I’m Over All That (2 page)

On with the show!

W
hen I look back on my seventy-six adventure-peppered years of life, I want to celebrate my “still here-ness.” While I am definitely more
still
now, I do like being
here
.
One of my great passions in life was traveling, which I’m sorry to say is not true anymore.
I’m over all that
.
I like being here where I am. And I like being still.

The idea of walking through an airport in a state of terror over the idea that the TSAs (“Thugs Standing Around”) won’t let Terry, my terrier dog, on the plane with me is my worst nightmare. What has happened to us? We obediently cower in fear, hardly even made uneasy by the thing that should really scare us: our own acceptance of the foregone conclusion that the possibility of terrorism trumps our freedom to travel.

I’m over that conclusion. I don’t believe that terrorism is the real reason we have become saluting robots. I believe we have neglected to see that terrorism is just a convenient excuse for those in power to gently instruct us to go quietly into that
good night of being compliant and unrevolutionary citizens who willingly become subjugated to authority.

Tom Paine has always been my idol. He wrote of the common sense of starting a revolution and praised the Age of Reason instead of religion. Of course, he’s buried in a potters’ field somewhere where no one can pay respects. He flew too much in the face of accepted behavior, which didn’t sit well with those whose first priority was political popularity and maintaining the status quo. People like that tend not to be the ones who get the big memorials and shrines dedicated to them.

The blood of the Founding Fathers runs through my veins because I was born and raised in Virginia, the real birthplace of our American Revolution. It was also the place of metaphysical leadership—the Masonic Order. But there will be time for words like “metaphysics” later. I got over the box-type religious thinking a long time ago too, because I wanted to breathe. That is what freedom is for.

I find it interesting and more than coincidental that I developed asthma during the “W” administration. I was so frustrated with his idiocy and perpetration of harm that I literally couldn’t breathe. I ended up in the emergency room three times, and each time I felt what it must be like to die of asphyxiation. I felt the land of the free was becoming asphyxiated, too. People were so dumbed-down they didn’t even realize they weren’t in charge of their own lives or thoughts anymore. Whether
9
/
11
was planned by people other than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, I don’t know. But it certainly
was conducive to the endeavor of dispensing with our individual freedom, which was supposed to be our inalienable right and the defense of which should be the primary reason we would ever go to war in the first place. We were told we should patriotically fight and kill those who would rob us of our freedoms. We didn’t need Osama. We allowed it to happen by not questioning our own elected leaders who said national security should be our highest priority.

For me, the searching of my bags and the patting down of my body
and
my dog is unconstitutional. Once, in Los Angeles, a big, fat, slovenly guy made me walk back and forth with Terry (
26
pounds) four times through security because my boarding pass was turned the wrong way. I found myself hissing like a cat and hating these authoritarian men who were exercising their power over me, a well-known and (admittedly) privileged woman. I heard he got fired later. Maybe he picked on Rosie O’Donnell.

Traveling for me is a constant reminder here and abroad that we are becoming afraid of ourselves and our neighbors, because
fear is the most powerful weapon of mass destruction
.
I don’t want to get over my abhorrence of such a condition. But I am over traveling, except when absolutely necessary, or unless a Pleiadean spacecraft offers me a ride to a planet where they claim to have solved such matters.

I hate that I’m over traveling because of all this security bullying. It was a multilayered experience for me everywhere I went before. I learned so much about myself because when
I found myself splashed up against a foreign environment,
I
was all I had and all I could depend on. I never traveled as a privileged person. I rarely even went first class. I wanted to experience the “real” world away from what had been the elitist world where I’d lived since coming to Hollywood when I was just twenty. If and when people recognized me, I followed the flow where it took me and more often than not, I made new friends.

Traveling has been my greatest teacher. It has offered me the gift of seeing and experiencing other points of view and other “realities.” Ever since the early days of film, the American movie screen reached around the world and I found that wherever I went, people told me their most private secrets, I assume because I was famous and they somehow felt they knew me. They were flattered that I was interested in them and listened. I quickly learned that my American version of the truth was not necessarily anyone else’s. Not only was truth relative, it was constantly changing.

I found that life itself was theater. Each culture played its own part. Sometimes the characters in my travels were mean and unethical. Sometimes they were kind and trustworthy. Sometimes events were comical, sometimes dramatic. I had been playing an American woman all my life, so when I traveled I could break out of this typecasting and feel I’d become a member of a new culture. I began to have a more objective view of myself, and my point of view of almost anything became more flexible. By the time I was forty years old, things
that previously would have been morally wrong to me were now lessons, not judgments . . . even regarding death.

I remember riding along a
klong
(waterway) in Bangkok, Thailand. I could see the activities of the
klong
dwellers as I glided past on my hired canoe. Suddenly, not more than one hundred feet away, a very young baby leaned over the side of the family canoe and toppled headfirst into the water
.
I strained my eyes to find him. The parents heard his coughing and gurgling, turned around, but did nothing to rescue their child. He disappeared under the water and drowned. I sat stunned, wanting to go in after the child myself, but my guide stopped me. From the Buddhist point of view, one should never interfere with the karmic will of God. If the parents or anyone else had jumped in to save the child, they would have placed him in a position of obligation for the rest of his life. The child’s life would have
belonged
to his rescuer. And this was one fate a Buddhist would never willingly inflict on another.

To a Buddhist, death is only another form of life anyway. Death is part of the cycles of life. Life and death are not regarded in terms of an individual’s survival or loss. The fate of the drowning child was not to be interfered with. The outcome was accepted as part of God’s will. By the same token, killing is abhorred because the act of killing
is
interfering with God’s will. There is, to a Buddhist, a profound difference between killing and allowing a death to occur. Fate and destiny are their philosophy and religion. I remember a friend of
mine who owned a private plane saying he would never have a Buddhist pilot because that pilot would be too serene in allowing a crash to happen—fate and destiny again.

