Watch Me: A Memoir (33 page)

Not long afterward, Katie left for London. I was in the back of a production car on the Long Beach Freeway, driving home from location on
Blood Work
, when I got a call from Bob. “Are you on your way?” he said. “Danny is coming over to the house in an hour. There’s something he wants to tell us.” I asked what he thought Danny might want to discuss. “I’m not sure,” Bob said, “but I have a feeling Katie might be pregnant.”

When I heard the news from Danny, I cried. It was like saying goodbye to him as a little boy. “I could never imagine this before,” he said. “It feels right. This baby will belong to all of us.”

That night, in separate countries, Danny and Katie both looked into the starry night sky and individually decided to christen their unborn daughter Stella.

They went to Puerto Vallarta to get married. Bob was having trouble with headaches on airplanes, so we didn’t go down for the wedding, which took place in the center of town in front of a statue of Dad on Isla Rio Cuale, with the mayor and several of Dad’s old poker cronies in attendance.

*  *  *

I began work in August 2002 on
Daddy Day Care
at a very beautiful old Spanish house on the edge of West Adams in Los Angeles. Eddie Murphy was the star of the show, and in the parking lot where our campers were based, his four trailers were at the center of a cluster of motor homes surrounded by a twelve-foot plywood wall with video cameras. I guessed that if we came under attack, his place could double as a stronghold.

Eddie was sleek and burnished when he came to work, and expected everyone to be there before him. It was hot waiting on set, so I preferred to stay in my air-conditioned trailer until the last minute. But when I asked if we might get our call at the same time, the answer came back, “Ladies first.”

*  *  *

It had taken Bob more than four years to create and render the iconology of the Great Bronze Doors, and many more months to address and commit to bronze the attributes of the Virgin Mary that would adorn the entrance. Each day Rafi drove Bob on the freeway to an engineering company in San Dimas that made hydraulic parts for amusement-park rides and was contracted to take on the function of the doors. Rafi had been with Bob since 1989. He was our houseman, bodyguard, gardener, floor finisher, driver, and general all-around go-to guy.

Making the trips back and forth to San Dimas, Bob spent almost half his waking time on the road. He confided that his joints were aching and his feet were getting numb from the physical inactivity. He bought a van with ergonomic seats and decorated it with a Persian prayer rug, two Indian leather ottomans, and a large ceramic ashtray.

After the doors were finished and ready to travel and Bob had completed the Madonna, he gave a big celebration at San Dimas for the many workers and technicians who had helped bring the project to fruition. Ten beautiful female mariachis in white played Mexican songs, and many of our friends and his fellow artists came to salute Bob’s accomplishment before the doors made their final journey to downtown Los Angeles.

Joan Buck was staying with us at the time, and we rode together in the van with a police escort, beside the huge flatbed truck that carried the Virgin through the night, bound to the trailer with ropes and chains, to be released and raised high on a crane to take her place above the cathedral doors at dawn.

On September 2, 2002, the cathedral had its dedication mass in a powerful and moving ceremony. Cardinal Roger Mahony poured holy oil on the altar as fifteen bishops helped him consecrate the space in the presence of a pipe organ, a large vocal choir, and a troupe of dancing Vietnamese nuns. So began Bob’s work with the Catholic Church. He had found a way to circumvent the traditional choice of working with galleries, or so he hoped.

Later that month, on Monday, September 30, 2002, Allegra and Cisco welcomed their son, Rafael, into the world. And two months later, on November 4, after a difficult labor for Katie, my niece Stella was born. Because I had contracted the flu, I met Stella a week later at Danny and Katie’s house. When I first held her, her little head was tiny, cupped in the palm of my hand.

*  *  *

Allegra and I were on the phone, discussing her baby boy’s christening. “He’s Rafael. Rafa for short,” she said.

“What else?” I asked. Never having been equipped with a middle name, I was anxious that he not come up short.

“Well, I was thinking Patrick for Ireland,” she said. I agreed. Patrick was a lovely name. Then she added, “He was born on the feast day of San Geronimo.”

“Now that you mention it, there’s no question in my mind but that you have to name him Geronimo as well,” I replied.

