Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (17 page)

I’m not the only one who loves a pratfall served with slapstick humiliation. It’s called low comedy. Low comedy is looked down upon because it’s targeted toward people who want to feel better by laughing at someone else’s misery. Obviously it’s not respected among certain circles, and yet comic geniuses like Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Jerry Lewis, and Jim Carrey are some of its masters. To me, sight gags are as intellectually challenging to pull off as a pun. Watch the setup to a great pratfall, and you’ll see the tension build to some form of physical gag that releases it, and BOOM … that’s where the laugh comes in. No one has to feel guilty, or
apologize for laughing at Adam Sandler’s misfortune, in the safety of a theater. In fact, it makes us, the audience, feel better about our own trials and tribulations.

Melissa McCarthy may be the first female low-comedy genius in film. She can do anything, say anything, and get away with it. She’s a foul-mouthed truck-driving ball breaker who can dish it out with the rest of the guys. The difference is, she can also make you cry on a dime. That’s the female in her. She’s vulnerable. But in
The Heat
, when Captain Frank Woods says to her, “You look like one of the Campbell Soup kids who grew up to be an alcoholic” and she says, “That’s a misrepresentation of my vagina”—come on. That’s funny. I know, ’cause I’m laughing just writing it down. The Women in Film organization should stand up and applaud Kristen Wiig, too. Only in
Bridesmaids
do the gals get to be the gals
and
the guys as well. Bring it on, Melissa and Kristen. The world is theirs.
Bridesmaids
was groundbreaking. Take the scene where Kristen Wiig, playing Annie, is about to have a meltdown when she’s confronted by a snotty teenage girl at the jewelry store she works at. The girl walks in and stares at Kristen.

Unlike Kristin and Melissa, when it comes to comedy, I’ve mostly played sidekick half-wits. In
Annie Hall
I was elevated to the role of an inarticulate young woman who wanted to mold herself into someone more sophisticated. Duh!!! Inarticulate! Awkward?! It was a walk in the park. With
Baby Boom
, Charles
Shyer and Nancy Meyers gave me the role of crackerjack businesswoman J. C. Wiatt, a woman who needed to be taken down a couple of notches by a baby in order to triumph. It was more of a stretch to pull off. I guess you could say it was my attempt to enter the lofty world of high comedy, characterized by witty dialogue and biting humor.

Sleeper
and
Love and Death
, two early Woody Allen movies, were a lot of fun. It was second nature for me to play birdbrains and spoiled brats. Woody’s humor in those movies revolved around sex, a bodily function that leads to a release, just like laughter. So were these movies low comedy, or did the witty dialogue set them apart? In
Sleeper
my character, Luna, asks Woody’s character, Miles, if he would like to perform sex.

Later in the movie Luna says, “It’s hard to believe that you haven’t had sex for two hundred years.” Miles responds with, “Two hundred four, if you count my marriage.”

In
Love and Death
, my character, Sonja, complains to Boris (Woody) that she’s unhappy.

It’s true, both
Love and Death
and
Sleeper
were set in worlds where complex situations were hashed over among articulate people. But the primary topic, sex, was delivered by a couple of dimwits. Did that make Woody’s early movies high or low comedy? Does anyone care? Not really. And anyway, comedy is not a science. It’s an art. As soon as you try to analyze it, the funniness disappears. All I can say is, I wish I had made more comedies.

On the drive home, I forgot about my throbbing toe. I forgot I was a broken-down privileged white woman of a certain age with a crabby attitude. What difference did it make if Chancellor Block and his wife had walked out on “God Bless America” in a nightmare? Sure, the alarm going off at three in the morning was worse than the nightmare, any nightmare. Yes, Dexter was annoying with her first fender bender. And, of course, I needed to work on Duke’s creepy-ass cracker language skills. No, I had not been able to charm the police officer. Yes, I was the kind of idiot who chose to walk backward barefoot only to fall and break her toe for the fourth time.… But—and it’s a big but—at the end of the day, I had to get down on my knees, praise the Lord, and thank
Grown Ups 2
for reversing a possible (and, I admit, self-imposed) mental breakdown with the quickest of fixes. Laughter. It had been a rough day. But wasn’t it ironic that I would find myself in a theater watching a movie about grown-ups where the gag was that grown-ups were anything but grown-up?

None of this, not one bit, downgrades the beauty of a smile. Not at all. It’s one thing to see a smile like Barack Obama’s. It’s another to feel it. A smile is appreciation, and empathy, and wonder. But laughter is release. Laughter is letting go. Babies laugh three hundred times a day. Adults twenty, if we’re lucky. What is it with being an adult? Does growing up—and, in my case, growing old—have to be
characterized by increased seriousness and less laughter? I intend to join the babies of the world and laugh more. Especially since—and this is a fact—laughter leads to less stress. It just does. So while smiling is lovely … laughing is beautiful.

