When, the following year, I was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the role I’d agreed to play so reluctantly, it was an overwhelming reward. My father would have been so proud, I thought; but more important, so was I.
Slowly I was becoming more satisfied with myself. The process of settling, of eliminating, of taking responsibility that I’d begun at thirty was continuing and paying off. Increasingly I had felt I was the embodiment of the dilettante—jack-of-all-trades, master of none; and I finally decided to do something about it. To begin, I shed those things I hadn’t the discipline to do seriously.
First to go was photography. It was a perfect example of the half-measures I took, of the things I would no longer do if I wasn’t willing to make them count. It was not that I didn’t love photography; I did. But if I wasn’t going to make the commitment to master the profession, I had no business taking assignments I didn’t deserve. And so I put photography aside—except for occasions with friends and family, snaps without professional aspirations—until the time when I could return to it and devote to it the attention it required.
I became clearer about carrying out my professional commitments. My attitude about a long-term endorsement contract for Cie perfume—once that of a put-upon artiste—was now one of gratitude for continued creative participation and a salary that afforded me greater discrimination in my choice of films.
One of the first to gauge my growing up was Pat Kingsley, who had been my press agent since I was twenty-one. She was a maverick in the profession—a publicist with principles, with politics, opinions and convictions. She was also a trusted and unflagging friend. As one who believed in me long before I did and who tried, for ten years, to protect me from myself in the press, she was especially relieved to witness my increasing professionalism, to see ambivalence replaced by appreciation. “You know, kiddo,” she said to me, in a compliment I could finally accept, “I always knew you’d come through.”
Most importantly, at thirty-two I began to study. I took classes in acting and script analysis and started—after fourteen films—to learn basic techniques. I vowed never to accept another shoddy movie for expedient reasons but to look for roles that involved taking risks. I was finally finding my way in films and I was finding it—as my father had always hoped—in comedy. It was he who had first urged me in this direction, perhaps contrasting the stiffness of my performances to my bawdy humor at home; perhaps because he saw me, like him, find freedom from self-consciousness through comedy; and perhaps because underneath our shared reserve were clowns eager to be called to play.
I had always wanted to do comedy, but with my “glacé perfection,” I was frozen solid in the “Ice Queen” category. Until Alan Pakula cast me in Starting Over, I was considered an unlikely candidate for comedy roles. But Starting Over wasn’t idly titled. Rich and Famous followed, in which I co-starred with Jacqueline Bisset. A witty, bitchy comedy about the warfare between two best friends, the script, by Gerald Ayres, was tailormade for the director, George Cukor—eighty-two and still the master of high-style comedies.
I played a Southern belle named Merry Noel: ambitious, overdressed, occasionally endearing, somewhere between Scarlett O’Hara and Eva Perón. Now, thanks to class, I knew how to break down and prepare a script; and this time I did my homework, stalking women on sidewalks and in department stores for inspiration, accosting strangers with quirky Southern accents, reading books about Southern women and by Southern women. By the time I was done, I knew her inside-out and under.
AT RIGHT: with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clay burgh in Starting Over
With Jackie Bisset during Rich and Famous
I loved every day of Rich and Famous and couldn’t wait each morning to get to the set. I loved the script, the work, my co-star and crew, and respected my director, whose constant refrain was “At a good clip!” Never had I felt such security, such confidence, such joy in my work in films. Much of this was the comfort I felt in comedy, in playing a well-drawn character role. A lot of it was Jacqueline. Hollywood wags who had predicted fireworks on a set that featured two female stars were abruptly brought up short, not having reckoned on Jackie’s generosity, her maternal instinct toward the cast, and her lack of competitiveness toward other women. We were in instant sympathy with each other: long typecast for our looks and ready to break out of our restrictive roles, we worked closely with each other throughout the film, a tight two-woman team, and our friendship was reflected in our performances.
George Cukor also taught me a thing or two about comedy, intent as he was on fast pacing, alert to the rhythm. A friend and fan of my father’s, he declared that comedy was in my genes. Yet when my new sense of professionalism asserted itself in one request for a retake, he found it not so funny: he glowered at me fiercely and sputtered, “You Swedish fanatic!” To me, it was high praise indeed.
At last I was approaching work with honest ambition; shelving the suspicion that what made you good at acting made you bad at life—finding, instead, the self-knowledge that can come from living with a role, and discovering a thing or two about the character arcs that had so mystified me in the beginning: above all, I’d put into action my belated perception that acting—good acting—takes courage and commitment.
I had learned—determined—not to pay attention to reviews, good or bad. I seldom read them and had been conditioned to expect the worst. When someone dropped a copy of Time onto a table before me, I braced myself as I began to read. “… and this once bland beauty has become one of the screen’s most arresting comedians.” I blinked and read it again. And again. And I smiled and thought, Well, well.
It was only ignorance (or arrogance) that ever made me think acting was easy. If I hit my stride in one film, I lost it in the next. In the small cameo role in Gandhi that Richard Attenborough had asked me to play fifteen years before, I was a wallflower among British virtuosos, awestruck by the agility of the actors around me, earnest but uneasy with the dialogue. My discomfort clearly showed, and I was briefly discouraged at losing some of the confidence I’d finally come to feel.
