What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  "Yes, Mother Finbar, but I had to go to the bathroom." (Not true.)

  "On the second floorPr She was getting shrill. "What were you doing on the second jloor?"

  "I don't know, just looking around. I made it up about the bathroom. I'm sorry." (I really was.)

  Back in Beverly Hills, when everyone in the house was sleeping I used to wander around and look at my family, sound asleep, and every once in a while, with my thumb, I'd very carefully open up somebody's eye, just for a second, to look at the eyeball in there.

  The nuns who weren't stationed in our dormitories slept (that they slept at all was itself an odd notion) in cloistered quarters behind a thick green curtain at the end of a long hallway. One evening, while they were in the chapel, I sneaked down the corridor and with my heart doing double time I slipped behind the curtain and continued down the hall. The first doorway on the left revealed an absolutely bare room, with just a bed and a dresser. Something caught my eye that froze me in my tracks: on the white bedspread lay a crown of thorns. Underneath that, I found a black satin bag, and inside the bag was a small whip. You don't forget a thing like that. I was out of there in a split second. I was careful whom I told. It took me a few days to organize guided tours, for the fee of one shilling a head. There was plenty of interest, but people were wary, and finally I only got one expedition off the ground. I was all business on that second trip behind the green door. Carme-lina and Barbara were scared but it was going well. The crown and whip naturally were a great success, and soon I was feeling loose and confident enough to expand the tour a little: we were just opening the first dresser drawer when

  from way down the corridor came the umnistakable clud of nun's shoes on the wooden floor, and the terrible swoosh and snap of long skirts and stiff, starched habits heading our way at a good clip. I dragged the girls behind the long drapes and slammed them flat against the window.

  "Feet!" I hissed. Three pairs of black shoes flipped sideways. We didn't breathe as the nun went about some errand of her own and left. When her sounds faded we scuttled out of there and I never went back.

  Despite our ambivalent feelings toward some of the nuns, we remained genuinely committed to our religion and intrigued by the lives of the saints. For penance, Nancy, Leslie, and I rubbed stinging nettles on our arms. We made rosary beads out of acorns, and our fingers bled with the effort, then I buried mine in the school garden because I thought it was impure to be so proud of them.

  It was no secret that I didn't want to be in the May Day ballet. The costumes were immodest, I felt, and the entire event would be mortifying. So when I twisted my ankle and a swelling the size of a ripe plum popped out, the Reverend Mother (crediting me with more than I deserved) decided I had done myself this injury to avoid being in the ballet. Although she was mistaken, the idea entranced me: it would have taken such courage, such conviction, it would have been almost heroic. I denied it of course, but not too vigorously, and when I was placed in solitary confinement for a week, even girls I didn't know all that well risked coming to see me; a couple of nuns visited too, and people brought me chocolate. The Reverend Mother refused to take me to a doctor despite the size and color of my foot and the fact that I couldn't put any weight on it for about a month. And she didn't get me a bandage or a crutch, and hopping hurt so I either had to crawl or Casey piggybacked me— but I got so much respect, it was worth it.

  In the summer of 1959, after the first year at boarding school, my family returned to County Wicklow. In the fall.

  Prudy and the rest of the family went back to California, while I stayed in Surrey. That second year I won the gymnastics badge, which gave me as big a thrill as any I'd ever known. When they announced my name, I remembered trembling on my feet, and the bored face of the doctor, way back in the polio wards.

  With some students and nuns I traveled to Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris, Geneva, and Rome; I got blessed by the Pope, went to Mass in the catacombs, and to the baths in Lourdes. I visited Pisa and Pompeii, where the jolt of seeing the twisted figures preserved in ash made me swallow my ring. But the most vivid memory of my travels that year was of a man who sat opposite me in the third-class compartment of an Italian train, trying to open a cheap bottle of wine bare-handed, tearing at the cap, and the bottle was covered slippery with blood.

