Then Again

by Diane Keaton

  Godfather III had a lackluster, middle-aged feel. Everyone was older but not happier. Francis Coppola preferred to direct from the Silver Bullet, his trailer. Things picked up the day Winona Ryder arrived—with her fiancé, Johnny Depp—to play Kay and Michael’s daughter. Winona was rushed into the makeup trailer while we were shooting. Her tiny head looked lost in the black wig the hairdresser tried to adjust. It was almost like reliving the blond wig with Dick Smith when I was twenty-three. That evening Francis was notified Winona had collapsed, which gave him the opportunity to put his daughter, Sofia, into the role of Mary Corleone. Francis told us he had written the role for Sofia in the first place. When word got to Paramount’s CEO Frank Mancuso and Sid Gannis, his Number Two, we were told they would “handle it.”

  The next day, “Two” flew to Palermo. At dinner, Gannis confided to Al his concerns about the Sofia Problem. Paramount didn’t want her. He, Sid Gannis, was personally going to have a no-nonsense chat with Ellie, Francis’s wife. Ellie? What about Francis? Needless to say, Gannis left a few days later and Sofia played my daughter, Mary Corleone.

  On our way back to the hotel, Al’s phone rang. Robin was on the line. It was Dad. He was acting confused. He couldn’t remember Randy’s name. He forgot his wallet and he wasn’t even concerned. It was so not Dad. When I called a few days later, Mom told me a biopsy had revealed a stage-four glioma the size of a grapefruit lodged in his frontal lobe. She put him on the phone and I asked how he was doing. “They’re going to put a brace on my head until they come across the growth. It’s swollen. I have a tumor on my mind, or rather, a tumor in my brain. One of them. They tell me I’ll be sitting in a class. I’ll be in a program. They say they’re going to radiate me. I don’t know, Di-annie, I don’t know. When I turned sixty-eight it all went to hell.”

  In a magnanimous gesture, Francis insisted I catch the next plane to L.A. When the 747 landed, I drove to UCLA Medical Center, where I found Dad looking the same, except for the bandage covering the top of his shaved head and the plastic tube filled with fluid that was attached to his arm like a leash. It made me think of the bird feeders you buy at Builders Emporium. He was pulling his pants up, while the television set hanging from the ceiling played his favorite show, Major Dad. I asked him how he felt. “Oh, I’ve lived long enough. Sixty-eight years is plenty, Di-annie.”

  Dad was given a treatment option: In conjunction with radiation, he could also become part of an experimental program led by a well-known UCLA doctor, who told us Dad was a ripe candidate at the right age. His cancer was fast-acting and very invasive, but he was healthy in every other respect. His doctor at UCLA felt he was a good choice for the new treatment. Robin called it the “immunvert” stimulation of the immune system or something like that. Dad decided to give the double whammy a try. Loaded with pills, Mom drove him home to get a few things before they checked in to the Royal Palace Motel in Westwood and he began radiation.

  Dr. Copeland, Dad’s internist and old friend, had a different take. “It’s bad. The older the age, the more aggressive the tumor. The frontal lobe controls our ability to concentrate. The likelihood? No matter what therapy he agrees to, Jack will decline. He’ll lose his appetite. He’ll sleep more. He’ll become less active, more confused, and more disoriented. Eventually he will slip into a coma. His heart will stop, or he’ll get pneumonia and die. It’s a bad tumor.”

  Outside the Royal Palace, I took Dad’s hand and walked with him to Arby’s for a roast beef sandwich. I helped him take off his jacket. It was hot. My hand brushed up against a label on the inside of the collar, hand-printed in black ink. “Jack Hall’s jacket. Return to 2625 Cove St., Corona del Mar, California.” Dad was a stickler about identifying personal items. Jack Hall’s robe, Jack Hall’s boxer shorts, Jack Hall’s pajama bottoms.

  After we ate on plastic chairs drilled into the floor, we sauntered back to the Palace, a mid-sixties structure with a large neon sign welcoming travelers to its royal warmth. It looked harmless enough, but inside, it quickly revealed its true colors. Hairless men and gaunt women sat under the glare of the fluorescent-lit lobby. Defeat permeated the atmosphere. Everyone looked like boarders on borrowed time. Mom and Dad’s little suite didn’t make me feel better. I saw a pair of Dad’s loafers next to the bed. Jack Hall’s left shoe. Jack Hall’s right shoe.

