My Life So Far (42 page)

I
arrived in New York in time to spend two weeks researching my role as the call girl Bree Daniel. I had asked the director, Alan Pakula, to get his production assistant to line up some call girls and madams I could spend time with. Aside from that, I hadn’t been thinking much about my role, and now that it was looming I was getting nervous. On my drive, I’d begun to wonder if it wasn’t politically incorrect to play a call girl. Would a real feminist do that? I asked myself.
A real feminist wouldn’t have to ask herself such a question.

Before backing out, I decided to ask my friend the singer Barbara Dane to read the script and give me her advice. Barbara—a warm, wise, and talented blues singer spending most of her time those days singing for the GI movement—was, after all, an entertainer as well as an activist. I remember what she told me: “Jane, if you think you have room in this script to create a complex, multifaceted character, you should do it. It doesn’t matter that she’s a call girl, as long as she’s real.” Recently Barbara admitted to me that she hadn’t been at all sure the script would allow for complexity, but she didn’t know Alan Pakula—and she hadn’t realized how ready I was for complexity.

I
met different call girls or madams each night for about eight nights. Some were classy, some were strung out. The madams were high-class, though probably not on a level with Madame Claude in Paris (I had never met her, only heard about her). I went to a sleazy apartment one afternoon where a girl bought cocaine. I watched the dealer cut it up with a razor on a mirror, watched her snort it through a straw with an eagerness that chilled me. I had never seen anyone do cocaine before, and I disliked her helplessness in the presence of it, though it helped me understand the character of my girlfriend in the film: a fellow call girl junkie who disappears.

I asked one madam, “There’s a scene in the script where I’m supposed to strip while I’m telling a sexy story to an old man who never touches me. Does that really happen?”

“Are you
kidding?
” She almost fell over laughing and proceeded to tell me about her favorite john. “He would be outside my door peeping through the keyhole while I stood on the other side playing with myself and talking dirty to him. Honey, that’s the kind of john you dream for. Nobody touches nobody.”

The women told me they had clients at all hours of the day: in the mornings fresh from home on their way to the office; during lunch breaks (“nooners,” they were called); at cocktail hour, dinner hour, and after hours. “You wouldn’t believe the men I service,” one madam told me with a weary chuckle. “Senators, presidents of the biggest companies in the country, diplomats. And the more important they are, the kinkier they are.”

She told me about one executive who always wanted hot wax dripped on his chest while having sex, another who liked a lot of girls together sticking pins in him. There was a story about a priest who insisted the call girl squat over a pan of cat litter; a politician who kept a boa constrictor in his bathroom and could climax only when a terrified girl would scream and come running out. (I spent too much time pondering that one.)

Several times I went to after-hours clubs with call girls, places they’d go to meet up with their pimps and where pimps would bring new girls. Never once during those evenings did a pimp even try to solicit me. I interpreted their ignoring me as a sign that I wasn’t right for the character of Bree Daniel. And while I knew there must be “whores with hearts of gold” like those you read about and see in the movies, the ones I met were, understandably, hardened. I knew that if Bree was as cynical as these women, with no inkling of something more underneath, the film wouldn’t work. But how could I betray reality? That did it. I asked to meet with Alan Pakula, my director.

“Alan, you’ve made a terrible mistake,” I told him. “I am all wrong for this character—there’s no way I can play her. Even the pimps know I’m not call girl material.” I proceeded to give him a list of the actresses who would be much better suited to the role, starting with my friend Faye Dunaway.

As Bree Daniel in
Klute.

(Photofest)

Me in 1970.

“Alan, Faye would be perfect as Bree! Please let me out of my contract. I just can’t do it.”

Alan just laughed at me and told me I was nuts. He would go on to tell this story many times over the years when speaking to acting students—I guess to show how blinded actors can be by their insecurities. My friend Sally Field once said to me that the anxiety and emotionalism just before starting a new role is part of the process of becoming raw and porous, so that the new character can inhabit you. Seen this way, the discomfort is a necessary stage in the morphing, when you are not quite
you
anymore but not quite someone new yet.

V
anessa and Dot were staying with me during the filming, and on weekends we made a habit of going to the Central Park Zoo and riding the carousel. Vanessa was a spunky, beautiful child with a husky, striking voice. Though only two, she was also more than able to let me know that she preferred her father, whose exotic eyes she shared. As a father preferrer myself, I couldn’t blame her. Besides, I regret to say that I did not feel I had gotten better in the parenting department. It had nothing to do with my work. It was that when I
was
home, I still wasn’t really present. Mother and Dad had been my models, but by now it was up to me, and I hadn’t yet learned to leave my “stuff” at the door.

