Watch Me: A Memoir (35 page)

I haven’t had a cigarette since, and I have had no desire to smoke. Possibly I was hypnotized, and evidently the prayer worked.

*  *  *

Danny left for New Zealand in August to act in
30 Days of Night
. Although Katie didn’t confide to me in detail, she and Danny were not getting along; she seemed off-balance and was very thin. We met in the valley on Ventura Boulevard one morning in September to look at a potential school for Stella, who would be starting kindergarten. Katie was downcast but defiant and had bought a diamond ring to cheer herself up. She had just come into a family inheritance and was in the process of buying a new house in the Valley, to be close to the school we had
chosen for Stella. When Danny returned for a brief hiatus in filming in November, they began divorce proceedings.

*  *  *

I was invited to go to Norway in December as a cohost with Sharon Stone for the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, a televised event that celebrates the recipients of the medal. That year, the winner was Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the leader of the organization Raúl Juliá so passionately supported.

Jaclyn and I stopped first in London, where I attended a special evening at the British Film Institute to screen
The Dead
and participate in a Q&A. I also reconnected with David Bailey and sat for him in his studio in Brownlow Mews. The studio was bustling as usual, with several squealing stylists who had just had their picture taken for
GQ
, hairdressers, art directors, and two small, plump dogs lying on a daybed amid piles of couture—a beautiful contained chaos specific to Bailey. Portraits of Mick Jagger, Damien Hirst, and Jean Shrimpton gazed down on the influx of models, actors, and personal assistants. Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Peter Blake, and Trevor Nunn were being photographed. Bailey was working with rhythm and energy.

Norway, from above, looked like the opposite of California—long fingers of land reaching into an inky black sea. The plane rose and dipped like a boat in the turbulent sky.

Oslo was a clean, refined city. On our first day, Jaclyn and I ventured out to a park that had been the life’s work of a sculptor named Gustave Vigeland, whose pieces included legions of round people in shiny bronze, erotic configurations at various stages of their lives; his bronze baby,
The Angry Boy
, a whinging, whiny child, is the most famous of his sculptures.

We visited the Norsk Folkemuseum, with its farmhouses and an ancient wooden church with a straw roof, and the Viking Ship Museum, which had the most beautiful longboats, wood-slatted and sleek as sea serpents.

But there was no daylight in Norway; it was dark when you woke up. At midday the sun made an appearance for a couple of hours, then retreated into night. We ate copious amounts of salted and pickled fish, and reindeer was on the menu in every restaurant, which made me sad. Before going home, I bought troll dolls for everyone at the farm for Christmas, and a sailor suit for Stella.

The peace concert, attended by the king and queen of Norway, offered an amalgam of talent from Rihanna, John Legend, Lionel Richie, and the former Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam) to Wynonna Judd, Simply Red, and Renée Fleming.

But the best time of all was on our final night in Oslo, when the artistic director of the concert, Petter Skavlan, gave me a small, intimate dinner at his house and invited the great actress Liv Ullmann. We stayed up laughing and drinking red wine until after 3
A.M.
I’d always wanted to meet her, having admired her collaboration with Ingmar Bergman for years. And she was everything I’d hoped for and more.

CHAPTER 33

M
y first vision of India was when I was landing on a British Airways jet in January 2007, through a murky stretch of morning smog above a patchwork of gray and rusted tin shanty roofs, spread out between foothills and coast like a filthy blanket. These were the slums, a network of paper-thin huts, a warren of noise and activity and squalor. Jaclyn and I had flown through the night from London, and the airport in Mumbai was modest by contrast to Heathrow. There were no concession stands and no shops, and the floors and walls were the color of sour milk and made of solid concrete. I was excited to be on my way to Rajasthan to work again with Wes Anderson, this time on
The Darjeeling Limited.
My part would be that of Sister Patricia, a nun. Wes had been sending me small metal replicas of Mother Teresa for some time to get me in the mood. The backstory was that I had deserted my three sons after my divorce from their father and run away to India. My sons were now on a quest, traveling through that country, to attain spiritual understanding and to reunite with their mother.

