by Diane Keaton
This is what remains of Al Pacino.
1. Eight pink slips from the Shangri-La Hotel in 1987, saying, “Call from Al.”
2. A page ripped out of a book with the sheet music to “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” inscribed “To Di” at the top of the page, “Love Al” at the bottom.
3. One happy-birthday note card, with “Love Al” written on it.
4. A handwritten letter from December 1989: “Dear Di, I am feeling uncomfortably lonely more than I have in many, many moons. I don’t know why this is so. It’s perhaps being in a foreign country and not being able to speak the language; you could say that’s one of the reasons. But mainly it’s being away from you and what we have together. As I’m writing this letter I’m sitting in an outside café in Rome, it’s pouring rain. I’m looking onto a beautiful square with a church talking to myself. I’ve got my hands folded as if in prayer. But in the middle of my hands is a little tape recorder. So it looks like I’m talking to my fingers. That’s the way it looks. If only I could dictate this letter without moving my lips. Just trying to tell you I miss you, ‘darlin’. In a sort of roundabout way it seems. I will get back to you. Love, Al.”
5. A note on a torn piece of paper: “Diane, Andy, me, and Don went to a restaurant in Mondello. I will call you with the name of the joint. Sit tight be right. Don’t fight. Love Al, Your friend.”
6. January 29, 1992, handwritten: “Dear Di. I heard that Anna Strasberg talked to you on the phone and may have mentioned something about my sending regards or some such amenity. Never did I do that. I would never use such a coy approach to trying to communicate with you. It’s unbearable to think that you would get that impression. I need no go between if I want to contact you. I apologize for having put you through this note. L. Al Pacino.”
7. August 19, 1995, on Chal stationery, typed: “Dear Di, Thank you for your very beautiful note about Lucky. Your warm words, thoughts, and deep understanding of my relationship with Lucky made me feel not alone. Thank you. Meanwhile, I heard about your mother and the news was upsetting to me. I send to you my thoughts and hopes for her recovery. I know it’s very difficult. It’s seriously a hard life, and that’s all there is to it. I feel now, of course, helpless to do anything for you except to let you know that I have some understanding for what you’re going through. Once again, thank you for your note. It helped me. My thoughts are with you, and I think about you often. Love, Al.”
A Portrait
At the end of November, Dad’s remains sat on the bookshelf of our Tubac, Arizona, home. Dorrie and Mom were waiting. I was flying in from Dallas to join them. Early that morning, Dorrie woke to the sound of a thud. She opened the sliding glass door to find a mourning dove lying in a pool of blood.
I arrived in time to help finish making Dad’s cross. We three women walked to the top of the little incline overlooking the valley below the Santa Rita mountain range. We hammered the handmade wooden cross into the ground. We thumbtacked a photograph of Dad above his name, date of birth, and date of death. We stuck a couple of hundred-dollar bills underneath the rocks. We figured he’d want a little cash on his trip. We placed the mourning dove alongside Dad so he’d have a traveling companion. We weren’t sure of their destination, but we felt better knowing he wouldn’t be alone.
1990 was the year I lost my father. It was also the year I lost Al. In a way, Dad’s dying was a preparation for Al’s goodbye. During Dad’s five short months living with brain cancer, I learned that love, all love, is a job, a great job, the best job. I learned that love is much more than a fantasy of romance. It turned out losing Al was predictable, but losing Dad was not. Losing Dad would change me in ways I never could have guessed.
One day I took a photograph of Dad looking unflinchingly into the face of death. He was pretty much flying on his own, soaring over California, checking out the lay of the land just before he was about to make his last flight. Some people say photographs lie. My father’s eyes gazing out of prolonged suffering is the truth to me. I’m aware that it might seem peculiar to focus on a portrait of dying Dad rather than young Dad or dynamic Dad. Yet I can’t pass it without reflecting on the way he left. Stripped of reason, hallucinating dogs doing backflips in his bedroom, Dad was on a wild ride. His face in his sixty-eighth year makes me hope I can engage in life the same way he engaged death. Straightforward, unembellished, and uncluttered.
