I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (23 page)

C
arol Sobieski brought
The Neon Ceiling
to the Red House for me to read. The writing was beautiful. I thought of it as the first indie movie written for TV. I identified deeply with the woman she’d explored, a housewife with a twelve-year-old daughter, married to a dentist for whom she could do nothing right. Couldn’t look right, think right, talk right. I knew her cold. Frank Pierson was set to direct. Frank was a golden Hollywood writer:
Dog Day Afternoon
,
Cool Hand Luke
,
Presumed Innocent
. He was also a neighbor, in Trancas, one beach up from us in Malibu. He dropped off his rewrite of
Neon Ceiling
two nights before we were to start shooting. I read it. I didn’t sleep. I stayed up until agents stirred and I called mine, Jack Gilardi. I told him to come to the Red House. I couldn’t do the script. He called Frank, and they arrived together.

I told Frank, “I won’t play this woman. You’ve killed her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t recognize the character Carol wrote. I don’t recognize the marriage. In your draft the dentist is married to a spoiled neurotic who makes his life impossible—and is a rotten mother to boot! The whole insight into that relationship is blown! Who is that character?”

Frank: “Well, she’s based on my sister-in-law.”

“And you hate her?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, get some other actor to play your impossible bitchy sister-in-law, who makes life hell for her poor dentist husband!”

I felt that whatever bad times Frank had had with women had been completely imposed on a character written by a talented woman, containing revelations about her own life. Her insight didn’t come from observation; she’d been there, had lived it.

At some point I saw this awareness register in Frank’s eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I got it. Wrong script for my sister-in-law.” I breathed. He breathed. It was Frank’s first directing job. He could not have been more discerning or sensitive and was a true friend, for life.

We filmed
Neon Ceiling
deep in the desert. The scene when I, as an always inadequate wife and mother, take my wise twelve-year-old daughter and run away from home and husband was liberating.

It was, of course, the story of my life with Arnie and Dinah, which was why I fought so hard for Carol’s vision of her script. As I, as the character, drive away from home, a Bach chorus comes on the car radio, and my daughter and I sing along triumphantly as we head out on a new life, as unprepared as I had actually been when I left Arnie. We drive for hours into the desert. At the end of the day we spot a gas station. The gas station owner is Gig Young, who kindly gives a hungry, faint mother and her child a place to spend the night.

Gig, an elusive, charming Hollywood guy, a natural actor, was born for the part. The character, a loner who has this home-slash-gas station-slash-diner deep in nowhere, has created a fantastical ceiling out of all the old neon signs that used to exist: cocktails bubbling in different colors, motel signs flashing on and off. When it’s dark out and the regular lights are turned off and the neon lights are turned on, it’s his vision of magic, the world he wants to live in. Gig and I, both of
us hiders, hidden people, find a common soul in each other—much to the devastation of my twelve-year-old daughter, who’s developed her first romantic crush on Gig. Lovely?

I, as the character, spend my days in his rocker on the back porch, looking at hot desert. Sand and sky, nothing more. As happens with some film or theater experiences, the desert went from city-dweller boring, incomprehensible, to seductive, fresh. The scent of the sand, of dry heat, the shimmer, the light, the calm entered me. My eyes opened to the way artists saw this endless, changing, subtle, powerful life-scape.

At lunchtime, a group of thirty or forty dark shapes stood on the dunes against the sky, watching us eat. They were Sioux Indians. Their leader, a fortyish woman, Louise, came to our caterer and asked that the tribe be given our leftovers to take back to their families. She was firm. She did not want garbage, but food that was untouched, food the cast and crew could not stuff into themselves, food that had not yet been put on plates. Virgin food. Our producer agreed, and so it was that the Sioux became a part of our new lives in Pearblossom, California.

Louise became a friend. It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten how that group of Sioux ended up in the desert, but it was clear that life for them there was hard and unsustaining. I had dinners with Louise and her husband in their cabin. She was elegant and proud; when shooting was over, she gave me one of her poodle’s pups. Nusski, she told me to call him, Sioux for something. Noble? Dog with Soul? Nusski was all that.

I took him into the limo that would drive us home, his warm, plump, silver-haired body lying on my chest all the way to the Red House in Malibu, inhaling his sweet puppy smell.

Nusski was a great, great friend till he died, twelve years later, after we’d moved back to New York. Like the Sioux woman who gave
him to me, kind, loving, full of valor. I cherish his memory and miss him always.

And Gig Young, a decade after
The Neon Ceiling
, killed his twenty-one-year-old wife and himself. Despair, I thought. That great sadness of Gig himself, which he covered with such great charm in
Neon Ceiling
. Despair and desperation.

