Watch Me: A Memoir (6 page)

Jack had tickets to a UCLA game in Portland, Oregon, once, and he said, “You’re coming, Toots.” I hated flying, and I had no idea how far it was. The flight was bumpy and lasted three or four hours. When we finally got to the game, the team fell behind instantly and was crushed. At a nearby motel that night, Jack was going on and on about a UCLA player whose athletic prowess had fallen short when I finally said, “Jack, this is unbearable. Let’s turn on the TV.” A show called
The Newlywed Game
was on. We watched for a few minutes in silence, then Jack said mockingly, “Oh, little marriage. Little tiny marriage game.” And I replied, “If you had any balls, you’d marry me.” And he said, “Marry you? Are you kidding?”

I wept all the way back to L.A. and sobbed for three more days after that. Jack just didn’t get it. He’d say something innocently, and I would plunge into a sea of tears, go to my bed, and turn my face to the wall—something I’d possibly learned from my mother and honed through my years with Bob Richardson.

At a certain point, I decided I just couldn’t bear basketball anymore. One night I begged off. I said, “Jack, I’ve got a dinner with the girls I can’t get out of.” Naturally, the Lakers won that night, so I was never invited again. “No way. No, Toots. You can’t come. You’re bad luck.” I’m sure it was just an excuse. He probably had some other bird on his arm.

People think, “Jack the joker”—Jack’s all about fun. And he pulls it off successfully, but it is a one-dimensional view. He is emotional. Life touches him, and moves him, and upsets him. He is a deep and serious person. He takes things harder than you’d imagine or than he would want you to know. On the other hand, perhaps in part because of the early experience of everyone in his family lying to him about his birth, it is not surprising that he’s quite cynical.

*  *  *

Jack’s house was a gray stucco bungalow typical of California in the early sixties. In my first year with Jack, my model friend Phyllis Major came over from Paris to visit. Those days she was dating the singer Jackson Browne and planning to marry him. She suggested that we should have Jack’s outside walls repainted barn red, which was a big improvement. The property overlooked both the Valley and Beverly Hills, and at night the view of the city lights in the Valley was a vast sea of fluorescence. On the other side of the house, a canyon sheltered a large reservoir, where Jack and I would often go running.

I was spending my days at Jack’s house, very much in love with him but feeling thwarted professionally. There was a degree of absurdity to my position in that I was the girlfriend of the world’s most famous actor, but I didn’t want parts to come to me because I was with him. I had contempt for that idea.

Every day scripts arrived for Jack and he complained that he didn’t have the time to read them all. Everyone was pressing him to do this or that. Every phone call was a proposition or a proposal. I announced to Joan that I had decided to become a lady of leisure. Joan Buck, to whom work was something of a religion, was clearly horrified.

When I moved into Jack’s house, it seemed there really was no niche that I could fit into other than his bed. The food was cooked, the flowers arranged; he was more than catered to. I had a bad habit of popping open Coca-Cola cans, taking a couple of sips, and leaving them around the house, two or three at a time. Someone complained to Jack about that, and there were little asides from Annie and Helena as to why I shouldn’t draw on the notepads by the telephone. I found this irritating—why couldn’t Jack tell me himself? I was embarrassed by the criticism. It made me feel like an errant child. But as soon as I got over it and realized that they were just attempting to follow Jack’s direction, both women became my lifelong friends.

My attempts to imprint on Jack’s territory occasionally proved disastrous, as when I insisted on the hiring of Cici’s Jacuzzi builder to make a similar one in Jack’s back yard. Unfortunately, a key element was omitted, the pipes became clogged with hard cement, and the contractor went on a bender and disappeared. Eventually, the whole mess had to be drilled out of the ground, very loudly and at great expense. Jack and I were not too lucky with bathtubs.

Jack loved his house on the hill, its walls plastered with paintings. He knew a good deal about art and learned more as he accumulated a diverse and eclectic collection, for the most part building it on his own instinct. He had a personal affinity for pigs and a prime collection of porcine artifacts—photographs and porcelains, which overflowed the bookshelves. People sent pigs to Jack on a regular basis.

