Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (39 page)

I’m a great friend, but I’m a bad enemy. You don’t treat me badly and get away with it. A couple of nights later I was on
The Tonight Show
with Gene Hackman, who told me he was flying to Rome with Burt because they had to reshoot the ending of
Lucky Lady.
So I said, “Do me a favor, will you? When you get on the plane, sit down next to Mr. Reynolds, look at him, and say just one word: ‘Wrong.’ ”

So the next day he got on the plane with Burt and did exactly what I’d asked him to. Burt said, “Oh, Jesus.” Then when they arrived in Rome, the first thing my sister said to him was “Wrong.” You don’t treat Liza’s baby sister that way, either. Burt couldn’t believe it. No one had ever treated him like that before. No one had dared.

When the reshooting was finished and the movie finally premiered, Jack and Liza and I flew to New York for the opening. Somehow it seemed only fitting that the movie was a total debacle, badly edited and hopelessly flawed. I felt terrible for Liza. She was in tears. Burt was on the plane back to L.A. with us. I was sitting upstairs in the 747, and most of the cast and crew were downstairs, including Burt. We still hadn’t spoken to each other. His press guy kept trying to get me to talk to him, and after an endless number of “No, I don’t want to’s,” I finally agreed to talk to Burt.
When I got downstairs and sat next to him, Burt said, “I was an asshole.”

I didn’t say anything. I just kept staring straight ahead. Then he started to tell me how badly he’d treated me, what a schmuck he was, which might have been touching if I hadn’t heard him say all the same things on
The Tonight Show
more than once about other women. At some point in all this drivel I couldn’t stand it any longer and started humming
The Tonight Show
theme and finished with, “And here—s Burt!” And I got up and left before it got too deep to walk.

I can’t honestly say that Burt broke my heart. I’d never been in love with him the way I’d been with Philippe or Barry. The truth is that he’d hurt my feelings and bruised my ego. It didn’t help that the story was in all the tabloids, either. “Burt Dumps Lorna, Goes Back to Dinah.” And it didn’t help that most readers thought I deserved it for “taking Dinah’s man away.” At twenty-three humiliation is pretty hard to swallow gracefully.

I have to hand it to Burt, though. In the long run, he turned out to be a friend. Years later I ended up on a plane to New York with Loni Anderson, and she told me she was in love with a wonderful man. When she told me who it was, I said,
“Ay!”
And I proceeded to trash him. Loni took it all good-naturedly, and after they got married, we laughed about the whole incident.

When times got lean in later years and I wasn’t working, Burt even found work for me. He invited me down to his theater and said, “I’m going to find a show for you,” and he did. Burt had a dinner theater in rural Florida that served as a training ground for young actors and production people after they graduated from college. Burt made it possible for these young students to get real-world experience in a working theater; at the same time Burt brought in his friends in the business to conduct classes for them. Burt is generous in his own way, and he often gave his friends a chance to teach and perform at the theater when they needed work.
I’ve worked at his theater many times over the years; it was Burt who first suggested I teach class.

We never talked about what happened between us romantically, but I knew he was truly sorry for the way he had treated me. In his own way, I think he was trying to make it up to me. He and Loni even invited me to their wedding. I couldn’t go, but I appreciated his asking. I’d rather have a good friend than an old enemy. Burt’s a complicated man. He and Loni had a wonderful relationship, and I was sad when it ended. My tabloid time with Burt was nothing compared to his breakup with Loni. I don’t know if he’ll ever find lasting happiness with a woman. He’s had some of the best. At any rate, I wish him well.

Naturally, I wasn’t quite so philosophical at the time. I was hurt and humiliated by the public collapse of my relationship with Burt, and when Liza invited me to join her in Italy for a while, I jumped at the chance. Her father was directing her in
A Matter of Time,
what turned out to be the last movie of his life. We didn’t realize it yet, but Vincente Minnelli was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the shoot in Rome was difficult. It was very painful for my sister. There wasn’t much knowledge of Alzheimer’s at the time, and we didn’t understand why Vincente was acting so strangely. We kept trying to laugh it off when he made odd mistakes. One day he came into the dressing room and called Liza “Yolanda.” She kept saying things like, “Oh, he’s just got his mind on the film,” but I knew she was worried. We comforted ourselves with the notion that he was getting older, and that he hadn’t directed a movie in many years. It was tragic to watch the brilliant man who’d directed
An American in Paris
struggling just to function.

