“I didn’t notice.”
He got up and walked to the window and looked out over the town square of Denver. The bell in the middle of the square chimed two in the morning. He turned around.
“You were working with Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, and Richard Dreyfuss. Right?”
“Right.”
“That’s the cream of the crop in my book.”
“Mine too.”
“And still you didn’t really get a kick out of it?”
“Oh, I guess so.”
“Did you ever enjoy making movies?”
“Maybe I just thought I should, because it all happened for me so fast. But I was always counting the days. Seems like I’ve always counted the days, and only now am I realizing it.”
I hadn’t intended for the conversation to sound so alarmist, but I was being as honest as I could. Was my present mind-set affecting my perceptions of the past? Was I even being correct in the assessment of my feelings? Here I was telling my agent that I really hadn’t derived much pleasure or satisfaction from the profession I had been in for nearly forty years. Was that really true? Had I entered the world of make-believe because I enjoyed creating my own magic, or had I done it because it was expected of me? My mother scampered through my mind again. Then my father stood over me, berating my attempts at self-expression. I felt as though I was on a treadmill of making magic in order to please other people.
If a good movie script came up I’d do it, forgetting that around the third week into shooting I’d be looking for my days off. If a good play date was arranged for my show, I’d take it because I loved to travel, not remembering that what I really enjoyed was to come home to a hotel room and be by myself and think and write or watch a movie.
Was I basically a recluse? Did I want to do nothing? I seemed so extreme—out there in front of masses of people, then the quiet solitude of just me. I adored being by myself for weeks and months on end. Once I hadn’t even left my house in the Pacific Northwest for three months. I had a rich internal life somehow, not seeming to need people and parties and action. Yet when I ventured out into the world, I was more gregarious than anybody—the first to come and the last to leave.
Maybe I was just noticing these contradictions in myself for the first time. Perhaps I was using films and this show to mirror parts of my basic motivations in life. Mort finally broke the silence.
“Remember how we tossed that coin of chocolate in London over whether to extend the run at the Apollo?”
“Yep.”
“Let’s treat this the same way. Whatever you want to do is no big deal. I can cancel the tour. Legally we’ll have some problems, but so what? Your life and happiness are more important than anything. Whatever you decide is okay by me. But I’ve gotta tell you something. I think that when you get on a wooden stage, cut the show like you want it, get Jack French back as conductor, and get to your house by the mountain, you’ll feel different. Maybe I’m wrong, but knowing you, you probably just need a rest.”
I laughed. He knew me pretty well. He had heard apocalyptic talk from me and others more than once in his life. Maybe I was overdramatizing. Depression is a powerful distortion trap. Maybe he was right. I’d wait.
Mort left and I tried to sleep. Was I really toying with the idea of leaving the world of entertainment before it left me? Were advancing years creeping up on me so rapidly that I was getting defensively ahead of myself? I didn’t seem to be able to fully lose myself in the moment anymore. I was projecting too much into the future and that was what was causing the anxiety. But even if I was only five minutes ahead of myself, I was ripping off the joy of the present.
Show business, and live entertainment in particular, is an art form that requires immediacy in the moment. The joy of it dissipates when one thinks too far ahead. Yet I seemed to have a lifelong habit of putting the cart before the horse.
I was always thinking too much into the future, and perhaps I was now doing it on the stage. Perhaps I had even experienced the whole tour already on some existential level that wasn’t clear to me. If I believed that we each should take responsibility for everything in our lives, then I needed to take responsibility for everything that was happening to me. Perhaps it was all a lesson in enjoying every moment and not taking anything too seriously.
The next day the new opening costume arrived. It fit pretty well, and I liked what it looked like. The weekend of double shows arrived. I cut the sketches, and the intermission, and did the show my way. It worked. A critic who had had reservations on opening night came again and gave it a rave. But by Sunday night’s second show, I was ready for a rest home. So were the dancers.
My home near Mt. Rainier beckoned, the thought of it sustaining me through waves of fatigue. When the phone rang at seven in the morning I knew it couldn’t be good news. No one ever calls me at that hour when I’m on the road. It was Mike, who takes care of my house. He was sorry to wake me, but all the power was out in the house—no lights, no hot water, no stove. Maybe I should stay in a hotel.
Life was getting to be a bitch. Maybe I should just put my electromagnetic mattress on an ocean wave and float out to sea.
When I arrived in Seattle, I went to the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. I stayed overnight, got up early to do a press conference, and then drove home in a rented car. I didn’t care about the power. I just wanted to sleep in my own bed and play with my dogs.
The mountain, the river, all my trees spoke to me as soon as I arrived. I walked among the flowers and fed the fish in the pond. I romped with my dogs and told them my woes. I watched the moon come up over the mountain, and for a few short hours before I fell asleep I was in paradise.
The next day I drove to the Paramount Theater, which only took an hour; and after a sound check, which was pretty good, we opened. It went very well. I talked about loving to come to work in my beloved city and meant every word of it. The reviews were excellent and I was feeling comfortable with the show for the first time. I guess I was meant to perform without an intermission; the pacing was smoother, the energy built and sustained.
