It's Always Something (4 page)

I ran back to my room and started mixing. My color chart was all set up under an appropriate light. I mixed, then waited a half hour—the dipstick in the liquid turned blue. The blue matched the blue on the chart, which meant I was ovulating. I ran back into the bedroom and calmly woke Gene and told him that we had to have sex right that second. I never let on about this expensive ovulation kit.

My ovaries became the center of my universe. Everything, even my brain, was down there all the time. I thought if I really concentrated, I would be able to tell when I was ovulating—I could feel what was happening there. I would be so relieved a few days after my period when it wasn’t a time for fertility, so I could relax, but then as soon as I got to the middle of the cycle, the panic came in. I was always counting days on my calendar. Then when I got my period,- it was like a death—a failure—another lost child.

Orion Pictures gave Gene the okay on
Haunted Honeymoon.
It was a “go” picture in April of 1985, to be shot in England, directed by Gene Wilder and starring Gene Wilder, Gilda Radner and Dom DeLuise. I swear Gene is the only person I have ever slept with to get a part in a movie. It is never easy to get a movie made, but
Woman in Red
was a nice enough success to make the movie company confident in sending us out again. Because the English pound was much weaker at the time than the American dollar, the exchange rate made it possible to shoot the movie in England for nine million dollars when it would have cost over thirteen million in the U.S.

The idea of working and living in London over the next year delighted Gene. I began a slow, desperate internal panic. Sparkle could not go to England. England has strict quarantine rules because it is an island. No yacht on the Thames, no helicopter drop-off, no underground smuggling ring could help. Sparkle could not go to England without spending six months in quarantine. Now you might be saying to yourself that, after all, this was just a dog—but not to me. Sparkle was my baby. I felt very torn about leaving her even for the three months that I was required to be in London for the movie. Gene and I decided not to stay in London for the six months of pre-production and the casting of the movie; instead, Gene would make several trips back and forth and I would stay with Sparkle in America. For one month I’d take Sparkle to the south of France and Gene would visit us there. This was our way of making the movie and staying with Sparkle.

I continued to dwell on the fact that every time Gene traveled and we weren’t together, I was missing an ovulation cycle—an opportunity to have a child. What I created was a tremendously stressful time in my life. I wanted to have everything—I wanted to be the costar of the movie; I wanted to be with Gene all the time; I wanted to have a baby; and I wanted to have the dog with me. I knew that traveling all over the place wasn’t so good for my menstrual cycle. I knew that I needed to be with Gene, but the dog couldn’t go, and the dog was my little baby. I had to leave the baby that already existed to pursue the baby that might be. I put myself into a terrible, stressful panic. I made it all so important that I thought my brain would pop.

In June, we flew to Connecticut where I stayed and prepared for my part in the movie while Gene went to London to cast the picture and find a place for us to live. When Gene returned three weeks later, both of us began to question the timing of our sexual activity. We thought that maybe we should abstain from having a baby now because a movie company was spending a lot of money on us. I couldn’t play my part in the picture if I became pregnant. So suddenly we faced a new dilemma—do we want the movie or the baby? We decided to use birth control. It seemed weird that after in vitro fertilization and tubal surgery and eighty-dollar ovulation kits, I, the perpetrator, was choosing to put off having a baby in order to be a movie star. But my career was still very important to me, too.

Then came the day when I had to send Sparkle back to California where Gene’s secretary was going to take care of her for three months. I acted it out like a major tragedy. A friend of mine was flying back to California and took Sparkle with her. I went to the airport. I held Sparkle in my arms until the flight attendant insisted that everyone board the plane. Then I broke into such a gush of tears that Sparkle’s head got wet. They boarded the 747 bound for L.A.—my friend, my dog and the official airline pet traveling case. I stood weeping until I saw the plane safely take off. Sparkle never even looked back.

