Watch Me: A Memoir (11 page)

“This is Nona,” said Jack. “And this is All-England,” he added, gesturing toward a polished gentleman—Nona’s husband, I presumed—who introduced himself as Martin Summers. “Nones and All-England are the greatest! They’ve been taking care of me in London.”

“I can see that,” I replied. My initial wariness about Nona and Martin faded in about twenty-four hours. Their house on Glebe Place in Chelsea was the center for amusement, and Nona was a fantastic hostess; by day she was designing exercise attire with padded shoulders, and the girls were meeting at her house for white wine and aerobics, then going out at night to the great parties Nona and Martin threw. All kinds of people came; everyone was young and beautiful. There was delicious Thai food under an Arabian tent all done up in Fortuny fabric in one of the long living rooms, and the furniture was a fantastic collection of bohemian art nouveau by Carlo Bugatti, the father of the car designer and manufacturer Ettore Bugatti.

Martin was a co-owner of the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street. Nona was of Austrian-Hungarian descent, educated in Switzerland. Their circle of friends ranged from theater and movie people to Greek shipping magnates and Jordanian princesses. One morning Nona called me up, her voice bursting with excitement. “Flagrante delicto!” she cried. “Flagrante delicto!”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I inquired. It
seemed that Martin had been spotted by Nona in Berkeley Square in the embrace of a pretty secretary. I was surprised that this event, as opposed to provoking a negative reaction from Nona, seemed instead full cause to celebrate, and celebrate she did, heading straight to Browns on South Molton Street for some serious retail therapy in the form of a new fur coat.

Our circle expanded in London, and I made many dear and lifelong girlfriends—among them Sabrina Guinness, Jerry Hall, Penelope Tree, the British actress Anne Lambton, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lyndall Hobbs, the model Marie Helvin, and the photographer Carinthia West. Sabrina was seeing Prince Charles, and there was little respite from the British press. I admired how coolly she coped with finding herself under a magnifying glass when so much was being made of it.

One afternoon Nona had a bunch of us come over to the house in Glebe Place to watch a live black-belt demonstration by a judo master called Steve Seagal, who had operated an aikido dojo in Japan. This before he met Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz of CAA and was transformed into an action star and married the British model Kelly LeBrock. He was flying around barefoot in a linen happi coat, doing great leaps and jumps in the hallway. The men were all pretty blasé about it, but couldn’t resist poking fun, probably because of a sense of inadequacy about their own physical prowess. The girls were transfixed, if a little bemused.

Allegra had come to London to be with me and was staying with us on the top story of the house. It was a quite spacious attic, and she rarely came out of that room, staying alone and reading all day. She was studying for her tenth grade at Marymount with a tutorial equivalent, and at fourteen she
was reserved and, to my thinking, antisocial. I charged her with overspending on taxis, which was rich, given that I used to steal from Mum’s handbag to take them and had not troubled to teach Allegra the London bus or subway system. I was on a health regime and forced her to come out to jog with me along the Thames embankment one day. She remembers my expounding on the freshness of the air as diesel engines passed us, spewing noxious fumes. We wound up going to Hyde Park in short shorts to play Frisbee, but it felt wrong—too much like the era of Ryan O’Neal—so we didn’t do that again.

*  *  *

Jack was very honored to be working with Stanley Kubrick; evidently he was a taskmaster, but for Jack he was all genius. It took weeks for Jack’s back to repair even to the point of his standing up. Since Kubrick owned most of the equipment—including cameras and lights at Pinewood—the fact that insurance was paying for the hiatus was bearable, but the workload was immense for the actors. There was talk that Scatman Crothers had exceeded one hundred takes on a scene in an afternoon, and Shelley Duvall had moved out of London entirely and was staying at Pinewood so as to be within a stone’s throw of the studio. Everyone worked late and looked exhausted.

*  *  *

Jim Harrison came to stay while Jack was working in London. Jim’s luggage had gotten lost, so he went off to look for a shop to buy clothes. When he returned in a pair of stitched-pocket boot-leg jeans, he thought he looked nifty.

