My Life So Far (92 page)

MOVING ON

—E
LLEN
G
OODMAN

A
T AGE SIXTY-TWO
I found myself alone, living in my daughter’s guest room. I was acutely aware of how different I felt this time from the way I’d felt after my breakup with Tom eleven years earlier. I didn’t feel alone, because I wasn’t. I was with myself, for the first time, and proud that I hadn’t capitulated out of fear. So what if it had taken so long? What matters is that I got there.

For two weeks I was alone in the house with my golden retriever, Roxy. Vanessa had gone to Paris with eight-month-old Malcolm to be with Vadim, who had been battling cancer for three years. Her pain and concern were palpable, and I was glad my new circumstances made me available should she need me.

Neither Roxy nor I was accustomed to stillness. The absence of Ted’s booming voice and constant activity left a deafening silence. I had wanted stillness. Here it was. My friends wondered if I would experience “luxurium tremens” (as singer James Taylor calls the sudden loss of luxury). I didn’t. In fact, I found the smallness of my surroundings humorous: I had gone from twenty-three kingdom-size properties and a private plane that could sleep six to a small guest room with no closet in a modest house in a charming but not quite gentrified section of Atlanta.

I experienced mourning rather than anger—mourning not so much for the relationship as it was as for the loss of what I had hoped it might become. The anger rose somewhat later, when in agonizing drips and drops, I began to find out about Ted’s quests for my replacement during the year I was rejoicing in what I thought was his concession to monogamy. For about a month I would write him letters venting my rage and hurt; fortunately I never mailed them. (Time and understanding take the edge off anger. Best not leave everlasting proof of your temporary insanity.)

Vanessa and Malcolm returned to Atlanta for a while, and in the quiet of her home we talked about fathers and husbands, marriage and divorce. But when it became clear that Vadim hadn’t much longer to live, she hurried back to him while I remained in Atlanta with Malcolm. I felt bonded to this little boy in a way I never had with anyone before. He was showing me how to love. I would lie in bed with his sleeping body draped across me (his position of choice), his nose in my right ear, his toes in my left, and feel utterly complete. Later, Malcolm would take my face in his hands and say, “I yuv you, Gamma.”

It was a painful time for Vanessa. Not only was the father she adored dying, but she was separated from her son. She had been breast-feeding, and by the time I brought him back to her in Paris, that precious window had closed. I stayed in France for a while, wanting to see Vadim one last time and to help Vanessa with Malcolm. She spent her days at her father’s bedside, alternating shifts with Vadim’s sister, Hélène, and greeting friends, family members, and former wives and companions as they came and went. It felt synchronous that my separation from Ted had made it possible for me to be totally available when I was needed, and to reconnect with my family from my first marriage.

I remembered something Katharine Hepburn said to me during the filming of
On Golden Pond:
“Make no mistake, Jane, women choose their men and not the other way around.” If this is true (and I’d like to think it is), then in spite of everything, I feel that I chose well. I learned and grew with Vadim, Tom, and Ted (sometimes because of them, sometimes in spite of them), and I feel grateful for that. I also have to say that in hindsight, each divorce, painful though it may have been at the time, marked a step forward, an opportunity for self-redefinition rather than a failure—almost like repotting a plant when the roots don’t fit anymore. Of course, I wish I’d found just one husband, also capable of redefinition, to make the whole journey with, but self-redefinition is harder for most men, especially since in a patriarchy they are not supposed to need it. Given my parents’ difficulties with relationships, and my personal evolution, choosing right for the long haul just hasn’t been in the cards. I comfort myself in knowing that should I choose again, the haul will be shorter.

O
ften during periods of transition in my life people or books have appeared, like miracles, to teach me what I need to learn. During my final months with Ted, as I struggled to make sense out of the impending separation from a man I loved, I began reading
In a Different Voice,
by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan. In the very first pages, Gilligan wrote that women “often sensed that it was dangerous to say or even to know what they wanted or thought—upsetting to others and therefore carrying with it the threat of abandonment. . . .”
Exactly what I had been facing.
Gilligan went on to describe the damage that this does to women: “The justification of these psychological processes [of silencing the self] in the name of love or relationships is equivalent to the justifications of violence and violation in the name of morality.”

If I’d been a cartoon character, the balloons over my head would have read: “Oh my God!”; “Now I understand”; “So that’s why!” I saw that the issues I had been wrestling with in my marriage were not just
my
struggles; they were
other women’s
struggles, and they were important enough for a psychologist like Gilligan (and the many others I subsequently read) to study. I had had revelations before with books
—The Village of Ben Suc
and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
for example—but this time the book was speaking to
my own life experiences.
I was like a nearsighted person suddenly given corrective lenses (or having the old lenses, distorted by patriarchy, suddenly removed). The whole world looked different to me now—so many elements in my life and my mother’s life began to make sense. I don’t know if another woman would have the same visceral response to Gilligan’s book, but the time was right for me. I was ready. Earlier I could not have taken in the full implications of what she wrote. I would have been more worried about rocking Ted’s boat than captaining my own.

