Watch Me: A Memoir (36 page)

One morning I went out riding with our producer, Alice Bamford, and Owen’s mother, Laura. We rode the local breed of horse, the Marwari, interesting because the breed moves at a fast shuffle on long legs and has ears that curve like an ornament. My best buy in India was a large silver replica of a Marwari horse that happened to decorate my hotel room.

January is peak wedding season in Rajasthan. At night, the streets of Udaipur almost levitated with music and dancers, the grooms being led out on white horses or some astride painted elephants. Festooned with marigolds and roses, the brides wore jewels on their foreheads, noses, and ears, anklets with tiny tinkling bells, and armloads of colored bangles. One afternoon out shopping with Jason Schwartzman, we went to an obscure fabric store that he claimed had outfitted Gandhi and then into a small glass-bangle shop where a score of young women sat on a dirt floor in front of the proprietor. From a floor-to-ceiling stack of cardboard boxes, to which her two minions flew back and forth like an organ grinder’s canaries, the proprietor amassed different combinations of bracelets in specific choices of size, design, and color for each girl to match her wedding sari. Jason sat on the floor among them. They giggled but paid him little attention. The bangle seller’s focus never wavered; her eyes barely acknowledged his presence.

At one point, Mick Jagger arrived in Udaipur with his
daughter Jade. I had some days off and went shopping with them, and was surprised how good at haggling they were. He was buying fabric to decorate his summer house in Mustique. Later that night we went to a most beautiful Jain wedding. As we were sitting waiting for the maharana to appear, his floating motorcade drew up to the plaintive strains of “Loch Lomond,” as rendered on a pair of bagpipes. The ceremony, which went on for hours, was gorgeous. The bride wore a red sari, and her feet were washed in rose water. The priest poured honey onto the palms of her hands and bound them to the hands of the groom with silk and banana leaves.

*  *  *

After I returned from India, I was pleased to learn that the Library of Congress deemed Dad’s
The Asphalt Jungle
“culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry.

I remember speculating at the time as to whether the ruling in 1991 by the French courts preventing Ted Turner from colorizing
The Asphalt Jungle
had possibly “colored” Turner’s view of my film
Bastard Out of Carolina.

*  *  *

I visited Katie and Stella at their house for lunch. Danny had left for London. When I walked in, both of them were dressed in white. The windows were open to the canyon breeze, and, disconcertingly, a dozen candles were burning on the living room table. I told Katie that if ever she should need peace and quiet, she had an open invitation to visit the farm at all times, but to watch out for fire. A few weeks later, following a visit she made there, her friends became alarmed about what she was confiding to them on the phone. Soon after, they persuaded Katie to enter rehab.

For the couple of weeks that Katie was in rehab, Danny was still away working. Stella’s nanny, Christine, received a call from Katie, asking if she would bring Stella to visit. Christine said that she would feel more comfortable if I came along.

It was a facility in Pasadena, an old Spanish estate, and groups of hard-eyed people were sitting outdoors drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Stella was only four and held on to Katie in a long embrace. Katie told her to stay with Christine while she and I went for a walk on the grounds of the clinic. When we were out of earshot, she paused under some tall pines and said, “Watch after Stella for me.” She was frail but resolute that she would get well.

When Danny returned from filming, Katie had left rehab, sold her new house, and moved to a condominium in Manhattan Beach. I wanted to stay in contact with her. I feared that because she and Danny were having problems, she might decide against my seeing Stella. I wrote her a letter on December 15 saying that I hoped we could continue to reach out to one another in friendship, saying how saddened I had been by the spiral of recent events regarding her relationship with Danny, and telling her how much I cared for her and Stella.

CHAPTER 34

W
henever I listen to the voice of Maria Callas, I think of Bob. That explosive sound, soaring to the vaulted ceiling of our living room. On either side of the high window above the fireplace, where the Mexican Madonna that Dad had given me after
Prizzi’s Honor
bestowed her benediction, the arches that Bob had designed curved overhead in the shape of angel wings.