S
ince for better or worse I was going to go through with it, I began searching for a way to play a call girl differently—tough, angry, but not totally hardened—and this was when I drew on my experiences with some of the call girls I’d gotten to know in Paris with Vadim. There had been a few in whom I had seen glimmers of talent—and hope. That was it! Bree wouldn’t be a call girl who wanted to be an actress or a model. She would be an actress, a talented one, whose life experiences, including early sexual abuse and a consequent need always to be in control, had led her to choose hooking as the way to pay for acting classes and rent. From that realization on, I turned a corner. Work on the film seemed to flow. Alan and I were so in sync that it was like having the perfect partner in a grand waltz. I loved him dearly.

I loved my co-star, Donald Sutherland, as well. I found his rangy, hangdog quality and droopy, pale blue eyes especially appealing. He also had something of the old-world gentleman about him. It was nice that through our mutual work as supporters and fund-raisers for the GI movement we had become friends months before beginning rehearsals.

Bree’s apartment was built on a sound stage at a New York film studio, and Alan, at my request, made it possible for me to spend nights there, even going so far as installing a flushing toilet in the bathroom of the set. I would lie at night in Bree’s bed in the eerie silence of the sound stage and slowly envision the items she would surround herself with. I had never seen books or pets in any of the apartments of call girls or madams. But I decided that Bree read, not Dostoyevsky, perhaps, but romance novels, how-to books, and the astrological then best-seller,
Sun Signs.
I decided Bree would have a cat, a loner like herself. I remembered an actress from Lee Strasberg’s private classes who would be called down to Washington from time to time to pleasure President Kennedy, so I decided Bree had done this and put a signed photo of Kennedy on the fridge. Bree, I realized, wouldn’t do hard drugs—pot, maybe—but her control issue limited it to that.

In the script, Bree’s psychiatrist was male. But early in rehearsals I realized that Bree would never reveal herself to a man, so I asked Alan to change the character to a woman. I didn’t have to ask twice. I also requested that we wait until the end of shooting to film the scenes with the shrink, by which time I would have fully internalized Bree, and then I told Alan I wanted to improvise the scenes. He had given me several books on the psychology of prostitution, and together we talked a lot about the power/control issues that surround gender and the difficulties with trust and intimacy faced by women who have been sexually abused as children (mostly by family members or family friends). I understood how when Bree was with her johns,
she
was the one in control.

One of the scenes I most enjoyed filming was where I am with a john, having what appears to be a real orgasm and then sneaking a look at my watch over his shoulder. Women in the audience always howled at that scene. There was also a scene in which Bree is asked by Detective Klute to go with him to the morgue to see if her missing friend’s picture is in the files of murdered women. At my request Alan arranged for me to visit the actual city morgue, where I was allowed to look through the case files. What I saw remains within me to this day: hundreds and hundreds of color photos of battered and bruised women who had been killed by husbands, lovers, johns. I had to excuse myself, go to the bathroom, and throw up. It’s not that I hadn’t known that violence against women was widespread, but the reality of it had not fully dawned on me until I saw face after face. This experience is what informed the scene toward the end of the film when Bree finds herself confronted by the murderer.

A well-dressed businessman, played terrifyingly by Charles Cioffi, sits across from me and begins to play a tape recording on which I can hear the voice of my missing friend talking to him in the come-on way call girls talk to johns when they first meet. Then the conversation takes a dark turn. I can hear fear rising in my friend’s voice and I realize that the man sitting across from me had taped their conversation just before he murdered her and that he intends to kill me as well.

I had purposefully not done any preparation, wanting instead to let the raw impact of the scene carry me. Throughout the scene I was silent, just listening. But I’m a good listener, and I assumed I would be convincingly scared (although it’s the most difficult emotion for me to play). But when the camera started rolling and I heard the fear in her voice, instead of fear for myself I was overwhelmed with an archetypal sadness. It was sadness for my friend, sadness for all the women who are victims of men’s rage, sadness at our vulnerability. It felt . . . inevitable. I began to cry—for all the victims. Soon the tears came from my nose as well as my eyes. For an audience, it didn’t matter what caused the tears. What mattered was that it was so unexpected, and the unexpected reality brought an electricity to the scene that wouldn’t have been there had I simply been “scared.” Lee Strasberg once said, “Don’t plan. Be.”

I knew when we finished the scene that my reaction would not have been the same had it not been for that cross-country trip with Elisabeth and the stirrings of a new feminist consciousness in me, locating an empathy toward women. I understood then that my expanding consciousness as an activist could broaden my understanding of people and why they behave as they do—from (rhetorical, but it’s true) a purely Freudian, individualist perspective to one that includes historical, societal, economic, and gender-based factors—and that this in turn might make me more compassionate and my acting more intelligent.

Even now, when I watch
Klute
I admire everything about it. In these times of mega–special effects, when we’ve grown almost numb to what we used to find terrifying, Michael Small’s ominous music track is still heart-stopping; Gordon Willis’s photography, which caused him to be dubbed “the Prince of Darkness,” sucks you in and then slams you with terror. Alan Pakula was alert to every nuance and knew just how to draw it out of me. As a result, a year later I would win my first Oscar, for my performance as Bree Daniel.