England turned out to be gorgeous in the fall. We had a house there—narrow and five flights tall. It was in the area called Belgravia near Victoria Station—quaint and wonderful streets lined with little shops and pubs and townhouse gardens. I had to go to work immediately, fitting costumes, deciding on styles for my hair, thinking about the period of the movie—the 1930s—and how my nails would be, what hats and accessories would be appropriate. I began meeting a whole new group of people, all of whom would be helping me to be wonderful in
Haunted Honeymoon.

I was determined to be a movie star. My mind conjured up images of Ginger Rogers and Carole Lombard—beautiful women so large on the screen, taking people out of their lives and into specially lit fantasies. Television was earthbound, but the movies were up in the stars.

They were trying different makeups on me, giving me screen tests, elaborate costumes—everything. Hats were tilted in different directions on my head and warm lights were adjusted to make me look my best. I had been in movies before, but there was something especially glamorous about this one. I was the leading lady, so everything had to be just right.

When Gene makes a movie, the people who work on it have such a love for him that the set is always a happy place. The cast and crew were mostly English except for Dom DeLuise and me and Gene and our dear friend the actress Julann Griffin. Dom and his wife, Carol, came to London but were not there the entire shoot because of previous commitments Dom had in the United States. Julann and I spent every day off together shopping and exploring London.

We began shooting the first day of September in 1985. On September 18, I was sitting—in my folding canvas movie-star chair wearing this luscious black-and-white evening gown—when the assistant director called me to go onto the shooting stage in the next room. At the same time, Gene was called onto the set from his trailer wearing his blue-and-white-striped pajamas. As the two of us appeared on opposite sides of the room, the cast and crew, who had gathered in a group, began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” at the top of their lungs. A huge cake sparkled in the light of one candle. It was our wedding anniversary—our first-year wedding anniversary and here we were on a movie set with the whole cast and crew around us. Just like our wedding day, it was a perfect time. We were thinking what wonderful lives we had—that we could be married in the south of France and have our first wedding anniversary in London, England. The cameramen filmed the event.

Over the next few weeks I got heavily into the adventure of moviemaking—up before the sun and asleep by nine at night. A driver took me to and from the set, and on any errands I needed to go on. Gene had his own driver because we were often on separate schedules. When the weekends came, we were exhausted. But Saturdays I did the laundry and shopped for Sunday dinner. The English shops close by one o’clock on Saturdays so supplies had to be gathered quickly. We always played tennis on Saturday afternoons at different private courts and ate a big Italian meal on Saturday nights at a restaurant called Mimmo’s around the corner from our flat. Sometimes on Saturday nights, if we weren’t too tired, we found time to make love. Sundays we played tennis or went to a movie, but I always cooked salmon steaks and baked potatoes and broccoli with delicious English whole-grain bread and fruit and shortbread cookies for dessert. Gene was always working on his next day’s shooting schedule and I did my vocal and dance exercises. Except when I was complaining about something I did or didn’t do in the movie, life fell into a pleasant pattern. The weather stayed miraculously warm and I loved being a pampered movie star and an English housewife.

The shooting of
Haunted Honeymoon
required me to wear a wedding gown almost every day for two months. I looked like a bride all the time and people seemed to treat me that way too. My makeup woman did my makeup at about six-thirty every morning. I would always joke with her about how my face was going to break out before my period and she would have her work cut out for her. But my skin was looking very good and I didn’t even think to look at my calendar until I got the first dizzy spell. My calendar showed that my period was late. I couldn’t believe it. It had been the last thing on my mind.

I sent my dresser, Jenny, out to get me one of those home pregnancy tests that show results in an hour. If your urine made a bull’s-eye appear in this tube, you were pregnant. Bull’s-eye! I made Jenny run out and buy two more kits. She said they were already congratulating her at the chemist’s where she bought them. Bull’s-eye again! The last kit (a different kind) I took home so Gene could do the test. A stick had to turn blue. It did.

