What falls away : a memoir (18 page)

"If you kill yourself," said Barbara, "I'll never forgive tf you.

Within hours, I was in Miami. It was a hot and humid night as the taxi drew up to the Fontainebleau Hotel. A giant sign said FRANK SINATRA in lights, and all the way out on the driveway I could hear the band playing, "It's my kmd of town, Chicago is . . ." He was standing in that familiar smoky light with his tuxedo and microphone and hair and black tie.

Through a restless night we dredged up our regrets and loosed them on each other. The old dreams roused themselves too, and choked the sky with their changing forms. By morning we had spent everything, and we fastened ourselves together with shaking promises.

The next day or the day after, I went back to London. We agreed we'd finish our respective movies. Then we would see. I moved out of the London flat and into a rented cottage in the country, near George and Ringo. Frank and I spoke regularly on the phone, and we wrote to each other, and I turned my attention to work.

The mere presence of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in London was creating a stir. In a studio adjoining ours, Richard Burton was making Where Eagles Dare, and the

two companies had synchronized the couple's schedules. They were living in a sizable section of the Dorchester Hotel, while Elizabeth's numerous little dogs, who were not permitted to enter the country because of quarantine laws, could be visited on the Burtons' yacht, moored in the Thames for that purpose.

Workday lunches with the Burtons took place in a restaurant near the studios and generally lasted about two hours. Without fail, Elizabeth saw to it that I was invited to lunch and any other event she thought I might enjoy. "I feel protective of you," she recently told me. "I always have."

I was night-shooting the week my mother came to visit me in the country cottage. So I wasn't there when two men came and broke our windows, and turned the house inside out. They tied up my mother, and pulled the rings off her fingers, even the engagement ring from my father that she never took off. The next day I took her to Cartier, and while she cried I bought her a new ring. It had been my ring the thieves were really searching for, the diamond engagement ring Frank had given me; and my mother hadn't known it was right there, in the case with my glasses. Soon after, I sold it and the diamond koala bear and the rest of the jewelry and gave the money away.

Secret Ceremony also took us to Holland, where we filmed in an immense, decaying seaside hotel. In the off-hours I rode horseback on the beach, and Bob Mitchum wrote beautiful little poems on shreds of paper. Every evening we all gathered in the lounge where Richard Burton recited his many favorite verses in a golden voice. As he drank, he became more and more disrespectful toward his wife. But Elizabeth always held her own, and even when he turned mean, she was so good-natured that she kept the rest of us laughing. At the start I was in awe of Elizabeth—I'd seen every film she'd made since National Velvet. Now, working with her, I experienced her legendary loyalty, her generosity, and her down-to-earth humor. Bob, Elizabeth, Joe, and I

became friends and shared good times, and in the process I grew stronger.

My friendship with Joe Losey continued through the years; he was the most tortured man I'd ever met, and one of the most sensitive. After we finished Secret Ceremony, I reconnected with my old friends: Maria Roach, Dali, Ruth, Liza, Lenny Gershe, and Yul. After a few months, although I loved Frank no less, I began to believe that we should not be looking for a future together.

I wish I could tell my children that throughout the sixties I was busy fighting bigotry, but it wouldn't be true. Events in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Jackson were a long way from Beverly Hills. My all-white consciousness began to awaken after I read Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent expression of his moral philosophy. Dr. King's dream and the civil rights struggle roused my own slumbering social conscience.

During the summer of 1968, while I was filming Secret Ceremony in London, Rosemary's Baby was released and became the number one movie in the country. Its success, and my own too, were abstractions that translated into surprisingly little satisfaction.

I managed to dodge my divorce from Frank until August 1968; after I returned to California, his people arranged for the proceedings in Mexico—I don't know why. On the morning of the seventeenth, Mickey Rudin and I were the only passengers aboard the Learjet. I sat as far away from him as the compact plane would permit, but when our eyes met by chance, I smiled so as not to hurt his feelings. He shuffled through papers or lay, moist and heavy in his seat, with his tie loosened and his eyes closed. I fiddled with a large hole in one of my sleeves. The sun and salty sea of Goa had faded the once-yellow cotton shirt to a wheat color. My worn-out sandals had taken me clear across India

and through the damp months in England. But shopping never got any easier, and I wore a thmg until it was in tatters. It crossed my mind that maybe people got dressed up for divorces—I didn't know.

