by Diane Keaton
On the set, Barry, the hairdresser, would joke about farts while rolling my hair in curlers, as thirtyish Paul slapped on the makeup. Occasionally Jeremy Pikser, one of the writers, would join me for lunch and talk about iconic characters he couldn’t stand, like Scarlett O’Hara, who was nothing more than a selfish brat. I don’t know, I probably got the message wrong, but it seemed like he was trying to tell me something.
Everyone knew I didn’t take well to Warren’s direction. It was impossible to work with a perfectionist who shot forty takes per setup. Sometimes it felt like I was being stun-gunned. Even now I can’t say my performance is my own. It was more like a reaction to Warren—that’s what it was: a response to the effect of Warren Beatty.
It took the tragic reunion of John Reed and Louise Bryant at the train station for me to find a sense of pride in playing such a provocative character. Warren waited through something like sixty-five excruciating close-ups before I finally broke through my self-imposed wall of defiance and let go of my judgment call on a woman I needed to love in order to play. Shooting the scene was an experience I couldn’t have foreseen. Because of Warren’s tenacity, suddenly, against all odds, love came rushing through when Louise Bryant saw John Reed’s face approaching hers at last. Reds was an epic with themes enriched by human ideals. John Reed sacrificed his life for his beliefs. But for me, it was imperfect love that was at the heart of Warren’s movie.
PART THREE
9
ARTISTIC
Focus
It was the eighties. I was nominated for an Academy Award for Reds but lost to Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. My next movie, Shoot the Moon, was released to mixed critical success. The Little Drummer Girl tanked big-time. Mrs. Soffel with Mel Gibson also bombed. Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek, was sweet but did little business. Somehow, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro agreed to have a meet/greet for their upcoming film Cape Fear. They went with Jessica Lange. Other projects, including Almost Human, Reform School, Klepto, Whatever Happened to Harry, and Book of Love, never saw the light of day.
It’s not that I didn’t work. I worked in Canada, Los Angeles, Finland, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, Greece, Napa, Israel, Germany, and Southport, North Carolina. It’s just that for the most part my contribution to the art of filmmaking wasn’t particularly inspired. When I wasn’t on the road I continued to live in New York. Warren, having won his Oscar for best director, was here and there, until there won out. Woody met Mia Farrow and began a new alliance. Without a great man writing and directing for me, I was a mediocre movie star at best. I didn’t have a publicist. I chose not to brand out with an Annie Hall line of clothes. I didn’t have a manager, nor did I want one anymore.
When I wasn’t acting, I pursued a variety of visual hobbies under the umbrella of “art.” My friend Daniel Wolf even agreed to give me a show of paintings based on religious pamphlets I’d collected at swap meets. I commissioned a Kansas City sign painter named Robert Huggins to put my ideas on several billboard-size canvases. When Religious Commissions proved to be inexplicably bizarre, I took photographs à la Sandy Skoglund, most famous for Radioactive Cats, which features green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. In honor of Sandy, I assembled a tableau setting in my living room that resembled the view from an alpine ski lodge, complete with fake rocks bought at a prop shop and genuine-looking crows flying overhead. Nine willing ballerinas in pink tutus and masks agreed to stand in front of my homemade diorama and have their photograph taken. It became glaringly apparent I was no Sandy Skoglund, so I took portraits of friends like Carol Kane sitting inside boxes with polka dots framing their faces under patterned light casting shadows. I also wrote lyrics to songs that were never recorded. “She sits in a Chinese restaurant. She’s crappy. She’s a creep; she looks at him. She’s lost too much sleep. And a one, and a two, a one two three. Two different worlds … We live in two different worlds … Our hearts …” Et cetera. I started photographing people on the streets, à la Diane Arbus. As if that wasn’t enough, I began cutting and pasting four-by-six-foot collages. One, called Face Lift Off, featured Bette Davis’s head being hoisted up into God knows where. Don’t ask.
Warren, now a friend, would remind me I was a movie star. Focus on that. I didn’t listen. Cindy Sherman had arrived on the scene and, with her, the decade of appropriation. I wanted to be part of it. I kept telling myself I was an artist. The awful truth was, no matter how hard I tried, I was an actress who hadn’t been in a comedy since Manhattan in 1979.
