Watch Me: A Memoir (21 page)

Nic and I had a good rapport, and it is my honor to be the recipient of his steady-cam award, a silver charm that he makes for his favorites. I won’t forget how he helped me with a difficult monologue when I was so uncomfortable and tired of being encased in rubber under hot lights for hours that the lines had ceased to make sense to me and all I wanted to do was cry. But he coached me through it. Later that night we all went to dinner at Marit Allen’s house; Theresa Russell, whom Nic was living with, was also there. She was very patient with both Nic and me as all evening he just beamed in my direction, exclaiming over and over, “By God, we did it! We broke the spine of the bastard!”

The following night, when I left the apartment to go to a party in Notting Hill Gate, I accidentally left open the ground-floor window. When I returned at 3
A.M.
the place was ransacked. My father’s little gold-and-alligator Tiffany travel clock, the gray baroque pearl Jack had given to me from Darlene de Sedle’s collection—I still search for those pieces in every antique jewelry store I pass when I am in London.

*  *  *

Before I reported for work on
The Witches
, I’d already signed for my next role. Suzanne de Passe had offered me the part of Clara, a frontierswoman, in the TV miniseries
Lonesome Dove.
I considered myself incredibly lucky to work on such a great endeavor, because I had loved the novel and was impressed with how the scale of the American West was depicted by Larry McMurtry, as something vast but also as a human microcosm. It reminded me of the qualities that I associated with the movies of the great John Ford—wild, beautiful landscapes, horses, cowboys, and women whose emotions run strong. The movie tells the story of an ex–Texas Ranger, Augustus McCrae, played by Robert Duvall, who joins up with his old friend and partner, Woodrow Call, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to embark on a cattle drive from a dusty town in Texas across the country to Montana. Along the way, they encounter fearsome weather, sodbusters, outlaws, whores, Indians, grizzly bears, and water moccasins. My character, Clara Allen, is the long-lost love from Gus’s youth whom he reencounters at the end of the trail.

By the time I started shooting, Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and most of the cast had worked on the series for several months out in Texas and at the beautifully named location of Angel Fire, in northeast New Mexico.

When I joined up, the crew had made its final move to the red-clay town of Santa Fe for the last three weeks of filming. A week or so prior to my departure, I received a call from Robert Duvall, whom I had never met. Over the course of the conversation, he asked me a few loose questions—the month of my birth, my favorite song, my favorite food. It was only when I arrived in Santa Fe that I realized why, when he threw me a beautiful party with crab cakes for dinner, and a mariachi band playing “Galway Bay.”

Bobby Duvall was a prince to work with, as was Tommy Lee Jones, albeit a more silent one. Bobby was verbal and communicative and always took it upon himself to help his fellow actors with their jobs. Being in a scene with Bobby was like having a pillow to lean against. Since all my work had been scheduled in a block, the shooting days were often long and arduous. But Bobby took the pressure off the scenes, one time playing “Galway Bay” on his tape recorder to induce my tears as his character rode off into the sunset.

It was also on
Lonesome Dove
that I met an actress I love and admire, Glenne Headly, who was originally with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. I had met Diane Lane when, as a sixteen-year-old, she was doing a movie for Lou Adler called
The Fabulous Stains.
She had grown up into a beautiful actress. Chris Cooper, Freddie Forrest, Robert Urich, Danny Glover, and Rick Schroder rounded out the spectacular cast. Suzanne de Passe was our executive producer, and our line producer was Dyson Lovell, who was Franco Zeffirelli’s casting director when I tried out for
Romeo and Juliet
at the age of fifteen. Santa Fe was a fabulous location. We filmed some twenty-five miles outside of town, in Galasteo, at the Cook Ranch, a magnificent spread, which
years later was owned by Tom Ford and his partner, Richard Buckley.