And so, on June 8, 2003, I gathered together all of my character’s flowing silk dresses that I had kept from my wardrobe on
The Mists of Avalon
and, per Allegra’s request, traveled to Taos, New Mexico, with Danny to preside over the christening of my new nephew, Rafa, on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The christening was to be a nondenominational event, which meant in this case that there would be a group of guardians to welcome Rafa—Cisco’s best friend, Louie Hena, war chief of the Tesuque Pueblo; Steve Harris, a colleague of Cisco’s; and me.

Danny and I had flown in from L.A., landed in Albuquerque, and rented an SUV to drive up to Taos. We were meeting Joan Buck and her new boyfriend, Kim, who had driven up from Santa Fe the day before, and Jeremy and Yolanda, who had flown in from Los Angeles with boxes of long-stemmed sunflowers that I had ordered. Danny and I had rented a casita on the north side of town.

The next morning we arrived at the appointed bend in the river where the christening was to take place and were surprised to see my brother Tony dismounting from his vehicle, carrying a giant staff and wearing little other than a shoulder-length curly brown wig and a deerskin. He explained that he had come as John the Baptist. As the crowd assembled on the shore, I recognized faces that I had not seen in the longest
time: Allegra’s father, John Julius Norwich, with two of his adult children, Allegra’s half siblings Artemis and Jason, and my mother’s best friend, Gina Medcalf. Another dear friend from London days, the American artist Jay Hutchinson, was there, along with Lillian Ross and her son, Erik, and the producer Michael Fitzgerald and his wife, Kathy.

A cluster of us were standing under a processional banner that spelled out Rafa’s many names in gold on blue when a barge bedecked with garlands appeared, floating toward us. Everyone on the bank applauded, including an inebriated stranger who had just appeared on the scene. As the dinghy drew closer, we saw Rafa in Allegra’s arms, a Hawaiian lei hanging around his little neck and shoulders, with an expression of wide-eyed wonderment. We guardians made our speeches and welcomed him into the world as his full name was pronounced: Rafael Patrick Geronimo Niño de Ortiz Ladrón de Guevara. The stranger with the tequila bottle lurched to his feet and declared, “Don Rafael!” to the crowd. According to Cisco, if one is proclaimed a don at christening, the name will stick.

Early the following day, Danny and I traveled to Albuquerque through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with Joan and Kim. As we drove up to the high green fields, we breathed the fresh air and agreed that all beautiful places looked to us like Ireland. We stopped at the sanctuary in Chimayo, where the earth is curative and the sick and weak come from all over to drink the waters, and ate in a little restaurant close to the chapel. The air was sweet with a perfume I did not recognize; the chain-link fences surrounding the grounds were laced with flowers and crosses made of twigs and reeds, with prayers and letters to the saints.

*  *  *

A few days later, on June 11, 2003, the silver
Torso
that Bob created for Rodeo Drive was unveiled. The mayor of Beverly Hills declared that date Robert Graham Day. And on Monday, June 23, I watched as Bob was inducted into the Knights of Malta by our friend and his patron Prince Rupert Loewenstein at the Brompton Oratory, in South Kensington, London, during a solemn ceremony. Sabrina threw us a party at her flat and we had dinner one night in Mayfair with Hercules, Jeremy Thomas, and Michael White. Hercules was oddly fretful; Bob and I wondered if he was unwell.

CHAPTER 31

I
n September, I arrived to stay at a boutique hotel in Rome. I wasn’t partial to my room, which overlooked an outdoor restaurant. The scent of food and the clattering of dishes below reminded me I was hungry. Jaclyn Bashoff, who had been my assistant for three years, and I had just arrived to work on
The Life Aquatic
with Wes Anderson. We had been picked up by a unit car, but otherwise there was no welcoming note from production in my room, no flowers, no phone message, no customary box of inviting chocolates. I asked Jaclyn to get hold of someone on the crew. “They’re all out at sea,” she said, hanging up the telephone. Apparently, Wes and his crew were filming on an island off the coast and had no cell-phone reception.

The next morning the hotel management announced that the building was having serious plumbing problems and offered to relocate us. There were scores of unhappy, unwashed tourists in the lobby when we came downstairs. The management offered to send us to the Hotel Hassler, atop the Spanish Steps, the best and most luxurious hotel in Rome, free of charge for the week, which softened the blow enormously.

