The last thing I wanted, of course, was for Warren to see me in this state. Our relationship had always been conducted on his turf (in all those years, he’d never come to my apartment) and only when I was done up in full makeup and runway-ready outfits. But I literally couldn’t get out of bed to visit him, and he begged me to let him come over. Bored and desperate for some company, I relented. What the hell, I thought. What harm can it do? Within an hour, he was ringing the buzzer of my apartment at 100 Central Park South.
I could see the profound shock on his face the moment he walked in. Smiling tentatively, he slowly advanced toward my bed, where I sat propped up by pillows, yellow and frail, my hair a greasy mess. He stopped short of the bed and didn’t kiss me; he kept his hands clasped behind his back. We made awkward chitchat for a few minutes, and then his eyes fell on the bookshelf next to my bed, where I had placed a framed picture of Jesus Christ. Warren cleared his throat, then gestured toward the picture. “Well, maybe He can help you,” he said. “I don’t think I can.” He quietly retraced his steps and let himself out my front door.
And that, dear reader, was the last time, outside of a movie or television screen, that I ever saw Warren Beatty.
chapter 45
THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
With Sterling St. Jacques, my dance partner and lover, 1976.
The model who wants to be an actress or a singer is as much, if not more, of a cliché than the model who hooks up with a rock star. Well, then, mea culpa: I am that cliché. Born with the performing gene—witness my delight in dancing as a five-year-old for Mom and Aunt Helen’s friends—I’d nursed a desire to sing and dance professionally since high school, when Bobby Seligman had me whisper-croon Burt Bacharach tunes from the upstairs lounge at Le Club. And while I like to think that I brought an element of performance to runway work (I practically bounced down that catwalk!), I was getting frustrated with the limitations of modeling and yearned for a larger stage and a more fulfilling method of self-expression. I was always practicing, pretty much anytime, anywhere. On at least one occasion, I got the seal of approval from an authoritative source.
My friend Billie Blair and I got a kick out of singing together whenever we could. One night in Paris, after midnight, she and I were waiting at the taxi stand on Boulevard Saint-Germain in front of Le Drugstore and across the street from Café de Flore, belting out our version of “Chapel of Love,” when a private car pulled up. A black woman who looked to be about fifty rolled down the window and growled from within the depths of the backseat, “Hey, you girls are good! You should come to the studio sometime and sing with me.” Billie peered into the car, did a double take, and asked, “Wait a minute! Are you . . .”
“Nina Simone?” came the answer. “I most certainly am. And I’m hungry.” She drew out the first syllable and pronounced the word as if it were spelled with a short O: “hong-gree.” “Why don’t you gals get in and take me someplace where I can get a bite to eat?”
After we calmed down (Is she who she says she is, and did she just say what I think she said?), Billie and I conferred. Paris, alas, has never been the late-night town that New York is, and we couldn’t think of any place that would be open at that hour. Then, with a what-the-heck shrug, we piled into the car next to Miss Simone, who was sprawled across the backseat in a white fur coat (it was the middle of summer), seemingly a bit tipsy. We told the driver to take us to La Coupole on Boulevard du Montparnasse. We figured the sidewalk café might still be open, even though the actual restaurant would no longer be serving.
When we got there, we sat down at one of the outdoor tables, and Miss Simone told us she’d been living in Switzerland, and that it was a no-man’s-land and we should never, ever live there. She said she was out of money, dead broke. As if we didn’t believe her, she announced again that she was hungry—and proved it: As a waiter walked by with a tray bearing a big lobster on a plate, Miss Simone grabbed it, broke off the tail, and began gnawing on its underside. Billie and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. As with so many other moments in my life, the central thought running through my mind was: Wait till I tell Mom about this!
That episode notwithstanding, Miss Simone was one of my heroes, and her raw, soulful voice never failed to give me chills. When we parted that night—Billie and I paid the bill, and I hooked Miss Simone up with some friends of mine who helped her find a cheap place to live—she told both of us to keep singing and reminded us that she wanted to record with us sometime. I took that last part with a grain of salt, obviously, but her encouragement did strengthen my determination to make a go of it.