The boys were being played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, with appearances from others in Wes’s fold, such as Waris Ahluwalia and Kumar Pallana. The opening scene would involve a race through city streets
with Bill Murray in the back of a taxi, rushing to make his train.

Jaclyn and I passed through customs, and an envoy from the film met us and helped us with our bags to a parking lot. It was still early, but the sun was starting to come on strong over the sea of tin by the side of the runway. Children darted around us, pulling on our sleeves, begging. One small boy tried to insert a dog-eared copy of something by Somerset Maugham through the open car window; another sang “Jingle Bells,” even though it was late January.

I was staying at the Taj Mahal hotel for two days before flying north to meet up with Wes Anderson and the cast and crew of
The Darjeeling Limited
; they had already been filming in Jaipur, and I had come to finish up the final weeks with them. The Taj, which was beside the Gateway to India monument, was on a grand scale, with a distinctly Victorian air—an imposing building with arches and domes, gray stone streaked with soot on the exterior, the downstairs a series of expensive galleries, jewelry and fabric shops, and restaurants. There was a large open-air central patio, decorated in tile with palm fronds beside an outsized pale turquoise swimming pool. I noticed several ravens flying randomly above our heads and found their presence a little menacing.

That afternoon we attempted to shop a little, but we were jet-lagged, and the city was so active and crowded that it seemed almost impenetrable. We had heard of a particular gallery close by that had wonderful antiques, but we almost got killed crossing the road. The population drove at top speed to a cacophony of horns and car engines; the tuk-tuk trucks raced forward, accelerating for pedestrians and red lights. The “antiques” were indeed lovely, but when I asked
if I might use the bathroom, the shop owner guided me to a second-floor toilet in the next-door building, which had multiple reproductions of everything we had seen downstairs. “Some antiques are older than others,” he explained.

We went down some crowded streets to an outdoor market under a bridge—stalls selling pith helmets from forgotten wars next to skinned sheep heads. Around us were women in shawls, burkas, and veils, young men sleeping on bales of hay in the back of trucks, animals being led to slaughter. A skinny old man in the gutter, naked to the waist, dropped his arm down an open drain up to the shoulder and came up with a handful of black silt, which he poked through with his fingers.

That night we ate at a trendy rooftop restaurant not too far from the hotel. Later, as I tried to sleep, the ravens outside my window croaked and cawed, and when I got up and looked outside at 3
A.M.
, I saw their shadows batting above my window in the amber streetlight; two stray dogs were asleep in a gutter. I looked forward to getting out of the city.

We left for Rajasthan at 4:30
A.M.
and flew north over open expanses of dry, hilly land dotted here and there with bushy trees. No water to speak of. When we arrived at the small airport in Udaipur, we were told the film unit had been shooting there and most of them had moved on to another location. However, it was nice to see a few familiar faces from
The Royal Tenenbaums
and
The Life Aquatic.
Our driver welcomed us to the town of Udaipur. “It’s clean here,” he said. “Not like Mumbai.” But as we drove through the outskirts of the city, we remarked on the number of cows chewing on plastic bags and the men in their jewel-colored turbans and heavy blankets warming themselves at small bonfires of acrid black smoke by the side of the road.

The car climbed a hill on the outskirts of town, and a lake like a black mirror spread out before us; there were several small, canopy-topped barges anchored in the early-morning haze. A beautiful girl in a beige silk cheongsam sat silently with us in the back of the motorboat as we skimmed across the misted expanse of water toward the hotel. Wes had chosen a spectacular location. It felt like
One Thousand and One Nights.

Udaipur, known as the City of Lakes, was created in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II as the final capital of the former Mewar kingdom, and many of its Rajput-era palaces now serve as luxury hotels. The Lake Palace Hotel, constructed of white marble, is situated on an island in the Pichola Lake; another palace has furniture made entirely of lead crystal. The City Palace, which remains the residence of the present maharana, is a gray stone fortress accessible by land and water, with an immense fortified gateway on which, one was informed, an opposition army’s elephants might have impaled themselves if the castle was under attack.