On the Road
I took some of Warren’s advice and went looking for a movie to produce. After reading Somebody’s Darling, the story of one of the few bankable female directors in Hollywood and her best friend, I took the train to Washington, D.C., and met my own soon-to-be-friend Larry McMurtry at his store Booked Up. Larry, with his feet on the desk, listened to my pitch. Not skipping a beat, he said he’d give me the option and he’d write the script too. Six months later it was finished. That’s the kind of guy Larry is. My agent secured a meeting with Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount, who did not mince words when she told me the project was not commercial. That was it for Somebody’s Darling, but not for my friendship with Larry.
Every other month or so, I would hop on the Amtrak to D.C., where Larry and I would hit the streets in his Cadillac. As usual, I had a creative task that consumed me. One time it revolved around a series of photographs on taxidermied animals. Leave it to Larry to know some people who owned a pair of stuffed sheep joined at the hip. Traveling became a metaphor for our friendship.
On one of our road trips through Texas, I told Larry about my dream of living in Miami Beach, where it was forever humid and hot. Sometimes, I told him, I thought about moving to Atlantic City or Baja California. Then again, what I really wanted to do was pack it in and move to Pasadena near the arroyo, right by Greene and Greene’s Gamble House. Larry listened with a Dr Pepper in one hand, the steering wheel in the other. When we found ourselves on the outskirts of Ponder, Texas, a big sign told us that Bonnie and Clyde had been shot within the city limits. Warren Beatty—my high school crush; my Splendor in the Grass. It was impossible to wrap my mind around the fact that we met, became intimate, and spent a year making Reds. Drifting back to 1967, I remembered Mom’s home movie of Bonnie and Clyde, starring Randy as C. W. Moss, Robin as Bonnie, Dorrie as Blanche, and me, Diane, as Clyde Barrow. I had outright refused to be Bonnie. Hell, no. I didn’t want to be Bonnie. I was going to be Warren Beatty. Who in their right mind wouldn’t? And that became our central problem. I wanted to be Warren Beatty, not love him.
The facts of my life felt more surreal than any dream. As we passed through Ponder, I rolled down the window. Out of the dust that enveloped our silence, Larry’s words started coming and going. “It’s so plain in Nebraska, I can’t tell you, it’s just totally plain. Last week I crossed the Missouri on a tiny toll bridge and the little old woman toll keeper was so lonely, she made me stop and eat a doughnut with her. ‘It’s punk here in the wintertime,’ she said. ‘I sit here all day just grinding my teeth.’ ” Then he’d be quiet for a while and begin again. Larry was a born storyteller. I think about those times, the lull of the engine, the endless horizon, and Larry’s words dangling. It turned out we shared something the filming of Somebody’s Darling could never have given us: a friendship and the road.
Memories
Dear Diane,
My book has a total of three pages. So far my diggings have turned up a bit of pain I can’t avoid but funny remembrances too. Many thoughts I kept so private dwell on my anger toward authority figures that never came out as anger. Writing this is not a pleasant pastime; in fact the book is seldom touched, because I’m trying to be accurate & honest.
I’m not writing about the years you kids were growing up. I don’t want to be guilty of “the good ole days” trap. All I need to do is sift through the photos of us, and I sink into a nostalgia of the WORST
kind. In Memories it’s not like that; I’m writing of things that shaped me. I remember a common thought I had about not doing things my parents did when I grew up. I would make chocolate instead of yellow cake. I would laugh & talk a lot. I would keep romantic love alive. I would be loving rather than impatient with my kids. I thought these CHANGES WOULD take place—
It’s a day to speak of today—so sparkly & beautiful—Jack bought himself a 12 ft. sailboat yesterday. He is happy. We will be sailing later. I have a strong feeling of fun ahead.
Love,
Mom
Mother didn’t finish her memoir, Memories. Memories. Lost memories. Memories unfinished. A book called Memories. It was almost as if God’s will had taken over Mother’s future. I didn’t notice. I was too busy to register the significance of taking on the task of writing a memoir or to be encouraging enough to help. I don’t know if I actually read Mother’s letter. I have no recollection. I was content to assume Mom was free from the drama of raising us kids and now she had all the time she needed to devote to her artistic pursuits. Of course, I made sure I didn’t know what was going on. I had other more important things on my mind.
