Watch Me: A Memoir (16 page)

Our first day of work was in a wedding chapel in Brooklyn, and I remember sitting in the back of a company car that morning on the West Side Highway, with dawn coming up over the city and nude men displaying themselves in the windows of the lofts in the Meatpacking District. I was sharing my ride with the girl who was cast to play the bride, and the driver remarked to me as we got out of the car that she was beautiful. I remember feeling a stab of jealousy and thinking, “Yes, this is what Maerose is all about. And now she’s going to turn the tables.”

Kathleen Turner was playing the part of Irene Walker, a killer hired by the Prizzis. In a moving dolly shot, sitting in the front-row pew, the entire Prizzi family attends a wedding. In close-up, Bill blinks like a lizard. The other members of the clan are introduced, including Jack as Charley Partanna and me as Maerose, then a cutaway to Kathleen Turner in the balcony—we are already set up as rivals. Typical of my father’s films, most of the information is imparted in the first few minutes.

On the second day of shooting, the set-design team divided the ballroom from the hall outside by a movable wall of white latticework with two ovals cut out of the crosshatching. As I was standing with a group of extras, about to pass through to the hall for my first scene with Jack, for a moment Dad was perfectly framed in one opening and Jack in the other, like a pair of cameos. For me, it was one of those instances when life and art merge, and it somehow pinpointed Maerose’s dilemma.

*  *  *

That day, the script called for a moment of tearful vulnerability on Maerose’s part, after a scene in which her father derides her for looking like a whore at the wedding. She is confronted with advice from Charley to “Practice your meatballs!”

Dad was having a lot of fun with all this, and the nature of the piece—the fact that it was so tongue in cheek—gave us all a kick. Dad decided over lunch one day that Tommy should play the opera singer who serenades the don at his son’s retirement party. Although performing was not his forte, Tommy took this proposal very seriously, and for days to follow, he was never seen without his sheet music for “Figaro” in hand, his fingertips nervously tapping his Adam’s apple. He would be dubbed in the movie, but he wanted to be sure his lip-synching would be perfect. He had memorized his libretto, and after several hours in hair and makeup he came onstage to do his turn. Wardrobe had dressed Tommy in a blue ruffled shirt with a big gold chain hung about his neck. Dad sent him straight back to have the costume changed. “I don’t want a mockery made of this man,” he said.

Finally, Tommy returned to the scene. He was visibly uptight, in white tie and tails. I was sitting behind Dad on the floor beneath the stage, alongside the camera. Dad cocked his head and winked at me. Tommy lip-synched the aria brilliantly, if somewhat nervously. But when he came to the end, the music continued.

“Cut,” Dad called out. Then he inquired seriously, “Tommy, what about the rest of the song?”

Onstage, in the glare of the footlights, Tommy turned pale green. “What do you mean, John?” he asked dazedly. He began to loosen his tie. “This was all I was given to learn.”

Dad shook his head, feigning dismay. “But, Tommy,” he said, “we need the rest of the song.”

By now, Tommy had jumped off the stage and was running for the exit door of the theater. He disappeared for the rest of the day, and from then on he stayed in Jack’s kitchen. I don’t think we ever saw him walk on set again.

Another day, Dad and Kathleen were having a difference of opinion as to how a scene should be played. “Just go to the suitcase, close it, carry it out of the room, and shut the door,” said Dad.

“But, John,” said Kathleen, “I think I’d prefer to go to the wardrobe and take something to put in the case before I walk out and close the door.”

“No, honey, just go to the suitcase, close it, carry it out, and shut the door.”

“But, John!”

“Okay, honey, you do just what you want, and we’ll cut it out later.”

On a rare visit to a restaurant in Brooklyn one lunchtime, an elderly gentleman at the bar took stock of Dad as we walked in. “That’s Walter’s kid!” he exclaimed. After that we had a cashmere bathrobe made for Dad, navy blue like a boxer’s, with the words
WALTER’S KID
embroidered on the back. We gave it to him as a wrap present.

The design of the movie was somewhat mysterious; undoubtedly, it had a timeless quality and seemed oddly rooted in the thirties, despite some modern notes. After the company had moved to Los Angeles, Kathleen Turner was wearing a very modern Kieselstein-Cord belt and Nikes when she looked out her trailer window at a long row of antique cars lining up for a shot. She called Laila over and asked, “Is this a period movie?”

“I don’t know,” Laila replied. “We should ask John Huston.”

They made their way across the street to where Dad and John Foreman were sitting. “John,” said Laila, “Kathleen wants to know if this is a period movie.”

Dad tossed back his head and laughed. “We’ll see if it matters, honey.”

It was a wonderful thing to be given a part like Maerose Prizzi, ironclad, and I am forever grateful to John Foreman, Dad, and Jack for making it possible. For Dad and me, it was proof that if you believe in each other, are willing to risk humiliation, and put your heart on the line, miracles can happen.

*  *  *

About a month after I finished
Prizzi’s Honor
, I received a call to audition as the replacement for Denise Crosby, who had the title role in a play called
Tamara
at the American Legion Hall on Highland Boulevard in Hollywood. It was a beautifully mounted experimental play, written by John Krizanc and directed by Richard Rose, about a visit the young Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka pays to the villa of the fascist poet Count Gabriele D’Annunzio circa 1927. It was one of the very few auditions that I had ever done well, most of all because I had seen Denise’s performance and it had given me courage. Sometimes another actor’s interpretation can give you ideas. I started rehearsals a few weeks later.

It was an elegant production, with the Legion post transformed into a 1920s Italian villa. The costumes were by Gianfranco Ferré and the luggage by Louis Vuitton. The scenes were acted out simultaneously in different rooms, and members of the audience followed the characters of their choice as they moved around the house, opting sometimes to
change direction or to follow another character. There were ten of us, five upstairs and five below in the servants’ quarters. Karen Black, Jack’s co-star from
Five Easy Pieces
, played D’Annunzio’s mistress, and she was a pleasure, if surprising, to work with. She was very spontaneous and never repeated the same performance. One matinee, Karen got locked in her wardrobe and couldn’t get out until the second act. Often we would walk into a room to find the audience playing with our props or in our beds and have to go blithely on with the show, so it helped to be good at improv.

For no apparent reason that I could fathom, the actor playing D’Annunzio insisted on French-kissing me in the oratorio scene. I was getting irritated with this, and my performance began to suffer, but he persisted despite my complaints to the stage manager. Sometimes if you moved too fast, you’d lose the audience, and I was giving less time overall to the kissing scene. Consequently, on more than one occasion, I would find myself all alone, having fled to Tamara’s bedroom too early and performing only for myself. But then the audience would trickle in and I’d snap back into character.

Outside the building, we had several vintage cars parked—one a Bugatti for Tamara’s departure from the house at intermission. Invariably, at the beginning of the run, I’d get stuck and let out the clutch too abruptly and the vehicle would shudder to a halt. Eventually, in an attempt to improve on this maneuver, I pressed my foot hard on the accelerator, so that the car leaped forward under the porte cochere, into the traffic on Highland Avenue. I did this night after night. It’s a miracle no one was killed.

From what I later came to understand, through an article in
The New Yorker
, my former lover Bob Richardson was
now homeless and living on the beach in Santa Monica. In the years I had been living in Los Angeles, he had lost everything in New York and drifted west. When I was working on
Tamara
, he was camped out on the boulevard below the American Legion Hall, watching me come and go in the Bugatti.

It was at this time that I signed with Toni Howard, of William Morris. Although Yvette Bikoff had done very well by me, it had become apparent that I needed stronger representation. Toni was a brilliant agent, and became a dear friend, and we worked together for the following twenty-four years.

*  *  *

On June 14, 1985,
Prizzi’s Honor
opened nationwide, and on the twenty-sixth of the same month, Dad was rushed to Cedars-Sinai to spend several weeks in the respiratory intensive care ward. In September, I went to the Venice Film Festival to pick up a Golden Lion for him, then returned to New York, where, in November, the Museum of Modern Art put on an evening with screenings of two documentaries Dad had directed for the War Department during World War II,
The Battle of San Pietro
and
Let There Be Light.
Dad flew in to attend that event.

*  *  *

A year or so later, Ted Turner, a dedicated supporter of the colorization of black-and-white film, caused a public outcry when he proposed to color-tint Orson Welles’s masterpiece,
Citizen Kane
, for television. Almost simultaneously, the Turner Entertainment Company’s colorized version of my father’s classic film
The Asphalt Jungle
appeared on the French television channel Le Cinq, which led to a landmark three-year legal case in France. Using French copyright law, the Huston family set a binding precedent in 1991 preventing
the distribution or broadcasting in France of any colorized version of a film against the wishes of the original creators or their heirs.

Major legislative reaction in the U.S. was the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, which created the National Film Registry and prohibited any person from knowingly distributing or exhibiting to the public any film in the registry that has been materially altered (including by colorization) unless the film bears a label stating that it has been modified without the participation of its creators.

In the aftermath of this legislation, under the aegis of the Directors Guild of America, a group of Hollywood heavyweights, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Mike Ovitz, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, joined to launch the Artists Rights Foundation, an organization devoted to protecting film authorship. With a $100,000 contribution from J. Paul Getty, and spearheaded by the director Elliot Silverstein, the John Huston Award for Artists Rights was established in 1994.

CHAPTER 16

I
had a dream that I wrote down:

I am having an extraordinary and blissful love affair with Michael Jackson in a glittering penthouse. He is wearing a red satin suit with sequined lapels. His voice is deep until I remember it’s Michael Jackson, and then it gets breathy and high. We are levitated four feet above the ground. Then suddenly we are in long shot; we are in a sparkling desert. A herd of elephants thunders behind us. I travel in and out of my body, watching the herd advance. The elephants raise their trunks, forming a bridge over us, which becomes a tunnel. Michael and I float in the vortex, ecstatic.

I had not thought too much about the dream, nor had I met Francis Coppola, before he asked me to come up to his offices at Zoetrope. He was planning something entirely new with George Lucas—a 3D short that would be introduced as an attraction at Disneyland, starring Michael Jackson. He offered me the role of the Supreme Leader. I was to play the evil sorceress of a wretchedly grim planet, from which I would be delivered by Michael, transforming all that was shadowy and dark to cheerful and radiant in one transcendent song.

The piece was titled
Captain EO
, and the shoot was scheduled to take only three weeks. Of course, I was reminded of the dream I’d had about Michael and the herd of elephants. It was amusing to see that in the cast of supporting players, one member of Captain EO’s posse was a small green elephant called Hooter.

When Michael and I started to rehearse, I was impressed not only by his extraordinary androgynous beauty but also by his exertions to keep it all in place. It was evident at short distance that he had undergone a lot of bleaching and surgery; his facial skin was several degrees whiter than his hands, his eyebrows were tweezed, his mouth and eyelids tattooed. Every morning he showed up with his face covered in thick makeup. When Francis asked us to improvise a scene, I was struck by how obviously hard it was for Michael to display anger. He seemed incapable of it.

Michael had a friend, a blond boy about twelve years of age, who kept him company on the set. They often spoke on walkie-talkies, and sometimes the kid would sit on Michael’s lap. At lunch, they would retire to his complex of mobile trailers to watch Disney movies and eat vegetarian lunches provided by Michael’s cook, who was a Sikh. Michael’s manager was often present, a short, older, glossy-looking man who wore shades and signet rings and smoked a fat cigar.

Every other day, a big movie star would come to visit Michael on set and write her name in lipstick on his dressing room mirror, sealed with a kiss—Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor. There was usually a sighting at lunchtime.

Once, on a break, Michael disappeared, then returned with his arm in plaster from a children’s ward that he’d dedicated at a hospital nearby in Culver City. No one had seen him hurt
himself. It was as if he had invented the injury over the course of the morning. I felt that Michael, like a child pleading for recognition from his parents, was probably hooked on getting attention from the world at large.

One morning, production called to ask that I come in early to get into full costume and makeup for Michael’s side of the scene. I was not to be on camera that day but had to undergo hours of preparation and then get strung up to the rafters in my uncomfortable costume so that he might react to my character. I was slightly put out—until the music started and he rose dancing on an elevated hydraulic platform opposite. Instantly, my annoyance was dispelled as I witnessed the heart-stopping brilliance of Michael Jackson, live and up close, singing just for me.