It's All In the Playing (2 page)

That’s just about how I look at things now. It’s all my dream. I’m making all of it happen—good
and
bad—and I have the choice of how I’ll relate to it and what I’ll do about it.

Other people are creating their dreams, too, with their own casts of characters. These realities intersect in ways so involved that the dynamics of the outcome ultimately drive one in upon one’s own reality. The question then becomes: “What do
I
do about this, or what do
I
want from this?” which, of course, was the question in the first place. The lesson? Perhaps we are all telling the
truth—our truth as we see it. (Or hiding from it, of course.) Perhaps everyone has his own truth, and truth as an objective reality simply does not exist.

There’s nothing like making a movie to bring home that point, because you can make the truth anything you want it to be. Particularly if what you’re dealing with is your own life. I have been accused by some of “remarkable” hubris in making
Out on a Limb,
but because of the experience of playing myself in a film, I was able to look closely at the illusion within the illusion. It began in Peru ten years ago and ended in Peru ten years later. But the stops along the way were the real story.

Chapter 2

   A
BC Television approached me to consider making a miniseries film of my book
Out on a Limb.
They spoke of metaphysical searching being popular now and extraterrestrials and UFOs as something the public was genuinely interested in. Witness
Cocoon, E.T., Star Wars, Close Encounters, Starman,
and so on. For a long time I didn’t take their suggestion seriously. Somehow in my mind, my writing speculations were separate from my performing career. It wasn’t until later that I realized that each was an aspect of the individual creativity, coming from the same source and returning to the same source.

About the same time, I found myself “accidentally” in a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley talking with my friend Roddy McDowall, who said that writer-director Colin Higgins (
Harold and Maude, Nine to Five, Foul Play, Best Little Whorehouse)
thought that
Out on a Limb
would make a good movie. A movie? Or a television miniseries? A captive audience shelling out $5.50 per person for the privilege or a living-room audience getting up for a beer? Then I thought: Two hours isn’t enough time to tell the story, and besides, every American
household has at least one member of the family who has had a mystical experience, felt
déjà vu,
seen a UFO, or experienced an inexplicable “coincidence” of one sort or another.

I decided to call Colin.

“Listen,” I began. “TV seems to me to be a natural medium (no pun intended) for a real-life drama about my reincarnated love affair with a British M.P., and a Peruvian encounter with a man who claimed to have a relationship with an extraterrestrial from the Pleiades. What do you think?”

“Well,” said Colin, “I see a lot of entertainment value either way. What you just outlined is already funny.”

God knows Colin Higgins knew comedy, irrespective of the fact that he spent his childhood in Australia. I wondered how funny he would think TV salaries were. Or more to the point, how funny would his high-powered Hollywood agent feel if Colin was slumming in television.

It didn’t matter. Colin, as it turned out, was a fellow searcher. He had attended as many metaphysical seminars as I had, and even introduced me to a transmedium I had never previously heard of. He also began to reveal to me a set of personal values of the highest human priorities I had run into in twenty years of successful artistic encounters. The litmus test for me then was, as it is now: do people apply their spiritual and metaphysical knowledge to the roles they play in life? Colin does—in spades, as they say.

So we began a creative and personal friendship which challenged us both and which I’m sure will also stand the test of time and artistic trauma. It was evident to both of us that spiritual material, if honestly perceived, tended simultaneously to keep the working and personal relationship free of contaminating influences such as power grabs, ego trips, temperamental fury, writer’s block, and fear of what the audience thinks and feels.

Colin is about five eleven, storybook handsome,
with a brown mane of hair so luxuriously rich that on first meeting him I had the impulse to run my fingers through it but hesitated for fear the tresses would come unglued in my hand. A baseless fear. The hair was real. I emphasize the hair of the man because somewhere under there I felt that it was the gift wrapping for his creativity. I was right.

