“Baltimore,” I answered.
As though she knew something I didn’t know, she smiled and shrugged and said, “Baltimore? Oh, okay.”
That was all, but in that “Oh, okay” I heard something I didn’t understand.
The morning she died I woke up with a start. Then the phone rang. It was Mother’s nurse in California who said, “Your mom just took her last breath.” Suddenly I felt Mother next to me in my rented house in Baltimore. The TV suddenly switched on to static. I pulled myself out of bed. Then I heard her talk to me in my head. She wanted me to drive to our old house in Virginia. I blindly got dressed, called the assistant director, told him I wouldn’t be in that day, and got in the car. My mind was tumbling so fast. I remembered her expression when she said Baltimore. Then I realized—Mom and Dad had met in Baltimore. They had married in Baltimore. She taught dramatics there at Maryland College. Dad had attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And now I felt her next to me as I drove from this city of firsts for her, realizing this was the only way she could come back and die here. Because I was going to be in Baltimore, she had computed her decision to leave at the same time.
I should have recognized that light in her eye, I said to myself. I should have remembered that “Oh, okay” never meant yes with her. Yet if I had stayed in California with her, perhaps it would have prevented her from squaring the circle of her life.
I got in my rented car and went to our old house in Virginia. It looked the same. I sat in the car for a while and I felt Mother speak to me in my mind. Not in words, but in feelings. She urged me to go into the house to a drawer in an old cabinet and retrieve a letter. It was a drawer I had not known about. I opened it and found a letter she had written to me twenty-five years before. I couldn’t tell if it was a letter she had never mailed or a copy of one she had mailed. I opened it with real trepidation and read it.
The letter had to do with my daughter and my husband. Mother was warning me about certain things. I broke down and cried. Had I understood that letter twenty-five years before, it would have altered the course of my life.
I was eighteen years old and working in the chorus of a Broadway musical when I met my husband, Steve Parker. It happened after the show one night as I sat with some girlfriends in the restaurant bar across the street from the stage door. As soon as Steve walked in and sat down, I knew my life was to take a new course. Yes, he was handsome, almost overly charming, intelligent, and had azure eyes of a depth and perception that touched me immediately. But more than that, our connection had the shock of destiny to it. I have looked back many times at what happened between us—the things the letter warned me about—and I still conclude that it was meant to be and there was nothing I could have done to alter or avoid the experience we were intended to have together.
Now I cried as I walked through the house feeling Mother and her wisdom in every room. Feeling how right she had been about so many things and how wrong I had been in not listening to her more. She slowly guided me through the house as though she was taking one last walk with me. This was the person who had given me life and now she was proceeding to another level of her own. It was the last time I would see the place as we had lived in it, and I felt we were doing it together.
I stopped in the living room with the white sofa and the red pillows—she loved that color combination. I sat down on it the way she used to. I crossed my legs as she used to. I felt that I was her. I thought about how much she had wanted to be a recognized actress. How much she had lived through me. I thought of her soft, measured voice reading me poetry. Why didn’t she pursue her dream? I wondered. Then I felt her say, “Because I wanted to be a mother more.”
It seemed so simple as I sat there on her sofa, reflecting on who she really was and might have been. Then I felt her tell me to go back to work, not to hold up production, not to keep people waiting. Again, the show had to go on. Warren and I might have believed we were not from a show-business family, but now in retrospect, because we have both lived out the unfulfilled fantasies of our parents, I think we had a greater inspirational motivation than the Barrymores or the Redgraves. And Mother and Daddy were just as theatrical in real life. They often seemed to perform their relationship, as though, in the absence of a real audience, they made our household the stage.
I sat for hours in the living room sobbing, feeling and remembering some of their dramas, which even transcended earthly reality! I went into the bedroom where Mother said Daddy had visited her soon after he passed on. She said she smelled his pipe and saw his face quite clearly. It wasn’t entirely comforting, she said, because she wanted to be free of him and felt that even after death he was observing her. I went to the underwear drawer where she claimed he had placed a hidden valentine in between his socks for her. Valentine’s Day had been their special day, so she was never really certain whether the valentine was placed there before or after his death. She was perfectly prepared to accept this “after death” theatricality as proof that she would never be free of him. I walked away from the underwear drawer thinking that Mother had her theories of life after death and I had mine. One last time I passed through all the rooms and out of the house. I knew I’d never return. I didn’t think she would either. And she didn’t. For a theatrical life-after-death gesture she followed me back to Baltimore.
This is what happened.
When I returned to Baltimore that night, I lay in bed watching the swan outside my window, because it reminded me of her.
The house I was renting had an alarm system, but I didn’t know that and therefore hadn’t turned it on. Suddenly the alarm went off. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t know how to turn it off. Then I heard Mother in my head again. “The switch is in the closet in the guest room,” she said. I got up, went to the guest room, opened the closet, and there it was. I turned it off and got back into bed. I turned on the TV set. I couldn’t get a single station without static. Then the light in the living room, where I had placed the letter and other treasures retrieved from Mother’s belongings, began to dim slowly and come on again full force. When I walked into the room I could feel Mother. Once more the light dimmed and came back again full force.
