Read My Lips (17 page)

Bud bought me a pair of lovebirds once. They were a nice symbolic gesture, but in reality they would never shut up. I couldn’t make a move without them squawking. If an overnight visitor got up to use the bathroom, I would hiss at him, “No! No! Don’t move!! Don’t turn on the water!” But I always said it too late—the squawking would begin. The lovebirds did not last,
perhaps a not-so-subtle metaphor for my own romantic life at the time. But that was Bud: darling and generous, with a great eye for art, if not pets. I was happy to be working with him again as well as Bob.

I still hadn’t seen the finished version of
M*A*S*H,
but Bob had believed in me then and now had cast me in
Brewster
without an audition. At the time I had no idea how rare that was—what a gift, what a vote of confidence. I should have been grateful, but instead, believing it was normal, I began to expect to land roles without competing for them.

For the most part Bob just made up my role in Brewster, as the title character’s fairy godmother of sorts. After my recent experience as Hot Lips, making it up as we went along was fine by me. However, Bob knew very well that I wanted to portray real-life women in films, not a wacko. So what part did he give me? He chose me for the role of a very unconventional angel who walks around calm and lovely and ethereal, murdering people with bird shit, all the while dressed in a trench coat.

In one scene Bob told me to sit in a fountain, topless, like a giant bird. “No, Bob!” I protested. I’d had enough with taking my clothes off.

“It’s five in the morning, and it’s a long shot. We’ll hardly see you,” he argued.

Yeah, right. We’ll see about that,
I thought. But I did it, because it was Bob.

There is another scene in which my character gives Bud a bath. Again, I was to go topless. The day we shot that, I thought we were on a closed set. Only my naked back was supposed to be visible to the camera, so the audience could see the beautiful scars my wings left behind. Apparently, however, security on the set wasn’t exactly airtight. Someone snuck in and snapped a picture of me from the front, and I soon ended up in
Playboy
as one of the new “Sex Stars of the Seventies.” I suppose I could have sued—nowadays you would without thinking twice—but back then we just rolled with the punches.

And, hey, I got to sing in that bath scene! I sang “Rock-a-Bye, Baby.” For me that was a big highlight of
Brewster McCloud,
right up there with working with Bob and being part of a fabulous cast, including Bud, of course, Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy, and others.

I also loved our producer, Lou Adler. I developed such a crush on him, but nothing ever came of it. At the time he was dating actress and singer Peggy Lipton, a darling girl and so talented, who sang a song for the soundtrack, called, “Brewster, Don’t Blow Your Mind.”

Lou would go on to produce the cult classic
The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
among other movies. But he was also a legend in the music business, having produced the work of such famous artists as Sam Cooke, Jan and Dean, the Mamas and Papas, and so many more, including one of my favorite albums of the time, Carole King’s
Tapestry.
He knew everyone in the business, and everyone loved to be around him—especially me.

All the movie people lived in the same apartment building in Houston, and on days we finished work early Lou would get his big old Rolls Royce with the tinted windows and take us to Neiman Marcus, which at the time was not a store any of us had ever heard of in LA. He gave all the actors peppermint oil, which I put it in my bath after work to give me the energy to go out. One night Lou took me to a ballgame. Because I found him so attractive, I was uncomfortable being alone with him and spent the entire game on the phone. Lou even threw a birthday party for me with twin pigs, ducks, and two astronauts. (Houston, we have landed.) Still, my favorite nights were when Lou, Bob, and I would go to a club called Patty’s. There was a wonderful piano player there, and I’d get up every night and sing the same two songs: Bobby Hart’s “Hurt So Bad” and “Lazy Afternoon.”

Oh, how I wanted to sing professionally. Lou knew of that desperate longing. After singing at Patty’s, I’d always turn to him and say, “Lou, I can do it! I know I can!”

I wanted Lou to produce a demo for me, a rock-and-roll song
that someone had given me. One night he finally agreed. I was all set to record it the next day.

But when I woke up, I was mute with laryngitis. Ladies and gentlemen, does fear have any power? My vocal cords that morning would have said, “Yes.”

Brewster McCloud
was quirky and goofy and magical—far ahead of its time, as far as I was concerned—cementing Bob’s reputation as a maverick. I was lucky to be a part of it. But my life was not all movies, piano bars, and trips to Neiman’s. Another huge change engulfed me: I was about to be married.

T
HE MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC LIKE TO MAKE CRACKS ABOUT THE
shelf life of Hollywood marriages. Marriage is work—period. I don’t know if being married in my business is any more difficult than it is otherwise. However, I can confidently say that having your boyfriend show up on set and start picking arguments with you—as my soon-to-be husband Rick did on the
Brewster
set—does not bode well for your relationship or your career. Of course, I played my own part in those arguments. What they were about I have no idea.

I had met Rick Edelstein shortly after my relationship with David Rayfiel had dissolved. I was sitting, moping and heartbroken, in the bathtub of my friend Liz Hubbard—my “cousin” David Bennett’s one-time wife—at her apartment in New York City, where she starred as Lucinda Walsh on
As the World Turns.

“I know this guy who writes and directs some of our shows,” Liz called from the other room. “He seems nice and intelligent, and I know he just got divorced. Would you like to meet him?”

“Does he smoke grass?” I yelled from the tub. “If so, tell him to come over!”

Sally gets back in the saddle. The Cowgirl Club rides again. Love, take two.