I
have heard that Ernie Lehman wrote in his autobiography that Lee Grant threw him off his own set. Yes. While directing his own script of
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Ernie turned into a cross between Cecil B. DeMille and Caligula.

The first clue came when I met him about the part of Portnoy’s mother. Portnoy was played by Dick Benjamin. I learned at the time that my rival for the part was Elaine May, my remarkably talented friend. I know she would have handled the situation differently, particularly since the first words out of Ernie’s mouth as we crossed a soundstage were, “I’ve got things on Mike Nichols, locked up in my safe.”

Huh? “But
Virginia Woolf
was brilliant!” I replied. “Your screenplay, his direction, the performances?”

“Never mind, I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do!”

Mike had directed me in
Plaza Suite
and become a friend. His talent was legendary, and he needed no defending from anyone.

As a matter of fact, Ernie’s talent was pretty up there also. He’d written
North by Northwest
for Hitchcock and many other first-rate
films. But the man I was meeting for the first time was an angry, small man with his neck pushed forward.

He showed up on the first day of shooting, on his first director’s job, dressed in pale linen, dark glasses, and an ascot. When he called “Action!” he would fall to his knees and demand that padding be slid under his knees as he fell. Since he never fell in the same place twice, as the scenes progressed, the unhappy wretch with the padding would be gliding around trying to guess where Ernie would land next. If Ernie landed on his linen-covered knees, the poor stagehand wouldn’t hear the indignant end of it. So, from the first day of shooting we all understood the main drama was going to be behind the camera, not in front of it.

In a dinner scene, the glasses placed in front of us were filled with red wine. We toasted—to God, or something—but the glasses at our places were water glasses, tall water glasses. Dick Benjamin suggested we exchange them for wineglasses, like real people drink from. Ernie walked back and forth, thinking about it, then asked for the storyboard on the scene. The storyboard artist had indicated “water glasses on the table.”

“No, these are the right glasses,” Ernie said. “They’re right here on the storyboard.”

Dick and I looked at each other and sipped wine from our water glasses.

Later in the scene, I toasted my son, my eyes full of tears.

“Cut! Cut!”

We turned to our director.

“Lee, your voice sounded funny. You know, thick . . .”

“I was moved, Ernie,” I said.

“Moved?”

“Never mind, Ernie. Let’s do it again, my voice will be clear.”

The last week of the shoot had an important hospital scene. I, Mrs. Portnoy, would age from forty to eighty, the character was now old and sick, sharing a room with another woman patient. My son comes to visit me; I’m lying in bed in my hospital gown. To convey my age and condition, I’d worn a lot of padding and wigs throughout the film, and for this scene, I’d chosen a big brassiere and filled it with birdseed, so it seemed like my breasts were falling on either side of me, like I’d seen on older, heavy-breasted women. The other woman in the room was played by an experienced Actors Studio actress, who had one line to say to me before my son entered the room. I don’t remember her line, but it was something like “So, your son’s coming to visit you. I’ll bet you can’t wait—blah, blah.” Innocuous. Ernie, now standing, no longer falling to his knees, had found his target. The actress read the line this way and that way.

“Cut! Cut!” he’d scream. “Can’t you do anything right?”

He screamed at her until she could no longer put the words together; they made no sense to her. This went on for an hour, leaving the big scene between me and my son dangling.

“Action!” he screamed every two minutes, pointing at her.

Suddenly I jumped out of my bed, in my hospital gown, my long birdseed breasts flopping against my ribs, my panty-hosed backside exposed.

“Stop it, stop it,” I screamed at Ernie. “You’re torturing her to death, you little shit. She’s a good actress! Look what you’ve done to her!”

The actress had tears running down her face. She literally could not put two words together by then.

“Get out of here!” I shrieked. “Go to the camera trailer and direct from there. Dick and I will do the scene without her line!”

Ernie looked around at the crew. They were silent.

“Go!” I pointed to the door, like an old Eloise.

He left. Dick and I filmed the scene, and Ernie stayed in the camera truck that day.

Everyone in this business knows that a problem with a line on set can be fixed in postproduction. Ernie Lehman was playing Erich von Stroheim, reveling in sudden power. Viewing
Portnoy’s Complaint
in the theater for the first (and last) time made me shrink back in horror. It was not a good reflection of Jewish family life. Maybe Ernie’s rage at Mike Nichols made him treat actors exactly opposite of how Mike does.

One more side note to
Portnoy
. Karen Black played the Monkey in the film—the crazy-beautiful model Dick Benjamin has an affair with. Karen had already done
Five Easy Pieces
and many more first-rate films. She was a big talent. We were going to the same parties around that time. Karen had a baby, a little boy, almost a toddler, whom she breast-fed at the parties. She wore satin nightgowny dresses, very glamorous, very alluring. She would lower one satin shoulder strap to reveal a charming breast, which in due time she would bring to the baby’s mouth. Her conversation had nothing to do with the breast or baby, it had to do with the universe, philosophy, things on a higher plane. I had totally missed the whole hippie thing, but I thought,
What an innocent but provocative way to be really sexy and stand out in a crowd at a big party.

