The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  What is perhaps most interesting about the film—which includes the relentless close-ups, angst-ridden bursts of dialogue, and long pauses Bergman is known for—is its focus on the unforeseen harm done to children by the behavior of irresponsible adults. Josephson’s opening voice-over is a rumination on the destructive forces unleashed by divorce. Thereafter, the viewer is rarely allowed to lose sight of Isabelle, the ethereal young daughter of Marianne and Markus, who watches the breakup of her parents’ marriage with enormous, reproachful eyes. The camera keeps coming back to linger tenderly on the girl, whose unspoken despair runs like a black thread throughout the movie. Bergman’s screenplay did not include the little girl as an on-screen presence. “The child was never in the script,” Ullmann points out. “Without changing any of his words, because he’s very protective of his words, I put her there, listening, vulnerable, desolate.”

  In a similar shift, she put the older Bergman character in as a real person; the film was supposed to be shot over his shoulder, in such a way that he wouldn’t actually appear on-screen but would exist as an unseen, magisterial creator. These revisions seem to be a matter of some pride to her, perhaps as evidence that she has succeeded in sidestepping Bergman’s towering shadow—his personal mentorship of her career as well as his weighty artistic imprimatur.

  But it is also Ullmann’s way of bringing her intimate history with him, and her specifically female imprint, to bear on the material. “He’s a controlling person,” she observes, “but he gave me the script, and for him the thrill was letting it be mine.” As I listen to the note of quiet triumph in her voice, it occurs to me that the decision to emphasize Isabelle’s suffering may have had as much to do with Ullmann’s desire to convey a private message to the real-life Bergman—who was largely an absentee parent, leaving her to bring up their daughter, Linn, on her own—as with her wish to exert directorial independence.

  Linn Ullmann, who is now thirty-four and one of Norway’s leading journalists and literary critics, has an understandably complicated relationship with both of her parents. When she came to New York in 1999 (she lives in Oslo with her young son) for three weeks to promote her novel, Before You Sleep, she refused to be identified as their daughter in interviews. Her novel draws a less-than-flattering portrait of Anni, the character who appears to be modeled on Ullmann. Anni is described as an “irresistible woman” with “reddish-blond hair” and “glittery blue eyes.” So far, so good. But she is also painted as a self-absorbed and self-dramatizing “empress” who devours men (“when she smiles men die”) and cries fake tears. “Anni is the most sincere hypocrite I know,” the narrator dryly notes. Worst of all is Anni’s wobbly maternal sense, exemplified by her tendency to outshine her daughter at every opportunity: “Anni is standing in the light, I’m standing in the shade. Isn’t that just typical, I say, and move closer to her.”

  Linn spent her early years moving around the world as her mother’s career dictated, attending thirteen different schools. She and her mother settled in Manhattan when Linn was fifteen, and she went on to study English literature at New York University, living with her mother—with whom she always spoke Norwegian—until she was nineteen. She spent summers with Bergman but rarely saw him otherwise. Although Ullmann says that she and her daughter used to be “tremendously close, perhaps too close,” she seems confounded by the coolness that has developed between them over the years.

  The two don’t see eye to eye on many things, including Ullmann’s intense involvement with her work throughout Linn’s childhood and adolescence. “I feel mostly guilty that I wasn’t available a lot of the time,” Ullmann says. “I was so full of my own life—my career, being in and out of love.” She also refers to Linn’s anger at the saccharine evocation of herself as “the sweet little person” in Changing, Ullmann’s bestselling 1976 memoir. “That’s how I experienced her,” Ullmann says, somewhat defensively. “She herself claims she was tough, with a cool eye.”

