Watch Me: A Memoir (13 page)

Dolphins danced rings in the ocean as the sun set blood orange along the coast, and after about thirty-five minutes, in from deep water, we pulled up on the little white beach of Las Caletas. Dad was watching our approach from the cliffs above. Maricela came out to say hello, then went back into hiding. The buildings were all
palapas
—little open-sided dwellings with palm roofs and concrete floors and some mosquito netting. Dad’s living quarters were separated from the rest by a bridge that went over a small creek, with bright pink bougainvillea.

Dad was living in a jungle enclave. There was no electricity. Everything worked off a generator. He eventually had a satellite TV, but he was essentially living in the wilderness. There were no roads. He had the forest at his back and the sea in front of him.

Looking down from the cliffs at the beautiful beach below, one would see the ocean alive with fish, manta rays flying out of the water, and there were even whales sometimes. It was an extraordinary place, full of natural beauty. Unpredictable and exotic. Snakes, lizards, scorpions, big bugs.

Next door to Dad’s along the coast, separated from his property by jungle, the Von Rohr property was also spectacular—a long, even stretch of virgin beach, with one extraordinary wooden structure in the midst of banana plants and birds of paradise. I would sometimes visit Von Rohr, his wife, Cathy, and their child, Quique, who ran in the jungle barefoot like a towheaded Mowgli.

One day at Las Caletas, a helicopter landed on the beach, blowing shoals of sardines out of the water. It was an awful sight until the pelicans came along and ate them all up. The visitor was Carlo Ponti, the venerable Italian producer. He was traveling with a companion, an entrepreneur, who was building his dream hotel on the coast of Mismaloya.

Dad loved our morning conferences, when we would give each other updates on the preceding night, including sleep or lack thereof, dreams, visitations by mosquitoes, sightings of scorpions, and plans for the morning—reading materials, exercise, snorkeling. We had to report to the commander. This brought me back directly to my childhood in Ireland, when my brother Tony and I would run upstairs to Dad’s bedroom for breakfast and he would ask us, “What
news?” even though we had seen him at dinner the night before.

In the natural calm of Las Caletas, the days began with dawn and ended with the last glimmer of sunset. Dad’s attitude had changed in Mexico; he was warmer, kinder, less judgmental, even if he asked me once, at twenty-eight, if I wasn’t “a little old for that, honey” when I braced myself and said, “Dad, I want to act again.”

Maricela was a constant presence in the background. Dad told me he thought she was like a little animal, a coati. She tended to his needs, and they seemed to have made a pact to be together. Dad, in his mid-seventies, was obviously feeling his age. He told me that he had leased Las Caletas for only ten years.

“Then, if I’m still alive, I can rent it again from the indigenous people, or it can just fall back into the jungle.” Dad told me about his last conversation with his dear friend Willy Wyler. Willy had opened his eyes for the first time in a long time and said, “Hold my hand, Johnny, I’m dying.”

Dad said, “Wait six weeks. If you feel the same, I’ll help you.”

“But that’s criminal, John.”

“Shit, Willy, we’ll get on a motorbike!”

*  *  *

Lee Grant was directing a film based on the Strindberg play
Playing with Fire
in February 1981. It had a lovely cast, including Carol Kane and Maximilian Schell; I was excited and flattered when Lee offered me the part of Adele, the maid. I had very little formal training at this point, and apart from
Hamlet
, no stage experience at all. I could see this grating away at Lee in rehearsal. I could also see that my choices of flimsy summer
dresses and strappy sandals for rehearsal had started to irritate her. Maybe Lee thought I was too flirtatious. The objective was to mount the play in an empty Spanish house that Lee had rented, and shoot it all the way through as a movie. I was going slow and having some issues with Adele, a complicated character who spends a lot of time in tears, running between the two male characters. I felt that Adele was quite manipulative, and I was still working out her intentions. One morning Lee grabbed my script and proceeded to enact the part of Adele, reading from the text in a voice thick with tears. I was astonished. Unfortunately, later that afternoon Lee discovered that she had lost the financing for the movie.

Driving back to town from Lee’s home in Malibu with Carol Kane, I was feeling very sorry for myself, still stinging from the humiliation. “How could Lee have done that?” I asked.

