When we shot the scene proper we had no dialogue. Our fathers do the introducing, but our eyes meet; we are both in tremulous close-up for a second, connecting. I have a cap on my head and am smiling shyly (lips together, teeth hidden); then we break and join the line of novices trooping into the convent chapel.
Just before the cameras rolled, Fred took me aside and whispered, “Do something that will make us notice you.”
I decided to fake a sneeze. After the shot was completed, Fred came over to me. “Nice touch,” he said, “but you should have told me beforehand what you were going to do.” Nevertheless he kept that take—it’s a nanosecond-long part of my debut on the big screen.
I SPENT THE next week filming transitional scenes: Audrey and I walking down a corridor, sitting in a class, working in the convent hospital. While reciting our culpas to the Reverend Mother, I had one line—“I accuse myself of daydreaming”—and I wondered as I said it whether Bob Anderson had written it especially for me.
I was finding movies difficult to act in. I preferred the theatre, where you can build your performance in unbroken arcs. Movies were made up of bits and pieces that are assembled after the fact into an illusion of wholeness. I couldn’t get used to that.
And then for ten days we were drilled for the long, complicated processional scene inside Cinecittà’s biggest sound studio. There were two hundred of us, counting the extras, all moving slowly through an enormous replica of a Belgian convent chapel. It seemed as big as Grand Central Station—big vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, and a copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà, which I confused with the original.
It took hours. There was much adjusting of lights and cameras, but everybody was very patient. The atmosphere remained hushed; we spoke in whispers to the real nuns, who hovered near us making sure we kept our eyes cast down. We knelt and then prostrated ourselves over and over again in front of Reverend Mother Emmanuel (aka Dame Edith, looking properly magisterial).
Just before we began filming, Audrey joined us, gliding up to Fred and Franz Planer, who were huddled in front of the cameras. She seemed almost transfixed. We’d been told she’d been building her character from the inside out. She was on a regime of convent-type meals; she refused to look at herself in the mirror and turned off the radio in her dressing room so she could be totally quiet while she prepared.
I’d heard that the character of Sister Luke challenged her; she’d grown bored with the fashionable gamine creatures she’d perfected on the screen. Sister Luke’s fierce dedication to her conscience and her attraction to an interior life and doing for others appealed to Audrey. She would later say that she never felt comfortable being a celebrity. She’d never enjoyed the constant narcissistic focus on self.
OUR LUNCH BREAKS were always a relief and we’d go together, Millie and I—still in our flowing habits—to Cinecittà’s noisy commissary where pasta and wine flowed from eleven onward. As soon as we entered the room we could always count on the same greeting from the lone man in our movie, the diabolical, often-drunk Peter Finch. “Get out of my sight, you fucking nuns!” he’d growl, and then he’d collapse laughing.
The place teemed with familiar faces: the beauteous Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida bursting ripely out of their dresses, Marcello Mastroianni chain-smoking in a corner, Fellini in his big black hat. There were movie stars from Hollywood too, like Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Charlton Heston strutted around in a toga; he was about to start shooting Ben-Hur. It was rumored that one thousand horses would be used in the chariot race. I could watch them from the commissary windows being exercised, cantering around two enormous dirt fields far below me.
One morning I ran into Gore Vidal; he was rewriting the Ben-Hur script with Christopher Fry. Gore took me back to his office. I’d never been to a writer’s office before. I was impressed. It was so organized—much research on ancient Rome, books and papers and a storyboard of the entire movie up on a bulletin board. We made plans to get together when we could.
BECAUSE I HAD such a small speaking part in the movie I was often free for days at a time, so I spent them sightseeing around Rome with Millie. We went to Hadrian’s Villa; we trudged all over the Seven Hills. When I was alone, I’d wander into a church and kneel down, praying I’d have the guts to go to Confession. I never did.
I still felt ashamed and unhappy. One morning I took a day-trip to Florence with a lawyer from Warner Brothers, a trim slender man named Tonino who’d been my escort at several big parties.
