The Varnished Untruth (27 page)

Anyway, just an hour or so into our evening with David at his hotel – in keeping with my usual ability to make a terrible
faux pas
– I suddenly said, ‘Oh my God, David – you’ve got one brown eye and one blue one!’ David gave me a sideways look. Of course, almost everyone in the world knew that he has mismatched eyes. (What is WRONG with me?) David then embarked on a talkathon, that is, he and Billy ‘rapped’ for almost eight hours non-stop. I have no idea what they talked about – I was just desperate to leave and find my bed. I was so tired I could barely stay upright, but my brain kept going, ‘It’s DAVID BOWIE! I’ve GOT to stay awake.’

Then there was that party at Gail Zappa’s house where porn mogul Larry Flint arrived in a wheelchair disguised as a gold throne pushed by burly Men in Black – it was for Moon Unit Zappa’s karaoke wedding at which even the priest did a number (well, one of the priests – I think it was the Christian one. The other person officiating at the wedding was a chubby woman who ‘worked with crystals’). But I think everyone’s energy was well-UNbalanced by the end of that evening. I’ll never forget Rose McGowan, a very pretty soap star who was going out with Ahmet Zappa at the time, doing an amazing rendition of a heavy metal number in a frothy summer frock – wonderfully bizarre. And, after the newly-weds retreated up the aisle, they returned in terrycloth dressing gowns with towels round their necks à la rock ’n’ roll and sang a number. Crazy, enormous fun. I love the Zappa family, especially Diva who likes to knit (a thoroughly rebellious act for one of Frank’s daughters) and Dweezil who’s just so goddamn cute. And Gail keeps dropping bombshells like: ‘We lived next door to Charlie Manson and his “family”. I used to see their comings and goings through my kitchen window . . . !’

One of our favourite couples to hang out with in LA was Sidney and Joanna Poitier. Wonderful people, and I especially loved to see Sidney go from elder statesman to giggling Bahamian kid in a nanosecond – usually when Billy pushed his funny bone. The Poitiers kindly helped us place Scarlett and Amy in the same school their own children had attended. Later, I enrolled Amy at the same school the Zappa kids had attended, and Scarlett joined her a couple of years later. Once it was a kind of hippyish school, but now it’s also highly academic. ‘Yeah, I went to your school,’ Moon said to Amy. ‘We went barefooted if we wanted, and the vending machines only contained apples.’ Nowadays pupils still call the teachers by their first names, and there’s no uniform. I really like that style of education; lessons are conducted in seminar form with everyone arguing the point, and the kids are really taught to think for themselves and question everything. Yes, the cult of the individual is alive and well in such schools; although it did make ‘answering back’ to one’s parents a virtue. I just had to put up with that.

But the heady LA scene has its limitations. I could see that, if left unchecked, I could end up scoring high on the ‘vacant’ scale. I could turn into one of those blonde women – too thin to be healthy (if only!) – focused on charity events, perfecting the art of understated dressing to impress, regular nip ’n’ tucking, and sleeping with one’s personal trainer. Not my idea of a fulfilled life. After I caught myself doing ridiculous things, such as purchasing two Labradors at a charity ball, I thought, ‘Pamela, you’re losing it!’ and promptly decided to go back to school.

Of course, it wasn’t just finding myself seduced by LA’s charmed life that made me want to switch careers. I finally managed to own up to the fact that I was bored with comedy. And show business in general. If you count my childhood shows, I had been performing for thirty-five years. I still loved the actual work, but most of the periphery stuff – touring, always having to try to look good, dealing with various quirky (actually, that’s being very kind!) agents and managers, press intrusion – it was all getting very old. So, what could I do? Appear in movies again? I was bored and annoyed with that kind of work – especially the auditioning process.

