Read My Lips (38 page)

On the big day I got dressed with Jennifer. She was sitting at the makeup table with three magnifying mirrors. I said I didn’t know how she could stand it, all that reality staring you in the face.

“Honey,” she said, “I do the best I can, then I walk away.”

Thanks for the tip, Jennifer, because now I’m the one with the three magnifying mirrors.

The vows renewal was one of the happiest, funniest nights of my life. Hanna was rushing around, grabbing hunks of the centerpieces and handing them to my “old” bridesmaids, the ones who were in my first wedding. Bob Altman, Mark Rydell, and Henry Jaglom were there, directing the action. Milton, who saved our marriage, again walked me down the aisle, prompting the joke, “Look! Milton’s still trying to give her away.”

The ceremony had everyone in stitches. Jennifer had lined up a federal judge, Matt Burn, on short notice. When he forgot the words to the ceremony, Jonathan had to help him out. Hanna and her best friend, Vanessa, Lorna Luft’s daughter, began pelting us with roses, and all I could think was,
Oh no, I’m going to have to replace all the carpeting in Jennifer’s house.
Well, I didn’t have to. At the end of the evening Jonathan and I sailed home on a cloud with the kids asleep in the backseat. What a blast!

I
AM SO PROUD OF OUR LOVE AND ALSO PROUD OF THE SUCCESS
Jonathan made of himself in his second career. “Passion first and the money will follow,” he always said. And it had followed for him, that’s for sure. After working with Blake Edwards and starting MCEG, he got into distribution. Our friend Marilu Henner introduced him to John Travolta. The two really hit it off, and
Jonathan began managing John’s career and producing a string of hit films, like
Look Who’s Talking, Face/Off, Phenomenon, The General’s Daughter, Michael, Swordfish,
and others.

Jonathan produced
Look Who’s Talking
for $7 million, and it made $500 million worldwide. Actually, from the minute Jonathan started working with Blake Edwards, our lifestyle started changing. At first, when the money began rolling in, I actually got depressed. Money—real money—made me uncomfortable.

“I don’t want to be an alcoholic!” I wailed at Jonathan one night. I had this image in my head of self-destructive behavior brought on by idleness and wealth. I’d think of Palm Beach and all the huge mansions that line Ocean Boulevard, and I would imagine well-to-do drunks lying in their foyers—all those moneyed drunken wives I had played in my early days on television.

Needless to say, I got over my distress. We didn’t go hog-wild on luxuries but instead started upgrading what we had.

We asked Frank Gehry, whom we knew from ten years of group therapy, to come in and do our home. Years earlier, in group, Frank was always worried about going bankrupt at any minute, always questioning whether he was an architect or an artist. Then Frank went on to become one of the most famous architects in the world.

The first time he came out to our house he did not seem all that impressed. “This is how you live, big movie star?” he said.

That made me laugh. Then I started to tick off the changes I hope to make.

“I’d love a balcony outside our bedroom,” I began.

“You can’t have that,” Frank countered.

“I’ve always wanted a family room off the kitchen,” I went on.

“You can’t have that either,” he said. “But here’s what you can have . . .”

Frank began making drawings and models, showing us all the best possible renovations. He was there for what seemed like forever, but we ended up with a rooftop garden, a screened-in porch off the master bedroom, a master bath with a big window on
the curve of the street, measured so precisely that I could take a shower without giving everyone the Hot Lips show.

Ultimately, Frank changed everything in the house. He even took out my one-of-a-kind, custom-made, Harrison Ford bookcases. In the new old house of my dreams, the screened-in porch off the bedroom is my favorite; it’s like a tree house. When I can relax for a minute, I sit out there and read and look out on the hills. After working with me for two years, Frank decided he never wanted to do another house again. So, actually, I’m responsible for his success. And P.S., we’re still friends.

D
ESPITE OUR NEW INCOME,
I
CONTINUED ACTING, OF COURSE.
I love working, plain and simple. Doing
Boynton Beach Club
was a wonderful experience with a fabulous female director, Susan Seidelman. It also gave me the chance to work with so many gifted old friends, like Dyan Cannon, Joe Bologna, and Brenda Vaccaro, as well as meet new ones, like Len Cariou.

I also got more serious about my longstanding voice-over career, doing Sears, JC Penney, Volvo, Cadillac, Mercedes, Woolite, and more. Voice-overs are fun when the copy is good—it all starts with the writing. It was fun to work with documentarian Ken Burns on
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
When Bob Altman did his pilot for a television show based on Bill Gates, he featured a talking computer with a screen sporting a pair of big red lips—my lips, my voice.

Funnily, I once got a call from Lena Horne’s people, saying they were going to sue me for using her voice. Here I thought I had been using my voice all along, from moaning in ecstasy for Quincy Jones to singing the praises of Hidden Valley Ranch. (I still remember Howard Stern calling me during a radio broadcast, saying, “Sally, come on. Say ‘Hidden Valley Ranch’ just once.”)

