What falls away : a memoir (9 page)

our evenings and our audiences. As for the performing itself, the terror of my first night on the New York stage was only eclipsed by the panic of learning, one matinee, that Vivien Leigh was in the audience. To my mother, of course, she was a childhood friend from school, but to me she was Scarlett O'Hara.

Ms. Leigh showed up along with Ruth Gordon and Gar-son Kanm; even though I was racked with nerves and had to play the famous tea-party scene with a wicker chair stubbornly attached to the seat of my gauzy dress, all three were complimentary when they came backstage. But Ms. Leigh didn't leave it at that. Because we were in the middle of a newspaper strike, there had been no reviews; so she gener-ouslv sent agents, casting directors, and journalists to see my performance.

Before long, I was asked to test for the pilot of a television series that the producers hoped would begin filming in the fall, in California: Peyton Place, based on the scandalously sexy novel. When the producer, Paul Monash, first came backstage, he asked if I could do an American accent.

I realized by then that the best way to proceed with an acting career was to stay in New York and try to work on the stage, and not be in a television series at all. But I had no other job offers ahead, and I worried that I wouldn't have any other opportunity: this might be my only chance, so I'd better take it. I shot a screen test and was offered the role of Allison, with a contract at 20th Century—Fox that included five movies. So after much agonizing and dragging my feet, I signed the contract in a coffee shop on West Seventy-second Street, together with my mother, since I was a minor, and Dali, who remained focused on the unremarkable, brownish wallpaper, and the name of the restaurant, Oliver Cromwell. Deep in my heart I was convinced that the series didn't have a prayer.

Meanwhile my mother rented an old house by a lake, in Westport, Connecticut, and in June the rest of the children

and Tuffy came east. A housekeeper named Minnie Lou was left in charge, while during the week Mom and I lived and worked m the city. But Minnie Lou didn't last long, nor did her replacement, or the one after that, though my mother was doing all she could, God knows.

Mom, oh Mottij the siblings are out of control. There are gin bottles under the beds, and someone's shooting up cooked cough medicine and someone else has got a gun and that's not the half of it, what shall we do? Vm going to the Madison Avenue Playhouse now. I don't know how to do anything more.

When The Importance of Being Earnest closed in July 1963, I joined an Ohio summer stock company and appeared as the ingenue in My Three Angels. The theater was massive, it seated four thousand people, which required quite an adjustment after the mtimacy of the tiny Madison Avenue Playhouse. The first place I ever lived alone was a motel in Youngs-town.

In September I returned to Beverly Hills to film the pilot for Peyton Place. My school friend Tisha Sterling was now living at 809 North Roxbury Drive, the house where my family had lived and where my father died. Tisha's mother, Ann Sothern, had rented the house, furniture and all. I accepted their invitation to stay for the three weeks of rehearsal and filming, and I gave no thought to ghosts.

Brought to its knees by the costly and disastrous Cleopatra, 20th Century—Fox had been shut down for two years, and the enormous soundstages stood silent. Shirley Temple's house, the writers' buildings, the stars' dressing rooms, the legendary commissary with its murals of famous faces of the thirties and forties, were all locked and boarded up. Peyton Place was the only activity on the lot.

Incredibly, just twelve months had passed since, at seventeen, I had left the Roxbury house that nobody loved to return to school in England. I had known then as well as

anyone that, despite the illusion of order, circumstances can be controlled only sometimes, and sometimes not at all. Nonetheless, on that cloudless day one year earlier, as I had walked toward the car with a suitcase full of books and a mind full of dreams, I assumed that I'd be back for Christmas, and that my father and mother, and my sisters and brothers, would all be in their place as I had left them. And so mv good-byes had been light as I moved toward the car.

But looking back, oh looking hark . . . Why didnt I hold them there, my family J why didn't I hold them in their places, help them take up arms, to stand firm against demons, not to falter, and above all, to make tio exits? Could I have pressed my own strength through their skin? Would it have helped? How did I, so feather-light, leave them that day? Was there no hint of the spiraling, breaking, dying mutations of my family?

Here now is the hard clear truth: on that clear September day when I walked out of my house, what I did was this: I did not think of them — / simply saved myself.

