I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (27 page)

O
ne sunny Malibu afternoon in 1975, the phone rang. I sat down at my little desk. It was the American Film Institute. They were forming their first-ever women’s directing workshop and wanted to know if I had any names to suggest. I did. Then I stopped for a moment. “Me,” I said.

There were about twelve women, including my friend Dyan Cannon, Lynne Littman, an editor, and another actress. “Do whatever you want to,” they said. “It will be on tape; we’ll supply you with a producer and a crew. A half hour in length.” I looked around. We were meeting in a room at the old American Film Institute in Westwood. Black and white marble floors, a curved marble staircase, lush, 1800s-style green grounds with secluded seating areas, even ponds and willows. I thought,
What period piece
could I use this place for?
I remembered seeing Anne Bancroft and Viveca Lindfors’s
The Stronger
, a Strindberg piece, at the Studio.

The play is a very rich, complex piece about two actresses meeting by chance in the Christmas season. I looked around me. I would turn the main room into a restaurant, filled with diners in 1800s costumes. Two musicians would be playing; two young women on violin and
cello. The staff would be running around, eager to please the diners coming and going. There would be a velvet settee in the lobby where one of the actresses would wait for someone. She would smoke. With the help of the AFI producers, my afternoon imaginings came to life.

One actress is celebrating her success onstage and reveling in her producer husband and adorable children. She talks incessantly. The other actress listens and smiles, she never speaks. She has a secret. Who is the stronger?

Joey called Andy Davis for camera. Andy has since made a huge name for himself as a director. I cast Susan Strasberg as my elegant and successful actress and Dolores Dorn, another Actors Studio actor, as my woman with a secret. They were both brilliant. I drew on all my Actors Studio actors for the maître d’, waitresses, and extras playing diners in this, my first entrance into directing.

The AFI awarded money to film in color. When Joey put out a call for crew, all the crew guys from the commercials he’d made volunteered. I had dolly pushers, crane and lighting guys; Burton Miller costumed, and the costume houses gave us all those grand period costumes for nothing. Everyone gave and gave. I even had Susan drive up to the establishment in a horse and carriage, with snow falling and a chorus of children singing old Christmas carols, before she made her entrance up the great restaurant’s marble staircase. I cast my dear friend director Clyde Ventura as the elegant maître d’, running up the staircase to greet Susan, playing a great theater artiste. An intimate scene took place in the mirrored powder room, with interruptions from strange ladies (of the period) entering and leaving.

It was magical.

Most of all, I could do it. I could dream something, take four typewritten pages of dialogue from a play, and create a world for actors to inhabit for a twenty-five-minute film.

A door was opening. If I walked through that door I might not
have to “depend on the kindness of strangers.” Not have to wait for some studio or network to call my agents, who would then call me. Not wait, as all actors do, for the telephone to ring. Of course I knew
The Stronger
was a one-time thing, shot over a weekend. Everyone wants to be a part of someone’s first step, first movie, and they help push you over the top. Joey produced. He didn’t know it then, but it would be the first in a long run of our working together. He producing, I directing, fighting over everything.

S
tu Rosenberg called. Stu was the director of the
Defenders
TV show, who had cast me in the series when I first got off the blacklist. Now he was directing a big film,
Voyage of the Damned
, with an international cast—Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, Ben Gazzara, Maria Schell, Malcolm McDowell, on and on, all wonderful, global actors. It was the story of the
St. Louis
, a ship that sailed out of Hamburg in 1939 carrying a thousand German Jews fleeing the death camps. The ship was refused admittance first in Havana, then in the United States by order of FDR, and was sent back to Germany, where most of the passengers perished. It’s a true story.

There was no script yet, but Stu said, “Take it—I promise you an Academy Award nomination.” “Well, okay!” I decided to get a permanent, since women in the 1930s had that look. What I didn’t know was that permanent solution, when applied to hair with bleach and dye in it, shrivels the hair into a frizzy mess. I was off on the wrong foot. My concentration went to how I looked through the whole film, making life for the director a burden he didn’t need, and for the cinematographer a pain in the ass.