  The Big Machine

  The next day Dad and I wandered through UCLA’s massive complex until we reached the radiation room. It was dark, maybe to soften the look of the afflicted. “Well, I guess it’s time for the guy who does the camera work down in the dungeon to take the big picture. If he keeps zapping me in the head, I’m going to look like Yul Brynner.” Sitting down, I looked over and saw Rocco Lampone, the button man, from The Godfather. What was he doing here? Tom Rosqui, aka Rocco Lampone, came over to say hello. He wanted to know about Godfather III. He was sorry he’d been killed off in II. When the loudspeaker called Jack Hall’s name, Tom suddenly clasped my hand. He was getting radiation too. As I steered Dad into the room with the big machine, Tom waved goodbye. He died the following year. Radiotherapy didn’t help him, not for very long; longer than Dad, but not long enough.

  The X-ray machine, a sickly beige, was at least twenty years old. It looked like a massive appliance from the fifties—a sort of toaster, grill, and steamer room rolled into one. The attendant marked Dad’s head with green X’s, designating the areas to be radiated. The machine, exhausted after battling cancer for so long, seemed harmless. After Dad was strapped onto the gurney, I watched the shadow of his head move across a floor-to-ceiling photo mural of giant redwoods.

  On the way back to the Royal Palace, Dad and I walked down Le Conte Avenue, past the old Bullock’s parking lot. He wasn’t in a hurry. Holding my hand in the midday heat, he stopped and looked at the ground for a while, then looked some more. Bending down, he picked up a plastic ring and gave it to me.

  Dad had taken to contemplating the design of things like broken pencils, dents on tables, and even the configuration of drops of water in the kitchen sink. The boundaries of what was considered worthy of his curiosity had expanded, like the universe. As I put the Cracker Jack prize on my little finger, Dad wandered off to become friends with a giant sycamore tree’s temporary tenant, a robin redbreast.

  That night we went to dinner at Plum West. Mom wore a black dress, topped off with a pair of Dad’s red plaid boxer shorts wrapped around her neck like a scarf. He was her man. She had his underwear on to prove it. Dad ate all his moo shu pork and drank his Johnnie Walker Red on the rocks. We were happy. It was as if we’d always be happy. Of course it wasn’t true, but what lasts longer—the truth, or the memory of a perception of happiness? I opened my fortune cookie. “Value what you have now, so as not to miss it when it’s gone.”

  After two weeks of radiation, Dad said, “I feel like I’m brain-dead. It’s interesting, Di-annie; I don’t know where I am half the time. I feel pretty good except when they stick their fingers up my ass every day.” After two weeks Dad’s head was crispy. He didn’t complain, but he did say things like “I woke up in the middle of the night. I wanted to brush the hair out of my head before it cracks. I started looking for the brush but couldn’t find it. I figured I’d put Dorothy on the case. But when she opened the refrigerator, there was a pigeon inside looking for its sunglasses.”

  Mom was starting to lose it. “You know, I think I should drive him to Santa Monica, so he can put his feet in the sand and look at the waves. He needs it. I’m worried, Diane. They’re frying him raw. And what are those pills doing to him? He doesn’t say a word. He just takes it. He’s going downhill fast. He orders shakes at Arby’s, but I can’t get him to drink them. He doesn’t eat. The doctor is alarmed. But how alarmed can he be? Anyone can see that Jack’s an experiment that’s destined to fail? I think the ‘alarm’ is centered on the experiment, not Jack.”

  To watch my father analyze his toothbrush in the bathroom of his suite at the Palace or wait patiently with Rocco
Lampone and the other cancer patients was unbearable. He would say things like “Life is transitory. We’re just traveling through.” And “It’s like the circus, Diane: If you’re going to go to the damn thing, you should see it all the way through.” After another couple of weeks Dad’s head was red, as red as a robin redbreast, brighter than a red-winged blackbird, and even brighter than the brightest of all the red cardinals.

  On April 13, Dad prematurely flunked the “program” and was driven home in an ambulance to be more comfortable. “It’s the quality of life, not the quantity,” his doctor told us. An air of disbelief prevailed. He might get better. Right? At the same time, Dad was looking more wounded. His failure to live up to the program’s requirements was obvious.

