Many Lives (14 page)

Nichiren Daishonin served me for a while but I started to question the materialistic motivation of many of the temple's members. I'd embraced Catholicism and I knew I loved Buddhism, but I couldn't fully commit. It was rather depressing. That's when I went to Ron Scolastico and was told that my inability to settle was bound up with what had happened in a past life.

What the psychics had told me and then landing up in Hollywood all seemed rather contradictory, until I realized that Southern California is the home of the spiritual seeker. There, the openness to spiritual enquiry is massive.

After my experience with hospitals and surgery I was never going to be trusting of traditional medicine again, and Southern California has every alternative therapy treatment and approach lined up and waiting. I was looking for a doctor and was advised to see a Dr Wagner in Bonsall Canyon, Malibu. Dr Wagner practises applied kinesiology. He muscle-tested me for homoeopathic medicines. A whole new way of looking at things began to open up.

My first real contact with Hollywood was through Ava Gardner. I co-starred with her and Ian McShane in the film
Tam Lin
in 1969, a couple of years after leaving RADA. We had taken over the Peebles Hydro in Scotland. The place was crawling with crew, equipment and a cast that included Cyril Cusack, who was playing my father, Cyril's real-life daughter – Sinead Cusack – Joanna Lumley, Richard Wattis and our director, Roddy McDowall. All we lacked was our star.

Ava arrived chauffeured like royalty, with her corgis, a gramophone player and a box of Frank Sinatra records. He'd been her third and last husband and, though divorced, their love never died. I stayed in my room when she arrived. I thought she'd have far more important people to meet. I was young and unknown. She was a seasoned star, a Hollywood legend. It was a mistake – she felt snubbed. She'd wanted to meet her young co-star. I was still learning. We made up, though, and became friends. She was a lovely person to work with; she mentored me and I was hungry to learn from her. She'd get me to stand on a box during
scenes in which we had dialogue. I asked her why. ‘The lights are far kinder to the older face when it's looking up rather than down: bags under the eyes – gone.' She knew all the tricks.

I remembered this trick when on the set of
Dynasty
one day, when we were doing close-ups. Just as we were about to go for a take, Joan Collins, in full regalia as her character Alexis Carrington, kicked her shoes off.

‘Oh my feet, they're so sore,' she said, with a huge sigh.

Without her heels my eye line was going to be considerably lower.

‘Oh gosh,' I said, ‘I
so
know what you mean.' I looked at her discarded shoes and measured up the heel in my mind. ‘Could we have a four-and-a-half-inch pancake – techie-speak for what's essentially a box – for Miss Collins, please?' I asked the chippies.

Ava Gardner was of course a great beauty. In her heyday, during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, she'd been
the
Hollywood
femme fatale
. She was 46 when we worked together, and losing confidence in her looks – but I saw a flash of the legendary beauty that had so entranced audiences. In a fit of pique she'd thrown three Mason and Pearson hairbrushes at her hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, a star in his own right. Her eyes turned a piercing green, her forehead rose and her cheekbones became accentuated. Her inner Contessa literally smouldered with presence. If I was her director I'd keep her angry all the time, I thought.

Ava taught me many things and was wonderful company. Her laughter was catching, a deep throaty chortle. I've seen her dance on tables and slam doors. A mass of contradictions, she
was a firm believer in marriage even though she'd made such a foul mess of hers. A fabulous woman.

My second contact with Hollywood happened the next year. I co-starred with Marlon Brando in
The Nightcomers
. I'd already worked with the film's director, Michael Winner, on his film
The Games
. I knew how Michael worked and Michael knew how I worked. Marlon's reputation was that he was unique and difficult. Michael thought he would have his hands full. He needed Marlon's co-star to be reliable and easy to direct – a grunt. That was me.

‘What's the part?' I asked when we met to discuss the film.

‘Well, my dear,' he barked, ‘it's a good role but what I will tell you now is that it entails a degree of freedom of clothes.'

I wanted to meet Marlon before working with him so that if he wanted me to be fired it would be done before we got to the set. Michael arranged an evening at his house. He also invited John Trevelyan, the Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors. It was political. John Trevelyan took a hard line when it came to on-screen nudity. During the course of the evening the conversation turned to Zen Buddhism. I joined in and John Trevelyan cut me off while I was speaking. I felt embarrassed and humiliated. Sitting next to me, Marlon put his hand on mine as a sign of solidarity, support and reassurance. It was a warm and generous gesture. We became great friends, and he was fascinating to work with.

Marlon was a special, gifted and very talented man – a true star in every sense of the word. His fame and physical beauty
meant nothing to him. Far more important were his sense of personal integrity and his commitment to the various causes he supported throughout his life. His gestures of solidarity and support came to anyone he felt was being unfairly treated.

The Nightcomers
was far from the best movie ever made, but I'm incredibly grateful for having been able to work on it. It gave me the gift of my friendship with Marlon, and the honour of co-starring alongside the actor named as the fourth greatest male star of all time by the American Film Institute.

Marlon had had his fair share of fellow actors playing games with him. Over the years, he'd been so mucked around while doing reverse shots, by actors taking his focus away from the camera, that he preferred to do his close-ups to a white piece of
tape on the camera. He explained that I needn't be there when he did his close-ups, but I told him I'd rather be.

‘That's very sweet of you,' he said, ‘but you don't have to be.'

‘Of course I do,' I replied, ‘because I want you there for me.'

