Watch Me: A Memoir (27 page)

*  *  *

On November 19, 1992, John Foreman died of a heart attack at sixty-seven. He was a marvelous, kind, smart, funny man, and I loved him. He adored Paul Newman and Dad—two people he could look up to, because there were few who met his requirements or merited his attention. He was attracted to the best, because that’s what he was.

John produced such films as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
for Paul Newman and
The Man Who Would Be King
for Dad. It was John’s belief in me, and his determined efforts to launch my career, that changed my professional life. John gave me
Ice Pirates
to help me grow and
Prizzi’s Honor
to help me shine. He restored my confidence when I, more than anyone, did not believe in myself.

John prolonged Dad’s life. When others were wary of hiring him, or deemed him too old or unfit to direct a film, John
stepped up with a quality project. John cared more than anyone and made it look like water off a duck’s back.

John’s funeral service was held at Westwood Memorial. Michael Caine told funny stories about being on set with Foreman and Huston, and Polly Bergen sang “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which, in the words of John’s daughter Julie, “brought us to our knees.”

CHAPTER 25

I
n the summer of ’93, I was shooting a miniseries in Toronto, a quite beautifully written piece called
Family Pictures
, about an autistic boy, Randall Eberlin, whose disorder severely disrupts the people around him. I played his mother, Lainey, a woman increasingly dependent on alcohol as she struggles with the impossibility of helping her son. It was a good part, with a demanding range of emotion. Dermot Mulroney and Kyra Sedgwick were my children, and a fine young actor, Jamie Harrold, played Randall. Sam Neill was the conflicted father, faced with the choice between putting his son in an institution or allowing the family to painfully self-destruct.

Sam and I hit it off in the first few days. He was empathetic and lovely to work with. We compounded our friendship by going to see k.d. lang in concert. Although the workload was intense and I was tired, Sam’s theory that listening to great live music was better than a full night’s sleep held out. Our director, Phillip Saville, was British, and, although very nice, he shot the movie slowly and conventionally, always starting with a master, inevitably followed by medium and close-up shots to cover each detail of a scene. It was a little frustrating to shoot by the numbers after the experience and freedom of working with Woody Allen, who was more prone to cut in the camera, economically and efficiently, like Dad.

We were staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, a limbo away from home for many actors working in the city. Bob came to stay with me a few weeks into production and took up all the room in my suite by building a full schematic maquette of our future home in Venice. But it was exciting to be planning a domestic space together.

Mittoine had come with me to work on
Family Pictures
, and I was increasingly worried about him. He had become terribly thin. Although he would order a lot to eat if we went out to dinner, he was never able to finish what was on his plate. I pretended not to notice that his hands were shaking when he did my hair. After we wrapped, before we left Toronto, Mittoine went to the most expensive department store in the city and maxed out his credit cards on lavish end-of-movie gifts—cut-glass perfume bottles and cashmere blankets.

*  *  *

Woody Allen wrote to me around this time, asking if perhaps I would like to work on his new movie,
Manhattan Murder Mystery
, because I would both solve a murder and get to kiss him. It was a very pleasant if short assignment. Alan Alda, Joy Behar, Ron Rifkin, and Diane Keaton were all in the film, and although Woody was still in child-custody litigation with Mia Farrow, he seemed in a good mood. He obviously enjoyed Keaton’s company. Every morning she arrived on set looking like she had walked out of the pages of
Vogue
, and that was before she even got into wardrobe.

As was Woody’s habit in the nineties, we shot all over New York. The dialogue was especially difficult when we were all in a scene, as I had most of it and it was scripted that my character should be smart and come up with the solution to the crime. The part required some fast talking. Some of the actors
were prone to taking long pauses before or during the take, and I was panicked that I might miss my cues, but somehow I got through.

*  *  *

And the Band Played On
, directed by Roger Spottiswoode from a book by Randy Shilts, was an HBO film about AIDS, from the first signs of its inception through the early days of the mysterious disease that was decimating the gay population. A number of actors had agreed to participate in the film for no fee, feeling that whatever they could do to defray the cost of making it would be worthwhile. I joined a cast that included Alan Alda, Matthew Modine, Bud Cort, Richard Gere, Glenne Headly, and Ian McKellen. I was playing the part of Dr. Betsy Reisz, an AIDS researcher, for just one day.

