atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (17 page)

My Hollywood Bungalow 

My home, my Hollywood bungalow on Gardner Street, sat a block and a half above Melrose Avenue, where I could walk to dinner at a variety of restaurants, shop for vintage clothes, and find organic groceries at Quinn’s Market. I could go to Canter’s for lox and blintzes and catch an old Charlie Chaplin silent movie on Fairfax Avenue. On La Cienega, there was a mall with the current film hits playing. I could run around the track at Fairfax High, and my anxiety would melt away. It was almost a neighborhood.

My house had four rooms: a living room with a gas fireplace, a party-size kitchen, and two tiny rooms for a bedroom and a den. In the backyard, I intended to put a volleyball and badminton court and maybe a lap pool running along the side of my postage-stamp-size property.

The first night there, I was sitting with my friend Ron out on the flagstone patio, which was just off the kitchen and trellised with jasmine. We were surveying my estate and sipping a California chablis. I had recovered from my buyer’s remorse. I had just finished saying, “Look at that full moon. Life is good,” when there was a scrabbling, scratching, sliding sound on the roof above and behind us. We looked up and saw, lit by the moon against the dark sky, what appeared to be a small dog. We got a quick glimpse, and it was gone.

“What the heck was that? What’s a dog doing up there?” I said.

“It wasn’t a dog. It was a rat,” said Ron.

“C’mon, it was huge. It was a huge animal.”

“It was a rat,” said Ron. “They’re very large out here. They live in the—”

“Stop it! You’re scaring me. Why is it… on my rooftop?”

“Well,” said Ron, “they live in the palm trees, and it’s probably trying to get in or out of your attic.”

“My attic! Why doesn’t he live in the sewer?”

“There aren’t any sewers in LA,” he said.

“There aren’t?”

“It only rains about six days a year out here. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No. Why is that?”

“Well, LA was originally a desert, so—”

“You mean a rat the size of a dog is living in my attic?”

“You can put wire mesh over that hole next to your rain gutter and see what happens.”

“This is a nightmare!”

The next day, I had to replace the clay plumbing pipe from the thirties that ran all the way down to the street. It seemed to have crumbled overnight.

Two weeks later, I came home in the middle of a burglary. The thieves were climbing out the back window as I turned the key in my front door. The curtain was still swaying in the breeze of their exit when I entered, and the stereo was gone. The next day, I put up window bars and a gate that locked across the driveway.

Nevertheless, I had some great parties there in that little house. All my guests liked all my other guests, much to their surprise. I also had house guests from New York and discovered that although it was great to have the company, I really preferred privacy at this time in my life. However, the time came when I was again faced with the loneliness and unreality of LA and the blanket of fear that lies over a company town.

One day I found that I didn’t want to get rid of the ant that had gotten into my kitchen. That’s how lonely it felt. I let him stay on as a pet. One night I spent an hour listening through thin walls to a rat crash and thrash around in a trap over my head before he gave up the ghost. I had the insane thought that I might miss him.

There was an old couple, Holocaust survivors, living next door to me who walked by my house every day on their way to lunch at a social center on Melrose. When the husband died, the wife would go alone and would stop and tell me sometimes how deeply she mourned him. About three months had gone by when I saw her walking home arm in arm with a new old fellow. She had met him at the social center, and pretty soon he moved in with her. She told me it wasn’t that she didn’t love her husband. She still loved him as deeply as she always had. “But, Peggy,” she said, “I have to have a man in my bed.”

Argyle Avenue 

Thrusting up from downtown LA to the San Fernando Valley, the Hollywood Freeway soars over Sunset Boulevard, leaving an off-ramp to Argyle Avenue in its wake. Argyle Avenue is a wide street with white, wooden houses hugging the hill on each side of it along its first two blocks. The houses are made up of apartments. Farther up, set back and hidden behind greenery on the second block on the left, is a Russian mosque with an all-Russian-speaking congregation. A free Russian brunch is served after services on Sundays.

