Watch Me: A Memoir (7 page)

I received a call from Dad one morning some weeks after his return to the Palisades. He sounded terrible. “I want to see you,” he said. “Meet me for lunch at the Brown Derby.” I walked off the street into the restaurant’s dark interior, my eyes adjusting to the light. I followed the maître d’ to a table at the back of the room. Seated on a banquette, I watched Dad enter some few minutes later, moving stiffly forward to a seat opposite my own. I was struck by his grayish pallor. We ordered a bullshot.

“What is it, Dad?” I asked, fearing his reply with every corpuscle in my body. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Cici,” he said, wincing. His eyes were red and downcast. “She is accusing me of having an affair.”

“With whom?” I asked.

“Maricela,” he replied.

“Is it true?” I asked. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire sometimes.”

Dad, a legendary ladies’ man, looked at me as if, by asking the question, I’d openly betrayed him.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

I read later in a book about the Huston family that my brother Tony had walked in on Dad and Maricela in Morocco—as quoted, “wrapped around each other like pretzels”—but I never asked him about the matter. However, there is no doubt that Maricela had become Dad’s constant and intimate companion, his partner and confidante. After my conversation with Dad, I never needed or wanted to know the extent of their physical relationship.

When Cici told Dad that she wanted a divorce, he left for Xalapa, on the coast in Jalisco, Mexico, where he started a whole new chapter with Maricela. She was there for him and cared for him throughout the last twelve years of his life. Gladys moved to nearby Puerto Vallarta. I think Dad left Ireland, even though later he largely blamed Cici for the move, because his lungs couldn’t take the cold anymore; he needed warm weather. He knew that in order to extend his life, he’d have to change climate. Allegra continued to live at Cici’s.

*  *  *

Chinatown
had an impressive eleven Academy Award nominations. Its producer, Bob Evans, hosted a small party for the film at his house in Beverly Hills, with Cristal and beluga caviar. For the ceremony, I wore a Halston dress with transparent sequins over painted silk that looked like fish scales. Jack wore black tie, shades, and a black beret. Faye Dunaway was in a bat-wing satin dress with her husband, the musician Peter Wolf, also in a black beret, by her side. If memory serves me, Robert Towne, who wrote the movie, also wore the ubiquitous beret, as did Lou Adler, who brought Lauren Hutton, bronzed and resplendent in Halston rainbow chiffon. The costume designer Anthea Sylbert was elegant in black and white with pearls. There was an atmosphere of expectancy. We were very excited. Everyone was convinced the movie would win.

It soon became evident that
Chinatown
was not doing well in competition.
Godfather II
won Best Picture, and Francis Coppola won for Best Director. Finally, the wind gone from our sails, we got into the car to leave the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Robert Towne was the lone member of the group holding a statue, for Best Original Screenplay. In the back of
the limousine, embarrassed, he jokingly pretended to hide it under the armrest, as if it were not the highest accolade his industry had to offer but, rather, an object of shame. Jack was philosophical and Evans despondent. The highlight of my evening was meeting Fred Astaire. The following day, Hal Ashby came by the house on Mulholland and very sweetly gifted Jack the Oscar he had won for directing
Harold and Maude.
Hal was aptly named: he was a prince.

*  *  *

The state of Montana stretched out under an endless expanse of blue—Big Sky Country. It was July 1975 and Jack was making
The Missouri Breaks
with Marlon Brando costarring, along with Jack’s traveling academy of favored actors, including Harry Dean Stanton, Freddie Forrest, Randy Quaid, and John Ryan; the film was produced by Elliott Kastner and directed by Arthur Penn. We were living in Billings, not a large town, so it was easy to maneuver my big rented Ford truck. I loved driving it, dressed up like a cowgirl, listening to Waylon Jennings on the radio.

Joan had left her job at
Women’s Wear Daily
in Italy, had broken up with her boyfriend, and was looking for a new life when I sent her a postcard: “Come west, rest.” She flew with me up to Montana from L.A. and we brought Allegra. Jack’s daughter Jennifer was also there, so we were a happy little clan. Jack was renting a bungalow belonging to a Mr. Ikkes. Upon arrival, I found some love notes from a girl saying how much she missed Jack and how tender their lovemaking had been and how she couldn’t wait to hear from him again. I was in floods of tears when I confronted him, but he told me a wild story about how they were really letters meant for Harry Dean, who had been impersonating him. For a sophisticated
girl, I could be tragically gullible—maybe that’s why acting has always appealed to me; if I want to, I can believe almost anything. I must have wanted desperately to buy this story, because it was so clearly far-fetched.

