Watch Me: A Memoir (17 page)

From the shy, reclusive boy with whom I had rehearsed, this new entity, given a song with which to express himself, was fiercely urgent and commanding. It was as if the voice, which had not been able to defend itself above a whisper in rehearsal, now commanded each phrase, every note, and I felt my heart beating hard and high in my chest as I watched the power of his astonishing transformation.

*  *  *

One morning in February 1986, asleep in my house in the canyons, I was awakened and told by Toni Howard that I had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for
Prizzi’s Honor.
I remember being very excited and nervous over the next few weeks, but the time leading up to the Academy Awards was not as fraught, it seems to me, as in the present day, when there are so many awards shows presaging the main event. I had no publicist, no manager, no stylist. Through Mum’s friend the designer Dorothy Jeakins, I had met Tzetzi Ganev,
who worked at Western Costume and was known for cutting the best pattern in Hollywood.

“Would you make me a dress for the Oscars?” I asked Tzetzi.

“Sure,” she said in her round Hungarian accent. “But you have to bring me the fabric.”

This was a mystifying challenge, and when I walked into International Silks and Woolens, a riot of color met my eye, but one color sang louder than the rest. I went back to Tzetzi with a bolt of kelly-green silk jersey under my arm. She threw it over my shoulder as I stood in front of a mirror at Western Costume, and the fabric floated to the ground on the bias like a stroke of luck. That was the birth of my Oscar dress.

Laila was going to the Oscars as Tommy Baratta’s date. She and Greta helped me get ready at my house. In addition to the green dress, I wore the fabulous jewels that Jack had given me for my birthday—the diamond-and-ruby clips and a matching ring and earrings, from the estate of Tamara de Lempicka, and a white fox stole I rented from Somper Furs.

Dad was very sick; the oxygen tank followed him everywhere. At the Oscars, he sat in the audience with Maricela across the aisle from where I was sitting with Jack. We had eight nominations, including one for John Randolph for Best Supporting Actor, one for Jack, one for Dad, and one for me. We were also nominated for Best Picture. Directly in front of me, the bald head of John Foreman shone under the arc lights.

The Best Supporting Actress category came up very early in the program. My name was called out by Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss. From far, far away, the announcement trickled down from the stage and into my consciousness. Everything went into slow motion. After I waded up
there through the limelight, I accepted the Oscar in memory of Bruce Weintraub, who had become sick during the making of the film, and in honor of my teacher Peggy Feury. But in my delirium, I forgot to thank Jack and John Foreman. I managed to thank Dad, then spontaneously ran off the front of the stage back into the audience. I didn’t go backstage with the minders to the press room but dashed back up the aisle toward my seat like a homing pigeon. I turned to see my father in the middle of the center row, tears coursing down his cheeks, and when I looked to the left, there was Jack, looking emotional. John Foreman was crying, too. I was electrified. I couldn’t believe it. They were all awash in tears, and I was dry as a bone. Someone came and got me from my seat beside Jack and brought me backstage to the press room, where a hundred cameras flashed and the reporters yelled and gradually I returned to consciousness. But out of eight nominations for
Prizzi’s Honor
—including Best Picture, Director, and Actor—mine was the only win.

As we pulled away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the limousine, my cheeks were twitching from smiling so long in front of the cameras. I held the Oscar on my lap as we drove over to the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip, where Dad was staying. He had left right after the awards. Jack, John, Laila, Tommy, and I had gone briefly to the Governors Ball.

The atmosphere was charged from my coup, but we were all a little rueful that Dad and Jack had not won as well. If that had happened, it would have echoed the dual win Dad shared with his own father for
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, when he had won for Best Director and Walter for Best Supporting Actor.

When we arrived at his hotel room, Dad was sitting in
his wheelchair, wearing his customary white Sulka pajamas, breathing oxygen through a plastic tube attached to a scratched-up green canister in a corner. It looked like a bomb, and the oxygen made a sound like gas escaping a balloon, until we realized that Tommy had been accidentally standing on the conduit.

“I’d hoped they might have let us share that one,” Dad said to me, “but I am so proud of you.”

