I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (22 page)

I
had an offer to play the leading man’s hovering, tightly wound sister in
Valley of the Dolls
. It had been a huge success as a book, as
Peyton Place
had been in its time. It made its writer, Jacqueline Susann, the most ubiquitous guest on TV interview shows of the day. The setting was Hollywood, steaming and corrupt; the “dolls” were the pills, shortly before drugs and cocaine became the norm. This was Patty Duke’s big career break as a grown-up after
The Miracle Worker
. She was to play the nice, innocent song and dance girl who swallows too many dolls and becomes an unbearable, relationship-wrecking, spoiled bitch, who literally ends up in the gutter after a night in a bar in San Francisco. Gay Heaven!

Just before filming was scheduled to start, I realized I’d missed a period, then two. Shooting was only a few weeks away, and I needed the money. I didn’t know where to go or who to ask about an abortion. Joey said one of his friends in Delaware knew a doctor. Afterward I’d fly back to Malibu, rest, and go to work. Dinah stayed with her friend Tootie.

Joey and I flew to Philadelphia, rented a car, and drove to the doctor’s house. I remember standing in a converted kitchen. A long
padded table was in front of me, the wall paint was old, yellow, the linoleum on the floor cracking, and the foot-pedaled garbage tin was overflowing. I felt liquid begin to trickle down the inside of my thigh. It was pee or blood. I sat nervously on the padded table while the doctor looked. It was blood. A protective pour, as it turned out. I had a New York physician check me into a nice sterile hospital to be cleaned out. I was not pregnant. The hospital doctor thought it was the hormone shots I’d been getting that screwed up the cycle. I stared at my skinny legs hanging over the hospital bed and thought about how lucky I was, and how interesting my body’s reaction, protecting itself immediately in response to my fear and horror of that room and that doctor.

The story of
Valley of the Dolls
skidding downhill to win the laughingstock prize of 1967 is legendary. It was an unbelievable, laugh-out-loud disaster. I remember coming back from my New York trip and watching the very young, very talented Patty Duke cavorting on the green lawn at Warner Bros. with Marty Mull, her love interest in the film, and my sweet girlfriend from
Peyton Place
, Barbara Parkins, actresses breathing the golden breath of success and impending superstardom, as if to say,
This is it, this is it. Don’t you wish you were me?

No. I was never that brave. Especially in Hollywood, I never wanted the leaden, overwhelming responsibility of carrying a film, or a budget.

How long is the life of a star? How long is the life of an actor? Longer. Longer is all I wanted. I wanted protection against the short life of Hollywood stardom. I was thirty-four when I landed back there, more than a decade after
Detective Story
. By Hollywood standards I was already over the hill. I was neurotic enough about this new life, post-blacklist, instinctively waiting for the hand on my shoulder telling me it was over, it had all been a bureaucratic mistake.

Or that I was no longer young enough or pretty enough for my next job. I was hungry to act, hungry to work, as hungry as a rabid dog.

Most of my scenes were with Sharon Tate—this was three years before her young life was cut down by the Manson family and her death became a grim part of Hollywood history. She was lovely in the part, the only one I really believed on-screen, including myself. She was shockingly beautiful, but she also had an element of victimhood that was right for the part. She sank like a woman drowning in her role. I never saw Roman Polanski; he was away working. Her companion and confidant during the film was Jay Sebring, on whom Warren Beatty’s character in
Shampoo
would be based years later.

The director of the film was Mark Robson, who was basically an editor. There is a scene, if I remember correctly, where I’m given the news that my brother’s sickness, Huntington’s chorea, is recurring. It meant his wife, Sharon, and I would lose him forever. He would have to live the rest of his life in a mental institution. I prepared for the scene and did it. The director tiptoed over to me with his stopwatch.

“You did that in three minutes, forty-two seconds. Do you think you can do it in two minutes and thirty seconds?”

“You want it shorter and faster?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m editing as we go along, and that’s the time I gave this scene.”

“Oh.”

One morning I did a scene with Sharon on a Monday that was a pickup of a scene we’d half finished on Friday. It was a scene that had called for emotion on Friday night, and it had to be carried over to Monday morning with the same feeling. After we’d filmed the scene, the director said he wanted to talk to me. He led me through the whole lot, past sets, trailers, till we climbed the stairs to his trailer.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“What?”

“You know, carry over that feeling from Friday and bring that same feeling on Monday?”

“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t a big deal. I’d found something real for me, and I could leave it Friday and find it again when I came back into the situation.”

“Yeah, but how?”

I looked at him to see if he meant it.

“It’s called acting,” I said. We left the trailer together and walked silently back to the set.

Years later I was invited to a fair-sized theater production of
Valley of the Dolls
. Everyone in it was gay. The lines were absolutely the same as in the film, and everyone played it straight, the way we did. It was foot-stompingly funny; as farce, it really worked. The whole audience knew every line. Maybe if John Waters, the writer-director of
Hairspray
, had had a shot at it . . . Who knows, but then it wouldn’t have been Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls
.

