Read My Lips (29 page)

S
O LET’S RECAP MY BEHAVIOR SINCE ANNOUNCING TO
S
TUART
I was going to make amends in Hollywood: I appeared in some
films but walked out on others. I’d left Chuck, who was available, only to fall for someone who was married. Maybe I needed a breather. A trip to Iran seemed to offer, if nothing else, a change of scenery and distance.

In April 1977 I was invited to the Tehran Film Festival. The idea was that afterward I would go visit my sister Diana and her partner, Gloria, who were still living in a small medieval village in the south of France. I hadn’t seen Diana in years, not since she’d left Claire behind with Ian.

Tehran was full of half-finished cement buildings, bazaars, and enough traffic and smog to give LA a run for its money. The film commission had invited stars from all over the world in order to show off how Iran had stepped into the modern age and to celebrate its film history. Brenda Vaccaro (a wonderful actress and a good friend) and Kenny Solms, another friend, were on my flight. Kenny was a kick—a writer for the
Carol Burnett Show
and a producer of the
Smothers Brothers,
among a million other credits. All the invited actors, directors, and media people stayed in the same hotel.

Brenda, Kenny, and I spent a lot of time together looking for adventure, usually unsuccessfully. I saw the crown jewels in Tehran’s museum, but the closest I got to the “real” Iran was the bazaar. We were warned not to drink the water or to eat raw fruits and vegetables. But on the upside, Iran’s caviar is world class. One night Brenda, Kenny, and I went to a hookah bar. I don’t know what we were smoking, but I didn’t get high and ended up coughing up green gunk for the next three months. These were my adventures. Oh—and I bought a tiny rug.

The festival itself was held in the Roudaki Hall, Tehran’s opera house. It was stunning. The local papers called me Sally Keller, which I thought was pretty funny. The afternoon of the event Brenda and I got our hair done, slipped into our evening gowns, and headed off to the bus, only to wind up standing in our high-heeled shoes and holding on to the strap for the two hour-long, half-mile trip to the Hall. I ended up squeezed in next to Paul
Mazursky. Years earlier I had turned Paul down when he offered me a part in
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
Now I was mad at him because he didn’t hire me for his upcoming movie
An Unmarried Woman.
So Paul was cold, and I was peevish. One of us was justified in behaving that way, and it wasn’t Sally Keller. But boy, was that a long bus ride.

Shortly after the festival ended, my pals Brenda and Kenny joined the exodus of movie people leaving Tehran. But I was stuck. Somehow my schedule had gotten turned around, leaving four days before my sister was returning to her home in France. So I wandered down to the hotel lobby, looking for people I knew. There I saw Otto Preminger, a famous director who had made many well-known films.

I had met Otto in 1967. He was a notorious hothead, and my first interaction with him confirmed that. My agents at the time at William Morris had thought it would be a good idea to test with him for
Hurry Sundown,
even though Faye Dunaway had already been cast. Otto was still casting for one of the male roles, so he had me read with three men.

When the first guy stumbled over a line, Otto jumped on to his feet.

“You don’t know your lines?! Bullshit! I go to my office!”

He stomped out and did not return.

The next day Otto let the poor guy try again, only this time he made him audition in front of the other two actors. Brutal.

I don’t think I’d seen him since, and now here he was, exploding as only Otto could, this time at the restaurant management.

“What do you mean you’re not open?!” he bellowed. “I am Otto Preminger! I take my shirt off!”

Dear God, he was just as arrogant and awful as before. And as luck would have it, he remembered me. So I could hardly avoid joining him at his table in the restaurant, which had now decided to stay open.

Next to enter was John Simon, a reviewer for the
New York Times,
whom I knew to be particularly cruel to any actress who
didn’t look like a Barbie doll. My friends had all left, and I was lonely. I had days to kill before my sister got back to her home in France, and I was sitting at dinner with two of the most miserable men on the planet, Otto Preminger and John Simon. Perfect.

I shared my lodging predicament with the two of them, and Otto, oddly enough, had a solution.

“You will come to my house in the south of France. You will stay there until you can go to your sister.”

Maybe I misjudged him,
I thought. I felt so desperate. As much as I loathed Otto, I did not want to stay alone in Tehran. So I made all my arrangements—called the airline, booked a flight to the airport closest to Otto’s home, and reserved a car. When the day of our departure arrived, I found Otto in the lobby.

“Oh no, you can’t come!” he said. “My wife would be too jealous.”

In your dreams.

“Don’t worry about it” was all I could say.

But I was worried about it. I went back to my room, called the front desk, and begged them to extend my stay. I had a good cry and then decided to make the best of it. The only person I knew for sure who was still in the hotel was John Simon. So I quickly signed up for a tour, feeling that would at least get me away from the city and the cranky critic.

Of course, the moment I boarded the tour bus, who was the first person I saw? John Simon. Then, like a mirage, I spotted Arthur Hiller, the director I had worked with back in the 1960s on the television show
I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.
I plopped down right next to Arthur, and John Simon never said a word to me again. Soon Dick Guttman, a publicist friend from LA, boarded the bus along with his daughter, who wound up being my roommate on the short trip. We visited Shiraz, Isfahan, and Persepolis, where we saw beautiful mosques, and Arthur and I ate more caviar together than we would ever see again for the rest of our lives. In the end it was a wonderful trip. Then it was off to France.

