I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (31 page)

I
did an awful movie,
Charlie Chan and the Curse of
the Dragon Queen
. But do you know who was in it? Peter Ustinov, Roddy McDowall, Rachel Roberts, Angie Dickinson, and the very young ingenue Michelle Pfeiffer. The prettiest, kindest, sweetest girl. At that time she and the young leading man were on a strict vegetarian diet. At lunch I could hear them discuss excitedly the change in their bowel movements.

It was a farce, of course, the highlight of which was getting to know Peter and getting to hang out with my friend Roddy.

Rachel had been married to Rex Harrison. She told a great story about him. He’d been up for his part in
Cleopatra
—the Liz Taylor, Richard Burton classic—and was expecting a call telling him whether he’d gotten the part from the director, Joseph Mankiewicz. He was fretting and walking up and down the room. Talking to himself, to her—“I need this part, I don’t need it, screw them all. Do you think I’ll get it?”—and on and on, when the phone rang. He picked it up. “Hello? Oh hello there, Joseph, how are you? Good. How’s the weather
in California? Eh?
Cleopatra
? When are you shooting, old boy? I hope I don’t have a conflict. Two months should be fine, yes. Shall I tell my agent to ring you in the morning? Lovely talking to you, Joseph, bye bye.” He clapped his hands together in triumph—“Hah!”—then proceeded to walk up and down the room again.

Rachel: “Rex, what’s wrong?”

Rex: “I’m not sure Joe Mankiewicz is the right director for this film.”

Rachel was madly in love with Rex. He’d left her for a beautiful, tall, fragile model. Rachel was drinking a lot. Inconsolable. It was Roddy who told me she’d committed suicide after the film, six months later.

Roddy had started in film as a child actor in the forties. He was the little frail boy in
How Green Was My Valley
—in black and white then. He grew up on the studio lot with all the other child actors—Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland. He asked nothing of anyone at the studios, maintained himself as a portrait photographer. He photographed all the stars in his life, with great insight. There are many photo books of the celebrities in Roddy’s life. I’m in one of his albums, an unpretty shot from
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
.

One afternoon, in the late nineties, the phone rang. I picked up.

“Lee, it’s Roddy.”

I started to say “Hi.”

Roddy said, “Lee, I’m dying, I have incurable cancer. I’m calling everyone I love to say good-bye.”

Silence. “Roddy, who is with you?”

“Stefanie.”

“Can I talk to her?”

Stefanie Powers got on the line. “It’s true, Lee.” I was dizzy and crying. I’m crying as I write this.
Gallant
is the word for Roddy. Gallant.

No one in Hollywood had the cachet that Roddy McDowall had. Roddy lived in a modest charming house in the Valley. Tycoons and talent drove to his house from Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Malibu for the privilege of sitting at his dinner table, which was large and round and seated about twelve to fourteen. I sat at that table across from Alan Ladd Jr., Guy McElwaine, Stefanie Powers, Dennis Hopper, Tina Sinatra, Johnny Depp, Roddy’s partner, of course, whose name I can’t remember, but whose caring heart for Roddy I do remember. Everyone became equal and real at his table, everyone had a story. No gossip. Like AA, it never left the table. Roddy was the secret keeper.

This mix of unreachable producers, heads of studios, agents, and talent filtered through Roddy’s quiet wisdom and came out simply folks, with stories and problems and pasts, raised and forgotten at Roddy’s table. After dinner he would take a Polaroid shot of us all. A reminder, I guess. He practiced kindness and gentility in a town that longed for both.

“I’m calling to say good-bye to everyone I love.” If he were calling everyone who loved him, he’d still be here.

We were in our second year at the magnificent Green House when everything suddenly started to fall apart. The roux dissolved in the salad dressing. Everything that had magically come together in California came apart as quickly. In Joey’s ever-busy mind, the sale of the new house would give us the money we needed to move back to New York. We’d start a company where I would direct and he could produce, as he had with the commercial company. We would move back to New York and start a new life. My third or fourth.