  What is perhaps most surprising about the current situation is Linn’s closeness to her father, which Ullmann professes to be pleased about. When she delves into the dynamics of it further, however, it becomes apparent that she is bewildered by the way things have turned out. “He has been so tremendously absent,” she says, speaking of Bergman. “Her wedding was the only event he’s been to—not her university graduation, not high school, not even her christening.” Bergman seems to have contributed next to nothing monetarily, and Ullmann says that when she told him Linn was accepted to college, his answer was, “Oh, that’s nice, but I’m retired now, I can’t help you.” She pauses, as if trying to make up her mind how much to divulge. “He’s a multimillionaire, you know,” she says in a conspiratorial tone. And then, as though suddenly defeated by the unfairness of it all, she sounds terribly sad. “He was never there,” she repeats, almost as if she were trying to address an invisible judge. “Fathers get a lot of credit for nothing.”

  Ullmann’s small apartment, in a sterile, glitzy building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, is more of a pied-à-terre than a permanent residence. She divides most of her time these days between Boston and Florida, where she lives with Donald Saunders, a real estate developer. The couple were married for ten years and parted in 1995—only to reconcile in cinematic fashion the morning after the divorce papers were signed. Ullmann was on a plane bound for Switzerland when her new ex-husband suddenly appeared in the first-class section and declared, “We are partners for life.” They took up where they left off but have not remarried.

  Despite Ullmann’s peripatetic existence, her living room has a homey, cultured feel. A facsimile of George Orwell’s manuscript of 1984 lies open on a stand, and the yellow walls, Miró drawings, piles of books, and assortment of bibelots suggest a catch-as-catch-can personal aesthetic rather than a decorator’s sleek touch. The actress is dressed in an understated navy knit pantsuit, her thick straight hair (a Russian director who once wooed her described it as “red straw”) is simply styled, and other than mascara she wears little makeup. Her nails are short and unmanicured, and when she puts her glasses on to read, she does so without the self-conscious comments that older women often make.

  Although Ullmann describes herself as a natural listener—“I’m not a talker,” she says—she is in fact easily engaged in conversation. Sitting on her chintz couch, we dash from topic to topic as though we once knew each other and now have much to catch up on. She mentions Erland Josephson’s rediscovery of his religious roots during the filming of Sofie, which follows the life of a bourgeois Jewish family in nineteenth-century Denmark. “Erland was brought up by Orthodox grandparents,” Ullmann explains, “and he suddenly remembered his Hebrew.” She goes on to express mixed feelings of pride and chagrin about Linn’s novel. She comprehends her daughter’s need to come to terms with the past, but she is also quite evidently wounded by the fictionalized version of herself in Before You Sleep. “I can’t allow myself to be crushed,” Ullmann says resolutely, “that she didn’t write the romantic fantasy of me that I hoped she’d write.”

  Several days later, I attend an evening at the 92nd Street Y at which Ullmann is interviewed as part of a film series moderated by the critic Annette Insdorf. Their discussion is preceded by clips from a recent documentary, Liv Ullmann: Scenes from a Life, narrated by Woody Allen, followed by a screening of Autumn Sonata. In contrast to the mousy, earnest daughter she plays in the film, Ullmann, sitting onstage, looks glowing and womanly in a black velvet pantsuit, the very incarnation of Goethe’s ideal of Das Ewig-Weibliche—the eternally feminine. Replying to questions about her years with Bergman and her current career as a director, Ullmann displays her customary charm but also a sly humor, as though she no longer feels compelled to meet anyone’s expectations other than her own. She refers to her past with affection but not much regret, and without a trace of reverence. Recounting an incident that occurred on the set of Autumn Sonata, in which she looked on wide-eyed as Ingrid Bergman challenged “the genius Bergman” (as
Ullmann calls him) on his view of her character, Ullmann sounds as though she still relishes that long-ago moment of unprecedented impertinence. “I’m not going to say that,” she recalls her assertive co-star insisting. “I would slap her in the face and leave the room.” Ullmann crosses her legs and pushes back her hair. “I used to sit in a corner and admire her,” she tells the audience, “because this is the kind of woman I wanted to be. I learned a lot from her.”

