Whatever...Love Is Love (6 page)

John had a wonderful family, one of the first modern families I have ever witnessed. His modern family consisted of his stepchildren, an ex-wife, and her new husband, all of whom he adored. They lived in Canada so he didn't see them that much. He had many friends, his best friend being the late Mike Nichols. John was so respected in our business that he was almost revered. People speak of him as the most honest gentleman who ever worked in Hollywood. I was lucky to meet him some years before he died. By then, it was mostly just his dear friend Martha and I who spent time with John. We always shared our deepest thoughts with each other, either on the phone or in person.

I am going to share some of those conversations with you. Here's the backstory though: We originally had the conversations because I was developing a character based on him for a novel that I was writing at the time. We sat at my kitchen table in Venice for hours and days as I recorded some of our best talks. After John passed away, I went back to them, and I realized just how profound they were. I decided they needed to be shared, not as fiction, but as the real words of a man who had helped me accept all of the pieces of myself by sharing with me all of the pieces of himself.

At this point in my life, every man I met was the one. John understood completely.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I was in ‘obsession' for more than half my life.”

When we talked about love versus passion, or if they were the same thing or mutually exclusive, he said, “Romantic love may be an illusion, but it is a powerful one. When you look back, you see that those guys are all the same, interchangeable really. One was not better than the other. The common denominator is you. You bring the passion to the table. It's you who drives it. Remember that.”

Even when I had the loveliest live-in boyfriend, I was not satisfied. I was all about the chase. I loved the beginning of our courtship, the not-knowing phase, but once we settled into the routine of watching
Hoarders
at night and doing Jackson's homework together, the intensity wore off. I told John once that my boyfriend was a great companion. John said, “If you want a companion, why don't you just get a dog?”

John was funny, too.

I was driven, yet ashamed of my sexuality back then. He embraced and celebrated it, as he had with all the women he had been in love with in his life. And there were many. Some were real, some just fantasy. He constantly affirmed to me that there was nothing to be ashamed of by being a woman driven my passion.

“You are a highly sexualized woman, like all the women that you love and admire. You are Anaïs. By the way, did I ever tell you I made out with her in a closet in the Hamptons? She was hot for it even at sixty-five.”

I wanted to be that woman, but at the same time I wanted to be with someone who loved and cherished me and who would never let me go.

“I love and cherish you.”

“I know, but it's not the same thing. I don't have sex with you.”

“If my goddamned dick worked we probably would be.”

I visualized Anaïs Nin and how cool she was to live in her body and mind at the same time. She influenced my behavior sexually. With some men I even tried to be Anaïs, as highly charged, as reckless and sexually fearless. One day, in a manic state, I sat crying at 6
A.M.
on a balcony at my rental apartment in Vancouver, drinking a scotch and talking to John on the phone. There was a man in the next room who I was working with, doing the push-pull dance. He had a girlfriend back in New York. We had had a terrible night, with me withholding so he would come forward, and my Anaïs act just wasn't working. I felt rejected. I knew he just wanted sex and what I really wanted was sex
and
love.

“But he is rejecting me, because he has a girlfriend,” I said.

“Bullshit. He can't keep his hands off you. You're a lot better off than the model girlfriend who is at home, waiting for him to stop fooling around with you and give her a call. He's not a bad guy,” John replied. “Just not plausible for you. You're right in that you made him up in your head. Who is he really?”

John was right; I had blown him up in my head to be someone or something much more important than he was. I thought he, like most of the other men, had the power to save me. I should have known better when I caught him jerking off to his own image on the Internet.

John and I would sit in a restaurant for hours as everyone looked at us as if we were having an illicit affair. The rich, dirty old man and the pretty movie star. We were used to it. If people only knew the truth, that he was completely impotent and that I was only attracted to young assholes. He had had his share of young asshole women over the years, so we had that in common, too.

“So this was back in the sixties, before you were born,” John said. “This woman was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Anyway, I fell in love, or should I say, I fell in anxiety.

“When we were together, it was brilliant in the beginning. She was funny and charming and made me feel funny and charming. She said, on one of our first nights together, that we should just get married. I took it to mean that she was crazy about me, but then she wouldn't take my calls for a week. When she did call, I would run to her. She would suck me in with ‘you're the only one' and all that shit, then she would drink a bottle of Jack Daniel's and fall asleep drunk. I really thought if she loved me, I would finally be someone.”

When I asked John how he finally got over his obsession, he told me it took him about a year. He went to a healer, a woman he had heard about in Burbank. She was a nice-looking, middle-aged woman with blue eyes and white hair. She had him close his eyes and do a meditation for about an hour. He was bored out of his mind and all he could think about was the girl with the Jack Daniel's. And when he finally opened his eyes, the healer blew what she said was white light in his face and said, “Everything is now fine.”

All he could think was, “Yeah right, asshole, how much do I owe you?”

It wasn't until he got into the elevator that he realized that he wasn't thinking about his obsession for the first time in a year. From that day on, his feelings were gone. He didn't know how it happened, because he didn't even believe in the white light; he just knew something had changed.

“When the anxiety was gone, so was my ‘love' for her.”

I asked him how I could find this lady. I needed her.

“Beats me,” he replied. “That was thirty years ago. She's probably dead.”

But he reminded me I didn't need this woman, I just needed to stop giving men my power. I wish I had listened.