Now, Colin has an interesting way of walking. I can always tell what mood he’s in by the way he walks. If he’s been hurt and is feeling vulnerable, his arms hang from his sides and his steps seem as though they are moving in place. His chin juts out as though he expects a jab, and a smile of ironic resignation plays on his lips. When he’s in centered spirits his eyes flash, he speaks much faster, with clarity and force, and when he walks, his arms move more enthusiastically. Sometimes he even holds a cigarette “to seem grown-up,” and always he cuts right through the comedy chicken fat until the bone of humor is pristine and sparkling. I’ve noticed that really creative comedy scientists never feel the need to perform. They are too busy observing and analyzing why something or someone else is truly comic—as opposed to “hostile” comic. But when their own funny bone is tickled they let go with uncontrollable abandon. Every once in a while that happens with Colin and he becomes an incisive, mischievous brat; the essence of comedy bite. That’s when I started calling him Harold after the character he conceived in
Harold and Maude.
In fact I sometimes see myself as Maude (the eighty-year-old fun-loving Auntie Mame character) and him as Harold. Anyway, that’s my way of referring to him when I love him the most or when I feel he should listen harder.

So Harold and I began to interview prospective writers for
Out on a Limb.
He would oversee and supervise and I would keep it real and honest, since it was my life.

To make a very long one-year story short, we decided
to write the screenplay ourselves. We knew the material better than anyone else. Even though I had never written a screenplay before, and Colin, an experienced screenplay writer, had no idea about writing a five-hour film with commercial breaks, we proceeded with courage. A regular two-hour screenplay usually took a year. So were we talking a two and one-half-year job here? Well, we both knew the UFOs would have landed already if we took that long.

I had attempted a kind of detailed screen treatment of five hundred pages on another subject I had shown Colin some months before. He was impressed with the fact that I “worked hard.” Now I pulled out the screenplays for
Terms of Endearment
and
Being There
(two that I admired a great deal) and began to study them as a writer, not as an actress. I began to see and understand the subtlety of the craft a bit more. I wrote the first three hours of
Out on a Limb
as an exercise in on-the-job training. Colin said, “Now at least we know it can work.”

So then we wrote a “treatment”—that is, a brief plot rundown with high-point scenes and a fleshing-out of the chief characters—for a five-hour screen scenario based on the book. There were really going to be only four major protagonists: Gerry, my British M.P. lover; Bella Abzug, whose life and friendship speak for themselves; my precious David, who introduced me to spiritual matters and guided me in Peru; and myself. Colin and I worked with our proposed producer, Stan Margulies, who was an experienced television miniseries producer
(Roots, The Thorn Birds)
until Stan said we were ready to present our outline to Brandon Stoddard, head of entertainment at ABC.

I was leery of television executives, feeling that you could put their collective intelligence on the head of a pin and, as Oscar Levant once said, still have some room left over. But Mike Nichols had told me that Brandon
Stoddard was different. Mike had made
Silkwood
for ABC. He was right.

Brandon ushered us into his office with an informal flourish. (He looks like a shrewd child-man with intensely intelligent eyes and a skin of scrubbed freckles.) He listened politely as Colin and I blue-skyed our presentation. (We embellished as we went along.)

Stan sat quietly, reminding me of an inscrutable Talmudic scholar who, in calm shrewd silence, knows he will always get his way. Stan had earned the respect of so many people, he didn’t need to do anything that even hinted at pulling rank. He knew the show would be good.

One of ABC’s female executives was present as Brandon’s co-decision-maker. She was a pants-suited “I’ve come a long way, baby” female. She must have seen her job as one of being the devil’s advocate (again, no pun intended) in a sea of mystical spiritualistic ecstasy. On an earlier occasion she had literally auditioned Colin and made some sterling suggestions for Shirley’s character, such as: “She is too successful, too much in command of her life, and doesn’t have any problems the TV audience can identify with. Maybe you should give her a serious leg injury so she can’t dance, or maybe make the love affair with Gerry really agonizing to the point of suicide and
that’s
why Shirley goes on her spiritual search.” When I pointed out that neither of these suggestions was even remotely true and hence hardly relevant to my life story, she countered with: “But we need to pull a rating.” I felt doubly awkward because she was a woman in an important job, but her need to prove her “executivibility” was earnest, so we simply had to cope with it as well as we could.

