Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  And I truly did. I was trying to be open minded for India’s sake, but most of what Nancy was saying continued to rub me the wrong way. I made horrendous comments that had Callum doubled over in tears of laughter.

  When Rosario Dawson had to leave in the middle of day two because of a death in the family, I quipped a little too loudly to Callum, “Lucky Rosario!” He almost fell off his folding chair.

  I was shocked at my behavior, and I’m sure Callum was, too. He was British, after all, and to a born-and-bred Brit, being rude is a cardinal sin. The funny thing was, my actor buddy was born on the wrong side of the tracks and grew up in a strip club with a gangster dad. And here he was, acting the perfect gentleman (except when I had him guffawing) and pretty much channeling his role as the duke in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement.

  Meanwhile, I’d been taught the strictest rules of proper etiquette and was descended from a royal pedigree (Mom is a bona fide princess, and second cousin to Prince Charles of Wales), and I was acting like a common, haggis-tossing hooligan!

  And there was India up front, behaving like the well-mannered dream I’d brought her up to be, looking over at me quizzically. It was like we’d done the Freaky Friday switch, and I was the immature adolescent.

  The only, only, other time I’d ever behaved this outrageously in a class setting was the time India was in preschool at the prestigious and progressive Waldorf School and her teachers were putting on a Christmas nativity play for the kids.

  Again I sat in the back of the classroom, teetering on a tiny kindergarten chair, while India was up front acting like a little lady. I was fine until the teachers put on their woolen, felt hand puppets and proceeded to enact the biblical nativity story, not as Mary, Jesus, and Joseph but as a family of insects. It was their version of a New Age nativity play; it was an Insect Revival!

  One look at those insects huddled in the manger, and I lost it. I laughed so hard, I couldn’t walk and had to get down on all fours to crawl out of the room as snot poured out of my nose and dripped down my face. Not my finest moment.

  Other than that day and this one, I was Miss Manners all the way. Which is why the way I was acting made no sense to me.

  Could it be an absurd, delayed reaction to my strict upbringing? My father adopted the motto of a generation that believed children should be seen and not heard. If my siblings or I were disobedient or voiced an objection, we were punished. I loved him, but my father had a fierce temper, and for my own survival, I taught myself to be quiet and stay out of his way.

  The one and only time I did muster up enough courage to defy him to his face was when I was sixteen. I spoke back, and he grabbed me by the throat and threw me up against a wall. You can believe I never tried that again. (The following year, I did tell him to go fuck himself, but it was over the phone, with an ocean between us to keep me safe.)

  And now, everything in my nervous system was urging me to fight back in that ersatz classroom against those smiling sash wearers, no matter what the consequences.

  Why? Why?

  Later on, I’d figure out why: although I wasn’t aware of it consciously, my subconscious knew very well that it was under siege; it knew I was being infiltrated and indoctrinated by a system of pure subterfuge. My gut was trying to tell me that my daughter and I were being lured into a trap.

  Nancy, of course, corrected me with the right answer as to why I was being so combative in class.

  “You, Catherine,” she said, pointing at me from the front of the room, “have a defiance issue. We’ll have to work on that.”

  It was a word Nancy would use for me many times over the next five days, but once again—I had a problem with that.

  She may have considered me defiant, but what she was witnessing wasn’t defiance at all. It was the wisest, strongest, truest part of me rising up to do battle—and for very, very good reason.

  2

  * * *

  LOVE BOMBING AND EPIPHANIES

  And then, something unexpected and inexplicable happened to me.

  Somewhere around day three, I wrote in my journal: “Hated the process. At the same time, couldn’t wait to get there.”

  We began EM-ing in class and broke up into small groups again. One coach was assigned to each group to work one-on-one with each member and go over answers we’d given when filling out a questionnaire on our first day. The questions included:

  What is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?

  What have you done that you’re most ashamed of?

  What is your greatest fear?

  The questions were designed to expose our weaknesses, and they did. Within fifteen minutes, students were making confessions and having tearful breakthroughs and revelations left and right like an explosive fireworks display—including me.

  Nancy was coaching my group. When it was my turn, the first thing she tried to dismantle was the emotional charge around the memory of my father throwing me against the wall at sixteen.

  “Had you known then that it would be the worst thing he’d ever do to you, would that have lessened your fear in that moment?” she asked.

  “I suppose so . . .”

  “And you survived it, and you are alive, right? So you survived the worst.”

  “Right.”

  “Men get terrified when they lose control of their children, Catherine. You were taking control in that moment, and that scared him. He was acting out of his own insecurity. Can you see that?”

  “I never thought about it that way . . .”

  “Your father yelling at you or grabbing you by the throat has nothing to do with who you are. And it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you or that you are not lovable.”

  I could feel a tug-of-war taking place inside of me: the kind of internal fight that ensues when a person tries to make a deep-rooted change. I’d held on to a specific perception of the incident for many years, and now Nancy was inviting me to reexamine it and dismantle it through a new lens—her lens. I felt a struggle, and then gave in to it.