We were shocked. We walked around Belgravia, our English neighborhood. Gene had the blue stick in his pocket. The weather was warm and we held on to each other and sang quietly while our brains darted through this new phase of our life. We like to sing the song “Ohio” in harmony whenever we are happy, mainly because I’ve got the harmony down for the whole song except for one line near the end. I never get it right and that always makes us laugh. People say pregnancy never happens when you really want it to; it comes at the wrong time. This was absolutely the wrong time. I hadn’t been thinking about it. Neither of us had. I hadn’t been straining and struggling, but that is when they say it happens—when you aren’t thinking about it.

I went to a doctor and had the pregnancy confirmed with a blood test. He said, “Go ahead and live your life however you would—having a baby is the most natural thing in the world.” The next few days I was filled with emotion. I got a little irritable and I remember I cried on the set one day. I had a fight with someone, which I never would do, and a depression set in. I didn’t worry because I’d heard many people say the first three months of their pregnancies they were really irritable because of hormonal changes. I didn’t have any nausea, but I was very tired and high-strung. I felt swollen up—my breasts were getting really big and they ached.

One morning a week later, I woke up and felt relieved. It was like someone had drained the water out of me. I went to the bathroom and I was bleeding—bleeding heavily. I was having another miscarriage. It was so soon, only a week after the pregnancy had been confirmed. Gene was already at work. I phoned the doctor and he said I could go lie down, but I would have to stay that way for weeks and weeks. I knew I had to be on the set in a few hours. They were shooting a banquet scene—I would just have to sit at a table all day. I decided to go to work and try to stay calm. The bleeding continued. I told Gene privately in his trailer—and together we made the choice for me to stay at work. We mourned quietly. We were glad we hadn’t told too many people. We were creating a movie.
Haunted Honeymoon
was a third of the way “in the can.” I bled for two weeks. I went to the doctor and had an ultrasound to make sure the miscarriage was complete.

I really didn’t cry as much as I thought I would. It wasn’t the usual great explosion of disappointment. I became very philosophical about the whole thing. I had the movie—I would now be able to do the big flying scene in the harness that I’d rehearsed. Gene was wonderful about it. What could we do? We accepted that this wasn’t the right time for me to be pregnant. There would be other times. Gene was more frightened that I would have a breakdown, which I didn’t seem to have. I thought it just wasn’t meant to be, and besides, people had said that they had had miscarriages first and then pregnancies right after. At least I knew it was possible for me to get pregnant. I was so busy making the movie every day and loving it—being the coddled baby a movie star can be—that I threw myself into my work.

I
bounced back quickly from the miscarriage, but not too long afterward I caught a cold that was going around. The studio could get very damp and chilly and the cold settled in my respiratory system and wouldn’t go away. I never felt one hundred percent well after that. They say that you aren’t aware of your health until you lose it. It’s something I’d always just taken for granted. I had always had energy—too much energy. I was the type of person who had to say, “It’s three o’clock—I’d better run around the block or I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” or “I’d better go swim forty lengths or I’ll be tossing and turning.” The last couple of weeks in England I just didn’t have any energy. I slipped on the stairs in our flat and hit the small of my back. That slowed me down for weeks. I’d feel good for a few days and I’d think I was fine and then I’d wake up one day and feel like I was getting the flu. I’d think I had a fever, so from my life’s experience with illness I would say, “I’m getting the flu.” But then I would never get the flu. I would feel okay the next day and then a week would go by and I would wake up one morning and feel like I was getting something again. I’d drink a whole lot of liquids and take vitamin C and the next day I would be okay again. I didn’t have to miss work on the set, but something was definitely wrong.

We finished filming
Haunted Honeymoon
in the middle of November 1985. Then we flew back to Connecticut where I was joyously reunited with Sparkle, who was in perfect health and was plenty mad at me for the first ten days or so. She wouldn’t eat or play. She would just stare at me with those “where-the-hell-did-you-go?” eyes. She definitely forgave me on Thanksgiving. I prepared the entire meal, turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, the works! I was thrilled to be back in America and Sparkle got extra under-the-table handouts.