Rick was a writer and director not just of soap operas but also of other TV classics, such as
Starsky and Hutch
and
Sanford and
Son.
I used to joke that I liked him because he knew Barbra Streisand—not that I’m that shallow, but his knowing her certainly didn’t hurt. Streisand had been one of my heroes since I first saw her in the mid-1960s in
Funny Girl
on Broadway. She was a revelation, proving that you could be funny and break hearts all in one song, that you could sing songs and star in plays and movies, all in one career. I loved her.

I was rebounding hard, still longing for David. I wanted someone to fill that void in my life without needing me too much. Rick was perfect, but what he had to offer was hardly the storybook romance I had imagined.

The truth was that Rick had a temper. He was tough, difficult, and even mean—just my kind of guy at that time. I once watched him put his fist through a parking lot attendant’s glass booth because I had said something that ticked him off. But even rushing him to the emergency room wasn’t enough to turn me off Rick.

We had planned to have a garden wedding in the backyard of the house we were renting in the Hollywood Hills. I loved that house. It had a yard—I had grass beneath my feet again!—a badminton court, and a little pool. In 1970 a working actress could still afford to rent a house with a pool in the Hollywood Hills. I had made a few movies—two already with Bob—but I was hardly rolling in the bucks at that point. And money management was never my strong suit, a personality glitch that would come back to haunt me.

But for now I was going to have the big wedding I’d always dreamed of as a little girl. All my friends from the beginning of time. A beautiful dress. My parents were coming, and a renowned photographer named Alfred Eisenstaedt from
Life
magazine was to shoot the event. Then Rick and I had a fight over one of the guests, his friend. Rick wanted him. I didn’t. Rick’s famous temper flared up, and he announced that the wedding was canceled. That was it—no discussion, no two ways about it. All the invitations had gone out and the arrangements had already been made. My mom, who had planned a beautiful party in Palos Verde with
all my family and friends, said, “Darling, we’ll just have the party anyway.” And we did—at their club. It was lovely, but it was no fairy tale wedding.

At the time I didn’t see the wedding debacle as an opportunity to leave, to simply learn from my relationship with Rick and get out, sparing both of us more upheaval and damage. Apparently I had three rules for love: keep people at arm’s length if I think they might be capable of loving me too much, ache for the ones who never would, and—the most important rule of all—marry the one you fight with constantly. Anger and arguing felt safer than longing and needing and loving a little too much. “Mean” made sense to me. So I waited for the dust to settle.

It settled by the time
Brewster
had its New York premiere. There was some buzz building around me at this point.
M*A*S*H
had been released, and it was a blockbuster, surprising everyone—probably even Bob himself. The film that had worried the studios, the one they had even considered not releasing, was—along with
Airport
and
Love Story
—one of the highest-grossing films of the year. Now everyone was looking to see what that
M*A*S*H
director was doing next. And more people now knew my name, too, and were curious about my follow-up to such a successful movie, one with the same director.

I was booked to shoot a layout for
Harper’s Bazaar
and for interviews with Dick Cavett and David Frost. Suddenly I was being touted as a sex symbol. The problem was that I never felt sexy. No matter my size or whether I was playing a cheerleader or sitting in fountains with my top off, I still felt like the chubby girl. This “I’m not good enough” attitude seeped into my personal life and explains, to a very sad and great extent, my first marriage.

Rick and I decided to squeeze in a wedding ceremony between the film premiere, the
Harper’s
shoot, and my television interviews. We were staying at the Sherry-Netherland, a stunning hotel on Fifth Avenue at the bottom of Central Park. But the glamorous surroundings were not nearly enough to keep me from sobbing uncontrollably the night before our quickie wedding.

As we prepared for the not-so-big event, I looked around the suite and saw nothing of the kind of wedding I had envisioned for myself, nothing that had anything to do with “me.” The closest thing I had to an item of some sentimental value was a plaid wool scarf that belonged to my sister Diana that I had brought along with me. That would have to count as both “old” and “borrowed.” In an effort to have something in the ceremony that reflected who I was, I hung Diana’s scarf over the curtains in our suite’s windows. The “blue”-est thing around was my mood.

Someone else might have taken bursting into tears as some sort of—I don’t know—”sign” that getting married things wasn’t a good idea. But not me.

There were only a handful of people at the ceremony. My family couldn’t attend because it was all too last minute and my father wasn’t well. No one was sure what was going on with his health. Among the few guests was, of course, Rick’s friend, the very man I did not want to have at our wedding in Los Angeles. That will teach me. He had sparked the fight that had resulted in the cancellation of my beautifully arranged garden wedding, which had now led to this sad excuse for a wedding ceremony in a hotel suite with a scarf draped over the window for decor. To add insult to injury, after Rick had kissed the bride, that friend announced, in one of the cheesiest lines ever uttered at a wedding ceremony: “That’s a wrap.”

Boy, was it ever.

I felt ill. After the ceremony Rick and I walked down Fifth Avenue together, with New York City’s skyline closing in on us from every direction. Tourists shuffled by, wide eyed and bundled up against the cold. I was numb. It was the loneliest walk I’ve ever taken. We weren’t right for each other and I knew it. The marriage wasn’t fair to Rick or me. But good or bad, I got what I said I wanted.

O
N THE BIGGEST NIGHT OF MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE SO FAR,
I was saddled with some inescapable truths: neither my dress nor my marriage was a good fit. One of these problems I thought I could fix in a jiffy—at least I hoped I could. I had about two hours before it was time to walk down the red carpet.

My Oscar night story starts with a drug-fueled trip to Mexico, as I’m sure many ill-advised adventures do.