A few days after witnessing the death of that child, I went to a Thai boxing match. What distinguishes Thai boxing from any other kind is that kicking anywhere and any way is legal. The boxers wore groin cups in their trunks to protect themselves, but otherwise no form of padding or protection. In a ceremony before the match, the boxers entered the ring and performed prayers and reverence to Buddha. Each boxer prayed for the well-being of his opponent, not himself. A group of musicians began to play as each boxer performed ritualistic dance movements and stylized pantomimes in benevolent reverence for the fate of his opponent. A signal was given, whereupon the boxers proceeded to kick, smash, jab, and pummel their opponent with both fists and feet. No holds were barred. One of the boxers kicked the other in the head and snapped his neck and broke it. The man died right there on the spot.

I couldn’t believe that this was a popular sport for the peaceful Thai people, but the huge crowd went wild with enthusiasm. Two new boxers entered the ring and performed the ritualistic prayers and bowed to Buddha with mime and ritualistic dancing. The combat began. One sliced the other across the forehead with his elbow, causing blood to pour down his face. The roar of the crowd at the sight of blood was deafening. They shouted their approval above the ear-splitting
music that was being played. A doctor was summoned, but the crowd chanted wildly, “Let him fight!” The wounded boxer stamped his foot until the doctor went away. Again the crowd roared its approval. The wounded boxer attacked his opponent, smearing his blood all over them both. His adversary continued kicking the head wound open further and further. Blood was flying everywhere. The crowd was ecstatic. I was stunned and almost apoplectic. The doctor came back and the crowd booed. Two stretchers were ordered since the head wound was completely open now. Both boxers looked more like human protoplasm than men. Finally, the match was stopped, much to the anger of the audience.

Yes, Thailand was a paradox. But aren’t we all? One person’s entertainment is another person’s hell.

I began to speculate on whether such a popular bloodletting sport gave the Thai people an outlet for their repressed anger and submission. Was this sport a way to vent their hostility and rage (emotions that perhaps surge in all of us)? Perhaps violent sports are necessary and preferable to the alternative things we could do to each other.

In Thailand, I was once again made aware of how parochial my values were. I had learned everything I knew from the limited confines of my childhood—from my parents, from the schools I had attended, and from the neighborhood I grew up in. As a child and an adolescent growing up in the “land of the free,” I had not been educated to think beyond the parameters of what my traditional teachers wanted me
to know. My parents always tried to protect me from harm if I dared attempt too much. In effect, they put up a three-foot-high emotional fence around me. I learned to jump over it. They would then erect something a few feet higher. I would jump over that, too. They never made me feel afraid—they just wanted to protect me. Maybe I sought out so many dangerous adventures in my life because my parents made me see that there were a host of potentially scary things out there in the world, but didn’t do so in a way that would stifle my curiosity. In effect, they were teaching me
how
to jump. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. Intentionally or not, my parents taught me how to jump over my own walls in life and to
dare
.

When I look back on some of my experiences, I’m intrigued by which ones I recall as being important. There seems to be a separation of heart experience and mind/body experience. If I were to write a book today just about my travels, it would result in a different book from the ones I wrote in the past. The truth is that no matter where I went, I was always looking for myself. That journey into myself as I evaluated my beliefs and values, whether living at home or in far-flung corners of the world, has been the most important journey of all. That journey is what led to my search to understand the true meaning of spirituality. I was learning that I truly was creating everything. I was attempting to understand the character I had created as myself in the theater of life.

I
like ageing because I can forget all about the things that mattered in the past. I used to think it really mattered if I wore high heels to a premiere or not. Can you imagine? Over the years, I’ve realized that the “theater” of the past is a script I no longer want to play a part in.

The older I get, the more adventurous my script becomes, maybe even risky. But there is no fun to be had in a safe script. I learned that from watching my parents. I left the safe harbors of my parents and childhood in order to sail with the wind a long time ago. I explored and explored, and always the journey took me inward.

I acknowledged the theater of war, the theater of politics in Washington, the theater of television news. . . . If we humans were writing the scripts and acting in the theaters of reality, I wanted to change my script. I decided to explore the theater of inner truth.

I
have many actress friends around my age, and when we get together we discuss how difficult it is, and always has been, to be a woman in this movie business obsessed with youth and sexuality and beauty. We know we have had to be tough and resilient, but have we also lost our feminine vulnerability? What good is being vulnerably feminine, anyway? I don’t think men really prefer that.

When I look at the pictures on my Wall of Life, the wall in my home where I’ve hung hundreds of photographs documenting movies and many different moments of my life journey, the faces peering back at me are almost all men. True, in the last ten years I’ve been comforted by the faces of Elizabeth, Nicole, Jane, Meryl, Sophia, and some others. While the men may have been brilliant actors, they were not the human beings the women were, either in reliability, intelligence, or courage. Contrary to popular thought, women
working together on films do not “cattily” compete with each other. On the contrary, they bond together, usually against an insensitive male in power. On
Steel Magnolias,
our director Herb Ross was consistently unkind to Dolly Parton and to newcomer Julia Roberts. The rest of us called him on it. The movie was fantastic and Julia went on to become the biggest star in the world. Women communicate on the level of feelings and the heart. Men tend to stay on the surface level of logic and the brain. There was a well-known adage that went around the sets of Hollywood in the old days: Never marry an actress—she is so much more than a woman. Never marry an actor—he is so much less than a man.