At the end of the second block, a mansion loafs across the avenue, forcing a right-angle turn into an abruptly narrowed street, joining the winding roads zigzagging through the Hollywood Hills and getting lost on Mulholland Drive, which winds west to the Pacific Ocean. Argyle Avenue is like a map of a Hollywood career that starts out with a flare and goes nowhere.

In the twenties and thirties, that mansion that dominates and shrinks the beginning of Argyle Avenue was where Barbara Stanwyck, Hedy Lamarr, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis lived together and entertained their gentlemen callers. Well, that was the idea, the fantasy. It was a new twist on an old business based on a fascination with the glamorous movie stars of the Hollywood studio system.

These women were look-alikes. There was a living, breathing, Madame Tussaud-seeming house of them. A movie star look-alike living and working there was required to do daily research on the star she was impersonating. By reading about her every day in the newspapers, gossip columns, and the trades, she found out what happened on the set where the star was working, what was said there, what parties the star went to, with whom she attended them, and what she wore. If, say, Bette Davis were sick or away on location, her look-alike stayed in her room and didn’t receive clients until Bette was back in town again.

I found Argyle Avenue one day while looking for yet another place to live. I had moved many times during my stay in Hollywood. I couldn’t settle anywhere, but this street attracted me, invited me, said, “Oh, come live here, you’ll love it.” How quaint it was, off-beat, quiet, and peaceful. I moved into a complex of apartments that shared a wrap-around terrace filled with huge pots of red geraniums. Other actors—Dennis Christopher, Peter Frechette, and a costume designer for Miami Vice—were living there. I thought, What a find, this charming “compound.” It was a modest rent, and we all had a second-floor bedroom and a garage underneath us. The Russian mosque hidden in the trees was just across the street.

It was a Wednesday. When I moved in on the following Saturday, I was shocked to find the street filled with cars, boom boxes, and Mexicans. I thought, Gee, maybe it’s a party. But it was a party that happened every night. On weekends, cars were parked bumper to bumper along the sidewalks. During the day, rows of legs stuck out from under these cars as their owners worked on them with heavy wrenches that doubled as hammers. All this was accompanied by mariachis playing at top volume on the radio right under my living room window. They seemed to be in the room with me, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that if I went out and asked them to be quiet, to go do their work somewhere else, they ignored me. This drove me nuts. I had moved into a ghetto, and nobody had warned me. I felt trapped, betrayed. The sun glared down as if to split my skin in two. I was coming apart; I was beside myself. There was impotence in my fury, and I screamed. I screamed at the Mexican who sat in his truck gunning his motor and drinking beer in front of my window. He never looked at me. I didn’t exist for him. I was invisible to this profile of indifference in a pickup truck, this dark shadow of an archetype, this animus.

“Do you have a green card?” I heard myself shrieking.

Without a glance at me, he stripped into gear and drove away. I never saw him again.

My friend Brett said later, “You know, deep down everybody’s a bigot when they’re angry.”

Next, I began to see hypodermic needles in the street. A couple of times, there was a shell casing in the gutter. Now and then there would be a muffled gunshot sound from deep inside the building directly across from me, where a shiny black car had pulled up briefly. Finally, one day around two o’clock in the afternoon, there was a loud, rapid knocking on my door and a voice crying, “Help! Help me! Please help me! He’s beating me. He has a knife! I need help!”

I looked out the window and saw a scrawny girl in her late teens or early twenties, sobbing and pounding on my door. Since I didn’t see anyone chasing her, I opened the door and said, “What’s the matter? What is it? I’ll call the police.”

“No. No! No, please, miss. It’s my boyfriend. He’s after me. Please, no police!”

“Well, come in,” I said. “What is it? Where is he?”

“I got away from him! He was beating me but I got away from him! He’s chasing me… help me!”

“Come in,” I said. She came in and stood on the threshold, sobbing and trembling.

“No, miss. Please. Thank you. No.” She dissolved into a spasm of tears.

“Look,” I said, “you need help. I’m going to find it for you. I’m going to look in the phone book and find a halfway house, a place where you can go where they know what to do for you.”