“I know I can’t take this world with me. I don’t even know where I am half the time, but I’ll tell you, Diane, I feel better. You never realize how much you appreciate the little things. Your Mudd, for instance. I love your mother, even though I never know what she’s going to do.” It wasn’t Norman Vincent Peale. It wasn’t Dale Carnegie. What it was was Dad.
11
AFTERMATH
Two Letters
Dear Dad,
It’s the first day of 1991. I think you would have been happy to see your girls today. The sun shone through a dense marine layer at 10. Robin went to the store towing Riley and little Jack, now a toddler. Dorrie, Mom, and I went to look at an open house on Ocean Drive. Can you believe they were asking 2.5 million dollars for a 2,000 square foot box with a marginal view? You would have been proud of Mom. She nearly gagged.
Back at Cove St., Dorrie put on Willie Nelson. I opened a bottle of wine, and we all sat down to one of Mom’s delicious tuna casseroles. The kids ate candy for dessert, your favorite, See’s chocolate turtles.
It was unseasonably hot, so Robin, Dorrie, and I swam over to Big Corona, where we caught waves with people who don’t own homes on the beach. Thank you for our little box with a view, Dad. When Mom and the kids joined us we built sand castles. Riley taught me how to make them correctly. She’ll end up in management. She’s your kind of girl. Little Jack bent over a collection of buckets on the shoreline, examining sand crabs.
I think you would have gotten a big kick out of your three daughters eyeing all the hunks. Dorrie joked about my type. I want to reiterate: I don’t have a type, Dad. I know you think all women love bums, but you’re wrong. It’s complex. Al and I broke up a couple of months after you died. It’s been sad, but educational. I wonder if I’ll ever find a better way to love a man, the “correct” way. I wish you and I had been closer. I wish I’d been a Daddy’s girl. Your girl. I wish I had figured out a way to love you with a little less effort.
In any event it was a good day, this first day of 1991. We were happy at the beach. It was just us, your five girls, and a little boy named after you. Jack. Love, Diane
Dear Jack,
I want to talk to you about some things I regret I’ve learned too late. I know you wouldn’t want me to live with regrets. And I’m trying not to, but I look at couples bickering about some small matter and I want to say, “Don’t take your living time fighting & fussing over nothing. Be happy. You have one another.”
I still feel your presence. When that feeling comes I look up to the sky (as if that’s where you are), and I think if I feel you so intensely you must have a sense of me also. If that’s true you know that I am feeling old. I hate to confront the fact that I’m slipping in my mental capacities too. It bothers me. I still have the red heart you gave me last Valentine’s Day full of See’s chocolates. Or was that the year before? Oh, God, Jack, you see what I mean. It’s all slipping away.
I would like to request a favor from you. Please be with me, for I am very much in need of you. Force your way through to me, will you? Please. I am lonely. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to tell you how much I loved you when you were sitting across from me on the bar stool, drink in hand, music playing, dinner cooking, all things working. Maybe you know all the answers now that you’ve gone to the other side. All I know is I held you in my arms as you lay dying. I want to go that way too. But who will hold me, Jack? Who will hold me now that you’ve gone?
I love you.
Your Dorothy
The Price of Pretty, March 1991
It’s funny how the rain came so sudde
nly. A mud slide crushed the yellow crocuses in my backyard. Even at dinner with Dana Delany and Lydia Woodward, two fantastic single gals, my mind was never far from the avalanche. Dana ordered a glass of cabernet. She wanted to know if I was dating. I mentioned a guy in Newport Beach. “Did he do you?” Dana asked. “No,” I said. “No, he did not do me.” I hadn’t been done.
What I wanted to say was, my lungs were filled with a residue of dust from the past. Why did I have to be intrigued by the Goth with bloody cuts decorating his tattooed neck outside Musso and Frank instead of the happy-faced family eating vanilla ice cream as they entered the Hollywood Wax Museum? Why was Lydia’s loneliness more compelling than Dana’s conquests and confidence?
After Al, I lost all semblance of Dana’s sexy confidence. The truth is I never had it, but that isn’t the point. The point is I let myself, yet again, become preoccupied with failure. Mine. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough for Al. Maybe Al, like Ronnie McNeeley back in junior high, wasn’t attracted to my face. My face was my failure.