We stayed only a short while. Below the third-story window overlooking Sunset Boulevard, colored lights and flashbulbs filtered through the drapes and reflected on the walls. A cry arose from the crowd outside. Swifty Lazar’s party was heating up across the street at Spago, and a line of pedestrians and photographers were calling out to the movie stars as they walked into the restaurant.

Dad glanced out the window. “I wonder if this town realizes how much it will miss Swifty when he’s gone,” he said quietly.

*  *  *

Swifty Lazar’s parties were almost as important as the Oscars themselves. No favors, no compromises, no additional guests, no cancellations. He ruled with an iron fist. Swifty was beloved to us all. He was a gnomish figure, with his egg-bald head and a large pair of tortoiseshell spectacles perched on his refined little owl’s beak; he stood no more than five feet two, but he was a dynamo and a very powerful figure in Hollywood. You wouldn’t want to laugh at him or criticize his bearing or his distinctly British choice of tailoring or how he stressed the “A”s pronouncing the word “caviar.” Or his challenging expectations of his dinner guests. Having sold the rights to many autobiographies of famous people
at record prices (both Dad and Henry Kissinger were clients of the moment), he himself was a celebrity. He was a stickler for decorum and fetishistic about order and cleanliness; stories abounded about how Swifty always brought his own sheets and pillows to hotels and laid down a track of towels on the floor from bedroom to bathroom so his feet would never touch the carpet.

Swifty’s wife, Mary, was pretty and sweetly obedient. Up at their house on Carla Ridge, the parties were sleek and smart. Billy and Audrey Wilder were always in attendance; Billy was gruff and brilliantly fast-witted, and she was a dark, glittering presence in a Clara Bow haircut, dripping black jet and diamonds. By contrast, Willy Wyler and his wife, Talli, were understated. Often the guest of honor would be a writer or a politician. Swifty was from my father’s generation—there was a grandeur about him, scornful if things were not up to par. He was one of the grown-ups.

Back then most of the action took place at people’s homes. Roddy McDowall was another dedicated host; he brought together stars as brilliant and diverse as Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen O’Hara, Vincent Price, and Gene Autry and matched them with up-and-comers like Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp. Roddy’s Tudor house was right down the hill from Mulholland, in the Valley. It always felt like Christmas at his place—lots of dark wood and low-beamed ceilings and an extraordinary collection of items, awards, objects, photographs, and memorabilia, and a beautiful garden that he tended himself. But above all, Roddy collected famous and talented friends.

One evening at Sammy and Altovise Davis’s estate, four armed bodyguards ran back and forth on the tennis court under
floodlights while Sammy stood before a tank of flesh-eating piranhas behind the bar, displaying his collection of handguns to a small group of dinner guests, including Jack and me.

There were cocktail parties at Fran and Ray Stark’s house, which had previously belonged to the Bogarts. Fran was the daughter of Fanny Brice; her best friends were Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale. Her daughter Wendy’s friends were Helmut Newton and David Hockney, local artists, social New Yorkers, lots of visiting Europeans, and the usual movie people.

Almost everybody had a screening room and you saw all the new movies before they came out. David Begelman’s room had a cash register on the bar, and Bob Evans’s was red tartan on a background of mahogany. Dinners at Evans’s house were always great. His chef invariably served the same meal: consommé madrilène with sour cream and caviar, duck à l’orange, and crème brûlée for dessert.

I remember an evening when Bob and his houseguest Alain Delon, looking oddly alike with their black hair and bronzed skin, wore matching cashmere sweaters and socks in contrasting colors, each with a silk foulard at the throat. Every work of art in Bob’s house was lit by a small spotlight, which made the objects look museum-quality precious. French doors opened to an oval swimming pool, a fountain, and a rose garden; a well-behaved fire warmed the living room. I thought Bob was like a latter-day Jay Gatsby—cynical and romantic and eccentric at the same time. He had a vast number of beautiful girlfriends and was prone to marriage, although he always spoke of Ali MacGraw as the love of his life.

