The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  When I first met her in Los Angeles six years ago, I spent hours in rapt contemplation of the fine-tuned Southwestern sensibility on display in the Beverly Hills house she lived in at the time. From the outside, the residence was an unprepossessing Spanish Colonial, but a dazzling yet austere sanctuary awaited inside. She had filled the rooms with Monterey furniture (not to be confused with Mission) and Navajo rugs, against which vivid touches—a collection of silver-and-turquoise jewelry, six graduated urns burnished with a turquoise-green glaze—stood out. When that house landed on the cover of Architectural Digest, it was snapped up by Madonna. Like a master shoemaker who hobbles around in worn-out slippers, Keaton has suffered the fate these last years of living for long periods in a rented house, as she does now.

  The thing about Diane Keaton is that she has more energy than anyone under the sun—“She uses the time in her day like no one I’ve ever seen,” John Burnham says—as well as the boundless curiosity to go with it. Jack Nicholson, who starred with Keaton in Reds in 1981 and in Something’s Gotta Give in 2003, describes her as “crackling” and appears to be in genuine awe of her Energizer Bunny stamina. “Energy is the most amazing thing about Diane,” he drawls over the phone. And then, audibly chuckling at the memory, he recalls that during a three-day break while in Paris filming the end of Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton managed to trot over to Spain while he barely left his hotel room. “Her basic unit of energy is so enormous,” he says. “It’s hard to decipher.”

  Nicholson seems to have forged a uniquely strong bond with Keaton, one that enables him to get her in the way few others do. “We talk a pretty fast shorthand on deep subjects” is how he puts it. Nicholson was the solitary male among a bevy of female friends, including Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow, to be invited to her fifty-ninth-birthday party. Keaton claims that she asked him to the celebration, which was held at her friend Nancy Meyers’s house (she describes Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give, as “the only comedy writer in the world who wants to tell stories about middle-aged women’s love lives”), because “I knew he would make it an eventful evening. I knew he would stir things up. Not that an evening full of females is his kind of fun.” Nicholson, in his turn, admitted that he did feel “severely male, yes,” but says that he found the invitation “both enticing and odd.”

  I am struck by the way the two of them talk about each other in the same curious tone of erotically charged admiration, which leads me to wonder whether their relationship might have blossomed into something else—if only (he weren’t an inveterate skirt chaser) and if only (she weren’t so confoundedly full of high standards). And indeed, when I ask Nicholson if he’s surprised that Keaton is romantically unattached, he ducks the question—as well as the ambiguous nature of their connection—by referring obliquely to “the particular nature of her refinement.” Pressed to explain what he means by that quaintly Jamesian phrase, he succeeds only in deepening the mystery: “She’s complicated enough that at this point she’s not going to be involved with someone as a halfway measure. She at least knows what she doesn’t want.”

  Then again, there are many things the actress is sure she does want in her life, although these days they have little to do with either romance or the trappings of fame. Like a perennial extracurricular student, Keaton has always been captivated by many subjects, especially by those that call upon the meticulously honed aesthetic that permeates everything from the scrapbooks and other oddities she likes to collect to her famously idiosyncratic way of dressing. Keaton has enormous, if peculiar, style, which is as unmistakably hers as it is difficult to describe. It usually includes some combination of the following: a hard-edged touch by way of a belt or footwear, a Chaplinesque bow tie or hat, some appropriation from street fashion in the form of gloves or hosiery, and a nod or two to the layered look she popularized in Annie Hall. “She wakes up every morning,” a longtime friend of hers, the art dealer Daniel Wolf, told me, “and she sees her clothes like paint coming out of a paint tube: What am I going to mix today?”

  Many of Keaton’s interests are too intensely pursued to be categorized as mere hobbies. They range from photography (she has edited four collections of photographs on offbeat topics like hotel lobbies, salesmen, and grisly tabloid shots from the Los Angeles Herald Express) and architecture (she’s on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy and is currently editing a book on Spanish Colonial architecture for Rizzoli) to music (to the consternation of some filmmakers she has worked with, she is in the habit of listening to Bob Dylan or Linda Ronstadt on her headphones until the moment the director says “Action!”) and politics, about which she is surprisingly well-informed. (She is a CNN addict and told me that one of the high points of her career was meeting Bill Clinton at a screening of Hanging Up.)

  Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays the detested girlfriend whom the oldest son has brought home for Thanksgiving in The Family Stone, assumed that she would never get the chance to know Keaton, whom she has always admired as an iconic figure in the way that many younger actresses, like Kudrow and Ryan, seem to. “I was worried she’d think of me as a terrible, vacuous, superficial blonde,” Parker confides. Instead, to Parker’s delight, the two of them found themselves alone in a makeup trailer every day of the shoot for a solid two hours before they were called to the set and ended up talking about everything from clothes to real estate to children to that day’s news. Parker is particularly admiring of Keaton’s self-discipline, noting that the older actress came to work promptly at five in the morning dressed in “a cinched-waist skirt, heels, and hat” while “the rest of us were in sweatpants.” Then she adds, sounding more like Miss Manners than Carrie Bradshaw, “You can’t be a woman and gotten where she’s gotten without showing up on time.”

  * * *

  For the last decade, ever since Keaton chose to take on motherhood at the age of fifty and proceeded to make it, however belatedly, first and foremost among her priorities, her schedule has been even more packed than it once was. These days, her large, well-staffed household revolves around her ten-year-old daughter, Dexter, and her four-year-old son, Duke, and their attendant playdates, outings to the L.A. County Fair, parent-teacher conferences, and pediatrician appointments. It helps that Keaton has always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of creature. (Bill Robinson, her friend and partner at Keaton’s Blue Relief production company, once characterized her as “a Pilgrim nightmare, up at dawn and in bed at ten.”) Keaton is indeed up at five to answer e-mail and troll the Web in search of items that stir her eclectic visual imagination (“I love the computer,” she declares. “I wish I were partners on eBay”), after which she prepares lunch for the kids and gets them ready for school. Dexter and Duke attend the University Elementary School (UES), a progressive, socioeconomically diverse lab school affiliated with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles. Having considered herself “a neglected student,” Keaton is particularly impressed with the teachers at UES, “who,” she says, “are constantly trying to find new ways to be creative about stimulating children to learn.”

  It was during her forties that the actress discovered a growing baby hunger in herself—“the need to participate in being part of a family.” Having tried and failed to become pregnant and having never made it down the aisle despite her many romantic liaisons, Keaton decided to adopt. Both Dexter, a towheaded girl who stares out with a slightly wary gaze from the tiny black-and-white snapshot Keaton pulls from her bulging date book, and Duke, a fair-haired charmer of a boy, were adopted when they were infants. Keaton’s eyes still gleam with pleasure when she talks about her first week snowbound in a hotel room in New York with a six-day-old Dexter newly arrived from a Texas agency.

  She is by all accounts a deeply engaged mother who eats dinner with her kids every night, gives great birthday parties, and is intimately acquainted with her children’s friends and the other parents at UES. Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA School of Law wh
ose daughter has been close pals with Dexter since they were in prekindergarten together, describes Keaton as remarkably “in there” with her children and as a “direct and in some ways no-nonsense” but also “love-struck” mother for whom the experience of parenting has been “life altering—it’s changed her in ways that she probably never anticipated.”

  Keaton would undoubtedly agree with this assessment. “To have a child,” she says, “you’ve got to stop messing around.” She has, of course, often played mothers, including the wonderfully textured performance she gave as a betrayed wife and devoted mother of four in 1982’s Shoot the Moon on through her latest role as the crusty but heroic mother in The Family Stone. In real life, Keaton’s relationship with her own mother, whom she describes as “irresistible,” is a pivotal one. Over another lunch, this time at the Blvd, a swanky restaurant in the Beverly Wilshire, she talks about her mother with an almost fierce passion. In answer to my question as to whether any of the men she was involved with was the One, she states unequivocally, “There was no love of my life except my mother.”

