My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (37 page)

Twenty minutes later, Schuyler called Jack from Mrs. Smith’s store, crying and hysterical.

“He got run over, he got hit by a car!” she sobbed. Jack jumped out of bed and took the flight of stairs in two leaps, despite his stitches. He jumped in the car and raced over there, making bargains with God to be a better person if Austin was spared. As he rounded the corner, his heart nearly stopped when he saw a crowd of people standing around a small form in the road. But when he pushed through the crowd he saw that it was our dog Lucky. Austin and Schuyler were inconsolable, but okay.

They had done everything right, waiting and looking both ways before they crossed the road. Buster had followed them, but Lucky had hesitated. They were calling her just as a big truck came over the hill.

It’s a wonder that children survive their childhoods, and that parents survive their children. As long as there are trees and playgrounds and sharp furniture, emergency rooms will stay in business.

One summer a good friend of ours, Sue Kramer, was visiting us from New York. She’s a screenwriter that Jack was working with at the time. She was terrified of horses after a traumatic riding experience when she was younger. She had fallen off and broken both of her arms, and was in double casts for months. Jack invited her to go riding on Simon, one of our gentlest horses, in the hope that she would be able to conquer her fear. Finally she mustered the courage to take a slow trail ride around the farm. Schuyler was about nine at the time and didn’t understand how anyone could be so terrified of horses. She wanted to go on the trail ride, too. Jack was afraid Schuyler might go running around on her horse, jumping over everything, and scare Sue even more.

Schuyler was mad because she couldn’t go, so she climbed up into a huge old oak tree and onto a tree house that wasn’t quite finished. Jack was keeping an eye on her while he and Sue walked their horses slowly around the field across the pond. Suddenly Schuyler fell out of the tree and landed with a thud. Then she started to scream. Jack leapt off his horse and threw the reins to Sue, yelling, “Take the horses back to the barn,” then sprinted to Schuyler’s side. Poor Sue had to figure out how to get to the barn and what to do with the baffled horses while Jack took care of Schuyler.

It was a frightening injury; her arm had come unhinged at the elbow and was twisted in a way that arms don’t normally twist. I heard yelling from across the pond and grabbed a tray of ice and my homeopathic kit and ran to help. I had been running about six miles a day for years and years, but I was breathless after running only a hundred yards to help my injured child. We bundled her into the car and picked up Sue, who had found someone at the barn to help her with the horses.

On the way to the hospital, we called the best orthopedic surgeon in town and alerted him we were on our way. Dr. Frank McCue was responsible for saving Jack’s hand after an accident with a high pressure paint sprayer, and he’d set several of my broken toes. (He was the go-to guy for injured appendages.) As Schuyler was taken out of the van, Jack called to Sue, “Park the van!” A dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, Sue was unfamiliar with driving large vehicles. But she had a job to do, so she forged ahead. Just as she was pulling into the underground parking garage, someone came running out, waving their arms for her to stop. That’s when she heard the crunch and realized she was taking off the top of the van.

By the time we got to the hospital, I was feeling so queasy that I was ready to faint. After they had calmed Schuyler down and given her morphine for the pain, they whisked her away to surgery. She was lying down in the operating room and I was lying down in the waiting room. When the doctors came out after the surgery, Jack and I jumped up, hoping to get to see her. The doctor said, “She’s asking for …” “Me?” I interrupted. “No, she’s asking for Sue.” “Sue?” I said. “She barely knows Sue!” Sue stepped forward and offered an explanation: “I’ve been telling her stories all day. That’s why she wants me.” “Sure, sure, go ahead,” I said. But I was thinking,
Hey, I gave birth to her. Doesn’t that count for anything?

Dr. McCue came by to see us and told us Schuyler was doing fine. The arm was not broken, but it was seriously dislocated and would be in a cast for several months. Good news. My stomach was starting to settle down and I wasn’t feeling quite so faint. Then the anesthesiologist came over to give his report, and he recognized me and started chatting away about his brief career in the movie business. He said that before studying medicine, he had worked in the art department on a couple of films but had decided to change professions after a disaster on one film he’d worked on. Jack took a closer look at his face and then said, “Oh, I remember you now! You’re the one who ruined my set! I fired you!”