While my sister was trying to deal with her father’s deteriorating health, I was trying to mend my hurt feelings and bruised ego. I was partying with my girlfriend Manuela Poppatakis while I was in Rome (her mother was the French actress Anouk Aimee from
A Man and a Woman).
As it was for my mother, partying at clubs
always seems to be my cure for heartache. Liza’s movie was constantly being shut down because of a strike (Italy was very big on strikes), so we had all the free time in the world. Liza and Manuela and I would go to a club called Jackie-O’s every night, stay till dawn, sleep until three the next afternoon, go to lunch and dinner, and start all over again at Jackie-O’s. Every now and then Jack would fly over from California, but most of the time we girls were on our own.

That was the time of the “spaghetti westerns,” as they called them in the mid-seventies, and I kept meeting these Italian “cowboy” actors. One of them who thought he was the next Clint Eastwood introduced himself to me. He told me his name was Fabio Testi, and someone whispered to me that he was the “Italian Burt Reynolds.” Talk about the wrong recommendation! Fabio kept asking me out, but I knew we’d never get his ego through the door. I nicknamed him “Fabulous Testicles” and laughed at him with Manuela and Liza. I never wanted to date an actor again. This time I was holding out for my prince.

Amazingly enough, my prince actually showed up, right on cue. No kidding, he really was a prince, and I don’t mean the artist-formerly-known-as, either. His name was Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, but we called him “Stash.” He was descended from royalty in some obscure European country that I’d never heard of.

Our meeting was straight out of the movie
Roman Holiday.
Manuela and I were in the midst of sightseeing one afternoon at about four o’clock on an exceptionally beautiful day. It was that magic time when afternoon is just starting to hint at evening. We had just reached the bottom of the Spanish Steps when I looked up, and there he was! An Italian god, straight out of the cinema, and absolutely gorgeous. Six feet tall, long dark hair, and a flowing cape. He smiled at me, and to my infinite joy, it turned out that my friend knew him. She introduced us, and after spending the evening being charmed by him, I went home with him after dinner. I was
in the mood to be seduced, and the prince was the guy to do it. He was very good at it (I later learned he’d had lots of practice). We spent a passionate week together, and then he left for some island hundreds of miles away. Liza was afraid I’d be devastated, but I wasn’t. I knew it had been what they call “a romantic interlude,” not true love. When Liza asked me if I was upset, I just started singing, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and we rolled around on the floor laughing.

Stash had been just what I needed at the time. I later found out that although his bloodlines were genuine, he wasn’t what you’d call a prince of a guy. It didn’t matter. He was there when I needed him, and that was all I cared about.

At the time I broke up with Burt, I wondered how I could have let myself become involved in such a miserable relationship. I thought then that I knew what miserable was, but I was wrong. Then I met Jake Hooker, and I found out.

No one sets out to marry the wrong person. Nobody sits down in a rational moment and says, “Just think, this person will wreck my life. We’ll be absolutely miserable together. So I know what I’ll do; I’ll marry him!” My parents certainly didn’t. The Las Vegas bookies might have bet against my parents’ marriage, but Mama and Sid thought they’d live happily ever after. Love is a great deal more complicated than that. I don’t think Jake set out to make me miserable. It just worked out that way.

I had first met Jake Hooker when I was a kid. He was seventeen or eighteen then and living with Lynne Allen, Peter Allen’s sister. Liza was married to Peter at the time, and I had just moved to New York with Joe and my mom. I must have been about fourteen. I remember being at the Plaza Hotel. Liza was upset about something and said, “I need to talk to Lynne.” I was accustomed to running errands for my sister, so she put me in a taxi and sent me over to pick up Lynne and Jake. I didn’t think much of it at the time. To me, Jake was just some guy with long hair who was dating Lynne. I remember that Joe
and I nicknamed him “Jake the Snake” (because of his snakeskin boots) and “Jake the Rake” (because he liked to play around). That should have been my first hint.