Now, one year later, the contents of the house were eerily unchanged. Each chair and lamp and book was in its place, exactly where my parents had left them. Ms. Sothern now slept in my mother's sorrow bed, and my old room had become a crowded beauty parlor equipped with a professional hair dryer and a big drop-backed chair, a makeup table and a mirror framed in light—Ms. Sothern was a famous television star. Tisha and I slept in my sisters' old beds. Sometimes in the middle of the night we were awakened by the sound of the heavy Spanish dining-room chairs being moved on the wooden floor beneath us, and often I went to work in the morning exhausted.

The suffering and disarray of my family had stuck to the walls, crouched in the shadows; I entered each gloomy room

slowly, to allow ample time for ghostly withdrawals. With each passing day my father s presence became more vivid: memories and illusion became so entwined that I could barely distinguish them.

Ghosts, after all, do exist in possibility.

There was one room at the farthest corner of the house that I did not enter: the bedroom where my father had died with the phone in his hand. Even Ms. Sothern, who feared nothing, didn't use the room and the door was kept shut.

On the final afternoon of my stay in California, humming a little made-up tune, I crossed the large Spanish living room and stopped at the door of my father s bedroom; now in full song, I grasped the cool brass knob, and with a quick twist I stepped inside.

Tidy, hushed, lifeless, expectant—familiar details stabbed at me: the leather cup full of sharp Black Wing pencils, a yellow legal pad, a volume of John Donne, the oval portrait of my grandmother, a box of Kleenex half-full, the wooden rack men hang their suits upon, two dimes in a cup. Only my father was not in place. I touched his lovely burgundy fountain pen where it lay beside the phone, and the room thickened around me. I pressed my palms to the white bedspread monogrammed JVP, and then, perhaps, a miracle: from the depths came an urging, whispery then powerful, "Find eternity in this and every instant of your life"

Somewhere between birth and death, inside one pellucid moment, I stepped outside dread and imaginings, the fist of anger and guilt unclenched, and I lay down, clear as glass, on the bed where my father had died. A wound familiar as my name burst open, streaming pure and painful love and I accepted; there, finally, I embraced the essence of my father, and with him, humanity in its hideousness and its brief quivering beauty, its pig-selfishness and its willingness to give everything, in its contemptible pettiness and its most noble striving, in its utter meaninglessness and its sacred

significance; and all the mysteries, hopes, lacerations, losses, and celebrations of a lifetime . . .

The contents of my father's medicine cabmet had been cleared out except for one small item: a plastic box with a transparent, hinged lid through which I read, on a shred of paper, "Mia." With my forefinger, I carefully moved the paper aside, and there on a bed of cotton lay a nest full of pearly baby teeth.

I whispered my love for my father, and in peace and fullness, I left his room, teeth in hand.

A message from Dali was waiting when I got back to New York: he and Gala had arnved for the season. I was overjoyed to see them and told them excitedly every detail of my recent experiences. We resumed a schedule much like the previous winter's. When I confided to Dali my concern about finding work, and my impatience because nothing was happening, he said, "If you want dramatic change, put your shoes on the opposite feet."

No sooner had I swapped shoes than I got a phone call: from Fox. In England, Guns at Eatasi, starring Richard At-tenborough, had already been shooting for a few weeks. When the young actress Britt Ekland left the project abruptly because her husband, Peter Sellers, had suffered a heart attack, a replacement was needed immediately. Within hours I was flymg to Paris, where the director and producer would check me out and hopefully approve of me. I was a wreck.

Over peanuts and ginger ale in the bar of the George V Hotel, the director, John Guillermin, doubted I looked old enough to be credible as a nurse. A nurse! Who knew? I swallowed my peanuts and lit my first cigarette, narrowed my eyes, crossed my legs, and leaned back in my chair to say, in a low cool voice, that with makeup surely I could pass for twenty.

At eighteen, my looks were serviceable for an actress. My mother said I was lucky: I could look plain, and with help I could pass for pretty. The director and the studio were under pressure to complete filming. Right there in the bar Mr. Guillermin phoned Mr. Zanuck at Fox, and from the depths of my swivel chair, wreathed in smoke, I overheard him report unenthusiastically that I was innocuous, and he supposed I would do. Later I looked up innocuous.