“Thank you, missus,” she said. I turned to get the phone book out and started to leaf through it. Something made me turn back to her, and I noticed that my wallet was on the floor. It had been sitting on the hall table next to my keys, and now it was on the floor. Leaning down to pick it up, I found it was empty. When I started to speak to the girl, I realized that she was gone. In the fraction of a second, she was gone. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a bad script. I went out on the terrace to look for her, but she was gone, down the stairs, swallowed up by Argyle Avenue, over like a view out of a train window as one leaves the station, part of the past, no rewrites accepted.

Sometime later, after I had gotten away from there, I heard that the woman with the fine white hair and dirndl skirts who lived down the street from me went out with a camera when the shiny black car was visiting the druggies’ house. As the driver was coming out, she said to him, “I just love your car. It is the most beautiful one of its kind I’ve ever seen. Cars are my hobby, you know. I’m a regular aficionado. You don’t mind if I just take a little picture of it, do you?” She quickly snapped a picture of the car, including its license plate. “Thank you so much,” she said over her shoulder as the driver said, “Wha—?” “And please give my regards to Mr.—” She mumbled some gibberish that was indistinguishable as she was halfway down the hill by then and had just about disappeared. Argyle Avenue never saw the car after that. I applaud that woman for her ingenuity, courage, and impeccable manners.

My last move was into a high-rise security condo on a different hill. Shortly thereafter, I went back to New York where the insanity was more familiar, allowing me to function in it at a higher level. In New York, I can stay in the same apartment for twenty years before I get the urge to move.

George Clooney and… 

I was driving down Argyle Avenue on my way to the studio. As I crossed Hollywood Boulevard on a green light, a jalopy, barreling backward through the intersection, crashed into me. The driver got out. I knew her; she was an actress. The first thing she said was, “Where the hell is the Pantages Theatre?” I’m a good driver from the East, and I wasn’t used to the insanity of this reaction I didn’t tell her the Pantages was right behind her. I hope she’s still looking for it.

When I got to makeup, George Clooney was standing there waiting his turn.

That’s when I started to react to the accident. Delayed, hysterical sobs burst out of me. He stood there and listened. He was a wonderful listener. I had never been listened to so well in my life. I carried on a little longer than I needed to as a result.

Then we got to talking. He has a beautiful voice, although you can hardly hear it in his films. I asked him if he sang, too, like his aunt Rosemary, who was a favorite of mine. He said, “Nah, I gave it a shot, but I decided one singer in the family was enough.”

He had come in late as a replacement on a TV pilot in which I played his mother. He did a scene in a real kitchen, where he cooked breakfast while he got dressed for work. He went from pajamas to business clothes, including tie, jacket, shoes, and socks, as he scrambled eggs, fried bacon, flipped pancakes, buttered toast, spread marmalade, and made coffee, which he drank. He had a bunch of lines that he knew perfectly, got all the jokes, and charmed us to pieces. He accomplished all of this in one take. There was a “Wow, how did you do that?” reaction from all of us and a great deal of applause.

Then the director said, “George, the scene can’t go longer than four minutes. Could you cut twenty seconds off what you just did?”

George said, “Sure, why not?”

The next time I saw him was on the TV show Sisters in a scene with Sela Ward. I got to watch George keep the scene alive through sheer good nature and a sense of fun during the endless takes the cameras required. He never stopped. Between scenes he kept entertaining us.

I didn’t have a scene with him on ER (I was playing a crazy lady whose husband had brought her in for a psychiatric evaluation because she’d freaked out over the rash of muggings in town), but George was right there making me, the new kid on the block, feel comfortable. He came over as soon as he saw me to find out if I needed anything. I showed him the seven guns my character had in her purse for protection and how I had learned to spin one of them around on my forefinger. He made a genuine effort to be impressed, but I could tell he had something else on his mind.

Another time I was eating lunch at the Farmers Market, a huge open-air restaurant in Hollywood, and George got up from his table on the other side of the patio where he was eating with a friend and came loping over. “How are you, Peggy? Everything all right?” He really wanted to know.

