What falls away : a memoir (24 page)

the tall grass, strolling under the trees, talking and laughing with Woody.

Weeks before we started shooting, Steffi had asked to be my stand-in on the movie. My nerves were already knit into concentric circles and this idea brought me to a halt. I thought back to when my brother Patrick had briefly worked as an extra on Peyton Flace, and how awkward and out-of-whack things became in that context, with me playing a role, and tons of people being so attentive to me, and a chair with my name on it, while my big brother was herded around with the other extras, who almost never got treated very well. It was upsetting, and made it harder for me to do the work. And now my sister needed this job—so I asked and she got it, even though Woody thought it was a bad idea: he said he wouldn't have his sister on the set no matter what. Then it took my breath away how quickly and unreservedly he accepted Steffi. It seemed so out of character. In no time at all he had asked her to come with us on a three-day trip to Rome and Paris. Which she did.

At times during the shooting, I was overpowered by such a paralysis that I couldn't understand who the characters were supposed to be or what they were doing. Woody, now my director, was a stranger to me. His icy sternness pushed my apprehension toward raw fear. I was no artist, only the most inept poseur. This seemingly straightforward material was beyond my capabilities. I remembered the movie Fat and Mike, in which Katharine Hepburn, a professional athlete, was unable to do a thing when Spencer Tracy was around. My instincts, an actor's lifeline, screamed to head for the hills. By midmovie I had an ulcer and was taking Tagamet four times a day. I was so apprehensive, dispirited, and humiliated, and so convinced I had failed Woody, that I asked if in the future, if there was a future, I could be his assistant, so I wouldn't have to act. He looked at me doubtfully and said, **It's hard work being an assistant."

"I tend to be maybe a little abrupt sometimes," he told

his biographer, Eric Lax. "So I calmed her but I was not completely sympathetic, because I didn't realize the dimensions, the gravity. I knew she'd be wonderful in it. It never occurred to me she'd disappoint me."

I wasn't the only one who was having difficulty. Jose Ferrer, after numerous failed attempts to do a scene, finally blurted out angrily, "Now I can't do it. You've turned me into a mass of terrors."

Woody's comments to actors could sting. "I don't believe a word of that," he would say quietly, but very intensely. "Human beings don't talk that way." "That was pure soap opera" was one of the comments that upset Ger-aldine Page while they were doing Interiors. "You could see that on afternoon television," Woody told her. Maureen Stapleton, v/ho worked on the same film, said, "He's not shy, he's antisocial. That's a different ball game."

"There are certain directors," he has said, "who have affectionate relationships with actors, but I've never been able to work that way. I give as much contact as is required professionally." But that didn't stop actors from wanting to work with him for a fraction of their usual salary. "I think they do that because there's an appreciation of what my films try to be."

Woody usually shot his films in the fall, but for obvious reasons Midsummer had to be made during the summer; since that left the fall free, he decided to make Tielig, another small film, back-to-back with Midsummer. But both films took longer than anticipated and overlapped with Broadwcr^ Danny Rose, which in turn ran into Purple Rose of Cairo. There were days when we shot scenes from two or three different films.

The children and I visited Martha's Vineyard rarely now. Going there for longer than a week without Woody, who wouldn't go, was out of the question, and to go for less than a week was costly and impractical. We had to take two taxis to the airport and get eight seats together on the

shuttle; in Boston we hurried over to the Air New England terminal with our fingers crossed; if the flight wasn't canceled from fog, we boarded the little plane, grateful to be bounced over to Hyannis, Nantucket, and at last the Vineyard. Just getting there was such an accomplishment we couldn't think about leaving.

When we got to the house, we turned on the water, electricity, and heat. We threw out the dead mice, and then everybody piled mto the jeep to buy food at the market. It was only then that it hit us, as we walked up and down the aisles, that we were actually back. We said hi to familiar faces as if we'd been there right along. If eight people each want a sandwich, that's sixteen pieces of bread. Everyone wants eggs and toast, that's another loaf of bread and sixteen eggs. Or a couple of boxes of cereal a day.