They sent a limousine to take me out to Long Beach for the shoot, and Mittoine was coming with me to do my hair. He had been staying in a friend’s apartment in Los Angeles since
Family Pictures
, but I hadn’t seen him in the hiatus.

When he got into the car, I could see that things had become much worse. His complexion was the same unnatural orange that I had seen before with others who had been diagnosed with AIDS. He was even thinner than the last time we’d been together. We rode along in a silence so thick I thought I might scream. Mittoine’s eyes were hollow as he stared out the window.

“How are you feeling, Mitti?” I asked him.

“Fine,” he said unsurely, with a little grin.

When we got to my camper, I entered first. Then, hearing Mittoine’s bag crash to the floor, I turned around to see every imaginable pill roll out in full view on the chocolate-brown carpet. There were hundreds—blue and red and yellow and
green—all combinations of containers, sizes, and colors, like a pharmacy. Mittoine and I just burst into tears.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I wasn’t brave enough.”

*  *  *

When Vice President Dan Quayle made a speech in 1992, following the L.A. riots and the aftermath of the beating of Rodney King, he attributed the discord in the city to a breakdown of “family values.” He also criticized the character Murphy Brown, a role played by Candice Bergen on television, for bearing a child out of wedlock with the intention of raising it on her own. There had been a considerable outcry in reaction to his statements, and he was the subject of much derision by the Left. Paul Rudnick wrote a sequel to
The Addams Family,
cleverly entitled
Addams Family Values.

Two years had passed since the first movie, and there were some changes in cast and crew, but overall, Scott Rudin and Barry Sonnenfeld held to the high standards that they had previously established. Every frame was composed and considered, and our lighting cameraman, Donald Peterman, painstakingly lit Morticia hotter than anyone else on-screen, so that her luminous pallor would seem otherworldly—all this before the age of color correction. Fern Buchner was doing my makeup again, and Toni-Ann Walker, with whom I had not worked since
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and
Frances
, was doing my hair. She was unchanged after all these years, soft-spoken and intelligent, with an upturned nose in a doll’s face.

Theoni Aldredge did the costumes for
Family Values
; her approach to costuming was more forgiving than Ruth Myers’s, and the dresses themselves were more lavish, with different textures and shades of black, embellished with jeweled insects,
bats, and arachnids. One piece, a silvery cloak, transparent as a black widow’s web, was particularly spectacular.

When I entered a rehearsal room at Paramount with most of the former cast members from
The Addams Family
, I noticed a few changes. My friend Carol Kane had taken over the part of Granny, and Joan Cusack had come aboard as Uncle Fester’s maniacal love interest. Shockingly, the children were now adolescent; Jimmy Workman was grazing at the craft service table under the approving eye of his mother, and Christina Ricci had somehow matured without having visibly grown. Raúl was back as Gomez, enthusiastic and good-natured as ever. He had lost a little weight because of an appendectomy. But it was exciting for us to be working together again.

Soon after we started, Raúl and I went into dance rehearsals for “The Mamushka,” a hot tango composed by Marc Shaiman, in which Gomez spins Morticia like a dervish and she throws a kitchen knife that he catches in his teeth. In a particularly funny gesture, Fester tries to woo his girlfriend by shoving breadsticks up his nose. There were fresh oysters for the scene being shucked offstage, and Raúl tried a few for lunch; soon after, he was violently sick. It began to be apparent that Raúl was having trouble eating, and he was becoming increasingly thin. At no point did he ever complain. Raúl’s wife, Merel, and their handsome sons visited the set on several occasions. Raúl was very proud of them.

For a week we were on location up at the Sequoia National Forest, about twenty miles from my farm. I invited my hair-and-makeup team to stay at the farm, along with Raúl. For a few nights, Yolanda cooked Mexican food, and Raúl seemed to enjoy it. In the evenings he would sit outside on the porch, smoking a good cigar and singing along with the bullfrogs.
That is how I love to remember him. Raúl made more than thirty movies, including the amazing
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, before he died after complications from a stroke.