I appeared to be a nice girl. I obeyed my mother, who said, “Diane is a lot of fun to be with. She does her chores without any complaints.” I had a sun-filled life. Our family vacations took us to national parks like Yosemite and Bryce Canyon. We went to drive-in theaters and saw movies like
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. I sang in the church choirs and ate Cheerios for breakfast. I was an innocent girl living in Southern California when the specter of starless nights came calling.

I can’t pinpoint when dark became beautiful. At first it was shadows hiding bloodthirsty ghouls, who would break into our home by smashing the windows with mallets and then kill us all. Dark was the sound of rats scrabbling on the floor in the middle of the night, ready to leap into my bed and eat me alive. Dark meant something else, too. It meant tiptoeing into the kitchen after Mom and Dad were asleep to sneak a plateful of chocolate chip cookies. The only time to accomplish this “mission impossible” was in the quiet dark of Night.

I was ten years old on the day I flipped through the pages of
Life
magazine and found a photograph of Sophia Loren. She sat on a stack of newspapers wearing a bathing suit and a pair of black patent leather stilettos. Her face had a sultry “take me” look. She was not sunny. There was something else, too. She appeared to have a long black line between her breasts. Later I learned that it had a name. Cleavage. Sophia Loren had lots of cleavage. I told no one of my new interest. Not Jesus in my prayers, or his father, God. Not Mom. Not Dad. No one. What I did was begin to hunt down other
Life
magazines, in search of more cleavage.

A year later, my cousin Charlie Rupert took me to see a matinee of the movie
Kiss Me Deadly
. It was about a serial killer who kissed his victims, put a gun to their heads, and pulled the trigger. They were called women of the night. Like Sophia Loren, they had cleavage, but theirs jostled around inside
V-neck sweaters worn over tight skirts. Later, Mom told me women of the night were sad because they sold their bodies. I told Mom I would never sell mine if it meant getting shot in the head. But I did want to know what sort of services were provided in the body-selling business. “Something not nice,” Mom said. “Something not nice.”

Grammy Hall’s fixation on the death of Johnny Stompanato wasn’t nice, either. One tabloid suggested that the movie star Lana Turner found Mr. Stompanato in bed with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane. Distraught, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him to death. That was one story. The
Herald Examiner
’s was different. Cheryl heard screams, ran into her mother’s bedroom, saw Johnny Stompanato choking her, rushed for a knife, and plunged it into his heart. After a lengthy trial, the jury convicted Cheryl of justifiable homicide. She was made a ward of the state of California and sent to a home for problem girls; she escaped from that home in 1960.

I’d never heard of a girl killing a man, or a man in bed with a girl, or a movie star nearly choked to death by a gigolo. The death of Johnny Stompanato was a Hollywood morality tale driven by a fading movie star’s unbalanced longing for a man of questionable character with swarthy appeal. At the center of the story was a teenage problem girl only two years older than me. Tabloid photographs showed an enigmatic
Cheryl Crane being taken away in handcuffs. At Cheryl’s age, I was not an enigma, or a murderess. But I did want something about me to be alluring, even dangerous. I wanted to wear black stockings with black seams. Anything with a hint of shadow. A black belt over a black skirt, a gunmetal-gray wallet with a midnight-blue change purse. You get the drift. I began to understand the beauty of a little light mixed with dark. You could have both. Black and white. Dark and light. Good times and bad. Pain with pleasure.

I was a junior in high school when Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. Somewhere in the darkest reaches of my mind, I understood that her breathless insecurity not only held the weight of her appeal but may have caused her death. My girlfriend Tammy said it was because she was getting old and her personal life wasn’t so hot. Plus, she had no children. I wasn’t so sure.

I lingered over a picture in the paper of a black-haired man clinging to his scrapbook as a tornado approached. Watching Channel 13’s local news, I cried when I saw the broken Barbie doll a little girl grasped as the floodwaters rose. They seemed to be holding on to mementos of the dreams they’d lost on the way. Were my dreams going to get lost, too? I knew that roses faded, but I didn’t understand the thing about how when you reach “the peak of perfection” you also
“begin to wither.” I hadn’t clocked in beauty as a “time’s up” trick played on all of us.

By that time I had my very own cleavage and I was a high school musical comedy star, applauded in particular for my antics. Boys thought I was marriage material. Girls thought I was fun. But underneath my affable veneer, I was beginning to spread a little dark into my light. At Santa Ana Junior College, I smoked marijuana with my friend Leslie, in my dad’s VW van. Was I bad? Were questionable choices overshadowing my lily-white reputation?

I was twenty-two when I landed a role in the Broadway production of
Hair
. As soon as it became a giant hit, the entire cast went on a trip to Fire Island and took peyote. Me included. I swallowed a pill called MDA with a young man I dated; he laughed when I told him I saw a witch fly across his face on a broom. A few seconds later, his eyes became thousands of crisscrossing spiderwebs. I stuck my finger in one and it disappeared into a wall of thick black goo. Was I compiling a mountain of ominous secrets that would reveal the real Diane?