•   •   •

C
ouples broke up. Bernardo Segall, the dear friend who composed the theme for
The Stronger
, and his wife split. Bernardo’s wife left and took with her their nasty black cat. Bernardo was desperate. He
was being fired from his position as professor of music because of his age. I went to downtown L.A. to fight with the head of the university for Bernardo’s right to teach music at any age. We lost.

In Beverly Hills, the Yorkins were trying to work it out; Frances Lear was leaving Norman to establish a magazine in New York. Actor Tony Costello, who played the husband in
The Stronger
, died. It was AIDS, though we didn’t know the word then. Nancy Chambers left Everett. Mary Beth, my best friend, had split from Peter Yarrow and moved to New York, and the Friedlanders, Len and Jen, were separated. The Friedlanders had adopted James, the little boy brought to us by Dr. Stephen Youngberg in Thailand. Lenny took a small apartment in Venice. James went with him.

Joey was repainting the rooms in the Green House for the rich young tenants who had a year to decide whether or not to buy it. I was an actor butterfly turning into a director moth, neither one nor the other, jobless. Joey was thirty-seven; I was forty-seven.

I had always been the prestigious, sought-after leading lady on TV. Now I was the lawyer, defending the leading lady, or accusing the leading man. Supporting actor.

The magic was gone.

I was almost broke.

Only the Green House stood between me and the poorhouse. Joey knew that. He knew numbers. He had been fighting for the wall around the Green House not for artistic reasons, but for its future sale. He’d understood that from the first minute he’d planted those twigs in the ground, the twigs I’d made fun of, the twigs that were now thirty-foot-tall eucalyptuses.

I was stubborn; he was more stubborn, to the point where I got it.

This was life-and-death. We had a future or we didn’t. My instincts for saving myself kicked in. The water flooded in; I held on to the
rock, and the rock was Joey. The next rock would be working as a director.

•   •   •

H
arry Belafonte owned an apartment in a building on 74th Street and West End in Manhattan and was on the board. The apartments there were vast and comfortable. The Italian professors who leased it to us were going to Italy for a year to study goddesses and muses.

Harry and the board approved us. We had two months or so before we could move to New York, before our new apartment would be empty.

Joey slept in the second floor office while getting the Green House ready, and I asked Jenny Friedlander if I could share her apartment on the beach until Joey, Belinda, and I left for the East Coast. Dinah had a roommate in a small apartment on the Pacific Coast Highway. Belinda stayed with our friends Nanni, Harold, and their kids in Trancas Beach.

While the Green House was being prepared for the tenants, “the girl” went to her family in Wisconsin. But the cold in my belly stayed. I knew nothing would be the same. And the same malady that had struck all of our friends had struck Joey and me. We were in crisis.

It was an uncomfortable time. I was alone with Jenny, a young woman who was doing me a favor in letting me be her guest. We had one thing in common: We were both unhappy. Jenny and I had never been close, so we were awkward with each other.

In the middle of my stay with Jenny, my former stepson Mikey Manoff called. He was in L.A., could he visit?

Mikey had been sixteen or seventeen when Arnie died, still a boy. We’d been in Malibu about twelve years. So a young man knocked on
Jenny’s door and entered the apartment. I flashed on the three-year-old Mikey I’d been mother to, then Mikey at fifteen, when I’d left him, and tried to wrap my head around the fact that this tallish stranger was ever my kid.

He stayed about two weeks in L.A., I don’t know, with friends. He wanted to be a writer and showed me a screenplay he’d written about a mountaineer-slash-naturalist.

I was between lives.

Mikey needed a mom. His had died ten years before; he was on medication for depression and I don’t know what else.

I could feel his need, his yearning, his desperation.

I couldn’t recognize him.

Like Peter Pan’s mother with her new baby, I couldn’t open the window to Peter’s tapping.

Mikey was a familiar stranger, a man who looked like him, but shaved and smelled like a man, not a little boy.

•   •   •

J
oey left for our New York apartment, 300 West End Avenue on 74th Street.

The Vonzegizers who leased us the apartment went to Greece and Italy for a year to study “seated muses,” not standing ones—very specific. Their apartment was huge, comfy, and scholarly. Five bedrooms, ours with a fireplace and a four-poster bed, with windows in the back so there was light. The living room windows faced West End, but it was dark because the apartment was on the fourth floor. The elevator emptied right out into the foyer. No door, no doorbells.