In 1984 I had a new agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Rick Nicita had been recommended to me by Richard Lester and we got on pretty well, at least he seemed to understand my sensibility. But I wasn’t really like other women who would go to auditions and be very accommodating. I didn’t know how to behave. For example, I once went to see a casting agent about being in a movie with Molly Ringwald. They flew me to New York because they were serious about casting me but, halfway through my reading, I stopped and said, ‘Listen, why don’t you get Cher to do this? She’d be perfect.’ Agghh! You’re not supposed to do things like that . . . What is WRONG with me?!

Anyway, in Los Angeles, I was sent me to meet the well-respected movie-making brothers David and Jerry Zucker, who had written and directed
Airplane!
and were now looking for a comic actress to appear in their new spoof comedy
Top Secret
. The movie was set during World War II and the character I read for was that of a French woman involved in the French Resistance. She would lead the central male character into a wacky espionage scheme. I read a scene in my best French accent, and got on well with the Zucker brothers, so I thought I had a chance. But the message went back to my agent: ‘We’re looking for a REAL French woman.’ Well, I was fuming. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’m an actress, I can be totally French . . .
N’est pas?
’

Then I hatched a mad caper. I asked Todd Smith from CAA to call the casting agent. ‘Tell her you have a new French actress on your books who has just arrived in California. Tell them she doesn’t speak much English but you feel she could be perfect for the role . . .’ Todd complied, and I donned a complete disguise. As Danielle Bergeronette, a dark-haired beauty from Perpignan who had just made a comedy with French pop star Johnny Hallyday, I flounced back to the studios where I behaved coquettishly towards the Zuckers . . . and a little erratically. At one point, when they were telling me the story of the film, I even pretended to get upset. ‘You joke about Le Resistance?’ I pouted, ‘
Ce n’est pas amusant
. . .’ ‘Well,’ said Jerry, hurriedly trying to cover his tracks, ‘It’s just a movie . . .’

Oh, I enjoyed myself. At the end of the meeting I left the room, then whipped off my wig and returned to tease the brothers. We all had a jolly good laugh, but I still didn’t get the part. ‘Yes, it’s true we want a real French woman,’ explained Jerry. ‘But not THAT one!’ In the end, the role went to Lucy Gutteridge, a non-French actress who had appeared in
Airplane!
Yes, I never liked feeling powerless to create my own destiny; and that, unfortunately, is the lot of most Hollywood actresses.

Even beyond the humiliation of auditioning, I hated the whole process of movie-making – sitting alone in one’s trailer for hours and hours in full make-up, having to stay so incredibly thin (or at least that’s what I believed was necessary for me), travelling to faraway locations to film and never being sure when it would all end. And anyway, since I was now in my forties, and the cult of youth was alive and well – especially when applied to woman – I knew things would only get a lot harder.

I’d already achieved everything I ever wanted in comedy, and now I would just be repeating myself. I longed to do something with less focus on external appearance and behaviour, and more focus on my brain and internal self. I also recognized that it would be better for the children and family as a whole if I was firmly rooted in one place.

Most importantly, I sensed this would be the most important step in my personal evolution. The mysteries of the mind – especially my own and Billy’s – had been drawing me towards a formal investigation of them for many years. Rather than being just ‘an option’, deciding to become a psychologist was probably the most vital step in my destiny thus far – and not just for me, but for the whole family. I had been leading up to it since my teenage curiosity about, well, poetry really. I had never heard of the ‘mythopoetic centre’ back then, but yet I understood that human beings held within them a reservoir of acute feeling, longing and passion that could not be articulated through ordinary conversation.

Yes, aside from the sheer intellectual curiosity I held for the workings of the mind, the desire to be a psychologist seemed to emanate from the part of me that cradled my own aching and harboured enormous empathy for people like me. And now I’m grateful for the people and circumstances that frustrated my performing career, because they helped pitch me towards what I was truly meant to do.

But at the same time, it was downright scary to imagine doing something else, being someone else . . .

What exactly was that like for you?

