-husband, should be interviewed. Langley agreed to participate in the project immediately; she was excited, if a little guarded. Dree was a harder sell. One of the film’s main focuses would be Margaux’s suicide, and Dree felt protective of her aunt. They were both models, both headstrong and confrontational. I had to convince her that the movie wouldn’t betray Margaux’s memory—which meant, of course, that I had to believe it myself.

  The film also presented a nearly impossible acting challenge. For decades, I had appeared in movies playing characters. I knew how to do that: I read the script, found some aspect of the character I could identify with, learned my lines, connected with the camera. Here, I was supposed to play myself, and I wasn’t sure what that involved. On the surface, it seemed simple—just tell the truth—but what did that really mean? The Mariel in the movie was preoccupied with her family’s struggles and her struggles with those struggles, and though those were things I had thought about for years, they were only one aspect of my life. Pushing them to the foreground was inherently artificial. And how did you present a natural version of yourself to the camera, anyway? Did you exaggerate your mannerisms? Did you eliminate them? Did you enter some Buddhist state where you dissolved your traditional sense of self and trusted the camera to rediscover it?