I'll Scream Later (No Series) (20 page)

T
HE NEXT REAL
break in my career came with the CBS-TV movie
Bridge to Silence,
which also starred Lee Remick and Michael O’Keefe.

It was scary new terrain for me; a lot of my dialogue was spoken aloud, and this project would first introduce me to the much larger audiences that television routinely draws.

I could relate to the story, but I wanted one fundamental change.
Bridge to Silence
follows the life of a young Deaf woman who loses her husband in an awful auto accident. As she struggles to recover from the grief and depression of that loss, her mother, played by Lee Remick, steps in and tries to gain custody of her five-year-old daughter.

The spine of the story is built around the conflict between mother and daughter. Not only has Remick’s character never accepted her daughter’s deafness, but, we learn late in the movie, she is actually responsible for it—overlooking a high fever when Peg, my character, was a child. It all felt familiar.

The way the script was initially written, though, Peg’s anger is largely tied to her resentment at being Deaf. That’s something I pushed to have them change.

As I thought about the character, began working on developing a backstory for her in my mind, that plotline increasingly made no sense to me. The anger, I believed, would come from the loss of her husband, the ridiculously freak accident that turned her nearly perfect world upside down. That would allow the anger to come from an organic place. Then the conflict would naturally shift to the fight with her mother for her daughter.

Yes, Peg was Deaf, but in this story that wasn’t the real issue. Thankfully, the filmmakers agreed.

This highly emotional script dealt with death, all kinds of loss, even love. Michael O’Keefe’s character was Peg’s husband’s best friend, but also very much in love with Peg.

The estrangement between mother and daughter was particularly poignant to me. In one scene, not too long after my husband has died, my mother shows up to check on me. There is a fight over an old shirt that still has the smell of my husband, and I don’t want to let it go.

We are both extremely emotional in the scene, neither of us understanding where the other is coming from. The disagreement only underscores our emotional distance. I had so many moments from my own life to pull from to add texture and hopefully truth to that scene. But it was also a tough reminder of how my relationship with my mother was so saturated by tension and conflict.

I had great respect for Lee Remick, but it was difficult working with her because she barely moved her lips when she spoke. Even with a script, I was often searching for where we were from moment to moment in a scene.

I talked to the director about it, but apparently Lee felt that if she talked more clearly, moved her mouth more emphatically so that I could better read her lips, she would look foolish—she was worried about how it would play on-screen. So we limped along, finding ways to make it work.

At the end of the shoot she gave me a necklace, the same one she had worn the first time we’d met—I had noticed it and said how beautiful I thought it was. That she remembered and wanted me to have it was such a thoughtful gesture.

She was a lovely woman and a terrific actress, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with her. Her life and career were cut short by cancer only a few years later, at fifty-six, far too early.

Bridge to Silence
also began my connection to Sammy Davis Jr. We met in Washington, D.C., when I received a Victory Award, which honors, as they put it, “individuals who best exemplify exceptional strength and courage in the face of physical adversity,” in part for my performance in the film.

Sammy and I just connected immediately. He kept up with what I was doing over the years and always encouraged me—he knew everything about being an outsider and succeeding against the odds.

I have such fond memories of so many evenings at his house. I’ll never forget the night he had me and Jack over with some other friends for a screening of
Tap,
starring Gregory Hines in the lead, and Sammy as Little Mo. Lucille Ball, one of my heroes, came in wearing a white jumpsuit with the words
LUCY WHO
? stitched on it, and with that red hair and creamy skin she looked absolutely stunning. She spent a lot of time with me that night encouraging me not to let Hollywood get me down, telling me, “I was older than they liked their stars to be, I wasn’t the kind of beauty they were looking for, and I’m sure they didn’t like my attitude, but I never quit, and you can’t either.” Those are words that I try to live by even now.

One of the last times I saw Sammy was at his house for a big
party. So many Hollywood legends were there, no one wanted to miss what would probably be his last party. As usual, it was an amazing night; if Sammy was there, you just knew everyone was going to have a good time. He just had an effortless way of creating that vibe.

Hanging out with Sammy Davis Jr.

During the evening, a group of us had drifted into the kitchen and were standing around reminiscing. I met Clint Eastwood in the kitchen that night. I so admire his work, whether it’s in front of or behind the camera. But he is also, I discovered that night, one of the most difficult people for a lip-reader. He has the thinnest lips, which always makes it harder for me to follow, and he barely moves them when he talks. I would have loved to know what he was saying; hopefully I didn’t miss anything profound, but I just couldn’t figure it out.

