I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (30 page)

D
eath makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself, and someone is going to have to deal with my death sooner or later. I know there is no escaping it, but I resent all the holes in my life, the disappearances of those I hold dear. Death is not fair. Just when you get it—when you finally say
aha!
—the game changes.

I was not at the bedsides of those who gave me life when their lives ended. My vulnerable mother, who had thyroid problems, was overdosed with iodine by an arrogant new doctor, which made her so radioactive, she couldn’t join us in a house in the snow at Christmas. Indeed, she wasn’t allowed downstairs to be with her nursery school children for weeks. Her regular doctor was away, vacationing in Florida. I sat on the steps of the old house and called him. “My mother is radioactive—how could this happen?” Over the next fifteen years the cancer spread to her bones. “What’s wrong with me?” she moaned as she wandered the house at night.

I flew to her too late. Too late to hold her, to comfort her, to tell her how much I loved her. I know she expected me to save her. She thought I had all the powers she’d dreamed of when I was in her belly. The powers she infused in me to the point that I, too, believed nothing
was impossible. I knew she was waiting for me to save her, and I knew I couldn’t save her, and that destroyed me. That she would reach for me, the way I did for her when I was drowning in chloroform on the cot in the Poconos.

The call came our last week of filming
Tell Me a Riddle
. I decided to take the red-eye to New York at midnight so I could finish the day’s shoot. I called my best friend Mary Beth back in New York and asked her to go to the hospital, to be there for my mother and my father. On the plane to New York I prayed my mother would still be alive when I got there.

I flashed on a memory of my Uncle Joe lying on a gurney, pushed up against a wall at Long Island Jewish Hospital. He had a blood clot in his leg. As we approached him, my mother and me, he fixed me with his eyes, desperate: “Get me out of here!” I was sixteen. My lawyer uncle was looking to me to save him. Did he think I had the power to save him?

Mary Beth had left Manhattan for Long Island at four in the morning and was sitting in the corner of the room when I ran in. My father sat facing my mother’s bed, his back to me. “I didn’t know I would miss her this much,” he whispered, bewildered, heartsick. My mother was gone, a frown of pain still visible between her eyes. Her lips were slightly apart.
Where is Lyova?
those lips said to me.
Lyova?
Standing in the middle of the room, I screamed and screamed and screamed.

She was laid out in a coffin in a neighborhood funeral parlor near her nursery school, where she had been the beloved of generations of little girls and their mothers for having infused in them a sense of their great talent and beauty.

Fremo was aghast at how the funeral people handled her sister’s hair and makeup. They had assumed she was a Long Island matron. She was not. We combed the curls out of her naturally straight white hair. She had always worn her hair in bangs like a schoolgirl. We wet
washcloths and rubbed off the pink rouge and lipstick. We powdered her white face. Fremo took out a red lipstick from her purse and carefully smoothed it over my mother’s mouth.

Do I think I might have made it in time to my mother’s bedside if I hadn’t been directing
Tell Me a Riddle
in San Francisco—the story of a dying woman, riddled with cancer? If I hadn’t waited to take an overnight plane, after I was done working?

•   •   •

A
fter my mother died, I asked my father to come and live with us. My father nursed a Polish intellectual Jewish contempt for Joey and clung to it fiercely. His sensibility, his intellect was confounded by the Italian working-class in-laws and being displaced as head of the household for the first time. He was a quiet, fierce man. Also, he was losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. We had seen the top eye doctor at Cedars of Lebanon. Nothing could be done. He had lost his wife, the only woman in his whole life, he was losing his eyesight, and he was living in a hated stranger’s house in a strange, unfamiliar location, far from home, with his anxious daughter.

Rachel, Joey’s mother, was also staying with us. She prepared Abe’s soft-boiled egg in the shell, just so, made him oatmeal, toast, jam, and tea every morning. He would walk with his cane down our road to the ocean and sit there on a fallen log with the neighbor’s dog. Then he’d walk back up for lunch, nap with his folded handkerchief over his ear, listen to the radio, and sit on the porch, where he and my mother used to sit facing the ocean when they visited.

•   •   •

A
month or so later, our accountant read us my mother’s will. In it, she forgave the debt I had been paying back, the loan she’d given us for the Green House.