Departures began with a trip to the dump. I loved the dump. All the weathered, forsaken things, and especially the seagulls—armies of giant gulls claiming their desolate mountains of garbage and the air above it. The dump was a wild, beautiful, thriUmg place.

But all things considered, the Wooden House, place of my dreams, didn't make sense for us anymore. I put it up for sale and began the depressing search for a house I was certain couldn't exist—a place as nice as the Wooden House within a three-hour radius of the city.

"Get one on the beach," Woody advised. "The open sea. Crashing surf. There's nothing like it."

But my budget was limited to what I obtained from the sale of the Vineyard property. A house on the open sea with room enough for all of us, within a reasonable distance of New York City, would cost a lot more than that. Anyway, crashing waves don't seem so wonderful when you're minding little kids, and I don't like the beach for long. I burn.

I would miss the foghorns' nightly dirges, and the many bewitching nooks and crannies of Martha's Vineyard—Bee-

tiebung Corner, and the wild Squibnocket shore, and Menemsha, with its tangled heaps of lobster traps and tethered boats nudging in the harbor, this morning's catch of bluefish, and the snow on the driftwood, and summertimes with Ruth, Gar, Thornton, Carly, and the Styrons, dear friends through the decades, and my beloved Wooden House on Lake Tashmoo, as close to heaven as anywhere on earth.

But there is a New England village with white clapboard houses, circa 1800. It has two churches with steeples, a school, a library, a general store, a bank, and a post office; there are cornfields and cows on hills beyond hills, and horses and silos and tumbledown barns. Nestled on the outskirts of this town is Frog Hollow.

Woodland encircles the white farmhouse and the lake it intimately faces. There is a knobby field at the back, hemmed carelessly by a colonial stone wall; a mossy creek holds back the dense woods and winds along the right of the field toward its upper, northeast corner, where a plain wooden bridge crosses the stream and leads past a greenish secret pond into the deep woods.

The lake m front of the house is a good five or six acres in size, with an island in the middle big enough for the spruce tree that angles over the water, two sizable rocks you can sit on, a profusion of blueberry and alder bushes, and, in the spring, a goose nest. On the narrow ring of a beach, early in May, a goose couple launches its progeny; it is also where the blue crane wades and watches the beavers ceaselessly trafficking the lake. There are almost no mosquitoes, which seemed a minor miracle after the Vineyard. My school friend Casey has a home nearby, and the Styrons winter here.

During the filming of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy we packed up the encyclopedias, the red canoe, my grandfather's crucifix, and the music box Frank gave me, and we moved everything into the new house. That it was a little

run-down didn't matter; but the house had no showers, and since Woody wouldn't touch a bath, I had a fine tile shower built just for him and I hoped he would be comfortable and grow fond of the house and be there as much as possible.

There was no doubt in my mind that the gleaming shower would please him; on the evening of his second visit I watched him take a white rubber shower mat (for germs) out of his bag and carry it into the bathroom. But seconds later he emerged with the mat still rolled under his arm. "What happened?" I asked. ''What's wrong?"

"The drain is in the middle," he said, shaking his head dismissively, as if I should have known. No further explanation ever came.

This was an instance when a shower was more than just a shower; it was the reason, he said, that he could not stay at Frog Hollow for longer than a brief overnight visit. So I was determined to get things right. According to his specifications, in another part of the house, I had a whole new bathroom built with a shower that had a drain in the corner. It was called "Woody's bathroom."

We were still shooting A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and settling into Frog Hollow when out of nowhere, he began to look for a house. He showed me brochures of fabulous beach houses, but he didn't ask what I thought about them, and when he went to see them, he took Jean, not me. It was as disturbing and mysterious as the drain.

In a short time he bought a beach house in the Hamptons for millions of dollars. Through the winter of 1981—82 he and his decorator conferred, and renovated, landscaped, painted, and fiirnished, and every once in a while Woody was driven out to check the progress. Sometimes he brought seven-year-old Fletcher along. Finally, one windy afternoon in early spring, he took the kids and me out to East Hampton for an overnight visit in the newly completed house.

