Watch Me: A Memoir (18 page)

I burst into tears, turned on my heel, and left the house, sobbing. It was humiliating for Jack and me. I guess we needed to break up, but we couldn’t let go.

The next morning I was crying in my kitchen. The relationship was strained to the breaking point; I was convinced that he was seeing someone else. The phone rang. It was Dad. He was in Malibu, holed up at Burgess Meredith’s. I explained my state of mind.

“Come down here and see me, honey,” he said. “Just get down here now!”

I took a shower and answered the phone, which was ringing off the hook. It was Carol Kane; she talked me off the wall for about an hour, and then Dad called again. “Where are you?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Finally, I got myself down to Malibu, to his bedroom overlooking the sea, where I found him propped up among the pillows in a state of irritation.

“What is it, dear?” asked Dad with a measure of impatience.

I began to cry. “It’s Jack,” I said. “He’s unfaithful. It really hurts me. I can’t live with it.”

Dad threw me a look of exasperation, as if dealing with a difficult four-year-old who won’t let go of an idea. “Stop crying!” he said with an incredulous shake of the head. “This is nonsense. Meaningless, honey. Men do this—it means nothing. Why do you care?”

Suddenly enraged, I turned on him. “Dad,” I said, “how meaningless does it feel to be despised? Because that is what every woman feels in her heart when she’s betrayed.”

*  *  *

On April 12, 1986, Dad was again at Cedars in the respiratory ICU, and I was having lab tests done at St. John’s. Two days later, I had a hysteroscopy. Dr. Ross Donald was the surgeon. At this time, I began to visit a group in the San Fernando Valley who belonged to the Church of Healing Light, for the laying on of hands by some elderly white witches. I had finally proved myself professionally, and now I was hoping very much to become pregnant in the near future.

Ten days later, Dad was at the Jules Stein clinic at UCLA having a cataract operation on both eyes. When I went upstairs to see him, he was in a darkened room and had big Ray Charles shades covering half his face. My brother Tony greeted me, said goodbye to Dad, and left us alone. Tony was by now separated from Margot and the children and living in Los Angeles.

Dad asked me if I saw a script on the bedside table. I said that I did and picked it up. It was titled
The Dead
, based on the story by James Joyce. In smaller letters, it read “Screenplay by Tony Huston.” I was surprised. I had heard nothing of this project and was unaware that Tony had been collaborating with Dad. I will confess, now that I am out of Dad’s immediate earshot, that I hadn’t even read what is considered as arguably the best short story ever written.

Dad said, “Read it to me, honey.” And for the next ninety minutes, I did just that. I was amazed at the beauty and simplicity of the script.
The Dead
was the observation of an evening of music, food, and dance, an actual epiphany set at a dinner party in Dublin on the eve of the Epiphany, 1904. The Morkan sisters, Julia and Kate, host this annual dinner for lovers of the arts, young and old. Over the course of the evening, we learn more about the guests—Gabriel Conroy and his wife, Gretta, are regulars, and Gabriel worries about the
speech he has prepared for the occasion. Poems are recited, songs are sung. Gabriel and Gretta leave after he watches her listening to a tenor sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” a song that seems to affect her deeply.

They make their way to their hotel in a carriage; snow is falling. Once they are in their room, Gretta confesses a love from the past that she has kept secret. Gabriel realizes that although they have been married for many years, he has never really known his wife, and contemplates the mysteries of life and death.

“What do you think?” asked Dad. “Shall we do it?”

“Of course,” I said.

*  *  *

I was on my way to Washington two weeks later to work again for Francis Coppola.

Arlington Cemetery was the main protagonist in Francis’s
Gardens of Stone
, based on a novel by Nicholas Proffitt with a screenplay by Ronald Bass, about the devastating sacrifices of war made on the home front during the Vietnam conflict. The action focused on the elite ranks of the Honor Guard, the company charged with the task of burying dead soldiers returning from the fields of battle. I was playing Samantha Davis, a conscientious objector who finds herself falling in love with a sergeant in the Honor Guard at Arlington Cemetery.

