My Life So Far (47 page)

Probably his financing depended on my being in the film, and he wasn’t about to take this lying down. All hell broke loose!

While I was visiting Vanessa in Megève with her father, a man who was close to Jean-Luc Godard arrived at Vadim’s doorstep and threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t do the film. What was especially memorable about the encounter was how Vadim reacted. He shouted at this man: “
Sortez! Calviniste, vous êtes un sale Calviniste!
” (“Get out, you dirty Calvinist!”)
Calvinist?
This was a new one on me, and I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant to call this man, who was actually a Maoist, a Calvinist, but it sounded terrific and I loved Vadim for his lack of equivocation. Still, I went ahead and made the dreaded
Tout Va Bien.
I wasn’t even thrilled that Yves was co-starring in it, because by now it was no secret that he was playing around on Simone (I was perhaps the last to know), and she was very unhappy. I spent time with her and hated to see her so down.

During the filming, I kept my head down, staying under the radar, showing up on time, and keeping to myself on the set to avert outright hostility between Godard and me.

In late February 1972, just as I was returning to California from Paris, I learned I had been nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for my performance in
Klute.
For several weeks after my return I was a nomad, moving from place to place, sleeping on friends’ couches. Desperate for a place where Vanessa could be with me, I borrowed $40,000 from my father and bought a home on a hillside above Studio City in the San Fernando Valley. Dad must have seen that this would afford me some needed stability, and I insisted on signing a promissory note to pay him back (which I did within the year). Dad had his own nonintimate ways of letting me know he was there for me.

As Oscar time drew near, everyone was telling me I would win, and this time I felt they were right. It was in the air. But what was I going to say when I accepted? Should I make a statement about the war? If I didn’t, would it be irresponsible of me? I decided to ask Dad for his advice—Dad, who didn’t believe in the whole awards business at all (“How can you pick between Laurence Olivier and Jack Lemmon? It’s apples and oranges!”). But he came through. His verbal parsimony paid off: “Tell ’em there’s a lot to say, but tonight isn’t the time,” was his recommendation—and the moment I heard it I knew he was right.

I was sick with the flu on the night of the awards. Donald Sutherland was my escort, and I wore a stark black wool Yves Saint Laurent pants suit I had purchased in Paris in 1968 soon after Vanessa’s birth. My hair was still in the
Klute
shag, and I must have weighed all of one hundred pounds.

The Best Actress category is always third to last, followed by Best Actor and Best Picture. When my name was announced as winner, I somehow managed to make the endless march to the stage without falling, and as I arrived in front of the microphone, I was stunned by a feeling of love and support that emanated from the audience. I remember the booming silence as they waited for me to speak. I remember my fear that I would black out. I felt so small all alone on the stage looking out into the cavernous theater, seeing the upturned faces in the first few rows fixed on me, everyone holding their breath, their energy pushing toward me. I heard myself thanking the people who had voted for me and then: “There’s a great deal to say, but I’m not going to say it tonight. Thank you”—just as Dad had suggested. There was an audible release of tension from the audience; they were grateful that I hadn’t given a diatribe. I walked off with my Oscar as the applause erupted and walked right into a corner and sobbed, overcome with gratitude.
I am still a part of this industry!
Then, with disbelief,
How can this have happened to me when it hasn’t happened to my father?
I skipped all the post-Oscar parties and got home to discover I had a raging fever.

Winning the Academy Award was a huge event for me as an actress; whatever else happened, I would always have that. But nothing really changed in my life—not that I expected it to. Yet there’s always a vague hope that such acclaim will make everything else fall into place. It doesn’t.

I was betwixt and between. Was I a celebrity? An actor? A mother? An activist? A “leader”? Who
was
I?

The Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice, which Donald and I had launched a year earlier, was all but defunct. So much for my leadership. I still felt an urgent need to end the war, but I was unsure how to continue working with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which was splintering into factions) or the GI movement (since most of the ground troops were home by now).

I managed to take Vanessa to school every morning, but basically I was functioning on automatic pilot.

CHAPTER EIGHT

TOM

—B
ONNIE
R
AITT,
“Nick of Time”

H
E APPEARED
out of the darkness, an odd figure with a long braid, beaded headband, baggy khaki pants, and rubber sandals of the type I’d been told the Vietnamese made out of the tires of abandoned U.S. vehicles.

“Hi, I’m Tom Hayden . . . remember?”

I was dumbstruck. He didn’t resemble the Tom Hayden I’d met in Detroit the previous year at the Winter Soldier investigation.

Thank God I hadn’t known Tom Hayden would be coming to see the slide show I’d just given on the escalating U.S. air war; I’d have been too nervous. Tom was a movement icon, intelligent, courageous, and charismatic; one of the principal founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an author of its remarkably coherent and compelling Port Huron Statement and of the
Ramparts
article that had so influenced me.

