Dropped Names (29 page)

JILL CLAYBURGH

S
he stood looking into the mirror above my dressing room table, arranging and rearranging her gorgeous mane of blond hair to look as though it hadn't been given a thought. It always looked that way. Completely natural and elegantly stylish. Like the woman.

Her makeup was minimal, seemingly nonexistent. Dressed in a belted print dress that accented her tiny, tiny waist and small bosom, she looked nowhere near her forty years. More like a recently graduated Vassar girl (it was actually Sarah Lawrence) about to meet her first potential employer.

It was the spring of 1984. Jill Clayburgh, Raul Julia, and I were in rehearsal for Noel Coward's
Design for Living
, directed by George C. Scott, and due to open at New York's Circle in the Square Theatre several weeks hence.

She was on her way to meet Sydney Pollack for a drink to discuss the female lead in
Out of Africa
, a film he would be directing later that year. “I don't know why I'm bothering,” she said cheerfully, “Meryl's going to get it anyway.” (She did.)

But she stepped back to survey the goods, threw whatever tools she had emptied from her canvas bag back into it, slung it over her delicate shoulder, kissed me on the top of the head, and sailed out the door, her lovely summer dress gently swaying round her hips as her high heels determinedly tap-tapped up the stairs.

Jill possessed an ineffable, pragmatic optimism that permeated her being. An “I'll take whatever comes” gutsiness that I admired from the day we met.

I
t was in 1967. She was twenty-four, I was twenty-nine. We were cast as husband and wife in a television movie to be produced by the then immensely successful David Susskind. It was entitled
The Choice
. The story was about two men in need of a heart transplant. Their surgeon (George Grizzard) would have to decide whom to give the only one available. Either the young, brilliant violinist (me) or an aging former secretary of state (Melvyn Douglas). I got the heart, and Mel, I think, got an Emmy. Mel's wife was to be played by the great English actress Celia Johnson.

We would rehearse our tearjerker in New York and shoot in Toronto. The show's minor claim to fame was in its depicting, for the first time on television, an actual heart transplant performed by a pioneer in the field, Dr. Michael DeBakey. So fragile did the TV network believe the American public's stomach to be, that only thirty seconds of it were allowed to be aired.

Jill and I were, at the time, each involved in emotionally fraught relationships. She with another actor and I with a registered nurse. Jill was very drawn to the high strung and I was (and still am) a hypochondriac. We had each found perfect, if temporary ideal partners. We bonded immediately during rehearsals and once away from home, sealed our friendship prowling the discos of Toronto, dancing, drinking, and coming dangerously close to a tumble. But it was Jill who kept us out of bed. Things were confusing enough, she reasoned. It was the 1960s though, and disco dance floors may as well have been beds. There was a good deal of caressing, long good-night kisses, and a few times we fell asleep in each other's arms. Both of our relationships subsequently crashed and burned, but by then our train had passed.

Jill's career soon started a meteoric rise and by the early 1970s she was a major film star, Oscar nominated for
An Unmarried Woman
. By 1984, at the time of our production, it was beginning to look like her ship of movie stardom was drifting off course, and while she was not happy about it, she was not the sort of person to blame the business or cry in self-pity. She was handling it.

She was, of course, an actress. And if women, as men often feel, are impossible to know, then actresses up the ante considerably. But Jill was a good egg, with an open and generous nature, free of artifice.

There was, of course, her laugh. Easy to get and infectious to hear. That mass of hair would tumble forward as she bent over in hysterics and then fly back in wild abandon. It became the unifying component in our budding ménage-à-trois with Raul.

The seventeen years between our gigs disappeared and Jill and I were as close as we had been before. And with the addition of Raul, we very quickly became the Marx Brothers of the New York theatre scene, with George C. as our tyrannical but benevolent Margaret Dumont.

At the close of our first week of rehearsal the three of us went to dinner, admitted that George scared the shit out of us, and told one another the parts we'd stupidly turned down in films that earned Oscars for the actors who took them. We were now all married with five children among us. Jill was forty, Raul forty-two, and I forty-six. We were playing lovers, each character having slept with the other separately and together, and each discovering they could not live without each other and would carry on at play's end forever joined in a hedonistic, unholy trinity.

I
knew she was conflicted about returning to the stage and had, at that time, a fear, and even a dislike, of audiences. She hated the idea of being judged by them. Raul and I, on the other hand, were eager racehorses, anxious to gallop. Jill was hesitant about coming out of the gate in the first place. This was exacerbated by a passionate love affair with her first child, Lily, born to her and playwright David Rabe. Lily was as adored as any child I've ever seen. Every moment Jill could steal away from the show to be with her, she coveted. But still, she happily enjoyed being “the girl” with three men devotedly at her feet. George C. would have been quite happy to get her off those feet, but she handled him with good grace and lighthearted humor. She was a soft, feminine tomboy. Catnip to any man.

The limited and temporary freedom that backstage life gives actors turns up the sexual burners, and we grew deliciously physical with one another. One matinee, as Raul was pulling off his shirt for a quick change and Jill and I were kibitzing in his dressing room, she suddenly raced across the floor and clawed at his chest. “Oh give me some of that,” she said, “give it to me!” And they began a series of silent film star passionate embraces. In seconds I insinuated myself into the mix and for the next few minutes we became a pulsating Oreo cookie with nothing remotely chaste about where our hands and mouths wandered. It was fast, hot, and dirty, and it was the kind of fun at which actors excel. We brought it all onstage with us and the fact that it was never consummated kept us fully charged sexually in front of our audiences.