She had always claimed to have an electromagnetic field that prevented her from wearing regular watches. They speeded up on her, she said.
Now I actually felt she was using her force field to communicate with me. It was her way of saying, “I’m still here.”
That night was full of theatrical bells and whistles, lights and static. She exhibited all the special effects she longed for in her own life. As a matter of fact, by morning I was so amused at her antics that I nearly went outside and got the hose so I could turn the water on her and come full circle.
I feel that I came to a real resolution in my relationship with my mother. It took nearly sixty years. She was my stage mother, my insistent inspiration, the person whom I acted for, and in the end the one who released me from her own dreams. I would be an actress for myself now, and she could move on to another level of understanding.
2
BREAKING LOOSE
TO FLY
When I first came to Hollywood it was difficult for me to rehearse a scene full out because I didn’t want to take up the crew’s time and I was embarrassed and shy when the lights weren’t on me. The lights gave me permission, somehow, to indulge myself in the emotional requirements of the scene because the parameters were clear then, the boundaries drawn. The lights validated me. In the light I was to be observed. They were the observers. Then I could do it. But otherwise I was shy. This way of working was not good because no one really knew what I was going to do when it was time to shoot the scene. The crew couldn’t focus the lights, the camera people weren’t sure how I’d move. And the other actors didn’t know what emotional pitch to expect … an example of how shyness and undeservability can be excruciatingly unprofessional. I remember the day I broke through it all. It was
a picture directed by Daniel Mann called Hot Spell, with Shirley Booth and Anthony Quinn. It was a drama.
The set was quiet, the camera was too close for comfort (no lights were on). One or two of the crew lit cigarettes. Wardrobe sipped coffee and gossiped under their breath. Makeup and hair lurked behind the camera. The ceilings of the soundstage were so high, the walls so cavernously far away, that I felt insignificant and violated by the attention trained on me, but I knew the time had come to “act.” I had to let myself go. I had to.
My character’s boyfriend had just left me, and Shirley Booth (my mother) was trying to comfort me. Shirley walked into the bedroom, and I thought, This is it. I gathered my courage and went for broke. I launched into the scene, screaming and crying. Crashing around the bedroom set, I sobbed into my pillow, which I could barely see because the set was so lonely and dark. The more I got into the scene, the higher my voice rose. It stunned me that I seemed to revert to girlhood. Tears poured down my face. I could barely breathe. Shirley Booth was impressed and so was everyone else. The crew applauded, as did makeup, hair, and wardrobe. Danny walked over to me in the set. He sat down next to me on the bed. “How did you do that?” he whispered. “What did you think of?” he continued. “How does all that happen?”
I wiped my eyes and tried to explain that they were tears of liberation, breakthrough tears. I tried to explain to him how my shyness had made me feel selfish; because of it I had withheld the way I intended to play the scene, and I couldn’t help it. When I broke out of my prison of shyness, I sobbed buckets of relief. I felt light-headed and mellow. I saw that acting was a way to feel emotions just for the sake of it. There didn’t need to be a reason to cry. I had left part of my shy childhood behind.
Danny asked more questions about my feelings. I liked searching for them and I loved sharing what I found. He praised me and acknowledged my talent and said he would guard my private feelings. Days passed. I became acutely aware that I would do anything to please him; by searching deeper within myself, I wanted to gain his favor, make him proud of me, try risking more of my emotional truth. I soon realized I was falling in love with my first artistic, benevolent, openly vulnerable, patriarchal father figure. Because of my trust in him, I could summon my emotions anytime.
I was twenty-two, fragile, just learning about my feelings, instinctively knowing that I needed to explore them more deeply in order to become a good actress. But more than anything I suddenly found everything about my director an attraction.
I longed for contact with him at work. I reveled in his expertise with the other actors. I so appreciated his generosity in revealing his own life secrets as he probed with us to find our characters. Danny told me how, at the moment his father died, he could only focus on the spittle in the corners of his father’s mouth. He told me of his first love. He shared his feelings regarding his wife and children. I hung on every scrap of information, subtly calculating in a lovestruck fashion how to motivate our relationship to become more intimate. He had, after all, been responsible for my screen test in New York. He hadn’t required me to do a scene. He had allowed me simply to be myself as he asked questions and flirted with exposing my unformed personality on screen. He was there for me at the beginning, this man who had directed Brando and won Anna Magnani and Shirley Booth Academy Awards!
All my feelings of passion, both professional and personal, came crashing together. Suddenly I utterly understood why actresses fell in love with their directors, Directors were the fathers we longed to marry. They insisted that our emotions run free and then assisted in sculpting them. They adored our faces and bodies, but continually strove for improvement. They were our caretakers and caregivers. We were their wards. No one could hurt us, no one could criticize us…. Only they were commissioned with such trust and confidence.
And so the father-daughter combination got played out. Danny was twenty-five years older than me. That was a plus as far as I was concerned. What wasn’t a plus was that neither he nor I could get past the fundamental understanding that this was only a movie. I would probably experience the same feelings again with another fine director and he with another actress who was just learning who she was.