Carol looked at me. “Have you ever gone to class?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve just been doing it by instinct—I have no technique.”

“Why don’t you try it? You might like it, and at least you’ll be able to say you’ve done it, if anyone asks.” I went home and digested this advice, reminding myself of my new determination to get moving.

So when Jack’s friend Harry Gittes suggested that I might like going along with him to audit an acting class, I agreed. The teacher, someone Jack had studied with in previous years, had a big reputation. It was a lovely gesture on Harry’s part; he recognized how paralyzed I was and wanted to help me out.

The class was in a room somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. The teacher had a large white standard poodle that
sniffed up the girls’ dresses as they did their relaxation exercises. There was some neck rolling, loud yawns and sighs, and stretching on the floor. A few improvisations followed, culminating in a passionate breakdown on the part of a well-known television actress I’d admired for years in a Western series. She was on her knees, hands outstretched, sobbing and pleading with the teacher to give her a dime.

On the way home in the car, I ranted to Harry about what a wanker I thought the teacher was, how I could never attend such a class, how embarrassing it had been. Harry finally got a word in edgewise and said, “I’m sorry if you didn’t like it. I just thought it might give you some ideas.”

*  *  *

One evening Toby Rafelson gave a dinner at her house for Tony Richardson, who had moved to Los Angeles. Tony was seated on a low divan and called to me across the room. “Come here,” he said, “you poor, dear, little thing!”

Obligingly, I walked over to him. “What do you mean?” I said, smiling defensively.

“Poor little you,” Tony continued. “So much talent and so little to show for it. You’re never going to do anything with your life.” He had a singsong voice, like one of his own parrots, and he spoke with a slight lisp, but there was no mistaking the edge.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I answered. Inside I was thinking, “Watch me.”

Even though I must confess to loathing criticism, it has often been my catalyst for moving ahead. And it is the sheer effrontery of someone telling me what I cannot do, or never will do, that brings out my most primal defiance.

It was not that I was merely sitting around, waiting for
things to happen to me; it was that I hadn’t found my way in. I needed a background for my craft.

I spoke with my new best friend, Greta Ronningen, about a teacher she’d worked with—Peggy Feury, of the Loft Studio. Greta felt that we would be a good match. Within a few days, I met Peggy and joined her class. It is not enough to say that Peggy was a great teacher. To me, she was a revelation. I was, at thirty, the oldest person in her novice class. For the next couple of years, five days a week, I drove from my house to her studio on La Brea, sometimes with bags of props in the back seat, always looking forward to the work. The Loft Studio became my second home.

The first exercise Peggy gave me was to acquire an object from another actor—almost the same situation I’d witnessed in the class I’d audited with Harry Gittes. But this time it was me begging for the dime. I worked hard throughout the scene. After it was over, Peggy said, “Anjelica, you’re a tall and imposing girl, a big presence. When you ask for something, you don’t need to extend your hand. You have our attention.” It was a great piece of advice. It was the awakening in me to the illusion of confidence. I had not realized it until that moment, but I was pleading for things that I could have simply asked for.

Peggy was slight, fair, with pale wavy hair and China-blue eyes that would roll back dreamily whenever she made a momentary departure from the scene—she had narcolepsy. She could fall asleep sitting on a stool. Peggy had a short torso and long slender legs, and she always wore skirts and pale stockings. Peggy derived great pleasure from teaching, although she could be openly bored or irritated by a student’s actions or performance. She had a vast knowledge of playwrights and
gave us assignments that challenged us, characters that made us stretch, parts that led us into new, unexpected directions. Peggy had coached or taught class to people like Lily Tomlin, Sean and Chris Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Tilly, Melissa Gilbert, and Eric Stoltz, and it was no coincidence that they were among the best actors of their generation.

Horton Foote, Jr., was working at the Loft Studio at the same time I was, and we had access sometimes to his father’s new work. Bill Traylor, Peggy’s husband, gave improv classes. He and I butted heads quite often. But Peggy rebuilt my confidence the most by making me her friend, and I adored her.

In my diary, I wrote that Peggy and I had an unspoken conversation; words, when they came, were often superfluous. She had an extraordinary gift for making one feel understood. I would look over at Peggy in class sometimes and almost see a halo; I thought that she was halfway to heaven.

