Read My Lips (34 page)

“No, that won’t be necessary,” we said.

If I couldn’t even ask what they looked like naked, I certainly couldn’t stand having to see them naked.

I don’t know who finally picked the body double, but it sure wasn’t Jay or me.

Other TV films had me working with lovely people like James Brolin in
Hotel
and Geena Davis in
Secret Weapons.
I was awful in that one, stiff as a board. If I had been cast as a wooden Indian outside a cigar shop, I would have been spot on. During the filming of
KGB: The Secret War
I was, after about thirty years in the business, in my very first shootout. My gun stalled, and they told me to keep shooting. So naturally, I started making gun noises with my mouth:
Pew! Pew pew pew!!

“Cut!!!”

I had now ruled myself out of gunfights and sex scenes.

Moving Violations
was a violation, all right. I played a judge but also wore an S&M get-up. My outfit was so tight and revealing that I had to be tied to my trailer during meal breaks to keep from eating anything. I told the director, Neil Israel, whom I adore, that “I can’t run down the street in my heels in this awful outfit.” Like all great directors, he said, “Yes, you can. You’re a comedian—start running.” Another role I resisted but was glad in the end that I did it. When you’re a painter, you have the luxury of going through your blue period, a mediocre stretch. As actors, we don’t get that break. All our work is on display, in living color, good or bad.

Working with Leslie Nielsen on
Murder Among Friends,
a play filmed for TV, taught me a lot about comedy . . . but not necessarily in the scenes themselves. The morning we started shooting, everybody was hanging out in my dressing room. All of a
sudden Leslie let loose with a resounding fart. We all laughed, regained our composure, and moved on. Then another big one ripped free.
Okay. . .
But on set Leslie just kept farting away, as if he couldn’t control himself. At first I felt terribly sorry for him, but by the end of the day I was so disgusted that I never wanted to see him again. It wasn’t till I was heading home that someone said, “Didn’t you know that was a fart machine?”

Remarkable,
I thought. Leslie had timed his “farts” so perfectly and, more importantly, didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. Now
that’s
a comedian—I guess.

In my next film—a feature, not a TV movie—I had a chance to work with the king of comedy: Rodney Dangerfield.

Jonathan found me the script for
Back to School.
I told him I was worried.

“I don’t even know if I like Rodney,” I said. “How will I get this part?”

When I first met with Rodney and a large group of executives, they wanted me to come back to read for the female lead, Dr. Diane Turner. But we couldn’t work out the schedule. So they decided just to offer me a more minor part as Vanessa, Thornton’s (Rodney Dangerfield’s) shrewish wife, and call it a day.

“I can’t do that,” I told Jonathan. “I’ve played that role too many times and I just can’t do it again.”

“Don’t do it,” Jonathan said.

So I called my agent at CAA, Mike Menchel, to say that I wanted to read for the lead. “I’ll make them see you,” he assured me. And he did. I remember walking up the stairs to that meeting, trying to figure out what I could say, knowing that they really didn’t want to see me. I opened the door and out of my mouth came, “Good. I see you’re all as handsome as I remember. But I gotta go.”

Rodney laughed and said, “Readings are hard, aren’t they? Did you change your hair?”

“No,” I answered. “Did you change yours?”

He laughed again, I read a poem, and that was that. I was cast as Dr. Diane Turner. If all my auditions were as simple reading a poem, I’d get a lot more jobs. Rodney and I had some great scenes:

D
IANE:
Actually, I’d like to join you, but I have class tonight.

T
HORNTON:
Oh. How ’bout tomorrow night?

D
IANE:
I have class then, too.

T
HORNTON:
I’ll tell you what, then. Why don’t you call me

some time when you have no class?

Ba-DUMP-bump.

R
ODNEY WAS MAGIC.
T
HE DIRECTOR,
A
LAN
M
ETTER, WHO
had a real eye for comedy—he discovered Sam Kinison, among others—worshipped Rodney’s talent, and rightly so. I had the great fortune to see Rodney perform in Las Vegas. Brilliant. He was like a musician, playing the crowd, winding them up and dropping them down. We were all along for a ride with the maestro of respect.

Rodney was a very serious guy on the set. Every night he’d sit in his robe, writing notes on the script. Alan told me that I helped make Rodney human. That was an easy job—all I had to do was love him.

Back to School
was a studio film, and they treated us like gold. Still, Rodney would complain as we drove along in his limo. I remember he was being honored one evening and invited me to come along with him and his date. We had a lot of fun, and when we got back in the car, I said, “You know, Rodney, you’re going to have to come up to the house for dinner.”

The look on his face said it all: “I’d rather get in a helicopter and jump.”

I howled. The rejection wasn’t personal. Rodney was a nightclub guy. He didn’t want to have a nice, quiet dinner with Jonathan and me. He wanted to be in Vegas!

And he was a very good kisser.

For only the second time in my life, I was shooting two films simultaneously:
Back to School
and
That’s Life,
which starred Jack Lemmon, Julie Andrews, Robert Loggia, and me.

But
That’s Life
represented some major firsts: I was working on it with Jonathan as well my friends Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews—and with the participation of Milton, our shrink. Talk about “all in the family.”

“You want to be independent of the studios?” Jonathan had said to Blake, knowing his desire to have more autonomy. “You can make a picture for a million dollars.”

“All right then,” Blake said.