Before I had left for London and
The Witches
, I’d had a conference with the
Lonesome Dove
costume designer, Van Broughton Ramsey, about the wardrobe for my character, Clara. I had agreed on a number of sketches, Victorian silhouettes with bonnets and petticoats, and then gone off to work with Nic Roeg and totally forgotten about the next task at hand. When I came back to the U.S. to do
Lonesome Dove
, it was evident that I had not thought through the passage of my character—Clara’s husband had suffered an accident that had left him paralyzed and Clara in charge of the ranch. As soon as I took on the role, I realized that I would need a more functional costume. So my first morning on set, I knocked on the door of the wardrobe truck and raided the clothing racks for work boots, men’s shirts, a duster, and a beat-up cowboy hat. It was this last-minute decision that led to the truth of my character. Van understood perfectly, or he had the grace to pretend to.

Later, in 1994, when Suzanne de Passe again gave me a great part, as Calamity Jane in
Buffalo Girls
, Van did wonderful, authentic costumes. I loved the Santa Fe aesthetic and adopted it for the little adobe house that I had bought on the Kaweah River, going so far as to purchase corny howling coyotes and applying the very particular palette of turquoise and red clay that you see in New Mexico.

*  *  *

I flew back to London for my next role, as Mrs. Rattery, a huntress and aviatrix with a dash of the Duchess of Windsor, based partly on Beryl Markham, who flew her own plane solo over the Serengeti and shared Denys Finch Hatton with Isak Dinesen. The movie was
A Handful of Dust
, based on the
novel by Evelyn Waugh, to be directed by Charles Sturridge, an Englishman. Kristin Scott Thomas was the young star of the film. She had a very beautiful, striking, chiseled face and large, deep-set eyes above high cheekbones. She barely said a word to me, and I didn’t spend much time in her company.

I loved the character of Mrs. Rattery; it was not a large part, but she was very game—a throwback to the women I remembered from growing up in Ireland, who were so intrepid on the hunting field. I had only three scenes—alighting from a biplane, a hunt meet, and a game of cards. I enjoyed the company of the two male co-stars, Rupert Graves and James Wilby, and we filmed in some spectacular locations, like Carlton Towers, a Victorian Gothic country house belonging to the Duke of Norfolk; and a fifteenth-century castle armory in Cheshire, which contained the stuffed remains of various extinct birds and waterfowl I had no idea ever existed—mad-looking speckled brown creatures, with duck bills and long legs and bodies like swans, that had waded in European waters in the olden days.

It is extraordinary how many species went extinct in the nineteenth century. And in the last one hundred years, such damage has been done to the planet like never before, as with the taxidermied, prehistoric-looking avians in their glass domes, in that gloomy moated castle. The songbirds of the world are also fast disappearing.

The duke was more often than not on set, observing the crew at work. I was impressed one evening when he revealed a secret drinks bar, hidden behind a mahogany panel in the library. Consequently, we met for gin and tonics every day at wrap. He was a most charming gentleman with an excellent sense of humor.

CHAPTER 21

W
oody Allen wrote me a letter in October 1989. He didn’t tell me the name of the movie he was going to be making, but suggested that I might respond to the character of Dolores, the needy flight attendant whose constant demands force Marty Landau’s character, Judah Rosenthal, a happily married and successful ophthalmologist, to murder her. I agreed immediately.

I thought it might be a good idea to meet Woody, as I happened to be in New York. I called his office and asked if I could speak with him. They said they would give him the message. A few hours later, the phone rang. It was Woody.

“I heard you wanted to speak with me?” he asked haltingly.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought that perhaps since we have never met, and since I’ll be working with you in a few weeks, that maybe we could have a drink, or tea, or something.”

There was a long pause. I wondered, was it boredom or anxiety? “Why?” he asked.

“Well, I thought it might be a good idea,” I said.

“I’m sick,” he said. “I’ve got a cold. When did you want to have this tea—this drink?”

“Well, perhaps on Thursday,” I suggested, casting it out like a fly on a dry river.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll have a drink on Thursday.” There followed a long pause and an intake of breath. “What if I’m sick on Thursday, too?” he asked.

“Well, I guess we won’t get to have the drink,” I replied.

Needless to say, the drink never happened.

When I returned to New York two weeks later, I went straight into fittings with the costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland, for
Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Among other options, he had chosen a seriously ugly argyle sweater for Dolores, and although I felt it was a deeply unflattering shape and pattern, I kept my mouth shut. I had heard that Woody had fired a famous actress when she refused to wear a jacket of his choice, so I was determined to love my wardrobe. But in truth, Jeffrey’s choices were perfect for the cloying, overbearing woman I was playing, argyle included.