T
here were good angels all over L.A. who were giving me work in every other thing they produced or directed. Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, who created
All in the Family
and
Maude
; George Schlatter, the creator of
Laugh-In
. We became dinner party friends. Joey and I would drive in from Malibu to Norman’s or to Bud’s and George would be there, a larger-than-life, over-the-top laugher with a big heart and a beautiful wife.

So, George Schlatter called. We were in the Red House; I was reading a script on the bed.

“Lee, I’m putting an all-woman comedy show on TV: Joan Rivers, Lynn Redgrave, Brenda Vaccaro, songs, sketches. You want to join us?”

“Sure, are you kidding? Great.”

“And I want you to direct it.”

I sat up in bed.

“I have someone to do camera, but I need you to work on staging the sketches.”

A little pang of fear went through me.

“Jeez, George. I’ve never directed anything. This is a big deal. I don’t feel up to it.”

I felt intimidated, in a hole, trying to live up to a professional position that I had no experience or talent for. I’d acted in comedy sketches on TV directed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear with Dick Van Dyke. Those guys knew what they were doing, and they were fast, on top of everything. This was way too big for me to handle.

George had me go into the office to meet the writers, hear the material, and meet my codirector, Carolyn Raskin, the woman who would direct the multiple cameras from the control room the day of the shoot. George Schlatter is the warmest, funniest fast-talker, pushing all my “But George’s” aside and, without ever saying yes, I found myself directing a huge TV comedy special,
The Shape of Things
, with all women in 1973. George is a feminist.

I expressed my nervousness to a friend, a very good actress at the Actors Studio, and she recommended her psychiatrist, who was terrific with her “fears and doubts,” she said. I made an appointment.

It was the period of the Nixon break-in. The whole liberal community was suddenly free to make fun of a hidden Nixonian plot to subvert the justice system. A lot of the sketches were related to that, as in
Laugh-In
. George is a great rule-breaker, in the best way.

So that was fun. We had something like a two-week rehearsal schedule and a long day’s shoot, as I remember, in which the camera director, Carolyn, took over. Lynn Redgrave, Brenda Vaccaro, Phyllis Diller, and I sang a song in little Dutch Girl costumes: a grand Watergate number from the viewpoint of Mrs. Haldeman, Mrs. Ehrlichman, Mrs. Mitchell, and Mrs. Dean. Funny. Joan Rivers had her own material.

The whole show was a very important experience for me. The real Nixon presidency had been giving me Cassandra tremors of misfortune to come for years, that funny old “Can’t anybody but me see that
Nixon is subverting the justice system?” feeling. The openness of the whole event, easily combining politics and entertainment and directed at the wide TV audience, was very reassuring politically, relaxed a lot of my instinct to hide, to protect myself.

Brenda Vaccaro took it upon herself to veer from our candyish white formal dresses, went to her own designer, and wore a clingy violet half-naked number. She sang a solo to a huge athlete in her husky voice and won herself an Emmy.

During lunch hour, I was running to my new psychiatrist to express the fears and conflicts I had about this new responsibility. To get to his office on time, I had to skip lunch and drive from the studio in the Valley to his office in Beverly Hills, a drive of ten to fifteen minutes depending on the traffic. The doctor had a small, dark waiting room that contained only one person at a time. The door to the doctor’s office was locked. He would have to open it to admit you to his large windowed room.

The first half hour of our session was always spent with him remonstrating over my lack of respect for him, and me apologizing for being late, explaining once again that I was working a new job as a director that didn’t permit me to take off early, and that’s why I was meeting with him—because I was insecure in that job.

We developed a routine in which he always found me disrespectful and I was always trying to please him. I realize writing this that it carries echoes of my first marriage. My actual image of his office is him sitting in his big armchair, me sitting on his footstool, explaining, explaining, to his offended face.

So the problem became not about my insecurity at work, but my inability to ever please this shrink.

One lunch hour I arrived at his office, sat in his waiting room for half an hour, tried the locked door to his office, knocked on the door, no sound inside, knocked again, listened. I knew the office was empty.

I ran downstairs and called him at home from the drugstore. He picked up the phone right away. “This is what you get when you’re late—la la la.” I found my car, climbed in, and burst into tears, loud kid sobs, openmouthed, snotty, spitty, deep-throated.

Later, he sent me a bill for the hour.

How was the show? Good, I think.

Did I pay the bill? You’ve got to be kidding!