The day after our meeting in Detroit, I had accompanied several people who were driving him to the airport. I was in the front seat, he was behind me. He said something that made me laugh, some irreverent remark. I was unused to laughter and turned to look at him. His eyes were sparkling and he was wearing an Irish wool cap that made him look rakish. Our eyes locked briefly, and he put his hat on my head. It felt nice, slightly flirtatious. I had not seen him since.

Now, more than a year later, here he was, exuding purposeful energy and needing, he said, to talk to me. Tom Hayden came here to talk to
me
! We found a place to sit in the dim backstage area and I told him that I was sorry to have missed him the previous summer when I’d visited the Red Family in Berkeley while filming
Steelyard Blues.
I felt him tense at the mention of the Red Family (I didn’t know that he had been expelled from the collective). He was living in Venice now, teaching a class on Vietnam at Pitzer College in Claremont.

“You don’t look like you did last year,” I said to Tom. “What’s with the braid and beads?”

Tom explained that he had just finished writing a book about how the Vietnam War paralleled our genocide against the Native Americans and that the experience had made him identify with the Indians.
Oh my God!
On top of everything, Tom Hayden identified with the Indians! But the reason he’d come to my slide show, he said, was to ask me to help him with a traveling display of posters and silkscreens about Vietnam and its people. He wanted to use art to show the Vietnamese as human beings, to understand what it was in their culture that enabled them to fight the way they did against a far superior military force.

Putting his hand on my knee, he said he’d also just finished his own slide show and that “I’d like to show it to you sometime”—at least I think that’s what he said. An electric charge had gone right through me, and all I was thinking about at that moment was his hand on my knee.
Slide show?
“Sure, come on over anytime,” I said, and gave him my phone number. It made sense: I’d shown him mine, now he’d show me his. . . .

I got home that night and told Ruby that I’d just met the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I was giddy with excitement. I wanted a man in my life I could love, but it had to be someone who could inspire me, teach me, lead me, not be afraid of me. Who better than Tom Hayden? Respected movement leader, passionate organizer, and strategist par excellence,
who was even into American Indians.
And he seemed so . . . grounded. I needed grounding.

So over he came early one spring evening shortly thereafter, carrying his slide projector. Vanessa was already asleep, but I introduced him to Ruby and showed him around the place, including the pool and the fruit trees I’d planted. I noticed how quiet he was during the tour. But a few days later as we were drinking coffee at the house, he said, “This is quite an operation you’ve got here.” Then I realized that he didn’t approve—of the grounds, or the pool, or the fact that I had an employee. I, of course, felt immediate guilt and wished I were still living in the smoggy house on the cul-de-sac.
Then
he would have seen I wasn’t an elitist.

As we were heading back to the house, Tom asked if I was living with someone, meaning a live-in lover. I answered emphatically, “Oh no, never! I don’t ever want to live with a man again!”

Tom laughed and said, “Oh,” but his expression said
Whoa, lady! Why so defensive?
Good question. God forbid he should see I was lonely.

We went inside so he could do what he’d come for: show me his slide show. We sat on my living room floor, and there, on the paneled wall, unfolded a series of stunning images: children riding water buffalo, slender, reedlike women, graceful in their pastel
ao dais,
Buddhist temples with smiling roofs that curled at the corners, and always the rice fields stretching as far as the eye could see, dotted by Vietnamese in conical straw hats, waist-deep in an emerald vastness.

As the images flashed before me, Tom spoke of things not apparent to the eye: how, for the Vietnamese, “growing rice is not just about raising food, it is part of a collective ritual that unites them with nature. Their dead are buried in these fields, their bones fertilize the rice that feeds their families and, thus, it is believed there is physical and spiritual continuity; the children inherit the strength of their ancestors.” He didn’t need to say that our saturation bombing was destroying not just crops and land but the connective tissue of their culture. It was clear, and more painful than any statistics could have been.

I wasn’t prepared for
this.
Perhaps it was the very dryness of Tom’s voice in contrast with the lyrical images and spiritual concepts that made the experience so compelling, but I could feel something shift within me.

Alongside the fresh and surprising cultural picture he was painting, Tom chose to effectively weave in quotes from the Pentagon Papers to highlight hard facts . . . such as that Vietnam was really one country divided artificially in 1954, at the end of France’s war, into two separate entities, North and South, and was to have been
reunited
two years later.*
 
⁴

Toward the end of the slide show there were devastating images that showed what had become of South Vietnam as a result of the U.S. presence there: GIs in Saigon brothels with Vietnamese girls in miniskirts with huge breasts and push-up bras; starving, hollow-eyed urban refugees living in fetid slums, the results of our “urbanization program,” which aimed to drive the peasants away from their Vietcong-controlled land and into the cities that were controlled by the United States and the Thieu government, which we had installed. There was a large billboard advertising the services of an American doctor, a plastic surgeon, who could make Vietnamese eyes round and breasts bigger. Thousands of women were having this done, Tom said.