My Life So Far (26 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT

The magician’s assistant is easy to spot
the way her arm curves like a swan’s neck as she points
To a favorite piece of furniture for our inspection and approval,

The way her smile charms us into believing,
Disarming whatever might otherwise cut her in half.
Where does a magician find his assistant,

Such a beautiful woman (though we hardly notice her!)
who will smile at his side and give nothing away?
We assume she knows, of course, and imagine

that behind her perfect teeth, her mind is haunted by the knowledge
of another, secret kingdom where a dove crouches
next to the heart-hammering hare in a dark warren, waiting

To be abracadabred back to the dovecote, to lapin reality.
In that country of lifted wallets, colorfully endless handkerchiefs
and torn one-hundred-dollar bills that heal themselves,

women, cut in half, seem to dwell mindlessly under a spell,
play games with a marked deck or recline in utter weightlessness,
suspended only by our wish to believe in them.

—C
HARLES
D
ARLING,
“On Being Introduced at a Neighborhood Party
to a Magician’s Assistant”

T
HE FILMING OF
La Ronde
(retitled
Circle of Love
in the United States) with Vadim was a happy time for us both. I loved the joining of our creative forces, and I discovered tremendous sexual excitement in having him place me in the positions he wanted, calling the shots—and in my exceeding his expectations. I have always liked being directed, not having to make the big decisions but having parameters set for me and then infusing life into the director’s vision.

For an American I had a good accent, which meant people thought I was Swedish! In some ways speaking French acted as a mask for me, allowing me to be freer than I was in English. It slowed me down, softened me, and made my voice deeper and more nuanced.

Vadim’s ex-wife, Annette, was in Morocco at this time, and three-year-old Nathalie had come to live with us. Remembering how important Susan had been in my life, I wanted to be as responsible as I could toward the little girl whom I had just started to know.

O
ur apartment on the rue Seguier was too small for Vadim, me, Nathalie, and her nanny. Lacking the money to rent a larger apartment, Vadim prevailed on his old friend Commander Paul-Louis Weiller, who had turned one of his many houses, the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, into a haven for friends and artists (and beautiful young women, for whom the old man had a penchant). Weiller gave us an apartment there. The hotel, a magnificent historic monument built in the sixteenth century, is on the rue Vieille-du-Temple, in Le Marais, one of the oldest sections of Paris. I was fortunate to have lived there at that time, before it became chic and recherché.

The rue Vieille-du-Temple, old, narrow, and cobblestoned, was lined by buildings so ancient that they leaned in toward each other like friends longing to touch. We lived in the attic—vaulted rooms where walls and ceilings were covered with maps of the world painted by sixteenth-century artists. Our bedroom window was directly opposite a school for cantors, and as we were at the top of the two leaning buildings, it was as though the singers were right in bed with us. On the first floor, Roland Petit, director of the Ballets de Paris, and his wife, prima ballerina Renée Jeanmaire, made their abode. There was an apartment reserved for Charlie Chaplin, though I don’t remember ever seeing him there. This exotic atelier is where we made our home for several years and created a family.

Vadim directing me in
La Ronde.

Vadim wrote extensively about how, later, I spoke of having been “turned into a domestic slave” by him, as though this were a betrayal of womankind. I will admit to having made some pretty extremist rhetorical statements during that period, but I doubt it was the domesticity I was objecting to. I have, in fact, always liked creating a home. My physical surroundings are very important to me. I can’t think straight if my surroundings are disorderly or dirty, and during times when we couldn’t afford to have someone help out, I did the housework myself rather than live with the mess. During the years with Vadim it never crossed my mind to ask him to help with household chores. I saw it as women’s work, even though it meant doing double duty, since I often left home for the studios before dawn and returned after dark, while he stayed home and wrote—or went fishing.

This acquiescence was, in part, due to the way we were all conditioned, and partly because I felt that being the perfect, unselfish housewife would make it impossible for him to leave me—just as my mother had thought about Dad. Interesting how we interpret the radical notion of bringing democracy into the home as selfishness! It wasn’t that Vadim was mean or wanted to make my life hard. It’s just that he didn’t
notice.
He could live with dirty dishes stacked high in the sink for weeks. Now that I think of it, maybe
that
was what I railed about—his not noticing.

But there were other, more complicated problems that are much harder to write about. Vadim had created a view of life for himself, a view shared by all his friends, which held that any show of thrift, jealousy, or desire for organization and structure was a sign that you were bourgeois. God forbid! “Bourgeois” became the dreaded epithet, as horrifying as betrayal or dishonesty. There were even times when it was suggested that the French Communist Party had bourgeois tendencies.

