Watch Me: A Memoir (19 page)

“I don’t think so,” said Dad, “but ask Roberto. He might need it.”

Roberto Silvi came downstairs.

“Do you need close-ups on this scene, Roberto?” Dad asked.

Roberto shrugged. “I don’t think so, John, not if you don’t want it.”

“I’ll never use close-ups here,” said Dad. “You’ve got to see the distance between the characters; that only happens in a two-shot.”

Tommy had plotted that this scene would go on all day. But there was nothing else scheduled, so we were sent home at lunchtime. This was typical of Dad’s economical approach. Nothing excessive, just the important stuff, the footage he needed.

I became very tired when we were shooting
The Dead
; sometimes it was painful for me to get up in the morning. I asked for a bed in my cubicle. I went to Dr. Giorgi and tested positive for mononucleosis. I felt that, imagined or not, my body was ailing in sympathy with Dad’s.

There was a documentary crew on set, and I asked that they not film me while the movie camera was rolling. By its
mere presence, the documentary camera breaks the code of imagination by recording the actor as himself, and whenever confronted by it I have always found it intrusive during scenes. There is a moment in
The Dead
when my character, Gretta Conroy, is riveted by a piece of music. A scaffolding had been rigged above a flight of stairs, and when I reached the top, I was to stop in my tracks and listen to the song. On the first take, I climbed the stairs and looked down at Dad sitting in his wheelchair. This vision gave me the feeling I needed for the scene. But suddenly the lens of the documentary camera loomed from behind his head, pointed straight in my direction. It cut my emotion like a knife. I had to ask to shoot the scene again. I also could not help but feel that the documentary was pointing a fatalistic finger at my father, as if this picture had been pegged to be his last, and I dreaded the possibility of that.

I believe it was as proud a moment for Tony as it was for me to be working with Dad’s team. It felt like we were new instruments playing in his well-tuned orchestra.

Because the movie was shot in almost perfect sequence, I had a lot of time to think about the last scene. Initially, when we meet the characters in
The Dead
, they are seen full-bodied, all containing their own spirit and history, but it’s Gretta’s speech at the end of the evening that provides Gabriel with his personal epiphany. I asked Dad and Dorothy Jeakins if I might wear a nightdress in the scene, so as to emphasize the distance between the social interaction of that evening’s party and the confessional night that follows, when Gretta and Gabriel are alone in their hotel room and her vulnerability surfaces as she tells him of a long-lost love.

When I arrived that morning, I was raring to go. Dad and
Donal and I went upstairs to the set to rehearse. As we walked through the scene, everything I had held pent-up for weeks erupted and flowed. Afterward, as we walked downstairs to get ready in hair and makeup, and the grips went in to light the set, Dad said, “That’s good, honey, now put it in the past.” When we went back, he shot the scene in one long take.

Because Dad couldn’t travel to Ireland, he instructed a second-unit crew on what to shoot for the last images in the movie. The famous line “Snow is general over Ireland” was a surprising premonition for that year, as the country was blanketed in white for the first time in more than a decade.

After
The Dead
was completed, Dad wondered to me privately if an audience would have the patience for a movie “whose most animated moment is the breaking of a wishbone,” but I knew that he was excited about it. “It’s not quite like any film I’ve seen,” he said. I heard the underlying pride in his voice.

Later that summer, Dorothy Jeakins, in accepting the Crystal Award from Women in Film, said in her speech, “Most important to me is John Huston and his remarkable family and the years of work and friendship we have known. Each of these people is here. Here they exist, where I see everyone in the inner crystal chamber of my mind.”

When I was working on
A Walk with Love and Death
, I found a poem in a book of anonymous Irish verse that I loved. It went like this, in part:

You promised me a thing that is not possible,

that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;

that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;

and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

My mother has said to me not to be talking with you today,

or tomorrow, or on Sunday;

it was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was locking the door after the house was robbed.

You have taken the East from me; you have taken the West from me;

you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;

you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;

and my fear is great that you have taken God from me.

When we made
The Dead
, Tony included the poem in his screenplay.

*  *  *

In the spring of 1987, Jack was making
Ironweed
in New Jersey with Meryl Streep. When I arrived on set, she was in his trailer, and they were speaking the lingo of their characters, alcoholic lovers. There was no doubt they were very comfortable in each other’s presence, because neither one broke character to greet me.

It was to be Jack’s fiftieth birthday. I had called an assortment of his friends, from Michael Douglas to Art Garfunkel and Helena to Suze Forristal and Carol Kane, and hid them in an indoor swimming pool in the basement of the house he had rented. They all arrived before he awakened in the morning. As soon as he had the coffee mug in his hand, I dragged him downstairs, where there were at least eight of his
best friends swimming laps and singing “Happy Birthday.” He remained in a bad mood all day.

*  *  *

Back in California, Jeremy Railton took me up to a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, situated near the Kaweah River, to look at some land to buy. At first I was skeptical—the tule fog was thick on the highway until the ascent to higher ground. The terrain was rocky. The sun broke through in patches; the pastures were wet with frosty dew. I said to Jeremy, “This is coyote country.”

Jeremy went ahead and bought some land there anyway. In the spring I returned with him to the property and this time I noticed a small house with a bunkhouse on a hill close by. Jeremy explained that it was constructed from adobe brick pulled from the bed of an old lake that was now a tangle of briars and weeds. The house was the color of mud. I bought it and three acres for $107,000. It was the first land I had ever owned, with the first real money I’d ever made, and I was so selfishly satisfied with this acquisition that I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even Jack, for a full year.

