Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (18 page)

I wasn’t prepared for Al Pacino. We’d been cast in
The Godfather
. Neither of us had a clue that we were going to make a movie that would go on to be considered one of the greatest films in American cinema. Try to picture this: We met in a bar
in New York. I was awkward, and Al? Al was as mysterious as the love I felt for him the moment I saw his face. I didn’t want to be friendly—“Hi, I’m Diane”—or go through the “Nice to meet you, Diane” bit, either. There was nothing nice about my thoughts. His face, his nose, and what about those eyes? I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. That was the lure of Al. He was never mine. For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I’d never had. After Al, I began building a wall around my vulnerability. More hats. Long-sleeved everything. Coats in the summer. Boots with knee socks and wool suits with scarves at the beach. Woody said it best in a phone message: “I’m standing in front of your house, 820 Roxbury. It’s very beautiful. I’d like to get in, but I don’t have a hammer.”

My friend Daniel Wolf advised me to “want what you have.” Want what I have? Oh, Daniel. He didn’t get it. Of all the beauties I’ve shared a bed with, Al’s blacker-than-midnight version was unmatchable. Even before he quit the bottle, Al was the kind of drinker who played out his nights at Joe Allen’s bar reading Shakespeare to a group of like-minded actors. It was his love of language. It was the sound of his voice. It was his continuously evolving face. That was the miracle of his beauty. Evolution. As we got more familiar, I took every opportunity to make him marriage material. My project did not work. All my failed efforts only increased my obsession.
What did I learn? Never fall in love with the Godfather. Never stumble over a dark knight with shadowy beauty and deep talent.

Eventually Al became a father to twins, with Beverly D’Angelo. In 2010 I was a mother to Duke, age nine, and Dexter, age fourteen. My movie
Morning Glory
was a failure at the box office, and Al Pacino was broke, or so it was suggested on the CNN interview I caught at my brother Randy’s new home in the retirement community of Belmont Village. Maybe Al had been hit by the recession. Whatever it was, he seemed to have changed for the better. Maybe those twins of his made him happy. Was I jealous? I don’t know; all I know is that as soon as I allowed myself to register those old feelings, I got queasy, and I threw up in Randy’s bathroom. When I came out, Randy asked if I was pregnant. Pregnant in my mid-sixties? “Pregnant, Randy?” I asked, dumbfounded. What world was he living in? The world of dreams? The world of phantasmagoric possibilities?

Not the world of another Diane; oh no, not in the world of Diane von Furstenberg and media mogul Barry Diller. You can be sure that Diane wasn’t thinking about how to introduce the new version of her old black-and-white wrap dress when an interviewer said, “I think there’s a lot of curiosity about your marriage to Barry Diller.” This was her response: “I don’t understand what there is to understand. This man has been
my lover, my friend, and now he’s my husband. I’ve been with him for thirty-five years. At times we were separated, at times we were only friends, at times we were lovers, at times we’re husband and wife. That’s our life.” That’s their life, but mine? I will never marry. Do I envy their ability to weather the storm and stick with the deal they struck? Yes. I do, but my love of the impossible far overshadowed the rewards of longevity. I fell for the beauty of a broken bird. The ecstasy of failure. It was the only marriage I could make with a man. Black with a little white. Pain mixed with pleasure.

Diana Vreeland was not born with less. She was born with more—more ugliness than most women in the world of fashion and beauty could bear. The black–as–Grecian Formula hair slicked behind her ears and the cigarette dangling from her cherry-red lips were mere background material for the schnozzola sitting stage center in the wreckage of a face that defied compliance. Early on, she must have figured it was better to embrace the bad news and go with it. That’s exactly what she did. She paraded her flamboyant style while turning beauty toward the light of publication. As in the title of the documentary about her
The Eye Has to Travel
, her eyes traveled. They traveled when she worked at
Harper’s Bazaar
. They traveled when she was editor in chief of
Vogue
magazine. When she established herself as the premiere curator for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her eyes took
her on trips that gave the public some of the most extraordinary exhibitions in the history of the Met.

