Watch Me: A Memoir (8 page)

Ryan had amassed a list of gorgeous conquests, from his wives—Joanna Moore, the mother of Tatum and her brother, Griffin; and his second wife, Leigh Taylor-Young—to his girlfriends, who included Barbra Streisand, Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross, Nathalie Delon, Ursula Andress, and Anouk Aimée, with many broken hearts in between.

The truth was that there were two Ryans. He could be fun and gregarious, including Allegra on weekends and taking us shopping and for haircuts (I cut mine off to half an inch and Tatum followed), or energetically running Tatum, Allegra, his Belgian Shepherd, Jada, and me up and down the sand at Malibu, throwing Frisbees as we leaped and dove into the surf to catch them. Or putting on a pale blue Hawaiian shirt that matched his eyes and driving us up to Moonshadows or Hal’s or Giorgio Baldi’s in Santa Monica for dinner. But then there was a dark side. He could be critical, pugnacious, jealous, demanding, and deceptive.

On Fridays, we’d drive out to the beach house and sometimes I’d cook spaghetti and meatballs. Griffin was pretty much living out there all week long. He was only eleven, surfing and smoking weed, and although this seemed a matter to warrant concern, the attention was mostly centered on his sister. Ryan had gained custody of the children when Tatum was six, because of their mother’s substance abuse. I felt bad for them, these tough little survivors. They had charm, but poor examples to follow in life, and in the big picture I don’t believe that Ryan had much of a conscience, guilty or otherwise. He could go from Jekyll to Hyde in a heartbeat.

Ryan had recently returned from Ireland when we first met. It was part of a bond he ventured to establish between us, calling me “Big Irish” and telling me all about his adventures with Stanley Kubrick, the director of
Barry Lyndon.
He was very proud that he had been chosen for that film. It was the mark of artistic validation he had been seeking.

Ryan bolstered himself with two friends from his days as a student at Palisades High, Greg Hodell and Joe Amsler. Joe had the dubious distinction of having been one of the jesters who in the sixties kidnapped Frank Sinatra, Jr., as a prank, an offense for which he was lucky to have done only three years and nine months of time at Lompoc Prison, and not lost his neck. Joe and Greg were cast in Ryan’s image, muscled and tall and athletic, but just a little rougher than he was. They say you wind up looking like who you really are. Joe and Greg took the rap first.

One day we were up in the Malibu Mountains. Joe and Greg were jumping from rock to rock above a chasm; the terrain was very steep, perhaps a two-hundred-foot drop. Joe was carrying a beer and missed a foothold on the rock and plummeted backward. I thought for sure he was a goner. At the last second he grasped a little bunch of weeds and saved himself from a deadly fall. These guys were literally living on the edge. It was part of their makeup. There was often the sense with them that you’d made it through another potentially hairy situation but that it probably wouldn’t be the last.

In time I was to learn that there was something distinctly perverse about the O’Neal household. When I went to see Ryan in Amsterdam, where he was filming
A Bridge Too Far
, Greg and Joe were there with him; there was a strange atmosphere,
and I could sense Ryan’s distance. Tatum’s demeanor had altered toward me as well—she loved me but was now expected to lie to me on Ryan’s behalf.

Even though my pride was hurt, there was a modicum of relief when I found out Ryan was sleeping with another girl. I don’t think Ryan was capable of love without some kind of downside.

Ultimately, it was revealed that a young actress had just left for the airport and that she had been sharing Ryan’s bed. She was a playmate of Tatum’s and another kind of playmate to Ryan. And yet I stayed on after a confrontation. I knew that Tatum cared for me, and Ryan’s sleeping with her friend must have cost her a wealth of divided loyalties. When Ryan took me to the location, I saw that Dirk Bogarde had a part in the film, and I asked Ryan to knock on the door of his trailer. Dirk had been a friend of my mother’s, and we had spent many Sundays at his house in the English countryside when I was a teenager. When Dirk appeared in the doorway of his camper, he was delightful to Ryan but sour to me, and only later did I realize he hadn’t recognized me. I retreated, feeling hurt. He wrote me a note the next day, apologizing for his mistake and calling me a “silly goose.”

