Read My Lips (25 page)

Hitting the trail with Tony Curtis.

My two mid-life angels: Jack and Hanna.

Jonathan and me with Claire, Jack, and Hanna. Bliss.

I had announced in a newspaper article in 1973 that I was going “all out” with my singing. It’s not very helpful to your career as an actress to announce that you are focusing all of your efforts on a different profession. Now that I was planning a singing tour of three months straight, not everyone was happy, especially not my agent, Sue Mengers.

Sue passed away in 2011, but she remains legendary, one of the most powerful agents of the last half of the twentieth century. She had started out as a receptionist at MCA, the mammoth agency that grew into Universal Studios. (There’s still a little white colonial building in Santa Monica, where MCA was once housed.) Sue’s client list was like a Hollywood walk of fame, including Marlon Brando, George Burns, Michael Caine, Cher, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Barbra Streisand, Gore Vidal, Ali MacGraw, and Warren Beatty, to name just a few.

Sue’s sense of humor was famously acerbic. Whenever I was with her in a group setting or at one of her parties, I was always afraid to go to the bathroom. I was sure that the minute I stood up to leave she would rip a hole in me big enough to drive a Mack truck through. People loved her evil humor, though; the truth always came out when she was around.

Sue’s patience with me was wearing thin. She was furious that, just when my film career was thriving, I was turning down a movie and disappearing for three months to tour. I could easily have done a movie, then gone on the road for a bit, then continued to alternate acting and singing. But I wanted soul. I wanted to earn my stripes in the music world, just as I had as an actress. I wanted the Billie Holliday story but without the drugs—well, maybe a little grass every now and then.

I was getting to the point when no one could tell me anything, not even people who had my best interests at heart. Part of the problem was that I had begun to believe my own press. I went from feeling like a nobody to seeming arrogant. Arrogance is often just the flip side of low self-esteem. If you ever meet an arrogant asshole, chances are there’s a big mess of unresolved, low self-esteem lurking beneath the surface.

Worse yet, I had no comprehension of how the film business worked. For example, after
M*A*S*H
came out, Fox wanted to make a picture deal with me. To my mind, that meant a seven-year deal, the kind they used to make at places like Universal, when you’d get $750 a week and they owned you. Please! I was too big for a seven-year deal. I would be trapped! Only when it was too late did I grasp that they were offering me a deal to make films, not a weekly retainer. Oops.

Then there were films I turned down:

The Poseidon Adventure
: pass. Why? From the script, it didn’t seem that I’d have enough to do in the picture.
Poseidon
apparently was good enough for Gene Hackman, one of my acting heroes, and for Shelley Winters, whom I adored, but it was not good enough for me. The studio kept offering me more and more—more money, back-end profits—and I just kept saying no. Don’t get me wrong—it’s okay to turn things down. But if you’re going to build a career, you have to say yes sometimes. And I was becoming very stubborn.

I didn’t realize what a hit the film would be—no one can predict that. You can have the greatest talent in the world and still not have a hit. But hits make you more viable, more bankable.

Perhaps one of the most painful mistakes I ever made was turning down the man who gave me a career: Robert Altman.

I had just finished filming
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
when Bob called me one day at home.

“Sally, do you want to be in my picture after next?” he asked.

“Only if it’s a good part,” I said.

He hung up on me.

Bob was as stubborn and arrogant as I was at the time, but the sad thing is that I cheated myself out of working with someone I loved so much, someone who made acting both fun and easy and who trusted his actors. Bob loved actors. Stars would line up to work for nothing for Bob Altman.

Life is all about choices. There isn’t necessarily a right or
wrong about choices, but there is living with the consequences. It is never bad to make unpopular decisions or to go against the grain, but what is important is that you make those decisions from the right place. Trust your judgment, trust the writing, listen. Look, there isn’t an actor in town who hasn’t turned down some fabulous thing. There was just too much of that in my case. My choices weren’t made from a place of any real
confidence
but rather mostly from fear.

Oh, the Altman film I turned down?
Nashville.
In that part I would have been able to sing. Bad choice.

W
HEN
S
TUART SAW HOW STRONGLY
I
FELT ABOUT GOING ON
tour, he got behind me all the way. In fact, Rudi Altobelli was going to come on the road with me. All the arrangements and preparations would be done by Bob Esty, a man I’ve been musically codependent on for about forty years now—and one of my dearest friends—who happened be living in Rudi’s guest house at the time. An amazing arranger and producer, Bob has worked with people like Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer, and I had him for musical director of my first-ever tour.

My dress designer and friend Donfeld stepped up once again, this time teaching me how to pack. A couple of black-and-white boas and I was good to go on a three-month tour.

I’d be touring with a band of five guys, plus a group of three backup singers, called Gotham. Stuart begged me to get rid of Gotham. The money was too much, he said. The band, three backup singers, me and Rudi, and our road manager—I’d be paying for all of them. Furthermore, Stuart pointed out, a big group onstage could look awkward if the clubs weren’t packed. I didn’t listen.

Sue made one final plea before I got the show on the road.

“You believe in magic?!” she yelled. “You think all of this will still be here when you get back?!”

Stuart and I looked at each other, smiled, and said, “Yeah, we do.”

And that was that. I was off.

I
WAS SLATED TO DO THREE SHOWS A NIGHT.
T
HAT PROVED
more exhausting than I had imagined—and sometimes demoralizing to boot. There were often more people in the band than in the audience. (So Stuart was right: if I had traveled without a band, it might not have looked so damning.) In Denver that particular problem solved itself: Gotham wanted to sing more in the act, and one of its members threw a fit with the road manager about it. A few punches flew, and the next thing I knew, Gotham had quit, taking their sparkly costumes with them. The next night I went on faced with the challenge of covering as many different parts as I could while still appearing to be the lead singer. We needed emergency rearrangements for the music. And I needed to get to know that road manager better.

In Denver the sound engineer offered me a piece of advice: “Sing to the mic,” he said. “Talk to the mic, not the audience.” That suggestion made a big difference at the time. Every little bit helped. I was learning.

Every town had its tale. In El Paso we played the opening of some hotel. My hotel room was red, and there was a trapeze above the bed. I was tempted to use it, but I resisted. The hotel did not appear to be finished—there was a large, dirty plastic dome over the outdoor venue where they wanted me to sing. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that night, I looked like the Bride of Dracula. I had really overdone it on the makeup. The crowd didn’t seem to care, although I thought if I heard, “Where’s Hot Lips?!” one more time, I would call it a night and retire to my trapeze.

In Atlanta we had a run at the Playboy Club, which was in a dicey part of town. The management advised us that leaving the hotel after dark was not a great idea. Luckily, we could enter the
venue through a rear entrance of our hotel, sidestepping the little piles of rat feces on the stairs. Our mecca was the coffee shop in the hotel lobby. We practically lived there—between shows, before shows, after shows. Bob Esty had joined us in Atlanta, and he and Rudi were practically stools at the counter in there. One night, after we’d finished the second show, we headed to the coffee shop to get a snack.

“Wait! Wait!” someone shouted. “Don’t go in there! There’s been a murder. The cook and one of the customers were just shot!”

For the rest of the stay I ordered pizza and smoked a joint in my room.

I was excited to play New Orleans, not just for my shows but also to soak up the scene, the food, and some of the other music in town. For our performances at the Blue Room in New Orleans Bob decided to use a full orchestra. I was blowing through money, using all my movie earnings, but I felt I had to. If I was going to crash and burn, I was going to crash and burn with a string section.