At the Juarez airport, a fast-talking little man in tinted glasses and a shiny suit sprang out at us. After flinging a perfunctory nod in my direction, he then referred exclusively to Mr. Rudin.

As if it were an emergency divorce, we flew into town and came screeching to a halt in front of a nondescript office building. From the paparazzi outside I could tell this was the place. Once mside I asked, Where's the bathroom? and I threw up. I was then taken to a fair-sized room crammed to the ceiling with the press and their artillery. A well-lit desk held center stage as if sitting, illogically, in a boxing ring. I was cowering, backing up, even as someone pushed me into the room toward the desk. For scariest occasions I don't wear my glasses; now I also flipped my eyes out of focus. Fuzzy cartoon papers materialized on the table in front of me. A pen leaped into my hand. The walls were a tangle of metal, glass, lights and flesh that whirred, clicked, flashed, and hurled bold questions in foreign languages. The floor shook so badly I could barely form a signature.

And that, more or less, was that. The day had the hurried, rancid flavor of a backstreet abortion or a high-stakes cockfight, and it left an imprint of deep personal shame. Apart from the bathroom request, I don't think I said anything at all on the Juarez trip. Mr. Rudin didn't try to talk either. The last time I laid eyes on him we were reentering L.A. from the airport. By then he was chatting a blue streak to the driver: traffic was bad, practically at a standstill (galloping hooves, the rush of wings). On the freeway, I stepped out of the car, closed the door politely behind me, and hitched a ride to Frank's.

By the time I got there Mr. Rudm had called and put a

negative spin on how I had gotten out on the freeway and disappeared into some stranger's car. Frank was so mad he seemed to have forgotten all about the divorce, so finally I said, Well, we're not married anymore, so I guess I can hitchhike if I want; which calmed him down and after a while everything was okay. Still, I was careful not to stay too long.

I was living, for the moment, in the crumbling, single-room coffeehouse formerly occupied by my brother Patrick and his family. My encyclopedias were stacked in boxes on the wooden floor and covered with a madras bedspread to make a table. Like the beach cabin of my early summers, this house too was on a cliff and it faced the sea.

Again I was without moorings in an unfamiliar world, but by then unfamiliarity had itself become the familiar, and the late sixties was unlike any other time. In the inflamed idealism of my generation, things almost made sense —pieces came together to form one vaguely comprehensible whole, and in response to it, fragments of myself were drawn together too, and the heavy numbness began to lift. Light and feeling flooded the dormant parts as they struggled to become one.

This new me celebrated spring and sought the center of each moment. I marched against the war in Vietnam, and sang new songs, and went wherever anyone was kind enough to invite me. Along the way I met writers, artists, rock stars, movie stars, revolutionaries, folksingers, and regular folks. I saw them all as teachers who awakened a vision of countless thousands of golden threads streaming, spinning, weaving through time and space, connecting all of humanity, creating a shimmering cloth, a fragment of Being, through which we could transcend our separate selves to touch an infinite whole.

If at times I was restless or lonely, I would also have said,

without knowing why, that these were among the most important days of my Hfe. Sounds of Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, the Mamas and the Papas, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen floated over the Malibu cliffs and mingled with wind chimes, and scents of sandalwood and marijuana. But when the people left and I was alone, my music was Mozart and Bach, Beethoven and Mahler, especially the slow movements. In Mozart I found all the perfection and purity I ever hoped existed.

With Roman Polanski and Sharon I went to Joshua Tree in the desert, to Big Sur on the northern coast, Paris, London, New York, Texas, and Acapulco. In Switzerland I visited with Yul and his family, and, with my first boyfriend after Frank, I explored Rome, Florence, and Naples.

