I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (35 page)

D
efending Your Life
was the last good movie I acted in. Albert Brooks wrote it, and starred in it, and directed it, and handled all of us on set like a pro. And Rip Torn, Meryl Streep, and I were not an easy package.

Albert had been interestingly neurotic about showing me the script in the beginning. He had us meet first in the public park across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He introduced himself and walked me through the small green park for about half an hour. Telling me the story.

He was very intense, very quiet; he’d stop and look at me every once in a while to see if I got it. We walked to his car. He opened the trunk to give me the script. “When are you flying back?” he asked. (I’d been living in New York for almost ten years at that point.)

“Tomorrow.”

He thought a minute, then slammed the trunk full of scripts shut. “No, I can’t take a chance. Tell you what—I’ll mail the script to you express. You read it and mail it back to me the same day.”

Me: “Okay.”

“You promise? You’ll mail it right back? You won’t show it to anyone?”

Me: “Promise.” After I flew home there were several more calls of caution before the script arrived.

I could do it. I should do it, just to be on set with Meryl, whom I idolized. The problem was almost all my dialogue was courtroom speeches. Long, long pages of just me, talking on and on about Albert’s past life on earth and how he blew it.

I get dizzy now as I write this. I was dizzy with fear when I read it that I’d forget my lines. I have to take a deep breath writing about it, the panic is so palpable. The part was simple. Before—before the Neil Simon play, when I went up on my lines, when I was still a free actor—I would have jumped into the water, happy and free. Now I had to hide my self-doubt and fear and this fucking, ever-present tension.

I said yes, of course. Since I was basically in one place at my table in the courtroom, I could write out my lines in my law book and refer to them within the action. That relieved me. It made me more confident, I think that showed, and when I went in for the camera test, the DP, bored at the process, looked at me through the lens and got really interested. He liked what he saw in the camera. I could feel it, and that made me feel more secure.

Well, this cameraman saw something just slightly fuckable in his lens, and I could take a deep breath and relax.

And Meryl Streep. Meryl was “the pretty girl actress.” Usually “the pretty girl actress” in most comedy scripts written for the leading man has to be a little ditsy, young, pretty, have a great body, and either worship the leading man or play hard to get, giving him an objective, to try anything to get her to love him through the whole movie.

No, Meryl was brave casting. Her giant talent had to be diverted into a small piece of herself for this comedy.

Still, halfway through filming, Meryl burst into my trailer and leaned back against the door. “They want me sweeter!” she said in a hoarse whisper, and gritting her teeth, she ran back out. She, Meryl, was playing “the pretty girl actress.”

J
oey thinks it was around 1991 that we made our last assigned documentary for HBO. Sheila Nevins had given us the assignment on divorce. We called it
Love to Hate
. We headed to Houston, where we stumbled into Family Court to explore bias against women. The film became
Women on Trial
.

Houston, Texas, was where we found America’s worst domestic court system. Virginia Cotts was with me in Houston. I needed a strong partner for what we were uncovering there. I filmed four cases of women who’d had their children taken away from them and given to the fathers, in one case a father who hadn’t even asked for custody. In another case, a judge removed a five-year-old boy from his schoolteacher mother’s custody, would not permit her to see him for three years, and then for only a half-hour visit in the offices of a court-appointed psychologist. By the time the child was eight, his habits and manners reflected those of his rather violent cop father.

I interviewed two teenagers, brother and sister, who were given in custody, when they were small, to a father who hadn’t asked for custody. The judge ruled no visitation, no contact, between the mother
and her son and daughter. The mother erected a large billboard on the side of the road that her children passed on their way to school, telling them she, their grandma, and their grandpa loved them. The boy wrote to the judge many times, begging him to return him and his sister to his mother.

I interviewed this judge. He was pleasant, open, cooperative.

Me: “Why did you give custody to the father?”

Judge: “Any layperson could see she had mental problems.”

Me: “How?”

Judge: “She had severe mental problems.”

Me: “What about her son? He wrote you many letters asking you to return him and his sister to his mom.”

Judge: “Ah—he should be put in a mental institution.”

The power of life and death, which I think is what is involved in removing a child from its parent/mother, was in the hands of this judge.

I was appalled at the real lives of the women and children, whose lives were in free fall. There were villains; there were heroes. Rusty Hardin, the famous Texas lawyer, then an assistant district attorney, was helping me on the side. My hero. The fact that we’d caught the Family Court judges on film, that they would be exposed, filled me with a sense of triumph and hope.

