The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (27 page)

That was my BIG chance to be in a Woody Allen movie, and I blew it! I don’t know how or why I blew it, but it really doesn’t make any difference because I’ve clearly blown my only shot of being the next Annie Hall!

I was staying at the Pierre Hotel in room 642, the same room I’d stayed in many times and the only NYC hotel I’d slept in for almost 20 years. They were like family to me at the Pierre. I knew the staff better than I knew most of my relatives.

I pouted and sighed as I stomped past the hotel personnel. When I’m miserable, I appreciate everyone else suffering along with me.

“You okay?” was every hotel worker’s reaction.

“Grrr, blah, ger, grrrrr, bla, oooagh” was my response.

I opened my hotel room door and did a 1940s theatrical “slam, turn, throw my back against the door, and slide to the floor” number.

As I sat on the black-and-white parquet marble floor, staring at the ceiling like Joan Crawford, the phone rang.

I crawled, crawled I tell you, into the butler’s pantry of the suite.

“Hello,” I answered with the angst of a love-lost swan.

Agent: “Woody wants you for the movie. They’re sending your sides [parts of a script with your lines in them] over tomorrow.”

“OH MY GOD!! What did he say exactly? Tell me everything he said exactly as he said it,” I gushed.

“He said, ‘I want her for the movie.’ ”

“He did? Oh my god, he
wants
me for the movie!!!!!”

I hadn’t been that exhilarated since I got my first movie. Cloud nine was just a cloud compared to how excited I was!

I took my kids to Serendipity to celebrate! Frozen hot chocolates all around!

Oh my god, I could barely sleep and couldn’t stop saying to myself or out loud, “I’m going to be in a Woody Allen movie!!”

Even
I
thought I was cool.

The next day I got the sides. As I began to read over the lines I realized two things. The first was that I was playing Woody Allen’s wife in a movie called
Deconstructing Harry
. His wife? My heart was pounding. Annie Hall, Annie Hall, Annie Hall! Here’s my Annie Hall role!

The next thing I noticed was that I was playing the role of a psychiatrist. Ugh. Oh no! Jeez, I hate psychiatrists!! Well, to be more accurate, psychiatry! Oh god, what are you doing to me? How ironic! It was like rain on my wedding day, only it was sleet.

I wouldn’t mind playing a psychotic psychiatrist or a mind-fucking psychiatrist or a really screwed-up psychiatrist, as I feel this is at least reality. But a straitlaced, role-model shrink? Never!

What was I going to do? My personal integrity was clashing with my exhilaration.

“Hello, Woody?” was my icebreaker after being given his number.

“Yeah.”

“I know this is going to sound weird, but I hate psychiatry and shrinks.”

“Yeah, so, who doesn’t?” was his reply.

I started chuckling. That was fucking funny!

“I just don’t want to glorify a shrink. Can I play her wackier than she’s written?” This was risky, as Woody is the writer of all his movies. “Can I take drugs and drink while I’m counseling the client?”

“Sure, yeah [beat, beat, beat] as long as it’s funny.”

OH MY GOD!! I was in! I get to portray a lunatic psychiatrist, but I repeat myself. And still be Mrs. Woody Allen!!!!!! (in the movie).

The first day of filming I got to see the genius of Woody Allen firsthand. He works with the same crew every movie, so they hummed like the engine of an Aston Martin.

My hair was pulled back in an ugly low-slung ponytail. I had no makeup and wore a long skirt and turtleneck. Woody wanted it that way. He wanted me to look like the average uptight Upper East Side shrink. There was lots of chatter. Not about the script. Instead it was baseball chatter. Woody is a huge fan of the sport.

I came to find out that Woody doesn’t shoot long days. On many movies the shooting drags on between 14 and 16 hours a day. The average is 12. On
Deconstructing Harry
the average was eight. Woody directs in a precise manner, and he knows what he wants and doesn’t waste his time or anyone else’s. Maybe because he simply wants to get out early to watch baseball, which is a valid reason in my book. He also shoots his movies in the fall because he likes that hue of autumn. Most movies are insured for rain days. His movies are insured for sun days.