  Ullmann is emphatic about not wanting to act again; she describes acting as “a school” from which she has graduated with honors. Now she wants to do what she wants, which is to direct—to make her own footprints rather than follow someone else’s and inhabit her own complex self. (A large part of the reason her relationship with Bergman failed, she told me, was that he needed to see her as a woman “of one piece, with no neuroses.”) Perhaps the most poignant and admirable aspect of Ullmann’s life is the hard-won battle she has fought to cease playing the role of the woman behind the man and trading it in for the role of playing herself. I remember her telling me about her unease when she first began to direct and found herself falling back on her reflexive habits of self-effacement and wifely clucking over other people’s comforts—“I’m sorry I’m existing. Can I get you coffee? All those things.” In the intervening years, she seems to have grown more sure of herself—projecting that strength she so admires in her daughter. She has pulled back from her exquisite receptivity to the needs and demands of talented men, but she retains the passion—the impetuous, romantic approach to the world—that has always marked her life.

  “I never thought of myself as a muse,” she tells the Y’s rapt audience, endearingly pronouncing the word as “moose.” “I’m not sure what it is. If it’s complementary, then I want to be it. If it means being a pupil, I don’t want to be it.” It’s a declaration of independence of sorts, stated in her unshrill and unantagonistic style, but the message behind it is unmistakable.

  SLEEPING ALONE

  (DIANE KEATON)

  2005

  Diane Keaton, who the critic Pauline Kael once suggested “may be a star without vanity,” is fretting about her makeup. Keaton sits on an elevated director’s chair in front of a large mirror in a bare dressing room, worrying that an indiscernible powdery dab on her nose will show up on camera—she’s about to shoot a public service announcement on behalf of the dogs and cats left homeless in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—if she doesn’t locate some putty-colored foundation to cover it. The actress, who will turn sixty in January, returns to the screen in December in The Family Stone, an ensemble drama in which she plays the dying but buoyant matriarch of a large and strenuously colorful brood. Keaton is deeply attractive in a way that you don’t see much in Hollywood anymore (or on the Upper East Side or in any upscale area, for that matter): she looks, that is, the way a woman her age might look if preemptive cosmetic surgery for actresses over the age of thirty hadn’t somehow become the law of the land. Keaton’s slightly Nordic-looking features and good bones are still very much in evidence, but if you peer closely, you can see a faint tracing of lines etched around her unplumped-up mouth and at the corners of her slanted, blazingly alert hazel eyes.

  “Does anyone have any concealer?” she asks as she continues to cluck and make faces at herself in the mirror, her naturally droll inflection infusing the question with a note of comic desperation. (“She doesn’t ‘do’ funny,” her friend and Father of the Bride co-star Steve Martin observes. “She’s just Diane.”) Notwithstanding the fact that Keaton has defied the fetishization of youth endemic to celebrity culture, she will readily admit that her appearance—the visual impact she makes—has always been acutely important to her. This fixation goes all the way back to her girlhood, when she would hunt with her mother for the right plaid fabric from Goodwill to be whipped up into clothes based on Keaton’s own designs. “When I was younger,” she told me, “I was very concerned with how I looked, with a fantasy of what I wanted to look like.” She mentions a pink suit that she and her mother bought from Ohrbach’s that, she says, in her self-amused, mordant way, “I undoubtedly thought was the answer to everything.” She adds that she worked in J. J. Newberry’s bra department during high school: “I was very excited by bras.”

  Still, this brief glimpse of backstage vanity makes her seem poignantly ordinary rather than hopelessly shallow or self-absorbed. For one thing, it is immediately clear that Keaton’s concern about a potential blotch on her face is less an indication of the narcissistic anxieties of a movie star—one whose formidable lineup of ex-lovers includes Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, and Al Pacino and whose on-screen interests have included Albert Finney, Mel Gibson, and Liam Neeson—than of the “Oh my God, what now?” insecurity of a woman who has never been quite sure of her physical allure. (Make of it what you will, but Keaton claims that the persistent disinclination of her mother, now eighty-three, to acknowledge her oldest daughter’s fetching looks while she was growing up is the source of her drive. “I could never get her to say I was pretty,” Keaton says ruefully. “That fueled my ambition.”)

