Watch Me: A Memoir (12 page)

The fields were rich with Indian paintbrush, crocus, and edelweiss, and the sun cast long golden shadows before the sky turned pink in the evening, then a cool translucent blue as the stars came out. The bears came into town to hulk around the garbage dump just north of Hallam Lake, where Jack and Lou had purchased a beautiful Victorian mansion, forest green
with white trim, on the edge of town, “to hang my pictures and watch football on Sundays with the lads!” There was no thrill too fast nor risk too fearsome that didn’t get serious consideration. Many of our dear friends from the mountains had the impermanence and fleeting quality of the drifting snow—locals, artists, athletes, drug dealers, and movie stars, a heady combination of interesting and good-looking people. Music was always playing in town—by resident musicians like the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, and John Denver, who sometimes gave us rides back and forth to L.A. on his private plane.

*  *  *

Back in Los Angeles, on October 23, 1979, Jack and I went to a glamorous party that Sue Mengers threw for Princess Margaret, who, according to Suzy in her
Daily News
column,

wound up her visit to Los Angeles with a smashing, probably because it was informal, buffet dinner given in her honor by Sue Mengers, the superstar agent, and her husband, Jean-Claude Tramont. Everyone out there was anxious to entertain the princess, but because Sue knows the star-studded world, and because that world seems to flock to her door, she was chosen. The party not only brought out the best of Hollywood, especially the young, but the best in everyone who was there.

The security was extraordinary. Helicopters circled above Sue’s house, searchlights filled the garden surrounding it, and the police were everywhere. Guests, of course, were carefully checked.

Margaret never looked better. She wore a black-and-silver dress by Dior and a magnificent diamond necklace and earrings left to her by her grandmother, Queen Mary. She spoke to and mingled with all the celebs, who found her totally charming. She insisted on standing in the buffet line herself, and when she did sit down, she had Gov. Jerry Brown on her right and Michael Caine on her left. That’s some seat. Margaret arrived promptly at 8:30 and stayed until 12:30 when Prince Rupert Loewenstein, her friend and a reigning wit of the international set (he also manages The Rolling Stones), took her home.

Incidentally, Brown came to the party with Linda Ronstadt, who was wearing a white cotton dress up to her knees and dear little red boots. It would seem that there is still something going on between these two, whose hot romance I reported to a waiting world (first) what seems like quite a long time ago.

Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, whose hot romance I reported to a waiting world (first—then everyone jumped on it) several weeks ago, arrived together. Farrah was fetching in silk pajamas. Barbra Streisand, in black pants and a long black chemise, was with Jon Peters, naturally. Robin Williams (Mork) and his wife, Valerie, Gore Vidal, handsome Sean Connery and his wife Michelle, Ken Tynan and his wife Kathleen (they had given a small lunch for Margaret that day), Sybil and Jordan Christopher, Nick Nolte and his wife Sharon, Sylvia and Danny Kaye, David Geffen with Joni Mitchell, Mary and Swifty Lazar, Ali MacGraw in a short gold-and-black dress, and Barry Manilow with Linda Allen all chatted with the guest of honor.

Also eating lasagna and chicken and looking gorgeous . . . were such luminaries as Shakira Caine (Michael’s wife), Neil Diamond and his wife Marcia, Gene Hackman and his wife Faye, Peter Falk and his wife Shera, Gladyce and David Begelman, Peter Asher, Danny Melnick with Kelly Lange, NBC’s good-looking anchorwoman out there, Barry Diller and—get ready—the big sensation of the evening, Jack Nicholson with Anjelica Huston! My dear, everyone gasped. So unexpected. So whoever told you this one was over can go fly a kite.

Mengers had a staff of 25 to help with the party, one that will be talked about for a long time.

