Read My Lips (32 page)

We shot
Rained
in the desert above Eliat, Israel. There was nothing there—not scrub, not a bush, not a rock—just the changing colors of the sky and, occasionally, a Bedouin or two with camel in tow. Sometimes the Bedouins would venture up to where the film’s horses were stabled where they would sit and make hash tea for themselves. Each day we shot till about four in the afternoon, when the light began to transform everything in sight. It was beautiful. I’d get back to the hotel by about 4:30, swim laps, take a bath, listen to the sole radio station, which only
played classical music, read the
Herald Tribune,
go to dinner with a couple friends, and then head to bed. That was my routine. I loved it.

Because I was supposed to be a top-notch equestrian in the movie, I got a daily horseback-riding lesson from a darling Israeli. One day I looked at some of the Bedouins near the horses and thought about their hash tea. At that point I hadn’t smoked grass for nine months. But it wouldn’t be smoking if I drank some tea. So I asked my trainer to see if the Bedouins would let me try a cup—and to tell them to put lots of hash in it.

They gave me some. But as we made our way down the hill from the desert above town, I didn’t feel a thing.

Dammit,
I thought.
They didn’t put in enough hash.

After all, if I was going to cheat, I wanted to feel something. As I headed back to my hotel room, I looked at the ocean outside the bay window at the end of hall. It began to sway, then started surging up and down. The water seemed to rise like a tsunami. I ran into my room, slammed the door behind me, and stood in front the mirror for two hours, sobbing. Then I passed out on the bed until I got a call.

“We’re ready for your costume fitting, Ms. Kellerman.”

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

A second call came.

“Hi, are you ready for dinner?”

Blah, blah, blah
. . .

And then I passed back out.

When I came to, I had to ask myself which was more fun: dinner and a swim or passing out after a good cry? The answer was obvious. So that was the end of my getting-high time.

The last time I had worked with Tony Curtis was on
The Boston Strangler
in 1968. That had been exciting because it was only my second big movie. I’d seen Tony socially every now and then and had really been looking forward to working with him again, until the first day of shooting, that is.

He was standing at the top of a staircase, and he suddenly began yelling, “I hate this piece of crap. I hate everyone on it!”

Thinking I could somehow help by talking to him, I said, “Well, you don’t mean me, do you, Tony?”

“Especially you!” he shouted.

I stood behind a row of fake bushes to stay out of his line of sight until he calmed down.

The next time I saw Tony we were out in the desert, and he was yelling at the top of his lungs at the director. There was no place to hide in the desert. Then one day, when were out on location, I suddenly I felt an arm slip around me. It was Tony’s.

“Ah, Sally,” he said. “Life is really something, isn’t it?”

This was the Tony I had first met years earlier—so sweet. And for the rest of the picture, there was no sign of Mr. Hyde. Tony remained as talented and easy to work with as ever. I guessed at the time that he had a substance abuse problem, and indeed, not long afterward I heard that he’d sought treatment. Boy, those addictions can be cunning.

Jonathan joined me on the press junket for
Foxes
in Chicago, his hometown. We were in the hotel with the journalist Irv Kupcinet, Jodie Foster, and her mother. After the interview with Irv we went to dinner and some jazz clubs with him and his wife. When we got back to our hotel room, I was fidgeting around while Jonathan was sitting on the floor watching David Janssen—TV’s original Fugitive—on his new show,
Harry O.

Suddenly Jonathan asked, “Do you want to get married?”

“No!” I screamed. “Not with
Harry O.
in the background!”

So romantic, eh? Just like in the movies. I got up, walked over to the TV, and turned it off.

“Ask me again!” I said.

He did—and I said yes.

The next day I called Irv to give him the news.

“You and your wife inspired us last night, and we’re going to get married!” I said.

“I only hope that you’ll be as happy as we might have been,” Irv replied. To this day that still makes me chuckle.

W
HEN
J
ONATHAN AND
I
GOT BACK TO
LA,
WE TOLD THE GROUP
our big news.

“We’re getting married.”

“At my house!” Jennifer Jones immediately said.

Sold
. We had already secretly decided that if Jennifer didn’t throw us a wedding, we would elope, because at the time we did not have a lot of money. Jonathan was a young lawyer, and I had not, shall we say, kept very good track of my finances. In fact, my new business manager announced that he would never tell me how much I had made over the previous ten years so that I wouldn’t feel so bad about where it all went. (Note to young actors: pay very close attention to what you make and how you spend it.)

We decided on a date—May 11, 1980—and ran it by Jennifer to make sure it was okay. “Yes, that’s perfect,” she said. Only later did we realize that it was the anniversary of her daughter Mary Jennifer’s death. Mary Jennifer had committed suicide five years before by jumping from a twenty-story building. But Jennifer didn’t want to change the date.

“It will bring light and happiness,” she said of our wedding. “And you’re like my daughter.”

I had the two greatest moms in the world.

My other mom, Edith, had loved Jonathan from the very first moment she had laid eyes on that handsome face. Then she found out he was a lawyer to boot. What more could a mother want? She was thrilled about our upcoming wedding.

