Read My Lips (19 page)

Helen Hayes. The First Lady of American Theater. Never mind all the fine work she’d done over the years—she won best supporting actress for
Airport.

Bob was sitting behind me. I could feel him lean forward.

“They’re voting for a different war this year,” he said.

That took away the sting—not that I ever expected to win. Hoped, sure, but never expected. And Helen Hayes had long since earned any award she was nominated for.

Still, I appreciated Bob’s words, which proved true.
Patton
took home best picture, best director, best actor. A different war.

The only Oscar
M*A*S*H
took home that night went to screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., who had also won best adapted screenplay at the Golden Globes and an award from the Writers Guild of America—all for the screenplay that Bob had supposedly ruined.

No matter who won, it was fun to be with Bob and his wife, Kathryn. Rick and I spent the evening with them at the Governor’s
Ball, which, at the time, was the only party in town. Today you can’t even keep track of all the “official” Oscar parties. I frankly think that’s rather divisive, turning one of the few nights our industry celebrates together into high school. Where are the cool kids? Where’s the best party?

One year I watched the awards at the Bistro on Cannon Drive in Beverly Hills. That was the domain of Oscar party legend Swifty Lazar; he threw a party there after the Oscars for almost thirty years. Then there are the countless “viewing” parties, one of which is the Night of 100 Stars. I’ve attended that a couple times just to see my friend Norby Walters, the event’s producer. But my favorite place to watch the Oscars is at home in my pajamas.

Unless, of course, I’m nominated.

The day after the Oscars, reporters from all over the world were commenting on my dress, my accidentally risqué, daring, fabulous dress, with the neckline virtually at my navel. My look was a huge hit, and the dress got so famous that, years later, it was auctioned off at Christie’s for charity. Today that dress would hardly warrant a whimper, as everybody’s dress is practically falling off. I guess I was just ahead of my time. And it’s funny to think that the mistake that caused all the uproar and attention—making me the precursor of J Lo in Versace—resulted from my peyote-enhanced Mexican getaway.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE
O
SCARS
I
HAD AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
kind of premiere: the film Larry Hauben and I shot finally hit a few theaters. I went to see it, not sure what to expect. Although I was relieved to see that Larry had told the truth about the sex scene we filmed—only our legs were visible—I was shocked to see some other moments that Larry had included, moments when I hadn’t known that the camera was rolling.

There were scenes of us talking to friends on the phone and other scenes of Larry just goofing off. But what really got me was the footage of Larry breaking up with me over the phone. He had
captured the entire conversation, including my end. I sounded so needy that it was utterly humiliating.

It was obvious even to the reviewer from the
Los Angeles Times
that I hadn’t known Larry was recording us. Discussing the scene that took place in bed, the reviewer wrote, “While one does not mean to be insulting, we nonetheless can only hope that Miss Kellerman knew she was being photographed.”

The rest of the review was not exactly glowing, either, saying it was “impossible to tell where reality leaves off and fiction begins and, more importantly, whether the film is saying such a distinction is even possible . . . In intermingling two favorite forms of underground filmmakers, the potpourri of fragmented, superimposed images and the cinema-verite interview,
Venus
demonstrates the limitations of both.” It went on:

[Venus] has the look of a scrapbook record of a broken romance, and is finally too personal to mean much to anyone but Hauben and his friends. . . . In short, we never really learn much about Hauben or his motives. As for Sally Kellerman, sexy, beautiful, talented and funny—a modern-day Venus, to be sure—we do know that she thought enough of Lawrence Hauben to trust him completely.

Evidently I did. Maybe I thought enough of Larry but didn’t think enough of myself. I know that my parents saw that review, but my father never said a word. Thank God they never saw the film. Note to self: there is a difference between feeling desperate for work and taking work out of desperation.

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
I
WOULD RETURN TO THE
O
SCARS AS A
presenter. Alongside Richard Harris, I gave the award for the best supporting actor to Ben Johnson for his work in
The Last Picture Show.
But that time, instead of getting Donfeld to make a gown for me, I just went down to my old favorite boutique, Holly
Harp’s. I attended the awards with Jack, who at the time was dating Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. I have no idea where we went before or after, but from the pictures I’ve seen, it looks like we had an awful lot of fun.