The film was shot at Blake and Julie’s house, making it seem like even more of a family venture, like an extension of the Sunday nights when Blake and Julie would host a group of us for dinner and a screening. Milton had helped Blake develop the script, which was about a woman (Julie) waiting for the results of a biopsy on a weekend when her husband (the amazing Jack Lemmon) is dealing very poorly with his sixtieth birthday. I got to play the ditzy neighbor. Milton was on set too, which was an added pleasure. But it was also a reality check.

One day Milton came up behind me and said, “You’re such an asshole.”

Well, thanks, Milton. So nice of you to say.

“Why do you have to be the whole wheel?” he continued. “Why can’t you be a cog in the wheel? Why can’t you realize everybody’s job is hard?”

That moment changed me. It seemed I never stopped learning from Milton, and the lesson this time was that I was too self-centered, too focused on
my
life and
my
work.

Milton’s words reminded me of what Sydney Pollack had said about working with Meryl Streep on
Out of Africa.
I had met Sydney through my good friend Mark Rydell and had even worked with him for about three minutes back in the 1960s on a pilot that never got off the ground. I had also been in group with Claire,
Sydney’s wife, for ten years. Sydney was a great director. There was no subject, from comedy to thrillers to tear-jerkers, that he couldn’t do.
Tootsie. The Way We Were. Three Days of the Condor. Out of Africa.
I cherish those three minutes I got to work with him. Such directors are very rare.

What Sydney had said about Meryl Streep was that she was on time, every single day, without fail. She was always prepared, and she never, ever, complained about anything. And they were shooting in Africa. Milton’s words underscored that that was the way I wanted to behave, the kind of professional I wanted to be.

So thereafter on the set I became a dream. I told my makeup team on
Back to School
that I was going to be like Meryl Streep. Easy, no worries. One day a production assistant came into the makeup trailer, saying, “Sally’s gonna kill me! I called her in at five this morning, and looks like she’s not going to work until five tonight!”

The makeup girls said, “You mean Meryl Streep? No, Sally’s happy. She loves her trailer. It reminds her of a tract house in the Valley.”

What a change!

That’s Life
was a success, but
Back to School
was a blockbuster. It was HUGE, one of the highest grossing films of 1986.

But you know, what they never tell you when you’re working so hard in acting class, doing plays, trying to get into television, and doing some movies is that there is no
arriving.
What is truly difficult in Hollywood—and what really matters—is not achieving success but sustaining it. I know that as well as anybody.

There is no “top” you ever reach. Success just means more hard work, so there is no point to joining the ranks of show business unless you
need
to, unless it’s a drive that you can’t ignore. Being able to work at what you love is a gift. Jonathan would always say, “Passion first, money will follow.” I, for one, am grateful that I still have such a passion for entertaining.

Milton had suggested to me to get discipline and that if I did, I would see results. And I did: a huge uptick in work, a marriage to
a lovely man, and, now, two critically and financially successful films. I was excited. Claire was off at college, and my husband was becoming a successful manager. I felt reinvigorated about my career and was looking forward to the next challenge, the next adventure.

God laughs while we make plans.

I
WAS FIFTY-TWO WHEN
J
ONATHAN SAID HE WANTED KIDS.

This, despite the fact that I had warned him on our wedding day that I would kill him if, when I hit fifty, he told me that he wanted kids.

“I was talking to my shrink about things that have meaning in my life, other than work,” Jonathan said. “I know you’ll think it’s bullshit, but we were talking about kids.”

Guess how I replied.

“Well,” I said, “lately that’s all I’ve been thinking about too.”

We both did a double-take, as if we couldn’t believe what had just come out of our own mouths. But it was true: every time I saw a baby or a young child, I just ached.

We were both busy. Jonathan was producing more and more, and he now had his own management and production company, MCEG. And I was about to head off to Chile to shoot a film called
Secret of the Ice Cave.
The two of us decided that if we both felt the same way about kids after I returned from Chile, then we were going to adopt a baby.

I had just come off three films: a cute one called
Three for the Road
with a twenty-two-year-old kid named Charlie Sheen, who was a real joy to work with, then
Meatballs III
with another adorable
guy, twenty-one-year-old Patrick “Dr. McDreamy” Dempsey. In
Meatballs
I played “Roxy Dujour,” a recently deceased porn star who is working to earn her way into heaven by helping Patrick Dempsey’s character lose his virginity. One day Patrick and I went to lunch together, and I remember him innocently asking me how he could get a girl to like him.

I have no idea what advice I gave him, but clearly it’s working.

After
Meatballs
I worked on an ensemble picture,
Someone to Love,
with my friend Henry Jaglom. There was no script. Henry simply told me, “You’re a movie star who just left her husband. Action!” It was also Orson Welles’s last film appearance, and Andrea Marcovicci was in the film as well. It was a memorable experience on a lot of levels.

Chile, however . . . well, if I had known in advance what it was going to be, I never would’ve gone. But oh, am I glad I did. My first impression was a little rough, to say the least. At our first stop I wasn’t even sure what town I was in. “Your suite is right this way,” I was told upon arriving, and we made our way to my room. The living room consisted of a wooden board with a little thin pad, which I assumed was supposed to be some sort of couch. From there I headed down the hallway and came face to face with an enormous spider hanging by a single thread of web, right at eye level. In the bathroom I soon learned to focus my attention on the flowered shower curtain rather than the floor, where a team of termites were busy making dust. When Jonathan called to see how I was, I told him I was fine as long as I didn’t put my bare feet on the floor.