Sometimes this house is so quiet—I can’t figure how it got to be, or why. I walk around as if looking for noise. I speak to the cats, one at a time, or together. The windows draw me to look out; around the yard; check the pool; is the light still on or off? At another time this oversight drove me crazy. Where are all those things and people who brought their sounds to me? I don’t mind being alone. I like it most of the time. When it closes in on me a touch too much, I just walk out of the place, get in the car, and go for a drive.
Seeing as a Way of Being
After ten years in New York, things continued to stand out, like the photograph Woman Seen from the Back by Onésipe Aguado, at the Met. What does she see facing the wrong direction? I wanted to see it too. The picture was taken in the nineteenth century, yet the distance between her past and my present seemed to collapse. It’s hard to believe a woman’s back made it clear that seeing rather than being seen could be something so extraordinary, but it did. The power of photography’s ability to evoke rather than explain inspired me. Nothing has changed. Books like Now Is Then, The Waking Dream, and Least Wanted are links to artists who forged a path into their imagination. At least, that’s what it seems like to me.
Marvin Heiferman was the director of Castelli Graphics when he gave me a little show of photographs I had taken in hotel lobbies around the United States. “Reservations” included photographs of a broken-down, empty Ambassador Hotel, where Mom had been crowned Mrs. Los Angeles; the Stardust Hotel lobby, where Dad invested and lost every penny when I was twelve years old; the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach; the Pierre in New York; and the Biltmore in Palm Springs.
Thanks for Nothing
A few years later, Marvin and I decided to collaborate on a book of publicity shots from old movies. It took us to basements and warehouses throughout Los Angeles, where we hunted down large-format photographs of movie stars posed in scenes from South Pacific, Lassie, and Bigger Than Life, with James Mason, to name a few. Plowing through thousands of discarded four-by-five-inch color transparencies, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Joan Crawford, James Mason, Annette Funicello, and even Elvis. Inanimate and waxy, they looked like the taxidermied animals from the series of photographs I had taken with Larry.
I knew I was on to something major with the stuffed-animal motif. It made me think of that Roy Rogers quote, “I told Dale, ‘When I go, just skin me and put me on top of Trigger.’ ” Which in turn gave me the idea of a title, Still Life. Get it? My favorite example was the photograph of Gregory Peck from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I even wrote him into my introduction.
It’s hard to love someone you’ve never known, but it’s easy to long for someone you’ve seen idealized to the point where you think you’re in love. When you grow up, you’re supposed to be able to distinguish between fantasy and real affection. For instance, I know Gregory Peck isn’t going to enter my life and become an intimate part of it. Most people know that, and by the time they reach adulthood, they don’t want Gregory Peck anymore. But if Gregory Peck touched them once—he touched me once—he remains a very vital part of their makeup. The ideal image of him takes on many dimensions. He becomes a representation of the frequently frustrated longings of adolescence, all those things you wanted to believe life was going to place at your feet.
After Still Life was published I received a letter from Gregory Peck. He wasn’t pleased. He thought the book was stupid. On top of that he didn’t appreciate being compared to a stuffed animal. It was such a lame, kitschy idea, he hoped I wasn’t the mastermind behind it. He ended by saying my heartfelt introduction was total crap.
It never entered my mind that Gregory Peck might feel bad about looking almost real in front of a fake backdrop. I was busy patting myself on the back for a book Gregory Peck dismissed as camp, and how, miracle of miracles, it captured the essence of taxidermy and how it was going to put me on the map—which one I’m not sure.
Gregory Peck is on my long list of regrets I hope to be forgiven for. I’m sorry I carelessly held him accountable for some publicist’s brainstorm. I’m sorry I picked an iconic photograph that shed light on his stiff upper lip and abiding lack of affect, which hounded him throughout his career, like my own eccentricity hounds me.
