Homesick (13 page)

Whenever I hear people mention casually that they haven’t been home to see their families in years, it’s as if they’re speaking another language. I still remember once, after breaking off one of my relationships, how eager I was to get back with Mama, to have the time to talk with her and have her listening ear; to have her make my favorite yellow cake with milk-chocolate icing and pecans on top, and let me know all was right with the world. What else is home for, if not comfort and consolation?

But I was starting to think about making a home in L.A., too. I’d been eyeing a historic West Hollywood building called La Fontaine, and when a flat came available that had been styled by Waldo Fernandez, a famous L.A. decorator, I jumped at it. It was chic and contemporary, like living in a sophisticated dream. The owner of the building, Alfredo de la Vega, lived next door; he was kind and paternal and endlessly gracious, always eager to look after me and offer help when I needed it.

Here in L.A. it was easier to come by like-minded young actors than in New York; my part of town was home to a lot of up-and-coming artists, writers, and other creative types, and before long my little crew of friends had become a genuine social circle, my building its own little village.

There was plenty of free time between auditions, so my friends and I had lots of opportunities for entertaining. We began throwing theme parties. One night I had a black-tie dinner party à la Noël Coward; we all dressed up and sat around the table reading one of his one-act plays aloud, and by the end of the evening I had a living room full of elegant couples dancing on chairs I’d borrowed from Alfredo’s basement. And one summer afternoon we had a Renoir picnic in the backyard. I’d always loved his painting
The Luncheon of the Boating Party,
a portrait of a nineteenth-century outdoor feast on a floating barge—a motley collection of marvelous people, thrown together for an afternoon’s enjoyment. So that day we became the Boating Party, or as close as we could manage, flowered hats and all, and drank wine and laughed as I practiced talking in my “new voice.”

One weekend, of course, the dream, like all good dreams, had to come to an end. While I was away on location in San Francisco, my landlord, Alfredo, was murdered. When I heard what had happened, I thought immediately:
The killer had walked right by my door.

I took Alfredo’s death hard; he’d always been so kind to me. I kept thinking back to a big dinner party I’d been preparing not long before, and of that sweet man offering to lend me some dishes. “Oh, just keep them when you’re done.” Being a proper Southern woman, of course, I said, “No, no, I couldn’t possibly”—and gave them back. After he died, I regretted it terribly. If I had only been gracious enough to accept Alfredo’s gift, I would have had something to remember him by.

In 1983 my agent, Steve Dontanville—who believed in me when I was a nobody, and still does, which is why he’s still my agent all these years later—got me an audition for a role on a new TV series, a drama called
Emerald Point N.A.S.
He gave me a few pages of the audition script sent over by the casting agent. But when I arrived at the audition, they gave me ten
new
pages to read—a part of the script I’d never seen.

Being too young and foolish to know any better, I figured I could pull it off. We’d done many cold readings back in Bob McAndrew’s classes. I asked for a few minutes to look over my lines, and then came out and sat before a stone-faced female casting agent and her assistant in the front row, with several of the show’s producers behind them. I started to read, but when I heard the panic in my own voice I stopped and asked if I could start over. The casting agent rolled her eyes, then snickered toward her assistant. I waited an eternity before she cast a baleful eye at me then recited the opening line, my signal to start over. Which I did. But her rudeness had shaken me, and my reading was dreadful. To no one’s surprise, the role—a femme fatale named Hilary Adams—went to someone else.

I ran out of that audition into a driving rain, found a phone booth, called a friend, sobbed about hating Hollywood and how much I wanted to move back to New York. But then the unexpected happened. When they started shooting the
Emerald Point
pilot, the actress they’d chosen to play Hilary bombed. The producers called me back, this time to read for a different casting agent—and this time I got the part.

The show lasted only one season, but it gave me my first major acting work, and while I was shooting it I met my first serious L.A. boyfriend, an actor. He had a place way up in Topanga Canyon, an Australian shepherd named Whisky, and a way of adding a sense of romantic adventure to everything we did.

Naturally, I took my beau home to meet my family. Everybody got along well, but this was the first time I’d been back home since getting my steady job on television, and to be honest it made the trip a little different. The kindest folks—family, close friends—were proud of me; I could have been eking out a living doing Ty-D-Bowl commercials and my folks would have been supportive—but of course there were others who were, well, more
reserved
in their congratulations. And then there were the people who couldn’t seem to separate me from what I was doing on-screen—a problem that’s dogged me ever since. Years later, when I was on
Sisters
, they’d come up to me and say, “I can’t believe you painted the word ‘slut’ on your sister’s new Porsche!” I’d smile and cock my head and try to explain to them that that wasn’t really me, but something in them couldn’t separate the two.

My actor boyfriend and I were together for about three years. I was crazy about him—so much so that I began to put my career on hold so I could travel with him. In truth, I can’t help feeling now that my small-town upbringing hampered my judgment—because I was convinced, I realize now, that I couldn’t be more successful than the man I was with. And while this man was a romantic figure, he was also something of a cipher—elusive, unavailable, at times passive-aggressive. Things began to sour between us when he went up to do some location work in Vancouver. I moved up there to be with him, to have the romantic experience of taking in a new city together. But after only a week he freaked out, complaining that he needed his space. I packed my bags and called a car to take me to the airport; on the way there I got the driver to give me a quick tour of the city—the tour I never got with my boyfriend.

I really thought the two of us would one day be married, but he was terrified of that kind of thing. I should have seen it coming, but it was only when we were thrown into such proximity that I saw just how afraid of commitment he really was. And I think it was also in that moment that I first began to realize how much the idea of having a family meant to me.

