All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I WAS GROWING UP and there were expectations of me as a female actor. The world of make-believe was beginning to cause unrest, internal conflict with my identity as an androgynous woman. Al Waxman cast me as Maggie in Maggie’s Secret, a CBS Schoolbreak Special, the story of a girl with two alcoholic parents and a sexually abusive father. After reading the script, I knew I was meant to be Maggie, could express all those pent-up feelings from childhood and get paid for it. Good medicine.

  Maggie’s Secret was initially written by Margot Kidder, a fact that slipped from the page; the production ended up with male names on all the titles. I wanted to know the truth behind the story, but I didn’t dare ask. I knew only that Al Waxman was directing and I was hired. I wanted to speak with Margot because I felt like she understood. She was Lois Lane, an idol, a truth-teller. But I was told not to mention her name. I spoke to her in my head because I hadn’t met another female actor who wrote these types of stories. Instead, I was surrounded by men who wanted me to tell the story their way.

  I had a type of bravery, or stubbornness you could call it. After a wardrobe meeting I was ushered into Al’s office. He closed the door and screamed at me.

  “They wanted to fire you, Joanne, because you won’t wear the miniskirt,” he said angrily, sitting behind his desk. “I had to stick up for you and tell them that I knew you were the right one for the part, that you would wear the clothes. If you don’t want to get fired, Joanne, you have to compromise or you will lose the part.”

  Al was like a father and larger than life, a talented man whom many adored. He was Lieutenant Bert Samuels of Cagney & Lacey, but he was particularly kind to me, the closest I might get to having a film father like all my movie mothers. But I pushed back, like any child.

  “But … why can’t I do that scene without having to wear such a small skirt?”

  “It’s the network, Joanne. I don’t care, but you have to do this. I won’t be able to fight for you if you keep saying no.”

  I loved him even though I didn’t like what he was saying and he had no idea how much I truly hated being feminine, being forced to wear clothes that made me feel like an imposter, even if it was for a character. I couldn’t fight the man who stuck up for me, and I didn’t want to lose my role. I wanted to be Maggie.

  Al knew somehow that I was a lesbian, maybe because his own daughter would eventually come out — and not only did she come out, but she transitioned into a man. I didn’t know her at the time, but I would meet her, and I would then understand why he had fought for me.

  “But, Al, why don’t you wear a skirt?” I asked.

  “I won’t answer that” was all he said, with authority. The only way I knew how to express how I felt was to compare what it might be like for a straight male to always be asked to wear skirts or sexually revealing clothes when they were only comfortable in pants because those expressed their gender. But it wasn’t expected that they should have to wear skimpy clothes.

  I had to make a decision. Hollywood had no patience for feminism or young women with opinions or non-binary people. There was no language for it yet, and I could be replaced.

  “Okay, Al, I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good girl. Now go back to wardrobe right away. They are waiting for you.”

  I continued to meet the demands of the industry — auditioned, worked, hid my lesbianism — but I also had enormous amounts of fun, days when I spilled my guts with laughter.

  I got a part on Men, a show with Ted Wass and Saul Rubinek. I was beyond excited to work with Ted, whom I remembered as Danny from the comedy Soap. It was hard not to laugh on set working with a group of comedians, always “on.” I played the precocious teen runaway on the streets of Boston. In one scene I was in bed with a man. I had little flesh-coloured strips of sticky tape over my nipples, as I was supposed to be topless and in bed with this adult. But somehow it didn’t bother me, being nearly naked. No one cared on this set and none of these men tried to make a pass at me. Aside from continuing to pretend to be heterosexual, I was having the time of my life on sets.