  It was the afternoon of Christ’s ascension when Dad dispersed six legal pads in front of six chairs surrounding the dining room table, and it was the last time the entire Hall family would gather together. He passed around six pencils and presented what looked to be a thickly bound notebook, sealed with dozens of rubber bands. We looked at his chronicle of financial accomplishments, including the evaluation of the estate, the estimate of the property taxes, the holdings in real estate—in short, the net worth of Jack Newton Ignatius Hall. He informed us the estate taxes would amount to approximately 55 percent. We nodded in unison. “I want to talk to you kids about the living trust and how to brace yourselves for the future.” He picked up one of the yellow pencils and held it to the light of the sun. He ran his fingers across each crease. It was almost as if the pencil knew secrets. Slowly (what was the hurry?), Dad put the pencil down, rolled it across the table, then rolled it again, and again, and again. “Any questions? Randy?” Randy shook his head. “Randy, any questions?” Randy’s face froze in the smile he always wore when Dad confronted him. And that was it. Randy got up and left. Our meeting adjourned without so much as another word.

  We ate lunch on the patio while Dad faced the ocean without his Johnnie Walker Red. Robin told Mom to be prepared for possible seizures. She itemized her own to-do list just in case. “Turn him on the side so he can’t swallow his tongue. Don’t worry, you can do it. Put your knee under his head so he can’t bang it against something hard.” Dad’s faraway look was farther away than ever. “So much nothing, right, Dad? So much nothing, and then the big nothing.”

  The next time I spoke to Randy, I asked, “What happened? Why did you leave so abruptly?”

  This is what he said: “I called Dad last week. After all that’s gone on, I wanted him to know I loved him. You know what he said? He said, ‘What’s gone on?’ He just couldn’t go there. You know what I mean, Diane? Couldn’t go there.”

  Dad never let go of his big plans for Randy. They were classic. John Randolph would carry on the Hall family business. Instead, he sat in his singles condo on Tangerine Street, writing poems about the journey of underground birds. Like Grammy Hall, Dad couldn’t grasp it. “Birds fly, they don’t live under the earth.” But Randy went on to spend a lifetime writing about birds that couldn’t quite take off. According to Dad, everything Randy did was ass-backward. For instance, when the temperature in the townhouse Dad bought him hit ninety degrees, Randy didn’t have enough common sense to open the damn window. It drove Dad nuts. I just wished he could have understood there was no point in telling Randy what to do.

  Together Again

  Back in Palermo three weeks later, the tension on the set was explosive. Francis was where I left him, still sitting in the Silver Bullet, still rewriting the end. After dozens of breakups, Al and I broke up again. Masters of avoidance, we did not say hello.

  It was a cold Saturday when Francis called a rehearsal in the very room where Wagner composed Parsifal. The usual suspects were gathered: Andy Garcia, George Hamilton, Talia Shire, Sofia (soon to be on the cover of Vogue), Richie Bright, Al, and John Savage. Eli Wallach came up to me. “You’re a survivor. Good for you. You’re a bright survivor.” Survivor? The lights had been hung upside down in the Teatro Massimo. Gordon Willis was fuming. As we waited for the twelfth rewrite of the ending to Godfather III, I thought about the other versions. There was one where Talia kills Eli Wallach, Al is blinded, and Andy breaks off with Sofia the instant before she is assassinated. After blind Al discovers his dead daughter on the steps of the theater, he blows his brains out. There was the one where Al is assumed dead but comes back. There was the one where he is shot but lives, only to be killed on Easter Sunday on his way to church. There was the version where Al is gunned down at Teatro Massimo but Sofia lives. None of us knew what to expect. Would this be the final, final draft or just one in a continuing series of attempts to end the saga of our erratic and entirely brilliant leader Francis Coppola?

  All I remember about shooting the actual final scene to The Godfather: Part III is this: It was easy to sob. I sobbed and sobbed, then sobbed some more. It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was think of Dad. When I didn’t think of him, I thought of Al. We were back together, sort of.

  I didn’t care if it would work or not. I was happy to hear him read Macbeth at midnight, just to listen to the sound of his voice. He was crazy. Crazy great. It was always “Di.” “Di, make me some coffee, hot and black.” “Di, come sit next to me so we can talk.” One night—my favorite—I listened to him tell me about being a kid on the street. He loved the fall and how the shadows amplified the broken-down brownstones. He told me the world would always be that street in the Bronx. Every beautiful thing was compared to those days, with the light shining its gold on his friends and the street. Always the street. I listened.