  Keaton has by general consensus grown, if anything, more beautiful over the years, her broad-planed face having gained in elegant angles what it has lost in round-cheeked Annie Hall dewiness. And, as finally became clear during her split-second nude scene in Something’s Gotta Give, she can lay claim to an amazing body, one that is kept in willowy shape by lots of walking and swimming. All the same, she insists that she has never liked her own reflection. “It’s not fun to see myself in the movies,” she says. “It’s not fun to see myself in the mirror.”

  * * *

  The sun is high in a cloudless sky on this late September morning in Los Angeles, but inside the cavernous, windowless studio on Sunset Boulevard it might as well be midnight in a bomb shelter. Keaton is dressed in one of her usual obscurantist getups, in shades of blackness—with the exception of a pair of gold hoop earrings—from the ribbon band on her gray flannel bowler hat to the pointy toes of her high-heeled Gucci boots. Although it is a warm day, she wears a black turtleneck under a fitted black velvet jacket over matching pants that emphasize her slim, long legs. Given that she also sports tinted glasses, there is not that much left of her to see when she actually sits down in front of the cameras. But then she flashes what a critic once described as her “ravishing, clown’s smile” and begins to speak her piece in her distinctive ripe voice, and you suddenly realize that her most steadfastly glamorous asset is her megawatt personality, bursting out of her like an uncontainable force of nature, a geyser of quirkily endearing traits that fall on the air and lend everything around her a momentary sparkle.

  Keaton, as I learned when I first met her some years ago on the set of Hanging Up, the movie based on Delia Ephron’s novel that Keaton starred in and directed, is a consummate professional. This aspect of her has been noted by everyone who has ever dealt with her, from Beatty—who once characterized her to me, in terms that made her sound like a Girl Scout leader, as “industrious” and “punctual,” the sort of person who “makes plans and sticks to them”—to her former agent John Burnham, who says that underneath her charmingly self-effacing persona Keaton is “organized and tough and smart.” Today, true to her reputation, she sits uncomplainingly under the hot lights, holding Spike, the winsome hound (a mix of basset and beagle) that has been flown in from an animal sanctuary in New Orleans, in her lap, and does take after take—at least fifteen in all—without a murmur of protest. After what seems like the nth impeccable delivery, the actress obligingly adjusts her tone yet again, injecting it with more seriousness or greater enthusiasm at the director’s request, all the while keeping up a funny, slightly lewd patter about the developing intimacy between Spike and her. (She jokes about her hand brushing up against the dog’s genitals, his “package,” she says coyly.) In between laughing heartily at her own shtick—“She has the most ingratiating laugh,” Woody Allen observes, “it’s fatal”—she hugs and kisses Spike. Although I have grow
n fidgety with impatience, as have many of the twenty-odd crew members standing around me, Keaton remains unruffled until the end. Gracious as a Southern hostess, she bids everyone a warm goodbye before swinging her oversize woven-leather black bag over her shoulder and striding out into the day.

  After the shoot, Keaton and I repair to lunch nearby at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe, a Mexican eatery decorated with a brick wall, Formica tabletops, and out-of-season Christmas lights that Jerry Brown used to frequent in its heyday. The restaurant is hip in a counter-chic way and, perhaps more important from Keaton’s perspective, cheap. Despite her well-oiled lifestyle, which employs enough people to run a small luxury hotel, a certain hard-nosed attitude toward money is one of her many old-fashioned virtues. On the walk over to Lucy’s, for instance, she happily informs me that the Tom Ford pantsuit she is wearing was a freebie acquired on a celebrity trip she took to Las Vegas when she was up for a Best Actress Oscar in 2004 for Something’s Gotta Give. “I was only one of two nominees to go,” she notes almost proudly. Then, of course, there is her skill at trading up real estate—or, rather, her obsession with renovating houses—at which Keaton has demonstrated nothing less than a Midas touch. She recently sold her deconstructed hacienda-style house in Bel Air, which she bought for six million dollars, for sixteen million. She lived in it for less than two years after working on it for almost double that time, and it sold practically minutes after it appeared on the April cover of Architectural Digest.