What falls away : a memoir (21 page)

In the years between 1971 and 1977 I made several films, but my focus during those years in England was my family, and my primary work took place on the stage. Through ]. M. Same's odd and intense Mary Rose, which I played m Manchester and London, I met the composer John Tav-erner, and found a lasting soul mate. Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Aiha was an opportunity to explore as an actor, and its favorable reception gave me a fleeting boost in confidence professionally, but its most enduring benefit was my friendship with the play's translator, Tom Stoppard.

In September 1974, I was admitted into a London hospital with severe pain in my lower-right abdomen. The examining physician had diagnosed it as acute appendicitis and immediately scheduled an operation. I was nursing Fletcher, my six-month-old son, so I brought him with me to the hospital, expecting a stay of three or four days at most.

But things went another way. The surgeon came into the room looking important and distracted. He gave my stomach a little token push or two and concluded the problem was not my appendix but some other thing, "possibly a tubular infection." Whatever that mav be, it was not the problem: my biggest problem turned out to be his misdiagnosis. A ruptured appendix had been the cause of the pain and fever, but they didn't discover that until the operation nine days later, by which time peritonitis had turned my guts to gum.

My baby was taken home around the time of the first surgery—I, who took the quickest baths in the Western Hemisphere so as not to leave him for long; I, who had never missed a night tucking my children into their beds or telling them a bedtime story; I, who planned to breast-feed the baby for as many years as he wanted; I, who, with my secret ration of personal magic and with all the powers of

my will, could not turn this unthinkable progression of events around. The medications had "poisoned" my milk, they said, and anyway, by then I was too weak and in too much pain to even lift the baby. There was nothing I could do—I was losing ground, moving inexorably into a sphere where all thoughts, even that one, would be crushed from my mind, where there was only pain—pain to the farthest reaches of consciousness. No other self exists there. I was pain.

The morphine-heroin concoction they injected into the tops of my thighs at three-hour intervals didn't cover it— but more would kill me, they said, and gave no options. My mother flew in from New York and moved into the hospital. There were three major abdominal surgeries. Days and nights fused molten red. I was fed through a tube threaded up the vein in my arm, around my shoulder, and into the large artery near my heart. A half dozen other tubes streamed in and out of me.

There came a day, during the second month of my hospitalization, when I awakened into a zone of hyperaware-ness. The pain had receded somewhat and in its stead a curious lightheadedness was superseded by a sensation of tremendous acceleration—as if I were hurtling at top speed toward the shinv wall that came no closer than the foot of the bed. I could barely catch my breath—breathing became the task at hand. I was not afraid. Inside an exquisite clarity, it was very simple—no welcoming light, or waiting loved ones, no gathering of angels, just one breath. And not the next.

"What's going on?" Andre in the far far distance entered the room then slipped away. Simplicity and silence—then three, four shocks—people swarming, garbled talk, urgent and loud, but really it was my decision. I \m[\cA. myself to take the breath. And the next . . .

Later the doctors said that was the day I almost died.

After eight weeks I left the hospital. I came home differ-

ent. It was hard to talk. I stuttered. Anyway, what was there to say. Nothing seemed famiHar. I couldn't remember what foods I preferred, which colors I liked, or how I felt about anything. I cried without knowing why. My mother, who had never cooked in her life, astonished us both by making sensational meals that she carried upstairs to my bed on a tray. She stayed, taking care of me until I was well.

Although our nanny was wonderful, in my absence little Fletcher, who was now eight months old, had withdrawn into an infant depression. He slept fitfully or not at all, and he would not take baby formula, but with his bottle of apple juice he gathered into himself and rotted the first baby teeth right out of his mouth. When I first came home, the older children were overjoyed to see me—but Fletcher would not even look at me those first days. And then he could not let me out of his sight without coming undone, until he was five or six years old.

I could not have known it then, but Tom Stoppard was at the hospital nearly every day. He set up a work space in the waiting room and told Andre to pay no attention to him, he had plenty to do. But if Andre needed anything, Tom was there. Tom is godfather to my second daughter, Daisy.