When a random turn or two brought me more than once to the edge, I did not topple into the tangled mysteries below. But on that glassy threshold, the great strengths of my life pressed themselves into being—my illusive tools for survival, gifts from some primeval ancestor, passed in secret along the chain of my forebears. In the end, mine is a navigator's sense of place and the strength again to hoist the sails, the will again to catch the winds; and even when the land and all I ever loved are lost to me, and the stars are shrouded, and I am sore with losses, and afraid—even then, the miracles all around will leap to celebrate themselves, and I will celebrate them too. And even then, I'll trust that a new shore will rise to meet me, and there, in that new place, I will find new things to care about.

Martha's Vineyard had been a scene of my nightmares ever since "the boat trip," as Frank Sinatra always called it. But the Kanins loved the island and they were sure I would love it too. So when the time came for their annual fall visit, they were adamant that I come along. I woke up so hungover after a party in Malibu, where I was living, that I

almost missed our flight. For all her moxie, Ruth Gordon had to be the most skittish passenger on the airplane that day. I nursed my hangover as she clamped my arm painfully through the takeoff, turbulence, and landing in Boston.

At Logan Airport, an unimposing, white-mustached figure in a rumpled, blue-and-white striped seersucker suit bounded toward us with his arms outstretched. Nearly concealed behind the ample shape of Thornton Wilder hurried his dimmutive sister, Isabel, pressing a little straw hat into her brown curls. To spare Ruth a second plane trip, the Wilders were going to drive and ferry us to Martha's Vineyard. Isabel peered resolutely over the enormous steering wheel as she chattered away, bringing to mind a Disney chipmunk.

The four old friends shared a long and impressive history. Their pooled ingredients and delight in one other's company made a treat of the journey, which included a side trip to Quincy, where Ruth had spent her childhood, a lobster supper overlooking the harbor at Woods Hole, and the ferry ride across, in a wind of crying gulls, to the Vineyard. Inside the warm circle that seemed to hold them and now me so securely, their talk was of local characters, lobsters, and berry bushes; theater, from Sophocles to Strind-berg, the Broadway they'd loved and contributed to for forty years, roles I ought to play, and the merits of Shaw's St. Joan versus that of Anouilh; Thornton's winter visits to Vienna and Pans, Brecht, "dear Gertrude" (he meant Stein), and a recent, remarkable production of The Ring. Thornton told a story that still had the power to amuse all four, of Sigmund Freud's efforts to persuade young Thornton to marry his daughter, Anna.

Clearly, Dr. Freud was wasting his breath: I quickly realized that Thornton Wilder did things his own way. When the Kanins launched into a heartfelt lecture on the lunacy of their seventy-year-old pal driving around in a rattletrap relic of a Pontiac, and his insistence on picking up any

hitchhikers along the way, Thornton ignored them cheerfully, and pointedly changed the subject, while behind the big wheel, little Isabel shook her curls and sighed loudly, Dear, dear, dear.

Nonetheless, when confronted with something she did not know, Ruth always said, "I'll look it up in Thornton," for there was little to which Thornton Wilder had not given thought. He was a talker, and his words tumbled out like fast-popping corn. But equally, he was a listener: genuinely interested, enthusiastic, insightful, frank, affectionate, and wise. I was instantly nuts about him, and before the week was over he was referring to himself as "your Uncle Thornton," and "your old Thornyberry."

We spent the next day, a crisp autumn spectacular, poking around the island. By five or six that afternoon, although the average age of my companions must have been seventy, no one felt the least bit tired. Rather, it seemed we were under a spell when we left the paved road to follow a dirt track through dense pines and dappled emerald light, until the woods abruptly broke open onto a lake that wrapped widely around us on three sides. At the end of the track, on the point where we stood, a single, gray-shingled cottage was shuttered tightly against the silver stillness. A mile or so up the left shore, the sea danced in the day's last, low light. To our right, ducks bobbed obliviously in a sandy cove where pines and beach plums cast perfect, fringed refections. No breeze stirred the branches. Even Isabel fell silent.

"Imagine!" I cried. "Who could possibly live here?" It happened that nobody lived there. The place had been built by an Edgartown bishop as a summer cabin for his children, who had long ago grown up and left the island.

Two months later, while north winds clawed the frozen lake, shivering the pines, I stamped the snow off my shoes, turned the key in the stiff lock, and with a carton of ency-