Sammy was already so weakened by cancer that night, yet still very much his old warm Sammy self, making it such a happy/sad occasion. He was surrounded by so many of us who loved him dearly.

It devastated me that I was on location in Mexico shooting
The Man in the Golden Mask
when he passed away. Had I known how grave his condition had become, I would have flown in to see him one last time. To this day, I miss his presence and his good counsel, but most of all I miss his smile and his love. I know he still keeps watch over me.

F
AME IS NEVER
easy. It comes with many fringe benefits, but also has a lot of sharp edges. One of the things I hadn’t counted on is just how my celebrity would impact my parents and my brothers.

My mother had written a letter when I was in Betty Ford to let me know that my sudden fame had been hard on the family. Probably the biggest misconception that they had is that along with my fame had come huge amounts of money. Everyone assumed I was rich.

That couldn’t have been further from the truth. I definitely made better money than I would have if I’d kept the department-store job, but I was often just barely making ends meet between projects.

At times it was tough, and even impossible, for me to pay Jack. So he was often just scraping by as well. Living with the Winklers for as long as I did helped more than they’ll ever know. By opening their home to me, they also helped keep me financially afloat during some lean times.

None of this my family knew. They just saw my life being played out in magazine spreads. Reports from the front line of the parties I was going to. News of me at a premiere, on the red carpet.

My older brother, Eric, was facing his own struggles at the time. He was trying to build a business as a stockbroker and it wasn’t going well. He’d asked me to provide some introductions to people I knew in Hollywood. My name could open doors that his could not.

I did. The short version of this story is that it did not go well.
It put me in an uncomfortable position with the talent agency that represented me, and other producers and executives I knew in town. They wanted to help me, but they weren’t interested in doing business with my brother. That hurt him.

It caused a nasty rift between us for a while, but we got beyond it a long time ago, and I think our relationship may be stronger for it.

One of the best things to happen to Eric is that along the way he found what he truly loved to do and returned to law, where he’s developed an extremely successful legal practice. I am so proud of him. I feel that he is always in my corner these days, and I hope he knows that I am in his, too.

Marc, my sweet brother Marc, the middle child, always the peacemaker in the family, had almost a counterreaction to my visibility. He actually works to this day at blocking out as much of my life and career in Hollywood as he can.

It’s all in the cause of preserving the idea of the sister he knows and watched grow up, rather than someone who is also a creature of Hollywood. When he’s in town, he’ll opt for a trip to the beach with my kids rather than a front-row seat to watch me in
Dancing
with the Stars.
Sometimes that’s hard for me, I’d like him to embrace all of who I am, but I have never doubted his love for me. He’s always been there.

Marc also has made an amazing success of his life, with a life partner of twenty-three years, Jay, whom he treasures, and his own business, Chicago Dog Walkers, which employs a huge staff and walks, by my guess, most of the dogs in the Windy City.

My dad, my dad, my dad. He’s spent a lifetime breaking his back to make money to support the family, and another lifetime trying to hold on to the money he made. There have been bad deals, gambling debts. Good times, but a lot of tough times, too.

In the spring of ’89, he wrote asking me to front him $100,000 to underwrite his car dealership. That was an impossible request. He’d done so much for me over my life, but I didn’t have that kind of money. It was painful for me to have to say no.

I remember in 1994 doing a Screen Actors Guild conversation tied to the TV film
Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story,
which my friend and costar Melissa Gilbert hosted. One of the questions from the audience came from a young woman who described herself as a struggling actress. She asked, given my success, what advice did I have for her.

I told her, “Today, I can tell you I’m a struggling actress. I’m not working, I’m not shooting. Anytime you’re not working in this business, you’re struggling. You have to have an aggressiveness in you, a desire to get yourself out there even when it’s tough.”

Here’s how I think of it: There’s a wall, and you know it’s there, and you know your strengths, and you have to find that one place in the wall where you can use your strengths to push through. You keep going at it until you find that spot in the wall—you never stop looking for it.

That’s how it is every day in the acting life. No one has a guarantee that there will be another project, that there will be another paycheck. You have to really want to be doing this. To keep searching for that spot in the wall.

