Watch Me: A Memoir (28 page)

CHAPTER 26

I
n answer to Dad’s question: Yes, Irving Lazar would be missed and his generation, too, ardently so. Swifty died at the age of eighty-six in December 1993 of complications from diabetes, and was laid to rest in Westwood beside his wife, Mary, who had died in January of that year from liver cancer.

When Irving Lazar and Ray Stark and John Foreman died, a large part of the order of how things worked on the social scene in Los Angeles was gone forever with them. The graceful evenings at Chasen’s restaurant, once the background to almost any good Hollywood story of the fifties. Parties with the Wilders, the Walds, the DeCordovas. The senior affluent, with their spotless white carpets and silver-framed photographs of famous friends, their porte cocheres, their sweeping staircases, their gilded mirrors reflecting the confirmation of early hopes and opulent dreams, where summer trumped all the seasons with purple jacaranda lining the streets of Beverly Hills and coral trees that grew like weeds outside the mansions on San Vicente Boulevard, the old-growth bougainvillea wrapping the Spanish walls in shocking pink. A way of life beginning to fade—like nocturnal dreams—in the harsh light of a new day.

*  *  *

Sean Penn sent over a script that he’d written called
The Crossing Guard.
Jack was starring. I think Sean asked me to play the part of Jack’s ex-wife because of our history. In the film, I was to be married to a new husband, played by Robbie Robertson, but still suffering the loss of my and Jack’s daughter to a traffic accident. Sean’s kids were young at the time; emotionally, he always seemed concerned with the subject of the death of a child.

I hadn’t seen Jack in some years; there was a formality to the reunion, and I felt shy. We worked together for only a few days, and he was brilliant as ever. It always broke my heart when Jack played damaged men. On our last day, Jack asked if I’d like to have lunch, and over a very delicious pasta in his camper cooked by our old friend from
Prizzi’s
, Tommy Baratta, Jack said, “You and me, Toots—we’re like
Love in the Time of Cholera.
” Which for some reason pleased me, probably because that is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors, about one of my favorite subjects—hopeless, enduring love.

*  *  *

It was a hot June in Coral Gables, Florida. I was there to work with Marisa Tomei and Alfred Molina on Mira Nair’s
The Perez Family
, the story of a Cuban exile whose wife disappeared in the Mariel boatlift and who arrives in Miami having fallen in love with a young whore on the passage over, only to discover that his wife is still alive. The situation is not so unlike
Enemies, A Love Story
in that over the course of the film the wife becomes a mother figure to her husband as he draws closer to regression. In both cases, the woman makes the choice for him, then releases him with love. In
Perez Family
, my character, Carmela, the exile’s wife, goes on to a new
relationship with Lieutenant John Pirelli, played by Chazz Palminteri.

I had looked forward to working with Mira ever since we had talked about it years before on Bernardo Bertolucci’s jury at Cannes. In the interim, she had married Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, a professor and author, and was living in Uganda near the mouth of the Nile River. The war in Rwanda had left many victims floating downstream near where they were living. She was now the mother of a beautiful little boy, Zohran. I have always been drawn to Mira and to the way Indian women carry themselves—their perfume, their jewelry, their saris and shawls, the nuance of their movement, their attitude.

No woman I have ever met had the talent of Mira’s mother for being perfectly attired for all occasions in traditional sari, with the almost spooky talent of a chameleon. If we were under banyan trees, she would visit set wearing the colors of the bark and leaves. If we were at the beach, she would appear in layers of blue or turquoise. Mira always promised that she would show me India. We agreed that maybe we would work together there one day.

But when it came to the scenes on
Perez Family
, I felt that our styles were a little at odds, in that I was not achieving what she wanted from me. I was sensing her impatience and feeling a certain discomfort in performing actions without having found my own original impulse.