On the second page of Gilligan’s book I read:

When I read this it hit me so forcefully that I cried out, remembering my early years as a young movie star
—Sunday in New York, Any Wednesday, Tall Story—
when my voice was high and thin. Alone in Vanessa’s home, I watched videos of my films chronologically and was able to track my growth as a woman by noting when my voice began to drop. It started with
Klute,
which was when I began to define myself as a feminist; it was also when I won my first Oscar. My acting had improved as my voice deepened, because I was beginning to inhabit myself.

C
hange can come from the inside out or the outside in. I got a call late one night in early 2000, when Vanessa was still in Paris. It was Paula Weinstein in California. Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, producers of the Academy Awards show that year, wanted me to be a presenter.

“I can’t, Paula,” I said. “I’m not in the business anymore.”

“Do it anyway,” said my dearest friend, who can’t seem to remember that she’s not my agent anymore. “It’ll be good for you.”

She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Finally I said, “Oh, okay, I’ll do it. I have a dress that I bought four years ago that’s really pretty that I can wear.”

“Jane,” Paula shrieked, “no way. Vera Wang is going to design you a dress, and you’re going to get your hair cut by Sally Hirschberger, and that’s that! I don’t want any arguments.”

Isn’t it great to have persistent friends?

Psychologist Marion Woodman has said: “Changing your hair is a reflection of a shift in thinking.” Well, thanks to Paula, I had new hair to go with my new thinking.

W
ithin months of my singlehood, another germinal event took place: My close friend Pat Mitchell asked me to perform one of the pieces in Eve Ensler’s
The Vagina Monologues.
I had gotten to know Pat during the years she was president of CNN Productions and Time Inc. (Pat had just been named president and CEO of PBS.)

I had not acted in eleven years and had little desire to do so again, but I asked Pat to send me the script. I read one page of the monologue they wanted me to perform (it was titled “Cunt”) and called Pat.

“No, Pat,” I said. “I have enough problems. Hanoi Jane saying ‘cunt’ in Atlanta? I don’t think so.” But as is her way, Pat wouldn’t let up—not necessarily pressuring me to perform, just asking me to meet Eve Ensler. She told me that Eve was in New York performing the monologues and insisted that I go and see it for myself. “Trust me, Jane. You have to do this.”

As a presenter at the Oscars in 2000 with my new haircut and Vera Wang dress.

(Catuffe/SIPA Press)

So I did.

I had no idea what to expect, but as I sat there listening to Eve enact the monologues she’d written based on interviews she’d done with women about their vaginas, I felt something happening to me. I don’t remember ever laughing so hard or crying so hard in the theater, but it must have been during the laughter part, when I wasn’t paying attention, that my feminist consciousness slipped out of my head and took up residence in my body—where it has lived ever since.

Up until then I had been a feminist in the sense that I supported women, brought gender issues into my movie roles, helped women make their bodies strong, read all the books: I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart—in my body—but I didn’t; not really. I couldn’t. It was too scary, like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. It meant doing
life
differently.

Fans of Robert Heinlein’s science fiction masterpiece
Stranger in a Strange Land
know what the word
grok
means: to understand something so thoroughly on every level—spiritually, intellectually, bodily, psychically—that you become one with what you have observed or grasped; you merge with it. My experience upon seeing
The Vagina Monologues
(as with reading
In a Different Voice
) can only be described as “grokking” feminism.

Eve Ensler has remained a beloved presence in my life ever since that night. Beaten and subjected to incest for years by her father, she is a force of nature, a person who with lots of work has risen, burnished and purified, from the fires of violence and pain, and her vision of ending violence against women is contagious. She has turned her play into a global campaign, and as of this writing her organization, V-Day: Until the Violence Stops, has raised over $26 million in support of local efforts to stop violence against women around the world, more than the total amount that the United States government has spent on this pandemic. I serve on her organization’s V-Council and have traveled to many countries with Eve to help build this global movement.

V
aginal epiphanies and Oscar presentation notwithstanding, life was ratcheting down to soulspeed, just as I had wanted. My daughter’s home had become a womb in which I was pregnant with myself, entering what Dr. Susan Blumenthal described to me as “the infancy of my second adulthood.” It felt right, like when you hit a tennis ball on the “sweet spot” of the racket. It took place in small, incremental, cumulative steps that I might not have noticed,
except that I was paying attention—
becoming intentional. I also know that, manless (and not afraid of that) and surrounded by vibrant, brave, emotionally available women friends, I was able to remove the blinders and see things, which necessitated my rethinking fundamentals I couldn’t see before—like how differently most women “do” life. We listen with our hearts; we try to mirror the other’s humanity.