So many times I’d pick up the phone and call my agent, Carla Hacken, and say, “Help me find work, help me find a movie.” You
always want to do the best work you can, to be able to carefully pick each project along the way, but the hard reality—at least for most of us—is that if you get offered a job, you take it.

Keep yourself working, keep yourself in the game, put everything you can into every project, and walk away from it having learned something new. What happens when it hits the screen or the critics get hold of it—well, that you have no control over.

So I took work where I could find it. Often small, independent films that were struggling to find a voice, to say nothing of financing.

One of the crazier ones for me was called
The Linguini Incident,
and I mean that in a good way. It originally came out in 1991 and was at some point auctioned off by SAG (along with six other films) after the owners defaulted on residual payments. Now living in DVD-land, it’s been retitled
Shag-o-Rama,
I’m sure in an effort to plug into any remaining nostalgia for the seventies.

Carla helped pull together and populate this painfully small movie with a number of clients on her roster. It wasn’t art, though it aspired to be, and the cast, crew, and the director did everything we could. But it was a heck of a lot of fun.

A lot of people thought my agent Carla Hacken and I were sisters.

The movie starred David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette as the would-they-or-wouldn’t-they-fall-in-love couple. It was shot in downtown L.A. in an old Buick showroom that the set designers converted into the restaurant where most of the action took place.

The premise was sort of like
Green Card
’s, as David Bowie’s character has just a month to get one, crossed with an Austin Powers–heist kind of vibe—the waitstaff would conspire to take the restaurant’s money and run.

The set matched the zaniness of the story—going for a Salvador Dalí–inspired look that took surreal to the extreme. Rosanna and I wore sexy, shimmery, silver lamé minidresses. Almost everyone else wore short, dark go-go-style wigs. My hair was sculpted into a—it’s hard to describe, but think of big swaths of hair fashioned atop your head like a giant pretzel twist. It took a long, long time each day to get it, well, mounted on my head.

It was a great group to hang out with. Buck Henry was in the cast, too. The movie was so low on funds day to day that if a friend visited the set, he or she would likely end up as an extra. But that gave the production a kind of Spanky and Our Gang, let’s-put-on-a-play kind of feel that made shooting it a lot of fun. To say nothing of how cool it was working with David Bowie—he called himself Rock God. I couldn’t agree more.

My character, Jeanette, the restaurant’s hostess, refuses to speak but does swear in sign language at just about everyone and everything. I appreciated that director Richard Shepard was giving me a chance at comedy; most people just thought of me for dark, dramatic roles. He would go on years later to write and direct one of the cleverest comedies,
The Matador,
with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear.

A
FTER A LONG
time hanging out in the Winklers’ backyard, I decided to move out and get an apartment of my own. Stacey’s convinced that if they didn’t have dogs, which meant I couldn’t have a cat, I might have stayed. She might be right!

I set up a brief tenancy in an apartment in the Valley on Arch Drive that would have been dreary had David Oliver not been my neighbor and dear friend.

The one thing that sticks in Jack’s mind when he describes the Arch apartment is that it smelled like cat pee. My brother Eric, who stayed with me a few days during a trip to L.A., remembers it as smelling rather like cat poop. I remember that I just got used to the smell and forgot about it.

Then my friend Stephanie told me about an apartment near what is now West Hollywood and the Fairfax district. It was on Blackburn, right next door to Laura Dern, another of her friends.

This is a wonderful old section of L.A., just around the corner from CBS, but already jammed with a blend of trendy new restaurants and shops and old Hollywood classics, such as Canter’s Deli, which is open twenty-four hours, which in L.A. is a rarity.

There was block after block of huge duplexes, most of them built in the 1930s. The one I lived in was in a traditional style, but with lots of nice detail inside. It had three bedrooms, two baths, soaring ceilings, and hardwood floors—after Jack had the carpets ripped out and the floors redone one time while I was away.

It was a great place, terrific neighborhood. I stood inside it one day and thought and thought about what it needed. I know, it needed Ruthie!

By this time Ruthie had graduated from college and was getting ready to do some specialized research to get ready for graduate study. UCLA was just a fifteen-minute drive. It was perfect.

So I put in a call on a lark and asked if she’d be my roommate. She said yes, packing up her life, which was halfway across the country, and taking up residence in one of the bedrooms. I took the other, and the third was converted into an office for me and Jack.

New chapter of my life to write, and my soul sister was coming to town to help write it.

The Maa-Ruus were on the loose and living in L.A.—watch out!