Sometimes it’s hard to separate the concept of beauty from the concept of pretty. They’re different. Beauty is variable. It comes and goes. For example, Grammy Hall was beautiful once and only once, and that was the year she died. Natalie Wood went from pretty to beautiful in Splendor in the Grass. Anna Magnani was an ugly beauty who flung herself onto the dirt in Rome, Open City. All these women were beautiful. They were mesmerizing, but their beauty didn’t make promises. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t eternal.
If I wanted to be pretty I could put in an order for a face-lift, with an eye job on the side, and I could get rid of my Irish bulb to boot. Plastic surgeons would be happy to accommodate my needs. But then what? It’s a little late to start experimenting. And besides, pretty, with its promise of perfection, is not as appealing as it used to be. What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas. God knows, I want new ideas and new experiences.
The difference between prettiness and beauty is that prettiness—like the Avon lady knocking at your door, offering up a selection of neatly wrapped gratification—is a dead end. Beauty, flinging itself onto the earth like Anna Magnani, is alive and fleeting. I’d like to let go of pretty with no hard feelings, but do I have it in me? Beauty is not an option. Beauty is like living with questions. There are no answers. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, does that mean mirrors are a waste of time? I don’t know if I’m brave enough to live without answers or to stop looking at myself.
Life Goes On
HBO offered me the role of Hedda Nussbaum, a victim of domestic abuse whose adopted daughter, Lisa, died from a severe blow to the head given by Joel Steinberg, Hedda’s lover. I passed. No more victims for me. Instead, I restored the Wright house Dad had warned me not to buy. I took a road trip to Canyon de Chelly with Dorrie. I directed a music video called “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” with Belinda Carlisle. I took a screenwriting class at USC with David Howard, who talked about preparation and aftermath. “You’re never too old to learn, huh?” a student asked during a break. “Yeah, never too old,” I said. I met a producer named Judy Polone, who gave me a shot at directing a TV movie called Wildflower. We hired the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who went on to shoot Schindler’s List for Steven Spielberg. I cast Patricia Arquette and Reese Witherspoon to star. They were beautiful and talented. The future was theirs. Randy moved to Laguna. Al had a baby. Warren married Annette Bening. Dorrie bought a house. Robin had two children, one husband, and three rescue dogs. I kept moving.
At the Rose Bowl swap meet, Carolyn Cole, the director of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner photography collection at the Los Angeles Central Library, came up to me and wanted to know if I was interested in taking a look at something very special. Alone in the basement of Bertram Goodhue’s Egyptian revival landmark, I opened the file marked A and began a trip through two million photographs of found dogs, missing children, holdup suspects, wife beaters, cross-dressers—basically the whole kitchen sink of down-and-outers who shared a short-lived if splashy notoriety in the Herald Examiner. I found an eight-by-ten picture of Mother Anderson, who had been caught passing bad checks at Clifton’s Cafeteria while pregnant with her seventeenth child. Behind her was a photograph of Father Anderson in jail, accused of kidnapping one of their daughters. Blind ex-G.I. Edward Altman was pictured reunited with his Seeing Eye dog, Trump, and Gladis Archer was photographed in pants after she was freed from jail for having worn a Marine uniform to a drinking party. Subscribers like Grammy Hall and George Olsen ate up the insatiable black hole of someone else’s misfortune.
In the A’s, under “The Ambassador Hotel,” I found a picture of triumphant Dorothy Hall being crowned Mrs. Los Angeles by Art Linkletter. But under “Abandoned,” there was no photograph of Beulah Keaton scrubbing toilets at Franklin High School in her new occupation as janitor. What about her hard-luck story? The story of a woman who woke up to see her husband of twenty-five years drive off to Utah in the family’s only car with a woman he was about to marry, thus becoming a bigamist. There was no picture of little Jackie Hall’s face pressed against a window as he watched his mother, Mary Alice, play blackjack inside one of Catalina Island’s notorious gambling ships at one A.M. In fact, there were no stories or pictures of the other Halls or Keatons. For me, the thin line between newsworthy and not was converging. A book began to take shape. A kind of tabloid family of man. I called it Local News.