Years later we were together, talking about
another
man I was involved with. I was again looking for a powerful man who would take me away from all my pain. I was humiliated that I had gone to his bed once again with his sweet cunning words, and then he left and didn't call for a week.

Once again John listened. Once again he had wise things to say.

“Humiliation means I should be ashamed of myself because I've done something wrong. Humility is to want to be something beyond what is actually possible for a human being to be. There is no value judgment in humility. You want to have a magical effect on him. I mean, you are valuable, but no God. No woman will fix him. Every time you
think
of him see a line with way too much intensity in it. A high-tension wire. You are trying to fix him and he is trying to get you to fix him. That is divine, not human. Take that intensity and point it upwards. To God.”

The reason he knew all this stuff wasn't because he had read about it in books, he had lived it. One day, he explained to me how he came to do what he did, and how he decided to follow a different path. “I was head of a huge production company at the time. I have no idea why. I always hated the movie business, but I was good at it. But one day after too many years of the bullshit, I woke up and realized that I was so unhappy. So, I decided to go off to an island by myself and figure out what
would
make me happy.”

“And you discovered that you like reading and sleeping the best, right?” I asked, because he had told me that these were his favorite activities many, many times.

He laughed. “That's right. But it took me years to figure that out. It took a long time, walking the beach every day, for me to have my breakthrough.”

“What?” I wanted to know everything about this breakthrough, because I wanted one, too. Maybe if he told me the meaning of life, I thought, I would find out what would make me truly happy.

“It was just my normal morning walk. A beautiful, cold day. I don't remember what I was thinking. Probably nothing. And then I just started to cry. I looked around me and realized that I was a part of the whole universe. It was like an explosion. Like an orgasm.”

“How long did it last?” I asked him, fascinated.

“About three minutes.”

“Did you ever have it again?”

“Nope.”

“So what was the point?”

“Hell if I know. But I did know in that moment that I had tapped into some sort of enlightenment and only wanted to continue living in it.”

John always could boil things down to their sweetest essence.

Some years after we met, John was diagnosed with cancer. One of my last memories of him was his birthday before he died. Martha and I sat at his hospital bed. He hadn't spoken for days. I brought cupcakes and a CD player that looked like an old gramophone. We sat by his side and played jazz. John had started out playing in a jazz band in Greenwich Village back in the 1950s, and he loved that music. And we danced for him. He hadn't eaten for a month, but he opened his eyes. “Happy birthday!!” we screamed. He smiled and took a bite of the cupcake I fed him.

I will always recall my last conversation with John. I remember squeezing his hand. When he moved, I held it tighter.

“Here's what I know about you,” I said. “You are the strongest man I've ever met. You left home at twelve to become a bus driver and ended up running a movie studio. You are definitely the funniest person I have ever met, the only one who told me that you would actually order me a pizza if I ever tried to kill myself. You always knew I loved pizza the most.

“You're the only one I can really trust with all of myself. How can I tell you what you mean to me? When you came into my life years ago, I was on the verge of another suicidal depression. A depression that drove me to the place of questioning everything I was. Was I good enough? Was the life I was living enough? Enough, enough. I was always searching for more and more ways to validate myself, to show myself how much I mattered. With you it was different. I didn't need to prove anything. You loved me for who I was and accepted me unconditionally. You never tired of my need for reassurance.

“You make me feel safe. Like no one can touch me. Like no matter what happens, there is someone who loves me. When I don't speak to you for a day I feel edgy and just not right. Whatever guys I have been through, you've never left me and never judged me. What else can I say? I love you. I don't want you to die. I couldn't handle it and wouldn't want to go on without you.”

Martha called to tell me that he had died. I was numb and didn't cry until days later. I didn't go to his memorial. I didn't want to see him as some monument. I wanted to remember him in the quiet moments, the shared moments. I also wouldn't have known what to say. How could I explain to a crowd of John's friends and family how deep our relationship had been, all that John had taught me? It was a relationship I just couldn't explain. I just wanted to remember the secret he shared with me.

“Wanna know the secret?” John whispered to me once with his eyes sparkling.

Of course I did. If anyone knew the secret to it all, it would be John.

“The secret is,” he continued, “there is no secret. You are lovable just the way you are. We all walk around thinking that there is something wrong with us and that we are bad and unlovable and that everyone knows it, but the truth is there is nothing wrong with us. You are perfect. And they think so as well.”

Am I perfect? In his eyes I was. Thank God I found him.

6

AM I A GOOD MOM?

A
re you a good parent or the parent your child needs?

You do not have to be a parent of a child to answer this question. Your children can be your animals or nieces or nephews. It's anyone who you feel responsible for. Oprah doesn't have a child per se, but she is like a mother to many of us in the world.

Riding in our black, first edition, not-so-comfortable Prius, my then six-year-old son, Jackson, asked me an important question. Right after I just gave a guy who cut me off the finger and yelled out the window, “Fuck you, you fucking asshole!”

“Why do you curse like that and why did you yell at that man?” my son asked me. I was a little ashamed of my behavior and went silent. He continued, “And why do you smoke and be in movies? You're not like other moms.” Jackson was angry and defensive when he spoke in his six-year-old way. While trying to come up with a reply that would make me sound like a good mom, a thought leapt into my head.