A few of our best fights centered on picture hanging, as he was even more averse than I was to changing what was already on a wall. It was a problem, given that he was prone to augmenting
the collection with no particular regard for the lack of space, and to setting up a visual potpourri mixing styles and dates, which made me crazy. Ultimately, he solved this problem by acquiring other real estate properties next to his own, which helped in part to accommodate the artwork.

Marlon Brando lived farther up the hill from Jack, and they shared a driveway. At one point, having gone very green and eager to recycle the contents of his sewage tank, Marlon redesigned his watering system to irrigate the pepper trees Helena had planted along the driveway. So although the trees thrived, there was, for a short while, the low-lying odor of human waste on the property.

Marlon had several children, and the two eldest, Christian and Miko, would often pass Jack’s house to go next door to see Helena. She was sympathetic to them. Christian was very handsome, but he was troubled and seemed somewhat adrift. He had his father’s charisma and wanted to act, but Marlon never condoned it. Often, Christian would bring his crossbreed pit bull–German shepherd, Feisty, through the property with several other half-breed mutts who had taken to running in a pack.

Feisty and our Labrador mix, Big Boy, got into it a few times, and I usually wound up yelling at Christian to keep his animals under control. Helena had a little white bichon frise called Sasa, and I feared for her life, with good reason: Feisty went after her and killed her. One morning after I walked down the driveway to the post box with Big Boy at my heels, I had turned back to retrace my steps to the house when Feisty and three other big dogs approached us in a pack and crouched around Big Boy and me, as if they were circling game. I was frightened and stopped in my tracks. I heard a
deep growl low in Big Boy’s throat. I held on to his collar, and one by one we passed them all, with Feisty backing down like the coward he was.

When I first met Marlon, in Ireland, he seemed to like me more than he did when we met the second time around in Los Angeles. I daresay it was because I was no longer a child and had become shyer and more solemn and harder to talk to as a young woman.

Marlon loved to make practical jokes and generally engaged Helena to put them into effect on April Fools’ Day. Once Marlon instructed her to report to Jack that he had decided to sell his house to Sylvester Stallone, claiming that having been offered so much money for the property, he simply couldn’t afford to turn it down. While Stallone in those days traveled with a small army of bodyguards and lived a notably opulent lifestyle, Jack prided himself on his talent for privacy, moving under the radar whenever he wished, even though he had one of the most famous faces in the world. The thought of all those Stallone fans at the gate worried him to no end. Marlon thought that was just hilarious.

CHAPTER 5

I
got a call from Michael Douglas, asking if I would give Jack a script. It was a film he had wanted to do with his father, Kirk, from a novel by Ken Kesey called
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
They had rethought the movie and wanted to recast with a younger actor. Michael felt that Jack was the perfect choice to play Randle P. McMurphy, a criminal who pleads insanity to get himself moved from prison to a psych ward. McMurphy is one of the last of the literary American rebels, before everyone descended into pallor and angst. It was an iconic role, and Jack brought to it insolence and animal intelligence. Even in a lunatic asylum—maybe especially in a lunatic asylum—Jack is robust. The film was shot on the grounds of the state hospital for the mentally ill in Salem, Oregon. To an outsider, it appeared that there was an invisible thread, an artery, that bound the members of that community to the asylum. Everyone living in town, it seemed, had a history with it or a connection to it.

When I was still in L.A. and Jack was already ensconced in Salem, I invited Nancy Pfister to accompany me and Big Boy in my little bullet-gray Mercedes on a three-day road trip to Oregon. There was a detour in getting there—I awakened from a deep sleep to find us pulled over on the side of the road by the Arizona Highway Patrol, Nancy having been
apprehended for going over 100 mph in a 55 zone. She had also traveled ninety-five miles in the wrong direction. Eyeing my tweed hat, which happened to be sitting on Nancy’s head, I hoped the officer wouldn’t search us for marijuana. The last time I’d seen it, the bag was sitting on the dashboard. The cop was a kindly sort and offered to show us the way to the local police station so we could just pay the fine off the bat; we followed him there, paid our ticket, and walked to the parking lot. “What did you do with the grass?” I asked when we got back into the car. Nancy lifted my hat from her head, pulled out the stash, and gave me a wink.

