Watch Me: A Memoir (4 page)

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There was evidence after Spain that Jack had slept with a script supervisor. Whenever I was suspicious and I’d start looking around for evidence—in his wallet, his bureau, his bedside drawer—there was never a time when I did not find some telltale item, some scrap of inflammatory confirmation, so at a certain point I stopped snooping, but I also stopped trusting him.

I went off to the South of France to do a series of pictures for British
Vogue
in Nice and then Corsica, with Manolo Blahnik, photographed by David Bailey. I wasn’t getting the kind of attention I needed, and Jack had allowed me to leave. He had not regretted my imminent departure until the very last minute. And Bailey was seductive.

En route to Nice from Barcelona via Paris, I holed up for one night alone at the Esmeralda, the most romantic little hotel on the Left Bank, with Notre Dame framed in the window in amber light. That night I received flowers from both Jack and Bailey and felt good with the world. My room was on the top floor—wallpaper with green birds and butterflies on a sepia background, antique mirrors hung on the walls, my flowers in big jugs on a marble-topped chest, and in the
morning peach sunlight seeping through the open window overlooking the Seine. The birds sang; there was little traffic. I looked out over the top-hat chimneys, the gray slate domes with attic windows. Breakfast came, coffee and croissants. I was in a Colette state of mind, alone with my roses and lilies. August in Paris.

When I arrived in Nice the following day, I met up with Bailey, Grace Coddington, and Manolo Blahnik. Manolo and I were meeting for the first time, and I liked him instantly. To Manolo, everything was “amusing.” He was prone to short sound bites, yelps of contrasting hysteria and humor, in moments of outrage or pleasure. I remember some photographs at the Negresco Hotel as the first we shot in the series. Grace procured fresh orchids and pinned them to my hair and the shoulder straps of my dress. I was lounging on a bed with Manolo in the foreground on a telephone.

It was Bailey’s idea that we go to Helmut Newton’s house the following day and also try to fit in a visit to David Hamilton’s farm in the same area. David Hamilton’s photography was generally of very young girls provocatively posed in soft focus. Bailey decided to do a takeoff on David’s work, at David’s farm. It was an inside joke, and the same went for the picture at Helmut’s: I stood in the doorway of his cottage like a Newton model, in shades and a black beret. Helmut and his wife, June, even posed in some of the pictures. Later on that evening, June attempted to hypnotize me.

Bailey and I were drinking a fair amount of wine in the evenings. Before the morning departure to Corsica, we shared a couple of Fernet Brancas in the departure lounge to dispel our collective hangovers. When we actually took our seats on the flight, we were slightly unhinged by the presence
of a large group of nuns heading home in what turned out to be a lightning storm. The flight was extremely turbulent. We gleaned from the steward that this group was in fact taking a deceased sister home. When we landed, the storm had abated, although the runway was flooded and the clouds were scattered and gray in a cold lemon glow off the horizon. A man from the travel agency met us in a station wagon. When he opened the trunk of his car, I was surprised to see several repeating rifles, a sort of traveling garrison of machine guns, which he moved aside to make room for our luggage.

The hotel staff was almost entirely West African. The waiters in the hotel didn’t speak a word of English, nor, did it seem, French. They had a fleeting-eyed, nervous look, like boat people who didn’t know where they had landed. They always seemed to be on the verge of suggesting a deal one might not want to partake in.

That evening we decided to go into the capital, Ajaccio, for dinner, but the hotel told us that for some reason it was possible to eat only between the hours of seven and eight—otherwise, we would go to bed hungry. As we descended the hill into town, three Black Marias flew past us. The main square was filled with riot police in uniform, and the doors to all business establishments, including restaurants, were firmly locked and bolted. So much for dinner.

The following morning I was awakened by a strange chortling noise from an adjacent balcony. This turned out to be Manolo chanting, “Vive la Corse!” to no one in particular. I joined in this exercise for a while, and then we got a call to pull ourselves together; Bailey wanted to hit the road early.

Several hours later, we were in the mountains. On each hairpin turn, a pile of stones, a crucifix, a bunch of flowers—
some faded, some fresh. It seemed that people were careening off these cliffs regularly, given the profusion of roadside shrines. Up and up we went. The scrub turned to dark green and the mountains peaked around us. There was no one on the road. No cars. No buses. Eventually, we arrived at a citadel of white barracks and a surrounding cobblestone village of whitewashed concrete blocks. When we got out of the car and walked into a café, we noticed that the sole occupant wore a white uniform with a kepi. He was heavily scarred, had a facial twitch, and was armed with a pistol. We didn’t see many soldiers, but the ones we did see were shaved-headed, introverted, strange. It turned out we were at an outpost of the French Foreign Legion. All were dressed in white, as though they were fighting a ghost war up there in the mountains.

