Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  But on Bite the Bullet there was a moment of truth. I found—the hard way—some of the responsibility I’d been groping toward. One morning, heading for location in one of the fleet of station wagons, with a taciturn New Mexican teamster in cowboy hat, denims and silver-tipped boots at the wheel, steadily negotiating the rutted dirt road, I fired a small salvo on the dialogue to the other actors in the car: mine sounded like Tonto’s. “I can’t say this stuff. It’s like an anthology of cowboy clichés; Gene Autry had better lines, for God’s sake, Roy Rogers… .”

  Suddenly, Gene Hackman, who had been sitting silently beside the driver in the front seat, swiveled sharply and turned his fury on me full force. “Shut up about the dialogue!” He was sick of my complaining. If I had such strong objections, then I should keep them to myself because he had to play the script I was so furiously dissecting. He—actors—had to find a way to make those lines work and “I don’t need to hear any more of your wisecracks about how it can’t be done. My job is to do it.”

  Silence. You could have heard an ant sneeze in that station wagon as we bumped along the rest of the way. There was nothing to say. Gene was right, of course, in all he said. Even when you think people are wrong, it is easy to tell when they are right. When they are right about something you are trying very hard to hide from others and yourself, you know they are right because you want to kill them. They have hit the bull’s-eye, and you react with the righteous rage of someone trapped and wounded. The adrenaline bolts through your body and your face flushes and you break out in a slight sweat, but underneath, down in the depths of you, the temperature changes abruptly and it feels very cold. Simple acts like swallowing become monumental tasks. What are you trying to swallow there in your tailored cowgirl outfit bouncing along in the back seat blinking back the tears? Are you trying to swallow the truth?

  Gene Hackman is the kind of actor—a truly brilliant actor—who loves what he does for a living. He didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought of him, never wasted his time buddying up to the crew or getting chummy on the set. He funneled his energy fiercely into his work, and he did make bad material good, mediocre writing great. Made magic. An actor who worked with intelligence, honesty and passion, he was the first person to give me a sense of respect for acting, some real understanding of what was involved. Bite the Bullet was our second film together; he had shot me in the stomach in our first one, The Hunting Party, in Spain, and he got shot in the back in our third one in Mexico, an unfortunate film called The Domino Principle. That film (in which I wore a short, dark wig that prompted one critic to remark that I was beginning to resemble Shelley Winters) was a fiasco, but Gene and I finally became friends. He worked with me, made suggestions, explored the scenes, taught me exercises, told me tricks, encouraged me and coached me; he shared with me his sense of joy in what he did. By then I had been making movies for ten years; that was the first time I began to see the complexity, the infinite challenge of my profession.

  With Gene Hackman in The Domino Principle

  I turned twenty-eight during Bite the Bullet—a birthday of no particular significance except that it edged uncomfortably under the shadow of thirty and nothing had changed. Here I was closing in on thirty, as puzzled, as self-pitying as I was at twenty-five.

  Back in Beverly Hills, I began going to an analyst, a respected man, distinguished in his field, who had started conducting group-therapy sessions with his many illustrious patients. I enrolled in group and we began meeting twice a week in the art-lined, leather-upholstered office for what turned out to be a pleasant ritual, not the painful one we hoped and expected it would be. We began to look forward to it as a convivial and comforting gathering at the end of the day—a clubby Gestalt cocktail hour whose regulars included two heads of major motion-picture studios, a famous film star of the fifties, a prominent surgeon, the wife of a celebrated director, a conceptual artist and me.

  Bite the Bullet

  Most of us had known each other socially before the group was formed, and it seemed an easy if unorthodox selection. Conversations orbited around show business; there were epic anecdotes about famous figures, firsthand accounts of historic encounters rich in imagery and detail. The studio heads would lament low grosses and high losses, tackle test-marketing techniques and discuss production and distribution.

  Discussions were lively and quick-witted, informative and entertaining. Occasionally we would grapple and hold each other in an emotional hammerlock, but basically we enjoyed ourselves and drove home happy, comforted by the contact.

  Of course, we suspected that comfort wasn’t enough. Other groups, we’d heard, had things called breakthroughs, psy-chodramas. Other groups, real groups, were painful and intense. Ours was too much fun.

