I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (19 page)

“For God’s sake, Oscar,” Goddard said, “get the piano fixed. You can’t play that.”

“No, no,” Oscar said, “the Steinway people will take it from me, they gave me the piano, and I haven’t done a concert in years.”

“Get it tuned.”

“No, the tuner is a spy for Steinway.”

Not long afterward, Oscar went into an upscale mental facility for treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He called from there often with gossip about his fellow patients.

•   •   •

T
he houses on the beach side of the Colony opened right onto the white sand and the blue ocean. Lana Turner lived there, Jimmy Dunn from
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. Lots of big film people: Hal Ashby, my friend Susan Strasberg, Lee’s daughter, and Susan’s daughter, Jenny, by that wild actor Christopher Jones. Jenny, born with a defective heart. Ryan O’Neal lived on the beach and still does. Dorothy Malone lived on the beach side of the Colony, too. She had cast parties there all the time. Dorothy was a really nice, good lady. She had a long, mostly B-picture career and was a sun worshipper from the era when tall, blond, and tan won the guys.

Barbara Parkins was a nice girl and a nice actress. She had small features and dark hair that somehow blended into great beauty in front of the camera, like a miracle. Her close-ups literally took your breath away.

“Who is that?” I’d say.

“It’s that nice Barbara Parkins.”

Mia was a puzzle. She looked like Alice in Wonderland when I came on the show—an odd, lovely waif, there and not there at the same time.

“Was I good?” she asked once after a scene.

“How do I know?” I answered. “I was in the scene, not watching you.”

She was curious. Her agent kept telling her how great she was, and she wanted to know if he was right, if other people agreed. She brought her big deaf white cat to the makeup trailer. It was stifling inside because she insisted that the doors be closed so that the cat wouldn’t escape. But she also insisted that the cat not be on a leash or in a cage. Cats should be free, so the humans having their makeup and hair done with sweat streaming down their backs had to adjust. Soon after, Mia cut off all that lovely Alice in Wonderland hair. She showed up in the makeup trailer, like a beautiful haunted boy/girl, backing away into the corners because she’d made the front page.

“Allison cuts her hair off.”

This was the hot topic in every American household. And what did Frank think? Mia was engaged to Frank Sinatra at the time.
Peyton Place
not only survived the hair-cutting but made out on it. Pictures of the pale, shorn Mia with her fragile neck standing next to Frank Sinatra on his yacht appeared in every tabloid.

Mia, as I later came to find out, had polio when she was a child, in the years when it was regarded as “the plague.” All her siblings fled the house in Beverly Hills; her father, a well-known director, left. She was very sick, isolated in her home with her mother for almost a year. Mia’s adoption of multiple children, some blind or crippled, and her loving them into independent, kind adolescents came out of that period of isolation.

Her ambition had been to become a doctor. She went into acting
to help support her family after her father died. The impulse to cut her hair off, like Jo in
Little Women
, came from that core need to be herself, independent and strong, and break the image of Mia as Allison, the gentle romantic little girl from
Peyton Place
. And she did.

After my first season on
Peyton Place
, I was nominated for an Emmy. Entering the banquet hall, I was terrified a hand from the FBI would touch my shoulder, turn me in.

False identification, posing as a what? I remember walking across my first red carpet, wearing my first formal dress since high school, heart pounding with fear of being exposed: “This woman is an imposter; the real Lee Grant is un-American, blah, blah, blah.”

As I was standing backstage shaking, Frank Sinatra walked over to me. He was there with Mia. His eyes were a steady blue. He took my ice-cold hand in his warm one. He knew. Everything. And was on my side, and was saying
Cool it
without a word.

I’m so astonished these moments are still inside of me.

And I won. I won. From three nights a week
Peyton Place
could have gone to five. The line between the audience and the characters on the show was so fine. My character’s father died on a Friday. Saturday afternoon I drove into Santa Monica to buy shoes. I was trying them on when the clerk who was waiting on a lady nearby crept over to me.

“Excuse me,” he said. “That lady wants to know, isn’t today your father’s funeral?”

“Tell her,” I said, “that’s why I’m buying the shoes. I’m going to the cemetery right after I leave here.”