When my father heard this, he insisted that I pay him the rest of the debt. I said, “That’s not what Mother wanted.” “Yes, she did.” And so we battled for years. Stubbornly. We never discussed the debt when I visited him, but it was there like a big hard lump between us. Both of us fighting for my mother, over my mother, each in our own stupid and unforgiving way.

At the same time, Joey was asking for recognition:
Look at me, respect me.
Abe was dismissive. He was punishing me because I was with a man he bristled at. He was only happy when he was with Dinah, who was now in her twenties, living on the Pacific Coast Highway in her own apartment. Dinah adored him. With her, he relaxed and joked, answered her complex philosophical questions. Her grandfather was very proud of her; she was the bright spot in his life. But the situation in the house was becoming intolerable. I couldn’t breathe and I felt bad for Joey; he didn’t deserve this. “Motel management, that’s what you should go into,” my father would say to Joey. “Motel management would suit you.” It was demeaning and cruel.

I don’t remember who discovered the hotel with residents close to my dad’s age on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, whether it was Dinah or me. I know when I passed it families were visiting on the porch facing the ocean. I went inside and saw the rooms, the common dining room. I drove straight to the Chateau Marmont and checked in. I was alone. I collapsed on the floor in tears, in pain, in guilt, in sorrow, in helplessness—a terrible racking regret.

I asked my own father if he would prefer a hotel to living with Joey and me. He jumped at the chance.

W
e were still living in the Green House when Joey became infatuated with another woman. It lasted more than two years, through our move to New York. First he felt protective of her; then he became hooked.

“The girl” was never a threat, which is what made her so threatening to our relationship, Joey’s and mine. I’d never had a hang-up about Joey bedding available girls when he traveled for commercials. Like a dog peeing on a lamppost.

That’s a mean metaphor. There’s also plain old heat, attraction. I had that, too. Occasionally on a film there was either an actor or a grip or a cameraman who flicked a switch in me, and I’d go into heat. I came to expect it as part of the process. It didn’t need to be acted on. What was reassuring was how quickly the switch shut off at a film’s end.

So his instincts told him not to mention his liaisons to me; mine told me not to mention mine to him. It was our agreement.

“The girl” was not a fling; she was a promise.

“The girl” was my assistant and helper when I worked on
The Willmar 8
and
Tell Me a Riddle
. She came into our lives while we
were editing
The
Willmar 8
in the editing room we’d set up in our garage at the Green House. At the same time, I was working on the Tillie Olsen script, which we were getting ready to shoot in San Francisco. And I was furious with Joey. He was stoned all the time. He demanded attention. He’d finished the Green House and he’d left the commercial business. His mother, Rachel, was with us, cooking, seeing to his every need, every whim.

Did I tell you this before?

I was explaining something incredibly important to me. It was around one in the morning, in our bedroom. We were both sitting on a bench. I was making my point, I was impassioned, when out of Joey’s mouth came a loud “Ma-a-a-a, Ma-a-a-a,” a braying sound, a mooing: “Ma-a-a-a.” Rachel appeared in the bedroom doorway in her nightgown.

“Wha’?”

“Gimme a sliced steak and cheese on toast!”

“With or without tomato?”

Me: “Are you crazy? Waking your mother in the middle of the night to make you a sandwich? Don’t do it, Rachel. Go back to sleep!”

Joey: “With.”

Rachel disappeared, padding her way downstairs to the kitchen.

So you see there was a certain inevitability about Joey getting his way most of the time.

“The girl” was breaking up with her boyfriend, who had been lecturing her on her faults; he was overbearing and jealous. She needed a sunny place to restore herself, to recover an image of herself that wasn’t stupid or awkward.

She basked in our approval. Joey basked in hers, and basked and basked. He could not stop basking. Whatever approval beams “the girl” gave off became light and breath for him.

Joey and I became her friends and advisors. “Don’t do that. Do this.” “Leave him, move in with us, we have a spare room!” She, drinking in our warmth, superiority, glamour, worldly experience, did what we told her to do: left the two-year relationship with the jealous boyfriend and moved in with us. Wrong move.