  What we wanted was legitimacy, and the way to get it, we decided, was to have a marathon. Other groups had marathons—extended sessions that often lasted twenty-four hours, or even a weekend, and produced, through prolonged encounter and the vulnerability of fatigue, dramatic results.

  Flushed from the exhilaration of that decision, we tackled the next: where to have it. The office was an obvious choice but seemed too confining for so lengthy a set-to. The artist had a studio high in the mountains, but that was vetoed as being too far away. The wife of the director had a vast and elegant house in Bel Air and she offered to have it there, planning the menu as she spoke—a light meal of cold poached salmon with dill sauce, cucumber salad, white wine and fruit. No, no, we said, this was a marathon, not a buffet; be serious. The environment should be simple, impersonal, austere. So it was with great relief that we reached what seemed the perfect solution: a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  And it was there we found ourselves, two days before Christmas, variously attired in jeans, Ultrasuede and surgical greens, sitting uneasily in the living room, waiting for the waiter from room service to arrive with the drinks, tense, ready for combat, determined not to trivialize this experience, hell-bent not to have fun.

  Well-heeled, well-intentioned explorers, we set out to discover our feelings, expose emotions and slay our mental dragons. Hoping for a hero’s return home at Christmas, we trekked valiantly through the night, stopping only for a brief rest and room service, and continued on wearily until dawn eased over the palms.

  In the early morning light we eyed each other uncertainly, like first-time lovers edgy about finding ourselves in such intimacy, disappointed after having expected so much. We had waited and hoped for something to happen, and none of us knew for sure that it had. Perhaps we felt some sense of pride in simply having stayed up all night. As morning broke and the birds started up again, we filed out past the ferns, feeling exhausted and incomplete. Smiling bravely, hugging gamely, we wished each other Merry Christmas, sealed ourselves in our cars and drove slowly home.

  The party in Bungalow 5 had checked out.

  That summer I went to Spain to do a film with Sean Connery called The Wind and the Lion. Almería was the “Western capital” of Europe—a vast backlot. Its dun-colored, dry, rocky landscape and unexpected patches of sand dunes served as a convenient and economical substitute for the legendary geography it so handily resembled: the Arabian desert and the great American West.

  So many films had taken advantage of this similarity that Almería had the character of an eerie archeological site. The area was littered with primitive facsimiles, layered with conflicting civilizations. Western towns bordered Moorish villages; Mexican pueblos dotted the plain. You could crest a sand dune and find cartridges spent on Lawrence of Arabia, arrows from One Hundred Rifles, tombstones from A Fistful of Dollars, water gourds from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Fossils for film buffs. Explorers from the future who stumble onto this barren land will be baffled by these ruins, overwhelmed by this cultural windfall.

  And now we were about to leave another layer of our own. The Wind and the Lion was based on a historical incident between Teddy Roosevelt and the Great Raisuli, Lord of the Riff, which took place in Morocco. S
ome of the film was shot in Madrid, Seville and Granada, but most of it in accommodating Almería, its chameleonic country taking on the colors of the Riff. Old Moroccan villages sprang up overnight, centuries of whitewash gleaming in the sun; ancient abandoned forts were spread with Oriental carpets, filled with flowers and, for a few days, given new life.

  The film was a sweeping historical epic—spectacular in the old Hollywood sense, wonderfully written by its director, John Milius. Sean Connery played the great desert leader; Brian Keith, a truly bully Teddy Roosevelt; and I, an American widow in Tangier taken into the desert as hostage. My dream come true. Every day on the set was like walking into a book by Lesley Blanch: Berbers on horseback, herds of camels, Moorish palaces and black camel’s-hair tents piled with pillows, hookahs, camel saddles and silver trays of dates. It was the most romantic location of my life.

  While signing a Scot to play a legendary Berber chieftain seemed to some a quirky piece of casting, Sean gave an effortless performance: strong and dashing, witty and wry. He had that same wryness in life—a laconic sense of humor, an easy sense of fun. But what struck me as most unusual in a star of his stature was his lack of vanity, his comfortable sense of assurance. There was an honesty and directness about Sean, a wholeness, a manliness, that stardom had not eroded.