In January 1980 Helena started a Monday-night ritual at a roller-skating rink in Reseda, where a whole group of us glided mindlessly for hours under the colored lights reflected in a mirrored ball that hung from the ceiling. The music was mainly disco with some R&B thrown in. Helena named the club Skateaway but spelled it Skataway. She didn’t allow alcohol, so these evenings had an athletic freshness to them, and attracted people as disparate as the football star Jim Brown and Robin Williams and even Cher, who showed up wearing one of those fake rubber bottoms in case she fell. Marlon’s daughter Cheyenne appeared at Skataway one evening. At eleven, she was already tall and exquisite, with Tahitian features, blond hair, caramel skin, pale green eyes, and a high voice that tinkled with laughter. Ed Begley was there, and the Arquettes and Harry Dean. Broadway singer and dancer Charles Valentino became my dance partner. Valentino had performed some years before in New York in
The Wiz.
When we got out of our skates, we would keep on dancing. He’d pick me up and twirl me around as if I were a silk scarf. When we were at a party, I never sat down unless he was dancing with his other favorite girl, Joni Mitchell. The clothes designer Richard Tyler made up some custom satin jackets with the
names of the founding members embroidered on the pocket, and on the back the image of an eagle on roller skates. After shutdown, we’d move on to Carlos’n Charlie’s on the Strip, where Robin Williams would riff a blue streak and still be in a monologue when you returned from the dance floor.

Allegra had begun to help Helena with the memberships and the organization of Skataway. She often stayed with me up at Jack’s, and suddenly the butterfly began to emerge from the chrysalis. That winter I had stayed in Aspen longer than I had said I would, and Allegra was hurt and let down, because I had promised I would come back to L.A. and help with her end-of-term exams. Helena had taken over in my absence, and now they were good friends. Helena had given Allegra a purpose, and it was great to see her involved in physical activity for the first time. But one night at Carlos’n Charlie’s, I caught her kissing a boy and reprimanded her for “acting cheap.” I was one to talk! It’s an old story—you don’t want the people you love to make the same mistakes you’ve made. I need not have worried; within a few years she was accepted to Hertford College, Oxford University, and graduated three years later with a First in English language and literature. Dad always used to say that Allegra was a lot smarter than any of the biological Hustons.

I.
 jewel

CHAPTER 12

J
ack was starting work on
The Postman Always Rings Twice
up in Santa Barbara, and was being short-tempered with me—a pretty reliable sign that he was otherwise distracted. Jessica Lange was starring and she was at her most luscious. Jack described Jessica to me as the “It Blonde.” I asked him what that meant, and he said, “One comes along every decade or so—it’s a special thing.” The love scenes between them in the movie were torrid.

Bob Rafelson and Jim Harrison were both smitten with Jessica, and I guessed Jack was, too. Rafelson was directing. He and Jack offered me the part of Madge, a lion tamer into whose caravan Jack’s character is drawn to spend the evening.

I had done my homework on the part, researching the great touring circuses of the time, and the lion tamers, particularly Mabel Stark, who as early as 1910 did performances with unreliable cats like panthers and leopards and survived not only twelve maulings but five husbands. My mother’s friend Dorothy Jeakins, the costume designer on the film, had chosen a beautiful wardrobe for me, with jodhpurs and a wide leather belt and riding boots, and I had found some tiger-claw cuff links in an antique shop in Montecito. I’ve always liked to wear something of my own when playing a character—it’s like mixing sauces.

Because they needed photographs for the walls of my caravan in the movie, I had gone out to have some pictures taken at a wild-animal sanctuary in Calabasas, California, working with a young tiger. It was great to spend time with him off-leash; we took him swimming in a river and fed him many chicken parts until he started to look at me like one, and then we called it a day.

My first scene in the movie required that I be topless, which was something I had done before for photographs, but I was nervous. We did a rehearsal and then showed it to camera. It was a fractious love scene in which I relentlessly instructed Jack’s character on how to pleasure me. I could feel Jack’s irritation when I accidentally moved in the opposite way to what we’d rehearsed, and I felt my own hair-trigger temper about to snap in self-defense. But ultimately, the scene went well enough.

As we walked away from the set, Jack pointed to my trailer. “See what Curly put on for you? Your own trailer. That’s nice, isn’t it?” I felt he was condescending. I remember the resentment a small remark like that could conjure up, my teacup outrages at any suggestion of what was being done for me, and wasn’t I a “lucky girl.” And how hard it was for me to accept. I wanted desperately to be desired for my own worth, not to be the recipient of a consolation prize. It was a difficult balance.