I called Alan and Buz and Larry and told them what I’d done and that it worked. The orchestra was happier because I was. In fact, I really felt that Seattle was my lucky charm. The show jelled there and we all knew we had it right. I loved the long drive after the theater at night, and so many members of the audience were people I knew.
I was tired and my body was still in pain from the Denver stage, but I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe Mort had been right.
Before the Friday night show I made certain that I warmed up for an hour or more. I wanted to be prepared for the marathon weekend. Then we were scheduled to have a week off before San Francisco.
When I walked out onto the stage, I knew I’d be all right from then on. Everything came together—the sound, the lights, the band, the dancing, the audience. It was thrilling. I let myself have a wonderful time. It was magnetic.
Then came the big choreographers’ dance number. I finished the first section—a tribute to Bob Fosse. Big hand. Some people stood up. Then came the cancan and the tribute to Michael Kidd. Our skirts were flying, our legs were over our heads, the audience applauded every kick and trick. Then, heading down the homestretch of sixteen pirouette turns and inside circular turning kicks, I grabbed for my skirt because I thought the hem had come loose and I didn’t want to catch my heel in it. I made a slight adjustment in my hips as I was turning, and suddenly I heard a loud snap like a handclap. I tumbled to the floor.
I couldn’t get up. I was so stunned that I didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t know what had happened. I tried to rise to my feet, and my right knee buckled under me. I couldn’t put any weight on it. In a flash I knew I’d either have to stop the show or rechoreograph everything for myself on the left leg. I was constitutionally incapable of quitting, so I rechoreographed, and the dancers, thank God, were skilled enough to adjust. They all knew something had happene
d.
At the end of that section, they asked what was wrong. I had to say I didn’t know; it sounded as though I’d broken something, and I couldn’t put any weight on my right leg. I finished the rest of the number. I didn’t really know how.
Then, as I finished out the last half hour of singing and telling stories, I felt my knee seize up. I couldn’t turn around. The audience sensed something was wrong, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t offer any explanations, and no excuses.
After the show I collapsed. Someone lifted me and carried me to the dressing room where a doctor was waiting. He diagnosed a dislocated right kneecap and proceeded to snap it back into place. “You won’t be able to walk on this for a while,” he then said, “much less dance.”
Those were dreaded words I had always been sure I’d never hear. Me not dance? Why, I had danced on sprained ankles, broken ankles. But a knee? That was different—and I knew it.
I got very angry. I cursed myself, my stupidity at falling, the stage (could I have gotten my heel caught in the crevice of the extension over the orchestra pit?). I seemed to want to blame something or someone. It was hard for me to accept that I had indeed injured myself. My injuries had all happened when I was much younger. In the last twenty years of performing I had never missed a show, and I didn’t want to start now.
Bags of ice surrounded my knee, above and below the injury. My dance captain, Damita Jo, knew all about dislocated kneecaps, because she had been through the same thing herself. She tended to me while Mike Flowers and the doctor talked quietly about what this would mean. The promoter of the Seattle engagement, a sweet man who was about to be married and saw my run as a week of having a good time, walked in the door. His face went white as he instinctively understood he would have to contact over ten thousand people that weekend to say I couldn’t perform.
I apologized. I was beside myself. For the first time in my privileged life, a circumstance quit me before I quit it.
An old friend and previous assistant of mine had been in the audience that night. He saw me fall, came backstage after, and offered to drive me home. “It happened for a reason,” he said. “Now just calm down and figure out what it is.”
Back home I iced my knee again (ice is a dancer’s best friend) and climbed like a cripple into bed. I was wracked with guilt—-guilt at doing this to myself, the promoter, and the audiences. I had heard that several bus-loads of people had come from Vancouver for the next day’s matinee. It was too late to stop them. I could see their faces as they got off the buses to discover there was nothing to do but turn around and go home.
I couldn’t sleep at all. Over and over I relived the moment I went down. It was during a high-kicking turning step. What did that mean? Why that? If everything had a meaning, and I believe it does, what did that step signify?
Metaphysically there are intricate explanations for such things. It’s amazing how much sense these explanations make when you learn them.
For example, feet represent the first chakra issues of fear, fight or flight, and grounding—footing, so to speak. When you lose your footing (or your basic security), you are basically dealing with issues of confidence. My confidence was in the process of reaching a turning point from negative to positive. I went down in the middle of turning.
Knees are representative of flexibility (as are ankles), and they carry hidden anger. It made sense that I was angry over all that had gone on and pissed that at the point of turning my show into a happy experience, I had aborted it. Evidently there was more I needed to stop and look at. I was angry at much deeper issues. I needed time to confront them, so I had arranged an enforced vacation for myself by going down. A dislocated kneecap meant I was dislocating the fear that I had held there.
Sometimes an injury has hidden benefits. It stirs up hidden pain. It requires reflection. It certainly forces you to stop and take stock of yourself. There’s nothing like an injury to promote growth!
