I'll Scream Later (No Series) (12 page)

I
N
M
ARCH OF
1986, I went to the Academy Awards for the first time. The trip to Hollywood was magical. Bill had been nominated and would win an Oscar that night in the lead-actor category for his performance in
Kiss of the Spider Woman.

We stayed at the legendary Chateau Marmont. Stars were everywhere—and I was starstruck. Even now I can turn into such a fan when I see someone whose work I admire.

It was my first red-carpet event—I walked it with Bill and I loved it. Jack was there to interpret for me, Liz was there for moral support—and so that I could have a girlfriend along to hang out with.

I had an incredible feeling when they called Bill’s name, knowing how much it meant and how many years he’d worked on his craft. I loved being there to share it with him, including the Governor’s Ball, then a round of after parties.

That trip was just about perfect, except for what Liz and Jack and I refer to as “the Jessica Lange incident.”

The day after the Academy Awards, Bill was hurrying us to get in the limo and get out of there. We were leaving town, with packing to be done, and Bill had to check out of the hotel. Liz and I had gotten pretty stoned, pretty giggly, and were not moving all that fast—but then we were in the limo and driving around to the side of the hotel so he could check out. He jumped out of the car and said he’d be right back. When I saw him spot someone and stop to chat.

And so we sit. And we sit.

I ask Jack to look and see whom Bill is talking to. He ducks his head outside and tells us, “It’s Jessica Lange!”

Now before I go on, let me just say I think Jessica Lange is terrific—great actress, beautiful woman, always has been nice to me.

But that morning, I admit I had a huge flash of jealousy, and I was really tired of waiting.

When Bill got back into the car, I casually asked him, “Who were you talking to?” Both Jack and Liz shot me a look like
What in the heck are you doing?

“Jessica Lange.”

“Woo hoo, Jessica Lange. Woo hoo, big movie star.
We
were all waiting for you while you talked to the big movie star? Woo hoo.”

Bill swung around and got right in Jack’s face and said, “Is that true, Jack? Were you waiting?”

Liz and Jack didn’t know whether to break into laughter or run for cover. They opted for trying to look completely innocent.

Bill didn’t see any humor in the situation—we could almost see the steam rising from his ears! I was
so
stoned.

M
EANWHILE
, P
ARAMOUNT HAD
been doing test screenings for
Children of a Lesser God,
and the audience reaction was strong—except for the ending. The studio execs were pressing for a rewrite and reshoot to come up with something that felt more as if Sarah and James might have a “happily ever after.”

The timing I think worked to my advantage. In the story, I’m a year older and stronger, and in truth the months had left me in many ways more self-assured. The reshoot went well except for the icy winds that blew through what was supposed to be a springtime night, leaving my nose red and runny—which kept the makeup artist busy.

I was anxious for the film to come out or at least get to that point where you’re getting some kind of buzz in the industry about your work. I hadn’t gotten another serious offer since the film wrapped, and I was anxious to have a career. Living with Bill was feeling increasingly isolated, and without work I had no financial independence.

Still, so many things about Bill were wonderful, and sometimes it felt as if our love was strong enough and passionate enough to carry us through anything.

The notes he’d leave just to let me know when he’d gone out running were beautiful, poetic. The cards that would come with his flowers. Messages left when he was on location. Letters—filled with love, commitment, his hopes for the future, worries about the present. Also, letters filled with his frustration, jealousy, and anger, but mostly he wrote to me of extraordinary love.

I often thought he was working through his feelings for me in these long, stream-of-consciousness rambles. They clearly meant something long after our breakup. I have saved every scrap, whether it was an eight-word note or an eight-page letter. The photo album of those treasured times we spent with his son Alex. I think on some level I wanted to have a record that would stand as witness for both the good and the bad times.

In August I was turning twenty-one. Bill had gotten me the most beautiful Paloma Picasso bracelet from Tiffany’s that she had designed and signed. The wide, gold bangle had my name spelled in full-cut diamonds.

