Ask Me Again Tomorrow (4 page)

One of the great highlights of that period for me was introducing Michael at the Democratic National Convention that was held in Atlanta, Georgia, just months before the November election. I had made a short film about him and that was shown first. Then I stepped out onto this gigantic platform that overlooked the convention floor. The room was a sea of bouncing placards that read
DUKAKIS FOR PRESIDENT
!, and Neil Diamond’s “America” was blaring from speakers that surrounded the enormous hall. Then a chant rose up—“Duke! Duke! Duke!”—and it built until I stepped up to the microphone, when it erupted into applause and cheers. To be cheered like that, for my cousin Michael, for the name we shared, was like facing all the audiences I’d ever played to all rolled into one.

It had helped me to take my mind off of my own future to turn my attention and focus on Michael’s bid for the presidency. It was also a wake-up call when my Oscar was stolen—right out of our kitchen. This little larceny also illustrates how naive I could be when it came to handling the press. I found myself reading interviews I gave and cringing when I saw my words in print and thinking, “Did I really say that?” I made a few gaffes where I neglected to thank someone or I came off sounding arrogant when I thought I was just being emphatic. But somewhere along the line, when asked where I kept my Oscar, I told the interviewer that it was still in my kitchen, where I had left it after coming home from L.A. Around the same time, our insurance broker suggested to Louie that we should have my Oscar insured. “You never know,” he said. “There could be a fire or an earthquake or something.” Louie thought about it and had a rider attached to our home-owners’ policy that insured my statuette for ten thousand dollars. About a week after the interview ran in our local paper, someone broke in and took the Oscar, but left the plaque that had my name on it! The thief, for some reason, figured it would be more valuable on the black market without being identified as belonging to me, and so had taken the time to take the plaque off and leave it on our kitchen counter. We reported the theft to the police department and then Louie rang up our insurance company. Sure enough, a check for ten thousand dollars arrived within weeks. Louie called the company that made the statues and we got a replacement—for fifty-six bucks! I screwed on the original plaque with my name, and I had my Oscar back, safe and sound.

Right after the convention I got a call from my agent about a movie called
Steel Magnolias,
written by Robert Harling. It was set to go into production, and Herbert Ross, the director, had one key part still to cast and he wanted to meet me.

Ross was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, so I took the Number 66 bus in from Montclair one afternoon. At the front desk I asked for Mr. Ross. Without even looking up, the concierge said, “Go right on up to his room. He’s expecting you.” “Okay,” I thought as I got into the elevator, “this isn’t so bad.” I rang the bell on Ross’s door and a voice called out, “Come on in!” I walked in to find Herb Ross naked, faceup in the middle of the floor of the suite, with only a strategically placed bath towel covering him. A Japanese masseuse was straddling him, working away with intense concentration. I just stood there, unsure of what to do, when Ross simply rolled over and said, “Oh. It’s you, Olympia. The desk said it was Lee [Radziwill, his then girlfriend]. I’ll be with you in a minute.” I looked around for a place to sit while the thought ran through my head that maybe this was yet another run-in with the “casting couch,” and I remember thinking, “Is this still how this is done, even at my age?” The thought made me laugh out loud.

When his massage was over, Ross, now wrapped in a bathrobe, and I had our meeting. I liked him immediately. He offered me the part of Clairee, a recent widow in the town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, where this true story happened. But first, he asked to hear my southern accent. “Not good enough,” he said. “You’ll have to learn a plantation accent.” He wanted me to sound like what an upper-class southern woman would sound like. Sometime in the middle of rehearsals, prior to shooting, Dolly Parton turned to me and said, “I can’t stand that accent. I’ve listened to it all my life and I can’t stand it.”

With a finalized “deal,” I looked forward to soon heading off to Natchitoches to join Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Darryl Hannah, Dolly Parton, and the then-unknown Julia Roberts for filming. This was a big-budget affair—six enormous Winnebagos—way beyond the scale of
Moonstruck.

What I liked about Clairee was that in her quiet, subtle way, she was willing to take on life’s challenges and contradictions and be transformed by them. Though my character was no longer a young woman, and she had recently lost her husband, she was struggling to find her way back into a meaningful new life by buying a radio station and making plans to travel to New York City. Clairee had a razor-sharp sense of humor that took the truth, as she saw it, to the outer limits of decency; in some ways, she was not unlike Rose Castorini in
Moonstruck.
Both these women knew who they were, in a very basic and essential way, and made the commitment to honor that person. To be authentic and to not view themselves solely through the lens of male perspective that had, in their own lives, so limited them. Whenever I had the chance to play a part that went into this territory that short-circuits pretense, insecurity, and especially the limitations placed on women by the outside world, I grabbed it.

