I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (37 page)

When the heads of each department in the production company quit, the world stopped spinning and began to settle down. Those were the professionals. They all needed this job; they were leaving their paychecks and their own creations. It left Bruce and his new director without a crew.

Everyone but Bruce’s friend Salvio quit, from camera to food.
They all walked out. Went home. Left Wilmington, Delaware. Would not work for Bruce. Joey is still devastated. He felt betrayed and humiliated in front of his whole hometown.

I didn’t. Bruce was carrying the picture. He needed a hit to stay in the business. He was away from Demi, and I think he really needed a buddy/director, someone he could play with or chase girls with, a guy’s guy.

Bruce insisted that every piece of film be given to him, never to be seen. That was cruel for us. I liked the work a lot and wanted to finally edit what we had, to redo it with someone else. To prove how wrong he was—about me, about himself—especially for Joey, who was mortally wounded. We just didn’t have the kind of money it would take to fight this in court.

Then he made
Armageddon
and
The Sixth Sense
and became a huge star again.

Arnie Rifkin doesn’t represent Bruce anymore. I don’t know if Salvio is still a friend. We’ve all moved on. For Joey, what happens to a dream deferred?

It still hurts.

J
oey and I slunk back to New York, I shrunken and vague, he murderous. When we were back in New York, I received an offer from Lifetime, the TV channel for women. Run by women. The assignment was to do a documentary on women with breast cancer: their illness, their lives, their treatment. It was a piece of work that took me to emotional places I’d never been—a place I wanted to go and never wanted to go.

Our relationship with Lifetime marked our coming-of-age as a New York production company. We had arrived. When Joey negotiated the contract with Lifetime for their
Intimate Portrait
series, our company was launched into a multimillion-dollar deal. Before we were through, seven years later, we would have two floors of offices, three production teams running year-round, and more than twenty employees.

I would be interviewing old friends and introducing some of my heroes—Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan—to the Lifetime audience. I was being paid for talking to friends and strangers whom I’d been dying to get to really know and spend time with, and to ask them questions that one never asks in a living room, a good exploration of life, death, and work. We included the people important to
them and delivered a well-rounded, unexpected journey into their lives.

It was a great mix of work and family, Joey and I walking the twenty blocks to the office each day with our dog Dude. Joey’s sister, Phyllis, was living with us in New York City and working in the production office. Belinda worked as the office manager, bringing her new baby, Rachel, to the office each day. Rachel was a wonderful addition to the office, not bothered by the beehive of activity—we didn’t yet realize she was deaf. When we did, Belinda took her to Dr. Louis Cooper, a close family friend and the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who recommended cochlear implants. Today with the implants Rachel can choose what and who she cares to hear. Her ambition is to be a rock star.

As Blanche DuBois said, “Suddenly—there’s God—so quickly!”

•   •   •

S
ome years later I was sitting on the edge of my bed, absorbed in something on television. It was morning. I was still in my nightgown.

The bedroom door suddenly slammed open and Joey burst in.

“You’re sixty-five years old!” he yelled at me, barked at me.

I screamed and fell to the floor, covering my ears with my hands. “I am not,” I screamed, feeling faint.

“Yes you are!” An assault out of nowhere.

If ever I were to play Blanche DuBois, I had a private moment to draw on that nothing else could have given me.

Apparently my Social Security checks came due, plus the hefty pensions from the Directors Guild and others. The papers were sent to my money manager, Hersh Panitch. In order to receive payment, I had to sign papers acknowledging my age.

Hersh sat in L.A. with the papers for a day. Hersh is a sensitive man. Kind.

He called Dinah, whom he also represented. “Your mother is sixty-five,” he said. “Who is going to tell her?”

“Call Joey,” said Dinah. “I’m not telling her!”

So Joey, who has great sensitivity except where money is concerned, burst through the door and informed me, “You’re sixty-five years old!” The unacceptable was spoken. No year after that has been as hard to swallow or as difficult to accept. I signed the papers he held out to me.

Still, I’m not telling you the number, you can always look it up. I’m not well in that area and, of course, like Blanche DuBois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The protective magic flies away the minute I say the actual number. Like the Wicked Witch of the West when the pail of water is thrown at her. “Aaaaaaah,” she screams, and slowly dissolves as the steam rises from what had been her body.

I know. I can’t say it. Don’t say it—I could dissolve.