Woody’s hair-and-makeup department was run by two wonderful women, Fern Buchner and Romaine Greene. Woody called them the “Salad Sisters.” Both ladies of a certain age, they were adorable and comforting to be around, as well as professionally trained in the old-fashioned sense. Fern became my makeup artist for many years, inventing, among other looks, my makeup for Morticia Addams, which was considerably more complex than it seemed.

It was not necessarily Woody’s habit to give the entire script to the supporting actors—just the scenes they would be shooting. So I had still not read the script and didn’t get to meet Woody until the first scene, in “Del’s apartment.” It was a humid, rainy day, and we were shooting in a nondescript glass high-rise in the East Thirties in Manhattan, as Dolores threatens and cajoles Judah and tosses down tranquilizers with alcohol. I had walked upstairs from my trailer into the
bright hot lights and the bodies crowded into a small apartment, through cables and standing arcs and equipment—you had to duck under to get inside. Sven Nykvist was the cameraman. Sven and Woody were wearing identical blue wool caps and neutral-colored parkas, like climbers on the Matterhorn. It was 150 degrees when Marty and I started into the scene. Woody indicated that I should stalk from room to room, and I did my best, swallowing pills while desperately trying to remember my lines as I stumbled into doorways and lurched over cables and standing arc lights. Woody kept on shooting. He asked if I could pronounce the word “been” as “bin,” which for some reason I found harder than speaking Russian.

After his initial direction, he never said another word, but we shot quite a few takes, and soon there was a deep frustration between Marty’s character and mine, and I believe that was what Woody was looking for.

There was one scene that Woody was never happy with. It moved from a diner to a car wash to a Chinese restaurant, and every time we reshot it, I tried harder to make it good. I think that’s probably what was wrong with it—you could see the effort. Working for Woody was another sort of challenge as well: often there was quite a lot of dialogue, and one didn’t want to fail him as a screenwriter any more than as a director.

Moviemaking on the streets of New York was not a glamorous affair. One day at lunchtime I was sitting in my slip on the grim chocolate-brown banquette of my double-banger trailer, parked on Third or Lexington somewhere in the Fifties, outside an Irish bar. I’d been persuaded to share the trailer with Marty, even though I could hear his toilet flush and his side of telephone conversations behind a thin compartment,
so I wasn’t in a great mood. The air conditioner had broken down, and the teamsters had gone to eat lunch. Outside, it was pouring rain. Suddenly, without warning, the familiar blue cap and beige anorak backed in through my door. Slightly embarrassed, I grabbed a robe and inquired gently, “Is that you, Woody?”

The figure wheeled around. It was neither Woody nor Sven but a toothless vagrant clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag. “Wow!” he exclaimed, looking around at the shag carpet and the colorless walls. “Is this Hollywood? It sure don’t look like it!”

“I couldn’t agree with you more!” I said.

We were entirely alone as he sat on the leatherette La-Z-Boy, polishing off his bottle and eyeing the refrigerator. “Got anything interesting in there?” he asked. Mercifully, the accountant dropped in and my new friend was persuaded to leave. At the same time, at the opposite end of the trailer, Marty’s briefcase was lifted, script and all. There was some serious tension when the theft was reported to Woody, who liked to keep his scripts under wraps until release.

*  *  *

Early the next year, I read a script from Paul Mazursky, an adaptation of the great tragicomic novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Enemies, A Love Story
, about a concentration-camp survivor with three wives. Ron Silver was set to star as Herman Broder. The part I was offered was beautiful—that of Tamara, the Polish mother of the survivor’s two deceased children, who tracks down her husband in Brooklyn after the war.

When I went to see Paul, I realized that it was in the same office on Beverly Drive where Elia Kazan had rejected me for the lead in
The Last Tycoon
some fourteen years before. But this
was a very different experience. Even though no deal had been made for my services, when I walked in, I was delighted to see a photograph of myself prominently displayed on a bulletin board, next to a picture of Ron Silver, and one of the wonderful actresses from
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, Lena Olin.