I’d seen Jake off and on while my mother was alive, always very casually, and when I’d opened at The Talk of the Town in London a couple of years before, Jake had looked me up. I was flying off to Australia at the time for a show, so I hadn’t thought much about seeing him. But then I met him again in 1976, a few months after my breakup with Burt. I’d gone to London to do an appearance at the Palladium with Eddie Fisher. It was exciting for me to play the Palladium. It’s a magical place for me. In spite of its size, it’s an intimate theater that makes you feel the audience is up onstage with you. I was first there fourteen years earlier, when my mom filmed some of her concert scenes for
I Could Go on Singing,
and the theater is filled with memories of my mother. It’s still my favorite venue.

Jake sent a message backstage after the performance asking if he could see me while I was in town. I told him okay.

I was in a dangerous state of mind, though of course, I didn’t know it. I was still smarting from my breakup with Burt a few months before. My fling with Stash had helped, but I still wasn’t back on my feet.

Jake and I started dating. At the time he played guitar in a rock band called the Arrows, and I liked the other band members, too—I thought the guys were funny and cute. Jake was very attentive to me. Just as with Burt, the attention never stopped. It was constant. And after a while, just as with Burt, Jake’s interest began to wear me down. After all, I liked him, and there was a sense of connection with him because he knew my sister well, and knew Peter Allen, too. I had loved Peter like a brother. So I thought, “This is sort of nice.” It was a way of feeling connected to my past without being suffocated by it the way I usually was.

I wasn’t in love with Jake, but I liked him, so when it was time for me to leave London and he asked me to come back and
live with him there, it sounded as if it might be a good idea. I thought, “This could be interesting. What do I have going for me in L.A. anyway?” England could give me a new career start, away from my father and from my mother’s ghost, and I’d always loved London, ever since I’d lived there as a little girl. So I decided, “Why not? Let’s do it.” I flew home to L.A. and went by my Dad’s house to tell him and Patti that I was going back to England again. When they asked me how long I’d be there, I said, “Forever.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be talked out of it. My dad had been after me for years to get some focus in my life, to stop partying so much, to concentrate on my career, but all his advice had fallen on deaf ears. What could they say besides “Have a nice time”?

Although I was bold enough to move to London with a rock singer and live with him out of wedlock, I wasn’t bold enough to tell my father what I was up to. Rather than tell him about Jake, I lied and said I was moving in with two girlfriends there so I could work in England and Europe. I hadn’t been able to tell my dad the truth about my rock-and-roll lover any more than Sid had been able to tell me that I was conceived before marriage, or that Patti was sleeping in his bed years before. I couldn’t look my father in the eye and tell him the truth. Instead, I made up something and took the next plane to London.

Jake was waiting at Heathrow Airport with a limousine and a bottle of champagne when I got there. He was nervous and excited, anxious to impress me. I think maybe he’d been worried I wouldn’t come. He told me he’d spent the whole week picking out curtains and fixing up his flat for me, and in the limo he talked nervously about how he hoped I’d like everything. He’d already polished off one bottle of champagne waiting for my plane to land, and he opened a second one as we drove. I sipped a few drops in the limo as the driver took us back to the flat, but I didn’t drink often in those days, so Jake finished the second bottle, too.

When we got to the flat, he continued drinking vodka and
orange juice to steady his nerves. By the time his nerves were “steady” enough, it was time for bed. We crawled into bed for my first night in our romantic London hideaway; Jake took me in his arms, looked into my eyes, and vomited champagne and orange juice all over the bed. Afterward, he promptly passed out. I cleaned up the mess as best as I could with Jake out cold in the middle of it all, and then I did my best to fall asleep as he snored beside me. “Welcome to England,” I thought.

The next day Jake was embarrassed and apologetic. He told me he’d been nervous, afraid I’d be disappointed in the flat. I told him not to worry, that it was okay. I’d had a lifetime of training in thinking, in spite of the evidence, that “it was okay,” so I just tried to make him feel better and forgot about it. The whole episode was prophetic of our future together, but at the time I somehow missed the point. I’ve always been strong on hindsight.