  With Simon Harrison and Sean Connery on the set of The Wind and the Lion

  That in itself may not sound worthy of scientific study, but it is rare enough: I had discovered, over the years, that insecurity was not, as the stereotypes had it, the exclusive province of female stars. And I had met few men who had escaped the business of being movie stars unscathed, with their integrity and masculinity intact. For men, as for women, stardom often involved long journeys of obsessive self-involvement. Anxious, frequent mirror checks: makeup, hairpiece. Am I there? But our culture forgives this kind of behavior less readily in men than in women; so, most often, do the men themselves.

  The ones who survived it were either the rare, dedicated, unpretentious ones like Sean and Gene Hackman, or those who enjoyed—even reveled in—the dramatic facades they created off screen. Like Tony Quinn. On The Magus, his arrival on the set had been announced by his Spanish valet descending the steps, bearing a handsome leather director’s chair with ANTHONY QUINN in huge, elegantly hand-tooled letters. Funny, ferocious, childlike—and probably a pistol to live with—Tony was a giant: one of the handful of movie stars who are as large in life as they are on screen. His tall, solid frame filled a room and his expansive spirit left little space for anyone else. He loved every minute of it and I envied him his enjoyment of who he was.

  If I sound like a maven of male behavior, it might have to do with the number of Westerns I made. All locations are illusions, overnight universes where ordinary laws are suspended so that people can do whatever it takes to get the job done and go home. No one is held accountable for his actions; the citizens of this world have a slim chance of ever meeting each other again. So a sort of stag-party sensibility prevails, and sometimes the locations are more entertaining than the films themselves, rife with swift and shifty shipboard romances, liaisons unlikely and short-lived.

  But if all locations are mirages, Westerns are the most bizarre. Traditional male havens, they seem to induce some sort of strange childhood regression. Grown men return to being little boys in backyards, playing glorified games of Cowboys and Indians. Actors prowl the set twirling pistols, quick-drawing, smooth-holstering, hotshot mounting, drinking hard and riding reckless. Whipping their overworked horses into a gallop between takes so that when it comes time to shoot, the animals are lathered, winded and half dead.

  On most sets, slow-talkin’, fast-movin’, hard-ridin’, steely-nerved, roll-your-own stunt men watched those overpaid bozos silently through squinty eyes, their lips curled softly in a condescending grin. They made scant effort to conceal their contempt for certain actors they saw as pretentious pansies—big men who bullied little ones in bars after work, who tested their toughness on tired horses. Men who pretended to do what stunt men did best. Men who pretended to be men.

  There were some few actors who refused to use stunt men—made the refusal a point of honor, a declaration of their very manhood. They had guts, by God; they had spine. They had balls, let’s face it. They took their own falls, threw their own punches and bragged about it on talk shows later. I may be an actor but I’m a guy. Men certainly don’t make it easy on themselves.

  Locations also served as handy crash courses in language: I’d improved my French with Lelouch and his crew, picked up some Italian in Rome, and learned Spanish on Westerns shot in Mexico and Spain. But it was a quirky kind of Spanish learned from Spanish stunt men, Mexican wranglers—a cowboy’s command of the language. I could say, “Please lower the stirrups” (¿Se puede abajar los estribos?), “My cinch is loose,” “This bit’s too tough,” “Have you seen my spurs?” “Is this your arrow?” “My horse is lame,” “My shotgun’s jammed,” and “I have to reload my pistol.” Short of a bank robbery in Baja, I had no call to use it.

  When The Wind and the Lion was over, I was sad to see it end.

  Leaving a location was always hard for everyone concerned: readjusting to family life after three or four months away; or, for those without families, returning home to an empty house after working intensely, intimately, in a group. As sets are struck, cases packed, and trucks loaded to leave, the months of close camaraderie are already fading. Hard on everyone—and, for me, getting harder all the time.

  14

  TWENTY-NINE. Almost thirty. Traditionally a significant year. In the sixties, crossing that line had meant being banished forever to the establishment along with all of your peers. In the seventies, thanks to the women’s movement, “thirty” had ceased to be a social stigma and women were no longer branded and sent into the snow to die. Still, there was no denying that it was a milestone of sorts.