Diana Vreeland was a walking, talking master class on beauty. She did not tighten her face. She did not lift it. She did not chop off her unsightly nose or pull up her failing neck. She was a woman in the precarious world of fashion who embellished her flaws with a religious zeal that made her beautiful. Her black hair was still lacquered when the “elegant Crane picking her way out of a swamp,” as Cecil Beaton described her, died of a heart attack in her eighties.

I admired her gumption. Her face did not interfere with her mission. She was not swept up with regret. For Diana Vreeland, flaunting her flaws embellished the empire of beauty she created. I don’t wear the truth on my face. I’ve hidden my dark side with a smile.

This summer, on the last day of filming
And So It Goes
, I shot the final scene by myself. Leah, a sixty-five-year-old wannabe lounge singer, had fallen in love with Oren, played by Michael Douglas. They’d flirted. They’d kissed. They’d had sex. Feeling pressured, Oren had abandoned Leah. To get back in her good graces, he’d managed to secure an audition for her at a nightclub called Victors. Leah had landed the job. They’d gotten closer. Leah felt hopeful, only to learn Oren had unexpectedly sold his house and was moving away.

The crew members were saying goodbye to each other
as they set up the shot. The rest of the cast was gone, even Michael. I knew I had to break down, but I was filled with anxiety, and told Rob Reiner, the director. He shrugged his shoulders. What could he do? It was my job. Before “Action” he had one direction: “Cry.”

Suddenly I was sitting on a bar stool at Victors, speaking into a microphone: “The next song has a special meaning for me. I was seventeen, and this song was playing when I realized I was in love for the first time. That first time is so powerful you can’t imagine ever having those feelings for anyone else. But sometimes life outlives love. I never thought I’d love again, but here I am, still singing this song, still dreaming of love.” With that I nodded to my accompanist, played by Rob, and began singing: “The shadow of your smile when you are gone will color all my dreams and light the dawn.” When I got to “Our wistful little star was far too high. A teardrop kissed your lips and so did I,” I forgot I was making a movie in Stamford, Connecticut. I forgot the camera was pushing in on my face. I forgot about the audience of extras feigning interest, and I don’t know why, but I began to cry. “Now when I remember spring, and all the joy that love can bring, I will be remembering the shadow of your smile.” Only later did I realize that it was the music that had affected me. It was the recognition that sometimes life does outlive love. It was the regret of thinking I’d never love again, or see the color of my dreams light the
dawn, but it was also knowing that in spite of everything, to still be singing a song, and still dreaming of love, was enough for me.

My father and mother lived with the dream of love for fifty years. It didn’t matter how often the army of darkness approached. When Dad was dying, he still sang his song to Mom. He sang it from the mystery of his journey. Mom wrote it down. I found what she wrote about it. I wrote that down, too.

“We took a shower together on Sunday. We both had a feeling of closeness even though he was not the same. I scrubbed him good, and washed his hair. We kissed and hugged for a long time and said tender things to one another. I got to feel his body which I’ve loved for so many years. I’ll never forget these moments we have together. The grasping for one another’s hand; the squeeze. The long looks, he with his good eye, I with my owl glasses bumping him in the face as I lean in to kiss him. Tonight our kisses were long and open; our special kind. Our intimacy was the same as it was when we first met, forty-seven years ago. I told him about when I saw him at the door for our first date. His eyes were risky, direct, and light blue. I loved his eyes from the first moment I looked at him. As I held on tight with a long gaze, Jack told me he was climbing down off the ladder of steps that he was holding up with one hand.”

Mother and Father gave me their beauty, part silhouette, part shadow box. Part cleavage. Part Cheryl Crane. Part anger and remorse. Part failure. Part admiration of Diana Vreeland’s will to redefine beauty. Part beaten-up Barbie doll. Part Al. Part sex, drugs, and Marilyn Monroe. I carry their beauty inside the very soul of my being. Dark, with shades of gray. Light, with storm clouds in the distance. Because of Dad and Mom, I’m not afraid to dream of dark victories and black beauty. I’m not afraid to be in love with the night.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: