My Life So Far (36 page)

Dad visiting us in Malibu during
Horses.
That’s Dot hovering in the background.

(Bob Willoughby/MPTV.net)

I listened, storing things up. Making no moves.

When the filming was over we went to New York, where I found my way to Vadim’s hair stylist in the Village, Paul McGregor. There I had my first deep hair epiphany. Hair had ruled me for many years. Perhaps I used it to hide behind. The men in my life liked it long and blond, and I had been a blonde for so long that I didn’t even know what my own color actually was. I simply said to Paul McGregor, “Do something,” and he did. It was the haircut that became famous in
Klute,
the shag, and he dyed my hair darker, like what it really was. I didn’t look as if I were trying to imitate Vadim’s other wives anymore—I looked like me! I knew right away that I could do life differently with this hair.

Vadim sensed immediately that my cutting my hair was the first volley in my move for independence, though he did little more than grumble about it. It was during this time of making
They Shoot Horses
that director Alan Pakula sent me the script of
Klute
with a wonderful character named Bree Daniel. I immediately agreed to do it the following year.

My new haircut and I returned to France with Vadim and Vanessa. There I remained for the good part of a year, swinging with Vanessa in a hammock between two of the large trees I’d planted, trying to be a mother but not really knowing how. Parenting, I discovered, doesn’t necessarily come naturally. I realized much later that I was parenting the way I’d been parented, taking care of all the externals but not countenancing the personhood of my baby. There is one especially powerful memory. It is late at night; I can’t get Vanessa to sleep; I am despondent, again deep into the bulimia; I am lying on my back on the floor, with Vanessa lying on my chest. She lifts her head and looks straight into my eyes for what seems like an eternity. I feel she is looking into my soul, that she
knows
me, that she is my conscience. I get scared and have to look away. I don’t want to be known.

I was at the country estate of my best girlfriend, Valarie Lalonde, when this happened. Part American, part British, ten years younger than me, Valarie was fun and smart and had a great giggle. She’d swing in the hammock with Vanessa and me and make Vadim mad because she was very pretty but liked me better than him. We have remained friends all these years, and recently I asked what her memories were of that time. Her first comment was that I was “upstairs a lot.” Yes, of course I was—pretending to be sick so I could have time by myself. In addition, I was still actively bulimic, although no one knew. No one ever knew. It wasn’t difficult to hide—especially since no one was really paying attention: I would simply leave the table, go upstairs, purge whatever I had eaten, and come back down again, all chipper and lively. Since the act of purging is somewhat orgasmic, the chipper part was easy. The difficulty would set in within twenty or thirty minutes, when a precipitous drop in blood sugar would flood me with fatigue and necessitate a physical and emotional withdrawal.

I watched how every minute of Vanessa’s days seemed filled with discovery, as mine had been when I was little. Time, the most valuable thing of all, where was it going? It was withering away, and I was becoming, not a grape of wrath—grapes are full and juicy. No, I was becoming a raisin of wrath, shriveled on the vine. I had to do
some
thing. So I did what I have always tended to do when confused and at a turning point: I go as far away from what’s familiar as possible, in the belief that somehow the miraculous power of strange faces and foreign climes will reveal me to myself, force me to examine how much of my problem I brought with me and how much I can honestly blame on my current context.

A lot of people who seemed to be on a search for “inner truth” were going to India and coming back with what sounded like answers: Mia Farrow and the Beatles, for instance. So off I went with a small duffel bag to New Delhi.

I was shocked at what I encountered. Until then poverty was just a word to me. I had never before been to a third-world country. I soon realized that not everyone saw what I was seeing. When I told the young Americans I occasionally ran into how appalled I was by the poverty, they would say that I “just didn’t understand India”; that I was bringing my bourgeois (there it was again) notions to a country where they weren’t applicable; that I was missing the point if I thought the people were miserable; that their religion lifted them above “such things.” Finally I met some Americans who were with the Peace Corps, digging wells, helping out. They understood my reaction—after all, that was why they were there, to help. I briefly considered joining them, but I was almost ten years older than them, and also I couldn’t imagine bringing Vanessa to India while I worked with the Peace Corps.

Ultimately, in some ways my trip did “reveal me to myself.” It taught me that I wasn’t a hippie; that given a choice, I’d dig wells rather than go to an ashram or space out on dope. Hey, it’s no secret that I’ve smoked pot. I’ve tried most everything that doesn’t require piercing the skin. But except for alcohol, nothing has ever caught on with me. Basically I like life on the natch too much. Besides, it’s not possible to
make things better
when you’re spaced out.

