My Life So Far (20 page)

He sat down, looked at me, and said, “Well.” The silence that followed was broken only by an odd clicking sound he was making by forcing a quick breath from his throat out his nose. (He would use this tic to great effect in his scene with Al Pacino in
Godfather II.
I was paralyzed as he stared at me, his cold eyes made eerily larger by the thickness of his glasses. Then I felt something deep inside him relax and grow gentle. Perhaps he saw how scared I was. He told me months later that I had seemed shut down, trying so hard to be a proper, conventional young woman. I asked why, then, he had accepted me into his classes, and he said, “It was your eyes. I saw something else in your eyes.”

I
had gotten to know his daughter, Susan, earlier in the summer. She and her brother, Johnny, who was around Peter’s age, and a directorial protégé of Lee’s named Marty Fried would come over and hang out at the beach house Dad had rented. Susan Strasberg, with her tiny, perfect face and skin that shone like a magnolia blossom, had created a sensation in the Broadway play
The Diary of Anne Frank,
and earlier that year she had starred opposite my father in Sidney Lumet’s film
Stage Struck.
She seemed to me to be wildly confident and mature.

Day after day for more than a month as I played chess with Susan and Marty, I resisted their efforts to get me to join her father’s private acting classes. “Why not give it a try?” they’d say over and over. I insisted repeatedly that I didn’t want to be an actress, but the problem of what to do in the fall was looming. So in time I reluctantly gave in. I became an actress by default!

Lee Strasberg was associated with the acting style called the Method. It was not really a set of rules but a quintessentially American adaptation of an amalgam of techniques developed by the Moscow Art Theater’s director Konstantin Stanislavsky—with ample contributions from Lee himself, who prior to becoming a teacher had been a stage actor and director. In 1949, two years after Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis had founded the Actors Studio, Lee was asked to join and soon after became the Studio’s artistic director and sole teacher of actors. His students included most of the great actors and actresses of the time: James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, Al Pacino, Julie Harris, Rip Torn, Ben Gazzara, Sally Field. They brought a new, edgy realism to their work, more internal and personal than the standard theatrical fare audiences were accustomed to. They didn’t
show;
they
were.

It was into Lee’s private classes that I had been accepted—a step down from the Studio but nonetheless a step into the inner circle of the man who was considered one of the great teachers in this country. It had all come about because Marilyn Monroe was filming
Some Like It Hot
in Hollywood and Lee’s wife, Paula Strasberg, was her acting coach. That’s what had brought the Strasberg family to Los Angeles, living a few houses down from us on the beach. And that’s the coincidence that changed my life.

I remember going with Susan Strasberg to visit her mother on the set of
Some Like It Hot.
I had been on many of my father’s movie sets, but this was my first time visiting a set as a young adult, and I was paying close attention. As the heavy padded double doors that led onto sound stages thudded closed behind us and I stepped inside, I felt myself in a foreign land, a dark and secret world, what my son (who is an actor) calls “a civilization within a civilization.” A movie set is not an easy place to be if you are not part of the filming. Inevitably you feel like an interloper, left out of the secret that has brought everyone else to this dark, cavernous place with padded walls and a ceiling so high you have to tilt your head all the way back to try to see it. In the center there is a circle of light where all the energy is being sucked, where the secret lies. Thick electric cables snake across the black floor and up into huge boxes on poles, the klieg lights, which, like sentinels with their backs turned, are silhouetted in a glow. Everyone but you has a task connected to that light. People talk in hushed voices that hang, muffled, in front of their faces. They’re polite, but you feel an invisible cord drawing them away from you to that place. A siren shrieks. You jump and turn to see a red light swirling above the double doors, like the light on a police car. “
Silence!
” someone shouts. Then all you hear are murmurs. Then another shout: “
Camera rolling!
” Then: “
Action!
” and all sound and energy are sucked into the vacuum of light.

There was an overabundance of tension as well as excitement on the set that day, partly because of the extraordinary assemblage of star power (Marilyn, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and the director, Billy Wilder), but also because Marilyn was having problems with her lines and they had been shooting the same scene many times over. It was a scene early in the movie when she’s in the train’s sleeping car with Tony and Jack, who are in drag.

Susan Strasberg silently pointed out her mother to me. Paula was sitting in a canvas chair behind the camera, all her attention focused on what was going on inside the circle of light. She was a wide woman. Everything about her was wide—her eyes; her face, with high cheekbones; her body, draped in layers of black, covered by an earth-toned shawl and ethnic jewelry. Hers was a lap and bosom you’d want to be taken into. Thick glasses made her eyes large as an owl’s, and her pale red hair was pulled back in a braided chignon. She had clearly been a beauty once, like her daughter, Susan.

An eternity of held breath elapsed before a voice yelled, “
Cut!
” Suddenly people sprang into action, moving out of the darkness, doing their precise, union-prescribed tasks inside that circle of light. Then into the darkness stepped Marilyn Monroe, bringing the light with her, shimmering, in her hair and on her skin. She walked with Paula toward where Susan and I were standing while someone draped a pink chenille bathrobe over her shoulders to cover her revealing nightgown. Her body seemed to precede her, and it was hard to keep my eyes from camping out there. But when I looked up at her face, I saw a scared, wide-eyed child. I was dizzy. It was hard to believe she was right there in front of me, all golden iridescence, saying hello in that breathy, little-girl voice. There was a vulnerability that radiated from her and allowed me to love her right there and feel glad that she had someone wide and soft, like Paula, to mama her. She was very sweet to Susan and me, but I could tell she wanted Paula’s undivided attention, to give her what she needed so that she could go back and do the scene one more time. I wondered how it could be that she seemed so frightened when she was probably the most famous woman in the world. We lingered a few moments, said hello to Billy Wilder, whom I’d known since childhood, and to Jack Lemmon, whom I’d met at this very studio when he filmed scenes for
Mister Roberts
with my father. Then we left, stepping out of the darkness and into the blinding sunlight, into that other civilization that was real life. But for the first time a part of me felt drawn to the light within the darkness behind those heavy padded double doors.