Overall, the novel took a sympathetic view of the armed forces.
Gardens of Stone
was all about losing a child, a son, a soldier, a favorite boy. It was something of a surprise to me that Francis had chosen to direct the movie, given that
Apocalypse Now
, a film he had made seven years prior, seemed almost its antithesis. Possibly it was his way of weighing in for the other side, a documentary choice rather than a political one.

I was very excited to come to Washington, D.C., for our first read-through at the Kennedy Center. I have a pleasant memory of working with Jimmy Caan in those early days, in the glamorous, high-ceilinged, white-walled rehearsal hall with honey-colored wooden floors, and Francis’s dark-eyed, raven-haired son, Gio, recording the scenes on video. Those moments were the best for me, more real and direct than anything later committed to film.

A week or so before shooting, we had a big table read. It was a strong supporting cast—James Earl Jones, Lonette McKee, Laurence Fishburne, and Mary Stuart Masterson. Jimmy Caan was starring as the conflicted sergeant Clell Hazard, who raises a young soldier in the ranks of the Honor Guard only to lose him later in battle. Jimmy was among Francis’s alumni from the
Godfather
movies, and I recognized Larry Fishburne and Sam Bottoms from
Apocalypse Now.

I was immediately drawn to Sam; he was blond and handsome and quiet and shy and had a sweet, sly sense of humor. In those first few weeks of May and June, in the golden light of early summer, Washington, D.C., was spectacular and romantic. A group of us often went to see the memorials in the evenings. The Lincoln and Washington monuments were quite astounding, but we were most emotionally drawn to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial—a black granite wall etched with the names of the dead. We were far from alone. Hundreds of people clustered there, searching for the names of their loved ones, leaving flowers, lighting candles, shedding tears of loss. I felt that we were in the very heart of the nobility and sorrow of human sacrifice.

Ryan’s son, Griffin O’Neal, had joined the cast. I hadn’t seen him in close to ten years, and was glad that Francis was
giving him an opportunity to be part of the team. One night, as a bunch of us were crossing a high bridge over the Potomac River, Griffin suddenly jumped up onto the balustrade and started to walk along it; the drop looked to be almost a hundred feet. I pleaded with him to get down, which eventually he did, after scaring me silly. It reminded me of Ryan’s friend Joe Amsler, and of the time I thought Joe had died when he fell off the boulder and down the ravine in Malibu.

A few weeks later, I got a call from Laila in New York. She was working at Broadway Video as one of Lorne Michaels’s associate producers. “Is there any chance you can come here this weekend to do
Saturday Night Live
?” she asked. “We’d like you to cohost with Billy Martin.” Billy was the manager of the New York Yankees.

Production gave me the okay, and I flew to New York for two days of manic intensity in rehearsal with the
SNL
cast. On Sunday morning a call came from Sam Bottoms: “Gio Coppola died in a boating accident yesterday.”

That evening I returned to Washington. For the next few days, we walked around like zombies, until Gio was buried in a hero’s funeral at Arlington. Griffin had been driving the boat. Francis sat in front of the monitors like a ghost for the following days, until he was admitted to a hospital for rest. Gio’s mother, Ellie, was quiet and contained. Gio’s little sister, Sofia, and his fiancée, Jacqui de la Fontaine, seemed as though they were literally holding each other up. The grief surrounding Gio’s death was part of the collective grief of Arlington Cemetery, with all of its pomp and circumstance, pain and loss.

Francis valiantly stayed on to finish the film, but one felt suddenly bogus, like a pretender in the face of what had
happened. Griffin was replaced in the film and later charged with accidental manslaughter but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of negligent operation of a boat. He received a fine, was sentenced to probation, and eventually served a short jail sentence for failing to perform his four hundred hours of community service.

But the ending to this sad story was nothing short of miraculous. Jacqui revealed that she was pregnant, and a little more than seven months later, baby Gia was born.

CHAPTER 18

D
ad called and asked if I would go with him to look at the stuff he still had in storage from Ireland. His old friend and sidekick Billy Pearson would be meeting us at the facility and was interested in taking some of the pieces. Billy was now living in Holland with his latest wife.

The cases were opened. The narwhal tusks that had occupied the hall in the Big House at St. Clerans were exposed. Billy said, “I really want those, John.”

Dad replied, “Take them, kid. I no longer have a use for them.”