  My school in England was a world I had come to understand and make my peace with. I'd made friends and had countless laughs, and I was grateful not to be home, where there were so many problems. I hoped my parents would let me stay until my graduation, two more years, but they felt it was time for me to return to California. I was grief-stricken at the prospect of losing so much, and panicked as I braced myself for yet another life—one for which I was completely unprepared.

  My brother Mike had been dead for two years when the family moved back to California into a smaller, less appealing house with no garden at all, at a much more modest address in Beverly Hills. My father had become morose, difficult, and demanding. He had not worked in over two years. He read the obituaries scrupulously, mournfully commenting "gone" at the passage of each acquaintance. He spoke often of his own death and stayed in his bedroom on the ground floor. My mother kept up a better front in the

  daytime—she even spoke of taking up painting, and set up an easel in a sunny alcove of her upstairs bedroom. But invariably after dinner she went to her room and the lights were out, but I knew she was not sleeping.

  There were no parties now. Only the Jesuits still came. I poured two fingers of straight scotch into flat glasses and brought one to my father and each priest, officially launching their evening. Then I sat unnoticed on the stairs outside the living room, listening to the philosophical dissertations that continued well into the night. The Jesuits are the intellectuals, the core and conscience of the Catholic Church. Those long nights of theological debates and raised voices triggered in me some early questions and conclusions about the difficulty of being: responsibility, God, love, loss, and my own place in the universe. When I grew tired I crept upstairs past my mother's dark room, where she lay weep-

  . It was impossible for me to communicate in any important sense with either of my parents, however much I longed to. A feeling of failure slowly settled around me. My brothers and sisters were now in trouble too. We had been through too much, too separately; and now in the isolation our grief had imposed on us, we could not reach one another.

  In California my contemporaries were driving cars, dating boys, drinking beer, wearing makeup, and they had obviously thought about their hair. They were smoking Marlboros, humming hits of the day, and they could probably find the right radio station blindfolded. I was lost. My old chums Sheila, Tisha, and Kristin were now beautiful, confident, and popular. I was none of these things. I tried to copy them, even their breezy American, slangy way of talking, but I didn't fool the boys from Stanford who were understandably put off by my anguished silences and pa-

  thetic attempts to communicate, and I could not successfully conceal my awful intensity. I missed my deeply rooted boardmg-school friendships, the mist-shrouded hills of Surrey, the stiU chapel, the spartan, spiritual, predictable life at my school. I missed the seriousness of that place. I immersed myself in books and confessed to my parents that I hoped to enter the convent. When they seemed disturbed by the idea, I resolved not to mention it again until after high school.

  In an effort to develop my social skills, and to help me meet some "nice boys," they sent me to Elisa Ryan's Dance Class. These were agonizing affairs—I knew no one, had no idea what to talk about, my accent seemed out of place, and even the right dress looked wrong on me. In one memorably cruel exercise, the girls were lined up against one long wall of the auditorium, while the aged Miss Ryan, attached to her microphone, moved around goading the boys into choosing a partner. In a state near paralysis, I watched my worst-case scenario unfold until I was one of the two unchosen girls facing a short, fat, stubborn-faced boy in a military uniform. At that point I fled the room, shot under t
he coat-check counter, dug out my white cardigan with the melancholy orchid still attached, and in a broken run got myself home. In our garage I sat on a gasoline can until 10:45 P.M.—coming-home time. My mother told me again how pretty I looked and asked if I'd had fun. I told her yes, and nothing more.

  Three months after my seventeenth birthday, in 1962, I graduated from high school, counting the days until I could get out of the house and back to school in England, where I had been happy. Given our money anxieties, I didn't know whether this would be possible; so when my parents agreed to let me go, I was overjoyed. I had by then abandoned thoughts of becoming a nun: now I hoped to become a pediatrician and work with children in Africa or Southeast Asia. I loved children, and I was drawn to the idea of help-

  ing them. Once this idea took root 1 was tremendously excited and eager to get started, but my grades had been inconsistent, and my education frequently disrupted. In need of extra credits to get into a good university and medical school, I returned to London for extra preparation for A-level exams.

