by Diane Keaton
Diane’s Journal, May 29, 1995
With eight hours left on the twelve-hour flight, the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign goes on for the fifth time. I start to grip the arms of the seat. It isn’t like I haven’t been warned. The storm clouds at the airport were impossible to overlook. At the ticket counter a woman in a straw hat complained to her husband about plane connections in Las Vegas. What about taking off in a storm, lady? I tried to distract myself with Time magazine’s profile of Reynolds Price, whose new book, The Promise of Rest, had “rounded off a powerful saga of isolation.” Isolation. Did I have to be reminded I was flying alone? Where was Warren to hold my hand? I thought of Dad. He, too, found air travel intolerable. Did he feel isolated in the sky? When the plane was delayed I read “Heartbreak Motel,” an article singling out the leftover lives of drifters, boozers, and itinerant families found in motels along the Arizona border, as lightning lit the sky. There was Paul Coyle, who, after his wife left him, had the names of his sixteen children in a heart tattooed on his back. Another tattoo read I LOVE MY FAMILY. MARRIED OCT. 12, 1958, CITY TEMPLE, ILL. PAUL AND JANET COYLE. He must have figured if he died his family would find him. One thing I knew, there’d be no family finding me if, God forbid, the delayed Boeing 747 nonstop to L.A. crashed over the Atlantic Ocean.
I hate the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign. I hate it. Bouncing around at 35,000 feet is just plain horrifying. Plus, the two Xanax and the glass of wine have failed. Like a car shifting from fourth to third gear, the sound of the motor, at least to me, indicates the plane is trying to adjust to a lower altitude. Is this a good idea? Isn’t higher smoother? The stewardess tries to convince me everything is all right, but the thousand-foot drops are killing me. I imagine our jumbo jet flipping over upside down. I can see my face smashed against the window. When she launches into the old “car on a bumpy road” analogy, I wonder if she’s crazy. She can’t be serious. This is not a bumpy road. This is the air. This is being in the middle of nothing with nothing to hold on to. Sorry, but check it out. Flying is not normal. And guess what? I don’t care where we are, can we please ask the captain to please make it smooth, or something? Anything. Land it somewhere, I don’t know, England, or how about Barbados? Whatever landmass we’re near. I don’t care. Anything. I can’t take it anymore.
The Fasten Your Seat Belt light goes out. On cue my heart stops pounding. I start in with the usual promises of change. I’ll spend more time with Mom. I’ll stop with the endless projects and the half-assed solutions to a meaningful life.
It reminds me of the day I drove Dad home from UCLA’s Medical Center after he flunked “The Program.” I remember all those placating words the doctors and their staff used during Dad’s two-month stay, but especially “It’s the quality of life, not the quantity.” Dad didn’t look like a man with much quality left. We were silent as we headed south on the 405. The traffic was slow. I didn’t know what to say. Two blocks before Cove Street, two blocks away from Dorothy, Dad blurted out, “Diane, I want you to know something. I’ve always hated my work. I wish I’d traveled more, gotten closer to you kids, taken more risks.” It was his use of the word risk that made me think of the risks I hadn’t taken, especially those revolving around intimacy. It also made me think of the time Kathryn Grody told me Estelle Parsons had adopted a baby boy at age fifty. Wasn’t she too old to be adopting a baby? It made me remember my sixteen-year-old pledge not to have intercourse before I was married. Boy, that would have been a big loss, particularly since I’ve never married. And what about the time I told Mom I was against psychiatry on principle. What principle? Where would I be without analysis? I was intolerant of everything I went on to benefit from.
As soon as I see L.A. spread out below, I know I’m going to have to reinvent the future. I know I have to make a decision that will or will not lead to the experience of a different kind of love, a love of less expectations on the receiving end. I know if I adopt a baby I will need to adapt to conditions that require care and responsibility, and management skills too. But above all I will need to earn the right to be a mother, especially considering I am a single white woman staring fifty in the face.