I regretted leaving Jack. I hated causing him pain. Yet despite the way things were going with Ryan, I returned from Holland via London with him. One night a photographer jumped out from a dark side street in Knightsbridge as we came out of Mr Chow, but we outran him. In the year and a half I was with Ryan, I never had my picture taken with him in public. His innocent blue eyes, his automatic, coy smile for the cameras, his compliments, those big warm boxer’s mitts that seemed ready to punch or stroke—I was beginning to
mistrust everything about him. Soon he was telling me about unfinished business with Ursula Andress and confessing to phone calls with Bianca Jagger. Things were getting ugly; I was holding on longer than I should have, and I decided to return to Jack.

CHAPTER 7

T
he Last Tycoon
, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, follows the story of Monroe Stahr, the young head of one of the biggest movie studios in the Golden Age of Hollywood, during a time of industry turmoil due to the creation of the Writers Guild of America. The character of Monroe was inspired by the life of Irving Thalberg, the onetime boy-wonder production chief of MGM. It was evident that Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan very much wanted Jack for this role. Maybe that was why they agreed to let me read for the female lead.

I had gone to Mr. Kazan’s address on Beverly Drive, below Wilshire, to read with an actor called Cliff DeYoung. Sam Spiegel and Kazan stood up when I walked into the office. Sam called Kazan “Gadge.” I had met him when he came over to Jack’s house for dinner and had liked him immediately; he had been forthright and inquisitive and had asked me a good many questions about myself. Now he suggested that I read through a couple of scenes with Cliff, but afterward there was no sense that I’d gained any ground. There was no direction from Kazan. As I prepared to leave, he abruptly said, “I’ll walk you downstairs.”

We stepped out into the fierce midday sunlight. Kazan motioned to a bench by a bus stop. “Come,” he said, “sit down with me a minute.” An older woman was seated on the
bench. “Excuse me,” said Kazan, turning to her. “May I ask you a question?”

“Okay,” the woman said.

He indicated me and asked, “Do you think she’s beautiful?”

I blushed.

The woman appraised me. “No,” she said. “Interesting, perhaps, but not beautiful.”

I watched the part disappear forever in the ether.

“What do you think our relationship is?” asked Kazan, pushing it further.

She threw him a dirty look. “Don’t be disgusting,” she said, and got up to take the bus.

Soon I learned that Ingrid Boulting had been cast as the female lead, the “right” girl, Kathleen Moore, in
The Last Tycoon.
Jack had agreed to play Brimmer, a supporting role in the film, with Bobby De Niro starring as Monroe Stahr. Graciously, Sam Speigel and Elia Kazan offered me the part of Edna, the “wrong” girl, who shows up for a date with the hero only to have him reject her.

We were rehearsing at Paramount, and in the center lot a great pond had been created to contain an enormous bobbing fiber-glass head of the goddess Shiva, from which Ingrid and I were to dismount in an early scene in the movie.

Early that morning, Kazan had come by the bungalow I was using as a dressing room on the lot. He wanted Ingrid and me to do an improvisation. He set up the scene, explaining that my character needed something to wear under a transparent blouse for a hot date that night, and that Ingrid’s character might have something for me to borrow. He told me to take a few minutes to get into character, then to come to another bungalow a few streets down on the lot.

As I made my way past the backdrops and facades, I found the house that he had indicated and knocked on a door. I had worked a few times with Ingrid when we were models in our previous life in New York. She was a very beautiful girl, with even features and huge eyes in a gentle moon face. I had always thought of her as self-contained, remote, and very British. But when she opened the door, what I saw was quite different. Ingrid was choking back tears, with black mascara pouring down her cheeks, hardly able to contain herself. It was utterly shocking. Until that moment I had been living in my own head. I had not even considered the other character’s state of mind. It was a great lesson in drama, as given by Kazan. Sadly, even though the movie was full of promise, it was not a success. I was, however, always grateful to be able to work with its brilliant director.

On my first day of work, Jack sent me flowers, as he did on all my first days of work throughout our relationship.

*  *  *

In January 1976,
Cuckoo’s Nest
was nominated for six Golden Globe Awards, with Jack for Best Actor. Michael Douglas had been calling on the hour to make certain Jack would attend; Jack had decided to skip the awards ceremony. Finally, in frustration, Michael came to the house and pounded on the front door. Jack and I hid and giggled in the TV room until he was gone. It was just a taste of old-fashioned rebellion, as far as we were concerned. Jack and I watched it all on television with a limo parked outside that Michael had ordered to stay in the driveway, in case Jack changed his mind. The film won six awards straight. Everything. We turned to each other after the show and Jack said, “Well, Toots, it looks like we’ll be going to the Oscars.”