Later that night, Dad was looking through some of the items he had taken out of storage. He came upon a small brown leather box with the initials
J.H.
inscribed in gold. Inside was his ID from the War Department adjutant general’s office in Washington, with the fingerprint of his right hand—first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, issued 4/29/42. Also in the box were his medals from the Asiatic Pacific, European, African, and Eastern campaigns, a small enamel Maltese cross, and the Medal of Freedom, mounted on a silver bar. He made as if to throw it all in a wastepaper basket. When I stopped him, he asked why on earth I would want to keep it. The war was over. So was the dream of St. Clerans. That chapter was closed. Dad used to say, “Remember, you can always put your
hands in your pockets and walk away.” But I think it broke his heart when he left Ireland.

Dad told me the sad story of the death of Derek Trench, who had introduced him to County Galway and who, in the years after we left St. Clerans, didn’t have a horse left to hunt. He had sold all of them. At the opening meet of the fox-hunting season in 1978, Derek was there, his van stocked with oysters and champagne, and he followed the hunt in the van all day. That evening, Derek said to his wife, Pat, that he was taking his Labrador and going out to shoot a pheasant. Pat heard one report from the gun. Shortly afterward, the Labrador returned to the house without Derek.

*  *  *

That summer, Dad was too frail to travel to Ireland, so his producer, Wieland Schulz-Keil, brought the mountain to Mohammed. A top casting director, Nuala Moiselle, recorded the best working actors in Dublin on tape, and Dad made his casting decisions for
The Dead
in Beverly Hills. One day a movie camera and some lighting equipment was brought into his living room at a rented house on Laurel Canyon, and Donal McCann and I did a screen test together, in the roles of Gretta and Gabriel. Donal, who had just flown in from Dublin, was a remarkable actor, with brooding dark eyes and a troubled soul. Initially, I found him dour, but I grew to like him very much.

It was also a clever stroke for Schulz-Keil to have secured a warehouse in Valencia, California, a suburb of Los Angeles best known for the dubious distinction of being home to the Magic Mountain theme park. Apart from the lack of soundproofing, the warehouse proved to be an ideal setup, a totally contained environment in which Dad would be afforded the
ease to make the film. Because of an insurance clause, Dad also had to agree that should anything befall him health-wise, there would be an alternative director standing in the wings ready to take over. Dad and the producers had agreed on Karel Reisz, who became a gentle presence on the set day to day as we were shooting. It was a kind and thoughtful personal gesture, as well as a professional one; it cannot have been an easy position for him.

The cast members, many of whom came straight off the stage from the Abbey Theatre, were assembled at a motel a few miles short of Valencia on the freeway. There was a running game of cards on set at all times, and after work most of them were taking Western two-step classes in the motel lounge. Peter O’Toole’s daughter, Kate, was playing the role of Miss Furlong, and having her with us made it feel all the more like extended family.

Stephen Grimes, Dad’s production designer since
Moby Dick
, was working with his set decorator, Josie MacAvin, downstairs in the basement prop room. His beautiful watercolors and sketches lined the walls. On the ground floor, carpenters had partitioned off a section and erected plywood cubicles for the actors. I put up an Ed Ruscha poster in mine—
BRAVE MEN RUN IN MY FAMILY
in stark print, over a tall-masted ship forging through a stormy sea.

Dad’s first assistant was Tommy Shaw, who had terrified me long ago on the set of
Freud
, always bellowing for quiet before the cameras rolled. His daughter, Molly, a cherubic twenty-year-old, was filling in as my driver during her summer holiday. After
The Dead
, Molly came to work for me as my first personal assistant. Our beloved Dorothy Jeakins was designing the costumes; one of Dorothy’s favorite colors was
something she termed “goose-turd green,” and she used this shade for my one and only dress in the movie.

Roberto Silvi, Dad’s editor, was in a cutting room on the second floor. Dad and he were always in contact. One morning Donal and I did a scene in the back of a carriage, filmed inside the dark warehouse; we were supposed to be riding around Dublin at night. Dad placed the camera strategically through the window of the cab, and we acted out the scene in a two-shot. After it was completed, Tommy asked Dad, “John, do you want to move in for close-ups?”