N
orman Jewison made my friend Hal Ashby a gift of
The Landlord
. He purchased it for Hal as his first directing job. I read it. I loved it. I wanted to be in it. No, Hal and Norman told me, I was too young for the part I wanted, which was already cast in their minds. Jessica Tandy would be perfect. I kept on reading it and realized I would be even better for it than I first thought. I knew this character. I was raised by this character. She was a perfect combination of my mother and my Aunt Fremo. With all the delicious self-delusion they shared. I found an old honey-colored mink hat somewhere and plopped it on my head for hair color. “Just let me read,” I begged Hal. “You don’t have to hire me.” When I arrived at Norman’s office, I pulled them into the hall and put myself and the mink hat under the fluorescent lights. “See, with a top light and yellow hair I can make the age.” And then I read the part and they got it. I brought my mother and Fremo to them in a character they’d never met before—fresh and different and ridiculous, and just right for this Long Island doyenne, mother to Beau Bridges.

Bridges is the landlord, who lives in his wealthy mother’s mansion on Long Island. He decides to buy a brownstone in Harlem, throw out
the black tenants, and redo it into his new home. Pearl Bailey lives on the second floor, Diana Sands on the third floor. Beau falls in love with a young black woman in the neighborhood and the tenants won’t move out.

My favorite and best scene was with Pearlie. My character arrives in a chauffeured limo to the brownstone, carrying rolls of curtain material to help her son, Beau, decorate his new place. I end up drunk in Pearl’s second-floor apartment. It’s a great scene. My favorite. Pearlie and I are the original odd couple. She gets me drunk, loaded, I confide in her, and when I finally leave her apartment, I pick up a coveted pork chop from her supper table and throw it into my handbag. Great? Outrageous?

Except. When we filmed the scene, before I could reach for the pork chop, Pearl had it. And she threw it into my purse. “Here you go, dahling, a little something for the ride home.” Scene completely stolen.

“Ha-a-a-a-l,” I bleated, like a kindergartner.

Hal wagged his finger at Pearl. I threw my own pork chop into my own bag. But she almost got away with it. Smiling, sparkling at her own daring.

After filming was finished, I invited everyone to a cast party. What I really wanted was to have a good sit-down visit with Hal all to myself. He had a new wife who was abnormally possessive and overwrought.

I had rented Walter Bernstein’s big old apartment on the Upper West Side. I decided to fry chicken legs and wings for the party. Hundreds of legs and wings, it seemed, as I threw them in to fry in the big dark kitchen. I had hired two Spanish-speaking women to help me. The oil splattered our faces and arms. I cut holes out of three paper bags, and we put them over our heads and lunged back and forth between stove and table for an hour, sweating inside the bags. We were a
Diane Arbus photograph. In the end it was a dud. Most of the cast had returned to L.A. already. Diana Sands and I sat on the couch and talked. The phone rang. It was Hal. “I can’t come.”

I could hear his new wife screaming in the background. “Hal, please, please.”

“She won’t let me.”

“What?”

“She’s going through something.”

I heard her sobs. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

Diana and I talked some more. We agreed that we hated Hal’s new wife and that she was a neurotic jealous bitch. Then we ate the awful fried chicken.

B
efore Dinah went off to Lazy J Ranch in Malibu, she pulled me into the bathroom at the Red House.

“Mommy,” she sniffled, “when I am going to get breasts?”

“Oh my baby!” I hugged my thirteen-year-old little girl to my body and we swayed back and forth. “Soon, soon.”

She kissed me and held me and clung to me. Dinah was my grail, my constant; nothing and no one could get between us. Dinah and my need to support her financially, morally, viscerally, and my rage at those who had taken twelve working, acting years from my life, were what motivated me.

Summer ended and Dinah, my lovely child, was back from Lazy J Ranch camp, which had nourished her lifelong love of horses—and her breasts. She returned from camp with two big round mounds and a preference for the company of studly Malibu boys and young men, instead of her mother. Also a predilection for drugs, and a full-blown case of adolescent rebellion that would continue for fifteen years. Yes, my Dinah morphed into a Malibu teen. It hit me hard. When other parents had said, “Wait till adolescence, just wait,” I felt sorry for them. That could never happen to me. Not to my Dinah.

The example I had set for her with Joey was hardly exemplary. In 37A, the Colony house, we were given our first grass by Bobby Walker and his wife, Elly. Bobby was Jennifer Jones’s son with Robert Walker. The bodies were piled high at their beach house. Everyone ate hash brownies. The dogs ate hash brownies—and dropped where they stood. It was mellow. They were beautiful and fun. The first time we smoked grass we lay on the couches in the living room of the Pool House. It was late afternoon. Dinah was eight and sleeping over at her friend Katie’s house. Joey said, “Give me a word to spell.” “Criminal.” He spelled it. “Exemplary.” He spelled it. “Fortitude.” He spelled it, and on into the evening. The thing was, Joey was and is dyslexic. He could not spell. Cannot spell. His brain does not compute letters. Which is fine. Except that afternoon, for two or three hours, something in his brain computed. His brain took a leap of faith and something miraculous—for Joey it certainly was—something really happened. Grass was beneficial. Not being a person who does things by halves, Joey threw himself wholeheartedly into weed, then as it became an ordinary party drug, cocaine, and to wash it all down, why not a little brandy? So it was not exactly a surprise that Dinah followed her parents’ cool example.