  Carla tried to cast me in another film with her while I was shooting Men, but they would not allow me to shoot two shows at the same time. It was another short film, one that would eventually be turned into a feature, and she would catapult herself into the film and television market, becoming a star in her own right. Her light would shine while she was in the closet, living a secretive life, and I was her secret. I was living a double life, too, but I was willing to risk it all to profess my love. I was “arriving,” or so I thought. But it wasn’t that simple. I was just in love for the first time with a woman. I had had two first loves, and I was hoping my second first-love relationship wouldn’t end as tragically as the first, but the closet was getting too small for comfort.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WEEKS TURNED INTO MONTHS, which turned into two years of dating. I was twenty-one years old. Carla had moved twice since we started dating and I was still in the studio on Parliament. I added new furnishings and a small pool table and filled the walls with charcoal drawings I sketched of friends from photographs or of people I’d worked with on film sets, trying to capture moments to remember. There were no phones with cameras, and film was expensive to develop, only to be used on special occasions, birthdays, wrap parties, trips.

  I worked with actors and stars like Anne Meara, Amanda Plummer, Ally Sheedy, Helen Shaver, Brooke Shields, Whoopi Goldberg, Wendy Crewson, Cynthia Dale, and Marlo Thomas. Marlo was playing a role based on the life of Sharon Simone, who had survived sexual abuse by her father, a child-abuse investigator in the FBI. Being the “expert,” he expertly knew how to get away with raping his four daughters. Meeting the real Sharon that day on set, I wanted to thank her for being so brave, but I was tongue-tied and merely shook her hand.

  I was socially awkward, knew dialogue, memorized phrases that did not require sharing real stories or conversation, and wasn’t good with small talk. But I truly wanted to scream at the world to wake up and get its shit together.

  “I hate you,” I screamed over and over at the top of my lungs at Marlo Thomas for hours on set one night, until all the desire for screaming was zapped right out of me.

  “You’re a star,” Marlo said. “You’ve got something special.”

  I called it special “rage,” but I didn’t feel like a good actor, more like an imposter. I thought I was faking it, that any day someone was going to realize I was a fake, that I couldn’t truly be any good at being an actor, that I only pretended to be good at my job. Would that make me doubly talented for impersonating an actor while auditioning and playing a role, or did it just mean I had some sort of mental illness? I settled on mental illness.

  Shirley Douglas was another Canadian icon. She personified female power, but I was too young to know how she managed to achieve hers, and it was only some time later that I learned her father was one of the great Canadians who created and fought for health care in Canada, Tommy Douglas. Good genes.

  All these women kept me motivated, though they didn’t know it. We shared secrets about being female, about earnings, sexism, objectification.

  Actors found intimacies in six-week turnovers. Nothing ever lasted in film. Relationships formed quickly and ended just as abruptly, but I was used to that as a life pattern. The women did not disappoint, no matter the false narrative of the catty woman. Hateful women existed, but I would make them invisible and focus on the loving and intelligent women — and there were plenty of those. It was the men I needed to be careful of, middle-aged actors and directors who sought us out, particularly on location, in the north of BC, or in hotel rooms in Chicoutimi, Quebec, or Winnipeg, in those small towns where nothing remotely glamorous existed and there was too much liquor and men who were up to no good, men on location with young girls and women.

  One night in Quebec, I was playing poker with two actors in their midthirties. The men had invited me to their room to play poker
, which, after cocaine and too much whisky, turned into them suggesting strip poker on the carpeted floor beside the bed. I was uncomfortable but went along with it anyway, knowing that I would not reveal my flesh. By the time I had taken off my socks, jacket, and belt, had pulled my bra through the sleeves of my T-shirt, I knew it was time to go. The men were stealing glances at each other, as if I couldn’t pick up on their cues. I was young, but not as naive as they thought. I bolted, felt around inside my pockets for my hotel-room key, and shut the door behind me, alone.

  There was also the middle-aged, married actor who played my high-school teacher in one production, who stuck his tongue down my throat after months of friendship. Maybe I was naive. There were many men like this, actors, directors, producers. I was taken to a strip club in northern BC. I was a misplaced girl in a bar, watching a grown woman twirl on a pole, exposing every part of her body while I sat between our director and the lead actor, the “teacher.”