Over the past forty years I’ve had an amazing ride that’s still going strong. Not long ago I voiced Principal Stark on the FX animated
series,
Unsupervised.
And for the first time, after hawking everything from Woolite to Hidden Valley Ranch, my voice-over work was recommended for an Emmy.

At one point the
Wall Street Journal
called me the industry’s most sought-after female voiceover artist. That makes me proud. But the voiceover field is getting crowded today. When my friends’ children come up to me to say, “Sally, I’m taking voice-over lessons,” I want to tell them, “Beat it, kid.”

T
HANKS TO
J
ONATHAN’S ADDED INCOME AND THE SUPPORT OF
friends, I also had the time, money, and confidence to invest in music, my serious passion. The same year we celebrated our re-nuptials, Bob Altman hosted a show for me at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. Hanna bought me a glass figurine and a pink lipstick she thought would match my suit, and Jack wrote me a little note that makes me weepy to this day.

Dear Mom, You’re the best mom because you’ve reached your goal.

Both kids have been so supportive. One day I told Hanna I might have to be in and out of town quite a bit because of some music commitments.

“I don’t care if you’re gone for a whole month, Mom,” she said, “because I know you love it.”

In the 1970s, when I was trying to break into music, actors who sang were not popular. It can still be a struggle for actors to cross over unless they’re doing Broadway or singing on prime-time television. But during the slow times my music has kept me from being a victim of “having to be hired.” As long as I can pay the piano player and I can sing, I’m okay.

There have been bumps in my music career, for sure, but a lot of excitement too. In 2001 I did a show in Manhattan at Feinstein’s at the Regency that got panned by Stephen Holden of the
New York Times.
In essence, he said I couldn’t carry a tune, had no musicality, and I was desperate to seem young. When Bob
Altman saw the review, he called me from London, where he was shooting
Gosford Park.
“Even if I didn’t know you,” he said, “I’d know there isn’t one word of truth to it.”

My next performance, the night after the
Times
review, I caught sight of Elaine Stritch—not just an actress but also an incredible singer to boot—in the audience. After the show, as I was greeting people at the door to my dressing room, Elaine stuck her head in.

“Kellerman, I saw that review in the
Times,”
she said. “I knew that the woman whose body of work I’d known all these years couldn’t be the one that the reviewer was talking about. And I was right.”

Then she turned around and left. I’d always liked her. Now I loved her.

But a
New York Times
review carries a lot of weight. The club’s management now wanted to cut short my run. I was in my hotel room packing to leave when I got another call. It was the critic Rex Reed, asking if I’d seen his review. I hadn’t.

“You can’t leave!” he said. “My review just ran, and this is the week that everyone will be coming to your show!”

As I was talking to Rex, my assistant at the time, J. J., was literally rolling my luggage out the door, and the concierge was ringing to say that the limo was waiting downstairs. I got off the phone with Rex, but the whole way to the airport I kept telling J. J., “I don’t want to go.”

I called LA to find out when Michael Feinstein’s manager, who supposedly ran the club at the Regency, was flying into town. His office said he was arriving around 5:30, but they wouldn’t tell me what airline he was flying. It was 3:30
P.M.,
and I had a 5:00
P.M.
flight to LA. I called Jonathan.

“Jonathan, I don’t want to leave.”

“Well, then don’t,” he said.

I told him that my luggage was already heading down the conveyor belt. “Tell J. J. to go get it!” he said. So I sent J. J. running after it. He snagged it just in time, and we went and booked a
hotel room at the airport. We got hold of all the LA–NY plane schedules and found the one landing closest to 5:30.

Bingo!

When Feinstein’s manager got off the plane, I was waiting.

“Oh hi, Sally,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

I laid it all out. Why have the club dark, especially with Rex Reed’s great review, and so on. Finally, he told me, “Get in the car.”

I got all resettled at the Regency—just hours after checking out—and the phone rang. I was getting only Friday and Saturday night, not my entire contracted run. Well, what the hell—I was going to make those nights count.

I called all my New York friends, like Dan Aykroyd and his wife, Donna Dixon. They all turned out and packed the place. There were standing ovations, crowd whistles, and, more importantly, those shows were
fun.
J. J. and I were very proud of ourselves. I hadn’t been desperate; I was determined. It might have taken me a long time to learn the difference, but I knew now.

Closer to home, I played the Roxy for a year, singing standards, thanks to Lou Adler and his son, Nic, who now runs the legendary club on my beloved Sunset Boulevard. Then I did three years at Genghis Cohen, bringing in new material all the time. No scripts, no rules, no way to make a mistake—Bob Altman’s influence. We called it the “antishow,” and it was a blast. If I dropped a lyric, so what? You can always go see a show where the singer knows all the words.