In the Meantime
I talked to a woman at Hunter’s Bookstore who had just spent 3 days cleaning out her deceased aunt’s huge Victorian house. The aunt, a spinster, had died at age 86. She saved everything ever given, sent, or found. When asked why, she said that it gave her pleasure. She wouldn’t care what happened to it after she died. Her niece bought a box of heavy-duty trash bags and without sympathy pitched all of it into the dump. It was as if I was hearing this for a specific reason. All the writing I do, and all the words on paper I put away, and all the little inspirational messages I cut and save that I feel were written and directed to me and me alone, don’t matter. After I’m gone, I won’t care whether the family reads any of it or tosses all of it in the dump. There are some words I would want them to read though: the ones detailing my thoughts and feelings about each of them; how much I loved them, what it was about them that was so special to me; those five people who will be doing the pitching.
Imagining Heaven, the Ultimate Coming Attraction, 1987
It took a year and a half to make my documentary, Heaven. The reception was unanimous. I suppose the most painful rejection came from Vincent Canby of The New York Times. “Heaven, a film by Diane Keaton, is the cinema equivalent of a book that’s discounted to $19.95 before Christmas with the warning that it will be $50 after. If you respond to that kind of come-on, you may respond to Heaven. One’s torn between wanting to kick the film and wanting to protect it from wasting all this money.”
Heaven was a promise I’d longed for as a little girl. I knew I was afraid to die, but if I had to, I wanted to go to heaven. The epiphany came thirty years later, when I visited the Mormon Tabernacle visitors’ center in Salt Lake City with my friend Kristi Zea. Entering the dome-shaped hall, we saw what I can only describe as a coming attraction, featuring smiling people in white robes floating in the sky. Even Kristi agreed it was a strange juxtaposition of images that could inspire only a surrealist. I may not have been a surrealist, but I was inspired. I called my producing partner Joe Kelly. I had an idea.
We got permission to see 16-millimeter copies of MGM heaven-themed features as well as obscure evangelical Super 8 short films. The more I saw, the more my appetite grew, culminating with several visits to the film historian William Everson’s apartment in New York, where he screened Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Fritz Lang’s Liliom and both Dr. Mabuses—and more. Not only did we gather astonishing footage, we also assembled people who gave heaven the beauty of their imaginations. There was Alfred Robles, Grace Johansen, Don King, an
d the Reverend Robert Hymers, author of UFOs and Bible Prophecy (reprinted as Encounters of the Fourth Kind), to name a few.
When Joe and I began shooting interviews, I asked stirring questions like, “Is there sex in heaven?” “Is there love in heaven?” “Are you afraid to die?” Mom and Dad and Grammy Hall were among my first interviews. Dad was convinced. “If there is something after death, and I’ve led a good life, I can’t conceive why Dorothy and I wouldn’t be together.” Mom nodded her head and said, “It’s a subject I don’t like to think or give credence to.” “Yeah,” Dad said, “it’s something you don’t think about. I have partners that do, but I don’t.” Grammy Hall summed it up best: “There ain’t such a thing as heaven. Have you ever seen anybody who passed away that you loved and wanted to see? No! Nobody ever come back and said, ‘Well, here I am and I am so glad to see you.’ Anybody tells you they’ve died and gone to heaven is a dirty liar.”
After Paul Barnes, the editor, helped put the movie together, we began the preview process. Apparently the audience best suited to see a movie like Heaven came from two groups: women and “experiential” types. It turned out experientials were your “oddballs,” your “weirdos,” and your “downtown set.” This was concerning. Were there enough experiential women from downtown to make our movie a moderate success? We certainly had our fair share appearing in the movie, like the woman who said, “I’ve seen Jesus in the spirit. He entered my bedroom. He came from the top of the window like you roll the scroll, and he was nothing but a spirit. His chest was made out of sky, and his shoulders were made out of cloud. And he moved just like the waves in the water. All at once I heard a universal harp like … ooohhh … like a wind blowing oooohhh … like the wind when it blows like ooooohhhhh. That’s when he flipped over in my room. Then he floated through my bedroom and I said, ‘In the bathroom,’ so then he went right into the bathroom and then I said, ‘In the living room.’ He went right into the living room and sat on the ottoman. I said, ‘In the kitchen.’ But he had to go back through my dining room to get to the kitchen, and he turned and faced me, and when he turned he had on a different outfit with a little hood over his head. And that’s the truth.” It turned out we had more experientials in the movie than in the audience.
