I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (38 page)

I
n the blacklist days I’d had a swooning romance with Burt Bacharach.

Alan Foshko took me to the Apollo in Harlem. I’d cut my hair short, like a boy, I wore a sweater, a tight skirt, and heeled shoes with a d’Orsay cut. No stockings.

Foshko said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

We walked in the half-light to the side of the theater over the flowered maroon carpet. Foshko knocked on the door to the side of the stage. A young guy came down two carpeted steps. He was half in the dark, the half-light hit him . . .

“This is Burt Bacharach,” Foshko said, and my knees went weak.

Burt came toward me and stopped.

“I’m recording tomorrow night; you wanna come?”

Tick-tock.

“Yes.”

I showed up at the recording studio. Burt was recording “Walk On By” with Dionne Warwick. Young Dionne, young Burt, young me, the youngest I had ever been.

Burt conducted the orchestra, forcefully, ecstatically; Dionne sang. I was listening to, vibrating to, music that was sensation, holding on to the sides of my chair. Whoosh.

It was the spring of 1963 maybe. I was melting and dizzy and so hot for Burt that I shook. He was to me what Daisy was to Gatsby. He was Pan. Elusive, all music.

He played my old grand piano. All those amazing sounds, new, sexy. Singing in his croaky, cracked voice—the bottom dropped out of me. Talent.

All he ever wanted to do was play the piano, watch basketball on the TV, and go to bed.

I’d go half-faint sitting next to him on the piano bench, half-faint walking back from a party on West End Avenue. Kissing and breathing him in. In constant heat. In the spring air.

We had absolutely nothing in common. I lunched with his folks, his mom and dad, at a nice restaurant. They were lovely. Classy.

I had a clanging realization of the difference in our pasts. How foreign mine was. How privileged his was, compared to mine at that time in my life, with all my baggage. Still blacklisted.

I called my friend Norma Crane. She’d gone with Burt for a while.

“Norma,” I asked, “is Burt someone who can be there for you?”

“No, Lee, he can’t, his life is all about music.”

Something in me touched down. My feet landed on the street.

Burt came back from a trip to L.A. “Lee, do you know Angie Dickinson? I really like her.”

Burt married Angie. He was in the audience at the opening of
In the Heat of the Night
, my first Hollywood film after the blacklist, with her. He waved. Angie was a warm and steamy woman.

That was 1967. Around 1995, our company, Feury/Grant Entertainment, was working for Lifetime, and I was in L.A. to film Angie for
Intimate Portrait
. Angie and I had acted together in one of my last
films,
Charlie Chan and
the Curse of the Dragon Queen
, so we knew each other. I remember when I first arrived in L.A. to do
Peyton Place,
I went to a gritty, gangstery restaurant, and Angie was in a booth with a friend and the guys were teasing her: “Hey, Angie, let’s see that million-dollar leg.” Her great legs had been insured by the studio for a million dollars.

In interviewing her, she talked about the daughter she’d had with Burt. I’d met her daughter on the set of
Curse of the Dragon Queen
. She had Asperger’s syndrome and was a handful for Angie. She was older than twenty at that time. Angie also talked about her sister, who was very ill and whom she visited and cared for. Angie’s a mensch, and very beloved in the Hollywood community, a great friend, and still steamy.

Anyway, as part of her
Portrait
, I had to interview Burt. Burt had married twice since Angie. When Carole Bayer Sager, the wonderful songwriter, and Burt married, their honeymoon cottage was our Green House on Zumeriz Drive, the Green House that Joey had built. Carole said she was miserable in that house because Burt left her alone and stranded all the way out in Malibu. He was staying in Hollywood or Beverly Hills while Carole stared at the walls and wandered the wonderful terraces we’d built, looking out at the sea, confused and lonely for years.

Been there. Done that.

Burt, she found out, had fallen for another woman. So Carole fled the Green House forever and divorced Burt, who married for the last time, the current Mrs. Bacharach.

It was in the Beverly Hills house of this new family that I interviewed him, as Angie’s last husband and father of their child.

His wife, Jane, greeted the film crew, like she’d greeted many film crews. She was blond, pleasant, busy, nice-looking; there were older kids around.

Burt was in his study, his music room, and had an appointment after us. I walked in, curious, wondering if an ember remained, but no, we looked at each other, middle-aged now, both of us. I popped my questions like a professional person; he answered warily. Both looking hard at each other and computing where we stood. There was no strong connection from our past. It was a broken pot on the floor we ignored. We never discussed his and Angie’s daughter, who has since committed suicide. But it was odd to go from young, intense lovers for that one spring to basically strangers in a strong wife’s home, with things to do and adolescent children to deal with.