The perks were Spain! Barcelona! The hotel! We brought everyone
with us. Milton Justice and I went first. Milton had come into our lives when I was doing
The Little Foxes
, starting as my assistant and remaining along for the ride as long as it lasted.

We were booked into the Ritz Hotel. The first night, Milton and I stayed in the king of Spain’s suite, running through the rooms like mad children. When Joey, the girls, and Sammy Reese arrived, we settled into a more sensible but still grand set of rooms that opened into one another.

We were in and out of one another’s rooms all the time. Sammy was an actor from the deep South who had written a wonderful terror movie that we were developing, and for which we had start-up money from a backer. I remember young Steven Spielberg reading the script in the kitchen of the Red House and looking up at me with puzzlement in his eyes. “Why? Why would you want to do this?” Waldo had the same reaction. I loved the script and I still do, bizarre, disturbing, and funny as it was, and is. I could see it come to life.

My make-believe family on
Voyage
consisted of Sam Wanamaker, who played my husband, and Lynne Frederick as my sixteen-year-old daughter.

When I landed at Barcelona Airport, I spotted a figure hiding behind a pillar. It was a blond woman, her head covered with a black scarf.

“Lee!” she whispered from her hiding place. It was Jan Sterling.

“What are you doing here? Why are you hiding?”

“Sam’s meeting me here. I just don’t know if his wife came with him!”

Jan and Sam Wanamaker had been lovers for years, and she had taken an apartment in Barcelona to be near him. By the end of filming, Lynne, the pretty young English girl who played our daughter, the girl every man on the film tried to get into bed, including our director, succumbed. To whom? Daddy. Sam Wanamaker.

The voyage takes place on an ocean liner. All of our filming took place aboard this big ship, in its casinos, ballrooms, four stories high. It was in dock most of the time, but for Sam’s attempted suicide scene, where he jumps the railing into the ocean, we sailed farther out. All of our dressing rooms were cabins on the boat. It was a self-contained world.

I hate being on water.

I’m trying to figure out why I became such an insecure diva on
Voyage of the Damned
. I remember buying a mood ring in Barcelona. I put it on before a scene to test myself. The ring turned black in response to my ice-cold hand. By the scene’s end the ring was bright blue in response to the heat that changed in my body as I worked.

Faye Dunaway was, at that time in her career, beyond beautiful. This was the film she made right before
Network
, for which she won an Academy Award. She was flawlessly beautiful. I was flawed. Put a flashlight on Faye and she’d look amazing. Not me. I needed the cameraman to look at me and light me.

I asked the DP, an Englishman named Billy Williams, with whom I would work many years later as a director, to meet me in the hotel restaurant on our day off. “I’m not beautiful,” I said to him. “I need some adjustment to the lights, an eye light, something that works for me, not for Faye.”

Billy was taken aback. I was playing a German Jewish woman running from the Nazis. My character wouldn’t give a damn what she looked like. But Lee Grant knew Hollywood. “Yeah, she’s a good actress, but she’s getting too old.” “Too old for the part.” And Lee was protecting herself. I would act the part, no problem, but if I wanted the next picture, I had to stay young—younger, anyway.

There is a scene in
Voyage
where my character sits in front of her makeup mirror and grimly, silently begins to cut her hair off down to
the scalp. I’ve lost my husband to suicide. In my mind, cutting my hair off is an act of Orthodox Jewish protocol before killing myself. I think the scene takes place after America has turned our boat away and we’re heading back to Germany. Faye enters, her character sees that I’ve lost my senses, and she does everything she can to bring me back from the edge.