The documentary revealing those crimes ran for a few nights on HBO before we were slapped with the first of five lawsuits. We were charged in Texas. The judge and the other people we exposed in the film sued HBO and our company, Joey’s and mine, for eighty million dollars. The judge had signed a release before and after we filmed, but that didn’t stop him.

Luckily, our personal lawyer, Arthur Jacobs, had persuaded HBO to indemnify me and Joe, our production company, and our crew
without a dollar limit, against claims that might be brought in any lawsuits. “Insurance, Arthur, talking about insurance is so boring,” I’d tell him. Thank God we had insurance. One case went on for ten years. It was a foregone conclusion that we would lose. HBO decided to never again show the film, and as it was their film, I could never show it again. Yes. That hurts. To have tried to convey the reality of what these women and children suffered, and then to have their one channel to the world outside denied them.

I was to learn from my attorney, Arthur Jacobs, who’d returned to Houston for the case, that the women had banded together for a vigil outside the Family Court building. The women had set up cots and slept on them all night, taking turns from one night to the next for fourteen months, in protest of the Family Court rulings.

•   •   •

N
ot long after the trial began in one of the lawsuits, the phone rang. It was the wife of one of the court-appointed psychologists. He was divorcing her, she said, and suing for custody of their eight-year-old daughter. Could I help? My heart sank. “I have no more tools, no more weapons, no more power,” I told her. “The bad guys won. And my best advice is, don’t let anyone know you contacted me.”

I kept in touch to give her moral if not active support. She called one evening, crying. Her daughter had gone to her husband, the psychologist. She lost in the same shameful system.

It took me back to when Dinah was two and a half and I left her with her father, with Arnie, while I did a play. I had no money, none. I had no choice but to take this job. My next new life depended on it. But the fear that he wouldn’t give her back to me was always there. The fear of losing her washed over me, sickened me, made me dizzy every day and night. Fear of Arnie’s power. One of the unwanted
thoughts I had when I heard of his death was that he could never take Dinah. So all these years later, when we told the stories of women having their children taken away from them, I found my old fears were still alive in me, and my old pain flared to connect with these utterly powerless mothers from Houston, Texas.

I
directed three TV movies in 1994, not happily. It was a life-changing year. I was directing material that made commercial sense but was not connected to my brain or to my heart in any deep way. When an actor works on an inconsequential job, they do their work and go home. A director is imprisoned within the project for the duration and responsible for everything in front of and behind the scenes. It’s an overwhelming job. When I was working on the projects that I was excited to bring to an audience, I couldn’t do enough, be enough. I was bathing in the experience. But in this one year, I was to do a very commercial film for our company, which was fine, but on the next two I was working for outside companies. So when I wound up in trouble and disconnected, which I was a lot of the time, I couldn’t take it out on Joey. He wasn’t there.

I was alone. I was a director for hire. And I wasn’t good at it. All of the outlets I had as an actor were gone; the emotion, the highs, the lows, the anger that had a place to go in acting was bottled up inside me as a director. I had to sit and take notes from well-meaning producers and network executives, people who were for the most part really simplistic. As an actor they wouldn’t have dared to approach me. As a
director, I was their girl, and replaceable. That world really suffocated me. There are people born with a certain kind of resilience, like poker players who hide their hands and play the game and manage to walk away from the table with the winnings. I’m not one of those people.

Seasons of the Heart
was the last happy experience I had with a TV movie that year. I was working with Joey producing. I was safe.

Reunion
was a stressful shoot for me. The director turned out to be kind of a fifth wheel on this production. It was Marlo’s baby, an outlet for pent-up passion, of which she’s always had a huge inner reservoir.

I felt frustrated. All the TV movies I’d directed had been conceived by me, or had been dramatizations of a documentary I’d desperately cared about bringing to a wider audience. I had a short fuse. I finished up the second movie and left to take on the third movie of that year,
Following Her Heart
, with Ann-Margret as the star. In Texas.

She is a real angel, eager as a child to explore and to please. I’d recruited a good cast, with good friends: Brenda Vaccaro, Scott Marlowe, and for Ann-Margret’s love interest—who else? George Segal, whom I had just finished directing in
Reunion
. Dougie Milson shot it. Everyone, including myself, rose above the material, but I had a big bad thorn in my side the entire time, and as I’m discovering as I write this, I don’t take orders easily. Ever since the blacklist and fighting to reestablish myself, I’m bad at being told what to do.