The apartment was perfect. Good things and terrible things were happening within it. Everyone was scratchy. Joey was on edge till the couple in the Green House would decide whether to buy, so we could
buy an apartment with that money. Their decision might take a year. Nusski was tearing up mounds of toilet paper in the bathroom, bags of flour in the kitchen, every time we left the house. Belinda was sullen in her room, sneaking in snakes and frogs bought with her allowance, and refusing to do homework.

We had brought Trini to New York City as our housekeeper. Trini, from El Salvador, had been our housekeeper in the Green House in Malibu. She had five grown children she loved and missed, and they her. Trini was the only person Belinda trusted and would talk to. Trini didn’t speak a word of English, but that had never mattered. She had a great soul that spoke to me, and Belinda, and she knew and understood everything and everyone.

I was going through the motions, but had a big, cold, empty hole in my stomach and heart. I was unloved. Unloved by daughter Dinah, who was awash with life and love and career in L.A., too busy living for me. Unloved and resented by Belinda, and most sharply, unloved by Joey, still besotted, still reveling at his role in rescuing “the girl.”

“The girl” was still in Wisconsin, but calling, loving, a needy young friend. “When we go to work, we’ll call you,” I said, gritting my teeth.

The apartment came with a housekeeper. Big Erla, so named because her niece Little Erla would come and help her. (Little Erla has been with us for the last thirty years.) Big Erla would complain that Trini, our housekeeper from L.A., did nothing, that she had to do everything. This was true. We had a housekeeper for our housekeeper. Trini was in her late fifties, and we needed her moral support more than a clean bathtub.

This was a time when my father was finding legal avenues to force me to repay the $20,000 of my mother’s loan. Incredibly uncomfortable telephone conversations with him in his new adult facility on the
sands of Venice Beach: “Hello, dear, how are you?” “Good, Dad, what have you been up to?” No mention of the money ever.

I once saw a play on Broadway when I was a student. The set was a living room; a man and a woman were having a heated argument. Accidentally the actress hit a clay pot filled with earth and a green plant. It fell in the middle of the stage between them. They both ignored it, kept saying their lines. The whole audience was silently begging for the plant to be picked up. It was the best lesson I ever had on wrecking the fragile reality of acting onstage. All they had to do was pick up the damn pot. Use it.

That’s what the money my mother gave me was like. A potted plant in the middle of my father’s and my life. Ignored and growing into a tree.

•   •   •

J
oey had supervised the packing of all our furniture, knickknacks, and paintings and had them put in storage in L.A. All our rentals in New York were completely furnished.

That year, 1981, I’d finished two movies and two TV shows. Then I left to check out the apartment with Joey, leaving Belinda at the Lazy J Ranch Camp, the camp that Dinah had attended most summers.

Belinda loved California; she loved Disneyland. She’s like a fish in the ocean, and she loved the freedom of her life in Malibu. On the road outside the Green House there were many children on Zumeriz Drive, children of the pot growers and the old lady with the goat. The goat stood on the old lady’s roof. Belinda had made friends for life with the children of
my
friends for life. She refused to leave. Malibu was home, and she was not a city girl. Belinda hated me for prying her once again from the familiar, the known, her home.

That first winter in New York, Belinda was very angry. She was to remain so, in a secret place inside her, for a long time.

My father had moved to a retirement center, an elegant white apartment complex right on the beach. His sister-in-law, Sylvia, the one my mother used to be afraid of, had an apartment there. She was very social. It was a good move for him.

I still had not recognized his right to be paid back for the loan my mother had given me and had specifically forgiven in her will. We left for New York with the subject unresolved.

My father hired a lawyer over the loan. The situation escalated. Caught between guilt and resentment, I couldn’t breathe. I felt for him. He’d been an important and respected man in his worlds, first as director of the Bronx Y, then in East Rockaway, where he’d spent two decades on the town council. At the nursery school my mother was Miss Witia and he was Pop Abe. They were both loved and respected. Living with us he had felt rootless, resentful. He was still hurting from my mother’s illness and death, and he was lonely, casting around for a position of importance in my life.