I flew directly from New Delhi to Los Angeles, where I was scheduled to promote
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
It was nighttime when I got to the room Vadim had reserved for us at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Talk about a rough transition!

I woke up in the morning with the cacophony of India still ringing in my ears, the odors of India still in my nose—and when I opened the curtains and looked out the window onto the quiet streets of Beverly Hills, I thought, My God, where is everybody? Has there been a plague? So clean. So empty. I had to struggle to remember that this was how it had always been, and it had seemed normal back then. But now I looked at the lavishness of the place with new eyes, and I was disturbed. How could we live this way when there were New Delhis in the world?

By now Vadim and I both knew that the woman who showed up in that hotel room was no longer his wife. I had moved out psychically. And it was for good.

Marriages end in stages, and it has nothing to do with a piece of paper. Part of mine had ended years earlier, when we weren’t even married yet, but I’d plowed along in deep denial. Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism—and sometimes it’s both. I had felt I needed the structure of our marriage to keep me from . . . vaporizing.
I am with him, therefore I exist.
And the newness of our being together had still permitted passion and romance. Then there was the stage when I’d grown numb and abandoned my body—yet keeping up the routine was the only thing that seemed possible, since the alternative still had me falling down a dark hole. After six years I had begun to see a faint outline of a
me
without him. This had ushered in a feisty period, when I dipped my toes a few times into the uncertain waters of independence—cutting my hair, going to India, having a romance of my own. (In a rare fit of discretion I won’t name him.) But by the time all this occurred, the marriage to Vadim was no longer emotionally viable, at least not for me. Vadim may have been able to continue with the status quo, but I couldn’t. Yet I discovered that you have to watch out for extramarital romances.
You
are raw, and
he
is usually inappropriate. But the relationship can take on an unwarranted and intense place in your lonely heart simply because of its juxtaposition to your marriage. Fifteen years or so later, when Vadim gave me the manuscript of
Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda,
I was flabbergasted to find that he had portrayed himself as the faithful husband, cuckolded by
me
at the end of our marriage. I said, “Vadim, come on! How can you write that without saying what
you
had been doing all during our marriage! You’re being hypocritical!” That did it. For Vadim, being called a hypocrite was almost as bad as being called bourgeois! He did some rewriting on his book, which acknowledged (barely) that he had regularly played around on me—but I was still made to look like the principal transgressor. I found this interesting, since Vadim never admitted to jealousy and would have sworn on his life that
he
didn’t hold to a double standard.

Vanessa was only a year old when I told Vadim that I wasn’t sure I could keep putting energy into trying to save what I suspected wasn’t salvageable. A callus had formed around my heart, perhaps to protect me from feeling the pain of self-betrayal: betrayal of my own body (participating in threesomes in order to please him and show I wasn’t a bourgeoise) and betrayal of my own heart (staying with him when I no longer respected him). But while my love for him had grown numb, new parts of me were waking and reaching for the light. Those were the instincts I wanted to follow.

In the winter of 1969,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
was released. Pauline Kael reviewed the film:

This review of my professional work seemed to be eerily emblematic of the changes that were rocking my personal life.

CHAPTER THREE

COMING HOME

It may be that the satisfaction I need
depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone
and come back, I’ll find it at home.

—R
UMI,
“In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo:
In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad”

Though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset
is to ensure sterility.

—E. M. F
ORSTER,
Howards End

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
for me to realize that this was a new country, the America I’d come home to, as different from the place I’d left as I was from the me who used to live here.

Looking back, I see that it was more than America I was coming home to; I was coming
home.
It wasn’t a hotel or rented house I chose; I took Vanessa and Dot and moved into the first-floor servants’ quarters of my father’s spacious Spanish colonial residence in Bel-Air. At the time I thought of it as a way to save money, but in retrospect I realize that it was more than that. I needed a safe haven, a place to regroup. Vadim’s family—my ten-year-old stepdaughter, Nathalie; Vadim’s mother; his sister, Hélène; his niece—they had been my family. Now, suddenly, I was alone but not emotionally anchored enough to be “out there,” familyless. For a while, anyway, living in my father’s home provided me with the roots I have always sought, a nest from which to fly and return. There I could figure out who I was now—post-Vadim.

Dad’s way of relating to me, however, made this a little complicated. When I was married Dad treated me as a grown-up. Now that I was single again with no man to validate me, I became the little girl for whom he felt responsible and whom he seemed unable to respect or take seriously. In the months I was in his house we skirted each other politely, assessing the lay of each other’s land, bumping up against each other on more than one occasion. Yet it was perfect. He provided a familiar landmark from which I could gauge how far I’d come from where I’d started.