12
HELLO
The Bundle
Dexter came to me in a straw basket with two handles. The first thing we did was drive to the pediatrician’s office. As I put her in the new car seat, she looked cautious; after all, she’d flown across the country to meet up with a woman she would have to learn to call Mother. Everything about her was new: her tiny hands and feet, her big round face. When the doctor deemed her “alert,” that meant she had passed her first test. She was alert, and attentive, and prepared, and vigilant. That was the moment I knew I had it in me to take on the rest of the tests Dexter would have to pass for as long as I lived. That’s when I put my hand on her face, looked into her eyes for as long as forever will ever be, and smiled. I knew I could do it. I knew the dust from the past had lifted. Yes, Warren was right, I was a late developer, but I’d become a woman, despite my protestations, and now a mother too. Dexter was my “in sickness and health, till death do us part,” unconditional love. She was my new family, this sturdy, resilient, alert girl from North Carolina.
Born Thursday, December 14, 1995, Dexter flew to Houston, Texas, four days after she was born. She arrived in Los Angeles the following Friday. On Saturday, Uncle Rickey, Robin’s husband, drove Dexter and me all the way to Tubac, Arizona, for Christmas with the family. Dexter was up for the frequent diaper changes at various gas stations with other fellow Americans on their way to Christmas cheer. She appeared to be content with the steady movement of the car on the road. When we arrived at Mom’s ranch, Aunt Robin, Aunt Dorrie, Grammy Dorothy, Cousin Riley, Cousin Jack, and my friend Jonathan Gale gathered around Dexter in the living room. We all agreed she had a sly smile, almost as if “Prove it” would inform her character. At ten days she was unusually street-smart and ready to go.
As if that wasn’t enough, two weeks later Dexter and I flew to New York so I could complete filming on The First Wives Club, a comedy about three old friends who are dumped by their husbands. Ivana Trump summed up the film’s message best with “Ladies, you have to be strong and independent, and remember, don’t get mad, get everything.”
Dexter and I had a ritual. Every night after work, I placed her in the bouncy chair and marveled at her almost fishlike, slow-motion, underwater gestures. Sometimes she followed me with her eyes. Sometimes I tried to imitate her expressions, but how could I? I’ve lived too long to go back to the beginning. I held her against my chest. It was hard to believe she weighed less than a medium-size bowling ball. I touched her face and gave her kisses. I put the bottle in her mouth. She swallowed the formula. Simple miracles. I began to appreciate the comfort of furniture, not just the design. More simple miracles.
In the mornings at the rented loft on Prince Street, I fed her and changed her diaper. I talked to her too. There was a lot to say. Sometimes, not always, she’d crack a smile. Then came the most important task of the day: selecting an outfit, at least 70 percent of which were gifts. First I chose one of Dexter’s twenty-two hats, thirteen of which came from Kate Capshaw. Then I’d pause for a moment and go over the list of people who’d been so generous. There was Woody Allen, who gave her a flowery little dress I returned. (Too small.) Meryl Streep gave Dexter four boxes of dresses, and hats (more hats) and blankets, and jumpers and leggings and tops, and washcloths that she called a starter kit. Bette Midler gave her a health book and a very funny carrot hat with a pea on top. Then my boss, Mr. Scott Rudin, gave Dexter a fancy French coat from a store called Bonpoint on Madison Avenue. Steve Martin gave her a much needed and very practical diaper bag. Martin Short and his lovely bride, Nancy, sent her flowers and balloons that flew up to the ceiling and stayed there for two weeks. I could not believe our good fortune—a once-in-a-lifetime complete wardrobe from a host of remarkable notables.
First Ladies
Always on the go, Dexter and I went
out to dinner three times a week. She came to the set every day. We took the Circle Line and saw the Statue of Liberty during a snowstorm. Bill Robinson, who’d been an intern for Ted Kennedy, made arrangements for a tour of the White House. Veteran travelers, we grabbed the first train to Washington, D.C.
We began our visit in the Oval Office. It was very yellow and blue—official blue. We took pictures in the pressroom—beside a surprisingly antiquated phone system underneath a wall of tiny black-and-white television sets monitoring the whereabouts of the First Family. The phone system was obsolete, and the television sets were tiny. In the East Room, where Presidents John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln had lain in repose before burial, Dexter dozed off in her BabyBjörn. When we moved on to the Red Room, I learned Eleanor Roosevelt had changed it from a ladies’ social setting to a pressroom for women reporters who were excluded from presidential conferences. The stipulation? Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences were limited to subjects centered on “women’s work.”