The doctor was the person who’d worked on
Phantom of the Paradise
and who’d used water-soluble caulking on the skylight, which collapsed, ruining the set and delaying the filming. Jack still hadn’t quite gotten over it. And now this same guy had put our daughter under for surgery. We were just praying he was a better anesthesiologist than he was a carpenter!

I confess that I have always been a fainter—it’s a condition that runs in the family; my father also had it. I’m told it’s an oversensitive vasovagal response to different triggers, such as pain, surprise, or watching your six-year-old have lidocaine injected into her gashed eyebrow. (But that’s another story.)

My most famous fainting episode took place during a dinner party at the farm. I had the table set and candles lit and a beautiful bowl of pasta and fresh tomato sauce was ready to serve. We were just sitting down to dinner on the porch with a table full of guests when I saw a mangy stray cat that had gotten into the house jump up onto the kitchen counter and head straight for the turkey that was fresh out of the oven. I was hoping no one else saw it, and I quickly excused myself and rushed into the kitchen to remove the cat. As I hurried through the door, I smashed my foot into the doorjamb and felt a lightning bolt of pain shoot up through it, but I shook it off and grabbed the cat. Then I limped back to the table and sat down. The next thing I remember was waking up on the floor with a pillow under my head, both girls staring down at me, and hearing Jack’s voice outside a dark red veil covering my eyes. Jack helped me up, and I apologized to our guests as he walked me up the stairs to bed.

“Jack!” I whispered. “My eyes are burning and I can’t see!”

“It’s okay, Sissy,” Jack said mildly. “You just fainted into the pasta sauce.”

I’d broken my toes before, but this was a bad one. My toe went sideways instead of straight ahead. I’d broken it in half. So Jack took me to see our ol’ friend Dr. McCue to have it set. I was supposed to fly to New York early the next morning to meet with a Dutch director about a film he wanted to do with me, and I really didn’t feel up to the trip. But a broken toe didn’t seem like a good enough excuse to cancel the meeting. I told my doctor about it and he said, “Look, it’s a bad break, but if it would make you feel better, why don’t you just tell the director you broke a bone in your foot, and ask him to come down to the farm?” To make it more convincing, the doctor put on a full lower leg cast.

Sure enough, the director agreed to meet me at the farm. As soon as he arrived, he was helping me hobble around in my cast, serving himself tea, and being a complete gentleman. There were torrential rains that day, but we had a lovely time out on the covered porch, talking about his film, while Madison, who was about two at the time, played nearby. The porch was wet from all the rain, and all of a sudden I saw her slip and fall on her back all the way down a flight of stone steps. I jumped out of my chair, sprinted across the porch and down the stairs, and scooped my screaming daughter into my arms. The director almost had a heart attack. He looked at me quizzically. I was hoping he had read those stories about mothers suddenly developing superhuman strength when their children are in danger. But I think he probably just thought I was some kind of freak.

And Madison was fine.

… 15 …

As soon as we moved to Virginia, the entertainment media decided I must have retired. I couldn’t convince them otherwise, so I just kept on working. But after I had children, my choices were even more careful. I only wanted to make films that mattered to me, or with directors or actors I’d always wanted to work with. And when I went on location, the whole family came along with me.

Gerri and I would fly to the location a month or so before filming began. We’d find a house to rent and then visit the local schools to find out which of their best teachers were out on maternity leave. We’d interview them and then hire a teacher who could bring her baby with her while she tutored the girls for a few months. We’d set up a classroom in the living room and usually would have classes in the mornings and take field trips in the afternoons. We brought the girls’ bikes and pets and toys to make it feel like home.

After a string of serious films, it was are relief to do a Southern comedy like
Crimes of the Heart
in 1985. Of course my character, Babe, tries to stick her head in the oven and kill herself, but not before realizing how hungry she is and eating some day-old popcorn on the stove. I got a great note about her from the director, Bruce Beresford. He told me to play the character straight; it made her so funny. I also asked Beth Henley the Mississippi playwright who wrote the script, “What can you tell me about Babe?”