  By the time I joined my mother for Christmas in New York, relations between my parents had shattered completely. In a humiliating role reversal, my proud and elegant father, with his monogrammed silk shirts and handmade shoes, was left in the house that nobody loved on North Roxbury Drive to preside over the children, while three thousand miles away, his wife worked to send money home. Her paychecks apparently were not enough, and their phone calls were brief and bitter.

  But my mother had entered a glittering new world. Her Broadway play. Never Too Late, was a smash hit and she was the toast of the town. After all the hard times it was great to see her riding high and so happy. Clutching her coattails, I was introduced to Manhattan: Broadway shows, backstage hobnobbing, stars every night crowding into my mother's dressing room, "Who's out there tonight?" Life didn't begin until after the show: there were parties, invitations, more parties, restaurants, pubs until all hours—heady stuff.

  We were staying at the Algonquin Hotel, and we didn't get up until late afternoon, then we ordered a rare steak and spinach and a potato and we went to the theater. Kirk Douglas was starrmg in One Flew Over the Cuckooes Nest across the street and he sometimes took us to dinner after the show. Often we ran into Brendan Behan, who was drinking hard and streaming strong, barely intelligible words, poetry, observations, stories, and advice. It was Brendan who bought me my very first drink, a brandy Alexander.

  Since the show was clearly going to be running for a

  long time, Mom rented an apartment in early 1963. I pretended not to notice that George Abbott, my mother's director, seemed to be takmg more than a professional interest in her. But when my father phoned in the early hours of a January night, I could not, could not tell him where she was. And later still, when the phone rang and rang and rang, I pulled the pillow tight around my ears.

  And when, in the hard light of day, we learned that my father had died that night of a heart attack with the phone in his hand, winds of nothmgness blew cold across my soul.

  There was a flatness to the day my father died, as my mother and I moved through the thick silence. She spoke briefly on the phone in a small strange voice. She took cottage cheese from the refrigerator and looked at it for a while, then put it back. In a brief exchange we agreed that, given the shortage of money, it was pointless for me to accompany her to California. He was, after all, dead. She packed a few things and went out the door.

  Again I was alone, lost in the swarming of memories: my father holding his head high in the sunlight, afternoons shared at the bookstore and trying to match his long stride along Beverly Drive, and John Donne, and the doubting and trusting of the deep dive beneath the waves, and his laughter, and Saturday barbecues and the hero's medals and Christmases and waiting in my mother's bed for the knife in my chest and the years of hopelessness and anger and despair, and the final phone call that rang and rang and rang. I couldn't answer it. Dad, I couldn't. And I thought of Mike too, and all the sorrowing from which we never emerged, and the disintegration of my family, and my helplessness in the face of these incomprehensible things; and the unutterable pain of being here on this earth.

  Ghapter four

  Now that our father was dead, the family's survival depended solely on our mother. She was employed, but she was fifty-two years old, her profession was far from reliable, and she had four children vounger than me to raise. Before Never Too Late she hadn't worked in years. "It was as if something died in me too," said my mother. "A moment before I'd been drunk with the euphoria of a big Broadway hit, and the next moment I was a lonely widow unable to live without tranquilizers. The only thing to do was get out there and keep working. John didn't leave any money. It was all a big struggle with lots of ups and downs and there were times when it was unbearably lonely."

  Except for Patrick, who joined my mother and me in New York, my younger brother Johnny, and sisters Prudence, Steffi, and Tisa stayed in California, supervised by our gentle housekeeper, Marcel. Mom, Patnck, and I moved into an unfurnished apartment on Fifty-ninth Street. We purchased three mattresses,

  three lamps, and three pots. I made a dressing table from an upside-down cardboard box, bought a mirror and some makeup, and began to look for an agent. It was no longer possible for me to return to school; it was time to help my family if I could, and at the very least I would pull my own weight.