The trouble was, I wasn’t sure that singing was my true calling. Maybe it was acting. Or dancing, which never failed to make me feel truly alive. Or some combination of the three. All I really knew was that I wanted to express myself creatively in a way that went beyond modeling. I’d begun lessons at HB Studio in New York when I was living at Zoli’s house, and while I loved them, I had to keep a low profile about that part of my life because in the fashion world at that time, mixing modeling with the stage or screen was very much frowned upon.
In addition, my limited experiences with show business had been somewhat frustrating. I’d been cast in the opening scene of the 1975 Diana Ross movie Mahogany, for instance, and had jetted off to Rome to film on location with Berry Gordy, the director, as well as Tony Perkins, the costar and by then the husband of my old Vogue buddy Berry Berenson, who was there with him. I was looking forward to a fabulous time (the story, after all—about a poor girl from Chicago who becomes a fashion designer and then a top international model—was partly based on my life) but instead ended up feeling dejected and disillusioned. The day my scene was filmed, I was last to arrive on the set because I’d been the last among a large group of actresses to get my makeup and wardrobe done that morning. Diana Ross went ballistic and accused me of deliberately holding things up. “Just who do you think you are, Little Miss Star?” she screamed. She threatened to cut me out of the picture, but in the end my “blink and you’ll miss it” appearance stayed in. (I was less fortunate a few years later, when I had a part in another Ross film, The Wiz, and my entire scene ended up on the cutting-room floor.)
Given my batting average in both love and show business, I thought my luck had changed when I got together with Sterling St. Jacques, who seemed to embody everything I was looking for in a man, personally and professionally. I met him one night in July 1976, when I was dancing under the disco ball at Hurrah, a hot new nightclub on West Sixty-Second Street, just off Broadway. It was a who’s-who club that was difficult to get into unless you were a fashion person, a music star, or some sort of jet setter.
I had recently moved to my own apartment at 100 Central Park South, which was nearby, and I went to Hurrah often, both alone and with friends, because it was close and I loved to dance. I was turning under the disco ball by myself one night, feeling rather lonely, when I felt a hand on my back. Before I knew what was happening, I was lifted off my feet and twirled around by a very tall, breathtakingly handsome young black man with a radiant smile. It felt like the coolest carnival ride of my life. “Hello,” he said, still holding me in his arms, “my name is Sterling. Would you like to dance?”
We started to swirl around the room, and I felt as if we were flying. I was wearing one of my chiffon Stephen Burrows dresses, and the layers of fabric seemed to become part of him while we moved as one; my Charles Jourdan heels barely seemed to touch the floor. Our steps were perfectly synchronized, and then Sterling picked me up in his arms. I pretty much stayed there, through better and worse, for the next year.
Sterling was a well-known man about town, very dapper—he wore cashmere suits, expensive shoes, and diamond jewelry—and debonair. Women were always swarming around him, but until me, he had slept only with men, including a long affair with the great designer Hubert de Givenchy (whose fragrances I can never smell without thinking of Sterling). Sterling and I became a famous danci
ng couple, a kind of latter-day Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, going to all the top nightclubs together—Hurrah, Regine’s, and once it came on the scene, Studio 54—and being constantly photographed for newspapers and magazines. He was “Twirling Sterling” and I was Pat, the “top model turned dancer.” We performed together on the television show Soul Train, and at Lincoln Center for a benefit, where we were introduced by Bob Hope, the master of ceremonies, as the “best dancing couple in America.” People magazine went even further, dubbing us the “hottest couple in America.” I was in heaven, and it wasn’t long before we were engaged and Sterling moved into my apartment.
