Little Known Facts: A Novel (20 page)

5. “I love Monet. I don’t care what those assholes think. If they could paint like he could, they wouldn’t be such stuck-up pricks about his water lilies or cathedrals or dying wife.”

At a fund-raiser for the Getty where he donated a big wad of cash to their endowment, he was almost apoplectic when he saw a couple of museum officials rolling their eyes after he said that his favorite artist was Monet. “Isn’t it possible that they were rolling their eyes over something else?” I asked him, trying to make him feel better. His reply: “I know you can be pretty fucking dense sometimes, but I think this one wins the grand prize.”

6. “I’m not a bully. Bullies beat people up and can’t control their tempers. I’ve never been like that in my life.”

He knew that he was being pretty selective in his definition of bully. I told him that he was forgetting about the people who are emotionally and verbally abusive, which, needless to say, I thought described him pretty well. He said that all married people argue sometimes, and it wasn’t my job to rate everything he said by some asinine bully scale that I’d gotten from watching
Oprah
or listening to
Loveline
or whatever sorry-ass bullshit I squandered my time on when he wasn’t home. (Oprah, by the way, adores him, and by then he had been on her show at least four or five times.)

7. “If one more person stops me and says how my movies got them to quit drinking or gambling or fucking their brother’s wife, I’m seriously going to kill them.”

We were at the Grove when he said this, late for a birthday party for Martin Landau, I think it was, and were trying to find a suitable gift. Renn liked shopping, but if he wasn’t in the mood to talk to fans, he knew better than to go to the mall thirty minutes before we were supposed to be at a surprise party ten miles away.

*Most of the above was excised from the published version.

The books on his nightstand:

1.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What California guy or wannabe hippie of a certain age and social class doesn’t pretend to like this book?

2.
Women
by Charles Bukowski. I didn’t read this novel until a few years after we were divorced. It helped me to see why Renn treated me the way that he sometimes did. With this being one of his favorite books . . . well, read it for yourself and see if you too aren’t worried about a guy who thinks this is the best thing since clean water.

3.
The Stranger
(both a French and an English version). He knew passages of this book by heart, and for some reason, he identified with Meursault, Camus’s strange murderer/anti-hero, who hoped at the novel’s end that he would be greeted by cries of hatred from the people who had come to witness his execution. I didn’t get this, and Renn thought that I was ignorant for not understanding what Camus was doing.

“He’s finally starting to feel something at the end,” he said. “After being indifferent to everything before now.”

“But why cries of hatred? That’s terrible,” I said. “You actually identify with him?”

“Yes, I do. It doesn’t matter if they’re cries of love or hatred,” he snapped. “The point is, he feels something after a long time of feeling nothing. He’s lucky. It’s a story of redemption, ultimately.”

I didn’t think so, and still don’t. Needless to say, I don’t have to discuss it with him any longer.

4.
Romeo and Juliet.
One of his dreams when we were together was to make a modern-day version of this beloved (but tiresomely everywhere) play in Paris with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Juliet as a lonely cashier at a Parisian movie house and Romeo as an usher who for years paints Juliet’s portrait from photos he takes of her unobserved. I thought this made Romeo seem pretty creepy, but Renn didn’t at all. “He’s a frustrated romantic, like so many of us,” he said.

“Not you,” I said, trying not to sound as unhappy as I felt. “You can have whoever you want.”

He opened his mouth to argue but then thought better of it.

5.
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H.
His children’s favorite book when they were little. It was one of my favorites too. He told me that he read it to Anna and Billy at least ten times while they were growing up. I asked him to read it to me too, and he did not long after we were married. He used different voices for the major characters, and the fact that he bothered with this, that he took his time reading it, performing it, really, using all of his considerable actor’s skills, was probably the single sweetest thing he ever did for me.

Causes he is interested in and/or donates to, in no particular order:**

1. PETA (because of Anna, not because he is against people wearing fur or eating animals, but I do think he genuinely feels bad about the animals that live their short lives on factory farms)

2. VoL (Victims of Landmines—losing a limb is one of his phobias)

3. GiRLS (Girls in Real-Life Situations—an organization devoted to finding and freeing girls from child prostitution. A worthy cause, obviously, but the director, Tamara Snow, is someone Renn fucked while he was still married to me, I’m about 98 percent sure)

4. HHOP (HIV Hospice of Pasadena—he had a close friend who died there, a guy he met in college who tried to convince Renn that he was bi when they were still in school together, but I don’t think Renn ever fell for it)

5. Cows for Life (because Renn has a soft spot for Wisconsin—both of his parents are from there. CFL is based in Madison, and their mission is to convince all dairy farmers to stop using bovine growth hormones on their herds)

6. SOCC (Save Our California Coast—I think the name probably speaks for itself. I’m not sure if Renn had an affair with anyone who works for them, but I wouldn’t be surprised)

7. WWF (World Wildlife Fund, not the World Wrestling Federation. He loves the earth. He really does. Especially when he can ride around on it in a Land Rover on an African savannah)

8. Himself (for the promotion and upkeep of his Movie Star Lifestyle)

**Some of the above was also excised from the published version.

Not all of it was bad:

He wasn’t selfish or condescending the whole time we were together; otherwise I would probably have left him before he left me. He had many soft spots, gentle habits, and generous moments. He loved his parents and brother, and both of his children, and treated them all well. He was also curious about the world and felt compassion and interest in people whose lives were very different from his. I don’t think he would ever have been interested in me if he weren’t willing to give everyone a fair chance at earning his attention. But this democratic spirit often made me jealous because I never felt like he was fully there, even when we were alone together. He was always preoccupied by some project or half-baked hope or why someone important was taking so long to call him back. His life seemed to me, the outsider housewife, to be full of suspense, of secret dealings and intrigue—it wasn’t just his movies that were filled with these things. He seemed to have so many ideas and sometimes woke in the middle of the night to make a phone call or scribble in a notebook that he kept on his nightstand, a habit that woke me up because he would always click on the bedside lamp.