I recall feeling very at home on that set. I enjoyed and admired the women. Darryl Hannah is a bright, intuitive, aware, and politically active woman. Sally Field is probably the most disciplined film actor I’ve ever worked with. Shirley MacLaine, well, let me tell you, she’s as high-spirited and generous as she seems. I remember sitting with her between takes one afternoon, and she looked over at Julia, and she turned to me and said, “She’s got it. The camera loves her. She’ll be a big star someday.” And Julia! She was really being put through her paces by Ross; she’d come on board the movie with absolutely no formal training and held her own with a crew of very experienced women. I admired her for hanging in there and turning in a fine performance, despite Ross’s constant needling. Dolly Parton held herself with such simple dignity and was sincerely generous with her fans. I determined that I would try to follow her example.

The only hard part of this job for me was being away from home and the theater. Whenever there was a break, I’d call Louie and the kids and they’d fill me in on what was going on back home in Montclair; they kept me posted on how my mother was faring. I’d talk with the theater staff about what was going on there and we’d brainstorm over the phone about raising money and other theater issues, but it was a little hard to try and run a theater long-distance.

Once shooting in Louisiana was over, I dove full-time into fund-raising. I was not above deceit in my quest for additional funds for the theater. I was told that a cat food company was offering celebrities five thousand dollars to allow their cats to appear in its annual cat calendar. I thought, “Hell, let’s do that.” There was one problem: we had a dog, not a cat. The woman in charge of marketing at the theater had a cat, and she offered to loan him to us for a day so that they could shoot the calendar. The morning of the photo session, we shipped our dog, Sandal, off to a neighbor’s (no, not the one right next door; even living alongside a bona fide Oscar winner hadn’t diminished his threat to sue us), and the marketing director brought her cat over. I quickly named him Baklava—the name of a Greek pastry seemed appropriate. Baklava, of course, didn’t respond when we called him, and he was understandably skittish and ill at ease, with so many strangers in such strange surroundings. He certainly wasn’t used to having so many lights and cameras focused on him, and I tried to explain to the cat company people that this kind of attention always made him, well, distracted. When we had him just about settled down, my mother happened to wander through the living room and took one look at poor Baklava and asked, “Where’d that cat come from?”

Everyone froze. The cat people looked nervously from me to Louie and back again. “She often forgets things,” Louie whispered reassuringly, as he gracefully steered my mother into her bedroom before she could make another perfectly lucid remark. We were able to shoot the commercial, and the theater saw some relief that week.

I had ridden the Oscar wave of goodwill back to Montclair and into the arms of my family, my community, and my work, but most important, I had gone home to the arms of my mother, which, for so many, many years, had seemed closed to me. Now she was living in my house and I had a chance to get to really know her, woman to woman, in a way I never had before.

When they had placed the Oscar in my hands on the stage of Shrine Auditorium, I had thought about my father because I knew exactly what his reaction would be—it would have been completely unconditional and straightforward. He would have wept for joy. My mother’s reaction, though, would be far more complicated. It would certainly mean as much to me as my father’s reaction had, but I knew her response would be more ambiguous and more emotionally loaded. It would be far too easy to say that my mother, at nearly ninety years of age, was simply weighed down by what pop psychologists like to call “emotional baggage.” My mother’s reaction would be informed by so much more than that: it would be colored and shaped by the influences of her cultural and emotional history in ways that had confounded me for most of my life. My father, who had always been much more of an optimist than my mother, would have taken my win as affirmation of everything that he believed in and aspired to. My mother, on the other hand, would not be able to enjoy my win without also fearing that there would be some kind of loss lurking behind it, that there would be, if we were not careful, a price that we would have to pay for such good luck. I was finally at a place in my life and in my relationship with her where I was beginning to understand the complexity of her reaction to me and to this kind of success. I wanted to know her, to accept her, and be able to embrace her, at last, with an open heart.

