Watch Me: A Memoir (39 page)

I didn’t hear from Jeremy Railton, either. I do not want to speculate as to how it happened that Jeremy decided not to be my friend—the loss of his companionship and the deterioration of our relationship still bewilders me. Life takes strange turns into backwaters, and we learn to let go.

I first really came to know my brother Danny when Dad was sick and we would rally around him at the hospital—the frightening episodes when he was diagnosed with a heart aneurysm, when the doctors worried he might not survive an operation with only one functioning lung, when his oxygen was so low that falling asleep was life-threatening: the hellish and continuous narrative of his ill health and failing body. Danny’s inherent sweetness and courage were my comfort.

Allegra wrote a book, published in 2009, about her upbringing and titled it
Love Child.
In it, she describes the mysterious conundrum of her earliest years, following the death of our mother, being raised by Dad, and meeting her natural father, John Julius Norwich, when she was twelve.

It was always my wish to protect her, even though I was ill prepared to take on the full responsibility of a child in
my early twenties. I did as much as my own singular agenda allowed. There were times I know I disappointed her.

These days Allegra lives and writes in Taos. Rafa skis the black-diamond runs and is an avid soccer player. He makes beautiful jewelry and wants to be an astrophysicist.

Tony’s son Jasper lives in New York City. He is almost thirteen years old and loves to draw and paint. His mother is the actress Jodie Markell. Matthew, Laura, and Jack are grown with children of their own—respectively, Noah, Mathilda, and Sage.

Stella sent me a drawing she had made of a girl with butterflies for eyes that she titled “See-through Nature.” On one occasion, a conversation was going on and someone said, “You can’t buy love.” And Stella said, “No, but you can buy a puppy!”

At twelve years old, she excels as a runner; has long, lean limbs, wide shoulders, honey-brown skin, gold hair, and pale aquamarine eyes that draw a lot of attention. People often remark on her beauty or ask where she got those eyes. She tells them she got them from her mother, Katie.

Stella and I spent a lot of time together after Katie and Bob died. I took her to the theater and to the ballet. We saw
The Nutcracker
and
Cinderella
,
Wicked
, and
Mary Poppins.
When I took her backstage to meet the corps de ballet of the Hispanico dance troupe, the dancers asked what she wanted to do when she grew up.

“I want to be a waitress,” she replied.

Most artists are involved in overcoming some form of childhood heartbreak. I don’t know if Stella will be an artist, but she is already a rider. For the past two years, she has been going to school in the English countryside and living with
Danny’s mother, Zoë. She wrote me a letter saying, “Today I galloped by myself, it was a wonderful feeling.” Her grandfather John would be proud.

*  *  *

I was at Dr. Klein’s office in Beverly Hills. Arnie had been in the news because it was no secret that he was one of Michael Jackson’s doctors, as well as his friend and confidant.

Arnie said, “Michael’s here. He wants to see you. Shall I order you lunch?” He ushered me down the corridor into an adjacent room. A large Baldessari print of a man with a yellow nose hung on the wall. A few moments passed, there was a gentle knock on the door, and Michael walked in.

On the rare occasions I’d run into him of late, it had been shocking to see how thin he was, how white his skin had become. The tiny nose, the tattooed mouth, the high-slanting cheekbones, the sadness in his dark eyes.

“I’m so sorry about Bob, I know how much you loved him,” he said.

I thanked him. “It’s a cruel world,” I said.

“I want you to know that none of what they claimed about me is true,” he said. “I love children, I always have, I would never in my life hurt a child.”

I know that many people thought otherwise, but I believed him. Michael died just a few weeks later, on June 25, 2009, the victim of a broken heart.

*  *  *

Whenever I fly to London, I try to stop at Sabrina Guinness’s cottage in Hampshire on the way into town. In spring, the woods are resplendent with bluebells, and I love to work in her garden, dig in the wet earth, and let the sun hit the back of my knees. They say it helps you to get over jet lag. In the year
that followed Bob’s death, I had struggled with anxiety and moments of panic and had not a few dark nights of the soul.