  I gave myself four months, six at the most, to get an acting job. I had no confidence that anyone would ever want to hire me; on the other hand, I was seventeen years old with little education—and nothing to lose. If I failed I would try something else, and someday, hopefully, I would go back to school. In the meantime, I sat in on acting classes with Stella Adler, Herbert Berghof, and Wynn Handman, and I began making the rounds.

  My father always claimed he'd "never met a happy actress," and his disesteem for women in that profession was made clear to me in countless ways throughout my childhood. When I was fifteen, walking down Roxbury Drive with our dog Tuffy, a man jumped out of his car and pressed a card into my hand: he wanted me to screen-test for the movie Lolita. I said, Sure, and ran home to show my father the card, which he shredded into tiny pieces as he hit the roof. My success in school plays and a prize for reading from Our Town only reinforced his position. He hoped I would meet an English aristocrat and settle in London with chintz and china. Now, before he was cold in his grave, I was wearing makeup and looking for acting work, and thinking more than once how disappointed he would have been.

  A month after my father's death and just before my eighteenth birthday, I found myself in an elevator, headed ambivalently toward a party on the top floor of the St. Regis Hotel. When the doors opened to a crush of strangers, smoke, and noise, I stood twisting my beaded evening bag

  until the elevator emptied and the doors shut in front of me. Before I could even feel relief, a sound startled me; I whirled around to see, for the first time, a quite extraordinary-looking man.

  "Very good, very good," he chortled. I had never seen a mustache like his: several inches long, waxed and wire-thin, It sprang antenna-like from above his pursed lips into a jaunty curl at each tip. His eyes popped outrageously, and his black hair fell past the collar of a pm-striped morning coat under which glimmered a gold brocade vest. Gold too was the handle of his cane, which he raised slightly to say "Bonjour," with a short bow. Never mind that it was nine at night. "Good morning" was my reply.

  When the doors opened onto the lobby, the mustache-man suggested "Encore?" with an upward gesture of his cane, and, abandoning my foothold in the real world, I nodded. There were three or four more ascents, three or four brief studies of the party, and then my companion introduced himself.

  "I am Dali. Le divine Dali. I am completely crazy."

  So I knew where I stood when I joined Salvador Dali and his wife Gala for lunch the next day at Le Pavilion. He did not smoke or drink himself but ordered for me a fragrant liqueur called Mirabel, cautioning that it was "only for smell." />
  It was Dali's custom to visit New York each fall, where he stayed at the St. Regis Hotel until St Patrick's Day when, as he put it, "everything becoming too green," and he moved on to Pans. In New York City, Dali had accumulated an eclectic assortment of companions, including a beautiful hermaphrodite, a ballet dancer, a scientist, a woman who resembled George Washington, and a dapper little man who managed some aspect of the Dalis' affairs— el Capitan, as he was called—who had an accent, wore a uniform from no known place, and was usually accompanied by an ocelot.

  From then on we met daily, sometimes with Gala, more often without. We lunched on butterfly wings and toured New York City with the garbage collectors. Speakmg in a unique combination of French, Spanish, and a smattermg of English, Dali led me into the world of surrealism, cutting loose my thoughts and throwing the walls from my mind. People have said that I was looking for a father. I don't know about that. Certainly I was looking for guidance—I had lost my bearings in what seemed a sea of senselessness. But Dali had long ago begun his celebration of absurdity and he embraced the part of me that was wildest and most frightening; he embraced the emptiness and the chaos, and the meaninglessness and nonsensicalness of the world; and his lawless interpretations transcended structure and illuminated another order that had its own shining, untrampled significance. "We are at the heart of a labyrinth and we can find our way while becoming labyrinths ourselves," he told me.

  In a single, unfurnished room of the hotel, Dali kept a large, beautiful, silver helium balloon that he visited at various times during the day, noting and delighting in its autonomous, barely perceptible movements. "I am penetrating more and more into the compressed magic of the universe," Dali said.

  When the first three-dimensional photographs emerged, Dali was as excited as a child. He carried one in his pocket to scrutinize and show to any passing stranger, and when he noted a relationship between the photograph and a streaked fabric called moire, a swatch joined the photograph.