We parked near the Piazza della Signoria, the L-shaped square opposite Palazzo Vecchio. Then we went on a whirlwind tour of the Uffizi Gallery, where crowds of tourists were craning their necks to study Sandro Botticelli’s mythological The Birth of Venus. When I saw that painting, my eyes welled with tears. It brought back memories of my childhood in Berkeley with my brother, when Mama was trying to teach us about art.
When we were very small she festooned the walls of our nursery with copies of masterpieces—Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. She’d keep changing the images, so sometimes we’d wake up to a portrait of Bacchus by Caravaggio or a Monet landscape. Mama’s favorite was Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. She had a postcard of it framed on her desk, and there was a larger copy of it in the nursery. She said she’d seen the original many times at the Uffizi. Botticelli had used a special alabaster paint, she told us, so the colors of the sea were shifting shades of green around Venus. Venus herself glowed pink in her nakedness, standing on her shell, hair flowing down—one hand over her breast, the other covering her vulva.
Daddy compared Mama to the Venus, and she didn’t contradict him. Once we were allowed to watch as he sponged Mama in her bath. Her hair was flowing down her back and she had one hand covering her breast as in the painting. Daddy called out to us, “Mama is Venus on the half shell, kiddies,” and he laughed and we could see his shirt getting soaked as he kissed her.
Then Mama decided that Bart and I should participate in a costume contest; it had something to do with Spanish culture at the university. She dressed me as the Infanta Margarita from Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Bart was around six; he was one of the Infanta’s entourage.
At the contest we were trotted around in our finery, but we didn’t even get honorable mention. A skinny, funny-looking girl dressed as Carmen Miranda wearing a hat made of bananas and berries won the grand prize.
Mama burst into angry tears; art books in hand, she marched up to the judges and cried out, “How dare you! My babies were the genuine article.”
Subdued, we returned home. I remember standing next to her patting her hand after she collapsed in a chair still sobbing. Bart climbed into her lap and asked her very sadly, “Mama, why are you crying?” She wrapped her arms around him and said, “Because I wanted you both to win!”
Bart shook his head. Later in the nursery he asked me, “Why do you have to win in life?” He seemed too small and young to be asking that question.
We pondered this for a long time, and when Daddy came upstairs to kiss us good night, I told him what had happened and asked, “Why is it so important to win?” He told us it was more important to make an effort, “to do the best you can. Nobody can win everything in life—it wouldn’t make sense if you could. It is far more interesting to struggle, to strive. All you can do is your best.”
I remembered Bart then; I could see him listening so attentively to Daddy. His big eyes got rounder and rounder. I’m not sure if it was before or after that he tried to make those wings to fly into the clouds.
THAT AFTERNOON IN Florence I attempted to tell Tonino about my brother and me and the costumes based on the Velázquez painting, but he wasn’t interested. I missed my brother so much. As soon as I reached my hotel room and shut the door I began talking to him in our private language. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time.
“Oh God, I wish I’d never told that story.”
It’s not a particularly compelling one. Interesting only to us.
“Do you remember what Daddy told us?”
Sure. Something about winning and losing and it’s supposedly better to try, to make the effort. I say bullshit; now I say it’s better to win.
“Why haven’t I spoken to you for so long?”
You’ve had a lot to do.
“You knew I’d had an abortion.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry.”
You are not sorry. You are glad. You made the movie. You didn’t die on the operating table.
“I could have.”
Don’t be so dramatic. They were just sewing up busted stitches, for God’s sake.
“I’m worried about Daddy; I’m worried about Mama.”
Worry about yourself. Think about yourself.
“I feel differently now. I’m going to be more sensible.”
I should hope.