It’s telling that I didn’t attend that Oscar show with Rick. Our marriage, never peaceful, had hit the rocks. I don’t blame Rick for that—it takes two to tango. We fought over ridiculous things. But our conflicts didn’t stop me from turning down work that I probably should have taken and from listening to Rick when I should have known better.

Little things got blown up into big ones, as they often do in relationships. There were warning signs, all of which I ignored. Some of them had to do with work, others with our personal life, family, and friends.

My family life had been painful. My father had died. His feeling of being run down never did go away. It turned out that he had cancer, which took him fairly quickly. The weaker he got, the more he worried that my mother would just up and leave him. He couldn’t imagine anyone staying with him as his condition worsened. Vitality, strength, never wavering in every way—Dad valued these attributes and wanted to instill them in his daughters. My mother was different—caring, comfort, spoiling, understanding, hot cocoa with cinnamon toast and sugar. That was why she would never have left my father, ever, during his illness.

Everything we need is within us, Sally,
she always said to me.

I knew that I had left so much unspoken and unresolved with my father. “I can’t die,” my dad had said during one of my last hospital visits with him. “I have to see you kids grow up.” After his death I found those two beautiful letters, full of love and support, reminding me that I had talent. At the same time I couldn’t forget his anger and disapproval and how stern and critical he could be of everything from my language to my wardrobe. Every transgression of mine—or my mother’s—was worthy of the same level of anger. Neither of us had reached a point in our lives when we could talk about any of that.

Mom insisted that she stayed in the relationship because she loved my dad—a lot. As for me, I could never find a way to reconcile his good side with his bad side, his encouragement with his reprimands. But I had noticed some changes. “I’ve even learned to like Gloria,” he had written me the year before his death, referring to Diana’s partner. “I must be becoming modern.”

My dad was growing, just like the rest of us. He had worked very hard to accept Diana’s coming out and also to see the good in Rick.

I
MYSELF WAS HAVING TROUBLE SEEING THE GOOD IN
R
ICK.
Things flared up in 1971 while I was in New York City, rehearsing for the film
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
with Alan Arkin. I was living at the Plaza Hotel, where we also rehearsed. I was loving the work. I had a fantastic part playing one of the women that a frustrated—and married—Alan Arkin gets involved with. Great parts are all about the writing, whether it’s a film or a voice-over gig, and this was a work by Neil Simon. You don’t get better writing than that.
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
remains one of my proudest accomplishments.

Unfortunately for me, every time Alan Arkin would do something during rehearsal, Neil Simon would start to laugh. But whenever I did anything, all I heard were crickets. At first it was just a little annoying, but then it really started to get distracting and was making me paranoid. Instead of becoming my character, I felt like I was trying to please Neil. So I had the director, Gene Saks, ask Neil if he would mind not sitting in on our rehearsals. Neil never said anything to me about it, but he did stop showing up when I was filming.

As our director, Gene was tenacious about getting what he wanted from his actors and crew. He always wanted me to play harder and tougher, displaying no vulnerability whatsoever. Gene was brilliant—and he was right. But when the film came out, reviewers tuned in to—you guessed it—my vulnerability. The
harder I played it, the more you could see how vulnerable the character was. My character and I were similar in a lot of ways. The more I tried to show everyone how confident and together I was, the clearer it was to those close to me that I wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

What made the time in New York even more special was that my mother came to stay with me. After my father’s death she needed to get away, and she’d never been to New York. I was busy all day, but in her typical self-starter style, my mom got all the brochures and maps, familiarized herself with public transportation, and went out into the city every day, taking tours and visiting museums. At night, when she returned from her adventures and I was done with rehearsal, we would sit in our beautiful two-bedroom suite at the Plaza, eating clams on the half shell and sipping glasses of white wine. I loved having the chance to spoil her as she had spoiled me all my life.

Edith Kellerman was such an example of how to live and love. She always took care of herself, plump or thin, tired or raring to go, hassled by my dad or standing tall on the pedestal he had for her in his mind. I’d always thought of my parents as Victorian and repressed, the source of all my neuroses. But during our time in New York my mom confided in me that she and my father were having sex until they fell off the bed because the cancer had made him too weak. So what the hell did I know?

Having Mom around was both a comfort and a reality check. Here I was with a woman who never looked to a man to make her happy, who did not stop living her life because he was gone. And here I was in a marriage with an expiration date that I felt was fast approaching, wondering how—and if—I could make it on my own.