  “Takes a long time to be as good as she is — lotta skill,” the director said in his cockney accent, turning to me. His white hair and white skin were blotchy from the days of exposure to the cold northern winter, where temperatures reached minus forty. We were all freezing.

  I slept with a bottle of booze every night, and on rare occasions, I could reach Carla, thousands of kilometres away. I missed her. The night I was taken to the strip club, I fell asleep wondering how long it took to learn to point your naked leg and stretch it from a pole into the splits. I had tried to focus on her face and not her body. It was void of expression. How many years had it taken to learn that skill?

  “Carla, I need to talk,” I said from my hotel room in Fort Nelson. I was on my bed, the phone receiver in one hand, my other hand wrapped around a bottle. I could hear my castmates in the pool, drunk beyond my doors.

  “You know it’s the middle of the night, right?” she said, not mad, but I had woken her up.

  “I’m sorry, Carla. I’ll hang up.”

  “No, don’t, it’s okay. You okay? You drunk?”

  “Yes, but it feels good to hear your voice.” It was true. Her voice was soft and familiar. “I love you, Carla.”

  “I love you.”

  Even if our relationship was secret, it was still safe, warm.

  “Did you shoot today?” Carla asked.

  “Yeah. Depressing here. Saw a woman strip tonight and thought of you.”

  “What?”

  “I mean … you know what I mean,” I said. Many women stripped to get through college, including Carla. I changed the subject. “My mother nearly let me take my clothes off on-camera when I was a child.”

  “Your mother was crazy, and anyway, the only woman you need to take your clothes off for is me,” Carla said.

  I knew it was a joke, but it triggered something inside I could not run from. Carla was old enough to be my mother, but it wasn’t that, it was the power imbalance between us, the secret. Childhood abuse was secretive, as was my relationship to Carla. I felt sick.

  “I have to go.” I hung up and threw up. Memories were tricky things.

  When I got back from BC, Carla and I spent as much time together as we could afford, but we were rarely sober, except during the daylight hours. Carla read lines and I prepared for auditions as we snuggled under blankets watching De Niro, Foster, and Streep, alone in our cocoon.

  “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well, who else you lookin’ at? Huh?” I was up on my feet in my underwear and T-shirt, pointing a finger-gun as if in the scene. Carla pulled me down toward her.

  “You fucking nut bar, you’re never going to get a part as a Vietnam vet.”

  “Well, rather be the vet than be the prostitute … again. I’m sick of prostitute parts.”

  Where were the Mary Tyler Moore shows? Even the oldie seventies shows from my childhood had better roles: Maude, Laverne & Shirley, One Day at a Time.

  “Well, stop acting like a thug and maybe you’ll get to audition for other parts.”

  “Oh yeah, like Anne of Green Gables? They’re not gonna hire me!” I struck a pose, then wiggled around the room before I dropped on the bed laughing. “I suppose there are other roles, like girls in the 1800s in mountain villages with a church. We should write a comedy and plant a bar like the Hose right inside the 1800s, and all the church girls come out at night to meet the butches of the 1980s.”

  Carla laughed, her lips lifted in one corner. I loved her lopsided smile.

  “Why can’t we be together more?” I asked. Normally she ignored this question, though it hovered above us like a heavy storm cloud. She looked at me lovingly, her fingers combing through my hair. I knew what it meant: it was to quiet the conversation, shift the action.

  We stayed in bed on Sundays, drank coffee, read poetry to each other. I took out my copy of poems by Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. Carla read out loud, sprawled on the bed. We talked about the meaning of each sentence.

  “Oh, wait.” I retrieved a notepad from the top drawer of the nightstand. “I wrote this for you after you fell asleep. Tell me if you like it. ‘I’ll drink your tears to share the pain until your eyes are dry again. I’ll never let you fall asleep without saying goodnight, without holding you tight.’”