That episode took place just weeks before my meeting with Lee, and long before the time I myself would be inside the circle of light and would have to find my own ways of dealing with the fears that celebrity cannot assuage.

Modeling to pay the rent and for acting classes.

(October 1959
Ladies’ Home Journal,
courtesy of Meredith Corporation, photo by Roger Prigent)

A few weeks later my father brought me to the Warner Bros. Studio back lot to meet with Jimmy Stewart about the possibility of my playing his daughter in the film
The FBI Story.
Director Mervyn LeRoy had come up with the idea, and I suppose my father saw it as a harmless, all-in-the-family sort of lark, Jimmy being his best friend. For just these reasons, I didn’t cotton to it in the least: It smacked too much of a “Daddy’s little girl” setup, and I communicated my lack of enthusiasm strongly enough to sweet Jimmy that things never got further than that first meeting. But in light of my subsequent relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wouldn’t it have been ironic if my first role had been in
The FBI Story
?

So Lee Strasberg had accepted me into his private classes in New York, and my problem of what to do in the fall was taken care of. Where exactly to live and how to pay for it all were the remaining issues. As luck would have it, Susan Stein, youngest daughter of MCA’s Jules and Doris Stein and sister of Jean (Stein) Vanden Heuvel, had graduated from Vassar and was looking for an apartment and roommate in New York.

Susan Stein suggested that I meet with Eileen Ford, head of the famous Ford Modeling Agency. Maybe I could get work as a fashion model to pay my share of the rent, as well as the acting classes. Within two months of my return to the city I had started Lee’s class, taken my first modeling assignments, found a duplex on East Seventy-sixth Street for Susan and me, and moved out of my father’s house (to the great relief of Afdera). I was on my way, a leaf in the river’s current—not in control of my destiny, perhaps, but at least on the move.

The modeling work I was doing to pay for the acting classes was difficult for me. I didn’t like the incessant focus on my looks, and I never felt I was very photogenic (those round cheeks), but I had no trouble finding a doctor to prescribe Dexedrine, which kept me hyper, and diuretics, which made me urinate incessantly, thus draining my body of fluids. On my five-foot-eight-inch frame, my weight dropped from the low 120s to under 110. My face, which in those years (1959, 1960), was prominently featured in many major magazines
—Life, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Look, Vogue,
and
Ladies’ Home Journal—
looked drawn, my eyes empty. But the modeling work kept coming. I would hang around the magazine stands when one of my covers had come out, an anonymous bystander, to see how people reacted to my photo. Eileen Ford, whose agency I worked for, once said of me, “She was something. She was terribly insecure about her looks and the impact she had on people. She was astonished to learn that people would be interested in using her and paying her well.”

A
cting classes were held in a nondescript building in midtown, on Broadway. We’d take a cramped, musty elevator up to the sixth floor to a small theater with a proscenium stage and seats for about forty people. Do you remember the feeling of entering a new school when you were a kid, looking around and picking up clues as to where you fit in and where you were different? Well, it was clear to me from the outset that I was different: I felt uncomfortably upper-class, an elite dilettante, as though I carried a sign that read, “I’m not really sure I want to be here, I’m just trying it out.” Everyone else had a scruffier, bohemian look about them that said, “I am an intense, serious New York actor. Deal with it!” My clothes were verging on preppy and my voice, with its Ivy League accent, seemed to come out of my ear. The other students knew I was Henry Fonda’s daughter and, whether it was real or imagined, I felt resentment.

There were a few famous faces in the class from time to time—France Nuyen, for instance, who was starring on Broadway in
The World of Suzie Wong;
Salome Jens; Carroll Baker, who was considered a major discovery after her sexy performance in Elia Kazan’s
Baby Doll.

Then there was Marilyn Monroe, Lee’s most famous student, who sat quietly and earnestly in the back of the room in a trench coat, a scarf on her head, and no makeup. Twice a week for one month I sat right behind her, trying to understand what was going on, praying Lee wouldn’t call on me. I had definitely not committed myself to a career in acting and wasn’t at all sure I’d even stay in the class. Marilyn, I was told, had never been able to do a scene there. Each time she’d try, fear would make her sick to her stomach. I remember following her out into the street after class one day. I stood behind her as she hailed a cab, and I watched her ride away unrecognized. I had seen her in newsreels, in the spotlight, being stormed by fans and paparazzi, and had wondered how a person could handle the extreme swing from being the center of fanatical attention to being all alone on a New York sidewalk, unrecognized and scared.

A few years later her press agent (who represented me as well) told me that once Marilyn had been so scared to come down from her hotel room to a press conference that she couldn’t stop throwing up. He said she vacillated between thinking she was not just a star but a “celestial body” and the fear that “this is the day they’ll find out I’m a fraud.” I wish I’d gone to her and held her hand.

The first of the two weekly classes was devoted to what was called a “sense-memory” exercise. One or two students would be called on to re-create the sensations of a particular activity, its smells, feelings, sounds—actually experiencing them. Unlike pantomime, which requires you to mimic an activity exactly but without props, sense-memory involves taking minutes to really feel the heat and weight of a cup of coffee in your hand, for instance, then many more minutes to feel the heat as the cup approaches your lips. It’s the difference between reenacting and
reexperiencing.
The purpose is to expand your sensory awareness and concentration. Following the exercise, Lee would do a critique of your work, and then the class could make comments as well.