“MORE SHORT TAKES,” I wrote in caps in my journal, dated April 21, 1958: “I am starting to feel better . . . This experience in Rome is emotionally intense on so many levels—just being in this ancient city! . . . In the morning I’ll be shooting a scene and then I’m off to tour the catacombs, and in the evening I find myself at a party dancing with Anthony Quinn. When I get back to my hotel it’s Daddy on the phone telling me he misses me and he’s gotten a weird new client, a comic named Ernie Kovacs—whose children have been kidnapped and Daddy has to hunt them down before he can get paid.
“I’m acting in a movie that may be iconic . . . Fred Z is amazing—he admits to improvising—he was both a documentary filmmaker and an assistant director, so two attitudes exist as he works in film! And then there is Audrey, who I have not gotten to know at all . . . A big disappointment . . . But she is a star and as Lenny Lyons says, ‘Stars want to be with stars . . .’ She remains a total mystery to all of us; she is regal, she is childlike—obviously tamping down her high spirits (which I am sure she has) to inhabit Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story . . . We have barely exchanged a sentence, but she did scold me for smoking too much on set. I get nervous. ‘I smoke too, you know,’ she told me quietly. ‘It doesn’t do any good.’
“I wanted to ask her if it’s true about her mother, who is apparently very cold and very difficult and once told Audrey, ‘You have absolutely no talent, so it’s amazing you’ve come so far!’ And Audrey is loving to her and supports her financially.”
April 24, 1958: “Mama sent me a birthday cake! It’s my birthday, April 24—I am twenty-six. She arranged to have Millie order my favorite white cake with caramel frosting. Millie invited Pat Collinge and Dame Edith, and we sat in the hotel garden. They toasted me with champagne. The birthday celebration—blowing out the candles and making a wish—brings back memories of the other birthday parties Mama gave me and my brother when we were small. She hired a magician and he took live white rabbits out of hats . . . and then the rabbits shit on the dining room table. Mama was furious! . . . Another time she asked the opera singer Lily Pons to sing “Happy Birthday” to Bart when he was seven and he started to cry. He told me, ‘Her singing hurt my eardrums!’ It’s all so long ago.”
I REMINDED GORE VIDAL that I was trying to write a novel the first time we’d met and I was still trying.
“But why?” Gore wondered.
We were in his office in Cinecittà. The lights were on; the room had no windows; it was stuffy. But I didn’t care because we were talking about writing, though I couldn’t explain why I was writing the novel.
“Four Flights Up, it’s called, maybe because the heroine is a young girl living in a four-flight walk-up in New York, as I do.”
Gore’s eyes glazed over in boredom and he switched the subject to families. “Much more interesting to write about a family, to write about somebody you know,” he said.
I told him my parents, especially my father, had always encouraged me in everything I’d wanted to do and they’d encouraged me to read—I’d read prodigiously as a little girl.
Gore said, “My mother worried that I spent too much time reading—escaped into the magical Oz books and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan . . .” We both agreed that we’d preferred to live in a world of fantasy by the time we were teenagers, “to get away from our reality,” Gore said.
I began telling him about Bart—his suicide and the circumstances surrounding it, the hanging death of his friend at Deerfield and the school’s fearful, dismissive attitude about the friendship.
Gore would later write an incisive piece on the complicated matter of sexual identity. “The American passion for categorization has managed to create two new non-existent categories—gay and straight. Either you are one or the other. But since everyone is a mixture of inclinations, the categories keep breaking down; and when they break down, the irrational takes over.”
Was my brother homosexual? I wondered.
“This is what you should be writing about, Patti, not a novel,” Gore said. “Write about your brother. Write about what you know. His torment, your torment.”
“Oh God, it would be too painful.”
“Of course it would.” His voice grew irritated. “It won’t be easy. If you can do it, it will take years.”
“But how—how could I even approach it?”
Gore thought for a minute. “You will have to go to a place inside yourself you cannot bear to go. You have to ruminate on everything about your brother. You have to swim in the pain, absorb it, understand it, and then when you do, you detach, because you must be detached to write something like this. You can’t be mawkish or sentimental.”