  I marked the occasion by moving back to New York; it seemed a more appropriate place than Los Angeles to live out the autumn of my years. A mature choice for a mature woman. A place for serious pursuits. And I bought an apartment overlooking Central Park, conspicuous in its lack of a rainbow. A mature apartment.

  In New York, I was offered a job by NBC’s “Today” show to produce a series of photo essays on subjects of my choosing. It was a dream job and I jumped at it. I crisscrossed the country from Camp Pendleton to Pittsburgh, Venice to Baton Rouge, photographing women Marines and women coal miners, blind beggars, body builders, Muhammad Ali, Joe Namath and the Ku Klux Klan; writing the accompanying copy, which I read over the series of stills. I loved it.

  Sometimes, arriving at NBC as dawn was breaking, I passed rumpled, red-eyed kids leaving the lobby; people whose day was ending just as mine began. They were writers working all night on a new late-night comedy program called “Saturday Night Live”; their first two shows had had George Carlin and Paul Simon as guest hosts. But few people had heard of the show or seen it when Lorne Michaels, the producer, asked me to host the third. When he showed me the tapes of the first two, I said I would follow him anywhere: it was everything you wanted television to be. In all, I hosted three shows over a year, with a rush of exhilaration and terror. Lorne said that the first time the camera cut to me as I was introduced to the live audience, my expression was “like Patty Hearst opening the door to find the SLA.”

  In 1976, when America was celebrating her two-hundredth anniversary, I was preparing to turn thirty. I took out a new passport—a jaunty Bicentennial model with Liberty Bells blanketing every page and an American eagle embossed on my face—and gave an interview in Vogue trumpeting my new maturity:

  … I am now thirty and have begun, like other women I know, to hit my stride, so to speak, to really come into my own. And while at times it’s confusing, uncertain, and often lonely, I wouldn’t have it any other way. There may be a point of diminishing returns but, for now, it all gets better….

  Then I went into a coma. Perhaps it was premature mid
life crisis; whatever it was, the symptoms were unpredictable fits of weeping: suddenly, at dinner with close friends, I would inexplicably burst into tears. Probably just part of “hitting my stride,” I supposed, but it left me embarrassed and bewildered. Then, apologetic, polite even in crisis, I would bring my weeping under control, smile weakly and wait for the next attack to come. Perhaps it had to get worse before “it all gets better….”

  The person so recently described in Vogue as “a 1976 woman who can shape, sustain, and enjoy life on her own terms” was now to be found wrapped in a flannel robe in a rocker, staring out over the park or religiously watching “The Bionic Woman” and whimpering softly to herself, “What’s to become of me?”

  Life was not proceeding according to plan. By my calculations, my life was meant to be in order by now; from the passport I took out at twenty-five to its Bicentennial replacement at thirty, everything—marriage, a family—should have fallen into place. I had not anticipated the sweeping changes that had occurred around me, sudden shifts in the social wind—and had failed to take them into consideration.

  I had traveled the feminist circuit faithfully for a time, speaking at pro-abortion rallies, equal rights meetings, women’s caucuses, campaigns for female delegates; but I had realized, more quickly than I admitted, that I couldn’t match or even truly comprehend the fervor, the sometime fury, of the movement. In truth, I was a special case—a woman lucky enough to lead a man’s life in a man’s world, who had functioned freely, profited handsomely by the system; who had not been penalized by my sex but rewarded for it. I worked for and supported “our” rights because “mine” had never been denied to me.

  Certainly, the women’s movement dramatically expanded women’s options. And it made many of my choices easier. But ironically it wasn’t until the late seventies, when women were coming to terms with the movement’s promises, that I discovered common cause with some of its staunchest supporters. Many women (never mind the men) were well confused—especially those my age, in whom twenty years of traditional thinking clashed with ten years of feminism. Were women meant to do everything? Work and have babies? Were love and marriage to be discarded completely? What was “… a 1976 woman who can shape, sustain, and enjoy life on her own terms” supposed to do? To want? What were my terms anyway? Frankly, I hadn’t a clue.