Watch Me: A Memoir (23 page)

The next morning I awoke and lay in bed, blinking at the ceiling. Life was irretrievably altered, the way it feels around a death—the irony being that this was about an impending birth. I wondered what Jack was eating for breakfast. Would he have coffee? Eggs? Would he go for a swim in the late morning? Would he dive or jump into the pool? All patterns, all routines and habits, had changed forever. I called him on the telephone. “Jack,” I said, “your lawyer is a real prick.”

“Well, you know lawyers,” he said sleepily.

I wondered if Rebecca was lying beside him. I was overwhelmed with jealousy.

“How could you allow him to talk to me like that?” I demanded tearfully.

“I’ll have a word with him,” said Jack, as if he had no part in any of it.

When Jack and I split up, what was the most shocking, in a way, was the collateral damage. People don’t mean for it to
happen, but sometimes it is so hard to be stuck in the middle that they feel forced to choose, and sometimes it’s not even a decision. I lost several people whom I considered dear friends when Jack and I split. All of them were men, guys I had cooked for. No matter what they do to each other, it seems to me the guys generally stand together.

At first some of the women seemed to feel forced to take sides. Jack’s daughter Jennifer, caught up by happenstance in this divisive scenario, was a friend of Rebecca’s but remained close to me. Although they were in the eye of the storm, Annie and Helena remained two of my dearest friends. We had been in the trenches together, and they both helped me to grow up.

I got a call from Susan Forristal a few days later. “I’ve got some bad news for you,” she said. She went on to tell me about an article in
Playboy
magazine in which a young woman made claims in an interview that Jack playfully spanked her with a Ping-Pong paddle in one particularly romantic encounter. I called Annie Marshall and said, “It’s too much! How can he dare to do this as well as the bomb he dropped on me just a few days ago?”

Later that morning I was in a dressing room at Western Costume, being fitted for
The Grifters
, when a telephone call came in from Annie. She said, “I have Jack for you.”

“Toots,” he said when he came on the phone, “that
Playboy
article is meaningless! It’s a reprint of an article that came out in England last year!”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At home, but I’m leaving for work at Paramount.”

“It’s just up the street from Western,” I said. “I’ll see you there.” A half hour later, when I drove onto the lot, I saw Jennifer
walking toward me. I parked the car. “I’ve come to see your father,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and gave me a hug. I was shaking.

When I got to his bungalow, an assistant behind a desk in the reception room asked if she could announce me. I told her that would not be necessary and walked straight into Jack’s office. He was coming out of the bathroom when I attacked him. I don’t think I kicked him, but I beat him savagely about the head and shoulders. He was ducking and bending, and I was going at him like a prizefighter, raining a vast array of direct punches.

Finally, I was exhausted. We sat down, and I cried. Then, with renewed effort, I attacked him again. And all the while I felt a strange underlying gratitude to him for allowing me to beat the living hell out of him. Later, in the days that followed, I talked to him on the phone and he said, “Goddamn, Toots, you sure landed some blows on me. I’m bruised all over my body.” And I said, “You’re welcome, Jack, you deserved it.” And we laughed. It was tragic, really.

*  *  *

Jack and Rebecca’s baby, Lorraine, was born on April 16, 1990. I was very lonely at this period of my life. But I realized that it had been Jack’s life, for the most part; I had existed in it. That was over now. And I’d turned the tables on him, too, in my way. I had thought of him as grumpy Jack. In keeping with my early experience, I had turned him into an often irritated and forbearing parent instead of a husband, a lover. The truth was that we had lost interest in each other.

After Jack and I split, I asked him to avoid talking about it, which he was able to do for some time. I tried to imagine Rebecca in a domestic scenario with him, following the
floor plan, moving through the rooms at Mulholland Drive as I had done before her. Around this time there appeared an article in
Life
magazine with soft-focus portraits of Jack and a moonfaced Rebecca Broussard in a large picture hat, alongside quotes from old pals like Bob Rafelson and Henry Jaglom, saying how great it was that Jack had finally found true love. When asked how he felt about his baby daughter, Jack was quoted as saying that the sight of her fragile skull reduced him to gibberish.