My mother was eighty-seven years old when I appeared in
Moonstruck
, and she had been living with Louie and me for a couple of months at that point. She and I were finally at a point where we were enjoying a relatively companionable relationship after many years of terrible, terrible tension between us. I knew that she was pleased with me, but I also knew that she’d never directly express what she was feeling, that she’d never be able to simply be happy for me. Her happiness would be tempered by a kind of foreboding, a reluctance to believe in the goodness of life that she couldn’t help but express, and it was this that I had processed as a lack of faith in me personally, that had hurt me so deeply when I was growing up. She had always been leery of what she perceived to be good luck or easy success. And though this may have been a trait shared by many Greek women, my own mother had more reason than most to expect tragedy to come in the middle of joy, even despite the fact that, by nature, she had great appetite for life. She had what Greeks refer to as the quality of
kefti
, the spirit of exuberant living. She could be playful, passionate, spontaneous, the life of the party. The truth be told,
kefti
was at the core of her being, but it was often hidden or muted as a result of the scars she carried following experiences she’d had that were tragic and devastating. It took me the better part of my own life to even begin to understand how much they affected who she was and how she coped with the world around her—especially with me.

With my Oscar win, my mother had her own moment in the spotlight, whether she wanted it or not, when she became the subject of interviews herself.
Entertainment Tonight
filmed her reaction to my win on Oscar night and she was interviewed by several newspapers in the days that followed. Talk about the camera loving someone! She enjoyed preparing for these appearances and she felt comfortable commenting on my success. When she was asked if she’d always known that I’d become a movie star she replied, “No. I never thought she was pretty enough!” I think this completely stunned the interviewer, but it didn’t shock or surprise me. To her way of thinking, one had to be a great beauty to be a true movie star. She was also trying (as any good Greek mother would) to ward off the “evil eye” on my behalf by tempering all that praise. Appearing in any way proud or arrogant would court disaster. The gods must not be tempted to second-guess or rescind the goodwill they had just bestowed on us all.

She took my brother, Apollo, aside and shook her finger at him, urging him to warn me: “She’ll get a big head.” She believed the gods were watching. If you dared to consider yourself on an equal footing with the gods, they would strike you down. She’d illustrate this by smacking one hand against the other—
boom
, they’d come down and take it all away. How you handled good fortune or success could be dangerous, and my mother wanted Apollo to remind me of that, to make sure I avoided disaster by staying humble. Here I was, fifty-seven years old, and she was almost ninety, and she was still trying to protect me.

Thanks to experience, I knew how to handle failure. I knew how to withstand it, what I could learn from it, and that it would pass. I didn’t know how to handle this kind of success. What about all those fine actors and actresses I had worked with in the theater? Why should I have this Oscar success and not them? They had paid their dues as well. As satisfying as the role of Rose Castorini was, I had played far more challenging roles—why all the recognition for a role that felt as comfortable as this one? I felt unable to enjoy this acclaim until I realized there was as much to learn from success as there was from failure.

D
URING THE
couple of years that followed the Oscars, we were finally able to collectively let go of our breath, which we had been holding for so many years because of various setbacks, professional and personal.

In some ways, the structure of our daily lives didn’t change that much: we were all busy, the children with their school and their friends, and Louie and I with our work, especially at the theater. What had changed was that now the structure of our family life was made a bit more solid, reinforced by the financial buttressing the Oscar brought us.

I was busier than ever at the theater. A couple of years earlier, I had taken on the job of producing artistic director, in what was a rather difficult and politically charged time of upheaval among the board and staff. We had always made decisions based on a shared vision of what we were trying to create. We hit a point in the 1980s, though, when this basic vision for what the Whole Theatre was, what it should be, came into question. At that time, I was artistic director, in charge of overseeing the creative side of the theater. The producing director was in charge of the business and fund-raising side of things. He wanted to stage more commercial plays on their way to Broadway. He convinced some board members that this would solve the economic problems of the theater—which were very real. However, their solution meant changing the artistic signature of the Whole Theatre. I wanted to be part of a theater that produced plays that dealt with issues important to the human condition, plays that could change the way people see their lives, plays that confront how we see ourselves and what we make of our existence.

The purpose of commercial theater is to make money. The purpose of a not-for-profit theater such as ours is to enhance the quality of life in the community—and the community consisted of the theater artists who worked there and the members of the audience. Part of serving the community meant keeping the price of the tickets affordable, which meant constantly hustling up the money to deal with the deficit, always a problem with not-for-profit. There were those who thought that we’d be able to make more money if we became a “trial run” theater for shows that aspired to make it on Broadway, who believed that positioned in this way, we could accept monies from commercial producers interested in seeing their shows developed at lower costs, and we would not have to exhaust ourselves always looking for subsidiary support. I couldn’t see us becoming some sort of a minor-league theater that would serve as a farm team to a major-league outfit that produces and mounts commercial Broadway shows. These were not the kind of productions I, and many of my colleagues, aspired to be involved with. I became the de facto leader of this side of this tense and heated debate. After many months politicking behind the scenes, the board of directors determined to protect the original vision of the theater. The current producing director was asked to vacate his position. The board of directors then decided that in order to avoid such conflict in the future, they would create a single position that would oversee both the business and the artistic sides of the company. I was asked to take on the newly created job of producing artistic director.