In July 2009 I was in London on my way to Ireland to receive a “Hooker” award at the annual Galway Film Fleadh. This award is not, as one might imagine, for excellence in streetwalking but, rather, is named for a fishing vessel native to this part of the West of Ireland, along with the curragh. Going back to Ireland was to remember a time when we were sailing on Galway Bay, before loss became part of my landscape.

Leaving Heathrow, Sabrina, Jaclyn, and I walked the endless distance to the Aer Lingus gate at the end of the terminal. Dad always said that his vision of purgatory was to be in transit on one of those long corridors. The last time Sabrina and I had come to Ireland was for Jasmine Guinness’s wedding at Leixlip Castle outside Dublin, when I had been challenged by Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains to dance a reel in front of a marquee full of assorted guests—my only excuse for accepting the challenge being that the Guinness made me do it!

This time I was going back to the west to be among the places and people I had grown up with. We landed at Shannon. The road to Galway had become a sleek highway; the signposts were painted green and had the Irish translation written beneath the names of towns—Ardrahan, Ballinasloe, Gort, Tuam, the sounds of my childhood.

I was staying in Galway as a guest of the festival for a week, which gave me just enough time to touch base with many friends from the past. Even Michael Burke was there, whom I hadn’t seen since I was nine, when he and Tony were playing hurley in the back field behind the primary school in Carabane.

We traveled up to Huston Beach in Connemara, named
for my father, where Dad once owned a cottage by the sea. Leonie King asked us over to Oranmore Castle for champagne. As we arrived, her father, Bill, wandered into the kitchen. He was, at ninety-nine years old, small and resilient, like a seabird. There was a lot of loose poetry in his head, of the water and of the wars; though he could recite long stanzas of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
by heart, he could not remember who my father was. He knew his daughter, Leonie, but recognized few others. He was living in a bathrobe in the cellar of Oranmore Castle, drinking coffee and eating chocolate ice cream. As he walked from his monastic little bed into the kitchen with the aid of ski poles, he said sweetly, “You may be an aunt, a sister, or I may not know you at all! Please forgive me if I don’t remember, for I believe that I am quite old.”

I spent a lovely afternoon touring the Galway campus of the National University of Ireland and visiting the Huston School of Film and Digital Media. Although Dad never received formal training, the Huston School is something he would have liked very much. Established in 2003 as part of NUI Galway, it occupies a building on the north side of town. I had received an honorary degree from the school in May 2005.

Jaclyn had made an appointment for us to visit St. Clerans, my beloved childhood home. This time we were invited only to the Big House, as the land had been subdivided. Where once the estate was of a piece, now there were walls, and gates, and boundaries. The stone lions outside were long gone, the fountain was still.

We walked into the main hall of the Big House; its beautiful fossiled black marble floor was carpeted wall to wall in red. We were met by Anne, a warm woman who, along with her husband, was in the process of packing up to leave St. Clerans,
which they had been running as a boutique hotel for its late owner, the TV host Merv Griffin. After Griffin’s recent death, the family had decided to move on. Anne offered us tea, and we entered the drawing room. No more pale gold, although the sunburst Dad had brought from Mexico still adorned the ceiling. Anne returned with small cakes she had baked specially, and offered me a little book about St. Clerans called
Portrait of a Manor House.
Inside there were prints and pictures of the house dating from the eighteenth century and on through Dad’s tenure. There were some quotes from Leonie King and my old playmate Mary Lynch about the grand old days. It was almost uncanny, like coming back as a ghost.

I was offered a tour of the house, and although the prospect frightened me, I agreed. Most of the furniture had been packed up except for the beds, and there were a lot of those. Every door upstairs and down led to a bedroom or a bath. The color scheme in Dad’s suite was yellow and lime green, colors that might have been good in Barbados but were somehow unthinkable without the benefit of sun. And yet the beautiful bones of the room were still in evidence. It reminded me of Greta Garbo in a bad dress.

In the St. Clerans of my youth, no other domicile was visible from any window. Now, with the subdivisions and the excesses of the eighties, the forests had been chopped down and cheap housing had sprung up all around, occupying the view from most of the windows. The Japanese bath no longer existed; nor the Grey Room; the Napoleon Room, with its splendid mahogany emperor’s bed; the Bhutan Room, with its violet walls and embroidered curtains; the Red Sitting Room; nor the pre-Columbian art gallery. Only in the Mexican tiles in the kitchen and the abandoned Waterford chandelier
suspended over the staircase were there small indelible traces of the past.