Early on in our stay, the plumbing in Joan’s bathroom burst and the ground floor was covered in bilge water. Within minutes, Mr. Ikkes arrived and proceeded, somewhat to our surprise, to check his militia-sized arsenal, with everything from pistols to body armor and hand grenades hidden in a room-sized vault behind a slab of fake wood paneling in the basement.

Meanwhile, Jack and I were in the back yard having our picture taken by Harry Benson from
People
magazine, beside an aboveground swimming pool bubbling with mosquito larvae. The house was an exposed bungalow in a suburban neighborhood, and the bedroom windows looked out onto the street. Sometimes at night, giggling girls would come to spy on Jack, poking around in the bushes and peering through the blinds.

Joan remembers my cooking a lot of roast chicken, and when she wasn’t catching up on reading the John Birch Society handbook or
The Total Woman
by Marabel Morgan in the Ikkes library, she was going out in my big truck to buy supplies for me at the local supermarket. Once she asked for veal from the butcher. “Hell,” he said, “we don’t kill ’em that young!”

I used to like to go to Skaggs, the drugstore, or down by the railroad tracks to the pawnshops on Second Street, full of wampum beads and steel guitars. On one of his days off, Jack and Annie and I took Joan and the girls to the Crow reservation and rented a boat to take us downriver, past marshes and
wetlands to a verdant place called East Rosebud Lake. Other than on this strip of water, the state was in a severe drought, and grasshoppers were piled up in the doorways on the streets of Billings. I stood on a big rock by the highway and Joan took pictures of me as the Marlboro Man. Montana was a marvelous place to ride horses. I’d ridden in the mountains and in Irish stone wall country but never on the American prairie, with the vast blue sky above like a heavenly fishbowl. As a friend from Aspen used to say, “And not a cloud from here to Guam!”

One day I picked up a local newspaper to read about a runaway, a pregnant girl who had tried to steal a farmer’s truck. Before she turned the key in the ignition, she’d written him a letter, explaining that she was desperate and needed to get out of town. The farmer shot her dead through the window when he saw her pulling away. The next day there was a picture of her parents in the paper, shaking hands with the guy.

Marlon had taken to residing in his Winnebago and eating alfresco under the stars. He had decided that, as the villain of the film, he was going to be experimental regarding how to send the other characters to their final end, and was thinking up various novel methods of incapacitating and slaughtering them. One device was a Catherine wheel with edges like a Ginsu blade. Along with this weapon, to give a necessary element of surprise, he had chosen to wear a frontier woman’s costume, from wide cloth bonnet to layers of skirts and petticoats. Thereafter, we would watch Marlon bumping along, driving back and forth to set, his skirts billowing, perched like a great mother hen atop a little green Honda scooter. When Annie spotted him, she raised an eyebrow and remarked wryly, “From
The Wild Ones
to this?”

One weekend, Harry Dean Stanton called up and said to me, “Come over to the Red Dog Saloon. There’s someone I want you to meet.” When Annie and I walked into the café, a large man with a fixed eye and a black walrus mustache stood up. Harry Dean introduced him as the writer Jim Harrison.

Harry Dean was recalling a scene he’d shot the previous day with Marlon. In the movie, Marlon’s character, the mercenary Clayton, wearing his dress, has tracked down Harry’s character, Calvin, intent on killing him. Harry Dean, a Method actor, was taut with tension before the scene, as, wounded by the Catherine wheel, his character staggers to the riverbank, where he is to receive his coup de grâce. Arthur Penn called, “Action.” The cameras rolled. Marlon dismounted from his mule, wagging, skipping, inventing snatches of dialogue, mugging through the death scene, which was meandering on. He was obviously having a whale of a time. Suddenly, the unexpected happened. Harry Dean lurched to his feet in the muddy river and lunged at Marlon, bringing him facedown in the water. A brief skirmish followed, a lot of white water, kicking and petticoats, and finally, they emerged, soaked from bonnet to boots, laughing hysterically. “Seriously, he was taking too long,” Harry Dean explained. “He won’t make that mistake again.”