The lady, the clerk, and I nodded conspiratorially at one another and I left.

All those smart Hollywood people who knew all about me never spoke about it, but opened up homes, hearts, work, till
Shampoo
pushed me over the top. After three Oscar nominations I took home
the gold and another nomination to follow. Twelve good years, following the twelve bad ones.

Even so, I was becoming my own worst enemy as an actor, traumatized onstage and fixated on staying young so I could keep working in film.

A woman of a certain age does not play in movies or TV; we’re kicked to the side or out. And I was a woman of a certain age, terrified I’d be found out and unemployed again. Not by HUAC, but by plain old Hollywood standards for women on-screen. Plain old reality, too old.

Driving my Bentley down the Pacific Coast Highway, I heard on the radio: “. . . and today is the birthday of blah, blah, and Lee Grant.” I pulled over, breathing hard. They could find out my age! I drove home and told Joey. As a birthday gift that year, Joey called my publicist, Dale Olsen, and arranged to have my name and birth date removed from the celebrity birthday roster.

T
here was a break in the
Peyton Place
schedule, and I was offered a prestigious TV show back in New York: three one-act plays, three couples, written by Murray Schisgal, an outrageous comedy writer and playwright. Stanley Prager, an ex-blacklisted friend, was directing. Alan King, a terrific comic, was costarring. It was being shot in New York
.
I couldn’t wait to go back.

I showed up at the address given for the shoot. It wasn’t a studio, it was an apartment building on West 14th Street. The assistant director met me in the lobby, and we took the elevator up to the top floor, a penthouse, large, with three-sided views.

The play was set in a penthouse, but an actor rarely gets to work on location. It was both unnerving and exciting. I have a fear of heights that makes me dizzy even as I write this.

Alan was already there. I don’t remember if we arrived in makeup or if they had a makeup room in the apartment, but there was a “Let’s get a move on and shoot this thing” kind of energy that was coming from Alan and the two young producers.

We rehearsed two or three times with our director, old friend
Stanley Prager. He turned to the producers. They nodded; he said, “Okay, let’s shoot it.”

The scene was a bitter, funny argument between us on the terrace of our penthouse, where I, the wife, threaten to jump off if my husband doesn’t do what I want. The dialogue ends with something like:

Me:
“If you don’t stop, I’ll jump off this penthouse terrace!”

He:
“You think you’re scaring me? Go ahead, jump!”

Me:
“I mean it, I’m jumping off this roof—”

He:
“I dare you—go ahead—”

Me:
“I will!”

When I got to the point where my character actually jumps, I looked at my director and asked, “Where’s the studio?”

Stanley looked at the young producers, who walked toward me.

Producer 1: “There’s no studio, Lee, we’ve set up the jump here.”

Me: “Where?”

Producer 1: “Here. You jump to the terrace right below. You see, there’s a stagehand lying there as a protection between you and the street, and we’ve set up a mattress so you won’t hurt yourself landing.”

I looked over the side where they had set up the jump. The traffic on 14th Street swam below me. There was a large concrete balcony one floor down with a broken balustrade. A stagehand was stretched across the balustrade facing out, his long arms holding the base, his boots hooked into an opening on the other end. His chest and belly stretched across the space open to the sky and the curious birds. He turned his head to look at me. His eyes implored,
Be careful, my life is in your hands.

I looked back at the smiling producers, unbelieving. Stanley had his head averted from the balustrade; he, too, had a fear of heights.

“Look, Lee, be a good sport. Let’s get this shot, so we can all go home, okay? You don’t want to put all these people out of work, do you?” Gesturing to the crew.

I looked at the crew. They looked back at me.

I looked at Alan, an old pro, the question in his eyes:
So?

I would later film
Plaza Suite
, in which Walter Matthau crawled out a window and walked on a ledge outside. You don’t think Walter crawled out of the real Plaza, do you? This is done in a studio.

Me: “What if I hit that man and he falls? What if I fall?”

Producer 2: “Lee, we don’t have the budget to shoot in a studio. We’re television. There is no studio.”

I felt trapped.