If that wasn’t special enough, I went home to Chicago and
People
magazine came to my birthday party!

The publicity team was trying to generate interest in the movie, and they saw me as a fresh face with a compelling story that could only help the film. After screening the film, the folks at
People
decided to do a profile on me.

So with a writer and a photographer in tow, we celebrated my twenty-first birthday in Northbrook. One of my favorite pictures was taken in the garage of our house—I’m in jeans and a white T-shirt with a giant peace sign painted on it, one of my favorites. I’ve just broken open the piñata, the ground is covered in candy, and my family and friends are all laughing.

I had a homemade cake that day, and I was surrounded by love. I felt better, freer, more me than I had in ages. It was a great way to officially ring in adulthood!

I
N THE FALL
, Bill went to Yugoslavia to film
A Time of Destiny
with Timothy Hutton and Stockard Channing. The separation was brutal and our correspondence from that time was filled with love
and yearning. In September, Bill flew me over for a few days and added a ticket for Jack.

The trip was rocky from the start. We flew first to Rome, then to Trieste, near Italy’s border with Yugoslavia. Bill was to meet us there with a car for the drive back to Portoroz on the Adriatic coast, where they were shooting the film.

But he’d accidentally left his passport at the hotel, and the border patrol wouldn’t let him through, so he sent his driver, Gorky, on to meet us with a handwritten note. Along with many apologies he said for us to go with Gorky, that I could trust him, he was a “good man.” Bill said he was “desolate” not to be there, and I know that was true. You can even feel it in the intensity and frustration of the scrawl—he’d written the note on the back of the September 5 shooting schedule that was one of the few bits of paper he had with him.

When I finally saw him, we were both so happy, we just melted into each other. I had bought seven new sets of lingerie—something different for every night I was going to be there. For a while, it was pure bliss. But then things went dark. He was at war with the production over creative issues, then at war with me.

Jack remembers, “I was taking a shower when my friend Joe, who’d flown in from Italy for a couple of days, knocked and said, ‘You’ve got to come out, there’s something going on next door.’ I got out and I could hear the most horrific sound. I had never heard anything like it before. Two people screaming, throwing things. It was like that nonstop.

“Joe and I debated what to do, and we finally decided to knock on their door. But just as I came out of my room. Marlee came out of theirs. She had bruises on her face and the start of a black eye. I could see Bill behind her, and he had a split lip.

“Marlee wanted to go home or to call the police. I didn’t see how we could do either. Bill had the tickets, none of us had any money, and I didn’t know how to contact the police in Yugoslavia, and given its politics then, I wasn’t sure that would be safe anyway.”

The storm blew over. I spent the next day eating fried chicken, french fries, drinking Cokes, and hanging out with Jack and Joe.
Jack asked me why I didn’t leave Bill. I couldn’t, I loved him and he loved me. It was going to get better.

By the time I left for home, things were back in a good place, or at least a better place. Bill wrote me the most amazing letter, which he started just moments after I left. In it, he worried his old worry, that I was so young I would lose interest in him, there would be younger men to catch my fancy—as I read back over his writings, it is everywhere.

I
CAME BACK
to the States and started a round of publicity for
Children of a Lesser God,
finally due to be released in September. It would premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, one of the major stops for movies with Oscar hopes. It was such strange new terrain for me to be walking.

By now, thankfully, buzz was starting to build, and I was getting good notices. Add to that, I was the new, exotic flavor of the month for the media. However, apparently few of those who interviewed me had ever talked to a Deaf person before in their lives. At times it was awkward, to say the least.

They would look at Jack, ask him questions, and avoid looking at me. Everyone wanted to know what my world sounded like—I don’t know how to compare what I experience to your world of sounds…I can’t hear! I learned quickly how to get control of the situation—first rule, look at me, talk
to
me. I can communicate. Pretty soon both sides got the hang of it.

