Watch Me: A Memoir (5 page)

On another occasion we flew back to Las Vegas with Lou Adler and his new girlfriend, Phyllis Somer, to see Muhammad Ali fight at Caesars Palace. The ring was elevated in a pool of golden light, and all around us, a magnificent display of jewels, sequins, and plumage glinted in the audience. The women were dressed to the nines, some with gardenias in their hair, and the atmosphere was high-tension. Many of the older fighters were there; we said hello to Joe Louis. I loved going to the heavyweight fights with Jack: the audiences and the entourages, the women and the athletes, stunning and adrenalized, like a four-ring human circus.

*  *  *

In the spring of 1974, we went to Cannes when Jack was nominated for best actor for
The Last Detail.
The festivities took place at the old opera house, the Palais des Festivals on the boulevard de la Croisette. We were escorted indoors, past a throng waiting in a light rain. Inside, the theater was humid and packed with people. As soon as we got to the circle upstairs, before we took our seats, they called out Jack’s name. He dropped my hand and proceeded to the stage to collect his prize, a pair of gold cuff links with an olive peace branch—the logo of the festival. The dress circle rose to its feet in thunderous applause. I was alone in the mob, barely able to glimpse, through the thicket of bodies, Jack’s big white happy smile. He was comfortable in the public eye and seemed to have forgotten I was there.

I remember screenings of two movies—
The Holy Mountain
, by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Bert Schneider’s heartbreaking documentary about Vietnam,
Hearts and Minds.
After the screenings, we walked down the Croisette toward the Majestic, where we were staying—Jack, Bert, Annie, Joan
Buck, and the director Henry Jaglom. Joan and I were both wearing white. She was my childhood friend, and we were like sisters. She had come in from Rome, where she was bureau chief for
Women’s Wear Daily
. When we entered the lobby of the hotel, Josephine Baker saw us and called out,
“Regardez! Mais elles sont des anges!”
It thrilled us to be deemed angels by this goddess.

Even though Jack and I were by now a couple, pretty French girls would come up on motorbikes and say, “Oh, Jack, you want to ride on my bike with me?” And he’d get on the bike and leave me standing on the sidewalk. Finally, I would just retire to our hotel room in tears. I remember another year, during a particularly awful week there, when everyone was going on Jean-Pierre Rassam’s boat. One of the most powerful producers in Cannes, he wore black silk Chinese pajamas and looked nefarious. His aide-de-camp, who trawled the harbor and picked up girls, was an unsavory guy called Joe Le Porno. Whenever Jack and I would wind up on Rassam’s boat, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t like the milieu; it brought out the convent girl in me. But it was part of what went on at movie festivals.

As far as I guessed, no one cared about me, and my way of coping was to retreat to my bed. Jack would trot in from the Croisette between screenings and the attentions of beautiful, forthright Frenchwomen, and toss onto the duvet the odd little oil painting or trinket he’d bought for me, hoping I’d lighten up. And I would sulk, jealously hoping he would linger long enough for me to forgive him for enjoying all that attention.

Above Cannes, for respite, there was the lovely Nid du Duc—Tony Richardson’s house, set high in the hills. Tony was always surrounded by friends, wives, partners, and
daughters. On one visit, Jack and I stayed there in a little cottage below the swimming pool. The first vision of the morning was David Hockney, in a pistachio-green suit with pink shirt and bow tie, under a fine white panama hat, painting alfresco with palette and easel. He was amazingly prolific. By lunch—as shopped for, cooked, and served by Tony’s partner, Grizelda Grimond, and his beautiful daughters, Natasha and Joely—the morning’s painting was completed, with its title in block letters on the canvas:
La Piscine
. Sir John Gielgud was also a guest.

Nearby were Arles, Les Baux, and Grasse, where they distill the flowers for all the perfume in France, the Matisse Chapel, and the Maeght Foundation in St. Paul de Vence, which houses a remarkable army of Giacometti’s standing figures. I had last seen the pieces on a trip to Vence in the sixties with the Bucks, when I stayed at Cap Ferrat one summer with Joan. One always made the pilgrimage to La Colombe d’Or restaurant, where they have a very good collection of Impressionist paintings dating from the days when artists who couldn’t afford to pay their bills exchanged work for food.