In 1974, we had written to the director of the orphanage in Vietnam, hoping to adopt another child. But then South Vietnam was invaded by the North, and unforgettable images o£ panic and pandemonium were transmitted around the world—the swarming Saigon airport, the evacuation from the roof of the U.S. embassy, men dangling from crowded helicopters, and the infamous crash of the "orphan airHft" that killed seventy-eight children and seven adults on takeoff.

In rural England, with the daffodils just coming into bloom, I was watching all this on television when a telegram, impossibly, arrived from Saigon saying that a baby girl had been chosen for us and put on the airlift—look for

her at Presidio Air Force Base in California. Her identification number was H-2. I phoned through the night trying to locate H-2 in the chaos of the base. I was also in continuous contact with Jacqueline and Yul Brynner in New York City. A baby for them had also survived the crash—a new sister for Rock, Victoria, and my namesake, "little Mia," who had arrived from Vietnam one year after Lark.

Under these dramatic circumstances I became the mother of a frail, seven-month-old, six-pound baby girl. At UCLA Medical Center we were told that she had suffered from malnutrition to such a degree that her liver was "palpable" and her intestinal lining had come away, distending her abdomen and making it impossible for her to digest normally: she was {ed through tubes going into her temples. Even after her hospitalization she was too weak to hold up her head without support. Her scabby limbs fell like limp vines from my arms, and her cry was barely audible and without conviction. But she was luminously beautiful, and there was something in the quality of her gaze that let me know everything was going to be okay.

Within a year Daisy matched perfectly, both in size and abilities, her silver-haired, blue-eyed brother, Fletcher, who is six months older. The two became inseparable companions—mv second set of tv/ins. When they were about five vears old, the pair came running, flushed and breathless, into my room. They had dressed themselves identically in blue mechanic suits, hand-me-downs from their older twin brothers, and they were wearing ski caps that covered their hair. Two radiant, gloriously different little faces declared ecstatically: "Look at us Mommy! No one can tell us apart. We even have the same number of pennies in our pockets!"

Between 1974 and 1977, I appeared in five plays— The Three Sisters, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Zykovs by Gorky, and Chekhov's Ivanov; the last three were

with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It seemed that every night someone terrifying was in the audience—Paul Scofield, Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Ian McKeUen, Irene Worth, Peggy Ashcroft, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Ian Holm, Noel Coward. Before the curtain goes up, the evening ahead looms like Mount Everest, or as a series of hurdles, which, when it is going well, you soar over effortlessly: emotions, thoughts, and words come spontaneously, and everythmg feels true, real. When it goes badly you feel leaden, false, unmspired, and wretched.

By 1976 Andre and I had gone through our jagged patches but we supposed they were behind us—that we had really settled in for the long haul. Our five children generated such radiance within our home, surely it would be shielded from harm. We decided to adopt another daughter, and this time our request was for an older child, because we were aware how very difficult it was to find families for children past infancy. Once again we waded through the daunting piles of paperwork, the months of interviews and home studies, and all the official back-and-forthmg between our U.S. adoption agency, immigration officials in the United States, Great Britain, and Korea, and social welfare officials in Korea and England. Eventually we were approved, and a little girl abandoned that month in the streets of Seoul was assigned to us. Her precise age was not known, but estimated to be around five; there was no other history. She could not understand or speak enough to answer any questions. She did not even know her name. The orphanage named her Soon-Yi.

At that point we ran headlong into a federal law that limited to two the visas an American family could obtain for the purpose of adoption. We had our quota. Forget it, the agency told us: to change the law would require an act of Congress.

But we had already been sent a blurry black-and-white two-by-two-inch head shot of a child who looked neither happy nor sad, with a shaved head and sores on her lips. This was my daughter. She had already taken her place in my heart, and I would not walk away from her. I had Soon-Yi transferred to another orphanage, the best in Seoul, and I began making phone calls. My old friends, Bill and Rose Styron, sought the help of Massachusetts Congressman Michael Harrington, and he agreed to sponsor the bill that was necessary. More than a year went by with me relentlessly phoning people and Soon-Yi still in the orphanage. Finally, in 1977, Congress passed the bill. Soon-Yi could come home.