Oh, I guess I actually underwent a massive existential crisis. I was having daily intrusive thoughts and images of a giant crack appearing in my universe, through which I was gingerly trying to step into another world. ‘On that other side,’ I thought, ‘No one will know who I am.’ The image was powerful; I would almost say it was a hallucination. I had come to identify so strongly with myself as a performer I just couldn’t imagine letting go of that, no matter how ready I was for a new career. It was a rather obvious psychological image, but the feeling that went with it was one of genuine, extreme fear.

I had to persuade my timid self, to proceed slowly – with baby steps. Feeling very insecure, I took myself off to Antioch University for a beginner psychology course, just to see how it felt. I absolutely loved it, and adored my professor, Dr Joy Turek. Joy advised me about the field of Psychology and the life of a professional psychologist, and I eventually enrolled in the doctoral programme at the California Graduate Institute – one of the best clinical programmes around.

I was ready to use my mind in a different way. This may seem strange, but psychology is not that different from comedy. Both involve the examination of human behaviour. I had been interested in the subject since I was a teenager. Eric Berne’s
Games People Play
was very popular in the seventies – one of the many ‘pop psychology’ offerings. I gravitated to
Primal Scream
by Arthur Janov which, for the first time, exposed me to the notion of healing catharsis, in this case taking off to the woods to have a good scream and let your demons out. I began to understand that we were all creatures who held important truths below the surface of our conscious minds, and that notion truly intrigued me.

I was also drawn to Luke Rhinehart’s
The Dice Man
because it was utterly anarchic and proposed breaking all the social rules I’d come to obey; it was shocking to consider any other way of being in the world, but I longed for such freedom. I was re-evaluating everything in those days – and a good thing, too. I felt I had to re-educate myself in what really mattered – the antithesis of what I’d already been taught. And I searched for people from whom I could learn. Oh, I was on a mission. I regularly consulted the Chinese oracle, the
I Ching
, that had been providing guidance in symbolic, often cryptic, form to people for thousands of years, and I learned that it could be trusted. When it had told me, just before I left Australia, that ‘It would be of great benefit to cross the wide water in a large boat’, I paid attention.

You were desperately searching for guidance, weren’t you?

Yes, since I was a teenager, really. But in California, I finally found my way to a wonderful therapist, Lu, who provided the solid psychotherapy I really needed. And she eventually guided me into her field. She completely changed the way I fitted in the world, helped me make sense of my life. After I began working with her I came to have a far better understanding about the things that continued to upset and sadden me. I mourned things that had happened to me early in life and began to recognize how my psyche had buried trauma-inspired thoughts and feelings that subtly influenced my behaviour and choices in an unhealthy way. My initial healing took several years and, as you know, it’s ongoing; but at least I learned to be hopeful that one day I can be truly, deeply happy . . .

Pamela, what do you imagine happiness is actually like?

For most of my life I would have settled for the absence of pain. Instead, I settled into an academic life and found that I adored studying. At first it was terrifying to have to take exams again, but I soon got used to that. I admired most of my tutors, and found them encouraging. The California Graduate Institute was not the most highly accredited establishment in the USA, but swisher universities, like the University of California, Los Angeles, only offered research programmes in psychology. Anyway, at my age I wasn’t going to be snooty about where I got my degree; the clinical programme at CGI was excellent and nicely set up to accommodate ‘mature students’ or people who were also working and needed to progress through the course at their own pace. I love that about America; it’s easy to find learning programmes that work for you at any stage in your life. And my fellow students at CGI boasted a wonderfully wide range of ages, races, ethnicities and backgrounds.

Billy was hugely supportive. In fact, he was thrilled that I was doing something that brought, as he described it, ‘an atmosphere of studiousness into the household’. But, naturally, being me, I pushed myself terribly hard and put extreme pressure on myself to get As in every course (anything less would wound me). What is WRONG with me?

Pamela, in this instance, you already know the answer to that question . . .

Hah, yes. I do.

Articulate it, if you please . . .

I had unconsciously internalized my parents’ expectations and addressed them to myself.

Precisely. But the workings of the unconscious are mysterious so you didn’t figure it out at that time. But frankly, getting Bs – and being content with them – would have been fine and even more appropriate for a busy wife and mother.