One of the collaborations that I was most excited about was a Broadway play called Let My People Come. Billed as “a sexual musical,” this risqué show celebrated sex in all its wild and wacky varieties. It had been a huge hit off-Broadway and was set to open in autumn 1976 at the Morosco Theatre on West Forty-Fifth Street (one of those small but legendary Broadway houses that later got torn down to make room for the oversize Marriott Marquis Hotel). Phil Oesterman, the director/producer, wanted to see us as a couple, so we went down to audition. That day was like a classic moment out of a forties movie (or maybe that other Broadway musical playing nearby at the Shubert Theatre, A Chorus Line), with all the dancers lined up, showing their legs, and dancing their hearts out, hoping against hope to get the part. When our names were called, we didn’t walk out onto the stage; we danced out and did our patented twirling, swirling routine.
We were cast as players in the larger company. I had about seven small parts to play, from a child in a school scene to a new dancer in a scene in which Sterling also appeared. As I mentioned, the show was all about sex, so the actors were nude in many of the scenes. I, however, refused to appear without a G-string, which Phil Oesterman agreed to. (Sterling gave me a powder-blue leather G-string with rhinestones on it—very trendy—at one of the rehearsals.)
The girls in the cast had their dressing room on one side of the theater and the boys on the other. I had my own teeny-tiny dressing room—there was barely room enough to reach into the open closet to get my costume, and every time I did, I’d be hit by wire hangers—on the top floor of the spiral staircase. I didn’t care; I loved my little stall, and I decorated it with pictures and pink cushions.
There were two months of rehearsals before the show was set to go into previews in front of live audiences, and not a soul in the fashion world knew what I was doing after work. Every evening Sterling and I would ride our bikes down Broadway from my apartment and sneak into the theater for rehearsal. I was terrified that if anyone in fashion found out about my role in this musical, I’d stop getting work as a model. The divide between the two worlds was massive back then. It was kind of like being a photo model and also walking the shows; it simply “wasn’t done.” But I’d always done it all. That’s how I liked it, and I wasn’t about to change now.
At rehearsal, I had a blast standing around the baby grand piano with the whole cast, all quite young but terrific singers and dancers. They coached me in how to hit the high notes and how to harmonize. Nothing beats the “learn while you earn” method—not that I was earning much. The pay was only about three hundred dollars a week, but I wanted to do this musical so badly that I would have worked twice as hard for half as much.
Finally, the first day of previews arrived. I was standing just behind the heavy red velvet curtains right before the first scene. I can remember looking at the hems on the curtains, almost as tall as I was, and at the way the curtains draped on the floor. The guy standing at the ropes of the curtains smiled, his face sparkling with joy. The cast was dead silent; there was no talking backstage. All of us were totally professional—no jokes, no looking around, just do your part, hit your marks, and the play will proceed like a well-oiled machine.
The orchestra was in the pit, and the music started up. The sound of the curtain slowly rising gave me my first glimpse of working live on a Broadway stage—and that was of footlights so bright I was nearly blinded. I knew the audience was there, but I couldn’t see them at all. I had no idea where Sterling was, and I felt like I would jump out of my own skin from the excitement. Then we all started to move into our positions as the first dance number began.
My tap dancing had improved somewhat, but I was still insecure. Shuffle-ball kick, one-two-three, circle round, then left stage, downstage, upstage, jump, and circle again. It was dizzying and dazzling and perfectly timed: I knew that if I missed a single step, I would screw it up for the other dancers. We danced the first number, ran into the wings for our next costume change, scrambled up the spiral stairs to the dressing room for another change and makeup, and hurried back down the stairs and onto the stage again. This up-and-down-the-stairs thing was so difficult that I finally convinced Phil Oesterman to please let me change just behind the stage.
At night after each performance, Sterling and I would have dinner at Sardi’s, where our show had reserved a table across from the one reserved by the show Rita Moreno was starring in. It was fantastic. I would wave at her and she would wave back. It was just like high school, with all the various groups at “their” lunch tables in the cafeteria, but instead these were Broadway stars. I would look around Sardi’s at all of the framed caricatures of Broadway celebrities done by Alex Gard and feel as though I were in a dream made real. John and Ethel Barrymore, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. And now I was here, too—not on the wall (though a girl could dream, couldn’t she?) but in the flesh, often until the wee hours of the morning because Phil would have notes for the whole cast. He’d go over that night’s show, pointing out flaws in the performances or places that could be tightened.