  * * *

  Keaton grew up in conservative Orange County, California, the oldest of four siblings (she has two sisters and a brother) in a tight-knit family. Despite the suggestion of tony Wasp breeding about Keaton’s disciplined approach to life and the air of reserve that underlies her friendly accessibility—she has been described as being as guarded as Garbo, which may be an exaggeration, but it is undeniable that she has managed to preserve a rare zone of privacy in the fishbowl atmosphere of Hollywood—her own background is not markedly patrician. Her paternal grandfather was a barber who was murdered in a labor dispute; her maternal grandmother worked as a janitor. Keaton credits her father, Jack, a civil engineer who designed the Olympic-size pool at Santa Ana College, with instilling in her quick reflexes, a “deep, instinctive ability to run.” Her mother, Dorothy, was a housewife who once won a “Mrs. Los Angeles” contest and was “the dominant person” in her children’s lives.

  Although Keaton sees bits of her father in her own “sappiness,” she identifies overwhelmingly as her mother’s daughter. It is Dorothy to whom she owes her limelight ambitions—“She was the best audience anybody could have,” Keaton observes. “I developed all my skills through her”—and her abiding interest in the artistic preservation of memories, the storage of history in various forms, from old buildings to scrapbooks. Her mother has kept forty years’ worth of journals about the family—“collage after collage, page after page”—and Keaton proudly points out that the photograph of her as a young woman that is the final image in The Family Stone (it has been doctored to make her appear pregnant) is, in fact, her mother’s handiwork. “The photograph,” she declares, “is the best damn acting I’ve ever done.” Since her face in the photograph is the face of a woman to whom life has not yet happened, I’m not sure what she means by this assertion, but I sense that it is her way of linking her own accomplishments with her mother’s unsung talents.

  We continue our conversation that afternoon as she drives me back to my hotel in her recently acquired hybrid Lexus after we have stopped to visit a cluster of art galleries in Santa Monica. I ask her if she ever gets flak for being an older mother. “No one will say anything to me because I’ve taken a stance,” she replies. Still, on some larger level, it clearly bothers Keaton—who referred to herself in an e-mail message as “twitchy, demanding, not fully grown-up”—that she feels herself to be something of a late arrival at the gates of motherhood in particular and adulthood in general. She is touchingly candid about her regrets, enumerating them with the stoic self-awareness of someone who has put in many hours on the shrink’s couch. “I wish I could have been braver. I wish my limitation with intimacy hadn’t been so crippling. I wish I had taken more risks. I wish I had started earlier addressing these things.” Keaton is a firm believer in analysis; she considers it “a huge privilege” she intends to take advantage of as long as she can. “I’ve been talking my life away about deep conflicts that don’t go away,” she says of therapy. “I’m never leaving. It’s like going to church. Whether I’m helped or not is not the issue. It’s about trying to understand more about why something is the way it is, about my own participation in a problem.”

  The biggest problem in Keaton’s life, as far as either of us can determine, has been with men. “Being in love,” she announces, “brought out the worst in me. The thing for me with men has probably always been, How much do they love me? As opposed to, How much do I love them?” Nicholson characterizes this “I never got to choose anybody, they always chose me” plaint as “Diane’s chapter heading on what the past was like.” Keaton discusses her amorous history with a kind of pained but succinct retrospective wit—as if it were a phase of her life that she has sadly but firmly put behind her. Which, in fact, as evidenced by her persistent state of uncoupledness, she may well have done. By her own admission, she hasn’t been seriously involved with anyone since her breakup with Pacino fifteen years ago. (When I asked her about rumors of a relationship with Keanu Reeves, she responded with a disbelieving yelp.)

  Some of her troubles seem to stem from the way her parents’ “difficult but passionate” marriage colored her own perspective on relationships. “They were a little in love and a little enraged,” she says. “I viewed them in a romantic light. I wasn’t prepared for complexities.” Then, as befits an actress who has been remarkably skilled—notwithstanding her overriding screen persona as Woody Allen’s darling flustered muse—at portraying shy, self-conscious women overcome by the power of their own awakened eroticism in films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Reds, Mrs. Soffel, and The Good Mother, she expounds on the mysteries of the flesh and the incongruousness of desire: “So much of romantic love is selfish and underdeveloped and doesn’t grow. I couldn’t love someone and like him at the same time. Sexual drive is such a big thing; it’s attached to such specific requirements for me,” Keaton elaborates. “Do you think I wanted a nice guy to come home to? I’m really happy I didn’t have a child with any of the men I was with.”