Jill was not a great stage actress, which she would have been the first to admit. She didn't have the killer instinct required to prowl the stage like a predatory lioness, daring the audience to look away from you. She had neither the voice nor the physical stamina for it, and she lacked the will to acquire either. Only later in her career, she told me, did she come to feel truly comfortable onstage. “I get now what you and Raul loved so much about being out there,” she told me. But even back then, with her reserve and uncertainty, she was a game girl.

T
he play was an enormous success and while we saw less of each other, we made a habit on most matinee days of going to my apartment, often surrounded by our mates and kids, feeding them and ourselves, usually bringing back Jill's favorite franchise at the time, Chirpin' Chicken, then racing back for the evening performance.

I was the first to leave the production for a prior commitment. Jill followed a month later, and Raul stayed on until closing. For a year or more afterward Jill and I stayed in contact and managed some long lunches and a few late night telephone calls. But an incident so small and petty; a series of unreturned phone calls not worth the ink to explain, caused us to drift apart. I will forever regret the loss of those irretrievable years.

In the early days of our start-up careers, she said to me: “L.A. is not for me. Racing all over the place holding little bits of paper with the names of people I'm supposed to impress. They're going to have to come to me, baby.”

And when they did, she handled the good years beautifully. Not for her the photo layouts with legs spread wide and breasts pumped high. Not for her the public confessions of illness, self-promotion, or mock humility. She was also one of the few women I have ever known who could, when it was suggested we go somewhere, just get up, grab her bag, give her hair a quick toss, and head for the door. That funny, fun-loving face, the ready smile, and the intelligence, made her a spectacular and sexy package. A package kept all the more desirable by its hidden contents.

O
ne year before her death, I found a nine-minute tape of Jill, Lily, my former wife, and our two kids on a visit to Raul's farm in upstate New York. It was made on Memorial Day 1984. We had traveled there supposedly to run lines, but the scripts stayed in the car, never opened. Raul, his wife, Merel, and their two sons were waiting for us. We barbecued, rode motorbikes, and talked mostly about our children. I made a copy for Jill, sent it and received this note from her:

Dearest Frank,

Thank you so much for sending me that DVD. I approached it with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing it would be painful as well as beautiful and touching. I was not wrong. To see our faces! Our children's! My son had not yet been born. And Raul—so heartbreaking! Ahh! It also brought back the fantastic time we had together—weren't we going to open a bar like Bar Centrale? And how little I wanted to act at that time, being so consumed with Lily. You were both very kind to me when my heart was always so far away from the work. Thank you.

I hope you are happy!

Love, Jill

I didn't answer her note. I'll get to it, I thought. There's plenty of time.

NORRIS CHURCH

N
orris Church moved slowly across my country lawn in the early fall of 2010, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and I was instantly drawn to her; simultaneously regretting it would be the first time we'd meet.

It was a party to celebrate my new house, attended by some thirty people or so. She arrived last on the arm of her son, John Buffalo, by the late Norman Mailer. Rail thin, a lovely silk bandana wrapped across her forehead and spilling over one shoulder with Native American jewelry around her neck and wrists and dressed in slacks and an elegant beige blouse, she tentatively moved toward a lawn chair and John carefully set her down there.

I understood immediately how irresistible she must have been to Norman. I leaned over to greet her, and she looked up, took my hand, and said:

“Oh Frank, thank you for being so kind to John. He needs a father now.”

John had played in
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
, an Oliver Stone film I'd done a year earlier. We'd had a chance to get to know each other somewhat in New York, and later in Cannes, where the film was shown out of competition. When I asked if he'd like to come up that day, he told me he'd be in Provincetown with his mom and could they both come by on their way to New York.

“It's going to be a long ride,” he said, “and she can use the break.”

“Of course,” I said. “She can have one of the guest rooms if she likes.”

T
hroughout the afternoon, Norris engaged freely with everyone there. She remained, for the most part, seated on the wide-armed straw chair John had set her in, ate sparingly, but seemed anxious for human contact. When I could, I sat with her and she spoke of turning their family house in Provincetown into a retreat for writers. Then she spoke of her sons and of the storm that was Norman. Her ability to draw you in and appear peacefully at ease despite her infirmities made her an irresistible presence. In a very brief time, I knew what Norman had found—a woman of immense inner strength who seemed not the kind to back down or cry “poor me.”

Toward the end of the afternoon, I was walking a few guests to their cars and when I turned back to the house, she was standing alone, looking at the unfinished garden only just begun by my daughter, Sara, earlier that spring. I walked over to her and she said, “This is going to need a good deal of tending to.”

“I know” I said. “It was so beautiful a month ago but Sara isn't here enough to see to it and I have a black thumb.”

A tall woman, almost my height, she turned toward me, took my hand, and put it up to her chest. We stood in silence for a few moments and then she said: “It's not going to be much longer now. Look in on John for me, would you?” Her eyes welled with tears and she put both her hands on my shoulders and lowered her head. We spoke not another word for a long while as she fought to regain her composure.

“Why don't you both stay tonight? The guest room is very comfortable. My daughter's in the other one, but John can bunk in the den.”

“Thank you, but it's better for me to be home in Brooklyn, close to my doctors.”

When they left and the house and grounds were cleaned up, Sara and I played our traditional game of Scrabble and she went to bed.

T
here is no question in my mind that had Norris stayed in my guest room, I would have visited her there, gotten into the bed if she'd let me, and held her in whatever fashion she needed. Her still magnificent beauty, her intelligence and warm persona, her tears, her cancer—even the death knell sounding—were, it felt to me, legitimate grounds for intimacy.

The next day I called John and asked him if I might take his mother out on a date. “Go for it, man,” he said. I would not have the privilege, however. Her decline was rapid and she died that November at only sixty-one, from the cancer she had valiantly fought for eleven years. Sara's garden eventually had to be abandoned; it too withering and dying at far too young an age.