I look up to my big makeup mirror on my dressing table where I write these pages.

I’ve aged ten years. I’ve said too much.

•   •   •

Y
ears after my acting life, well into my documentary life,
American Masters
called. Could I get Sidney Poitier to agree to do a documentary on his life? “Please, Sidney,” I asked. “For you, Lee,” he said. We were old friends after all.

Sidney took us to the Bahamas, to Cat Island, where his father had been a tomato farmer.

Sidney’s story is the stuff of legends. From the Bahamas to Miami
as a boy, all alone, told to deliver goods to the back doors, to his astonishing breakthrough as a hot, black and brilliant movie star—Oscar winner. When we made
In the Heat of the Night
in 1967 the film couldn’t be shown in the South, because Sidney was the star and we were still living in a segregated society.

Leaving Cat Island, I understood where Sidney’s intense, proud morality came from. He wasn’t burdened as a boy by the horrors of the South or the bleakness of the North. A sense of freedom pervaded him, like a dancer, a romancer. An innocence, almost, that allowed him to react to prejudice and racism in a fresh way.

•   •   •

F
or Lifetime, I made a documentary about Mia Farrow. I shot her at home with all her children. It was an extraordinary experience. The deaf white cat she’d adopted on
Peyton Place
had morphed into many well-behaved, caring, remarkable children, some with physical disabilities, adopted by Mia.

Mia had polio as a little girl. She was treated as if she had the plague, as were all children with polio at that time. She was isolated for a year in her own home, with her mother and medical help and treasured visits through the window from her girlfriend next door. The experience left her with a calling to be a doctor, a yearning to be there for lonely, sick children like herself. Her passion as an ambassador for the United Nations was yet another extension of her family.

I’d finished the portrait of Mia Farrow’s family when we received an invitation to Liza Minnelli’s wedding to David Gest. Mia was a bridesmaid, so I figured that accounted for the invitation. I did not know the bride. I was a huge admirer of
The
Sterile Cuckoo
and
Cabaret
, both of them milestones, with great performances by Liza.

In the last couple of years, she’d had huge physical problems. I
remembered pictures of Liza in a wheelchair. Mia had mentioned how ill she’d been, that she had cared for Liza for a while. Now Liza, well and in love, was marrying her beau. The wedding took place at Marble Collegiate Church downtown. The streets were cordoned off. Crowds pushed in. Joan Collins, in purple, with matching lipstick and hat, pushed by me with her then-new husband. Paparazzi swarmed in, down the red carpets toward the stained glass windows. We took our seats on the side, seven rows from the altar; we could see Anthony Hopkins on the side in the first row. Little by little the huge church filled up. Dina Merrill and her husband sat next to us. The best man was Michael Jackson; the maid of honor was Elizabeth Taylor.

After a while, we realized we’d all been sitting there, waiting for the wedding to begin, for half an hour, maybe three quarters of an hour. Was Liza calling it off? The huge, well-dressed crowd was becoming restless, craning necks.

Suddenly Michael Jackson was onstage. Pale-faced, black-haired, in a dark blue glittering uniform of some kind. Did he sing? I don’t remember. A few tuxedoed men joined him. Was there background music? An organ?

The groom appeared onstage through the curtains. A short, flaccid, very pale fifty-something man, patting the dampness on his face and neck with a white handkerchief.

I saw Mia emerging from a door to the side of the stage. She was whispering to celebrities on the aisle. I got up and squeezed past knees and went down to her. She smiled, flapped her hand. “Elizabeth brought the wrong shoes. She’s sent her assistant back to the hotel to bring back the right shoes.”

“Which hotel?”

“The Plaza.”

“The Plaza on 60th and Fifth?” We were on 29th and Fifth.

Mia nodded.

“We’re holding the wedding until Elizabeth’s assistant makes it up to the Plaza and back in this traffic?”

Mia nodded again and moved on to other guests in other pews.

Well, we all waited in our pews for about an hour. Made best friends with the strangers sitting next to us. I spied Joy Behar and Steve, her boyfriend/partner, in the balcony. We waved and laughed and shrugged. It was a great non-wedding.

Eventually Elizabeth was helped onto the stage by her friend Michael Jackson. She was wearing a long dress, so no one could see her shoes, right or wrong.

The music began.