Bob awakened punctually at seven o’clock each morning, showered, put on a starched white cotton shirt and cargo pants, and walked downstairs for breakfast. He would read the newspapers, drink coffee, eat an egg tortilla with hot sauce that he called
lo mismo
, light a cigar, rant for a short while on the politics of George W. Bush, and by 8
A.M.
be in his studio, ready to work.

There were exceptions to this routine, as when he was commuting to San Dimas to oversee the fabrication and the engineering of the Great Bronze Doors, or if he was warming up to tai chi with his Chinese master.

Bob would have done well during the Renaissance, when an artist might have worked for a patron or the church. He felt that art belonged to everyone and that artists should be supported by the state. He did not believe in ownership, in art as an asset, yet he worked with galleries all his life, using
whatever monies he made to partially underwrite his public art projects, for which the cost often exceeded the budget. He had it both ways.

Although he rarely invited me to do so, watching Bob work was fascinating. I see Bob, in the act of observation, dipping his head, peering over the rim of his glasses. This look was acute, searching, porous. He was relentless in his quest for the true essence and shape of things in an ever-changing light. Sometimes he would labor with the clay, fight it, complaining about its consistency and weight. He would take a mallet to break down a compromise he’d made, and start again.

Soon after I met Bob, he was commissioned to sculpt
Source Figure
, a monument for downtown Los Angeles, fourteen feet tall and cast bronze; the expression on the woman’s face is rapturous, with an inward contemplation. It was, I felt, a departure for Bob, who some years later again explored spirituality, in the transcendent expression of the Madonna of the Angels. With these two pieces, Bob had become increasingly involved with evidence, character, and what was taking place emotionally. I think this outlook was behind his empathy with my work as an actress. His later pieces became all about the spontaneity of the moment; the figures dance, leap, jump, spin cartwheels. They are exuberant, physically animated, and involved with their surroundings.

Bob lived modestly and elegantly. His only indulgences were Cuban cigars and, for a few whimsical months when he tried to give up smoking, a brand-new pair of white socks every day. He liked to experiment with modern technology and materials and was using computers to measure, cut, and build with resins and polymers. He talked about making new inventions. He loved women; he sculpted naked girls at the
zenith of their beauty and physical allure. He was a consummate artist. I posed for him only a few times; the prospect was unnerving to us both.

Bob usually returned from his studio at seven in the evening. I would sit opposite him on a white sofa in the living room of the house he had designed for our life together, and he would light another in the series of cigars that he smoked throughout the day. He’d pour himself a large tequila and play a tape of Callas very loud, leaning back on the couch and allowing his gaze to travel skyward with her voice.

The song was “Vissi d’arte,” from the opera
Tosca
by Puccini:

I lived for art, I lived for love,

I never did harm to a living soul!

With a secret hand

I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of. . . .

In the hour of grief,

Why, why, Lord,

Ah, why do you reward me thus?

The smoke billowed about him. He could remain silent like that for hours. “Thinking,” he would say. So many elements can fill a silence. Sometimes I felt a rising frustration, a wave of panic. What was unspoken between us had begun to disturb me. Something immense and frightening was present in the ether. Though often I thought it would drive me mad, I said nothing. I did not know why, but I was terribly afraid of the answer to my unspoken question: What is happening here? What is wrong? More and more we seemed to be drifting into a consensual forbearance to communicate;
we had developed a strange tolerance for the elephant in the room.

Bob was mysterious, but it had become increasingly evident that he was not well. A few years before, he had begun to complain of neuropathy and had been going to a doctor in Beverly Hills who was giving him something he described as akin to shock therapy for his feet. Bob’s general physician had died, and Arnie Klein had been recommending doctors, but they were specialists, and no one seemed to have formed a diagnosis for what was ailing him. I offered to take him to my doctor, but he refused to go.