Fade out. Fade in: May 2012.

I was lying in bed watching television, and on PBS there was a salute at the White House to the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. There, sitting next to President Obama, was someone supposed to be Burt Bacharach.

At the end of the program where every singer you really love sang (and those songs are a big turn-on still), Obama asked Burt to say a few words. The stranger went to the mike and transformed—in his cracked voice he was so damn charming, his smile, disarming; and then he went to the piano and started to sing: “What the world needs now, is love sweet love.” I swooned—the guy’s still got it. He is the music. Obsession is so attractive. Remember Lenny Bernstein, how in love we all were? He was beautiful, yes, but so are many. He, like Burt, burned for us. Talent.

So many lives we’ve lived. And the music and man still move me.

•   •   •

E
lizabeth Taylor. She died. At seventy-nine. My own sense of mortality comes rushing in. I’m older than she was.

She took on AIDS singlehandedly, when it was still an extremely frightening cause. So much that the president of South Africa who
followed Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, declared there was no link between AIDS and HIV, while thousands of young women, children, and men died. Elizabeth took it on when gays were closeted and her good friend Rock Hudson was outed and pilloried by the press. She fought with passion and clarity, legitimizing the plague and, in doing so, may have helped prepare us for gay marriage. I couldn’t have done it. I never had her moxie.

I had two encounters with Elizabeth. Once during her marriage to John Warner, the other when I did a documentary on her for Lifetime, maybe twelve years ago.

I was invited by Lynn Redgrave to be her date at a fund-raiser for Republican senator John Warner in 1979. It was an invitation extended to her either by Elizabeth or Elizabeth’s close friend, the clothing designer Halston. We had met on the street, Lynn and I.

Me: “Hi, how are you? What are you doing?”

Lynn: “Elizabeth is having an auction fund-raiser for Warner.”

Me: “He’s a Republican!”

Lynn: “I know, I know.” Sheepish smile.

I sat between Lynn and a young plastic surgeon at a luncheon table. There were maybe 350 or 400 people in the room. Celebrity friends were auctioning off oil paintings for the Warner campaign. The paintings were mediocre, and when the bidding was low, Elizabeth would run up front and plead and exhort with all her heart. Lynn auctioned off one, and then suddenly Elizabeth called my name. To auction off a painting. For the Republican senator. I was caught off guard. To a smattering of polite applause I made my way to the front, where an awful little oil painting of two red apples and a brown teapot stood on an easel.

“Who wants to bid on this charming still life?” I started to call out, when the whole situation hit me and I started to laugh.

I couldn’t stop, and the people attending did not join in. Lynn scooted down in her seat in embarrassment, and Elizabeth took over. With passion and fervor she talked of her John, what a great man he was, the important work he was doing; please, please buy this wonderful painting. Of course her friend Halston gave a thousand dollars, as he had all afternoon, and I slunk back to my chair. Later, I heard she had contributed one of the diamonds Richard Burton had given her to her new husband’s campaign.

Fade out. Fade in. It was twenty years later, and Elizabeth was in New York raising money for AIDS. She was in a wheelchair. She couldn’t walk.

My crew was all set up, waiting for her in a room at a ritzy hotel. We’d been waiting about four hours. She was staying in the hotel, about four floors above us. With each opening of the elevator doors, I ran out to the hall to greet her. Finally she appeared. Her face, alive and glowing with color, her body shrunken, her spine collapsing. We moved her to the apricot velvet chair the crew had lit for her.

“Do you remember the last time we were in a room together?” I asked.

“Is this a trick question?” She laughed.

As the camera rolled, I reminded Elizabeth of the auction.

“Omigod,” she said, rolling her eyes.

I have this episode on film, so I will only be paraphrasing her description of her marriage to Warner.

First, she committed herself, as only she could, to being a senator’s wife, no longer with a career of her own. Day after day, wandering around his estate in Virginia, or wherever, waiting, waiting for her new husband to come home. He was in the Senate working and had no time for his demanding new wife.

And so she ate. And ate. And ate.

Everyone in that period remembers pictures of Elizabeth ballooning into beyond-matronly.

This is a story she told about Warner and herself: Warner kept horses on his estate, and as an experienced horsewoman, she rode as often as she could. One morning riding with John, her horse balked and she fell. Hard. She called to John, “Help me get up.”

He, still on his horse, insisted she force herself to get up without help. “You need to toughen up, not baby yourself.”

She tried, but she couldn’t. He again insisted she force herself to get up.

Elizabeth became a movie star at age twelve in
National Velvet
. She was thrown from her horse during filming and suffered a back injury that haunted her the rest of her life, causing numerous trips to the hospital.