Jeremy, Tim, and I started to spend a lot of time up in the Sierras, riding in the back country, going up to Mineral King and Crystal Cave, and swimming in the rivers. For me, it was like a little taste of St. Clerans in the American West, a place where I could commune with nature. Jeremy and Tim occupied the bunkhouse next to the adobe house, while Jeremy built a house of his own design on his property next door. We accumulated animals rapidly. Soon I had eight horses, and Jeremy acquired a pair of ostriches and a small army of emus. When a property next door came up for sale, I bought it as well, and Tim moved in. Jeremy, Tim, and I formed the three
sides of the triangular map that together we had sketched out on paper when we were still at Beachwood. We felt that the farm was the manifestation of our hopes and dreams for a small utopia.

A couple of years later, Tim agreed to move there permanently to supervise the property, and more animals followed. He adopted a spaniel-Labrador mix he called Jake, and a female whippet called Whippet, who ate all the chickens and became pregnant. Eventually we kept one of her progeny, and she was shipped off to a friend of Jeremy’s in Oregon. The puppy’s name was alternately Francis and Whippet II. Laila became a frequent visitor to the farm and adopted a miniature Shetland pony she called William Valentino Blake.

Soon Yolanda Araiza came to work for me. She had come to California by way of Texas and had worked as a fruit picker and in the Tulare County Fire Department as well as at the Sequoia National Park. Yoli was a descendant of the Zapotec tribe from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico; although not too tall, she was very strong and could do anything a man could. I have seen Yoli in many situations—digging ditches and skinning rattlesnakes, making bonfires, raising children, and facing off with wild boars, all in the course of a day. She has as much knowledge of nature and the seasons as any almanac. Tim swore she wasn’t really human and was, in fact, a Sasquatch. He was only partly kidding. If I ever had to go into hiding in the wilderness, Yoli would be the first person I’d take with me.

One morning as we were sitting around at breakfast time, a little brown dog came by. His coat was tangled, and it looked like he’d been running hard. Later we learned that Barney was his name and that he lived up the road, but after that, he never
left us, and his owner didn’t seem to care. Jake, Whippet, and Barney had some wonderful times up in the hills, chasing rabbits and coyotes and mule deer and bears. They would go missing sometimes for several days and then come limping back to camp and sleep for several more.

Tim was like St. Francis in the spring, when the fledgling birds would often fall from their nests. He would rescue them from the jaws of the dogs and raise them on cat food. They were so tame, they would fly from the trees and alight on your shoulder. Tim and I were great riding companions and had fine times herding cattle with our cowboy friends at a nearby ranch and exploring the pristine back country on our beautiful little fleet of Arab quarter horses.

After the death of Jeremy’s parents, his younger brother, Joce, came over from Zimbabwe to live in California. Joce was helping to build Jeremy’s house, a few acres above my property in a grove of oak trees. He had married and was the father of little Jack, who, as a toddler, was as intrepid as his uncle Jeremy, going barefoot in the winter wilderness. I furnished my house with objects found at the local swap meet. Through the years, the farm became a refuge for all of us, family and friends—every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every Easter, most birthdays. Allegra, who had graduated from Oxford University and was working for a publishing house in London, and Tony and Margot’s children, Matt, Laura, and Jack, often came to visit from England.

CHAPTER 19

I
n the summer of 1987, Dad was intent on going to Rhode Island to be with Danny, who was about to direct
Mr. North
, an adaptation of the novel
Theophilus North
, by Thornton Wilder. After Danny graduated from film school in London, he had made a short film starring Buzz Meredith called
Mr. Corbett’s Ghost. Mr. North
was to be Danny’s second outing as a director. Dad had written the screenplay and was going to play the part of Mr. Bosworth. I was set to play the part of Mr. Bosworth’s daughter, Persis. I think it was more important than anything to Dad that he was making this choice because he could—to continue to travel and work. In true Dad style, no one was going to tell him what to do, at the risk of going under themselves.

Before we left for Rhode Island, Dad was saying that he needed some shoes. This seemed to me so poignant from a man who’d had the closet of a king just a decade before. I went out and bought him some midnight-blue suede loafers, as soft as rabbit ears. “Do you like them, Dad?” I asked.

“I love them so much, honey. I’ll never take them off.”

The trip from L.A. to our stopover in New York was difficult, as Dad was wheezing and frail from lack of sleep. He hadn’t really recovered from his last stay in the hospital. Nonetheless, the day after our arrival, he was eager to visit Picasso’s
Guernica
at the Museum of Modern Art with his dear friend Lillian Ross, the author of
Picture
, a book about the making of Dad’s film
The Red Badge of Courage.
He invited me to go along with them, but I was determined to enjoy a rewarding lie-in, having reached New York, a milestone toward our final destination. When I phoned his room to beg off, Dad reacted to me with scorn. “Tired? From what exactly, honey?”

The following day, we made the final leg of the journey, to Newport, Rhode Island. For the first few days, Dad’s health was touch and go. His doctors at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles were dismayed that he had made the trip; the chances of infection were very high for his compromised immune system, and the idea that he would be so far from their care should he go into crisis was, in their words, dangerous.

In Newport, Dad was soon installed in a pretty house among the sand dunes that the producer, Steven Haft, had rented for him; it had a beautiful view of the sea. For the first days that we were there, Dad was making an attempt to go with Danny to look at locations and generally supervise the plan of action. According to the script, a large portrait of my character, to which Mr. North finds himself attracted, would hang above a fireplace in a grand home. I had been obediently, or so I thought, posing every day for several hours for a local artist to paint my picture, as directed by the art department. When Dad had stopped by on his tour of locations, he happened to see it, half finished, on an easel in the room where I had been posing.

That evening I received a call from him. “How could you let this happen?” he said. Clearly, he was appalled by something.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked. “What have I done?”

“It’s the portrait,” he said. “It’s terrible.”