My Life So Far (89 page)

It dawned on me that in one year I would turn sixty. That was when the whole notion of my third act came to me with a jolt that wasn’t a bump in the road.
Oh my God! This will be a biggie. How do I want to handle it? I need to figure out what my life has meant up until now in order to know what I need to do with what lies ahead.

As I wrote in the preface, “Know thine enemy” is one of my rules: Confront head-on the things that scare me and become deeply familiar with them. This is why, knowing that sixty would be a difficult threshold to cross, I decided that the best way was for me to make a short video of my life to discover its different themes. I had all the makings: My father had been a home movie buff, so I had access to more than the average amount of footage and photos of myself as an infant and toddler. Plus there were the archives of interviews, movies, and press clips from when my life became public. All the raw material was there for me to resurrect the forgotten moments of my girlhood. It would be up to me to decipher the clues it held, to identify the patterns—and to be brave enough to name them.

I wanted to do it mainly for myself and for Vanessa, and it would also be for Troy, Lulu, Nathalie, and Ted’s daughters, Laura and Jennie. I had a sense that if I did it right, the notion of confronting the third act in this manner—intentionally working to address what my regrets might be—would resonate with my friends, especially my women friends. I then decided I would have a big party to celebrate the start of my third act and offer the movie as my gift to the guests.

Vanessa is a documentary filmmaker and editor, so I invited her to help me put it together. Her answer, albeit prickly, pointed to one of the central issues I would have to deal with. She said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?” Ouch. This was the rap on me: I’ve had so many personae over my lifetime that it’s easy to think, Who is she, anyway? Is there a “there there”?—to quote Dorothy Parker describing Oakland, California. When I looked at photos of myself over the years and matched them up with my husband of the time, I couldn’t help feeling that maybe it was true—maybe I simply become whatever the man I am with wants me to be: “sex kitten,” “controversial activist,” “ladylike wife on the arm of corporate mogul.” Vanessa had exposed one of my central issues:
Was
I just a chameleon, and if so, how was it that a seemingly strong woman could so thoroughly and repeatedly lose herself?
Or had I really lost myself?
I also hoped that exploring my past would help me define the next thirty years so that the ending, when it came, would be as free of regrets as possible. That was the promise I had made to myself as I had watched my father die almost two decades earlier.

Over the summer of 1996, as I researched my journey, a trail began to appear. But to make sense of the emerging patterns, I had to concentrate hard on remembering how I
felt
each step of the way: how I felt sitting on Sue Sally’s mother’s lap as she reprimanded me for using bad language; how I felt when Pedro tried to hump Pancho; how I felt when Susan asked me how I felt about Mother’s death; how I felt when Sydney Pollack asked me my opinion of the script of
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I knew that by watching my films—all forty-nine of them (at the time)—and by reading through my old interviews (many of which I had pasted into albums over the years), a sense of who I was back then would come to me and help me understand the ways in which I had changed. This process caused me much wincing, and much looking over my shoulder to make sure no one else was watching. Trust me, there’s something to be said for having your various utterances disappear into obscurity rather than linger in print or on film to haunt you.

All this research was done rather sporadically. I had to search for air pockets in the frantic life I shared with Ted. It was done mostly during the spring and summer while we were in Montana, and it wasn’t easy. Whenever my personal extracurricular activities (which, by the way, kept my head above water) would take time away from Ted, he would suffer abandonment anxieties. So to work on the “script” of my life, I would often “fake it”: I would drive out to the river with Ted and we’d separate, each to fish different stretches; then, instead of fishing I’d park myself under a tree and read, write, or think. Sometimes I’d sneak my laptop into the back pouch of my fishing vest and pull that out to write on it until the battery died. Then I would fish like crazy in order to have something to report when we hooked back up again. Occasionally I’d pretend to not feel well and send Ted off with other guests to fish or hunt while I worked.

As it turned out, what I was doing intuitively by choosing to prepare for my sixtieth the way I did was preparing myself for
myself—
starting at the very beginning.

With Vanessa and Malcolm (around age two).

In Rome with Troy for a V-Day summit meeting.

(©Joyce Tenneson)

In Juarez, with Eve Ensler, far left, and Sally Field, right.

(Jorge Uzon/AFP/Getty Images)

March 2004, in Mumbai, India, where I did
The Vagina Monologues
with Eve Ensler, Marisa Tomei, and Indian and Pakistani actresses.

Girls are at the core of G-CAPP’s work.

(Courtesy G-CAPP)

Christmas 2004 in Atlanta with Lulu, Malcolm on my lap, Viva on Vanessa’s lap, and Nathalie.

(Matt Arnett)

CHAPTER ONE

SIXTY