Regarding Monet, he also loved Modigliani, Ed Paschke, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud. He didn’t own much art, though, which seemed a strange omission, considering how many art books he had and how much money too. He could have bought some interesting things, and there are plenty of good galleries in L.A., not to mention in many of the other places he has traveled. He had a framed charcoal drawing of two small monkeys embracing that his daughter and one of her friends drew for him that he loved, though I thought it was kind of silly. Monkeys? Why? The friend, J, had a big crush on him and used to show up at our house in low-cut blouses and no bra and take every chance she could to bend over in front of him. I think she hated me. Needless to say, the feeling was mutual.

For as long as I was with him, it felt like I had to be constantly on the lookout for other women who were trying to get too close to him. It was both exhausting and futile because he wanted the pretty ones to get too close to him. I realized later that basically every straight man wants this. I am a jealous person. I think most people are jealous, if they’re being honest. But we are forced to swallow this poison alone, and sometimes it corrodes the soul. (Yes, Renn, if you’re reading this, I
do
love melodrama.)

One good thing is that I wasn’t yet thirty-six when the divorce went through. It could have been worse; I could have been his first wife’s age, or even older. Even though I’m not an actress or someone who desperately needs her looks to pay the bills, it seems to me that the worst thing a woman can do is grow older. I still had several years left to have a baby, but I ended up not having one. Going out with other men after Renn, especially at first, was very strange. I thought that I needed and wanted an ordinary guy, but in truth, I wanted someone more unique. Even though Renn was ungenerous and very harsh with me by the end, I couldn’t help but compare the men I dated to him. They weren’t as good-looking or as interesting or as charming or wealthy. He is a man who has everything other men want. Absolutely everything, and if he doesn’t, he can quickly acquire it. This is not the kind of man a sane woman should want to date. He is too impossible, knowing himself to be better than everyone else.

What I have documented here, in my fifty-third year, from June through October, on a Sony ICD-SX712 digital recorder, is intended to assist an authorized biographer after my death. Or, perhaps like Mr. Twain (he and I are hardly of the same intellectual caste, I realize), I will act as my own biographer/ghostwriter, and publish a transcript of the following as part of a posthumous autobiography. The pun seems apt, because in a way, I will be speaking from the grave. Although I won’t instruct the executors of my estate to wait a hundred years to release this material as Mr. Twain did with his own, I will tell them to wait no fewer than five—long enough, I hope, for any arguments over my last will and testament to have lost their initial, most potent virulence (if there is any virulence between my heirs—maybe there won’t be).

A few of the following revelations, needless to say, will not be particularly flattering—for myself or for my closest family members. It might be that none of these revelations will be released until after my children, Anna and Billy, have also passed on, if ever. But this detail is something that I will have to decide at a later date.

“When did you realize that you wanted to be an actor?” “Or did you always know that you would become one?” “Who are your role models?” “Who is the real Renn Ivins?” “Is there a
real
Renn Ivins?” “What are your secrets?”

They don’t stop asking these questions, however many times I’ve already answered them, one way or another. Who, if he has a shred of sanity, is stupid enough to tell a journalist his secrets, especially the darker ones? And isn’t it clear why people want to become actors? They want to be loved. They want to be rich. They want to have sex with beautiful people who will never forget them. They want revenge on all of the kids who used to pick on them. They want revenge on everyone who didn’t believe in them enough or dismissed them outright, despite how pathetic or dull these dismissers’ own lives were. They want to be forgiven their selfishness and thoughtlessness. If you become famous, more people than you expect will forgive you for things you probably shouldn’t be forgiven for, though there is also the chance that you will never be forgiven and that your disgrace will make international headlines, ones that might generate enough profit for the people reporting the story to retire to Monaco before year’s end.

Some advice: two questions that interviewers should ask but don’t (except for one guy who was doing an article for
Vanity Fair
a few years ago, when
The Zoologist
was released), probably because they know that I won’t answer them honestly either: “What’s it like for you to grow old in Hollywood?” and “How do you think it’s different for men than women?”
Grow old
—does this mean that the journalist thought I was old already? These questions aren’t exactly polite, but at least they’re not stupid. I told the
Vanity Fair
guy that I didn’t really feel like I was getting old, only more experienced. I remember his expression, something between a frown and a smirk, and I also remember feeling angry but hiding it from him. He sensed it anyway, because what he wrote was, “Ivins seems to be suffering from the collective Hollywood delusion that if you’re rich and famous enough, the rules of gravity don’t apply to you.” Frankly, he’s wrong about this. I do feel the gravitational pull that in due time will bring all of us down, but I’m fighting it. Almost everyone I know seems to live more in fear of aging visibly than of dying from cancer or seeing their children die before they do. Maybe even more than losing all of their money, and it’s as bad with men as it is with women. I have booked a few Botox appointments but so far have avoided the face-lifter’s scalpel and the antiaging snake oil sold in the back of otherwise reputable magazines. Despite all of our purported brainpower and common sense, human beings are truly a sad and ridiculous species.

That sounds cynical, I suppose. But despite our fears and vanities, I do think we are capable of selflessness and love and great empathic leaps of imagination. Many of us can and do appreciate beauty. We do not want to grow old, in part because it means that someday we will not be around to appreciate the things we find beautiful. Aging also implies that we will not be loved in the same ways that we were when we were younger. So few of us like change, especially when something is being subtracted rather than added. I don’t think that many of us are conditioned to lose: only to gain, to succeed.