Evening fell as we made our way back to Ajaccio precisely on time for dinner at the harbor. As we were sitting by the bollards lining the dock outside the restaurant, waiting to be allowed in, Bailey said something like “You’d be mad not to marry me.” And I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” And that subject never came up again, although we enjoyed a short but most pleasant affair. I was still in love with Jack, but I was in a replica of my parents’ relationship, during which both of them strayed—the “If that’s what you want to do, then I can do that, too” syndrome. I wasn’t going to hang around and let Jack treat me badly.

The next day we buried Manolo in the sand for a photograph. He claimed to have the unpleasant sensation of being entombed. I was fascinated at how many shotgun shells I found on the beach and, oddly, how many pairs of shoes, as though their owners had suddenly just airlifted out of them.
Grace joined us in another picture, putting on a cloak and a black beret with her red hair flying in the wind, and Manolo dressed like Picasso in a striped shirt and espadrilles. Manolo and I toasted the sunset with champagne, and Bailey took the photograph, which later got to be on the cover of the magazine.

CHAPTER 3

T
wo days after finishing
The Passenger
, Jack started
Chinatown
, arguably the most beautiful and authentic film ever to be made on location in Los Angeles, about Los Angeles. From the seamless pairing of the city’s little-appreciated but fabulous original architecture with Richard Sylbert’s inspired interiors, to the costumes and wardrobes for the actors by the great designer Anthea Sylbert, to the creative cinematography of John Alonzo, to the masterly direction of Roman Polanski, the movie looked like a classic black-and-white film magically transposed to color. Everything was right, from the shots of the orange orchards to the vintage cars; indoors, the photography was deep and saturated, and the exteriors, by contrast, were baked and dry as a desert. It’s a movie about water, and about the corruption that lies beneath the surface of the city. The performances are veiled and mysterious. Faye Dunaway, fine as an Italian greyhound, portrays Evelyn Mulwray, the haunted heroine who carries a terrible secret, and Jack, the private detective J. J. Gittes who follows the trail of corruption that leads to the character Noah Cross, played by my father.

Jack and Roman were already friends, and Dad and Jack got on really well, sharing some philosophical conversations and a lot of laughs. It was during
Chinatown
that I moved out
of Beachwood and into Jack’s house. My furniture from my mother’s house in London was still in storage, so the stuff I was moving was mostly clothes. Since we had returned to Los Angeles after
The Passenger
, I had been spending every night at Jack’s. By this point, I had developed more of a sense of etiquette insofar as visiting sets was concerned, or so I thought. I had never enjoyed visits to Dad’s locations as a child, because there was always that feeling of being extraneous and in the way, but when Dad asked me to come visit him on the
Chinatown
set, I agreed. At a long table outdoors, having lunch, Jack on one side, my father on the other, Polanski at the head of the table, I sat down quietly beside Jack. Out of nowhere, my father, eyeing him malevolently, said, “I hear you are sleeping with my daughter”—long pause—“Mr. Gittes.” I went bright red, and then I realized: they were rehearsing. Everyone burst out laughing.

Later, the word from set was that Roman and Faye had gotten into an altercation because he had plucked a stray hair from her head before a scene. This story became magnified and amplified in the retelling, but I believe it held up filming for a day or so.

On my father’s last night of shooting, I came to set again. Annie had agreed to meet me at the Luau in Beverly Hills before going out to location. We ordered a fortifying cocktail and headed for Chinatown. Night had fallen, and when we arrived on set, I could see through the window of Dad’s trailer a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya on a table. I knocked on his door and he called for me to enter. As soon as I did, I was met with a cold reception. What had taken me so long? What had I been up to?

They were taking a long time to light the scene. It was
to be the horrible denouement of the film, involving Noah Cross and his daughter. Fact and fiction sometimes blur, and it began to dawn that Dad was practicing on me. The crew broke for supper. It was about one o’clock in the morning. Dad and Annie and Jack and I were in the back booth at a café, having egg foo yung for dinner. Dad dropped a noodle on his lapel but didn’t seem to notice. Jack reached over delicately with his chopsticks. “Let me help you with that, John,” he said good-naturedly. They wrapped the final scene at 5
A.M.