“Set up the shot,” I said.

I climbed on the ledge, anger replacing fear, looked down at the distant cars moving on the street below, clear, not dizzy. I glanced at the stagehand, his knuckles white on the balustrade, his head buried in his arms.

Stanley whispered, “Action.” He couldn’t look. I turned to Alan for the cue.

“I really mean it,” I said.

“Go ahead, jump,” he said.

I focused on the mattresses way below and jumped.

The crew pulled me back up to the penthouse. They handled me with care. I waited. Grim.

“We could use another take, Lee.”

I felt so shut down and bitter and betrayed that I didn’t care. Two more times I jumped, carefully measuring the distance away from the stagehand, his neck red with strain. Both of us alone together.

It was a fuck-you jump. They pulled me back up and I left.

I took the next plane out, back to the safe sets of
Peyton Place
.

A
kind of elegant ex-actor, mixer in social scenes approached me about doing an hour-long TV program on Princess Grace in Monaco. Budd Schulberg was writing. Interesting. Budd had given names to the committee. He’d also written
On the Waterfront
, the great film Kazan directed. This was the project Kazan and Arthur Miller had shopped in Hollywood and been turned down because it seemed to favor the unions—and the studios were trying to strangle them.

Budd was a charming, worn-out guy. Very simpatico. We met on the way to the airport—we looked in each other’s eyes, saw the worlds apart in them, and kept our thoughts to ourselves.

I visited the castle, went through all the formalities. Castles are dreary old places. One thinks,
The upkeep, the upkeep.
We were taken to the royal living quarters—a comfy living room. Grace was welcoming, charming, stressed, and nervous—I asked her the questions Budd had written. The answers were formulaic and pleasant. Her posture was that of a girl whose mother had told her to sit straight.

After the first set of questions, while the camera was reloading, I spoke to her as one woman to another, one actress to another. Before
this choice to be princess, Grace had gone with my first theater boyfriend, Gene Lyons. Gene and I were together for two years; Grace and Gene were together for two years—and he was madly in love with her. She was a rich girl from Philly. Taking away the trappings, I said to her, “Why are you so cowered? What are you afraid of? Here’s a chance to talk about your life, your children, your husband—be open. You’re so closed off; the things you’re saying sound scripted. It’s boring.” She started to cry. The producer, who had been her friend in an earlier life, stepped in. “Am I boring?” she asked. “Am I boring? I don’t want to be.” I watched and wished the camera were rolling. There she was, our Grace, so vulnerable and appealing. The producer was furious.

On camera she relaxed more, was very charming, but revealed nothing. She saved the reality for the periods when the camera reloaded, and then she would really talk. She had no friends in Monaco, and the women in the royal families, those who were in the court, were very critical of her free and easy American style. She, at the time, was surrounded by sharp, mean critics. So she had to watch what she said at all times. Her husband, Prince Rainier? He had a lot of other interests, and she missed him. And he was sending her off that year to live in Paris by herself, because Stéphanie was going to start school there, and he felt the child needed her mother’s guiding hand. I said, “Well, Paris—you’ll be away from here, at least!” She said, “I spent time in Paris. I was never invited to dinner. I was never invited to anyone’s house, their home. The only time anyone asked me anywhere was to some big function, where they wanted me with the ribbon across my chest!”

While I was getting to know and care for Grace, Joey and Larry Hauben joined me in Monaco. I miss Larry Hauben more than any other of my dead friends. He was so fucking unique and smart. Talented and a total druggie. Larry won the Oscar for the screenplay of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

Larry and Joey took off for Rome, where Joey’s friend Cerro was the biggest and cuddliest coke dealer in town. They all stayed up at the Spanish Steps at the Hotel De La Ville, which had been my favorite hotel, and then went through literally mounds of white powder piled up on the coffee table. Joey and Larry understood Italian perfectly, though they didn’t speak a word of it, and had hours of heated discussions with Cerro and his friends. Larry slept upright in a closet, and they were both thrown out of the Vatican for lying on the marble floor in order to better view the Sistine Chapel. A boy’s life. All the while I stayed behind in Monaco.

The producer never spoke to me ever again.