How often had she huddled against me as a child in the backseat of the Bentley, crying, as Joey was stopped on the Pacific Coast Highway by the Malibu cops for speeding or driving erratically? They knew the car by sight; they’d given Joey so many tickets that our Malibu judge would say, “C’mon, Joey—what did they get you on now?” Good-naturedly. So no, we were not exactly a shining example.

Those were mostly scary nights for me. I did my widow’s walk up and down the length of the Red House, angry, furious at Joey for not calling, fearing him dead at the bottom of Benedict Canyon. And of course the Bentley, maroon on top, black on the bottom, and in the old square classic style, was a moving target for the cops on the Pacific
Coast Highway. “Let’s get Joey!” And true to form, he would jump out of the car stomping and waving his arms like a crazy man refusing to say the alphabet, which with his dyslexia he couldn’t say right. Once he told them he had diabetes. They took him to the Malibu hospital and he was almost given a shot of insulin. That night he called and said, “I’m in jail for the night.”

I said, “Thank God,” and I slept soundly.

•   •   •

D
inah was a suntanned, bikini-clad, post-hippie Malibu girl. She and her girlfriends all had horses. They rode together on the beach. They rode their horses across the Pacific Coast Highway and up to the village market, where they tied them to hitching posts and hung out. They were all having sex with their high school boyfriends. They partied.

“What’s wrong with that, Mom? Huh, Mom?”

We had awful, screaming, crying fights all the time. Between the two of us. Between Dinah and Joey.

Joey and I were equally inept trying to cope with Dinah’s adolescence. We were all three at war—she rebelling in totally scary ways, we shocked and angry. The experience turned Joey into Eddie Carbone, the Italian longshoreman at the center of Arthur Miller’s play
A View from the Bridge
. Carbone is so protective of his orphaned niece that his hackles are raised when any other man is attracted to her physically. Joey had this innate Italian gorilla thing with all the boys that Dinah brought around who were hot for her. Joey could barely control himself from fighting them as they sat at the dining room table.

“Why’s your neck so thick?” he’d ask, watching as the boy would turn red. “No, tell me, why is your neck so thick?”

In all honesty, he had the same possessiveness with all his women:
his twin sister, Phyllis, me, then Dinah. I remember sitting around the table on 6th and Lincoln, the house in Wilmington where they were raised. Rachel, their mother, ran an open house—friends dropped in and hung out at any hour, any day. Phyllis’s date was there. Joey couldn’t sit still. His hackles rose like the hair on a wolf’s back.

“Where do you live? What do you do?”

Like the head of the house interrogating a street bum who’s turned up to ask for Phyllis’s hand. He was so over-the-top that it would make me laugh, and everybody else would yell at him. You know those dogs with the low growls at whom everyone shouts, “Stop it!” But Joey’s low growl didn’t stop. We three women were his possessions.

Dinah had moved out of her bedroom to the attic opposite the front door. All of a sudden skuzzy, revolting men, not boys, were driving up to the Red House bringing drugs to Dinah’s attic. I screamed them off the property, chasing them down the hill like a banshee, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s monkeys. “No, Dinah!” I screamed.

“They’re my friends!” she screamed back.

“Then leave!” I threatened. “Leave!”

And she did. She moved in with her high school boyfriend Richard’s mother, who worked in the principal’s office. Richard was a dear boy who spoke with the pure, slow, child-of-Malibu accent. His mother was a lovely down-to-earth woman. It was such a relief. Dinah and I were killing each other, inflicting real wounds. She was trying to rebirth herself, to break away from a powerful, needy, panicked mother. I was trying to pack her back inside me.

One night, while Joey and I were having dinner at Frank Pierson’s house, I got a phone call. Our Mercedes had been in a head-on collision. Dinah and two passengers were in the Malibu Medical Center. We left Frank’s house and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. As we neared the medical center, I recognized our Mercedes as it passed by, dangling above the tow truck. It had been totaled. I don’t need to
describe my panic. We were very lucky. Dinah had a broken wrist and ankle, so broken she had to be homeschooled for the rest of the year by a teacher sent out by the school system, but she was alive. The face of the boy who’d been sitting in the passenger seat was a bloody pulp, full of glass. I don’t remember whether it was her sophomore or senior year in high school. So many of the children Dinah grew up with lost their lives in car accidents on the Pacific Coast Highway. Dinah was stoned, of course. If she hadn’t been driving our Mercedes, we would have lost her. The Mercedes was a tank.

Because of my migraines, I rarely did more than a token toot or drag of grass, and I never drank. But for some reason, I totally accepted that Joey was just one of the boys. And he was. There were guys that did less than he did and there were guys and girls that did much, much more.

Every A-list actor and director hung out at Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas’s house in Benedict Canyon. You got stoned just opening the door. But great work was still being done. This was the seventies, the decade the best, the freshest, and the most daring and original American movies were ever made. Major studios took a backseat as entrepreneurial filmmakers, writers, and directors made history, and lots of money, too. And I was coming into my own.