  Her explanation humanized my father and helped me understand his own struggle, lessening the resentment, fear, and grief I’d previously linked to the memory. Looking at him through this new lens, I actually felt compassion for him. I was even able to thank him for inadvertently being a powerful teacher for me in his school of hard knocks.

  “He was an antagonist for most of my life, but I developed a lot of strength, resilience, and self-reliance because of him,” I told the group, who all nodded in understanding. “I started supporting myself financially at seventeen. I became adept at dealing with difficult people.”

  Suddenly, in that room, I felt safe surrounded by these encouraging, empathetic people I barely knew, which was unusual for me. It was a soothing feeling, like a warm, gentle waterfall—and completely unexpected.

  Nancy asked me what I’d like to work on next, and I told her about my phobia of auditions. For decades, I’d get so overwhelmed by anxiety before walking into an audition room that I’d often end up not going in at all.

  “Why don’t you want to walk into that room?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. For some reason, I just don’t feel safe.”

  “Do you remember the first time you felt that way?”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath . . .

  —

  SUDDENLY I WAS four years old at a family gathering north of Florence, Italy.

  My grandfather on my mother’s side, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, owned a beautiful summer residence, Villa Demidoff, built by Francesco de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, in the fifteen hundreds. It was a palatial home filled with antiques from my grandfather’s Russian heritage. In the gardens, I used to climb onto the thirty-five-foot-tall, half-man, half-mountain sculpture Colossus of the Apennines by the Italian artist Giambologna, a disciple of Michelangelo’s. My sister and cousins and I would dare one another to run into the grottos at the back of the sculpture, which were filled with bats, and were war
ned by our parents not to swim in the lake out front because it was filled with venomous snakes.

  In the villa, family and friends had gathered after dinner in the living room: my mother; my sister; my cousins; aunts and uncles; Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent; and my grandmother, Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark.

  My uncle was sitting in the antechamber, and as I ran by him, he grabbed me by the waist and pulled me onto his lap. I didn’t understand what happened next, but even at four, I knew it was wrong. He started rocking me back and forth. I wanted it to stop, I wanted to get away, but instead I froze.

  I looked across into the living room; no one noticed what was happening to me. I could see my younger sister and cousins gathered around my grandfather. He was dunking sugar cubes into his coffee cup using a little gold spoon and distributing the cubes into the palm of each child’s hand. “Faire un canard,” he called it—French for “to make a duck.” He lined the children up in a row, like his little ducklings, eager for coffee sweets. In my mind, I imagined I was standing next to my cousins enjoying a coffee-soaked sugar cube, not frozen on my uncle’s lap.

  —

  WITHOUT ANY PROMPTING, that memory rolled seamlessly into another:

  I was in my early twenties, at an audition for a big part in a Blake Edwards film, and it was the first time I experienced debilitating anxiety during an audition.

  I’d grown up on the Pink Panther films, and director-producer Edwards was an idol of mine. His 1982 film Victor Victoria had recently won an Academy Award and a Best Actress nomination for his wife, Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music). I was still wet behind the ears and new to the profession. I’d made my acting debut two years earlier, playing Lady Diana in the highly rated TV movie The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, and had just been cast as Amanda Carrington on the hit ABC-TV series Dynasty. This was one of my first auditions for a feature film, and if I got the part, working with Edwards could be a career maker.

  I met with him alone in a studio lot office in Culver City, and he gave me some pages to read—we call them “sides” in the film biz—from his new screenplay. As I started to read, both my hands suddenly started to tingle, and I couldn’t move my fingers. I looked down at them; they were like two frozen crab claws pinching the pages, as if rigor mortis were setting in. I tried to concentrate on delivering my dialogue, but the tingling and numbness began to creep up my arms, sweep across my chest, and spread up to my neck. I had no idea what was happening—I felt embarrassed that he might notice and scared that something was terribly wrong with me. Most of all, I felt like a freak. Why is my body doing this to me, and why now, of all times?

  As they say in show business, “The show must go on,” so I did. But I sped up my reading pace, worried that if the paralysis reached my jaw, I wouldn’t be able to enunciate or even breathe. After I was finished, I quickly thanked Mr. Edwards and rushed out of the room, thinking I needed to get to a hospital and fast.

  But as soon as I left the audition room, the paralysis went away as mysteriously as it had taken hold.

  Amazingly, I did well enough to almost get the part—almost. Edwards called me the following week to tell me that the final decision was between me and another actress, and to let me know that he and Julie would be in Switzerland in the coming weeks at the same time I was vacationing there.

  “Come visit us for tea at our chalet in Gstaad!” he insisted. “We can discuss the part some more before I make my final decision.”

  His chalet, called the Fleur de Lys, was sumptuous. When I got there, I was ushered into a spacious living room with a stunning panoramic view of the Swiss Alps, where the director and Julie Andrews were waiting for me.

  Maybe it was the thin mountain air, but I immediately turned into the world’s most obnoxious fan. I was starstruck.

  “I can literally recite all the lines from The Pink Panther Strikes Again,” I gushed. Then I went into the infamous “Does your dog bite?” scene, acting out all the roles: Peter Sellers’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the old hotel clerk, and even the dog.