I was too young to understand that people didn't talk to Brando like that, telling him that he had to be there for my reverses. I was too young to understand how you did or didn't talk to a great star. I'm sure that's why we became friends: I was honest with him.

Sharing life's ups and downs, usually by phone, we were in touch right up until he died. One time he confided in me that he felt he'd been a bad parent and couldn't understand why, since he loved his children so much.

‘You're that man in the cap riding his motorbike on the front of millions of T-shirts, Marlon. How many living stars are on a T-shirt? You're an icon. That's a hard thing for any child to have to deal with.'

Working with Chuck was a delight. He really was called Chuck. He phoned me when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's: ‘I wanted to tell you, my dear, before I forget, that I love you.' I love that man very much.

I only saw Chuck dry up on his lines once. It was during a scene when we were being nasty to each other. I said something typically Sable, and hurtfully barbed, to him and he turned to shout at me. All of a sudden, he just dried. I asked him if he was OK and what the matter was.

‘I just caught your children's eyes,' he said, softly. ‘They looked so shocked.' Phoebe and Chloe were on the set, witnessing our fight. Chuck had noticed the discomfort in their eyes and felt responsible. He'd had to stop – dear man.

We were at a Christmas party one year, up at Chuck and his wife Lydia's house. I didn't know where Phoebe was and I was worried. She was only nine and there were a lot of people there. Suddenly I spotted her. I asked her where she'd been. ‘Oh, I was with him,' she said, pointing to Chuck. ‘He was showing me the stick that turns into a snake.' I turned to him. ‘You're the only man who could show a child a stick that turns into a snake and I wouldn't call the police.' He'd been showing her Moses' staff – or, rather, the prop he'd used when he played Moses in the epic
Ten Commandments
.

I came across Tony Robbins at 5 o'clock one morning while I was stretching before going to work and he was leering out of the TV with his huge white-toothed smile. He was advertising a set of self-help cassette tapes and saying, ‘If you don't make more money than these tapes cost in the first two weeks of doing them, you can ask for your money back.' I thought, ‘OK, you're on,' and I ordered them.

They were wonderful. They came into my life at exactly the right time. I'd listen to them while I was driving. One was about procrastination, another was about scarcity, and another was about the availability of multiple choices, and the option we always have to see things differently. Tony's
tapes helped me to save money and to make more money, just like he'd promised.

I'd landed a role in
Sea Quest
, for Steven Spielberg. I was going to be playing a marine biologist and had to learn as much as I could on the subject. There's no better place to do that than the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. I was wondering how I was going to be able to get in there. I thought ‘Tony Robbins' – approach it differently. I realized that what I had to do was phone Spielberg's office and ask them to set up a meeting for me with a marine biologist. I thought I had to do it on my own, but it was perfectly OK to ask. They were delighted. They arranged the most extraordinary set-up for me. They picked me up, took me to the research institute, gave me just what I needed and saved me an enormous amount of money. The visit taught me a great deal and I found the woman I based my character on. Unfortunately, the day before we started shooting I was made the ship's doctor, too. One evening is rather a short time to squeeze four years of med school into. Ah, well, you win some, you lose some!

Tony Robbins also stopped me from being such a terrible procrastinator. He enabled me to look at things differently and to organize myself in such a way that my list of problems was no longer so long and daunting. He showed me that I could live with far less worry and fear.

Coming to California was a huge opportunity: I was being given the chance to change. Fear was telling me not to change. I didn't know if the negative patterns had become too ingrained. I didn't know if I was dug in too deep. I didn't know if that British tendency towards self-effacement was so well-rooted I'd be unable to learn afresh. The thing is, if you think you can't, you won't be
able to. Show a child something and they have no limitations on the possibilities that they could achieve. I started to think, ‘Baby, change if you can.' Tony Robbins helped me see that I could.

As soon as Anthony Perkins and I met, we started laughing. So many of the best of my friendships have started with a similar sense of humour. We were in Paris filming
Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story
. Tony missed his family and I missed mine. He was working his way through
A Course in Miracles.
Every day we'd read some passages. It's an enormous tome but its wisdom boils down to the truth that everything we do in our lives is driven by either love or fear.

There are some very good restaurants in Paris, and we slowly worked our way through most of them and spent a lot of time fancying the same waiters. He was a bad boy, and I loved him.

We'd meet up and go to the Tutankhamun exhibition; we went to the Louvre; we went everywhere in Paris where there was anything to be seen.

Tony said, ‘If you're going to be a thin actor, don't just be a thin actor, be the thinnest actor in the world. What are we going to eat, Stephanie?' I became the fattest actress in the world because he didn't do any eating, he'd just choose what
I
was going to eat. He was very controlling but I got him.

I asked him if he loved his wife – the glorious Berry Berenson. ‘Yes!' he said.

I asked him ‘How much?'

‘Totally,' he replied.

‘No, I mean how much do you love her? Do you love her your
per diem
?' A
per diem
is what you get given to live on when you're on a job away from home. Like me, Tony was able to live on much less than what we were given.

‘That's a bit rich,' he said.

‘OK, do you love her 10 per cent? Do you love her a tithe of your
per diem
?'

‘Of course,' he said.

‘Give it to me, then,' I ordered.

‘What?' he shot back.

‘Give it to me – 10 per cent of two months' money.' We went to Boucheron or Cartier, I can't remember which, and bought her a wonderful piece, a bracelet. She told me later it was the only piece of jewellery he had ever given her. What fun.