Brandon fortunately turned out to be his own decision-maker. He caught the drift of my remarks in response to further suggestions from the lady and sent Colin and me away to come up with whatever script we
thought would work. He said ABC had been attempting a metaphysical story for years and could never arrive at anything personally dramatic and involving. He was well aware of the growing spiritual hunger in the American culture and wanted to be the one who had the courage to okay the nourishment.

Colin and I left extremely impressed. Thus began the collaboration of Harold and a slighter, younger Maude.

In June of 1985, Colin came up to my house in the Pacific Northwest. His agent did not know what he was doing there. If he hadn’t known better, he could have explained it away as a Hollywood fling or something. But Harold and I never thought of each other in those terms. He had a kind of a girlfriend anyway and I had sworn off men for a while. Or rather the “feeling” gave me up—I didn’t give it up. The two of us were to make the gossip columns quite frequently, but that only made us laugh.

Anyway, there we were in my home. It is a place of beauty and a joy forever, surrounded by trees and located on a mountaintop looking straight across at Mount Rainier, and with a full-fledged tumbling river below us. There is a swimming pool with warm water and a hot tub of hotter water, all of which one enjoys with the surrounding 360-degree view.

This house is my personal paradise which I bought by dancing two shows a night—the leg action that the female executive had wanted me to sabotage for “ratings”! (I always have felt that telling the truth is the wisest course, as well as explaining my feeling that one definitely deserves everything one has earned.)

Anyway, my assistant, Thomas Sharkey, endearingly known to me and my friends as Simo (because of a past-life connection), runs the house for me. He takes care of the dogs (a handsome chocolate-brown Lab named Hot Fudge Sultan and, a later arrival, a snow-white American Eskimo named Shinook). We have a large vegetable garden, which Simo tends and nurtures, along
with flowers abounding in rainbow colors, and chickens and birds that the dogs delight in pestering. Simo also cooks, which is important to this story, because Harold and I love to eat. Plain, regular eating is one thing, but eating as a kind of artistic reward is quite another. It’s difficult to articulate the joy of eating half a coconut cake
after
you know you’ve written a good scene. And conversely, it is probably hard for anyone to believe that we sometimes wrote good scenes because we knew there was coconut cake in the oven at the other end of the tunnel. But that’s the way it was with Harold and me.

We wrote in the kitchen den. We could have chosen any room in the house, but we chose to write near the food. It kept us going. And when Simo went into his act in the kitchen, it was up for grabs which of us was the most entertaining. The smell of barbecued shrimp, steaming homemade lentil vegetable garlic soup, hot homemade bread, and fresh apple pie was enough to motivate us to write
Citizen Kane Revisited.

Colin began as an actor. He has exquisite sensitivity regarding the problems of actors. So before we committed a scene to paper, we acted it out. Sometimes I took the part of “Shirley” and sometimes he did, and sometimes we switched roles in midstream. In any case, Simo had no idea that we worked that way. He had heard that writers
write.
So most of the time he would discreetly baste the roast, with his head in the oven so as not to overhear our artistic arguments. Then, in the middle of tempers flaring and insults screaming, Colin and I would stop cold and say: “No, that doesn’t work. Let’s try this.” And we’d be at it again. For a while Simo thought we were conducting a New Age relationship where we’d let it all hang out and comment as we went. What pleased Simo the most, however, was that in the first few days Harold and I devoured three cakes, pounds of shrimp and scallops, a couple of chickens, enough salad for an army of rabbits, and several quarts of ice cream.
Both the screenplay and our bodies were getting fatter. We worked and ate thirteen hours a day, sometimes taking a break to swim or walk. We didn’t answer the phone, and thought and breathed nothing but our story. In ten days we felt we had completed the first draft of the first three hours.