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Jack took me to Aspen in the winter of 1973. There were no ostentatious mega-chalets or dress codes, makeup was considered corny, and we never dreamed of putting on a snowsuit. We lived in blue jeans and stayed at the beautiful rustic mountain home of Bob and Toby Rafelson in Castle Creek. Bob had directed Jack in several films, including
The King of Marvin Gardens
and
Five Easy Pieces
. Jack called Bob “Curly” and Toby “Bums,” names that have stuck to this day.

It was through them that I met Paul Pascarella, an artist who drew birds and buffaloes and burned and tooled leather and deerskin. Jack bought me a poncho painted like a thunderbird, which I wore with the gray fox-fur stole and Borsalino hat he gave me for Christmas. Paul was one of the best chefs I have ever come across. His dinners were a harmonious assortment of ingredients shopped, picked, hunted, and found. He was a shaman in the kitchen, and a lovely skier.

I hadn’t skied since I was sixteen, in Klosters, where Tony and I went on winter holidays with our mother as children. I remember following Paul downhill in the still, cloudy silence of the mountains when the visibility was flat or when snow was falling and the moguls were hard to see. He’d make wide
arcs and long, sleek traverses, as though moving to music. Occasionally, I would fatigue and totally lose control skiing, humiliating myself once in a doubleheader by crashing into Teddy Kennedy and then crossing over Martina Navratilova’s skis as she was preparing to descend; to her credit, she simply arched an eyebrow. Roman came to Aspen that winter as well. He wore red-and-white racing spandex and was an excellent athlete.

Jack was introduced to Aspen by the fourteen-year-old daughter of his acquaintance Art Pfister, who owned Buttermilk and Ajax mountains. Her name was Nancy, and she was a wild child, a free spirit, and an amazing skier. A few years later, Nancy found a perfect house for Jack above a beautiful beaver pond in the Maroon Bells. In those days there were at least eight pubs on Main Street. After our last descent of the evening, we’d go to the bar at the Jerome Hotel for Irish coffee. Ads proclaiming Hunter Thompson’s run for sheriff were prominently displayed on the forest-green walls.

I liked Hunter, but he frightened me, and there were myriad stories about his wild behavior out at Owl Farm in Woody Creek. And yet Hunter might make an appearance on a winter’s evening, shuffling through the snowbanks into the house, legs bare to the freezing cold, in flip-flops and madras shorts, for a quiet Jacuzzi or a gentlemen’s conversation with Jack and Bob Rafelson over a good bourbon, without incident. I always considered this a miracle, having heard of his vast capacity for mischief. I respected his girlfriend, Laila Nabulsi, a beautiful Palestinian-American girl, for her bravery living with him in the wilderness in Woody Creek, where at one point later in life he accidentally shot his assistant in the buttocks, thinking she was a bear.

Jack and I returned to L.A. after New Year’s on a Learjet with David Geffen and Cher, his new girlfriend.

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The first time I saw Las Vegas was through the open window of a limousine with Jack. It was a black velvet night, the strip still baking from the blazing sun of day, a reddening of the sky over a gash on the desert floor, ahead of us a ribbon of colored lights flashing like a gaudy fault line. On both sides of the street, an effulgent avenue of kitsch—the Flamingo’s shocking-pink casino, the Roman columns of Caesars Palace, and on the pavement the transients, adrenaline junkies, hawkers, hookers, dancers, gangsters with their girlfriends and their bodyguards.

Jack and I were there to see Frank Sinatra, basking in the afterglow of a comeback album,
Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back.
Onstage at Caesars Palace, he ambled from the wings with a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other and settled in front of the audience like the king of his domain. His eyes were indeed as blue as periwinkles; his voice was slightly mocking but still sounded like the silken tone from the record player at St. Clerans, on the album
In the Wee Small Hours
, its cover depicting Frank standing under a blue streetlamp wearing a gray fedora. After the concert, we went upstairs to the penthouse suite, an open-layout space with white shag and gold mosaic, and a thin veneer of glassy marble on the floor. After a wait of some twenty minutes and some speculation as to whether he would appear at all, the door to the suite was flung open. Surrounded by bodyguards, Sinatra swept through the foyer, calling out, “Tina!” His entourage hard-shouldered everything in their path, leaving a note of bewilderment in their wake.