The fact that Rebecca Broussard had become pregnant where I had failed made me feel inadequate and bitter. The path to discovering what was wrong with me, and why my reproductive organs were not functioning, was a long and arduous one. The fertility doctors had discovered that I had endometriosis, and had probably had it since my teens. I had undergone a laparoscopy, followed by a hysteroscopy, but a child was not to be. As hard as I might try to visualize it, I found the idea of having a baby frightening, and could never truly imagine such a thing as pregnancy happening to me. I think much of what a woman is has to do with procreation. And to find oneself infertile somehow renders one useless as a woman, in the grimmest set of the mind’s eye, so I was very conflicted.

I was never completely sure until my late thirties that a baby was what I really wanted, or if it was more about pleasing my mate. I still felt like a child myself, maybe because I’d lost my mother so early. Selfishly, I didn’t want to grow up to be someone else’s mother. Jack had been enthusiastic about trying in vitro, but we agreed that having intercourse by the numbers was a turnoff.

It rained heavily that month. A mudslide came down the
cliff and washed away a portion of the Japanese garden behind my house. There was a loud scratching in the ceiling above my bed, which upon further investigation turned out to be a nocturnal army of rats. As I lay on my bed unable to sleep at night, I held my dog, Minnie, in my arms. It felt as if she had literally absorbed my pain and anxiety when, just a few weeks later, she suddenly went blind from the effects of diabetes.

In the short time since Jack and I parted, I realized how many of our friends had not told me the truth about Jack’s involvement with Rebecca. I probably would have resented them if they had. I went up to Oak Pass to see Bert Schneider. He and Greta had recently divorced, and I was surprised when he told me that Rebecca Broussard had been staying in his guesthouse. I heard from Jack’s decorator, Jarrett Hedborg, who had helped me with my house also, that he was shopping and designing for Rebecca’s new home.

I was feeling a lot like Lilly Dillon in my personal life—that I was having to sever a very vital part of me and let it go. No matter how good the image of us looked on the outside, it had been a long time since I had been really connected to Jack. We’d fallen out of step even before Rebecca Broussard came along. And shortly after she did, I heard she tossed a plate of spaghetti in Jack’s face and I thought, “I bet that will keep him interested.” I was right; he had another child with her—a son, named Raymond. Which was odd, because we’d once owned a dog by that name.

Although in many ways it was not logical, the sense of betrayal was overwhelming; I felt abandoned and dejected and humiliated. I was not yet forty, but in magazine articles, I was described as the older woman. We were now living separate lives, but I had always thought of Jack as family.

One morning I opened the door to the FedEx man, who handed me a package. It was from my mother’s half brother, Fraser. I took it inside and sat down with it at the kitchen table. A note said that he had found a poem written by Mum in a corner of his attic in Long Island and thought that maybe I would like to have it.

The poem was written in spidery italics and set in a dark wood frame.

THE CEDAR TREE

The cedar tree

is very strong

it sways and rocks in the wind

and when the wind goes howling by

I think of the bird with the broken wing

who found the shelter the cedar would bring

Enrica Soma 1938, age 9

I was feeling very blue and went for a walk on the hill behind my house. A van had stalled on the side of the road, and a well-built older man was walking up and down, shaking his head. He told me that he was a boxer’s manager and that he had his fighter in the van, but they’d broken down on the way to their gig. He asked if he might give me his card to call a towing company to help him out. Then he looked at me closer and said, “I know you—you’re John Huston’s daughter. I can tell you’ve been crying, but you’re a strong girl. You are your father’s daughter, and you must never forget that.”

Mum and Dad are like that, angels in the woodwork.

That Christmas holiday, another package for me was dropped off, from Mulholland Drive. I took it up to the farm and waited until Christmas day was over before opening it alone in my bedroom. It was an extraordinary pearl-and-diamond bracelet that Frank Sinatra had once given to Ava Gardner. The card said he hoped I would not find it overbearing. “These pearls from your swine. With happiest wishes for the holidays—Enjoy—Yr Jack.” I was devastated.