But now, at least I know enough to find acting frightening; I can finally admit my fear of failure, my dread of appearing foolish. I know I love making movies—making magic—and that I want to serve them well. I know, too, that working, not wishing, makes it so.
The spring after my father died, I took my mother with me to London, a city she had visited often with my father. This was the first time she had been there without him. The trip, which I had hoped would distract her for a time from her loneliness at home, only seemed to emphasize it more. Emotionally raw, physically fragile, she seemed lost and shaken, like a child who finds terror in familiar places when separated from a parent. It was as if every cell in her body were railing against the loss.
My brother, too, had been devastated by the loss, two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, of the person he loved above all else in the world. Theirs had been an extraordinary connection, exceptional in its closeness, and he was manful and moving about his sorrow, open and unself-con-scious in his pain. But as deeply as he missed his dad, he did not see it as the death of their relationship. Though they were no longer together, he continued to feel their closeness as a constant comfort and support. “I am my dad,” he said to me quietly, a few weeks after his death. “I look in the mirror now and that’s who I am.” And in some ways he was. Suddenly more mature, more silent, thoughtful, restrained, polite. A seventeen-year-old who had become a gentleman before his time.
In London, as my mother’s distress increased, I found it harder to comfort her. I was frustrated at my inability to relieve her pain, ashamed of my emotional ineptness. But my mother and I were new at direct expressions of affection and our vocabulary was still weak.
In our suite, the beds were side by side. One morning, my mother was smiling. She told me that during the night, in my sleep, I had reached out and held her hand.
When Charlie was put on permanent display at the Smi
thsonian Museum, our family flew to Washington for the installation ceremony, arriving early to check the exhibit.
A young man was propping Charlie on a stand, casually adjusting his head, which suddenly began to sag and topple. My hand lurched out—instinctively, protectively—and I jumped to steady him. Hold it, fella, that’s no way to handle dummies; I’ll tell you how to handle dummies. I was as indignant about the absence of respect (reverence, even) that Charlie had always commanded in our house as over the indifferent handling.
You see, you steady the shoulder with your left hand as you insert the head with your right—very carefully … never let go of the stalk or the head might fall. With your hand inside the cavity in the dummy’s back, keep a firm grip on the stalk, always holding it securely….
Stepping back from Charlie, I checked his appearance: The familiar brown eyes that for fifty years had shot sparks and flickered famously now stared past me stonily into space, strangely dull, glassy, dead. There was no sign of life; worse, no recognition. Hey! It’s me, Charlie—it’s Candy! I waited for the wisecracks that would never come, the throaty chuckle, the clipped movements. I was shocked at his final silence. My father made the magic and the magic was gone.
Now, it was for me to make my own.
It had not escaped my notice that it was only after my father died that I summoned the courage to commit to my work. Was it relevant that my father himself, for all of his genius, had been the ultimate master of playing it safe—a performer who had more than a consummate facade; who had an alter ego? Was it that acting was such an obvious—-an inevitable—choice for a child whose father made her talk, supplied her dialogue, literally manipulated her; that her terror at growing up to find no hand squeezing her neck, no voice but her own, receded only when all hope of rescue was irrevocably gone?
The approval I had sought so ardently—and perversely—was somewhere between a snipe hunt and the quest for the Holy Grail. I had spent so much of my life pursuing it that the impulse persisted even though the withholder had died.
Before I could let go, I had to look back. For a time, I became fixed on the fairy tale of my childhood. On finding the moral to the fable. On understanding all that my father had meant to my life.
At first, a deep sadness, an awful fear descended on me; my life kept flickering in front of me in furious flashbacks. And what I felt was the pain I must have caused him, the pain I had caused myself, the pain we had caused each other. But once I knew the pain, it all began to make sense.
I loved him so much, so illegally, that I had done everything to conceal it from him—and from myself. Meticulously, over the years I had spun a scenario that capitalized on his remoteness, propagated the fiction that he didn’t love me. That he was sparing in his affections, undemonstrative, unfeeling, cold. In the words of his dummy, “an emotional hermit.” So great was my investment in my fiction “that it had become intractably real. It was not that I had had a distant relationship with my father, but that I had had too close a one. For my mind. For my conscience, as it was being formed as a child.
And what of him? A shy man, a remote one, a man who expressed emotion by proxy. “You were the love of your father’s life,” my mother had said, and suddenly I could see him whole. A man whose feelings often caught him unprepared but were no less strong for his inability to articulate them. And so we were at cross-purposes for much of our lives. Needing, rejecting … when everything we wanted was there all along.
What a deep sadness it gave me: the awkward attempts at affection, the armoring ourselves from too much caring, the clumsy communication. But in time, regret gave way to reflection, to a reckoning with the romance. And what a grand romance it had been. Eagerly I studied old photographs of the child who gazed at him adoringly, and thought back to when we flew away on secret weekends, soaring together into the sun … early morning rides in the desert… . “Do you know what it means to ’bill and coo’?”… snuggling in bed and talk of stars and musings on infinity … trying to still the frantic beating of the six-year-old heart.