CHAPTER 6

I
t was October 29, 1975. Annie was packing Jack’s bags; he was flying out to New York the following day.

“What’s up with you?” he asked me. “Why are you so mad?”

I explained that it was because he had not invited me along.

“Evans is getting the key to New York!” he exclaimed. “None of the wives will be there.” He was referring to Bob Evans, and there was a tone of civic loyalty in his voice.

I reminded Jack that we were unmarried and retreated to my room to sulk. Jack left shortly thereafter on the Paramount plane without much further ado.

I rang Jackie Bisset, who had invited us to a party at her house on Coldwater Canyon that night. I told her that Jack was in New York and that I was alone.

“Come anyway,” she said. “I’d love to have you.”

A few hours later, I was at one of several round tables in her living room, having dinner, when Ryan O’Neal came by. He knelt by my knee and motioned for me to lean close so he could whisper in my ear: “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all night. I need to talk to you.” I should have known then that I was playing with fire. But I was just self-centered and egotistical and needy enough to follow up with him the next day. He had arranged with Lou Adler to invite me along to a
Lakers game on Jack’s season ticket. I drove my car to Ryan’s house in town, and after we smoked a joint, we set off for the Forum. We were late getting there, because we were high and talking and laughing along the way, getting lost in the cloudless wasteland of Inglewood. We arrived in the third quarter, giddy. The Lakers were losing and Lou was in a bad mood. I think he had suddenly realized his mistake in giving Jack’s tickets to Ryan and allowing Ryan to invite me. I could see he felt we were violating his trust. He said good night to us coldly in the parking lot. I went with Ryan in his magenta-maroon Rolls-Royce Corniche, with the license plate
PRO 3
, back to his house off Tower Drive, and kissed him for six hours straight on the dining room table.

In my memory of Ryan, I see a golden specimen, always in motion, an Apollo. His red-brown skin was darker than his mane of yellow-blond hair. He was an athlete, a runner, a boxer, and a bully. He loved to play Frisbee on the beach. He was a gorgeous California native, born and bred in the Palisades, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a peaceful name for a tumultuous sea.

When Jack returned from New York a few days later, I told him the news: I was in love and I was leaving him for Ryan O’Neal. Jack’s reaction was not to criticize or attack me. He was by turns confident and horrified; this event was sudden and surprising to him. For me, too. It came totally out of left field. I had no idea such a thing might occur. In truth, I found it quite ridiculous. How could this have happened? After
Cuckoo’s Nest
premiered on November 19, to great acclaim, Jack left for Aspen. There was never a confrontation between him and Ryan.

Although at first I stayed on at Mulholland Drive, I began
to go out to Ryan’s house in Malibu on the weekends. Lou’s girlfriend, Phyllis Somer, was my confidante. A California blonde with a great smile and a beautiful tanned body, she was living at Lou’s house in Malibu, close to Ryan’s on Broad Beach, and she gave me a song recorded by Mary MacGregor called “Torn Between Two Lovers.” I said to Lou, “I know that after a couple of weeks, I’ll be dragging home to Jack with a Frisbee around my neck.”

I spent New Year’s Eve with Apollonia, Ara, Lou, and John Phillips and his daughter, Mackenzie. Ryan was not with us. He and I had fought, as was to become our habit. He was demanding my attention by trying to hurt me. After the parties, we ran out onto the beach from Lou’s house; the sunrise was luminescent, like the glass in his collection of Gallé lamps. We were all in evening dress. Lou said, “I’ve always wanted to walk down a beach in a tuxedo.” He and John played football and made wonderful passes and catches, and on the way back to his house, Lou put his arm around me. I was grateful to him for that; I had always respected his friendship with Jack and had not meant to compromise his position. In a way, I was embarrassed, too, because I’d always found Ryan too eager socially. He had a rueful, self-deprecating charm. There was a molten quality to him, as if his engine ran too hot.

Ryan was very concerned with his daughter, Tatum, then about twelve, with whom he had filmed
Paper Moon
, with Peter Bogdanovich directing, and he brought her everywhere. Tatum was the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar, and I did not realize at first that they were almost a couple unto themselves; he seemed to have few boundaries with her. They were often photographed at restaurants
and parties and clubs. She was included in many of the finer details and decisions regarding his life.