The day of the wrap party I disintegrated. I said goodbye and drove back to Malibu. The family of shared feelings and artistic exploration had come to an end. I was sure those moments of magic would never come together quite like this again, and I was devastated.
Halfway home I turned on the windshield wipers. I thought it was pouring rain, but it wasn’t. I was simply crying so hard I couldn’t see.
The intimacies of people in show business are deep, searing, and can turn on a dime and be gone. I know that now. It was difficult then. Years later Danny and I met again and took a walk on the beach. We talked about how old he felt, and I remember he’d say, “God spelled backward is dog.” It seemed so profound when I first heard him say it. Thirty-five years later, I realized, he was still relying upon past profundities.
As we walked he stopped with his feet in the waves and said, “You remember our relationship on Hot Spell?” I nodded, “Well,” he said, “you were like an open raw nerve. There was nothing you didn’t feel. I remember thinking, This can be dangerous.”
Danny died soon after that. His family showed me a picture I had dedicated to him after we worked together. I had written, Darling Danny, you taught me how to fly.
I still feel the same way.
WHEN AN ACTRESS COMES TO THE DECISION TO “LET go,” it is momentous. This is true for many reasons. You leave yourself wide open for hurt. You uncover buried characteristics you never realized were there, which can be alternately frightening and enlightening. You become, as Danny said, a raw open nerve susceptible not only to the whims of others, but also to yourself.
As you unearth your inner universe it can be shocking. I, for example, found that anger was one of the easiest emotions for me to play. I had not been aware of the anger I had locked within myself. Who knows where this anger was born. For me it wasn’t bred only in my childhood. I have always felt I was born angry. I believe that I decided to come into this lifetime to resolve my issue of repressed anger. When I remember my temper tantrums as a child, I can also recall that I seemed to have a more than earthly reason for being mad. True, my mother was maddeningly phlegmatic, but there was more, and I believe that the “more” spoke to a rage that existed prior to my birth.
I believe that in lifetimes prior to this one I experienced such a profound lack of resolution with anger that I needed to come to terms with it and literally chose my mother because she would provoke me to resolve it. I don’t know, intellectually, how this schoolroom for the soul works, but I feel that we humans are not only products of the emotional conditioning conducted in our childhoods, parental and otherwise, but also of the genetic memory still residing in the patterning of our souls’ experience. The Hindus call it samsara.
I believe I was attracted to acting not only because of both my parents’ unfulfilled dreams, but also because it enabled me to venture, once removed, into the area of full-blown, dramatically angry expression without threatening my personal existence. From the beginning of my life—this life—I’ve been drawn to the art and the act of emotional expression. And it isn’t only because of the unexplained anger in myself as a young girl.
Many actors and actresses in Hollywood today are more conversant with the possibility that they came into this lifetime with unresolved issues that our business enables us to resolve and explore. We feel we are provided with not only an excuse, but a right and a duty to look into the vastness of ourselves and contribute what we find to our projects and characters.
This search for our interiors can be devastating for anyone else who doesn’t understand. Sometimes we don’t even know if we are doing it for the characters we play or for ourselves.
The line between professionally motivated emotion and the emotions of true personal feeling can be so blurred as to be blinding. That is why marriages are thre
atened with every picture, even marriages between partners in our business. Because my husband, Steve, had been an actor in New York, he understood what it took to investigate a character. In fact, he helped me. If an actor is married to a “civilian,” it is usually an impossible situation. It takes a monumentally secure civilian to understand what we put ourselves and others through in the search for truthful acting. We can be self-centered and self-serving to the point of excluding all other humans. But then, we know somewhere way underneath that unless we are centered in ourselves, the character we’re playing can spirit us away—literally. If we don’t serve ourselves, how can we serve the character and the project? Our actions and feelings often don’t seem grounded. We sometimes flail right off the wall. We become narcissistic beyond belief and still feel afraid to look at ourselves in the mirror.
To push our parameters and those of everyone around us we sometimes indulge in the grossest kind of exhibitionism. We can become so obsessed with personal perfection that we can actually believe the landing on the moon or the invasion of Bosnia is about us!
Yes, “becoming” a character and the search for it can make you a real mess. I was often reluctant to let a character consume my identity. It didn’t feel good. I didn’t like the abdication of the real me even though that was what I hoped to find. I was afraid I’d never come back, or more probably, I think I was afraid of what people would think of me.
I remember a little-theater play my mother was in when I was a child. It was called Children of the Moon, and my father thought she had turned into the character—a bitch who neglected her family, home and hearth. I remember hearing the arguments about the time she spent away from home to become another person at the theater. Dad was really upset. He thought our family had been neglected and the house was filthy. He wanted her out of that play and back home where she belonged. I saw Mother’s frustration and finally fier independent insistence as she decided to continue with the play. It opened, and Warren and I appeared as small children in it. It was successful, I think, but the memory of the price paid in our household was forever intense in my mind.
My Lucky Stars Page 3