Peggy died several years later in a car crash. It is possible she fell asleep at the wheel. Her loss was deeply mourned by her students. Her memorial took place at the Mark Taper Forum, and the theater was filled to capacity. Her beautiful daughters, Susan and Stephanie, spoke. It was evident that Peggy’s light shone through them. The aria from
Madame Butterfly
played. Lily Tomlin made us laugh through our tears. I held hands with Joan Didion.

*  *  *

Nona and Martin came to Aspen in March 1981. Her apparel on the slopes was an instant inspiration, and soon all the women in town were wearing jackets and parkas with inflated shoulder pads. Not that I ever needed them—my shoulders are so broad, I looked like a linebacker. We were all done up in spandex jeans in lurid shades of shocking purple, pink, and
puce; Marsia Holzer’s dangling metallic fish purses; the custom cowboy boots from Smith’s; the Rocky Raccoon hat. My uniform was Levi’s, pearls, and a mink coat.

Annie Marshall began working at Smith’s on Galena Street. They were selling knitted angora sweaters with patterns of clouds and hearts and horseshoes, long skirts, and cowboy gear. I met the jewelry designer Darlene de Sedle Vare, who lived in town with her twin children, Tai and Jessie. Jill St. John, the gorgeous redheaded actress and friend of Cici’s, lived up at Snowmass. Jane and Jimmy Buffett had bought a house down-valley in Woody Creek. The Eagles, Leonard and Jane Holzer, Peter Beard, and Michael and Diandra Douglas were often seen in town.

I used to walk around in big black furry boots to the knee with my new puppies, Ray and Dolly, trotting at my feet. According to the whim of the day, if we were not skiing, we girls would start up either at the Aspen Club for a serious workout on the Nautilus machines or belly up to the bar at the Mother Lode with a pitcher of margaritas in front of us. Often we would congregate at the Buffetts’ in the evening, cracking open stone crab shipped in from Miami. Jimmy cooked gumbo. Great music, cool guys, beautiful girls hanging loose at Margaritaville in the Rockies.

Jack, Bob Rafelson, Coulter Adams, and I once shared a harrowing if ultimately miraculous escape from injury when a roofless Land Rover that Bob was driving did a rollover in the Maroon Bells and tossed us out on the dirt. The combination of thin air, the elixir of the mountains, the age, the times, the substances, the rate of consumption—for the sheer elation of grabbing a cat by all four legs and dancing with it till dawn if necessary, Aspen reigned queen!

Everyone was getting high in my circle. Coke and grass were ubiquitous. Something about that particular place, at that particular time, had us engaged in improving and expanding the life experience through the use of drugs, a choice that took a lot of people up and many down.

It was hard to tell who was having more fun, the cheerful outlaws in our midst or the DEA agents, who seemed to be in legendary half-pursuit. There were always tales of narrow escapes and foiled arrests in the
Aspen Times.
On one occasion, a private plane carrying a number of inebriated FBI agents crashed on Highland Mountain; no one was hurt, but a vast number of beer cans were recovered at the scene. These kinds of stories were commonplace.

We thought we were pretty terrific until a guy came into town like the Lone Ranger and burned all the girls so bad, they were crying and squealing one night at a party at Annie’s. We called him “Dracula.” He had torn a swath through the hearts of several in our ranks and was visibly moving on to another romantic quest that same evening. By the end of the week, there was not a female left standing, including me, after a horse ride up Hunter Creek, oysters at Abetone’s, and a nightcap at his condo.

The following day he left town as quietly as a stealth bomber. The girls were like stunned chickens, with their eyes blinking and their heads bobbing in the aftermath. Then we heard that he was decimating the female population of Los Angeles. We cursed him, made effigies, spat on them, stuffed them with pins, and wished him old before his time.

In the eighties, practically every face on the mountain was famous. Gary Hart was gearing up for his presidential run. Jack and I were invited to a fund-raiser at a house down-valley.
When we arrived, Senator Hart was chopping away at some fallen wood with a hatchet for a photo op in the back yard. Don Henley was there, alongside a few other celebrities. A very pretty young girl, blond and about twelve years old, came over to sit beside me. She introduced herself as Gwyneth Paltrow and pointed out her mother and father. Looking nervously across the room at Jack, she said, “That man scares me.”