  Men may have taken up a lot of Keaton’s energy, sometimes to the slighting of her career—like the period during the 1980s when she seems to have dropped temporarily out of sight after the making of Reds—but she has actually spent very little time in domestic setups with any of them. “Maybe Woody,” she says, “for a short period. He was the only one who would live with me while walking on eggshells, as he claimed I forced him to do.” Keaton sounds as if she finds the very idea of an opposite sex both inherently fascinating and inherently objectionable, as if men were alien creatures to whom she has been drawn against her own better judgment. “I have ordinary affection for women,” she explains, “but I don’t have ordinary affection for men. I have extraordinary feelings. I was either so excited, so enamored, and swept away by them, or I wasn’t interested in them at all. Instead of seeing them as people, I saw them as more extraordinary. They don’t want anything to do with that,” she adds, chuckling. “It’s a nightmare for them.”

  Of course, there is always the possibility that rather than there being anything irredeemably wrong with either Keaton or the entire male species, there is something wrong with the specific sort of man she picks. Her producing partner, Bill Robinson, says, “Even if she had been a cashier at Woolworth’s, Diane would have been drawn to the wrong men.” By “wrong men” I suppose he means wrong for the long haul—what one friend calls (with the exception of Woody Allen) “pretty men,” and another describes as “titular boyfriends, the football star or the class president.”

  In any case, Keaton appears to have made her peace with falling in love the way she can most readily tolerate it—on-screen, where she has always been able to “get in there deep,” as Nicholson describes it, but she has also been able to get out, stay on top of the situation, be in control. (“She is a raw nerve,” Sarah Jessica Parker says, “but she is practiced. Her emotions are available to her, but make no mistake about her: she ha
s technique.”) Perhaps it goes back to a certain spacious quality of self-invention that her mother encouraged, the fantasy of “finding an audience for your life” that helped inspire her daughter. “She let us explore our strongest wishes,” Keaton points out. She says she believes that the “fake situation” of being in a movie romance is “underappreciated by actresses” and that this particular kind of magic, this make-believe rapture, is, in fact, the biggest perk of the job. “You’re in bed only in the best possible way,” she told me. “You’re not paying the price for being in love.” She pauses for a minute, as if sifting through her mind for an irrefutable piece of evidence to back up her position, and then says, as if it were the obvious icing on the cake, “I got to kiss Jack Nicholson a lot.”

  Keaton, of course, is referring to her role as the deferred but triumphant love object in Something’s Gotta Give, the money-milking hit of a fairy tale (for which, in the unmisty-eyed, bottom-line world of Hollywood, Nicholson was reportedly paid several times what Keaton was paid) that was supposed to give the definitive boost to her career after more than forty films and put her on the map once and for all as the box-office catnip that Woody Allen has always perceived her to be. “If she had wanted to,” he told me, “Keaton could have been the most popular female star in America, another Lucille Ball.” After a first act as Allen’s ditzy foil, a second act as a gifted and erotically nuanced character actress, a third act as an appealing maternal figure in the two Father of the Bride movies (or, take your pick, a woman’s woman with a sexy edge in The First Wives Club), Keaton was ready for her moment.

  And here’s the odd part, the part that sets people to shaking their heads, from Jack Nicholson to Sarah Jessica Parker, tsk-tsking about the limitations of the business, the glaring paucity of roles for older women, the neglect of more mature audiences. After the excitement of Something’s Gotta Give, nothing gave. Literally, nothing happened. Her moment was gone before she could say hello to it. “There’s no call for me,” she says. “I got a lot of attention and money, and then I went right back to where I was before, a TV movie once a year.”