Previously, when we’d read through the scene, I could hardly talk for the tears. Now, with the camera rolling, there were no tears, nothing. I was dry, grim, empty, cried out. Faye stood behind me and placed her hand on my shoulder. She was very still, but so intense that I could feel her heartbeat through my back—thump, thump—and the heat of her body. It stunned me. I looked at her reflection in the mirror. Nothing. Yet inside she was pulsating, giving off heat and heart. It meant a lot to me. She cared, and her performance took the scene in a different direction.

•   •   •

A
ll of us ate together, played together—German, English, American actors reveling in one another. At lunch I sat between Faye and Maria Schell. At night my whole gang went out with the film company. Günter Meisner, a German actor, became our friend. He would carry Belinda everywhere on his shoulders. Sammy, Dinah, and I climbed all the way to the top of the stairs of the Gaudí cathedral and we walked everywhere. All of Barcelona was in the piazza at two a.m., even children and babies. It was a partier’s paradise. One night, Joey and Michael Constantine, another American actor, got so loaded that they just lay down on the sidewalk leading to the hotel. They were so far gone, they couldn’t move. Dinah and I walked right over them and went back to our rooms. I had to work early the next day. I was in bed, churning, furious, when Joey burst into the room—“Blah, blah, blah.” Dinah and I put him in the shower with his clothes on—“Blah, blah,
blah.” He finally passed out. I was dying to push him off the bed. I showed up for work on three hours’ sleep.

Maria Schell was waiting for me in the ship’s dining room. “Lee,” she said, “I saw the dailies. You are right, you didn’t look too good!” I gasped and ran crying past the diners sitting at their tables. Past all the actors and our director. Stu caught up to me as I threw myself on my bed in the cabin. “What is it?” he said with genuine concern. “What happened?” As I sobbed out my anguish over my lighting, I could see his expression change. I could see myself in the mirror of his eyes, and I was ashamed.

Our last night in Barcelona, firecrackers began going off, and people ran shouting through the halls, laughing and singing. “What is it? What is it?” we asked. Franco had died, and we were all there to share in the celebration of a dictator’s end.

The cast and crew moved to London for the last few weeks of filming. We rented a cheery house in St. John’s Wood and stayed through Thanksgiving. There were eight of us for dinner—Luther Adler, Sammy, Milton, Dinah, Belinda, Joey, me, and another guest, the backer for Sammy’s movie. A really nice guy, with money, who announced while we were eating our turkey that he was pulling out. Sorry. No money for our movie. Really sorry. Our hearts fell to our bellies, where they joined the food. We all made polite conversation. We couldn’t look at one another. Sammy and I were sad.

Complicating my misery was the fact that I’d had several conversations with Kim Stanley about playing the lead in the film. Kim was an old friend and a truly great actress. She’d read the script and agreed to do it. We were all set for a great shoot. We had the money. The talent. Shortly after the backer pulled out, I got a call from Lucy Kroll. She was Kim’s agent, and had been mine briefly in the blacklist years. She was a good and smart lady. She said, “Lee, you can’t use Kim. You have to call and tell her so.”

“Why?”

“She’s an alcoholic, Lee. She’s just gone on the wagon. If she acts, she’ll drink again.” This from an agent who only benefits when her client works. We talked back and forth, me trying to reason with her, dissuade her, anything to work with Kim. I’d take her drunk or sober. Any way she wanted. I felt I could still save the film and find the money.

So now I called Kim. “We lost our backer, Kim.” She was teaching in Oregon somewhere. She was cool. “The minute we get the money to do this thing, I’ll call you.” Cool. She knew I’d spoken to Lucy. I felt terrible.

We spent our nights in London at the White Elephant, hanging out with the elegant West End actors. But the party was over. We all went home. Our luggage was a small mountain.

Just as Stu Rosenberg said, I was nominated for my fourth Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for
Voyage of the Damned
. I figured it was for shaving part of my head. It was the sympathy vote.