I went back to Los Angeles and left Jack and his character and his cook, Kathleen, in Santa Barbara. She was a chilly girl with a blond Dutch-boy haircut who baked the best cookies I’ve ever eaten.

I was driving in my little Mercedes convertible down Coldwater Canyon, a winding road that leads from Mulholland
Drive to the valley, when directly in front of me, a silver BMW crossed the line from the opposite lane, hitting the rear bumper of the car in front of mine. As I watched in horrified slow motion, the car turned and came straight at me. Later, they estimated that the BMW was traveling at sixty miles an hour. I was not wearing a seat belt; this was before it was compulsory. There was the image of his headlights, and bracing myself for the impact. I hit the windshield hard.

Everything blacked out but my brain, and it was saying, “Are you blind? Why can you not see?” I felt for the gears and pushed the stick shift forward to park. I was wearing flip-flops and left them on the pedals when I ran out of the car, feeling my way around to the side of the road. Some people came down from a hill with blankets and water, and then the police showed up and called an ambulance. The boy in the BMW was also hurt; he had broken a kneecap.

Sitting on the curb, I discovered that what I had ascribed to blindness was in fact the sheet of blood falling into my eyes from a gash in my forehead. When I put my hands up to my face, I could feel that my nose was flattened. A cop came over. I asked him if my face was badly cut.

“Your nose is broken,” he said. “The ambulance is coming—they’ll take you to Riverside Hospital.”

“No, thank you,” I replied. “The plastic surgery is better at Cedars-Sinai.”

I got him to call Annie Marshall’s number and asked her to come get me. My face looked awful in the rearview mirror. When we arrived at the emergency room, they took me upstairs for X-rays, and Annie set about calling her doctor, who was on the board of directors at Cedars. Just as soon as they had completed a full session of imaging, a diminutive
woman appeared. She looked to be in her seventies, with brown hair, and was wearing a white coat. Her glasses hung lopsidedly from her neck by a chain. Annie greeted her with obvious affection. That was how I met the wonderful, compassionate, and renowned Dr. Elsie Giorgi.

Born in the Bronx on March 8, 1911, to Italian immigrants, Elsie was a doctor and friend both to celebrities in Hollywood and to underprivileged minorities in New York and the Watts section of L.A. The youngest of ten children, Elsie put herself through medical school, and after working at Bellevue Hospital and at clinics in East Harlem, she moved west in 1962.

Elsie came over to take a look at me and said sweetly in a heavy New York accent, “Don’t worry, dearie, we’ll fix you up.” She proceeded to order a whole new set of X-rays and booked me into the hospital. It was just a matter of allowing the swelling to reduce for a couple of days before I would have my nose rebuilt. Elsie got me the best plastic surgeon in the hospital, Dr. Adrien Aiache. Because my nose was broken in eight places, it took a long time to extract the bone splinters from my nasal cavity.

Jack was still working on
Postman
but came to the hospital on the night of my surgery and stayed through the whole operation. Elsie and he were both at my bedside when I woke up. Jack had brought champagne and soup from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He told me he loved me, then headed back up the coast to Santa Barbara. A feeling of extraordinary joy washed over me. I felt renewed. I had never felt luckier or stronger before this moment.

After I broke my nose, something changed in me—I made up my mind to take greater advantage of my life. The memory
of the headlights of the oncoming car lived in my mind, woke me up at night, reminded me that life is short. How things come and go. How people come and go. I felt powerful, but in order to prove myself, I needed to do my own thing, to have something that was mine alone. So I decided to go to work on that.

PART TWO

FAME

© Snap/REXUSA

CHAPTER 13

I
n November 1980, I took Phyllis and Lizzie Spender down to Puerto Vallarta with me to see Dad. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, with Slavic cheekbones, Lizzie was the daughter of the poet Stephen Spender. She and I had been best friends since we first met in London as schoolgirls in the early sixties.

A woman called Joan Blake, who described herself as Gladys’s secretary, met us at the airport and took us to Dad’s house in town, a solid three-storied edifice on Gringo Gulch. From there we were to head out toward Xalapa from a small harbor called Boca de Tomatlán, in a little motorboat called a panga. Dad’s compound was on the coast and reachable only by the sea. We were told by Joan that Gladys was at Dad’s, waiting with him for us to arrive.