Jack was right.
Cuckoo’s Nest
received nine Academy Award nominations. He was going on a big promotional tour for the movie, from Paris to Hamburg to Copenhagen to Japan, and asked if I would come, too. But I said no. I had other plans. I wanted to find a place of my own; I still had unfinished business with Ryan. As Jack left for the airport, I handed him a letter that I hoped would explain. I asked what he was going to do.

“I’m going to work on being tied up,” he said.

*  *  *

That February I flew to New York to stay with Ara. I was feeling unmoored and indecisive. Whenever things went from horizontal to vertical with Ryan, we had bad fights. I had begun to suspect that, for all his flattery and bravado, he didn’t really care for me. On Valentine’s Day, Jack sent me flowers.

I modeled for Saks with Pat Cleveland and Apollonia and did a show for Halston. Ara had decided to become a photographer and had asked me to shoot some pictures with him for
Viva
magazine. One morning as we were traveling across town to see the editors at
Viva
, we noticed a palmist’s storefront near Lexington in the Fifties. I asked Ara if we could go in after our meeting. The woman who greeted us was obviously a gypsy. She spoke to Ara alone for a short while and afterward took me into a small room behind a curtain. She took a reel of turquoise thread and knotted it seven times and asked me to make a wish. I closed my eyes and wished for peace of heart and watched the knots unravel as she pulled the thread straight. “Your wish will be granted,” she said. “But there are several things you have to do.”

Before I knew it, the gypsy had me flying to L.A. for forty-eight hours to pick up, from its security box at the bank, a
ruby ring my grandmother had left to me in her will. Helena came over to the house in the morning and observed that I was not meant to be back in town so soon and, noticing that I was acting mysteriously, asked what the heck was going on. I realized abruptly that I had been in the gypsy’s thrall and that she was probably intending to rob me. But the truth was, I was unbalanced, in love with two men at once, under the influence of a lively assortment of drugs, and following Ara’s questionable advice.

On the twenty-ninth, Jack came to New York for the screening of
The Missouri Breaks.
I stayed on for a month, pining for Ryan. On March 11, I was with Ara in his kitchen, and he was dying my hair red, when the NYPD called to tell him that his brother had been murdered. I think that was the beginning of Ara’s descent.

I flew home to L.A., where, despite my better judgment, I continued to see both Ryan and Jack. On March 22, the day after the ski racer Spider Sabich was shot, I flew to Aspen. Jack met me at the airport with three pink roses tied up with a cherry ribbon. He appeared different, clean-shaven and shorthaired and healthy-looking. He drove me up to Maroon Creek. Annie Marshall had introduced Jack to a decorator, Jarrett Hedborg, and the house had been redone in my absence—mushroom walls and taupe carpets, grays and browns and luxurious austerity, some artwork I hadn’t seen before. Jack was very sweet to me. There were presents at dinner, with a full moon shining down on the snowy-peaked mountains.

We flew back to L.A. for the Academy Awards. Richard Tyler made me a white wool suit, very Marlene Dietrich, with satin lapels and a floor-length pencil-thin skirt with a
big box pleat. I loved when Oscar night wasn’t all about skin. Jennifer came with us. She wore a white lace dress and a little cape, just as I had at Dad’s premiere of
Freud
when I was eleven. That night
Cuckoo’s Nest
brought down the house and swept the major categories, including Best Actor for Jack as Randle P. McMurphy, volatile, proud, and heroic; it was one of the great performances ever. We celebrated that night at Warren Beatty’s house; he was living with Michelle Phillips.

Three weeks later, we celebrated Jack’s birthday in Vegas—Lou, Michelle, Warren, Art Garfunkel, Harry Dean Stanton, Annie, and me. We watched Bette Midler perform at midnight, and Brenda Vaccaro, Kenny Solms, and Jeremy Railton flew in to join the fun. Everyone was relieved that Jack and I were together again, but I was still not finished with Ryan.

CHAPTER 8

C
ici told me in February 1977 that she had introduced Allegra to her biological father, John Julius, Second Viscount Norwich, a traveler, writer, and historian with whom our mother had fallen in love when we were living in London in 1963. John Julius’s father was Duff Cooper, minister of war under Neville Chamberlain, and his mother was Lady Diana Cooper, Cecil Beaton’s favorite society muse, whose blond hair and blue eyes Allegra had inherited. Allegra was not surprised by the information that she was not Dad’s progeny, as by then she had suspected as much. She continued to live at Cici’s for the next year, until she moved to the home of Cici’s parents. I continued to have her with me most weekends.