*  *  *

Bob and I took the train from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Fe, where I would be shooting
Buffalo Girls
, a Western miniseries for CBS. We’d packed a lovely dinner and some wine and had a fine picnic before we bedded down. In the
morning we passed the red rocks of Gallup, Arizona, glowing in the sun. I’d taken a beautiful traditional house belonging to a friend, up a long, icy, winding road in the hills above Santa Fe. The next day I woke up sick with the flu. The costume designer Van Ramsey came over with my dresser, Nava Sadan, and Tzetzi Ganev, who’d made my Oscar dress and now was throwing me into buckskins, long johns, and overcoats until I thought I’d pass out. After this I had to meet with the director, Rod Hardy, at a wild and distant location in the mountains outside Galisteo, where I was to read through some love scenes with Sam Elliott, who was playing Wild Bill Hickok. The set was frigid and I had a big crush on Sam and all I could do was cough and blow my nose.

In the days that followed, there was a party for the cast. I met Gabriel Byrne, a handsome, brooding Irishman who was to play Melanie Griffith’s lover, Teddy Blue. Melanie shared the title with me. I was playing the part of Calamity Jane, and Melanie was playing the part of her best friend, Dora DuFran. We were always sympathetic friends, and we were happy working together. It was never hard to love Melanie.

I was wearing many layers of clothing with cross-belts so packed with ammunition that it was hard to even get up on a horse. Bob had always had a pet peeve about the inappropriate guns featured in movies and had taken it upon himself to arm me to the teeth personally: I had double-barreled Remingtons, buck knives, pearl-handled, silver-dipped revolvers, and a bullwhip. Boots and spurs and hats and gloves and buckskin jackets with a lot of fringe completed Calamity’s look.

I was introduced to my mount, a big black stallion named Satan. We were shooting the first scene in the movie, a crane shot where Calamity appears below camera and jumps a small
stream as she gallops across the landscape. The wranglers had offered to let my stunt double do the ride, but I had volunteered. Rod Hardy called, “Action,” and Satan and I took off at a good pace. Unfortunately, the pommel of the Western saddle became lodged under my gun belt and got stuck there, pounding into my stomach below my rib cage. I was worried for a few minutes but managed to strip it off at full gallop and save myself. After that, I was much more careful about riding with all that steel hanging off me.

Jack Palance and Tracey Walter were playing a couple of mountain men. Jack was tall, with a strong body. He looked imperious and tough and scary; he was very proud and might bark once in a while, but he was extremely game. No one really appreciated what the guys were going through. Apart from no longer being young men, both Jack and Floyd Westerman—who was playing Calamity’s friend, the Native American scout No Ears—had emphysema and were having a lot of trouble breathing in the high altitude. One day when Jack was running in a scene with Tracey up in the high desert with a wad of tobacco in his cheek, he hit the ground hard and didn’t get up. It took longer than it should have for anyone to approach him—they all seemed to think he’d bite. Jack and I got along very well, however, because when we were out in the middle of the icy landscape, side by side on his mule and cart, I’d slip him a shot of whiskey in Dad’s silver flask, the one from
Moby Dick
engraved with the words
PULL, BOY, PULL
. And he’d tell me stories.

The first day we worked was in a full-on blizzard at a three-thousand-acre elk farm above Los Alamos. Bob and I stayed up in the mountains in a log cabin on the property the night before. We had awakened at daybreak to see hundreds
of bison in an open snow-covered landscape outside our door, like a Charles Russell painting. A few days before, Bob had left for San Jose, where he celebrated the dedication of the winged serpent Quetzalcóatl, which he had been commissioned to make for the city. He had decided that he would return in his gray limousine all the way back to Santa Fe, with Nick at the wheel. This turned out to be a terrible decision. The roads had been ghastly, with icy winter conditions and trucks overturned on the highway. When I came home from a particularly ardent love scene with Wild Bill Hickok, Bob had just arrived at the house in Tesuque from his horror trip and was still shaking with fear. Sometimes I wished that Bob were more physically intrepid, but he was not a country boy.