17
ONE night in New York, burrowed in as usual in my snug bunker of pillows, a book that went unread propped on my stomach, I reflected idly on my life alone. Maybe Mary Ellen was right, I mused, staring out at the park, remembering that she had predicted that her friend, French film director Louis Malle, was the man I would marry. Louis Malle, she would announce again and again with simple certainty, was the perfect man for me. Her dogged insistence had become a familiar joke. But now, swaddled in my down-and-Dacron mix, I wondered if I should have listened. God knows I’d met everyone else.
In fact, I had met Louis Malle in Connecticut some years before, when Annabel and Mike Nichols took me to a Fourth of July party. He had arrived accompanied by the controversy that, like a faithful companion, seemed always to dog his heels. First, in the early sixties, with his second film, The Lovers, starring Jeanne Moreau; the suggestive intimacy of its love scenes had seemed thrillingly explicit to American audiences then. Again, in the seventies, with Murmur of the Heart, which became a movie classic; his screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, but many viewers weren’t ready for a lighthearted look at incest. His seven-hour documentary, Phantom India, had been unanimously acclaimed everywhere but in that country, where it was banned for its realistic treatment. And he was nominated for an Oscar again, this time for Best Foreign Film for Lacombe Lucien. The simply told story of an innocent country boy who becomes a Nazi, it was a sympathetic look at the mindlessness of evil—too sympathetic, according to some. And now, he was preparing Pretty Baby, his first film in America; shooting had not yet begun and already there was trouble.
The film, set in New Orleans at the turn of the century, was based on the life of the late photographer Bellocq and his marriage to a child prostitute. The search for the girl to play her had attracted enormous publicity and ended in the casting of model Brooke Shields, who was then eleven. The mere idea of depicting a child prostitute, coupled with casting such a young girl to play the role, had provoked a violent reaction, including organized religious opposition, and people were up in arms.
A small man was Louis Malle—well-mannered, soft-spoken—but people made such a big fuss. He was brave, brilliant, gifted and daring. Seated next to him at that Fourth of July dinner, I was sufficiently intimidated by his reputation that I hardly spoke. Still, in between clutching my caftan, which kept slipping off my shoulders, and discreetly picking up the endive that had spilled into my lap, I managed to eye him intently. He was right up my alley, I had to admit: attractive, adventurous and inaccessible. But he seemed as ill at ease as I, and that first meeting was an edgy encounter, awkward and uncomfortable. There were fireworks that night—but not for me. If this was destiny, it was riding a dark horse.
We had not seen each other since, and now, returning to my book, I thought no more about it. Until the following morning when, uncannily, I received the message that Louis Malle had called. I called back; he said he was in Montreal cutting Atlantic City, but was coming that weekend to New York and would like to have lunch. I said that I would too.
The morning of the lunch I was nervous. If I’d been uncomfortable with this man four years before, what made me think it would be any easier now? It was okay to be nervous, I decided, nervous was acceptable. What wasn’t was my old arch way of concealing it. Beforehand, as I bathed, I decided the most I could do was be myself. No more, no less.
It was a wintry Sunday afternoon, and we met for late lunch at the Russian Tea Room. He entered, breathless from the cold, burrowed deep inside a loden coat. Elegantly dressed, understated. His face was fine-featured and romantic. His softly curling black hair was shot with gray, yet he looked younger than a man in his late forties.
“Well, it’s cold. That’s all I have to say,” were his first words as he took off his coat. But that was not all he had to say. As it turned out, he said a great deal—in a beautiful voice, a lightly musical manner of speaking, and in English that was
precise, almost poetic. He had a funny, unexpected command of American idioms that, coming from his lips, somehow sounded both lyrical and literal.
He was interested and gracious—clearly a man who enjoyed and appreciated the company of women—and he spoke and listened eagerly, with a thoughtful intensity and subtle wit. He was unpretentious (“That’s one of the few things I like about myself”) and unpredictable. He was great.
On and on we talked—about film, painting, politics. He was extremely cultivated, intensely curious, and his perceptions were startling and astute; he did not think quite like anyone else.
He spoke with great love about his children—a daughter, six, and a son, nine, who lived in Europe. His face changed as he spoke of them, became softer, more open, and he looked very like a child himself.
And we spoke about relationships and the increasing odds against them. Odds I had begun to respect, I admitted, and I said I spent a lot of time alone and found it rewarding and productive. It sounded suspiciously like The Nun’s Story.
It came out that we were both, by nature, loners. Confirmed bachelors. Guarded and quick to retreat into ourselves. “Basically, I don’t believe in marriage,” he said. “I think relationships have to be reinvented every day.”
“All my life I’ve been searching for that one relationship and never really found it; something in me always held back. Probably I blame myself. Or perhaps I simply wasn’t ready.”
“But what were you missing?” I asked. “What more were you looking for that you didn’t seem to find?”
“To belong,” he said simply. “Just to feel that I belong.”
When we looked up from the table, the restaurant was filling up for supper. It was six o’clock; lunch had lasted four hours.
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