  Love felt dangerous, because now there was something to lose.

  “Do you think it’s possible to love someone too much?” Carla sipped water out of the jug that sat on the nightstand beside me, next to the empty Häagen-Dazs container. The window was half shut, the sun’s rays shining above our faces.

  “Like I love you?” I asked.

  “You’re such a cornball.… Do you? Do you think you love me too much?”

  “No, I love you enough,” I said.

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough that I’d do anything for you, stay quiet for you, sing for you, even stop eating for you.”

  “Well, you don’t have to do that for me, you dingbat, you already starve yourself.” She swatted the top of my head. “I should publish the fucking book on dating someone with an eating disorder,” she said as she touched my stomach, her fingers rubbing my skin.

  “Ha, that’s funny, and I don’t have an eating disorder. I eat. Okay, I know I’m not like a regular person, but you love me, right?” I rolled on top of her, looked into her shimmering eyes. The rays of light shone on her face as the light slowly faded from the sky, from us, into dusk.

  “Of course I do,” Carla said, and kissed me lightly. “I just can’t always be open about it, out there. I wouldn’t get work if producers and companies knew I was a lesbian.”

  “I hate that we have to hide inside our apartments or get drunk in pubs and places where no one will know us. Makes me feel like something is wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. But people would wonder why I’m dating such a young actress, too, you know.”

  I slid off Carla’s body, reached out toward the night table to grab a cigarette and lit up, my hands shaking until the match went out. I inhaled deeply and filled my lungs with smoke. There was the element of control between us that I didn’t know how to name, her control. If I challenged it too much, it could end our relationship. Tears fell from my face as I flicked the ashes in the ashtray, looking away from her.

  “Oh, come on … come here, Jimmy Dean.” The nickname usually made me grin, but not then.

  “I’m not a kid, Carla, and I’m not just some actress, and I don’t feel bad about being a lesbian.”

  She blinked and looked away, folded her arms on top of herself, away from me. “Well, I can’t take a chance on losing everything I’ve built as a director, losing everything I’ve worked for. Do you want me to fail?” She asked it accusingly, her body rigid. All the softness had vanished.

  “What? What are you talking about? I don’t want you to fail. I want you to be successful and happy, and I want us to be out there and let people see that we love each other.”

  “Well, that’s not reality. You’re living in some strange land that has nothing to
do with the world,” Carla got out of bed and walked away. I got right out of bed and followed her.

  “And the illusion of a life you’re living is just that, Carla, an illusion. Tell me, what does pretending and lying have to do with living in the real world?”

  She turned around quickly and pushed me up against the wall, kissing me. I felt her tears on my cheek. I wrapped my arms around her waist and caressed her head, held her.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re not going to lose anything. I won’t tell anyone, and I’ll pretend we aren’t —”

  I didn’t want her to feel forced to choose between her career and me, but secretly, or selfishly, I wanted to be chosen. She chose her film partner, her manager, her work, apartment, her city, and I was her girlfriend. I had chosen and fallen for her, intoxicated by discovery, touch, companionship. I wanted to believe in love. I wanted her to love me enough that she could choose me like she chose everything else and have it be known, be public. I wanted to be out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CARLA WAS DRINKING more and wouldn’t sleep with me unless she was drunk. A few days after our conversation about being out we were on her black leather couch in her new apartment, holding each other and kissing. She pushed me down on the couch slowly, and while lying on top of me, she brought her lips close to my ear and whispered, “We’re going to go to hell for this.”

  I sat up, uncertain that I had heard her correctly.

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  She looked at me as if she had shocked herself, too, with that phrase. “I’m sorry,” she said and rubbed her eyes with her hands and covered her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  “We’re not going to hell, Carla.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carla said again without looking at me. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm softly. Her eyes moved up to meet mine. “But why choose this, right?”

  “I like who we are.”

  “Do you think you are … because of what your mother did?” she asked, so calmly.