The producer running the show was attached not to the network, but to the Canadian deficit financier. She was young, nasal, ubiquitous, and, in every scene, would stand tapping her foot, looking at the watch on her wrist. “I’m gonna pull the plug,” she’d warn. “I’m gonna pull the plug.”

I’d get distracted, angry, want to throw her off the set, but it was her company’s set. Ann-Margret would ask, “Am I all right? Am I
doing something wrong? Is there anything you want to tell me to do?” Roger, her husband, was there protecting her. I couldn’t say, “Yeah, get rid of the yenta producer!”

The very last scene of the shoot—it was probably two a.m.—as we set up for the very last shot, the producer showed up. She tapped her foot, looked at her watch. “I’m gonna—” I jumped in, my arms outstretched in joy. “Pull the plug! Please, pull it.” I grabbed a plug with the cords attached and held it toward her. The crew picked up on it. “Pull the plug, pull the plug!” They clapped and danced. She stared at us, not amused. We were gasping with laughter and relief. We were tired and crazy, and this was good-bye after a long, tense month together. The producer stood her ground, her arms crossed, till we lit the last scene and shot it, and put our arms around one another, knowing we would never be part of this particular family again.

•   •   •

A
fter directing three TV movies in a row, I was exhausted. Our friend Dyson Lovell offered us his house in L.A. while he was in London, which gave us a chance to see sorely missed close friends.

One night I woke up, had to pee, walked across the bedroom, went up two steps to the bathroom, still half-asleep, started back to bed, and blacked out as I sensed my body hitting the wall on the other side of the bed. I opened my eyes to see Joey and two ambulance attendants looming over me. Our dear Dr. Derwin met us at the hospital. My heartbeat was irregular. Atrial fibrillation.

A very peculiar and frightening feeling. My heart was no longer the heart I had taken for granted and relied on, that had been a really great friend. Now it was literally failing me. Maybe the past year had been too much for both of us. Or maybe all of my life had been too tough on one little organ.

Back in New York, I heard of Marianne Legato, a doctor who
specialized in women’s heart problems. She became my doctor for everything, and she felt the only way to avoid big complications, since my heart refused to stay in rhythm, was to put in a pacemaker. In 1994 I was booked into Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights, where I’d gone to high school. Wires were put into my heart up to the left breastbone. The wires were attached to an oblong silver case, the pacemaker, which was placed in the cavity right below the collarbone.

That first operation hurt. Twenty years ago, pacemakers were man-sized, and mine felt like a big rock in my little shoulder space. I could feel it bang back and forth under my skin (that’s why Dr. Legato was so fervent about women’s medicine). Joey, who hates, hates hospitals, shaved
LEE
into his hair to make me laugh. I was in the Milstein Pavilion. The Milstein had a big charming room for guests and patients to hang out in. In the afternoon, a pianist played standards and light pop on the big black grand piano. Directly across from the music room, Sunny von Bülow lay in her room. I think she was there for sixteen years altogether. Fed, bathed, changed, never coming out of her coma. I wondered if she could hear the piano playing Cole Porter.

My room faced the Hudson. The window was big and had a window seat. I would sit there all day as I did in the window seat in our apartment on Riverside Drive when I was growing up. Watching the water, looking at the changing Jersey shoreline and traffic crossing the George Washington Bridge.

The year before, I’d gone to two heart doctors at Columbia Presbyterian. One was a South American who’d developed a new system for regulating heartbeat that was too complicated for me to understand. Mary Beth, a doctor’s daughter, was with me. “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked this charming doctor. “If it doesn’t work, eh—you die!” He laughed holding out his hands.

Dr. Mehmet Oz practiced at Columbia Presbyterian. Someone arranged for an appointment for Mary Beth and me. As we all now know,
Dr. Oz is God. He is as good as he is beautiful. He is also a great listener and sensitive to frightened women with scary hearts. He sealed the deal on the pacemaker.

I accept the process of aging by thinking of myself as a “former beauty.” But I am old in real years, and kept alive by this little clock inside me, this pacemaker that Dr. Schneller said is doing ninety percent of the beating of my heart, and he’s almost ready to put another inside me. That would be my third or fourth pacemaker—what a medical miracle.