*  *  *

Bernardo Bertolucci was the president of the Cannes jury in 1990 and invited me to come join him as a member. Since Bernardo was a dear friend of Jack’s, I was flattered that he had included me, although I suspect that his longtime girlfriend, Clare Peploe, proposed the idea.

I immediately set about finding a wardrobe that would sustain me for fourteen days and nights in the glamorous South of France. Evening gowns were required for each night at the screenings at the Grand Palais, and unless you got up early—usually after a busy night of partying—to watch the first jury screening of a selected film, attendance at the evening galas was a requirement.

I had traveled to New York and stayed at Joan Buck’s new apartment for a few days. Now we were flying together to Cannes on the Concorde. In the airport lounge, we ran into Paloma Picasso and her husband, and I wondered why Joan turned green. It was only when we landed in Nice that she told me she had experienced a nightmare that we were in a plane crash and that Paloma and her husband were also in the dream. I, too, had been trying to come to terms with a growing fear that the flight to Nice might possibly go down, as I had been embarrassed about tipping the scales with my four
overstuffed suitcases at the Air France transfer desk in Paris en route to Nice.

But when Elizabeth Taylor’s luggage sailed by with her sitting in the front of a flatbed minivan at Orly, I estimated some fourteen pieces of Louis Vuitton in all. As we took off, there sat Liz in the first row of the plane with a Pomeranian in her lap. She smiled and waved happily at me. She was an ambassador for the Foundation for AIDS Research and had always been one of my heroines. I figured if we were going down, she’d get the headlines.

As Joan and I made our way down the aisle to the back of the plane, Prince Albert of Monaco said hello and asked where I would be staying. We exchanged phone numbers, and Joan said, “He’s going to ask you out for dinner.”

I was staying at the Majestic Hotel on the Croisette, in a beautiful room overlooking the festival. This was before the movie stars began hiding out at l’Hôtel du Cap, some twelve kilometers down a coast of hairpin turns. At one time they were happy to be seen, and that was what Cannes was all about—starlets on the beach, lunch in tents along the sand, paparazzi a presence but not swarming. After l’Hôtel du Cap, everything got decentralized.

The jury met in seclusion at least every other day, then daily toward the end of the festival. The jurors included the Japanese producer Hayao Shibata, whose mother started buying movie theaters in Japan in the thirties; Aleksei Gurman, a large brooding Russian director; the lyrical French beauty Fanny Ardant; Sven Nykvist, Bergman and Woody Allen’s cameraman; the brilliant young Indian director Mira Nair, who had made
Salaam Bombay!
the previous year; Françoise Giroud, the journalist and screenwriter who had coined the
term
“nouvelle vague”
in 1958; Bertrand Blier, the French writer and director; and Christopher Hampton, the celebrated British playwright and film director known for his recent adaptation of Stephen Frears’s movie
Dangerous Liaisons
—all presided over by Bernardo. Even though some of the jurors did not speak English, it was great to feel in the thick of it with these very smart people.

The first week was something of a disappointment, but in the second week the films improved radically. There was an exquisite Chinese film, Zhang Yimou’s
Ju Dou
, about a young woman married to the owner of a dye factory who is having an affair with a man employed there. There was a complicated film by Jean-Luc Godard,
Nouvelle Vague.
Clint Eastwood had come to the festival with his film
White Hunter Black Heart
, based on Peter Viertel’s book about my father. It was actually a strange experience to watch Clint as Dad. At long distance, the similarity was often quite close. But whenever the camera moved in, the illusion dissolved. Bernardo left me out of the voting on that one.

Then there was the American tour de force by David Lynch,
Wild at Heart.
The movie was fast and violent and proved very controversial, with extraordinary performances by Nic Cage and Laura Dern. At the screening, the audience booed, but some gave it a standing ovation. At the beginning of week two, there was a powerful movie from Russia and I mentioned to Aleksei that I liked it. Every time I liked something else, he took the opportunity to playfully tell me that I had liked the Russian film best.