Joey, looking for an occupation after the Green House was built and slightly stoned much of the time, his value continually degraded by my father, turned his head to her, his lips slightly parted as they always are for pasta or steamed artichoke. Her neediness was a new, delicious drug.

One morning I woke up in the Green House, went out on the bedroom balcony, and saw Joey and “the girl” walking toward the beach, she explaining, he nodding, and my stomach fell out from under me.

Later, when he came back, he told me what “the girl” had been upset about. “She feels you’re cold to her. She turns to you, you’re older, experienced, she feels you’ve changed. What’s she done to deserve it?”

I wanted to kill her.

There was no sex. There was desire. Desire is much deadlier than sex. Constant unrequited desire, day and night. She ate it up. Who wouldn’t? Passion without guilt. How Catholic.

We were a threesome; she was a great friend. Young, looking for guidance, depending on this power couple for wisdom. Joey loved being looked up to, being needed, an advisor, not an adversary, not facing a fault-finder.

I was sick with emptiness, jealousy, and loss. Joey was doing his best to please us both, she and I. But I felt old and discarded and didn’t know what to do.

I accepted work that took me out of town, to Quebec and Toronto. Joey came to Toronto. The infatuation was over, he said. He didn’t
want to lose me. I wasn’t attracted to him. I couldn’t trust him. I walked and walked the gray streets of Toronto. I was totally unprepared for the pain.

I was in so much pain, I couldn’t take a deep breath. I was jealous of the two of them, my husband and “the girl.” But fatalistic. I had always liked her. I was the outsider; the romance was the real threat. They never slept together, and the tension of not going there made it even more romantic for Joey.

This was not just a Joey involvement. Wasn’t “the girl” starving for approval? For the glow that comes with adoration, especially after a cool, critical long-term relationship with her boyfriend? Wasn’t she opening and basking in Joey’s powerful sunshine? While I was crumply and mean and envious in the cold? Nuh nuh nuh nuh no!

I was bitter and morose and unable to take the knife out of my gut. I was achingly in love with my husband, sick in love, maybe for the first time. It hurt. Joey had a twin sister, Phyllis, whom he was close to, so having two women in orbit around him was normal for him.

N
atalie Cooper had been an acting student of mine at HB Studio in New York when I first started teaching. She was, a fascinating, gifted young gay woman. She’d written a screenplay called
Ohio Shuffle
, a fresh take on the relationship of three unrelated people, each of whom needs to escape a person or a danger. The three—two women and a man, total strangers—run away together. She had sent me her script to direct, and I was moving ahead with it.

Jill Clayburgh, who had just had a huge career breakthrough in
An Unmarried Woman
, had committed to play the lead. Mace Neufeld, a solid, respectable producer, was committed. Holly Hunter seemed the right choice for the other woman. The problem was casting the man, an innocent decent guy, a farmer. Stan Kamen called from William Morris. “Chris Walken,” he said. “Cast Chris Walken in the part and I’ll guarantee you the money.” Chris had just opened in a movie. My friend Mary Beth and I ran to see it. Chris is a monster, murdering people right and left. Big scary close-ups of big scary Chris Walken. Mary Beth and I looked at each other in horror. That guy playing my girls’ innocent farmer?

I called Stan. “Stan, no, omigod, he’s scary, no, no, all wrong.”

“Meet him!”

We arranged a meeting at the Green House. Chris was remote. I couldn’t ask him to read; he intimidated me. “Where were you born?”

“Queens.” He didn’t look at me. He gazed across the room into the distance, narrowing his eyes. I think I bored him. We had a few more awkward exchanges. He left, free at last.

I was relieved. I told Stan.

“Too bad,” he said. Wise Stan.

You know the story. I’d been given my chance. Two weeks later, Jill pulled out to do her husband David Rabe’s script,
I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can
. I felt abandoned and shocked at her betrayal. Mace Neufeld moved on to other projects. Meanwhile, I had turned down both the money to make the film and the best actor in the world. All right, one of the best actors, fascinating, always original Chris Walken. A year later I saw Chris on something on PBS, playing a character with all the sweetness and candor of my farmer in
Ohio Shuffle
. Did I learn my lesson? I’ve never learned my lesson. I’ve made similar mistakes in project after project and lost them because of it.