“Well,” she said, “Babe is the kind of girl who plans a big dinner party, has a gorgeous centerpiece, a fabulous outfit, and sets the table beautifully, but forgets to put the roast in the oven.”

“Oh, I know her!” I laughed. “I
am
her!”

The scuttlebutt in Hollywood was that the director was going to have his hands full with so many major female stars in one production. Who was going to be the biggest diva? But Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton, Tess Harper, and I defied the industry stereotypes by getting along like, well, sisters. There were no divas on this set. Usually the cast members are given their own motor homes as dressing rooms. But on
Crimes of the Heart
, which was filmed on location outside Wilmington, North Carolina, the production took over a house next door to the set and fixed it up for us. We had the hair and makeup department and wardrobe right in the back of the house. Each of us had a bedroom and bath, we shared the kitchen and a television in the living room, and we all hung out together like a family—which is what our characters were supposed to be.

One day, Diane came into the house and saw Schuyler standing in the living room with her brand-new doctor kit. Without saying a word, Diane dropped to the floor, grabbing her knee and moaning, “Oh, my leg, my leg! Is there a doctor in the house?” Schuyler was only three years old, and feeling kind of shy. She stood there like a soldier, clutching her bag. Diane looked up at Schuyler, then looked at her bag. “Are you a doctor?” she whispered. Schuyler nodded solemnly, then kneeled down and opened her kit. Before long, Diane’s leg was covered in bandages, and she had taken a sugar pill for the pain. It was a sweet, serendipitous moment.

I never realized how important my girlfriends were to me until I moved away from them. I hadn’t been at the farm too long when I read somewhere that it takes seven years to develop a great friendship. This put me right smack in the dumps. It was before iChat and Skype, and really even before computers. Occasionally one of my girlfriends would visit from New York or LA, but eventually she would have to go home and I’d be right back where I started—lonesome. But as time went by and I got into the routines of life, I began to make friends in Virginia. Then one day I woke up and realized that my dance card was full. I had some of the most wonderful girlfriends ever. And I met them in the most usual places—the grocery store, the school pickup line…

Diane (not Keaton, a different Diane) and I met in a grocery store. We were standing next to each other in line, both with little babies, and we started chatting. I had several hundred dollars’ worth of groceries and diapers and household supplies in my cart. When I pulled out my credit card to pay, the cashier shook her head and told me they only took cash or checks. I had neither. I looked back at the fifteen shoppers behind me in line and I was near tears, thinking about putting everything back. Diane said, “Don’t worry, I’ll write you a check.”

“You will? But we’ve just met.”

She looked at me levelly. “Oh, I think you’re good for it.”

We’ve been friends ever since.

I met Aggie when she broke through the press line at the Virginia Special Olympics held on the side of a mountain in Wintergreen, Virginia. I had Schuyler in a backpack and it was snowing, but that didn’t stop Aggie. She leaned close to me and said quietly, “I was wondering if you could give me an interview?” I smiled and explained that I wasn’t giving any. To which she replied, “Oh, it’s just a tiny paper in Nelson County. Nobody reads it anyway.”

She was so disarming and open that I broke my own rule and gave her the interview. She became another good friend. She had been a competetive swimmer, and she taught both of our girls to swim. I also thought Aggie would be a great match for Barclay, the writer/roofer/prospector, and am happy to report that they married and raised two fine daughters on a farm they call Rock Bottom.

Aggie was a member of the Walnut Mountain Study Group, a collection of friends who got together to study homeopathic medicine and medicinal herbs. We met on my porch every month, just like my mother had her girlfriends over for coffee. I have been interested in herbal remedies, alternative medicine, and healthy living since I was in my early twenties. As a kid, my idea of a balanced meal was adding a pickle to my cheeseburger, fries, and Coke. But shortly after I moved to California, I gave up the occasional cigarette, became a vegetarian, and started running—all in one day. In for a penny, in for a pound, as my mother would say. I had heard a lot of older people joking that if they’d known they were going to live so long, they would have taken better care of themselves. I was determined to start early, and I did.