“Wear whatever makes you feel pretty” was the only instruction we gave our guests. For my wedding gown I bought a white off-the-shoulder dress for $35 during a weekend trip with Jonathan to Mexico, which I paired with a $250 veil I found at Holly’s Harp.

Jennifer planned the wedding perfectly. She and her husband, Norton, had two houses on the beach, connected by a patio lined with mirrors and greenery. One was a single-story contemporary that Jennifer had bought from the director John Frankenheimer. On the day of my wedding, guests arrived at the Frankenheimer house to mill around and drink champagne. The walls were graced with artwork: a Van Gogh in the entryway and, around the corner, a Cezanne and a Henry Moore sculpture of the family. What a difference from my first wedding, when the only festive note was Diana’s scarf.

Next door was the Frank Gehry house, which had an entirely different feel: Indian art and stucco. That’s where I was, getting dressed with my bridesmaids—my closest friends, Luana Anders, Morgan Ames, Anjanette Comer, Elizabeth Hush, Joanne Linville, as well as my housekeeper, Vivianne Carter—and my maid of honor, my daughter Claire.

My “cousin” David Bennett, who had come out from New York, took charge of upholding the wedding etiquette. David shooed all the bridesmaids out of my room because, according to tradition, I was supposed to be left alone to reflect on my new life. Up until that moment there were so many people around that I felt like I was getting married on TV, as I had so many times in various roles over the years.

The wedding wasn’t huge, only about a hundred people. Mark and Joanne Rydell’s children, Amy and Christopher, were, respectively, my flower girl and ring bearer. My very dear friend Bud Cort helped Jonathan pick out a tie and gave me huge bunch of calla lilies to carry, each about three feet long. Bobby Walker, Jennifer’s son, and his wife, Dawn, were there. Darling Jennifer, who had done so much work to make my wedding day perfect, resisted posing for pictures. She hated being photographed. One day when Claire and I had stopped in to visit, we had found her cutting up these giant, gorgeous images of herself. Claire and I grabbed them and put them in the trunk of my car.

My mother read a lovely poem during the ceremony. Both my
fathers—my dad and my Stuart—were gone, so Milton gave me away. As he began walking me down the aisle, I realized,
Wow! I
know
these people! I love them! They’re not extras
!

This wedding was real.

When David Bennett got ready to launch us on our honeymoon, we realized that he had already sent my mother off with our luggage in her trunk. So we would just have to go to Vegas dressed in our matching white suits—my idea—looking like twins. We were giddy, surrounded by people we cherished and so very happy and in love. We both wanted this. This time there was no crying the night before.

I was about to turn forty-three. Jonathan was twenty-eight. I used to kid him that if he were one day older, he’d be too old for me. But I wasn’t entirely kidding when I said, “If you tell me when I’m fifty that you want kids, I’m going to kill you.”

O
NE OF THE FIRST TRIPS THAT
J
ONATHAN AND
I
TOOK AS A
married couple was to Monaco, to attend the film festival that had nominated me as Best Actress for my role in
The Big Blonde.
Part of PBS’s
Great Performances
series, the film was based on Dorothy Parker’s O. Henry Award–winning short story of the same name about a blonde who embarks on a desperate, alcohol-fueled search for popularity and love, faking her way through life and finally ending that life via suicide. Upbeat? Maybe not. But I loved the challenge of playing a character I could really sink my teeth into.

When my agent, Keith Adice, first mentioned the part, I said, “Keith—that’s gotta be me.” I then proceeded to call Jack Venza, who was producing the series, to tell him the same thing.

“Jack, I gotta do
The Big Blonde
.”

“They really want a star . . .” he began.

“Yeah? That’s why I’m calling,” I said.

“Well,” Jack went on, “we really think of you as more of a Garbo type.”

“Yeah, right, I know I’m too beautiful,” I replied. “But listen: I haven’t lived this long to be this big and this blond and not get this part. Don’t hire me. Just let me meet with the director.”

So I flew to Chicago on my own dime to meet with Kirk Browning in an airport lounge. We hit it off, I got the part, and I hopped right back on a plane to fly home.

My instinct proved correct. I found it a joy to work with Kirk, and my costar, John Lithgow, was a living doll. And I loved the part—most of the time. We had to learn the tango on set in twenty minutes worth of lessons.
Ouch . . . turn . . . crunch . . . swoon . . . My feet
! We laughed and laughed, despite our flattened toes.

But there were days when playing a wiped-out alcoholic wore on me. Once I called Jonathan, crying, “Jonathan, I have been playing drunk all day, and now they want me to shoot my wedding, and I’m supposed to be feeling good and happy. I can’t do it. I’m too tired.”

“But you love acting, darling,” Jonathan said. “Acting is your life, remember?”

“Fuck you,” I said and hung up. He may have been right, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

Kirk Browning knew how to handle me too. “You know, Sally,” he said one day, “if you spend less time in makeup, you’ll have more time on screen.” Message received. I found that such a kind way to tell me to get it together and stay on schedule.