I asked, “Where did you get those? Walter’s of Battersea?” And Jim wrote a poem:

WALTER OF BATTERSEA

For Anjelica

I shall commit suicide or die

trying, Walter thought beside

the Thames—at low tide and very

feminine.

Picture him: a cold November day,

the world through a long lens; he’s

in new blue pants and races the river

for thirty-three steps. . . .

Jim and I took to having long lunches at Osteria San Lorenzo, a haunt from school days when my mother first took me at twelve years old and introduced me to the owners, Lorenzo and Mara. Jim would have risotto with squid ink, and I’d always have mozzarella pomodoro, because in those days you still couldn’t get fresh mozzarella in Los Angeles. Then we’d progress to fishes or meats or pastas and desserts, washed down with a fine Barolo, a possible Chianti Classico, and a little grappa or Sambuca to polish it off. With just enough espresso to get us home from our boozy lunches, we’d weave our way through Chelsea to our respective naps before “Dad,” as we had taken to calling Jack, got back from the set.

We tried to appear perky, but Jack would take one look at us, still hungover from lunch at seven-thirty in the evening, and shake his head. He was always gray in the face when he got back from work, with a blood clot of dried red sugar from special effects stuck to his temple. After the endless hours
he was spending on set, he wouldn’t bother to wash it off in the hair-and-makeup trailer, preferring to shower when he got home to Cheyne Walk. So it was often touchy when he’d stagger in with his bad back, looking like the ax murderer of Pinewood, with a mood to match. He was so busy being good for Kubrick that he had no room for nice for the rest of us. He wouldn’t spend long over the well-done lamb chops that his cook, Annie Marshall’s nephew Tim Bourne, had prepared. Jack had a special disdain for garnish, and he would pick out parsley from his plate with unveiled contempt and toss it aside. Jim and I would push our food around and pretend we weren’t still stuffed from lunch. The atmosphere in the basement dining room felt monastic and chilly. Combined with Jack’s appearance, it was, it seemed, the nature of the day—cloudy skies but rarely bad weather.

One weekend Mick Jagger brought his wife, Bianca, and his daughter, Jade, to see us. They were living a few doors down. I’d known Bianca since Halston days, but I hadn’t seen Jade since she was a toddler and had told me to go away because she wanted to be with Jack. When I asked her what she wanted to drink, she said, “Fresh strawberry juice.” I thought that was pretty good for a seven-year-old in November in England.

*  *  *

On November 18, 1978, my brother Tony married Margot Cholmondeley in a ceremony in the chapel on the grounds of her father’s estate, Cholmondeley Castle, in Cheshire. The wedding was held over the course of a weekend, with lovely dinners and a long night of dancing and revelry. Dad flew in from Mexico, Danny and Zoë came down from London, where Danny was in film school, and Allegra came with me.
The following morning, with dew on the grass, we walked to the chapel through an ancient graveyard. Margot was a perfect Pre-Raphaelite bride, with her translucent ivory skin and a lace veil pinned to her wild red curls. She looked like a Rossetti. I gave Tony and Margot a Philippe Halsman picture of Mum from
Life
magazine in a silver frame. Tony seemed surprised. He said he didn’t expect that.

Margot was to give our family three of the most beautiful children on earth—my nephews Matthew and Jack, and my first niece, Laura.

*  *  *

Jeremy Railton came through London on his way to Rhodesia to see his parents. There was unrest in Zimbabwe, with Robert Mugabe at the helm of what looked to be a nationalist uprising. Local people from the townships were attempting to take over many of the white-owned farms, so there was a threat of violence. Jeremy was second-generation Rhodesian, and the bush was home to him. He was going over to help his parents set up an information center and museum at their game park.

Jack and I thought we would be going back to the U.S. for the holidays, but the schedule for
The Shining
was running over. I was upset because it was too late to buy Christmas lights or decorations. So Jeremy began to draw and make cutouts to inspire me to make my own. I begged him to stay for Christmas, but he insisted he had to go. “I might not see my parents again,” he said. Jeremy said this with such simplicity and conviction that I stopped badgering him.