  He hated goodbyes. He preferred to vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find him making tea or eating popcorn and plain M&Ms. He liked plain. I liked him plain. I loved him, but my love was not making me a better person. I hate to say it, but I was not plain. I was too much.

  My Story of the Story of Dad’s Life

  Right after I got back from finishing The Godfather: Part III, Dad told Mom to go look for a gun to kill the neighbors. “Do I have bad breath?” he said as he peed while kneeling in his bedroom, fingering the edge of the floorboard. He was terribly thin. He could barely hold a cup. He didn’t stop to look at sparrows anymore; he’d stopped walking. Dr. Copeland had been right. It was “bad.”

  In the beginning of August he pretty much stopped talking too. Sometimes I would sit on the corner of his hospital bed, look out the picture window, and tell him my story of the story of his life, like the time he took us all the way to San Bernardino to a place called McDonald’s, where they sold hamburgers for fifteen cents and orange juice for five. Did he remember the giant red sign that said, Self-Service System HAMBURGERS. We have sold OVER 1 million? Did he remember the hamburger, and the sign? Did he? He smiled but didn’t nod.

  One afternoon I talked to Dad about all the times we drove under the Avenue 55 overpass onto the Pasadena Freeway, until we made a left at the Pacific Coast Highway. It took us all the way to Palos Verdes. Once there, he and his friend Bob Blandin checked their lobster traps before diving off the cliffs into the ocean. Palos Verdes was famous for Lloyd Wright’s all-glass Wayfarers Chapel. Mom said people wanted to get married with an ocean view. I asked Dad if he remembered how every wedding was called off after a house slid down a hill one Sunday. Did he remember how we continued driving to Palos Verdes, landslide or not, and how we kept waiting for him in the backseat of our first and only woody station wagon as we ate Mom’s better-than-McDonald’s homemade hamburgers wrapped in tinfoil, with cheese and mayo and dill pickles too? Did he remember coming over the cliffs every weekend, singing, “Who stole the ding-dong, who stole the bell? I know who stole it, Dorrie Bell.” Did he remember how he’d always lean down to kiss little Robin Redbreast, then me, his Di-annie Oh Hall-ie? Dad tilted his head back and forth, trying to think it through. It was an awful lot of questions for a dying man to answer.

  I told him the story about the time I spied on him through the crack of h
is bedroom door as he slipped coins into nickel-, dime-, and quarter-size candy-striped wrappers he got from the Bank of America. After he filled them, he opened a drawer and put the new wrappers on top of a mound of others. Seeing the outline of his profile as he reflected on the cumulative results of his undertaking made me smile. There he was, Mary Alice Hall’s son, happily engaged in realizing a portion of his dream, the acquisition of money. I told Dad I wanted him to be sure and be proud of all the other dreams he’d realized too, big dreams, dreams he never thought he could have accomplished. I told him I hoped to pass on the memory of his accomplishments to a child of my own someday, even though I knew I was a little long in the tooth. Dad didn’t respond. After that, I didn’t tell him any more stories.

  The fat man in the black suit came from the coroner’s office. He put on rubber gloves to examine the body. It was brief. He wrapped a wire tag around my father’s big toe. No more Jack Hall’s right shoe, Jack Hall’s left shoe. Robin, Dorrie, and I went outside and sat on the Jacuzzi cover. I looked through Dad’s picture window as two men from the Neptune Society strapped him onto a gurney. Covered in a royal-blue cloth, Dad was rolled out of the living room, through the kitchen, into the garage, out the garage door, and onto the driveway. I followed the little procession from a distance. After they shut the windowed door to the van, all I could make out was the royal-blue blanket stretched across my father’s body. At least he was wrapped in the color of the ocean at sunset.

  What Remains

  Two months after Dad died, Al admitted in the safety of the therapist’s office what I must have always known: He never had any intention of marrying me. What he wanted was out. And that’s what he got. He got out. I watched him walk into the light of the California sun without so much as a glance back. Later the same day, he flew to the safety of New York, the George Washington Bridge, his driver, Luke, and his dog, Lucky, waiting at Snedens Landing.