Eventually, we got to Salem. Jack was occupying a model home on a lake filled with swans and mallards, next to two other model homes: on the right, Michael Douglas, who was producing
Cuckoo’s Nest
, and his girlfriend, Brenda Vaccaro, the hot actress from
Midnight Cowboy
; on the other side, Milos Forman, the director of the film, and his companion, the lovely French actress Aurore Clément, François Truffaut’s last muse. When Nancy and Big Boy and I moved in on Jack, his blood pressure rose. Big Boy started to misbehave, eating most of the ducks on Hidden Lakes in one fell swoop. Although I would try to restrict him to the leash, at some point I would start to pity him and let him off for a romp and he’d be gone, running up to the top of the city dump, or off to the supermarket to sniff up some woman’s skirt. After one such escape, it took an army of dogcatchers from the local shelter to eventually capture him. He was generally listed as a Newfoundland because he was so large, but in fact he was half Labrador, half golden retriever. Jack had chosen the puppy from a litter belonging to his ex-wife, Sandra Knight. And he was a truly fantastic dog, but up until two years old, he was nothing but trouble.

One night all hell broke loose when Jack and I came home from a dinner out, having left Big Boy alone in the house. It looked as if we’d been invaded by swamp alligators. The white shag rugs were filthy, the curtains all chewed off at two feet. For several days after work, Jack holed up with Big Boy in the garage for a series of exercises to bend a dog’s mind. Big Boy made a turnaround and became a saint among Labradors. Except for drinking paint thinner and getting hit by multiple cars on public holidays, he was a dream of a dog.

Aurore cooked local crab for the whole crew one night, and everyone declared it the best dinner they ever had. A few days following her triumph, I drove the nearly fifty miles to Portland to purchase live crab, as she had done. I wound up buying some natural deerskin boots that were too small for me, loading bushels of desperately clawing live crustaceans in buckets into the back seat of my car, and heading back to Salem in the relentless rain. Unfortunately, when it came to cooking them, it had never occurred to me that you had to gut the crabs, and I was terribly embarrassed, as they were totally inedible. I’d made nothing else for dinner. An ear of corn, perhaps. The company left disgusted and hungry.

Things had become a little strained with Jack, who by this time had fully taken on the role of Randle P. McMurphy and had little time for me. When I read in the newspaper that he had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in
Chinatown
, I went shopping for a bottle of Cristal and a bunch of yellow gladioli, and headed over to the set to congratulate him. It was lunchtime. I climbed the steps into his trailer, pulled some water out of the tap for the flowers, and propped them in the sink, at which point Jack walked in, grim-faced from his morning in the asylum.

“Congratulations!” I said cheerily.

Jack waved his hand in disdain. “I don’t have time for this,” he said irritably. I brushed past him on my way out and got into my car. I stopped at Hidden Lakes to dry my tears and to collect Nancy and a few items of clothing on my way out of town, and then we headed off on a 627-mile nonstop ten-hour drive to Sun Valley, Idaho, to stay with some pro ski racer friends of hers, leaving Jack and Big Boy to ponder each other for a full week at Hidden Lakes.

As the road to Sun Valley became ever more frozen, we found ourselves skidding on a skating rink of black ice somewhere near Ketchum, Idaho. Finally, we located the chalet and hooked up with Nancy’s ski racers, who shared their magic mushrooms with us and took us to spectacular runs on the mountains where the snow was fresh but not too deep and you could carve an arc like an angel’s wing.

*  *  *

In 1975, Dad was directing
The Man Who Would Be King
in Morocco, with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Cici had gone with him for a holiday and stayed at La Mamounia in Marrakesh, but fell ill and returned to Los Angeles early. Soon after, Collin and his nanny, a young Mexican woman called Maricela Hernandez, went to Morocco to visit Dad. Maricela was a quiet, mysterious girl with dark almond-shaped eyes and a short haircut; her features were primitive, like those of a jade mask from Veracruz.

When Dad got home to Los Angeles, something gave way between him and Cici; apart from fights they’d had related to the sale of St. Clerans, something had broken. Cici sneered at him and called him an old man, a fossil. Cici had seduced him with her amber eyes and tawny hair and tanned cleavage, and
he couldn’t believe that she had the audacity to turn against him. Cici was anything but half-measured. She could be your dearest friend or rise up against you like a lioness.