This was a huge step for me. I could not and would not give up my roles as actress and director. I knew the job of artistic director was demanding because I’d been doing that already for almost ten years. In that position I was responsible for selecting the season’s plays, putting together the team—director, designer, and actors—for each play, and choosing the special programs we’d put on outside of the season’s roster that were part of our community outreach efforts. In addition to all the hiring and firing of directors, designers, and actors, I was responsible for stage management and for all set, costume, and building crews. I had support staff of about twenty or twenty-five people. Adding the role of producing artistic director to that seemed overwhelming. I didn’t think I could do it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It meant an intense and ongoing involvement with the board of directors, constant efforts to raise money, daily interaction with marketing and publicity, and creating budgets.

I came very close to turning the job down, but before I did, I met with the department heads and told them how I felt. Then I asked them if they thought I could do it. By the end of the meeting, we figured out a way to structure the new arrangement. It meant changes for everybody—they all had to take on more responsibilities and work very closely with one another. There was no more “we” and “they.”

I went home and, still undecided, told everything to Louie. He said, “What the hell—give it a shot.” The next day I accepted the job that consumed most of my time and energy for the several years leading up to the Oscar, and for several years after that.

The first major decision I made as producing artistic director was to rethink how the company was organized and begin a major restructuring of the business offices. This reorganization was prompted by my inheriting, from the outgoing managing director, a whopping deficit of three hundred thousand dollars, and discovering that our balance sheet was in far worse shape than any of us had known. I had to act quickly to turn things around. I hired a consultant to come in and help me analyze the effectiveness of the existing structure of the theater. We quickly realized that the theater would benefit by being run quite differently than it had been, and so I reorganized the management and created a more team-oriented, democratic organization that gave people a chance to identify problems—working in pairs or small groups to think through solutions for those problems, and then presenting those ideas to the rest of us in a more relaxed and open environment. This would cut down on how much time people had to spend building a consensus every time an issue arose; it would help all of us to think and act more decisively and reduce the amount of paperwork and time it took to communicate with each other. Most importantly, it would generate an atmosphere that encouraged more risk-taking where there was far less of a threat of reprisal if an idea didn’t work. It fostered a kind of entrepreneurial way of thinking that really seemed to reinvigorate all of us.

By early 1990 we were finally in full gear: our subscription base was at an all-time high; we were in the midst of our most ambitious fund-raising drive ever and had already raised $1.25 million toward a goal of $2 million—which would then be met by a matching grant from the state of New Jersey. But then misfortune struck: our chief fund-raiser and a member of the board of directors suffered a heart attack and had to withdraw from his duties. We were in the middle of our most ambitious fund-raising drive ever, left without the person who had been most involved.

We were blindsided again when we lost three sources of funding at once—federal, state, and corporate. These sources simply fell away, due in part to a weak national economy and new federal and state budget constraints, but more directly as a result of a terrible domino effect that started with a “scandal” involving the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). When a small group of artists that included Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer known for his bold photographs that shocked and disturbed conservatives, were denied NEA fellowships that year, they protested and started a controversy that pitted the NEA against the conservative senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, who no one has ever mistaken for a lover of experimental art. He had made cutting federal funding of the arts his personal crusade, and the Mapplethorpe scandal was perfect timing for him, but deadly timing for us.

We were just then involved in our own mini-scandal, having recently mounted a production that caused a controversy, even in our part of the world. It was a play called
Spare Parts,
very funny and moving, about two lesbians who talk a male friend of theirs into helping them have a baby. I remember well the discussions we’d have on how to market and publicize this show, and I found myself vetoing all of the well-intentioned suggestions for marketing the play in a way that would not cause our subscribers any discomfort. I just wasn’t comfortable with euphemisms like “It’s about a new kind of nuclear family”: if our patrons didn’t know up front that they’d be coming to see two lesbians figuring out how to get their hands on some sperm, I didn’t want them to find out once they were comfortable in their prepaid subscription seats.