I knew that nothing in this world happens, regardless of how tragic it may seem, that doesn’t carry with it a positive reflective learning process. I hold that belief regardless of how serious or life-taking the tragedy is. Of course, my belief comes from the understanding that our physical lives are only moments on a magnificent canvas of time in the cosmic scheme of billions of learning experiences.
I no longer believed death was real; death was a belief even though fear of it dominated everything we did and felt. How extraordinary to harbor and nurture a conviction with such negative connotations! So even an injury was felt as a mini-death, because it served to remind the injured one of his or her belief in mortality.
But if the belief in mortality could be viewed as a limitational belief, rather than an actual fact, it changed one’s attitude toward “tragedy.” The same applied to anything “bad” that happened to us. Things happened for a reason; certainly there are no accidents. But also events don’t just “happen”; we create them. Whether we do in fact learn then depends on our attitude.
Some of us create more pain than others. Much of the world has been taught that suffering is necessary to self-enlightenment and certainly the stressed search for personal power, money, status; the greedy and callous trashing of our home planet; and the overall drive to militant “solutions” to the world’s political problems indicate a hunger to fulfill the teaching that we need to suffer.
But suffering was a belief too. In fact, our reality was always a question of what we perceived it to be. If I didn’t want to perceive an event as a tragedy, it was my choice. I could thereby alter my reality, because I could consciously alter my perception of it. We all know individuals who can perceive the happiest event—the birth of a child, say—with dire foreboding. Our reality is up to each of us, and how we chose to perceive it would either destroy or improve our lives.
We have become accustomed to believe that disease and death are tragic. But so many of my friends who were diseased and dying from AIDS were teaching the rest of us that there were mystical dimensions of great peace and understanding attached. When dying people reach the state of “peace that passeth all understanding,” it is beyond beautiful. Many of them seem to innately know that they are not dying but rather going on to another level of understanding. When that state is reached, the body pain subsides. But if a person fights death out of fear of it, the result is pain-wracked suffering.
I had seen that “peace” with my father and with several other close friends. In fact, one of the great gifts my father gave me was the happiness of being with him while he was dying. Those months were among the most peacefully fulfilling we had had together. He had finally accepted himself, his foibles, his failure. He talked only of love. He talked of visiting his mother and father, teachers that he had loved, and relatives that were long gone. The doctors thought he was hallucinating. I believed he was in touch with other dimensions, because he was in the process of giving up his body.
Everything he said related to love. He said there was nothing more important in the world than love and God and that we all needed to learn that. I always felt that he lingered as long as he did, hovering between the two worlds of “life and death,” because he was teaching his nurses, doctors, friends, and members of our family that love and God were all that mattered.
That was why it was so fulfilling for me. I didn’t even recall his harshness, his cruelty, his unaccepting disappointment in himself. I couldn’t remember any of it, seeing him only as LOVE personified. As a result, I didn’t feel his slow passing as tragic. I saw it as the grand communication in which the blissful silences of understanding between us were unspoken lessons in surrendering everything that had hurt us to love.
For some people, hanging on to life and fighting against death are defined as courage and the “will to live.” But in my Dad I saw his magnificent courage as that of the act of surrendering to God, which he claimed was in everything. He said it was a shame that it took dying to finally understand that.
The next day, Mort Viner arrived and m
et me at the hospital with his suitcase. “Isn’t this a little extreme?” he joked. “I could have gotten you out of this tour in an easier way!”
Then he looked serious. “How do you feel, really?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “It only hurts when I laugh.”
“Well, you’re going to do what the doctor says, and I’m going to make sure he’s conservative.”
I nodded as the nurse took me into a lead room and injected my knee with dye so the doctor could take x-rays; arthrography, they call the procedure.
I could feel the liquid mush circulating in my knee, which they said would be uncomfortable for a few days; they also said that I shouldn’t engage in any activity. The pictures showed that there was no actual tearing of the ligaments or tendons or muscles away from the patella (kneecap).
“If you had to have an injury,” said the doctor, “this was the best kind.” He sent me to a physical therapist who put me through exercise for the ankles and thighs, which lose their strength rapidly without use. He said I shouldn’t dance for a week or two. Maybe he had his own guides.
I felt relieved that nothing serious had occurred, except for the adjustment I would now have to make with the time on my hands. And then I recognized that that was a gift to myself.
WHAT A GREAT OREO COOKIE—FRENCH AND ITALIAN.
A GENETIC PHENOMENON, WHICH IS CUTE BUT SOMETIMES HARD ON SACHI. (ALLAN GRANT, LIFE MAGAZINE © TIME WARNER, INC.)
SACHI AT TWO LEARNING TO SWIM.
SACHI AT THREE LEARNING TO MIMIC.
SACHI IN JAPAN.
SACHI AND ME LEARNING TO LOVE.
KHRUSHCHEV SAID, AFTER MY CAN-CAN PERFORMANCE, “THE FACE OF HUMANITY IS PRETTIER THAN ITS BACKSIDE.”
J.F.K. AS A CULTURAL MINISTER OF MOVIE STARS.
INDIRA GANDHI WHEN SHE WAS CULTURAL MINISTER OF INDIA.
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