This was the first time I’d seen my sister since she had left
Claire for her new life. She looked older, kind of weatherworn, and I remember her hands being very rough. Still, she looked so happy, like she’d lived through a very hard time but come out the other side happier, more complete. As hard as it was for Claire, it wasn’t easy for Diana, either, deciding to leave. But she was convinced that Claire’s life would be easier, considering the times and the intolerance, if she herself were out of Claire’s life. I didn’t stay long, but man, I had some delicious meals. I love my sister, and it was so good, so important to have that time with her. And to get to know her partner Gloria.

When I got home, I decided that I wanted to take Claire on a trip somewhere. As luck would have it, I was offered a part in a film shooting on some island and thought that would be perfect. We packed, we got Claire a passport—I made sure not to forget mine this time—and we were both getting excited about the trip. Then, one afternoon, we came home from some pretrip errands to a ringing phone. The picture had been canceled. We were crushed.

Then, like an angel out of the blue, Sissy “my formerly bare-breasted housekeeper” Spacek called to ask if I would like to play her best friend, a 1940s B-picture ballad singer, in a PBS special titled
Verna: USO Girl.
It was part of PBS’s
Great Performances
series.

Would I want to play a singer? Would I ever! There was only one drawback: I couldn’t bring Claire. It was a low-budget film, and the money wasn’t there. I would miss Claire badly, and I hoped I could make up for our canceled trip.

We shot in Idar-Oberstein, a tiny town in Germany known for its jewelry industry. I loved being with Sissy again and also enjoyed working with William Hurt. It was one of Bill’s earliest jobs. Just a few years later he would be wowing us all in
Body Heat.
And I got the chance to sing, which of course always thrills me.

When you’re working with a small budget, out of necessity things move quickly. As the clock ticks, the dollars fly. So almost as soon as we stepped off the plane we had to shoot a scene—Sissy’s
death—though I didn’t yet have a sense of our respective roles and had had no rehearsal with her. But Ron Maxwell, the director, was so easy to work with and so spontaneous that we worked it out. We shot on Hitler’s training grounds, where US servicemen were living and drilling. Half the time we were so close to the firing range that we felt like we were dodging real bullets. Ron took full advantage of our military setting and the access to so many “extras.”

At one point Ron came running over to our trailers, yelling, “There’s a parachute drop!!” Piling into a Jeep, we raced over. Nothing in the script had anything to do with a parachute drop, but Ron figured that kind of drama was just too good to pass up. So he made up a scene on the way over. That’s the beauty of a lower budget; it’s freeing in so many ways. If you have the right kind of director—Ron was one, and Bob Altman, certainly, was another—the creativity that kicks in can make up for a lot of the bells and whistles that come with a bigger budget. I see that kind of creativity in many of the up-and-coming filmmakers of today, the ones working with limited funds. So here we are again, in Hollywood’s new Wild West.

In
Verna
I got to sing songs like Billie Holliday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and work with Donald Smith, a fantastic Broadway choreographer. The costumes were all originals, refashioned from vintage 1940s outfits. Ron shot me performing my “USO act” in a variety of different venues—the action was taking place during the war, after all. On one amazing night, when the rain was really coming down, I sang in front of nearly a thousand actual servicemen—Sissy, the amateur tap-dancer, and me, the ballad singer. I prerecorded my vocals at a nearby Marine base, just me and a Marine and a pair of headphones—no director, no choreographer.

Because I was always dieting, when Sissy, Bill, and other members of the cast and crew would go to dinner, I would head off to the
hallenbad
and swim laps with a bunch of sweet German women. Then I’d go back to my room and eat a candy bar alone before bed. But I loved my fellow cast members as well as
the project itself. I am forever grateful to Sissy for bringing me on board.

While in Germany I got news of another job:
Magee and the Lady,
a television movie, in which I’d star alongside
The French Connection’s
Tony Lo Bianco. It was set to shoot for two months in Australia. And this time I’d get to bring along Claire and my mom as well.

We landed in Sydney and it was heaven, worth every minute of the sixteen-hour flight. We enrolled Claire in school, where she made great friends. My mom shifted into classic Edith Kellerman mode, quickly finding a bridge group and going on tours and joining a local lawn bowling league to keep herself occupied during the day. I worked six days a week and was in every shot. It was such a blessing to have Mom with me, both for moral support and to help with Claire.

The minute we landed in Australia I had raced to the nearest candy counter to see what kind of sweets they had that I had never tried before. That’s when it hit me: I had a real sugar problem. So I decided I would use the time away from home to try to give up sugar. The cooks on the set made me whipped cream without sugar, scones without sugar, and jams without sugar. Oh, and my poor mother. My experiment with living life without sugar meant that the minute I returned home from shooting, I would storm into the apartment and start yelling, “Mother! Mother! Where’s my diabetic chocolate bar? Where are the raisins?!”

On Sunday, my day off, I would treat myself to honey on my pancakes and take Claire on a ferry ride. Tony Lo Bianco and I didn’t exactly turn out to be Hepburn and Tracy, but we had a lot of fun. I’ve never seen the finished film. Maybe it was better than I imagined. Maybe not.

W
HEN WE GOT BACK TO
LA
THINGS ALMOST SEEMED TO BE
finally starting to fall into place. Claire was happy at school, and I was working with people I liked. But Paul Mazursky’s snub on
that bus in Tehran reminded me that I had burned more than my share of bridges. The roles I was getting offered weren’t what they used to be. I didn’t have Stuart to rely on, and I was now a very unprepared single mother to my sister’s child. However, I was concerned about the “single” as well as the “unprepared.”

Jennifer Jones Simon, my fairy godmother, had recently told me, “If you ever have any trouble with men, call Milton Wexler.”

Milton was her therapist. I was no stranger to psychotherapy, of course, and had recently stopped seeing my latest therapist. I wasn’t quite ready to dive in again.