Then the state of New Jersey, like just about every other state in the union, was hit by the fallout from the NEA controversy and cut their arts grants budget. It was as if we had, after two decades of holding our seawall, been hit by a perfect storm that we just never saw coming.

When we lost our grant money, the board immediately asked me to slash the next year’s budget in any way that I could. I reduced our rehearsal time from four weeks to three weeks (I knew I could count on our professional crew to get the work done), but that wasn’t enough. They wanted me to cut the salaries of all the staff who were already working ten hours a day. Even worse, the board wanted me to systematically let go the most senior, and therefore best compensated, members of the core staff in order to bring in entry-level people, at much lower salaries, to fill these posts. This is something that I simply would not do. These were the people with whom I’d worked closely for many years, and for the last four years they had supported me in my dual role as producing artistic director. I couldn’t have done that job without them. It was because of their encouragement and hard work that I had been as successful as I was, and I just couldn’t do what the board wanted me to. I suggested they bring in someone to replace me.

By this time, the board members, who had always supported me as well, were totally dispirited. The theater was carrying a deficit from previous years and now we’d lost three major funding sources. The board refused to replace me; they said it was either fire staff or close the theater. When they told me that, I just said, “Well, close the doors.”

After almost twenty years, the end came swift and sure. Just like
that
, the Whole Theatre Company was gone.

Three short years earlier, when I came back to Montclair from L.A. after the Oscars, the main street leading up to the theater had been jammed with traffic and supporters. Now, though northern New Jersey had benefited so much from our presence, and for such a long time, the community around us fell oddly silent. In the end, this was just another piece of that damn storm that made the whole end so final and so terribly inevitable. So many good people would be out of work! I was luckier than most of the staff and crew; in the last couple of years, thanks to my higher profile, I had been turning down work for the first time in my life. I knew that my family would be okay. But I knew that some other people would not be. I wrote glowing letters of recommendation for anyone who requested one and I passed along any job leads that I could, but this didn’t manage to assuage my feelings of failure—there should have been something I could have done to avoid this ending and save the company.

In April 1990, for the first time in the twenty years since Louie and I had left New York City, I woke up in the morning with nowhere to go, no one to see, and no deadline to meet.

For all that time, I had been at the theater and in my office by nine
A.M
. I spent my days managing a staff of dozens; making endless fund-raising phone calls; meeting with this or that board member, actor, designer, or director; or rehearsing my part in our next production. For the first day in a long time, my calendar—my life—was wide open.

I found I had time to have breakfast at home—not on the run. I could sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper; I even had the time to do the crossword puzzle. But I lived with a world-class puzzler who insisted my inability to spell meant I should keep my hands off
his
puzzle (not to mention his special pencils).

After about a week of this leisure time, I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking around, and realized that the house, though clean, had been neglected. Things that needed repairs had gone unnoticed. Doorknobs wiggled, hinges groaned, three-way lightbulbs were now only one-way in the too few lamps in the house. I didn’t have a full set of anything—silverware, glasses, dishes, pots and pans. I took a tentative step toward the dining room, then stopped myself when I realized that I kept referring to this room as the dining room, even though it had been my mother’s bedroom for several years. I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking from a long sleep—or, in my case, what was more like an endless all-nighter. Looking around me now, I determined to take an inventory of the entire house. I began to make a list of everything that needed to be either replaced or repaired: I took note of the cracked or mismatched dishes, every creaky latch and door that I had been silently complaining about for years, and every lousy throw rug that was still underfoot but that I’d been swearing for years I would someday burn.

Then I called Bonnie Low-Kramen, who had been the publicity manager at the theater. She’d been the one to persuade me to have
Entertainment Tonight
over for breakfast before the Oscar nominations were announced. In the couple of years since the Oscars, she had taken on a great deal of responsibility as her organizational and business skills had blossomed.

She had helped me pack my desk, just days before, and as I was loading my belongings into the trunk of my car, she’d hugged me and said, “You need me. So call when you’re ready.” For two years, Bonnie had been handling my schedule, my calls, and all of the mail that had come for me at the theater. I really had no idea how much work she did solely on my behalf there, but I knew it was essential. Now I found myself thinking about our last conversation; I picked up the phone. Bonnie, like the rest of us, had been unemployed now for a week. The phone rang twice before I heard her cheerful hello.

“Olympia! Enjoying your break?” she asked.

“I’m not sure ‘enjoy’ is exactly the word,” I replied. “What about you?”