I didn't have to travel to Korea; the agency usually arranged for escorts to bring babies to their families. But Soon-Yi was not a baby, and I felt it was important to go there and bring her home myself—I wanted her to know me in advance o£ the long journey, I wanted to see the orphanage where she had spent more than a year, to meet her friends, and to take plenty of pictures for her scrap-book. I wanted to understand what little I could of her life there, with the hope that it would help us to build our relationship and make the transition easier for her. In my knapsack I brought two pretty little dresses and a pink candy-striped nightgown. Each was wrapped with the nicest paper I could find and tied with a pink ribbon.

When I arrived at the orphanage, a dozen or so little girls combed and clean were lined up on the pavement in front of the entrance. Standing behind the children was a nun who must have pushed Soon-Yi toward me. Out of respect, and not to frighten her, I knelt down, took her hand, and smiled. She left the orphanage without a sound or a backward glance. Only at the revolving door of the hotel did she stiffen. I carried her into the elevator and when it began to move, she threw up. This was mv own child.

She seemed delighted with her presents and sat on the floor holding them for the longest time until it occurred to me that she didn't know about unwrapping and openmg gifts, so I ripped a little corner to show her inside, but that upset her, so I waited awhile, then, careful not to rip the paper, I unstuck the tape and pulled out the candy-striped nightgown. Soon-Yi loved it. I held it up in front of her and carried her to see how good it looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Seemg the mirror, she jackknifed with a sound of pure fear and kicked it so hard we both fell backward nearly into the bathtub. On that day, it must have seemed that anything was possible—even a duplicate world where another strange-eyed, pale-haired woman was holding another terrified child who was holdmg another nightgown with pink candy stripes.

Soon-Yi didn't know about mirrors, or revolving doors, or carpets, or elevators, or ice, or eggs (I picked the shells out of her mouth), or grass, or flowers, or in fact most of the things the rest of us take for granted. Whatever caught her fancy—paper clips, peanuts, money, flowers, rubber bands, chewing-gum wrappers, Cheerios—she stashed in her underpants. And the only place she could fall asleep was on the floor next to my bed. When I went to Egypt to film exteriors for Death on the Nile, I brought the two children who were most dependent upon me, Fletcher and Soon-Yi.

It would be hard to come up with any better way to sail the Nile. I explored the temples and tombs with my incomparable companions Maggie Smith, David Niven, Peter Ustinov, Angela Lansbury, Jack Warden, and Jane Birkin. And Bette Davis and I found ourselves together once again, in another distant land, and this time I too was an actress. But by 1977 the long years of hard battle had taken their toll on Bette. Fragile and frightened in her hotel room in Aswan, wearing a lace nightcap (excessive wearing of wigs, she explained, had left her nearly bald), she sat in the big bed.

surrounded by too many impractical-to-pack silver-framed photographs of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, her family was a great source of joy, but she was mordant about the rest of her life. When I asked if she had a boyfriend, she groaned, "Oh God, no! I'm through with all that."

Surprisingly and heartbreakingly insecure about her work, she fretted constantly about the job at hand. Always, she confided, she had depended upon strong directors: she desperately needed guidance. Gone was the indefatigable sightseer on whose enthusiasm two apathetic twelve-year-olds were propelled through countless museums, churches, and palaces across Spain. The beauty and mysteries of ancient Egypt held no interest for this Bette Davis, who did not leave her hotel room except to film her scenes.

"In my day we'd have built all this at the studio—and better!" she snapped, as we gazed across the Nile toward the Valley of the Kings. The magnificent structure that had been Bette Davis—the illusion of size and power she had projected so valiantly for so long—had imploded under the weight of her disappointment and honest fury.

Bette was not gentle in life, nor had life been gentle with Bette. After completing our film she was attacked by cancer, and then strokes that paralyzed half her face. But it was my old friend, her daughter BD, who dealt the most devastating blow in her book about her childhood.

By 1978, my marriage was beginning to come undone. It was no one's fault. We had spent too much time apart; by then we had different expectations, concerns, goals, friends, and, finally, different lives. What power had drawn together our myriad pieces and shaped them into one? Why did it fail to hold? My thoughts continually returned to Ireland, to Scotland and the VW bus, and to holding hands as our son was born, and waiting for Lark while we watched the