But knowing what you want and having the willpower to choose it don’t always go hand in hand. After this first Hollywood relationship, I became involved with another actor. (You’d think I would have learned my lesson!) Again, we were together for just over three years; again we had good times together. But once again I knew in my heart I shouldn’t give myself over to the wrong man—this one a tough, domineering figure who was still in search of himself. As much as I had accomplished on my own, I was still struggling with the emotional conflicts that come with Southern womanhood. It was hard to resist deferring to the will of strong men, no matter how unhappy that made me. Lingering memories of my upbringing told me that was the way things were supposed to be, even though I knew better. I got to the point where I was turning down roles, and was prepared to sacrifice my career if the man I loved demanded it.

What finally made me leave that relationship was the simple realization that he wasn’t cut out to be a husband and a father—not the husband I wanted to have kids with, anyway. Marriage? Children? Yes. Mark it down to boredom, the biological clock, or (as I believe) maturity, but I was in my early thirties, and the glittery novelty of the Hollywood life was starting to fade.

A big part of it, I’m sure, was that I was beginning to miss the friendships I had with women back home. Women like Jeanne Fort, whom I’d known since ninth grade, or my sorority suitemates from college, Ginger Drago, Connie Crutchfield, and Ann Hale. Women who’d been there to share stories, and laughter, and dreams—but who now were hundreds of miles away, and already started on families of their own.

It’s not that I lacked for female friends in L.A.; it’s that women in an aggressive, industry-driven culture like Hollywood often aren’t friends with each other in quite the same way.

For one thing, it’s hard for women who are in show business to be friends. Too often you’re competing for the same roles, which doesn’t always make for easy honesty in your relationships. I was once close to a well-known actor and his actress girlfriend, who is my age. After they married, though, his career took off like a rocket, and she eventually dropped me; it was the first time I really felt the sting of the unforgiving Hollywood food chain, and the distrust it can foster. Women can be each other’s worst enemies when they think their survival’s at stake (a lesson I should have learned back in high school Hell Week).

There’s just no substitute for the sublime pleasures of Southern girltalk. Pining away one rainy weekend in Meridian last year, I phoned my friends Becky and Liz and invited them over from Birmingham for a visit. We sat around the kitchen table at my sister-in-law Hallie’s place, and with the kids all upstairs playing, we opened a couple of bottles of red wine, kicked back, and started gabbing. When I walked in with the cheese and crackers, Becky was holding forth on the subject of marital discretion.

“Like I was saying, Sela, of course a woman’s got to be passionate with her husband. But at the same time, it would be totally inappropriate to sit down at the country club and talk about the private, intimate things that happen between you and your husband. You just don’t respect women who do that.”

“Well,” said Liz, “in my sewing group, people say things.”

“Your sewing group?” I said. “You sew?”

“Honey, nobody sews,” Liz replied. “We just talk.”

“That’s how my bunco group was,” said Hallie. (Bunco is a dice game Southern women adore.) “I was in it for eight years, but I finally decided I wasn’t going to sit around and talk about women who had breast implants when I was going to be one of ’em.”

Everybody hooted, and started telling stories about their adventures in cosmetic surgery. Becky barreled into an epic account of her post-childbirth liposuction “to take care of that little roll that just would not go away.”

“So I went into that doctor’s office in this hospital, and I was sitting in this cute little Louis XIV chair, and it was so lovely. Honey, I was going in style. It just felt good to be there,” Becky said.

“Then when I went in for surgery, it was this awful fluorescent light, and it was stark, and oooooh, you just don’t look good. No makeup, no nail polish, no anything. Just like God sent you into this world. Any wrong thing you’ve ever eaten in your life is there under bright lights for all the world to see.”

Becky took a big swallow of her wine, then started describing how the doctor—whom she knew socially—made marks on her abdomen to guide him in the surgery.

“I was just so mortified!” Becky said. “No makeup on! Buck-naked, with this man who is my neighbor, who I go to Christmas parties with, just marking up my body in front of my husband, who was there, and this good-looking intern, the nurse, and the scrub. Oh, it was horrid, and they were just jolly about it all. They got me up on the table and asked me what they could do for me, and I told them just to call Dr. Kevorkian because I can
take no more.
”

The rest of us were laughing so hard we nearly fell out of our chairs. When we caught our breath, Becky reassured us that the surgery had actually gone well, with few side effects—except for those stubborn markings. “I had a big old ’86’ on my left butt-cheek, all in black marker, for about a month,” Becky said.

“You know, I was open about my lipo with all my friends. But it put them in a real dilemma. Wouldn’t it be bad form to run a casserole over to somebody who just got out of the hospital for liposuction?”

“Oh, all my friends have had breast implants,” said Hallie, “and everybody’s running casseroles over to their houses when they come home from the hospital.”

“But don’t you see, when you have breast implants, you’re putting something on, so that’s okay,” Becky said. “With lipo, you’re taking something off. Running a casserole over is like taking a pack of Marlboros over to a smoker who just had a lung removed.”

We had some more wine, and talked about makeup, and our mamas, and our childhoods, and all the things that I rarely get to talk about so intimately in L.A. At one point the conversation turned to friends we know who have suffered from breast cancer, which prompted Liz to tell a story that, for me, represents what being a woman in the South is all about.

“Our friend Beth”—not her real name—“had finished her chemo, and she was getting ready to go into the hospital to have her breast removed,” Liz began. “She was supposed to go in at eleven, so at eight o’clock that morning, her best girlfriends all went over to her house and piled up in the bed with her, and we cried and laughed and just talked about fun times that we’d had.