Now the gates were opened to a citadel behind the palace. Monkeys dangled from the trees, women strung marigolds on the pavements. Shops, temples, barbershops, souvenir shacks, and shrines lined the narrow winding streets.

Our cast was staying at the newest edifice on the lake. The hotel was very beautiful but somehow not site-specific—a fusion of Oriental influences, like a free-floating Shangri-la. My room was at the end of a long outdoor cloister; ribboning around the exterior of the building was an ocean-blue swimming pool where Owen Wilson swam his laps each morning. Beyond my room, at the end of the corridor, was a chain-link fence that protected a wildlife reserve. On my first morning, I saw vultures picking at a carcass on the other side. Often I saw
deer, monkeys, wild gazelles, and peacocks. Another morning as I was having breakfast at the restaurant, a pack of some twelve to fifteen jackals tore across the nearby golf course, barking and chattering at high pitch.

Upon arrival in Rajasthan, I had received a formal invitation from the maharana of Udaipur to dine at the City Palace. The maharana lived in an apartment where time stopped at the Raj. A photograph of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, and beside it one of Lord Mountbatten. The private rooms curved around a cylindrical center wall, and on the outer perimeter, a streak of taxidermied tigers—most shot down in previous centuries and pale with age—were cut in half and appeared to be emerging from the wall as if by magic. In his garden, some two hundred feet above the lake, a cluster of ancient exotic trees stood close to fountains and an ornamental rose garden. Farther out in the lake, the marble palace, white as a pearl, floated like a dream on the still water.

Under Wes’s new policy, we were not to have wardrobe or hair and makeup artists on set during the shooting of this film. Essentially, we were to costume ourselves each morning at the hotel, go through the works, and travel to set by minivan, dressed, coiffed, and ready to work. The situation on set was a little difficult in that my wig kept trying to pop off, and there was no one to help me with it; no one even seemed to have a mirror. To compound the problem, there was a scene of intense weeping with no one there to mop up my tears. I looked like a drowned raccoon.

Owen’s and Adrien’s real mothers, both photographers, were with their sons on location, their necks draped in long-lens cameras. They were always taking pictures of their boys amid the temples and the ruins. The movie was shooting high
in the hills, almost two hours from town, at an ancient monastery. The catering consisted of curry and rice served on the floor in bubbling vats next to the Porta-Potties. Soon Owen’s assistant, Steve, was doing back-and-forth duty to the hotel to get boxed lunches for the cast. I didn’t see Wes eat the whole time I was in India.

For research, I had gone to a Catholic mission in Udaipur that had been very inspiring. Part asylum, part old people’s home, part orphanage, it was a quiet, peaceful place. Everyone there, young and old, seemed supportive and caring for one another. There was a manger in the compound with a healthy milk cow whose sweet face was rubbed affectionately by the nun who was showing me around. I gave the mission most of my per diem. It felt nice to give it to the nuns, who had asked for nothing.

My days on the movie were not many, and I had some time to visit Ranakpur, a few hours’ drive from the hotel. When Jaclyn and I set out with our driver, he suggested we buy pencils and paper as gifts for the women and children in the villages along the way. We passed a town where there was a festival, and all the women were wearing dresses with tiny mirrors sewn into the material, so that the main street danced with their reflections. We passed jackals gnawing inside the rib cage of a long-horned cow, and a parade of girls in orange saris near a poppy field with brass urns on their heads and flashing smiles that lit up their faces. Everywhere in India were contradictions of savagery and beauty, fullness and deprivation, life and death. I never knew what to expect next.

Ranakpur’s Jain temple is constructed of more than fourteen hundred marble pillars, all carved differently. The high priest took Jaclyn and me to visit the small Kama Sutra temple
on the grounds; he said a special prayer for us, Wes, and
The Darjeeling Limited.
After the prayer, he told us he was cast in a scene in the film. On the way back to Udaipur, we turned a corner in a forest and saw about two hundred monkeys hanging out by the side of the road; they were being fed by a forest ranger, and each had his own individual carrot in hand.