When Woody asked me to fill in for Mia Farrow on Manhattan Murder Mystery, I took the job. It was crazy. Outside, the press circled Woody’s trailer. A day didn’t go by without microphones in his face. “What’s your take on the custody battle with Mia Farrow?” Inside, it felt like Annie Hall days, only looser, if that was possible. Carlo Di Palma shot the movie handheld. Entire scenes were completed in one take. We were in makeup at seven A.M. and wrapped at two-thirty in the afternoon. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. As for Woody, he never brought up personal problems while working.
Unstrung Heroes
Donna Roth and Susan Arnold were looking for a director. Unstrung Heroes was based on Franz Lidz’s memoir about the struggle of a boy named Steven after his mother, Selma, is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. When Selma begins to fade, Steven’s father has him stay with his two uncles, one a hoarder, the other a paranoid. They teach him to value his own uniqueness. Uncle Arthur in particular gives Steven a way of appreciating the beauty found in mundane objects like string and rubber balls. But it’s Selma who gives him the capacity to love. Steven creates his own memorial to Selma before she dies by filling a box with her things—a tube of her lipstick, a perfume bottle, a cigarette lighter.
Finding redemption through documentation was particularly moving to me. It was almost as if Franz Lidz was telling us that items, possessions, even stuff, could make up for the mercurial comings and goings of love. I auditioned with Donna and Susan by giving them my thoughts, particularly those related to documenting a family’s history. I’d been mimicking Mom for years by writing my own journal. The subject was personal. Susan and Donna were the kind of producers who had enough confidence to give me a try.
It was my first feature as a director. I needed help in every department. I hired a USC film graduate, Greg Yaitanes, as the visual consultant. He had an imaginative approach and was highly inventive with action. Together we shot the film before I shot the film. It may seem insane, but Greg operated the videocam while I played dying Selma, young Steven, even crazy Uncle Danny. Speaking their words made me feel more connected to the story. When we started principal photography, I was grateful I had my little video movie of the movie to help with camera setups. Phedon Papamichael, our cinematographer, went along with my folly. In fact, all department heads were willing to go along with my so-called “vision.” The music, composed by Tom Newman, was nominated for an Academy Award. Garreth Stover, the production designer, was full of ideas. Bill Robinson, my soon-
to-be partner, was invaluable. All the actors broke my heart. Andie MacDowell, lovely Andie; the late Maury Chaykin, a great actor and friend; Michael Richards, the reason Disney green-lit the film; John Turturro; and quirky little Nathan Watt were unique, idiosyncratic, singular, and wonderful. I loved them all. I wish I had made a better movie. Having directed two feature films, I’m more acutely aware of how nearly impossible it is to make a good film.
When Unstrung was selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, Disney flew me over. Susan Arnold told me not to worry: The plane was safe, we’d have a great flight, we would drink red wine. I took a Xanax instead. Once I was there, Cannes was a spectacular scene. My interviews with Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, E! Entertainment, HBO, the Toronto Star, Time magazine, and CNN were positive. Joe Roth, the head of Disney, wanted to know what my next picture was going to be. At the party, Richard Corliss’s wife talked about the theme of hands, how delicately the hands stood out in scene after scene. Wanting to end on a high note, I slipped into the official Cannes limo and disappeared into the dead of night. Inside my suite at the Carlton, a familiar sensation came back. With my Mizrahi dress in the closet, the party was over. I was alone again—this time in Cannes. It wasn’t different from any other night, except I didn’t have my dog, Josie, to pet, which, as lame as it may seem, gave me something to look forward to. Just the thought of stroking her mangy coat, grabbing her muzzle, and laying on lots of kisses made me feel good. I missed the ritual, the every-night of it, the knowing she’d be there. How was it possible that Josie—the shepherd mix who bit the mailman and attacked the neighbor’s dog, Freddy; Josie, aka Jaws, the dog I wouldn’t have wished on anyone—was the only thing I missed as I stared at the ceiling in a beautiful hotel suite six thousand miles away from my very own “yellow snapper”?