Across the street from our house on Windward Avenue, the Townhouse bar disgorged its customers at 2:30
A.M.
to yell and sing and fight or throw firecrackers for a full hour and a half until their cars were located, or even on occasion to shoot at each other. I had read that the sound of car alarms at night could induce a heart attack.

Often I would peer out from a tiny glass bedroom window like a keyhole in the fortress into the interrupted night, full of flashing neon and raised voices. My having chosen to live in Venice seemed like a faraway flight of fancy, and now we were stuck in the middle of it. Anger and distress generally made it impossible to return to sleep, so more often than not, Bob would turn on the television and say, “Let’s have a mini-day.” Oddly, these were some of the best times in memory, striding the hours of 3 to 5
A.M.
, watching classics on TNT or reruns of
Ab Fab
or Sacha Baron Cohen. Finally, we would lie back down, Bob would turn his back to me, and I would take his shape, cupping his body with my own, my hand over his heart to feel it beating into sleep.

I was asked to serve as president of the jury at the San
Sebastián Film Festival in 2005, and when we arrived Bob had accidentally walked into a pillar at the Bilbao airport. He was mad at me for rushing ahead when I was actually walking slowly ahead of him to the customs hall. Where just a few years before we were going out to dinner and salsa dancing, now Bob was complaining of numbness in his extremities. Apart from that journey to Spain, Bob was refusing to go out anymore, and socializing was generally confined to home, other than a few dinners we were invited to at other people’s houses.

At night I would awaken to find Bob sitting bolt upright in bed, his head bent forward on his chest. If I spoke his name or touched him, he would flinch or jump as if awakened from a nightmare, and his eyes looked panicked. I wondered if he was being overly dramatic, but something was mysteriously affecting him.

Steven and Bob decided together that Bob should see a doctor for a full physical. By now he was complaining of back pain as well; we had already endured several MRIs and X-ray imaging. I don’t know how aware Bob was of the seriousness of his condition. I have heard since that medical records from previous years had warned him of a weak heart, and that he had been advised to quit tobacco and alcohol, but this information was never imparted to me. Many of the people who loved Bob, including me, suspected that he was something of a hypochondriac, always worrying about this symptom or that, but as his friend David Novros later commented, Bob was in fact a stoic.

*  *  *

It was late in the afternoon on August 7, 2008. Bob and Steven returned to the house after their visit to the doctor; Bob was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and had been given a large dose of steroids. His hands and feet were massively
swollen. When I touched the skin on his ankle, it bounced back like a marshmallow. We were in the living room; Bob was sitting on an armchair between Steven and me. At one point, he looked around dazedly. “I think I’m really sick,” he said. There was wonder in his voice.

I was very worried, but he had just been prescribed medication, and I was confident it would work.

The following evening was the opening-night ceremony of the Summer Olympics on television. Bob and I watched on the flat-screen from our bed. The Chinese drummers were extraordinary; their syncopated sound was like thunder, and they beat out the changing rhythms as one. Such precision in such a vast number of musicians was daunting, almost mechanical. I drifted off to sleep.

I was aware of something terrible in the split second before I actually awakened. When I reached consciousness, Bob had already exploded from the bed and was standing at the foot, gasping in panic. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” I thought maybe he was having a nightmare. I emptied the brown paper bag of Chinese medicine from the bedside table and told him to blow into it. “I’m calling the paramedics,” I said.

“No,” he said, “don’t.” He stumbled into the bathroom. I was calling his doctor. The answering service said he was unreachable in Canada, but if I would care to hold on, I could speak to his substitute in an emergency. A male voice came on.

“Doctor,” I said, “Robert Graham is in crisis. He says he can’t breathe.”

“Do you have diazepam in the house?” he asked.

“Valium?”

“Yes,” he said. “Give him one of those. He sounds like a nervous patient.”

Bob was doubled up. I called Steven, then I called 911.