By the time those sessions were over—around two in the morning—I would be ravenously hungry. I was on what turned out to be an ill-advised diet of steak and grapefruit. Given the multitude of dance numbers in the show, I sometimes felt close to starving. I was all muscle, no body fat whatsoever, and when I did eat, I’d devour a huge steak for strength and drink grapefruit juice backstage between scenes.
It ended in disaster. In around the third month of previews, I was in the back row of the chorus during the second act. Standing in the back gave me a chance to rest up for my next dance number. Suddenly, I started to sweat so profusely that my eyelashes popped loose on the edges. Then I felt a sharp pain in my back just under my shoulder blades, as if a Mack truck had plowed into me, and I fell backward. Luckily, the actor standing next to me caught me and helped me stay standing until the song was finished. That was when I blacked out. When I woke up, I was on a stretcher, on my way into an ambulance. One of the dressers came with me to the hospital. Sterling stayed behind. The show must go on, after all.
Both my kidneys had blown out because I had kidney stones, probably the result of all the acid in the grapefruit juice I’d been drinking night and day. I was bedridden for three months, stir-crazy and unable to do any kind of work. I simply sat in bed and healed; in the meantime, Sterling stayed in the show until it closed after 108 performances, all of them previews. It never officially opened.
At the time I was devastated, but it didn’t take long for me to see that I was lucky to get out. All that work for a paltry three hundred bucks a week? What was I thinking? True, modeling wasn’t the most creative work in the world, but I needed to make a living and couldn’t jeopardize that. Fortunately, I got better in time for the fall fashion season in New York, so I was able to walk the collections and recoup the money I’d lost while convalescing.
In the meantime, Sterling and I had a beautiful affair—until we didn’t. We held on for nearly a year and a half, but ultimately, I had to accept the deeply painful fact that, despite our deep devotion to each other, his sexual preference was clearly for other men. I craved intimacy in every sense of the word, and part of him lay forever out of reach, even on the occasions when we did have sex. One night we had a huge fight, ostensibly over the whereabouts of two diamonds he h
ad given me—one in a ring for my finger and another in a pendant to hang around my neck—and he disappeared. I saw him around after that from time to time, and then he truly disappeared, moving to Europe and dying in 1984 from AIDS, though his death was never officially confirmed. That was pure Sterling: Even in death, he retained a certain mystery.
I made a few other forays into show business after my kidney-stone fiasco. I sang occasionally at New York’s Mudd Club (the “underground” venue where punk groups like the Ramones first found fame) in the early eighties, appeared in a 1981 episode of the television show The Love Boat in a cameo with Halston (an experience that brought us closer than ever), delivered a killer rendition of “Makin’ Whoopie” at an event with the great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton in 1983, and went to Rio de Janeiro to make a sexy Portuguese-language crime drama called Rio Babilônia (released in 1983, it has since become a kind of cult movie). All of these gigs were fun—some more than others, of course—but nothing I tried ever stirred the unparalleled zest for performing that I had during my brief romp on the Great White Way.
chapter 46
ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY)
Posing for John Taylor, Adel Rootstein’s master sculptor, 1977. What a privilege to be made into a mannequin.
I guess you could call it an experiment, and like many experiments, it failed. I had spent my early twenties getting my career in order, and relationships were secondary in my mind, at best. I wanted love and passion as much as the next girl, but my adolescent obsession with Matthew had introduced a note of caution into my heart: Grand passions were awfully draining, so watch out. Still, as I moved into my late twenties, I began to think more and more about how wonderful it would be to have a life mate with whom I could have a family. (My mother’s warning was always ringing in my brain: “Do not miss your chance to have children,” she would tell me, and I’d wonder if she was sorry she hadn’t had more than just me.) Like most women of my generation, I was weaned on happily-ever-after movies and books and truly believed that if and when I ever got married, it would be the most romantic moment of my life, a sign that I had finally found “the one.” To say that it didn’t work out that way is an understatement.
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