At liberty for several days, Jaclyn and I retraced the old steps I remembered from my time with Dad on
The Bible.
Visiting museums and churches and Caravaggios, having lunches at fine trattorias, and shopping at Missoni, Prada, and Fendi along Via Condotti, we had almost forgotten why we were there in the first place when Wes and the boys finally got off the boat. They had been out on the charming but funky fishing vessel,
The Belafonte
, that was serving as Bill Murray’s craft in the movie.

Milena Canonero was designing my look as something of a sea creature. I was thrilled to finally collaborate with Milena after so many years of following her work, from
Barry Lyndon
to
Chariots of Fire
, and my years of friendship with her and her husband, the actor Marshall Bell.

Wes invited me to come to dinner with the cast the following evening. That day I met my hairdresser, Maria Teresa Corridoni, who, from reputation, had worked on the great heads of Magnani and Callas. It was decided by Maria Teresa that the work should begin then and there. Another woman and an assistant attacked my scalp with breathtaking zeal, attaching long swatches of black and blue waist-length extensions, and sealing them to the roots with boiling-hot resin. It was a prolonged and painful process.

When I arrived for Wes’s dinner, I was still somewhat in agony but sporting a thick waist-length blue mane. I was very happy to see Wes and Bill Murray and Bob Yeoman, Wes’s director of photography. A beautiful man in a turban introduced himself as Waris Ahluwalia, and Owen Wilson stopped by with his charming steel-colored hound, Garcia, who was enjoying a fine adventure off-leash in the piazzas. I couldn’t sleep a wink that night, which is often the case before a first day’s shooting, and the shards of resin pierced my scalp like teeth. But I was excited to be working once again with Wes.

The Life Aquatic
centered on the character of Steve Zissou, a disaffected documentary filmmaker and oceanic researcher based loosely on and in the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, played by Bill Murray. I was his estranged wife, Eleanor; Owen Wilson was Ned Plimpton, his possible son; and Jeff Goldblum was Alistair Hennessey, Eleanor’s first husband and Zissou’s archenemy. Willem Dafoe was Klaus Daimler, a German boatman, and Cate Blanchett was set to play Jane Winslett-Richardson, a British reporter and the boys’ love interest. The Brazilian singer Seu Jorge was in the movie and contributed to the sound track.

Our location was an hour or so from Rome in Torre Astura, a peninsula in Nettuno that housed a medieval tower and the remains of a villa. This set was the Zissou compound. The cast and crew were put up in a small beach town down the coast called Sabaudia, which had at its center a postwar square with fascist architecture and a concrete cathedral. Our hotel was on the sand, and had two levels of open stairwells with turquoise tile and a delicious little restaurant downstairs where everything on the menu was traditional and fresh, right out of the sea. I was in the habit of eating mozzarella and seafood every night after work and going to sleep lulled by Seu Jorge’s guitar and the Brazilian songs floating up from his room downstairs. I made good friends with him and his wife, Mariana, and I went bicycling with Waris Ahluwalia; he, too, was playing a member of Team Zissou.

Overall, everyone was very pleasant, but I couldn’t always tell where I stood with Bill. On one of our first days in Sabaudia, he asked everyone but me out to dinner at a restaurant nearby, and it hurt my feelings. Maybe it was because he is a Method actor and our characters were divorcing in the
movie. I never knew why, since he had been considerate of me when we worked on
The Royal Tenenbaums.
But one of my dear friends from London, Melissa North, was staying at Bernardo Bertolucci’s summer house up the beach, and we had a lovely reunion.

It may be overly sensitive of me to say this, but that job in Italy was partly overshadowed by feeling strangely like an outsider. The previous outing with Wes, on
The Royal Tenenbaums
, had felt more family-oriented and inclusive, but this was a much bigger, more complicated canvas. We were also on the move for much of the time, from the Amalfi Coast to Naples, then back to Rome. After a few days filming out at sea, my blue hair was bleached ash-white by the sun. It had to be replaced, which took another seven hours of hot tongs and boiling resin. And the “eye specialist” who was to put in and remove my aqua-green contact lenses somehow managed to scratch my cornea, which required that I wear blackout shades in some night scenes. The work on the film was deceptive in that it looked simple, but a great deal of effort went into the sets, the costumes, the locations. Ideally, they should have started shooting in the late spring, because we were now entering September, the sea air was getting very chilly, and much of the action was out at sea.