I had inherited $150,000 from my mother. At the time, it was a nice sum, something I could fall back on if I stewarded it carefully. Vadim could not comprehend why I hesitated to give him large portions of it so that he could hire a friend to come with us to some vacation spot and work with him on a script. At first I was horrified and said so. But over time I began to feel that I was being petty and stingy. So I gave in. Only years later did I realize that Vadim was a compulsive gambler, that the locations for his films or vacations were often chosen for their proximity to a racetrack or casino. I had no idea that gambling was an addictive disease, as difficult to overcome as alcoholism, anorexia, and bulimia. Much of my mother’s inheritance was simply gambled away.

Along with thriftiness, jealousy was a major no-no. Why did women make so much fuss about the physical act of intercourse? Just because a husband or wife (though it always seemed to be the husband) had sex with someone else, that didn’t represent betrayal—“It’s
you
I love.” Vadim would go on and on with his friends about how the sexual revolution of the sixties showed that people were finally beginning to see what they had always known: that middle-class morality needed to be discarded for sexual freedom and open marriage. (We weren’t married . . . too bourgeois!) Maybe he’d smelled it on my skin when we’d first met—that I was malleable and insecure in my sexuality. In any event, I was vulnerable to him and felt that in order to keep him and be a good wife, I had to prove that I was, in fact, the queen of “nonbourgeoisness,” the Oscar winner of wildness, generosity, and forgiveness.

As time went on, Vadim would fail to come home in the evenings. I’d have dinner ready and he wouldn’t show. Often he wouldn’t even call. I would usually eat all the food I’d prepared for us, go out and buy pastries and French glacé (not nearly as satisfying as our ice cream), devour all of it, throw it all up, and collapse into bed exhausted and angry. Sometimes he’d come home around midnight and fall into bed drunk. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up till morning. I swallowed my anger (along with the ice cream), never really confronting him about this behavior. I didn’t want to seem bourgeois. I didn’t think I deserved better.

Then one night he brought home a beautiful red-haired woman and took her into our bed with me. She was a high-class call girl employed by the well-known Madame Claude. It never occurred to me to object. I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am. If this was what he wanted, this was what I would give him—in spades. As feminist poet Robin Morgan wrote in
Saturday’s Child
on the subject of threesomes, “If I was facing the avant-garde version of keeping up with the Joneses, by god I’d show ’em.”

Sometimes there were three of us, sometimes more. Sometimes it was even I who did the soliciting. So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced I enjoyed it.

I’ll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed (questions I never asked myself!) and, in the case of the call girls, what had brought her to make those choices. I was shocked by the cruelty and abuse many had suffered, saw how abuse had made them feel that sex was the only commodity they had to offer. But many were smart and could have succeeded in other careers. The hours spent with those women informed my later Oscar-winning performance of the call girl Bree Daniel in
Klute.
Many of those women have since died from drug overdose or suicide. A few went on to marry high-level corporate leaders; some married into nobility. One, who remains a friend, recently told me that Vadim was jealous of her friendship with me, that he had said to her once, “You think Jane’s smart, but she’s not, she’s dumb.” Vadim often felt a need to denigrate my intelligence, as if it would take up his space. I would think that a man would
want
people to know he was married to a smart woman—unless he was insecure about his own intelligence. Or unless he didn’t really love her.

As with my eating disorders, I believed I was the only one who betrayed myself by allowing other women into my bed when I didn’t really want to, especially when there was no mitigating financial need. (I know many women who have no money and no job skills who do lots of things they don’t want to do in order to keep their support, especially if they have children.) Then in 2001 I read
Saturday’s Child,
the autobiography of Robin Morgan, cornerstone of the contemporary feminist movement, inventor of the feminist symbol, and editor of
Sisterhood Is Powerful
and its two sequels,
Sisterhood Is Global
and
Sisterhood Is Forever.
In her autobiography she writes of her own self-betrayal within marriage. She describes how she

I partly dissociated my consciousness in order to survive them, an attempt to compartmentalize and contain the experience of violation.

Until then I had not planned on writing about my own experiences. I thought: There are enough people who dislike me, I don’t need to give them even more ammunition. But when I read Robin’s book, it gave me courage to see that a woman like her had had these experiences and written about them, bravely and without salaciousness. I saw that if the telling of my life’s journey was to matter to other women and to girls, I would, like Robin, have to be honest about how far I’ve come and the meaning of where I’ve been.