That first time in Cannes, Sam Spiegel was trying to persuade Jack to work with Elia Kazan, who would be directing Sam’s next movie,
The Last Tycoon.
Sam’s yacht, the
Malahne
, was docked in prime position in the harbor at Cannes; it was a gorgeous boat, not ridiculously ostentatious, just pure luxury. Its interiors were tasteful beige and maritime navy blue, the fittings all brass and teak. Sam was a generous host, albeit a touch controlling. Once when I was there, he lashed into Sophie, the stunned widow of Anatole Litvak, for lighting up a cigarette in the dining room; this in an era of smokers, while all the men were puffing on cigars and Sam, himself no puppy
in his middle to late seventies, was entertaining a seventeen-year-old girl and her midwestern parents, who seemed somewhat bewildered but not displeased to have fallen into Sam’s lair. After the festival, Sam loved to sail to the Italian Riviera down the Amalfi coast, overnight to Portofino. We were expected on deck for bullshots before dinner, rain or shine; if it was inclement, you could choose from a selection of blue wool pea coats with brass buttons. Sam didn’t take no for an answer. On the way out of the harbor one day, we passed Stavros Niarchos’s boat, a white shark the size of a small battleship, rumored to be the world’s largest floating art gallery, idling in deep waters. After sailing through the night, waking up to find ourselves docking in Portofino, the walls of the town blushing as the sun rose over the sea, was a most lovely sight. Mum first brought me to Italy when I was a small child, and I always feel close to her there.

CHAPTER 4

O
n July 8, my twenty-third birthday, Jack started work on
The Fortune.
The script was written by his friend Carole Eastman, and Mike Nichols was set to direct. When I told Jack that I would like to work in movies, he shook his head, declaring that he hated actresses, but later suggested that
The Fortune
might be a good vehicle for us to do together. He put forward the idea to Mike Nichols. I was reluctant to make the same mistake I had made on
A Walk with Love and Death
, working too closely with my family. As I remember, Mike and Jack wanted me to try out for the female lead. But I thought the situation was dangerously nepotistic, and I didn’t feel brave enough to participate. My reluctance was ultimately a boon to everyone, as the picture became the debut of a young actress called Stockard Channing. Jack and Warren Beatty were sharing the screen on
The Fortune
, and they spent much of their time, when not together, speaking to each other sotto voce on the phone. They seemed to have a lot to talk about. Warren was dating Jack’s old flame Michelle Phillips.

Jack chose a very unsightly hairstyle for himself in
The Fortune
—a disastrous, frizzy permanent wave. I couldn’t help feeling this commendable sacrifice of vanity might not be a good decision on his part. But Jack, a natural egotist, did not harbor fears to that end and managed happily to render himself
quite unattractive, which was a real accomplishment for one of the world’s best-looking men.

One morning I was in Jack’s trailer when the telephone rang. Someone at the house had received a message asking him to call a number in New Jersey. Jack’s sister Lorraine and brother-in-law, Shorty, were the two remaining members of his family living there. His mother, “Mud”—who owned a beauty parlor in Neptune, New Jersey, and had put curlers in his hair when he was a child—and his sister June, a beautiful brunette Earl Carroll showgirl, had both died from cancer some years earlier, as had his father, who, from what I gathered, was an enigmatic alcoholic figure who dropped by the house very sporadically in Jack’s youth. Jack was slightly thrown off by this message, but he called the phone number in New Jersey even though he didn’t recognize it.

A woman answered, claiming that she was married to Jack’s real father, the former lover of his sister June, and that he wanted a word with Jack. She continued, telling him that June, who hitherto he had thought was his sister, was in fact his mother. “Mud,” the woman claimed, was his grandmother. Jack was in shock. He called Shorty later that evening. Shorty denied everything at first, then Jack got to the bottom of the story with Lorraine. She confirmed the truth. The damage was already done: all those years, all that deception, all that was left untold and unexplained.

By the time Jack found out that he was in fact his sister’s son, both she and his grandmother had died, so there was no one to confront about these past events. Jack seemed to have no interest in starting up relations with his “new” family and seldom spoke of the situation.