“I really can’t get up,” she told John.

“You’re not trying,” he said.

She finally rose to her feet.

“You see?” he said.

The marriage was over.

I don’t know how long after that Elizabeth left the Washington scene, lost the pounds, and opened in
The Little Foxes
playing the fierce Regina, directed by Austin Pendleton. Her first foray into theater. Her reviews were great.

“Brilliant,” the critics said.

I say, “Brave.”

She was a survivor, always.

•   •   •

D
ivine to the ridiculous, postscript: Carole Bayer Sager, who was Elizabeth’s neighbor, good friend, and look-alike, by the way, told me Elizabeth never went to dinner parties without her little dog
nestled in her arms. The little guy was not housebroken, a small consideration that Liz never stopped to notice. So nobody else did, either. Everyone just laughed and talked till someone surreptitiously picked up the tiny messes.

I love that image.

I
filmed a documentary on Michael and Kirk Douglas. An idea Allen Burry, Michael’s close advisor, came up with. My first and last film before the blacklist,
Detective Story
, starred Kirk Douglas, who was then in his thirties, I guess. He was a big, big star. Gorgeous. Intense. Amazing. 1951.

Now Joey would produce and I would direct a film about the Douglas men, father and son. Fantastic.

We had attended Michael’s very grand wedding to Catherine Zeta-Jones, at the Plaza in New York. Catherine is not only astonishingly beautiful, but swell, and real, and down-to-earth, and fun. She carried their son, three-month-old Dylan, down the aisle, and handed him off to Michael’s mother, Diana, during the vows. Catherine comes from a small Welsh village. The most affecting part of the celebration was the blending of voices, the Welsh songs her many relations sang and have been singing all their lives, soaring songs not unlike in
How Green Was My Valley
. Her dad looks like Jon Hamm. Handsome.

Doing a film about a movie star friend with a complicated life and
his iconic movie star father was challenging. As anyone who’s read Kirk’s many memoirs knows, his mother was his angel, and his father an abusive drunk who sold rags from his horse cart, had no education, and was violent with his son. When Kirk became a well-known and respected actor and movie star, he went home to upstate New York, found his father in a bar, and still could never get any acknowledgment from him that his son was successful, talented, rich. Nothing. Ever.

The rawness Kirk showed on film, the intensity and need and sexuality, he also had in life. Which made him a very complex dad to be around for Michael and his brother Joel. When they were very young, Kirk and Michael’s mother, Diana, divorced. Michael and Joel wound up living with their mother on the East Coast, visiting Kirk and his new French wife, Anne, and eventually two new half brothers, Peter and Eric, in California.

The incident that stuck in Kirk’s craw was
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Michael’s first film as a producer, which was wildly popular, brilliantly acted, directed by Milos Forman, and earned Michael an Oscar as producer his first time out. Kirk had bought the book and the play of
Cuckoo’s Nest
for himself. To star in and to revive his career. He acted in it on Broadway to lukewarm reviews. He turned the play over to Michael. The play was pretty much dead in the water. Michael developed the script. His partner was Saul Zaentz. He got Milos Forman on board, who cast Jack Nicholson in the part that would make Jack a big star—the part Kirk played on Broadway and was on fire to play in the film. Michael could not convince Milos to give Kirk the part. “You’re the producer.” Kirk banged his fist on the table. “You could have demanded I do the part.” This is an old bitter fight, still alive and deep and contentious. “I gave you
Cuckoo’s Nest
, I gave it to you to produce a movie for me.” Kirk thumped his chest, still a contender. And so the two men, both of them producers and
actors, have this deep-seated raw wound between them still. They are open about it in the documentary, never covering up their differences or their anger, but not crossing the line.

During the making of the documentary, the week we were to film Eric Douglas, who had been in drug rehab, he died of an overdose. Kirk and Anne were devastated. They’d been living in fear of this since Eric was an adolescent.

Eric was a story in himself, always struggling for recognition, needy, hungering for attention and for the stardom of his father and brother. So Michael’s son Cameron was not the first in the family to struggle with the need for life-altering substances. Cameron had an easy reality in front of the camera. He was an in-demand disc jockey, well-paid and popular, and charming. He’s now serving time in prison on a drug charge. Cameron and Michael are deeply connected as father and son.

Kirk losing his youngest son, Eric, to drugs; Michael bearing the burden of his oldest son, Cameron, imprisoned for selling drugs. A heavy bond between them. Kirk forever contentious, passionate, competitive; Michael forever cautious, with a demanding father, both striving to expand their lives through their art, Kirk discovering and rediscovering himself through writing his books, Michael taking chances as an actor, building his own legendary career.