  “Does your duuug biiiite?”

  “No.”

  “Nice doggie—ouch! I thought you said your duuug did not biiiite?”

  “That . . . is not my dog.”

  Somewhere in the middle of my barking, I noticed the polite, tolerant smiles on their faces. Of course: they probably had rabid fans acting out for them “Does your duuug biiiite?” about a hundred times a day for the last decade. I felt like an idiot.

  We made chitchat, and they were very gracious, until Julie left the room to answer a phone call, and Edwards leaned in toward me.

  “Before I work with my leading ladies,” he said, “I like to go off with them alone for a weekend to get to know them really well.”

  I froze, just like I had when I was four. And in five seconds, a lifetime of admiration I had for my childhood icon shattered into a million pieces. I panicked, flushing from head to toe, and felt like I was suffocating. How could I get out of there without making him angry and losing the film role?

  I stood up and stuttered some lame excuse and rushed out of the room and out of the chalet without even saying goodbye to Julie. I was mortified, and agonized about whether I’d accidentally done something that led him on in some way. (I know now that victims of sexual harassment and assault often blame themselves at first.)

  I consoled myself with one bright side: at least I hadn’t gotten down on all fours when I did my dog impression.

  It was the first time a powerful man in the industry propositioned me, but it wouldn’t be the last by far. Each incident after that would harm me not only as a woman but also as an actress, chipping away at the love I had for the craft until there was barely anything left. It happened a lot, but I never got used to it. This kind of sexual harassment in the film industry has been around since movie cameras were invented, I’m sure. We were the only industry that proudly originated our own pet name for it: the casting couch.

  After my experience with Blake Edwards, I became plagued with terrible anxiety before auditions. Sometimes it got so bad, I had to take a tranquilizer beforehand to survive them. I had to monitor my dosage carefully, so that the effect would be somewhere between paralyzed and slurring.

  —

  “SO NOW,” NANCY prodded, bringing me back to the present, “why were you so afraid to go to auditions after that? Why don’t you want to walk into that room?”

  I looked down at the floor, barely able to talk.

  “Catherine?”

  I thought of the room where my uncle had touched me inappropriately and the room at Edwards’s chalet, and realized something.

  “Because”—I looked up at Nancy—“every room I walk into could potentially be a room I would be abused in.”

  Not until that very moment had I ever linked together the abuse at four, my incident with Edwards, and my subsequent angst before auditions.

  “You formed a belief about men in power hurting you,” Nancy observed.

  I continued to connect the dots:

  “I feel as though the memory of my father grabbing my throat is woven in there, too,” I said.

  Nancy nodded.

  “Maybe my body started to shut down at the audition with Blake Edwards because my subconscious sensed he was a predator?”

  More nodding from Nancy.

  “The anxiety after that—it’s like I’ve been suffering a form of PTSD,” I said.

  I took another deep breath and exhaled, bursting into tears. My little group cheered me on in support, and, again, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. All week, we in the class would bravely bare our souls and reveal our flaws and imperfections to one another—our version of emotional boot camp. Like soldiers in the trenches, we formed very special, intimate bonds.

  Did I overcome my audition anxieties after that day? I’ll never really know the answer to that because I haven’t auditioned since then.

  Did I feel fantastic after Nancy led me through a mosa
ic of memories until I reached a moment of connection and understanding? Yes! I felt elated! I found reason for my fears, I thought, and that gave me a sense of relief.

  “Human beings are meaning-making machines,” Nancy told us. That’s why it felt so good to make the associations I did during my EM-ing. Afterward, I felt empowered and exhilarated. And that day, I was the EM-ing rock star of the class.

  “Good luck to any of you following Bruce Springsteen here,” said one of the coaches, Nippy (who later married Sarah Edmondson), patting my back as I dried my eyes.

  I went home that night exhausted in body but euphoric in spirit.

  So it didn’t occur to me to ask Nancy or any of the coaches while they were zigzagging around in my brain if they were licensed therapists. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why most of the exercises we did in class had nothing to do with business skills. And it didn’t occur to me to remember that I’d been down this road before.

  Did I suddenly have amnesia? After a thirty-year history in the self-help world, I should have known this was the same-old, same-old, just repackaged. It had only been two days earlier that I was the Defiant One! Instead, I was once again getting hooked on a heady cocktail of neurotransmitters that was the chaser for each poignant revelation.

  The ESP program was so carefully calculated, so devious, and such a well-oiled machine that my subconscious had now been distracted and disarmed. As the ancient Chinese general, military strategist, and philosopher Sun Tzu once said: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

  —

  AT THE END of the five days, we had a graduation ceremony.

  Callum had been chosen to do a “live” EM in front of the class, as a shining example of a student who gave his all during explorations. He went to the front of the room and, before starting, warned Nancy with a chuckle, “I’m a really good actor, you know.”

  Nancy took him through some heart-wrenching experiences with alcoholism and difficult childhood memories, like the time his mother introduced him to his “real” father when he was five years old.