I liked the way he let his actors improvise. Meaning me. He was sort of short with the other ones. The lines were all there to support driving the story line forward, and of course they were distinctly Woody Allen funny. The first day on the set I asked him if I could improvise, and his answer was “If it’s funny.” No pressure there! There are many things I’m less than confident about. Being funny is not one of them. He also allowed me to bring my own bits to the scenes. I asked for breakaway glasses to throw at him during the scene. The character he was playing was such a misguided asshole. If I had really been married to a guy like that I would have thrown highball glasses at him on a regular basis.

Woody is afraid of bridges and tunnels. How he ever made it to the set avoiding bridges and tunnels in the tristate area is beyond me. I really loved my experience working with Woody, and the hardest part of acting opposite him is not laughing. If you think he’s funny when you watch him in a movie, try standing three feet in front of him and not cracking up. He’s also weirdly sexy, and I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because he’s not trying. Maybe it’s because smart men are sexy. But I think I just made that up. It sounds good, but are we really looking for smart men?
Oh, Dawn, look at that smart guy standing over by the hydrangeas, he just exudes IQ—let’s go hit on him.

The movie turned out cool. I personally got a lot of notice, which is all that matters. (It’s so hard to write things after being on Twitter using smiley faces after every sarcastic comment. I have the urge to do it constantly in this book.)

;)

Deconstructing Harry
was chosen to open the Venice Film Festival. I went with an idiot boyfriend who didn’t like me getting attention, and it’s pretty hard to stroll over the Ponte Vecchio, or its equivalent, with thousands of people cheering and hundreds of lightbulbs flashing, without being noticed. Woody had personally asked me to attend the festival opening to represent
Deconstructing Harry
. The asshole I was with was furious because I had to do so many interviews. And he refused to go to the gala that was thrown for us after the premiere. I was a sheep by then, so I didn’t go to the gala, either.

The acting business is actually a bitch. Think about it. You’re out of work after every job. You’re basically a door-to-door salesman. So when these premieres, these grand opportunities to show off arise, the celebratory thing to do is revel in it. I was trying to revel. I was surrounded by international film stars such as Gerard Depardieu, and I was trying to revel with him. I hate the word I’m about to use but my date was being a cunt. Don’t EVER be with a man who wants to diminish your power—EVER. If he doesn’t have big enough balls to allow you to shine, he is the wrong man. Oddly enough that’s who my character was in
Deconstructing Harry
.

Anyhoo—it was a great privilege to be at the Venice Film Festival, and it was a life-changing honor to perform alongside Woody Allen, Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Judy Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Richard Benjamin, and Billy Crystal.

After the festival I got a note from Woody. I still have it somewhere. It said something like—I’m paraphrasing here—“Thank you for coming to Venice. You were superb in the movie and thank you for all the publicity you did—although you were a bit of a cunt.”

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

—HARPER LEE,
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

The Art of
Maks

I
WAS SUPPOSED to meet him at a club in LA, but he was late, as usual. I had always wanted a tattoo, and I noticed a tattoo parlor to the left of the club. Here was my big chance. I asked the artist and proprietor to write the word “unbroken” freehand on a piece of paper. It was delicate and beautiful. As paparazzi flashed away through the windows, like they did when Britney Spears shaved her head, I suffered the electric pain of “unbroken” on the inside of my left wrist. The thought crossed my mind with each flash,
Am I just as nuts as Brit?
Did I want ink because HE had just started getting some on his rib cage, or was this word being burned into my virgin flesh a representation of newfound freedom? Perhaps it was a little of both.

There have been six categories of men in my life. Relatives, friends, husbands, lovers, mentors, and “guys I really love but am not in love with who are sorta like friends but sorta not who I want to shag sometimes.”