Every office had a gadget called “the toaster.” Like the monitors, its function was to inform the employees of the exact whereabouts of the President, the First Lady, Chelsea, and Socks, their cat. We were told that Hillary and Chelsea were actually in the White House. Chelsea was watching a movie, and Hillary was upstairs with a cold. She, of course, wanted to meet us but was feeling under the weather. Frankly, if I were her, I would cherish every moment of privacy and guard it like a treasure. Her life was nothing if not an intrusion. Imagine always being on view, always being groomed, always being judged and criticized. The more I saw, the more impossible it was to imagine the White House as a home. But then, I guess the idea of home is something you have to create for yourself.
There were many spectacular aspects to the White House, but the role of First Lady was not one of them. Even though she carries the burden of presenting the quintessential “American” family to the public, as well as rallying behind her favorite charities, visiting schools, hosting parties for traveling dignitaries, and privately advising her husband on the state of the union—all of it under the scrutiny of an entire nation—it’s not considered a job and she’s not paid.
We stood in front of the official First Lady portraits and listened to the guide tell us each woman was given the right to choose her own artist. A right? Who else was going to choose? I learned Eleanor Roosevelt felt she was so homely, she insisted that Douglas Chandor’s portrait focus on her finest feature, her hands. The upper part of the painting was a typical portrait, until it bled into a kind of second painting, devoted to a series of monotone inserts of Mrs. Roosevelt’s hands knitting and holding glasses—in short, engaged in the completion of domestic tasks. This was the same woman who, in 1948, was touted as a running mate for Harry Truman. Even Eleanor Roosevelt had to conform to the demands of a First Lady in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Barbara Bush’s newly hung painting was nothing if not predictable, until I noticed the framed portrait within the portrait of her dog, Millie—not her children or grandchildren, but Millie the dog—on the table next to her. Jackie Kennedy’s was alluring in a distant, subdued sort of way. Very sixties. Nancy Reagan chose the same artist, Aaron Shikler, hoping to mirror Jackie’s legacy. The difference was that Nancy, ever opposed to monochromatic colors, chose a red dress—a bright red dress. Nancy wanted to be Jackie in primary colors.
All of this goes to say what? An elite list of highly qualified unpaid women became First Ladies of the United States. What can I say? I hope Dexter will live long enough to witness all working women, including the First Lady, earning equal pay for equal work. Maybe she’ll even see a portrait of a First Husband hanging on that wall.
Home Again
After viewing home life at the White House, home was on my mind. I couldn’t wait to get back to Los Angeles. I was worried about Mother, whose failing memory skills were becoming more apparent. While I was in New York, she wrote a letter that became the official diagnosis of her illness.
Dear Diane,
Dr. Cummings told me I have the onset of ALZHEIMER’S, but I’m not buying it without further tests. I don’t really know how I’ll handle it, if it’s true. I don’t want to give up … . I admit I’m unable to recall names, and events sometimes, but not always. I must stop writing about my lapses of memory and work on recall. I have to keep trying but it “ain’t easy,” as Mary Hall would have said. The worst of it is people talk to me carefully. They’re deferential and aware that I will undoubtedly forget something or make a mistake in judgment. I find myself unable to remember words like genes and chromosomes, nor do I know how to spell them. (It is genes.) How do I tell my friends I have Alzheimer’s? Just don’t.
Love,
Mom
In 1993 Mom had written she had Alzheimer’s disease and it was “scary.” But this letter two years later confirmed the inevitable. She finally understood what she hadn’t remembered to admit. You see, Mom forgot to remember she was one of five million victims of the “forgetting” disease. I called Robin. Mother had just phoned her, saying she wanted to cancel her life insurance and empty out the house Dad had bought next door on Cove Street, knowing she’d eventually need help. She also said she wanted to be sure to commit suicide before she got bad. She was adamant, adding that she was going to take care of it. When I called Dorrie, she burst into tears.
Not a moment too soon, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn and I wrapped The First Wives Club by dancing down the streets of New York, singing “You Don’t Own Me.” The next day Dexter and I flew back to California to begin our real life together. It turned out Ramon Novarro’s Wright house was not suited for family living. My bedroom was the only room on the top floor. Dexter’s was a closet-size space next to the living room slash kitchen on the second floor, and the office off the garage was on the first. I began looking for an authentic California Spanish hacienda.