I remember seeing the film for the first time, seeing my name on the screen—that moment was unlike any I’d ever had, butterflies inside. My family went to a special showing in Chicago, and when I came on the screen, my mom couldn’t help herself and yelled “That’s my daughter,” and the audience cheered and applauded.

The reviews were exciting, generally the critics loved the movie, and most were moved by my performance. Interest in me—who I was, where I came from—began to build. I started getting requests from the morning shows and
Entertainment Tonight
. I found those TV talk shows so easy and comfortable. I loved settling into a couch and talking about the film, it didn’t feel like work at all.

As I got more critical attention, that only upped tensions at home. I lived my life walking on eggshells, probably both of us did, but certainly me. We increasingly wanted different things from our relationship. It often felt as if Bill either wanted intense togetherness or he was pulling away. Wanting hours of solitude in his office to work on whatever the next project was, and he was working a lot. But it was never a comfortable distance; I found myself tiptoeing around the edge of a volcano that could erupt at any time.

There were other differences, too. Our childhoods could not have been less alike—he was born into an affluent family that held education to be a sacred trust and expected him to grow up conversant in politics, literature, the world. He attended top schools, ones that pressed their students toward academic achievement. The prestigious Julliard School was his last stop.

By contrast, the expectations for me were more blue-collar, pragmatic. Basic skills so that I could eventually get through life and find a job that would provide me a living wage. When Mike, my first real boyfriend, and I dreamed, we had small dreams, though they seemed big to us at the time.

For Bill and I, conversation was sometimes difficult because I didn’t understand, had not been taught about, the world in the same way as him.

No matter what triggered our fights, they were made far worse by his drinking and my drug use. To this day, my stomach knots when I’m around someone who smells saturated by alcohol.

Sometimes, as I look back, it seems that we were always in some stage of warfare. One night he’d been invited to go to Glenn Close’s for a game of Murder. He told me that Glenn didn’t want me to come; maybe they thought I was too young. I got angrier and angrier as the night went on. So angry that I went into his office, which was off-limits to me, and started rummaging around in his desk. I found some coke there.

When I saw the coke, I thought,
Bingo, it’s my party now
. I snorted most of it. But that wasn’t enough. He’d taken the TTY with him, so I called and remember saying, “Guess what? I’m high on your coke.”

He slammed the phone down and was back at the apartment in fifteen minutes, raging mad.

November was a truly volcanic month. One night he was out doing research—or maybe not—for his upcoming film,
Broadcast News
. He finally came home around 4:30 a.m., drunk, and woke me up. I looked at the clock, then asked where the hell he had been. I suspected he was having an affair with his research….

The next thing I knew he’d pulled me out of the bed, screaming at me, shaking me. I was scared, I was sobbing. Then he threw me on the bed, started ripping off his clothes and mine. I was crying. “No, no, no. Please, Bill, no.” The next thing I remember is Bill ramming himself inside me as I sobbed.

Another night, we’d been fighting for hours and he called Jack to come pick me up, at one o’clock in the morning. Jack took a cab over and he recalls, “I could hear yelling as I was riding the elevator up and I kept thinking, can’t anyone else in this building hear this? When I got to their floor, I saw Marlee sobbing on the floor in the hallway, her clothes thrown in heaps around her. Bill came out in the hall, angry, and just kept saying, ‘Don’t believe anything she tells you.’”

I wanted to go to a hotel, but I was so upset, Jack insisted I go home with him. About an hour later, when I was calmer, I called Bill on the TTY and asked, “Anyone there?”

“Just us ghosts,” he replied.

I took a cab back to him that night.

O
N
N
OVEMBER
8, Bill wrote me a long, formal letter telling me our relationship was over. He said in that letter that he was guilt-ridden about what he called his “physical anger.” But he blamed me for doing things that made him crazy angry. In one moment he said I was emotionally Deaf; in another, he complained that I was too emotional.

The letter pains me to read even now and reminds me of the great chasm we faced. We interpreted everything that was going on between us from opposite banks of that growing divide. Still we were always back together again in days.