On Christmas Eve there was a winter storm. Jeremy left for the airport, and Jack, Jennifer, Helena, Allegra, and I had an all-out snowball fight on Cheyne Walk, ducking behind
parked cars, running and sliding on the Chelsea embankment.

When Jeremy and I reunited in Los Angeles some weeks into the New Year, he showed me photographs of a small but beautiful museum and visitors’ center that he had built at his parents’ game park. It was the last time he ever saw his mother and father. Intent on recovering the land his parents had settled a full generation before, a militia in Zimbabwe murdered them.

CHAPTER 11

O
n the occasion of my twenty-eighth birthday party, Jack really put on the dog, hiring Chasen’s to cater—the caviar sat in tubs and the Cristal flowed—and writing me a poem:

It’s Tootie’s day,

Hoorah! Hooray!

A Bigger Fairy dress she’ll want

No surprise please, just girls and guys, please

Perhaps a jool
^I
to flaunt

Party could be her middle name

But then she’s had so many.

Like—Tootman, Fab and Mine and Big

You know, my dear, this doggerel here

Is written all in fun

’Cause in my heart, and every part

You’re simply called “The One”

Happy b’day

Yr Jack

I was sitting on the gray wool carpet on the floor of the living room at Mulholland Drive, wearing a Norma Kamali
black satin flamenco skirt, and opening a box containing a fabulous set of diamond-and-ruby clips from the estate of the artist Tamara de Lempicka, when I turned to my brother Tony, who happened to be there on a layover back from London to New Mexico, and said, “Well, this is a bit over the top!”

“Yes,” Tony replied, “it certainly is.”

A very pretty, natural-looking girl with ice-blond hair came into the room on the arm of Harry Dean Stanton. She gave me a piece of carved sandstone and introduced herself to me as Greta Ronningen. Greta was just in from Kalamazoo, Michigan, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We were to become very close friends. It was, as she remembered it, a moment that changed her life, because she met her future husband that evening, the producer Bert Schneider.

Bert was tall and elegant and sleepy-eyed, like he’d just rolled out of bed. He moved like a snake. One of the handsomest men I’d ever seen, he was one of the “B”s in the title of the film company BBS Productions, which he shared with Bob Rafelson and Stephen Blauner. Bert was a producer on
Easy Rider
and
Five Easy Pieces
and one of Jack’s dearest friends. He was a freethinker, a confirmed liberal with radical leanings, a comrade of Abbie Hoffman. He went to Nicaragua at the height of the Sandinista revolution to make a documentary on Daniel Ortega, and gave Huey Newton of the Black Panthers a safe house when he was running from the law.

When I first met him, Bert was seeing Candice Bergen. I think they had just come back from Nepal. Bert loved to travel to exotic places and take drugs and go native. He was, in his serpentine way, both lovable and a little scary, and always provocative.

Bert bought a lovely piece of land on Oak Pass overlooking
greater Los Angeles, and he built what looked like an enlarged Japanese teahouse, with sliding shoji doors and bamboo matting and a great big kitchen made of maplewood with a huge Wolf stove where Greta and I would cook delicious meals. They had interesting friends, went on amazing journeys. Bert and Greta took me on a wonderful twelve-day adventure with some friends of theirs down the Green River in Idaho.

I met Huey Newton up at Bert’s on Oak Pass. He told me he liked me a lot and tried to kiss me. I thought he was gorgeous but more than a little dangerous. I asked him if it was true that he’d killed a woman in Oakland, but he said he’d prefer not to answer that question.

*  *  *

Aspen in the summertime was an explosion of green, red, yellow, orange, purple, and gold. The rivers ran fast and cold down from the mountains. Hiking on Hunter Creek, the air was fresh with the scent of pine. On the lower elevations, pale delicate ferns broke through the moss, and the silver-barked trees fluttered and whispered in the breeze. I loved climbing the narrow trails, often on horseback, when more often than not I would temporarily lose my way and have to circumnavigate streams and gulches on the descent. One day I almost lost my life on a thoroughbred racehorse that tried to back me over a ravine into the Roaring Fork River. But they were halcyon days, golden days.