•   •   •

I
lost interest in acting almost the minute I realized I’d outlived my enemies. And when the fight went out of me, fear leaped back in. Fight or fear. I had always had a tendency to sabotage myself, to shoot myself in the foot and the head. Sometime after
Voyage of the Damned
, the fear of forgetting my lines started to interfere with my film work for the first time.

Up until then, the fear had limited itself to the stage. Now suddenly—and illogically, since everyone knows you can do another take if you go up, it’s no big deal—I became consumed by my fear. I didn’t tell Joey. I didn’t tell anyone. I knew I was dealing with illogic, or should I say ill-logic; the same old fear with a different face. Nameless Fear was back.

I was getting ready to do Neil Simon’s Chekhovian play
The Good Doctor
, a Broadway play he had adapted for TV. There was a good cast: Marsha Mason, who was married to Neil at the time; Richard Chamberlain, who would leave for London shortly afterward and make a name for himself playing Hamlet; and wonderful direction by Jack O’Brien, a talented theater guy who had directed great pieces on Broadway.

I was the haughty lady of the house. Marsha Mason was my servant, and I never stopped talking, demanding things from her. I loved the play and the part. I had all the lines. I hired a girl to go over lines with me for a week during rehearsal. With her, of course I knew them all; on set, the panic button would go off. There were no takes. The plays were being filmed in their entirety.

I asked for a diary and wrote out all my lines. I’d cleverly established the diary as my character’s account book for bills. The costume designer gave me a lorgnette on a silver chain that had belonged to his grandmother as a gift, which I used both the better to see the lines and as a perfect character device. Feeling protected, I even enjoyed myself.

But I knew that something was painting me into a corner, limiting my activity more and more. It wasn’t coming from the enemy outside; it was the enemy inside. Was I feeling guilty? Was it that I had said the names of those two women in front of the lawyers from the Committee? How could I stop the enemy inside me?

•   •   •

E
veryone in L.A. got loaded. It was cool. The more out of it you were, the cooler. Look at Dennis Hopper. After
Easy Rider
he was King of Cool. Crazy was even better. Close to the edge. I told you about the friends of Dinah who died on the Pacific Coast Highway, driving stoned at seventy miles an hour. Dinah wrote this in her diary:

DINAH

My friend

Who knows me

And still doesn’t mind

And likes my

Bad side

And prefers it to

Someone else’s

Good side

Even

I tore this coffee-stained page out of Dinah’s diary when she was about fifteen, maybe fourteen. It’s in a small silver frame in front of me, where I see it every day. It’s the truest barometer of friendship I’ve ever read, and the criteria for all my relationships, including with Dinah. I admire and respect and am in awe of Dinah, more than anyone else I know.

In adolescence, she didn’t show much aptitude for any salary-earning career. She got by in school with the minimum effort, as all the Malibu kids did. She and her girlfriends all had horses, which they would trot across the Pacific Coast Highway and tie up at the small Point Dume shopping center—Dinah wearing a colorful knit string bikini. At around fourteen, I lost my baby girl, my heart and soul. Everything I did was connected to caring for and raising my daughter, the one constant in my life. Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes your luck disappears for a while. My baby always made me laugh, and at every age she fascinated me and clung to me, until adolescence. The new adolescent Dinah was teary and rebellious and had access to drugs I had no real idea of—until she grew up and told me. Cloris Leachman’s
handsome and charming son Bryan was one of her partners in romance and drugs early on. They made a charismatic couple and, I later discovered, stole my sleeping pills. This wonderful boy died of an overdose.

Around eighteen, Dinah suddenly became interested in acting. I worked with her on
This Property Is Condemned
, a Tennessee Williams one-act, for her audition for the Actors Studio. Then came Marty Maraschino in
Grease
, then a running part in
Soap
, a hot TV series. Then the lead in Neil Simon’s play
I Ought to Be in Pictures
. She was accepted by the Studio and quickly hired by Robert Redford as the girl in
Ordinary People
who commits suicide.