Relatives include grandfathers, uncles, fathers, brothers, and sons. Friends are men I could sleep next to in a fancy hotel room without the thought of having sex with them enter my mind. Husbands are men that I want to create a future with, spend the rest of my life with, envisioning children and weddings, houses, money, family, and how am I gonna pretend like I wanna have sex with them for the next 30 years. Lovers are those men whom I don’t actually love, the ones I can’t see a future with but who are charming and hot and look good after midnight and three cosmos. Mentors are the men who have changed the course of my life in business, education, and spirituality. Men of the sixth kind are strange friendlike creatures that I could not sleep next to in a fancy hotel room without wanting to shag on occasion. These men are maddening, as they really have no specific place in my life, they are just put there, apparently, to haunt me and screw with my mind for the rest of eternity. These men are a category of one . . . this is the category of Maks.

ABC told me you are not allowed to choose your dance partner but you are allowed to say who you won’t dance with. Being five foot eight narrowed the field. Most
Dancing with the Stars
male dancers are not tall . . . it was obvious I would not be the partner of Derek Hough, for example. I named what tall guys I would not dance with, leaving but one contender—Maks. It was clear to me after watching a few seasons of the show that Maks was either a raging psychotic or had something under that angry Russian facade that could crack my weary soul. Even after the warnings of a few of his ex-partners, a handful of excontestants who had not been his partners, and a couple of ABC execs who blatantly told me “he will destroy you,” I chose Maks. The one thing I could predict with this choice was that I would not be bored.

When I first laid eyes on him I had two thoughts. He is much more polite and charismatic in person. The next thought was
Isn’t this the exact combo of every psycho I’ve ever encountered?

I’ve observed one distinct trait of charming, psychotic men: they never have “psycho” carved in their foreheads.

My perceptions are my most keen gift and curse.

I instantly perceived his disappointment that he had the task of teaching an overweight middle-aged actress to dance. Sure, he was impressed by my acting pedigree and my slew of awards and sure, he knew he had landed a bona fide “star” to prance around the ballroom with, but I could read his mind:
Why the fuck can’t I get some hot bitch like Nicole Scherzinger, who has danced her whole life and makes me look like the hot piece of ass I am, to spin around on the dance floor? What the hell have you saddled me with, ABC? Do you really hate the bad boy of the ballroom this much? And how do you expect me to conquer the mirror ball with a trophy like this? I might as well pack my bags and head back to Ukraine to lick my wounds in the arms of one of my bachelor rejects.
Poor, poor Maks.

  •  •  •  

After Maks and I LOST the mirror ball, while we were in New York City I threw a dinner one evening for the extended Ukraine clan, to thank them for all the love and joy they had shown me over that five-month period. By then I’d fallen for each one of the members. Jhanna, Eugene, Teddy, Nicole, Val, the other Eugene, Sergey, Alex, Sasha, Lora, and of course Maks . . . Maks announced that night that I was an honorary member of his family. Wow! In Kansas we don’t roll that way. We barely acknowledge our own family members as family members. This was foreign to me, like some Russian Corleone ritual, some Ukrainian rite of passage. I was flattered and delighted to be part of a new group of people that I’d grown so fond of, so close to, so quickly.

These Russians are tightly knit, like a 600-thread-count cashmere sweater. Hmmm, and what are my obligations as a family member? Just the normal stuff like birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, sporadic visits when the north wind blew me into town? Or would I be called on for hits and such? Is my new family mob, or just immigrants that look like mob? And does this make Maks my brother, uncle, son? Hmmmm.

You see, I don’t presume to know anything about Maks. He is as mysterious to me as he is capricious, rude, thoughtless, and bossy. He is also gentle, childlike, fragile, and sensitive. He is a dancing contradiction.

The one really funny thing about Maks is that he presumes you will always love him no matter how much of an asshole he is. Unfortunately, it’s sort of true. That smile is honestly his most valuable weapon—it gets him back into good graces like a black Amex gets an ugly guy into a club. It’s truly irresistible to the point where I’ve trained myself to pretend he’s the Cheshire Cat, hopped up on opium, and I’m not allowed to listen to his gibberish.

Maks rarely says he’s sorry and he never engages in a conversation that would lead to an apology—the Artful Dodger—he moves in and out of the dialogue like a snake, slithering through a maze. If he touches on anything relevant he recoils and just continues sliding. Finally I give in, and when he says things like “I know you have drawn a line between us,” I just laugh. “
I’ve
drawn a line between us??!! I give up!”