In the meantime, Dex and I spent weekends at Cove Street. Mom adored her. She even bought a pint-size hope chest and filled it with things like puzzles and alphabet books and buckets and shovels. Dorothy was holding up. On several different occasions she had me sit down to Beulah Keaton’s one and only scrapbook. In an attempt to keep memories alive, she did very well remembering her mother. It was always the same. She opened the last page first. There was Dorrie, a black-and-white fat-faced toddler, being held by gorgeous long-legged Dorothy in front of Grammy’s Monterey Road clapboard bungalow. Robin stood next to them in her new glasses, while sheriff Randy shoved a toy gun into my chest. Mom always pointed out the sweet-pea vines in the background of Grammy Keaton’s old backyard. I would ask if she helped plant the flowers. She would nod as she turned the pages back to an earlier time. I was becoming a more ardent observer of two phenomena: the slow beginning of life and the even slower ending under the reign of Alzheimer’s’ tyranny.
Dexter was eleven months when Mom held her hand at the shoreline. Jumping up and down, all excited, Dex pointed at the seagulls, saying, “Brr,” like the day, like cold. “Brr.” Mom, even more excited, said, “Bird, Diane. She said bird.” Bird was Dexter’s first word, or so Mom decided. I shook my head in wonder. Dexter was as happy as she had been inconsolable only hours before when her little face was all knotted up in tears. I recognized that all the love in the world cannot cushion the reality of pain. In that moment Dexter seemed knowing beyond her eleven months. It made me think of girls—little girls, teenage girls, even old girls like me—who at one point or another discover, like all girls do, their sadness.
It took a long time, but I finally bought an old Spanish house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, a Wallace Neff fixer-upper. My friend Stephen Shadley began the restoration. In the process I developed an abiding interest in all things Spanish and all things built in Los Angeles. The sheer variety, history, and magic of the classic homes of Southern California made me want to become part of an organization that successfully saved them. I joined the L.A. Conservancy and became a preservationist. Our new old home took a year and
a half to restore before Dex became a little girl living in a genuine Spanish Revival house saved from demolition.
First Wives
First Wives was an unexpected hit. Bette, Goldie, and I did a ton of press. I’ll never forget the conference call with Goldie and me at her home in the Pacific Palisades and Bette on the line from her loft in New York. Always a contradiction in terms, Goldie drank some awful green health concoction while she smoked. The interviewer asked, “What’s better about being fifty than twenty?” Goldie plunged in with something like “Being a great mom; learning how to grow up and love yourself for who you are; coping with the discomfort of fame; loving a man by not holding on too much; letting people be who they are; helping your daughter live with the fact that her mother is famously loved by many people; getting revenge, but the right kind; learning to be spiritually aware; learning to grow into self-esteem. Those are some of the reasons why being fifty is better than being twenty.” What could Bette and I add? Goldie had said it all.
“Diane, this is your mom. I hate to bother you, but I couldn’t figure any way to do this. Merna down here in the Cove called and wants to know for sure when you’re going to appear on TV again. If you are, let me know what day and what time. She really wants to see it, but she’s bedridden. Maybe she got it wrong. I don’t know. Just let me know. That’d be great. Bye bye, Diane.”
Mom was beginning to leave messages on my voice mail all the time. She’d never been a phone person. The calls had a girlish aspect, as if she was concerned about things that had no relevance. I didn’t consciously decide to take over her role as the family documentarian. But I began to save her messages.
Almost two years after her diagnosis, she still volunteered at the cancer thrift shop, where she put my wardrobe from The First Wives Club on prominent display in the window. She visited Robin in Georgia. She built a tack house for Dorrie in Tubac. She kept her friends. It’s true our conversations centered on my concerns, like Dexter’s oral fixations. Why did she keep sucking her dirty stuffed cow instead of a clean pacifier—which, by the way, I had doubts about too. Just the word pacify was not indicative of a healthy sense of self-esteem. Mom concurred while pointing out Dexter’s more serious problem: eating sand. Might it have something to do with her formula? Maybe it was time to switch from Nutramigen to soy.