My Life So Far (23 page)

Barely a year had passed since I’d begun to study acting, and a portion of that year had been spent on
Tall Story.
This was my first time in professional theater. It was a highly charged, emotional role, and I was onstage the entire time, making lightning-fast costume changes in the dark on a revolving stage while trying to get into various stages of emotional meltdown. During rehearsals in New York, it became clear to everyone that the play had major flaws, and every morning Dan Taradash would bring in new script changes. I’ve always liked challenges, but this went a little beyond what I was prepared for.

On New Year’s Day 1960, one week before we were to begin out-of-town tryouts in Boston, we received news that Brooke Hayward’s mother, Margaret Sullavan, had been found dead in a hotel room in New Haven, an apparent suicide. The news hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Her death also hit Josh very hard, since their friendship went back to the earliest days of the University Players.

Two nights before our out-of-town opening at the Colonial Theater in Boston, Josh fired my leading man and replaced him with Dean Jones, who barely had time to learn his lines. Two nights later, at the top of the second act, Louis Jean Heydt, who played my father, died of a massive heart attack right before his entrance. Two nights after that, Josh himself, who unbeknownst to me had long suffered from severe manic depression, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for more than ten days, leaving us in the hands of the writer, who had never directed in his life.

In There Was a Little Girl, my first Broadway play.

(Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

As Kitty Twist with Laurence Harvey in
Walk on the Wild Side.

(William Read Woodfield/CPi)

Our final week of out-of-town tryouts was spent in Philadelphia. Three days in, Josh returned to us as though nothing had happened, though the way in which his wife, Nedda, clung to his side made it plain to me that something was wrong. My hotel room was next to theirs, and one night when I was getting ready for bed, I heard murmuring and decided I wanted to listen in. So I borrowed a trick I’d learned from a boyfriend: If you turn a glass upside down against a wall, it acts like a megaphone and you can hear what’s being said on the other side. That first night I was astonished to hear Nedda singing “Rock-a-Bye, Baby” to Josh. I was too frightened of what lay in store for me when we opened in New York to feel compassion for Josh’s illness. It only underscored how out on a limb by myself
I
was. The following night I again used the glass trick to eavesdrop, and this time I heard something that disturbed me far more than the lullaby: Josh was talking to someone about the necessity of keeping the play going for at least twenty-one days no matter how bad the New York reviews were, so that he could declare a tax write-off.

He knows that the play is going to be crucified, and he cares more about a tax write-off than he does about protecting our professional reputations!

My heart sank. While the Boston and Philadelphia reviews hadn’t been encouraging, to say the least, I had personally received some good notices and had, in desperate hope, managed to convince myself that Josh and Dan Taradash would come through with the right script changes. Now I knew they weren’t even going to try.
A tax write-off!
What about Lee Strasberg’s vision of theater as high art? What about idealism?

There Was a Little Girl
limped onto Broadway. I got through an embarrassing opening night and learned how to make it through Sardi’s without falling apart when reviews are crucifying, though some reviews were good to me. Brooks Atkinson, in
The New York Times,
wrote, “As the wretched heroine of an unsavory melodrama, she gives an alert, many-sided performance that is professionally mature and suggests that she has found a career that suits her.” John Chapman, in the New York
Daily News,
wrote, “With the budding talent that she displayed last evening, she might become the Sarah Bernhardt of 1990. But she’d better find herself a more genuine play than this one between now and then.”

The play lasted sixteen performances. Josh got his tax write-off, and I emerged with the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for “the most promising actress of the year for drama.”

I felt like a double exposure: There was the me people could see—my mouth opened and closed and words came out. I’ll never forget an audition I did for Elia Kazan for the female lead in
Splendor in the Grass.
Kazan, who’d done
On the Waterfront
and
East of Eden,
called me down to the edge of the stage, introduced himself, reached up to shake my hand, and asked, “Do you consider yourself ambitious?” I responded immediately with a resounding, “No!” This passive voice flew automatically out of my mouth, muffling my real passions and creativity. The moment the word left my lips I knew I’d made a mistake, I could read it on Kazan’s face. If I wasn’t ambitious, I must not have any fire inside, I must be a dilettante.
But good girls aren’t supposed to be ambitious.
I went through the motions of an audition but knew I’d already lost out. Natalie Wood got the role, starring opposite Warren Beatty. Neither of them would have hesitated in answering “Yes!” to Kazan’s question.

I was utterly disembodied. Even my voice, both professionally and in my personal life, was high in the top of my head. The other,
not
high-voiced, double-exposured me was almost a stranger, someone I was with when I was alone and had nothing to prove, but not someone I could bring to the party. Like an unused muscle, that other me began to atrophy over time so that I almost forgot she was there and was bewildered when someone seemed to see her and expect more from me than I was giving or that I thought myself capable of. Not taking myself seriously, I gave myself away—to films that weren’t very good and to people I didn’t really care about.

In the fall of 1960, just as I opened in my second Broadway play, Arthur Laurents’s
Invitation to a March,
Brooke Hayward’s sister, Bridget, was found dead, an apparent suicide, in her New York apartment. The darkness that had overtaken Brooke’s golden, laughing family was frightening. It meant that no one was safe; anything could reach in and pluck you from the light.

Around the same time, I discovered that Josh was about to sell my contract to producer Ray Stark for $250,000. I didn’t want to be “owned” anymore, so I offered to buy back my contract for the same price he was asking from Stark. While $250,000 may not seem like much in today’s show business, for me (back then) it meant having to work constantly just to be able to turn over a chunk of my paychecks to Josh for five years. But I committed to it without hesitation. Freedom was worth it to me.

Though I had vowed never to make another Hollywood film, I now needed to work to pay Josh, and when I was offered the role of Kitty Twist in the movie adaptation of Nelson Algren’s dark, Depression-era novel
Walk on the Wild Side,
I grabbed it. It wasn’t just for the money, however. I wanted to play the brash, train-hopping, petty thief who had just escaped from reform school and ends up a high-class prostitute in a New Orleans brothel. Kitty was about as far a cry from my role in
Tall Story
as I could get. What’s more, there were other stars to take major responsibility for the film’s success or failure: Barbara Stanwyck, Laurence Harvey, Anne Baxter, and Capucine.

This time out I had decided to borrow a page from Marilyn Monroe’s book and bring an acting coach to Hollywood with me so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerable. He was a flamboyant Greek actor and coach named Andréas Voutsinas, and we had gotten to know each other when he helped me with the scene that got me into the Actors Studio. After
Walk on the Wild Side,
he worked with me on the films
Period of Adjustment
and
In the Cool of the Day,
and directed me in a Broadway play,
The Fun Couple.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

VADIM

Explore. Dream. Discover.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN

“
Qui ne risque rien n’a rien,
” observed the devil,
lapsing into French, as is his wont.

—M
ARY
M
C
C
ARTHY,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

I
T WAS
1963. I was in Hollywood filming
Sunday in New York,
my sixth movie, when I got a call from my agent telling me that Roger Vadim wanted me to come to France to do a remake of
La Ronde,
the minor movie classic from the fifties. I had my agent fire back a telegram saying that I “would never work with Vadim!” I had seen his
.
.
.
And God Created Woman,
and—while I found Brigitte Bardot a fascinating force of nature and recognized that the film represented a new, iconoclastic style of filmmaking—I wasn’t all that impressed with it. Besides, I remembered feeling endangered when we’d met several years earlier at Maxim’s in Paris.

Dad and Peter visiting me on the set of
Sunday in New York.

(Photofest)