On Monday morning I walked onto the soundstage of Pinewood Studios for my first film role, wearing my hair in a sophisticated up do, a load of makeup including fake eyelashes, and Bri,tt Ekland's lavender skirt and top, which fit fine once I got the falsies on.

This movie was one of the last speaking roles for the wonderful Jack Hawkins, who had cancer of the throat. He wore a little green lizard attached with a delicate chain to the lapel of his costume, a military uniform. Throughout the day Mr. Hawkins was inclmed to forget about the lizard and he would suddenly swat at it. Then the lizard would hang from its chain until somebody tactfully replaced it.

Richard Attenborough's performance in Guns at Batasi was remarkable, and he was as warm and kind as any human being could possibly be. Knowing I was alone, he invited me to his home on weekends and I was treated almost as a member of his family. He showed me stacks of books and manuscripts he'd collected about Mahatma Gandhi, and told me how he dreamed of making a film about his i life.

Pinewood Studios at that time was an exciting place to be. Sean Connery was James Bond, and I watched him arrive each morning with his golf clubs. Once I saw a naked woman all painted in gold hurrying down the corridor to the Bond set. Every day was such an adventure that Td ask the assistant director to please call me in, even when I wasn't scheduled: I loved watching the other actors working on their scenes. Soon, I felt at ease on the set, except for the

day I shot the love scene. I wore shorts, and taped flesh-colored fabric to my front, and really it was just a prolonged kiss, and Johnny Leyton was as nice as could be, but still it was indescribably embarrassing. It was the first time I was ever in bed with a man.

Meanwhile, despite my predictions, Peyton Place was sold to ABC, and scheduled to begin shooting: I was told to return to California as soon as the movie was over. I phoned Richard Zanuck, the president of Fox, and said I'd made a mistake, so could he please release me from that commitment; but of course it was impossible. I consoled myself with the thought that as soon as I got to California, I would get my own horse.

From London I flew to Los Angeles, checked into the Chateau Marmont, and began working on Peyton Place. A New England town had been constructed on the Fox lot, around a village green. On weekends Maria Roach and I searched for a horse and a more permanent, less expensive place to stay. We discovered a small residential hotel called the McCarty, close enough to the studio that I could ride my new bike to work, which I did, with my deaf cat Malcolm in the basket.

Most of the cast was Irish Catholic: Ryan O'Neal, Tim O'Connor, Chris Connolly, Ed Nelson, and myself. Dorothy Malone played my mother: her blond wig was kept in the makeup room on a block with her thick, black, trademark eyelashes carefully pinned to it, so in effect Dorothy was mostly there before she even arrived in the morning. Teenagers across the country fell for Ryan O'Neal, and I was no exception—he was handsome and very funny. He was also married: Tatum was born just after we made the pilot, and his son Griffin followed. Despite the melodramatic plots and subplots of Peyton Place, it was a lighthearted set. We shot our New England Christmas scenes when it

was a sweltering ninety degrees: plastic snow covered the town square, and we worked in coats and woolly scarves, mittens, and hats. Our hours were so long that there were times during scenes with Ryan late in the day when I laughed so hard I disgraced myself, and once I couldn't even contmue the scene. I was so ashamed that the next day I sent everyone flowers.

Our shootmg schedule allowed us little free time; but I found the perfect horse—trustworthy, beautiful, and big, at seventeen hands. I named him Salvador. Now I got up before dawn so I could ride in the hills behind Malibu and still be ready on the set by eight. On the weekends I rode along the beach and explored the Malibu canyons. I brought along a sandwich and Hostess Twinkies and an apple for Sal, and sometimes we stayed out until nightfall.

After the first show aired, my mother phoned from New York. Her only advice was to wear more eye makeup. "You have such lovely eyes, you should show them off." Later she admitted, "We all watched it and thought it just dreadful, we didn't know how to tell Mia." But they didn't have to tell me. I felt bad for the people I worked with, whom I'd grown fond of, and whose hopes were so high, but secretly I'd known all along that Veyton Place would fail. Now, I only hoped I wouldn't be singled out for criticism.

I have no memory of watching that first show. The next morning at work someone showed me the review in the Hollywood Reporter: the headline read MIA FARROW LIGHTS UP SCREEN. If my ring had been in my mouth, I would have swallowed it. Of course I was completely wrong about the show: people loved it, and it ran three times a week for years.