I was taking bullwhipping lessons from an expert called Anthony De Longis, who had also taught Michelle Pfeiffer to wield the lash as Catwoman. I got really good at snapping a cigarette out of someone’s mouth or double-cracking the whip above my head, although in the beginning, when I was in L.A., I hit myself so hard on the temple that I fell into a swimming pool. Frustration with my costume and the laws of nature finally got to me. It was freezing in Santa Fe, and the toilet in my camper had gone unfixed for three days and I was irritated by having to ask Melanie if I could use hers. I decided to brave the outdoor Porta-Potty, which required that I disentangle myself from my firearms along with several outer layers of chamois leather and Pendleton wool. But I hadn’t reckoned on having to strip off the top half of my long johns, which unfortunately came to dangle in the blue toilet water. I finally bailed out of the latrine in utter fury, dragging the sodden long johns after me like a horrible soiled tail, and proceeded to attack the Porta-Potty physically, kicking at
it brutally with my spurs in front of a bunch of slack-jawed teamsters. But despite the occasional physical discomfort, I loved making
Buffalo Girls.
It was a gift to work in Santa Fe. As Jack Nicholson always said, one should do a Western every summer.

*  *  *

I had heard from Jeremy that our friend Tim was very weak and might have only a few days left. He did not want to go to the hospital; he was up at the farm, surrounded by our animals and friends. A few days later, I was in the kitchen in Tesuque when I received a call from Jeremy. He said, “Tim wants to speak to you.”

There was a rustle, a pause, and an intake of breath. Then a faint voice whispered, “Well, Anjel, I guess this is it.”

I told him I would never forget him. I told him I would love him to the end of the universe and back, forever and ever. The next day, December 14, 1994, Tim passed on from this life.

*  *  *

On a frozen morning a day later, on the way to the location at dawn, my driver, Harry, stopped by some railway tracks at the foot of a mountain in Las Vegas. Not to be confused with Las Vegas, Nevada, this was a small redbrick Victorian town with a main square and little else, in a corner of New Mexico still wild enough to tolerate the occasional exchange of gunfire at midnight. We were waiting for a train to go by when I saw a movement and a brown-spotted face that looked like a bear cub with two-toned eyes. After the train passed, I got out of the car and discovered two puppies in the grass. They were tiny, whimpering, and cold, but with big thick coats like mountain lions. Farther up the tracks, we found their mother;
she was stiff from rigor mortis. It only occurred to me halfway up to the location on the mountaintop that there might be more I’d left behind. All day I worried, and on the way down from set that night, Harry and I found two more puppies. One, a little female, was dead; the other, a male, was very weak but alive. I took the three survivors back to my hotel room on the square, fed them some steak I’d obtained from catering, and as the others dozed, I watched the little male strut up and down on the counterpane, full of himself, as proud as he could be. He knew that he had survived. I called him Billy, after Wild Bill Hickok, and his sister Crazy-eyed Jane, after my character, Calamity. The other pup went to live with a member of our crew.

After we got back from Santa Fe, Jane developed some issues and went to live at my farm and eventually ran away, but Billy was a great and noble companion to the end. He disliked walking on a leash, which he found humiliating. He always walked two steps directly in front of me, like a bodyguard, glancing at me over his shoulder from time to time to see if I was all right. The dogcatchers would recognize him and sometimes give me a break when they caught him off-leash. On the Venice Beach boardwalk, Billy was christened the Chairman of the Board.

*  *  *

After working on
Buffalo Girls
, I was diagnosed with a basal cell carcinoma on my nose. Following several months of radiation, the doctors discovered that the treatment hadn’t worked, and I was forced to have the carcinoma removed surgically on May 24, 1995. This scared me and proved to be something of an ordeal, because when the swelling went down, I had a visible hole in my nose. It was necessary to fill the scar with wax
before going on camera. I shed some tears of self-pity over my misfortune. It wasn’t easy to deal with, and it made me very self-conscious, especially under scrutiny for work, when I had kissing scenes, or when the lights were hot.

Two years later, I had my nose reconstructed with cartilage from my ear, but it remained a problem to photograph and looked bumpy until Dr. Arnie Klein administered Restylane to smooth it out, for which I am forever grateful. It’s still not perfect, but it could have been much worse. I don’t know why, but my nose always takes the hit first. Maybe it’s from having a boxer for a father.

CHAPTER 27

D
uring the course of making any film, with directors both great and indifferent, I have found myself wondering how I would have cast this or that part, or how I might have imagined the look and feel of the film. What would it be like to stand outside the action as an observer and not always be in the thick of the plot and subjectively involved as an actor?