When I saw him in Michael Clayton, I realized in the middle of the picture that I had absolutely no idea where they were, who anybody was, or what was going on. Spy stories often do that to me. I had an impulse to leave, but then I thought, No, I’m happy just sitting here watching him. I don’t have to know anything past that.

During the credits, he sits in the limo, thinking. That’s it. I felt like I could read his mind by just watching his eyes. It was as if he were going over what had happened to him that day. It goes on for several minutes. I’ve never seen anything that simple and that riveting.

He talked about that moment in the profile The New Yorker did of him. In it, he said that what I saw was exactly what he had planned to do, think about the day. But a crowd had gathered to watch, and it struck him as so funny that all his thoughts and energy went into not cracking up. I saw his original intention for the scene anyway. It’s a wonderful glimpse into the craft of acting, what the mind can juggle, and what a good actor he is.

Steve Guttenberg was another actor who was given me as a son in a TV pilot. I think it was only his second job. He was nineteen or twenty, and one day the soundstage got so frantic and out of control, with actors trying to shoot scenes while carpenters were still building the sets, that no one could remember any lines at all. It was Steve who showed me where to go for some quiet so I could learn lines while the set was exploding. He had found a hiding place and shared it with me. When I thanked him and told him what a great son he was, he said his mother had brought him up that way. Then he confided to me that once when he hadn’t behaved well, she locked him out of the house in the middle of winter, and he didn’t have any clothes on at all. But she wouldn’t let him back in for half an hour, which he thanked her for to that day.

There was Jim Carrey, whom I never met but who walked through my kitchen in Once Bitten. I didn’t know who he was at the time or I would have said, “Hello, son,” and maybe reminded him to drink some orange juice.

And there was Mr. T from The A–Team, who told me that I reminded him of his mother. So I told him his shoes were a disgrace and that he should get a new pair. He had on the oldest, dirtiest, sloppiest pair of sneakers I’d ever seen. They were coming open at every seam. He said, “I’ll never get rid of these shoes. They remind me of what I came from, and they’ll keep me from getting a swelled head, ‘cause if I don’t pay attention, I’ll end up right back there.”

This was in Chicago, on the set of The Toughest Man in the World, a Movie of the Week about Mr. T’s life. It was in his contract to be filmed where he came from so all the buddies he grew up with could be in the movie with him. It was a very unusual request, but it was granted.

Jane Fonda, after one of her scenes in Nine to Five, ended up sitting at the desk behind me and then was trapped there for the rest of the day in the background which had to be matched to the next scene, which was probably going to take all afternoon.

She said to me, “This is kind of a new experience for me, to sit here and be an extra in the scene. It feels really kind of boring.” I said, “It is boring.” I did it all the time. It’s really only fun being in a film if you’re in the whole thing or most of it, or if they film every scene you’re in all on the same day or days. When they don’t, which is pretty much always, you wait around all day and nearly go insane with boredom and anxiety, trying to keep your energy up and stay ready to say the lines they gave you at any moment. It’s really deadly.

Jane Fonda had never been in that position. I don’t know what she was experiencing, but she didn’t seem to like my saying, in effect, that I was bored being in this film she was starring in. I was flat-out tactless in those days. I could have been warmer to her in her dilemma, but perhaps playing a drunk twelve hours a day for six weeks was making me cranky. I was sorry I had said what I did. I didn’t see her after lunch that day. I think she spoke to someone and got excused.

Lily Tomlin came up to me the first day I was there and said, “I want to give you something. What could I bring on the set to give you?” I didn’t know what she was talking about as we didn’t really have a scene together, except for my saying, “Atta girl!” to her when she got pissed off at the boss. It was strange, but it was very generous. Later, I realized she was trying to make something of my presence on the set, to use everything around her. She surprised me. I had been thinking of the times our paths had crossed in a long hallway at a singing teacher’s studio in the Ansonia Hotel, and how I had gone to see her one-woman show when she first started out. It was at the Playboy Club in New York. She opened as a woman networking at a funeral, waving, carrying on, chatting away, but it wasn’t really Playboy material. I had been concerned about what might become of her.