Mittoine had been in and out of the hospital while I was working on
Addams Family Values.
Soon after I finished, he went into a hospice in the Valley and died just a few months later, on March 17, 1993, at the age of forty-four. He was one of the sweetest men ever born, and I miss him every time I go to work on a movie.

*  *  *

I sold my home to a young couple from a hit television show, and as the Venice house was not quite ready after escrow closed, Bob and I went to the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica for a brief stay. Bob had been asking all along what I wanted for the plan of the house, and designing it just so. The building wrapped around a central courtyard. It had high domed ceilings, outdoor walkways, recycled pine floors, and French doors that opened to the ocean breeze. Oxygen flowed through the house, and even on the hottest days, there was no need for air-conditioning. Bob had managed to include a lap pool and a Jacuzzi in the courtyard, and frescoes by his friend the painter David Novros lit the outdoor walls. The house was a perfect backdrop for my possessions—everything I had held on to throughout the years, from my collections that began in Ireland and London.

While the house was still under construction, Bob and I had gone to an arboretum in Gardena and chosen a coral tree with a sculptural trunk to fill the central space. It was lowered into the courtyard by crane, its roots sunk deep inside a metal container to stop the concrete patio from cracking around it. Bob laughed and said that after we died, the roots would
break loose from their confines and the house would crumble, something from a story from Gabriel García Márquez.

Every spring the tree grew a full two feet. In summer it blossomed with fire-red flowers, and in winter it dropped black pods with red beans that the birds devoured, in spite of the constant threat of being pounced on by one or more of the eight local stray cats I had adopted.

My understanding with the cats was that if they chose to stay, I would have them neutered. Often kittens would show up hungry or abandoned. I always took them in out of pity, but because of malnutrition and their feral pasts, they generally cost a fortune in veterinary bills. They also proved difficult to train to kitty litter and ruined many of my best rugs and plants. At night they slept in the garage, and in the daytime they loved to hang out with Dora in the kitchen, especially when she was making chicken enchiladas.

Across the outdoor walkway from our bedroom was my office, and above it, a guest room. On the top story was a little parapet from which one could see the whole of Venice Beach—from the flags of the many nations on the roof of the youth hostel next door, above a faded sepia mural, to the Townhouse bar across the street, the tattoo parlor, Animal House, the hippies and the homeless, the vendors, the performance artists, the swami with his turban and electric guitar on Rollerblades, the runaways, the snake-charmer, the rappers, the chalk and sand artists, the weight lifters, the addicts, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the tourists and the surfers, the skateboard kids, the guy who played “Eye of the Tiger” relentlessly and did crazy stuff with a chain saw for eight years.

Bob had designed our bedroom with a balcony overlooking the courtyard. It met the coral tree about twenty-five feet
up, and when we were moving in, a family of doves nested in the tree’s branches, until the starlings came en masse, trilling and squeaking for cat kibble. Then came two stern ravens who produced an angry chick each May, which the cats would circle and consider for a while before eventually abandoning the exercise, leaving the nestling to flop around in the empty lot by the side of the house as its parents screeched in distress. If it was evident that the deck was stacked against the fledglings, I’d put on gloves and make a rescue. I would put them in a big cage I’d bought for the first casualty and raise them on cat food and fruit and boiled eggs. If they were incapacitated, I would take them up the coast to a wildlife sanctuary, where they were placed with others of their kind in a huge aviary called “Crowatia.”

Birds, for some reason, seem quite attracted to me. Every spring up at my farm, babies fall from their nests and need saving or rehab. Occasionally, a morning finds me chopping up a frozen mouse at breakfast for a baby screech owl. It’s not a pretty sight.

The house on Windward became the embodiment of Bob’s and my mutual aesthetic, as well as a home and sanctuary for our menagerie. On weekends in the summer, we gave parties in the courtyard and played instruments. Bob and Steven were great on congas. The house was always filled with music.