*  *  *

In the spring of 2010—in London and ensconced at Claridge’s, Dad’s favorite hotel—I introduced a beautifully restored print of
The African Queen
to members of the British Film Institute. Many friends came, including Nic Roeg and Stephen Frears. There was a Q&A after the show, with the amazing, ageless Angela Allen, who had been Dad’s script supervisor on the film. I waffled on for a bit in answer to the question “What makes this film unique?”

Stephen Frears was adamant afterward. “It’s the most conventional movie ever made,” he said. “But it took John Huston to put it in the jungle.”

CHAPTER 37

I
n New York, making
When in Rome
in March 2008, I was introduced to Michael Mayer, who had directed
Spring Awakening
on Broadway. We agreed that we would like to work together one day, but nevertheless it came as a surprise several years later when he and NBC asked me to act in a pilot for a new television series called
Smash.
It was a bright and unconventional idea for a network show—the backstory of how a musical based on Marilyn Monroe makes it to Broadway. My part would be that of the show’s producer, Eileen Rand. The contract demanded that should the show be ordered to series, I would have to commit for up to six years. I had never before played a character for that long a time.

In early March 2011, I signed on for the role of Eileen Rand and within twenty-four hours was on a plane to New York to shoot the pilot over three weeks. When I got the news a month later that the show was picked up, I returned to New York for a publicity ritual called the “upfronts,” which involved many interviews and endorsements for television affiliates. After a whirlwind forty-eight hours, I flew home to L.A. The reality of the situation sank in. I would have to leave the house in Venice that I’d built and shared with Bob and relocate to New York. What would I do about the dogs?
Seized with trepidation, I called Sue Mengers and asked if I could come over for some advice.

Sue was sitting in her usual yellow silk chair, wearing her usual kaftan and wreathed in marijuana smoke. “Tell me about it,” she ordered in a measured voice, tossing back her ash-blond mane.

“Well, Sue, I’m nervous. You see, it would be a total change of lifestyle. A series. New York. I’m just really worried.” I was pretty worked up.

Sue eyed me for a moment and, without missing a beat, growled, “Are you kidding? It’s a fucking miracle.”

I stayed for lunch. It was just the two of us in the living room. Susan Forristal always talked about re-creating Sue’s living room as a public space and calling it “Sue’s Salon.” I took measure of the color of the walls, salmon pink, and the ceiling, stormy gray like the sky in a Fragonard. I knew it would be one of the last times I would see this room, with Sue at the center of it, her little white hands with their manicured nails fumbling to light a joint with a Georgian silver table lighter.

I got up to leave and moved to kiss her goodbye. She smiled wryly and turned her cheek. “I love you,” she said. “Now beat it!”

*  *  *

On July 8, 2011, I celebrated my sixtieth birthday. Many beloved friends were there. Mary Lynch came from Galway and Joan Buck from New York; even Jack came. It was a fine evening at the house on Windward. The only element missing was Bob, which, in a way, was everything. It had never occurred to me that we would not share a future.

*  *  *

I put the house and studio up for sale and moved to New York for
Smash.

Sue was right—doing the pilot was exciting. My character Eileen Rand’s office was filmed in the glamorous Brill Building, a longtime home to some of the most powerful and prolific producers on Broadway, its windows framing the heroic tableau of the Great White Way.

When the show went to series, a perfect replica was built at our Long Island City location, and even though its windows there looked out to green screen, I always felt like a female Harold Prince, sitting in my power chair. Working in the streets of New York, in cafés, bars, restaurants, and theaters, dealing with the vagaries of bad traffic and worse weather, walking in sleet and snow with crowds milling around was a challenge, daunting but often rewarding just to get through the scenes.

One challenge of a different nature was singing a version of “September Song,” from my grandfather’s famous role in 1938’s
Knickerbocker Holiday
, for composers Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, whom I first met on
The Addams Family
when I danced “The Mamushka.”