It was impressive, bigger even than I had imagined. A mansion facing the waves, with many cavernous rooms impeccably furnished with pale-pine antiques, all in shades of white except for the Laura Ashley curtains in the bathrooms and a brand-new restaurant-style kitchen. Every appliance, towel, plate, pillow, and billiard ball was in place.

While the children flew excitedly in all directions, Woody and I walked down the beach. The sun was setting. It was a lovely evening. But he was troubled, there was something about the house, some indefinable thing he didn't like. He wasn't sure he would even be able to spend the night there. I tried to be positive: the place seemed imposing now but it was only our first visit, it was a big house, it would become familiar, and it would be great to be able to come out on winter weekends, build a fire, and watch storms over the sea. Frog Hollow, I thought to myself, would still be there for summers, when the beaches got hot and crowded. It would all work out. It would be great. And we would get out of the city during the winter months —as things stood we weren't going to Frog HoUow more than once every five or six weeks, because even with the new bathroom he didn't want to go.

He paced and worried through the evening. The next morning we left and he sold the house and everything in it.

Then Woody hired a woman whose only job was to check out the best available places on the shores of the Hamptons, Montauk, Maine, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Block Island, Fisher Island, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod. He was nervous about flying in small planes, so whenever we went to look at a house, he chartered the biggest aircraft that the seaside airport could handle.

Meanwhile I fixed up Frog Hollow and tended my garden. I carried stones out of the field and I mowed it with my tractor. The children learned to swim, fish, and canoe. They made friends with neighbor kids and they brought their New York friends to visit. They played badminton.

Softball, tennis, and basketball. They made snowmen and ice-skated, they rode bikes and horses. Peering into a crate of squirming mutt puppies at the town fair, the kids clamored for the yellow one, and so Mary joined the family, then another kitten. We celebrated each season, but our Christmases and Easters were the high points of the year. I watched my children grow, and I collected the memories.

When Woody took me to see these other, much grander houses, it was hard to ignore a gnawing little knot of anxiety— if he ever found what he was looking for, if it existed, one way or another it would eventually replace Frog Hollow. We would move m, and put our stuff in the drawers and closets and on the shelves but not (he was clear about this) on the walls, and the children would make the new house their own and grow to love it, and probably I would too. But I would always be reminding myself that if something happened, if anything went wrong, we would have to take our things out of the drawers and closets and off the shelves, and we would leave. Because it wouldn't really be our house.

It wasn't simple for Woody either. Even with the best and biggest airplanes it seemed in the end that no house was worth the flight. His search ended with less than a whimper on a Sunday morning; we were at the airport going to see another coastal property that sounded perfect. The plane was chartered and waiting on the runway. But Woody was still in the terminal, staring at the space between his shoes, or walking up and down the hallway with his hat on and little Fletcher trotting respectfully by his side. Nobody said a word for maybe two hours, then finally Woody turned to my son and said, 'Tletch, do we really want to do this?"

Fletcher looked up and softly replied, "I don't think so." "Me neither," Woody said. "Let's go home."

For a tune Fletcher was the child who worshipped Woody the most. He was an openhearted, persistent little boy who by midweek always found the courage to ask Woody, Do you think we could have a play date this weekend? Although this enthusiasm was decidedly one-sided, Woody tried to accommodate my son's requests. On Saturday mornings he took him, sometimes with one of the other children, to the arcades on Broadway; in Grand Central station he showed them how you can whisper from one corner of the great station and be heard in the oppposite corner; he purchased elaborate "effects" at the magic shop that they would perform for the rest of us; and he took Fletcher up on his terrace to shoot pigeon eggs with his BB gun—Woody waged war on pigeons because they messed up his terrace.

After a visit to the model shop, my small son would lug home hundreds of dollars worth of motorized model-airplane kits, when that same week I might have denied him a ten-dollar box of Lego. In Woody's world of expensive restaurants, fine wines, chartered airplanes, enough caviar for even the littlest kid, and chauffeur-driven stretch limos complete with VCR, I struggled to keep things in perspective for my kids. We still lived in the rented apartment with my mother on Central Park West, on my salary, which was $150,000 per movie, increasing, over a dozen years and thirteen films, to $375,000. My goal was to put enough aside for each child's education. Andre and I split the tuition for the six children we shared.