*  *  *

A few days after I received the Academy Award, I did a screen test for the Australian director George Miller for his new
movie,
The Witches of Eastwick
, based on the novel by John Updike. I had already met with him a couple of times for the part of one of the three witches, and I felt the meetings had gone well. The part of Alexandra Medford seemed like a good fit. Bill Murray was going to play Daryl Van Horne, essentially the devil, but then had suddenly dropped out. Upon hearing this news, Jack, who had no reservations about going after something he wanted, had asked that I put in the word to George Miller that he was available.

I called the director. “Mr. Miller,” I said, “you are in luck. Jack Nicholson wants the part. He’s perfect for it.” Within hours, Jack was signed. Later that week Amy Madigan and I were screen-tested with the already-cast Michelle Pfeiffer. When Amy and I drove up to the Warner Bros. lot in our cars, Michelle, looking like the breath of spring, was already installed in a camper. She had been signed for the role of Sukie Ridgemont but had come to read with us. The screen test was set up on a garishly lit set with a lot of green sidelighting, which I was all too aware did not enhance my features. The dialogue was tough to deliver, and in all the Oscar excitement, I hadn’t the time nor the concentration to learn the lines as well as I should have. Needless to say, I was terrible.

As we walked away from the set after saying goodbye to Michelle, Amy said, “Well, I don’t think we’re in any danger of getting cast!” It was humiliating. Ultimately, I think it was probably best that they didn’t cast me. I had temporarily lost my confidence. On one hand, I was mad at Jack for not calling George Miller and standing up for me, and on the other I’d probably have resented him if he’d called in the favor. Cher was great in the role.

CHAPTER 17

I
hadn’t really been aware of Jack’s reputation at first. It kind of grew over time, I think, that idea of Jack: He’s so baaad! Even though Warren Beatty was one of his best friends, I wasn’t recognizing Jack as a world-class philanderer at the time. For as prolific as he seems to have been, and as I have heard reported, he was actually quite discreet. Occasionally, I’d find a piece of female apparel—once a jacket of mine turned up on a girl in the street—or I’d find some hand cream, or a trinket might get left behind in the soap dish. Sometimes I’d take to wearing the jewelry to see if anybody would come up and claim it, but that never happened. It could have been left there by Helena or Annie or any number of the women who came through his life. So there was no way of pinning him on something like that, or ever truly wanting to. I left him more than a few times, and I have such vivid memories of getting into my car and driving to Kenny Solms’s house with my bags all packed, intending never to go back to Mulholland Drive. Kenny would take pictures of me on his Polaroid camera, sitting in the trunk of my little Mercedes, crying over my suitcases like spilled milk.

But Jack and I had a very good rapport. He could really turn up the corners of a day. I loved him. I wanted to be with him and have his children. I thought that having a child might create an intimacy between us, and eventually I began taking
hormones for in vitro therapy, although I was unsure that having a baby would dispel the issues of Jack’s chronic unfaithfulness or my own past indiscretions.

When it became evident to me that Jack was not a faithful man, I didn’t know what I could do about that. There’s only so much that you
can
do. Then at a certain point, other people start to look good to you, too. This dilemma is something I would very much have wanted to talk to my mother about, but I never had the chance. I don’t know whether her affairs were designed to spite my father or to comfort herself. She had neither explained my father’s dalliances to me nor openly displayed her pain. She had held so much within, and I was following her construct.

The subject of marriage arose at various points in my relationship with Jack, but neither of us ever seemed to feel the urge at the same time. Jack’s business manager and his lawyer encouraged us to get married over the years, possibly because they saw it as a way to save Jack a lot of money in taxes. I found this idea strictly unromantic. Also, I was a child of the sixties and, to a degree, regarded marriage as a form of bondage. Sometimes I liked the idea, but more often I feared it. To correct the confusion and doubt, to address the lack of intimacy, or simply to surrender was a challenge neither of us volunteered to undertake.

One afternoon I went out with some girlfriends to El Cholo down on Western Avenue, and several margaritas later, they persuaded me that this was the moment—that we should go back to the house after lunch, and I should tell Jack that I was going to marry him. Everything went according to plan until Jack came downstairs and Phyllis said, “Go on, Tootie, tell him.”

So I told him what we had discussed, and he said, “Are you serious about this?”