He gazed at me. “You are still so young. You won’t be able to do it for a while, maybe not for a long time, since you have absolutely no technique whatsoever.”
“I know that.”
“Maybe in thirty or forty years. By that time you’ll have some distance, some perspective.” We both laughed, but I knew he was telling me the truth.
I hurried back to my dressing room and scribbled down what Gore had told me. That I should write everything I could remember; it’s only in writing it down that you know what you think. Pull from the raw material of your life—how is it possible to tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? Important events: the fire in the nursery where my brother was almost burned alive . . . Bart struggling to make those paper wings and fly far, far away . . . The rose gardens at Aptos . . . The view of the Hudson River from our house on the hill in Garrison . . . And above and beyond everything, my brother’s spirit hovering. My brother, who was always my coconspirator, my savior, when we were growing up. He would never forget me or leave me stranded. He was the silent one, but he was the one who helped me cope. I was the clown who entertained our parents’ guests and then often fell apart.
Chapter Twenty
THE MORNING I filmed my good-bye scene with Audrey, I felt like crying because I would be leaving Rome soon, but I realized I had to concentrate. I watched Franz Planer, the great cinematographer, wheeling the cameras into view before he conferred with Fred. I’d already been told I’d be in close-up through most of the scene; that scared me, since a close-up in a movie is the high-wire test of an actor’s skill.
As the lights were being adjusted, Audrey drifted over to me and took my hands in hers. “Patti,” she said softly and intensely, “don’t do anything. Above all, don’t act. The camera picks up everything. But do mean what you say.”
Then she whirled around and began her own preparation, withdrawing into the character of Sister Luke. In another moment the cameras would begin rolling. I had to enter from a hallway and then step into position opposite Audrey.
It’s an illusion to think that the ability to project in front of a camera is easy. It’s hard to act natural and hold the camera’s eye—to fill the space. That eye catches everything. In the space between my face and the camera, I would be undefended; my eyes and the set of my features would be my only means of expression.
But when I gazed into Audrey’s mobile, translucent face, that’s all I seemed to need. Focusing on
that face, I believed it when I told her, “I’m leaving the convent because I know I’m not like you—as strong as you . . .”
Our eyes met as the camera recorded me in close-up. I kept on looking at Audrey. Nothing moved as she listened to me. Eyes unblinking, she conveyed without words sympathy and affection.
Fred shot a couple of versions. He was making a big Hollywood movie, and while these scenes were essential, they were but tiny ones to be stitched together into the intricate mosaic of a picture. So when he called, “Print! Take! And now on to the next,” he was very brisk with me. “Good job,” he said.
I watched Audrey disappear; there was a sinking feeling in my stomach.
I was on my way back to my dressing room when Audrey’s assistant ran after me. “Miss Hepburn would like you to join her for tea tomorrow [it was Saturday]. Givenchy is flying in from Paris to show her his new collection and she thought you’d enjoy seeing it with her.”
AUDREY’S SUITE AT the Hassler was filled with her favorite things. It was said she traveled with forty pieces of luggage crammed with possessions, everything from china to linens. She traveled so much she needed to have objects around that she cared about, such as silver candelabra, white silk pillows, crystal dishes, a white cashmere blanket for the cream satin chaise. There were piles of books and scripts and photographs of family in silver frames. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, with Mel Ferrer and Audrey on their wedding day in Switzerland. Snapshots of her beloved tiny dog, Famous, who was barking and scampering around when I came in.
The minute I entered the suite I was enveloped in the sweet fragrance of L’Interdit, the perfume Hubert Givenchy had personally created for Audrey. She was the only one who wore it for two years; then he started selling it commercially. Audrey came into the living room almost at once dressed in a favorite outfit—toreador pants, flats, and a man’s shirt tied at the waist. After kissing me lightly on the cheek, she drew me down on the sofa. “Tell me a little about yourself—we don’t know each other at all.”
The Men in My Life Page 26