*  *  *

Jack was not fazed by much. He liked his creature comforts and had a real zest for life. He liked to travel, especially to Europe. He loved to collect people. Paternally, he would call us “my people.” This designation included Annie, Helena, and whoever else was in close attendance. At the time the generality of it bugged me; I wanted to be special, and I felt a loss of identity. “Where are my people?” But there was very much a sense with Jack that one was on his team. And it was a good team to be on. A strong team. The winning team. Jack held on to his friends, many of whom he’d known for a long time. He kept a special place in his heart for fellow journeymen from his early days in Los Angeles or, reaching further back, favored pals from Manasquan High School in New Jersey.

Jack had a temper and an extremely good command of the language, but he didn’t have my father’s vodka edge. They were both literate. Jack was reading Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, and the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes’s
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

My father and Jack were a lot alike. They both loved personalities—sometimes freakish or irritating people if only because they possessed an uncommonly interesting trait, like looking a certain way or reminding them of someone else, or people who were regional types. It was like casting your life with character actors.

Jack could be awfully generous, as with his kindness toward Allegra, his inclusiveness. It was not long before Allegra told Dad that she didn’t need Nurse to tie her shoelaces anymore, and moved in with Dad, Cici, and Collin at the Palisades, and Nurse returned to Ireland. At the time, I was more upset than anyone by this change. Nurse had been with the family since I
was two years old. Dad asked Tony and me to invest some of the money that would be coming to us in his will to help buy a house for her on the outskirts of Dublin, in Roscommon, which we were grateful to do. We had all agreed that Nurse was the closest thing to a saint there was.

Jack’s daughter Jennifer, from his marriage to the actress Sandra Knight, was a sweetheart. Jack called Allegra “Legsy” and Jennifer “The Bimbereen.” Jennifer was a year older than Allegra, and often came to Aspen with us at Christmas, or to London—wherever he was traveling to work.

There was a profound and devoted sense of loyalty with Jack. If he invested in you, or if he placed his heart with you, it meant something for life. Jack had a very healthy awareness and a self-approbation that you could enjoy with him. He saw the lunacy in situations and was generally at the center of it. Jack could wear clothes like no one else on earth. I walked into Harrods one day and bought him the yellow silk jacket he wore later in
Prizzi’s Honor.
There was a sense of festival and holiday to the way he dressed. Jack could have the greatest fun with clothes of anybody I knew. He could wear something that on any other man would make you cringe. Something about the way Jack took on color and shape in clothes kind of exalted what was unique and great about him.

I remember going out to dinner one evening with Jim and Holly Brooks in New York. Holly was a big girl. And Jack, at some point, contrived to have her lend him her stiletto heels, in which he proceeded to walk through the Carlyle Hotel lobby—clickety-clack on the marble floor in the toniest hotel in New York. On another outing, Susan Forristal was walking with us on Fifth Avenue when Jack decided he was going
to act like an infant. For the whole walk down Fifth Avenue back to the hotel, he would run halfway across a street, then jump up and down on the curb and flap his arms—stupid toddler stuff.

There had been a time when Jack courted Susan, whom he had rechristened “The Admiral” or, for short, “Addo.” On a previous trip to New York, I had been put out when he booked a lunch alone with her. Some months later, Suze and I were in my car going up Coldwater Canyon, and she said, “Anjel, I want you to know, I love Jack dearly, but he is with you, and I respect that and would never attempt to subvert it in any way.” It was a thoughtful thing to say, and I was always grateful to her. When I was with Jack, there were very few women I trusted.

Jack was prompt at sending flowers, and chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Annie covered him well. He liked to give beautiful presents. He often thrilled me with generous gifts of jewels and furs. We thought fur was just great in those days. He even gave me a drawing by the eighteenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Jack’s enthusiasm for certain things, like basketball, was joyously unrestrained. The first few years I was with him, I was determined to love the Los Angeles Lakers. Several times a week, I’d watch these guys with huge feet squeaking as they thundered up and down the floor at the Forum. It was relentless, and they’d always lose. Heading to the car, Jack would be momentarily despondent. Chick Hearn would be on the radio, rehashing the game. Lou Adler would be in the passenger seat, and I’d be sitting there in the back of Bing, staring out at Inglewood, thinking, “Why in God’s name am I here?” The only reason I was there was because I was in love.
Women will do strange things for love, as I learned in childhood, like pretend to know how to ride horses to impress my father, or stand alone and humiliated in a backless evening dress in a freezing marquee as my mother did, or, like me, go to basketball games in downtown Los Angeles to watch a team they don’t care about lose miserably three times a week.