The bridesmaids, dressed in black net dresses, walked down the aisle, followed by the bride, I think in pale pink. All I remember after that was my stomach turning when Liza’s lips met her new husband’s, that pale fish head that emerged from the groom’s suit, with his full fish lips pursed for a kiss. Uch!

I looked over at Elizabeth. She and Michael were whispering to each other. They broke the mold, folks.

R
yan. I thought so much about Ryan O’Neal in the weeks after Farrah died.

Farrah’s own documentary about her fight to the death with spreading cancer ran on a network twice, and then she was shunted aside by the media because of the sudden death of Michael Jackson. I won’t even talk about the nature of celebrity in these times we live in. It only heightens the horror. I did a documentary on Farrah for Lifetime. Actually, a do-over documentary, because Farrah didn’t like the way she looked in the first one. And she was right.

Ryan was in it, of course. When I first knew Ryan in
Peyton Place
he was the prettiest, most charming, shining, funny, dearest boy ever made. His whole face said
Love me
, and we all did. At that time he was married to his first wife, who spent most of her time in Mexico, I think. He had a sweet red-haired brother he played with on the beach.

Maybe ten or twelve years ago, I went to a party in L.A. and Ryan was there. It was before I did the doc on Farrah; I hadn’t met her. Ryan sat down and chatted. Much time had passed, but it was easy to talk. Then I noticed Farrah was sitting on top of the black grand piano in front of us. She was swinging her golden legs and smiling her
red-bathing-suit smile. Her legs were bare. On her feet were white socks and blue Mary Jane shoes. Her dress had puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, and the skirt just cleared her panties. Ryan was quoted later in
Vanity Fair
saying sex with Farrah was the best and craziest of all his women. I flashed on Farrah that night—so crazy, so seductive, so kinky.

What I felt most during the time spent with Farrah was her desperation. You know that look long-distance runners have toward the end of a race, the stride, the push to make it to the finish line? The tendons in the neck, the pulling back of the flesh in the face, the gasping for air. The focus. The fear of not making it in time. The fear. The determination.

She was not sick then. But she was driven. She had an exerciser on her apartment’s little Juliet balcony. She wanted me to film her doing push-ups, to show how strong her body was. She was involved in a sculpture project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A sculptor was working on a stone replica of Farrah, which she reciprocated by doing one of him. She was focused, chipping, chipping away on a big piece of stone, an art difficult and fairly new to her. The piece belonged in a sculpture class, not a museum, but the fact that she was performing this concept in the Museum of Art was the triumph for her.

Everybody takes time before they commit to the camera, but especially actresses. We are facing who we are and our changing, aging faces, whether we have a future or only a past. The first time I filmed Farrah, she stayed in the bathroom for an hour before she came out into her apartment. The second time, the redo, we filmed in a private room in the lobby of her building. Everyone was there: all her people—hair, makeup, manager, publicity, all of us from Lifetime, executives, camera crews. Farrah could not leave her bathroom for three hours. She had Lifetime on the hook. Lifetime cannot air a documentary until its subject gives permission, and Farrah would not give permission.
She wouldn’t sign the release. So that hot day in the lobby she had us where she wanted us, waiting and wanting.

Privately I always thought there might be cocaine involved. Her little nose was pink and running. My own life in the bathrooms of L.A. was extensive. Everyone, including me, did coke in the bathroom, grass in the living room. As I waited for Farrah, I remembered the cast and crew of
Valley of the Dolls
waiting for Judy Garland to come out of her dressing room. She never did. The studio replaced her with Susan Hayward and the movie went on to become a gay icon.

The point is the mirror. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The wicked witch wanted to kill Snow White because she was younger and prettier. Actresses who once saw astonishing beauty reflected back to them, who were petted and imitated and fallen in love with and hunted and paparazzi’ed and offered jobs, jobs, jobs, are suddenly too old, out of fashion, has-beens, not hot. On the outside looking in.

In Europe beautiful women are allowed to grow old. Vanessa Redgrave, a genius actress, was also breathtakingly beautiful. Remember
Isadora
? But there was never any question of her acceptance of her aging beauty. There were no pictures in
Globe
ridiculing her wrinkles or her sagging neckline.

And the real beauties are the ones hurt most of all. The Elizabeth Taylors, the Ava Gardners, the Farrahs—the plastic surgery, the shots, the Michael Jackson syndrome, until the actress is a parody of herself, or can’t leave the dressing room to face the camera that once loved her.