My Lucky Stars

1
 
 
THE QUESTION
 
Not long ago I was having lunch in New York with a friend when he asked me a question that set me to thinking deeply.
 
“How did you manage,” he said, “after so many years in the minefields of Hollywood, to retain the capacity to have your feelings hurt?”
 
The question stunned me. I couldn’t answer.
 
My friend pressed on. “I want to know,” he said, “why you haven’t become one of those well-functioning thing people? The ones with shrewd dead eyes who no longer live behind their faces; the ones who operate successfully but can’t feel pain anymore. One of those people who got what they wanted from Hollywood, but never knew what they wanted from themselves. How come that didn’t happen to you?”
 
I sat in silence. I couldn’t reply. Why was it good that I could still have my feelings hurt? It was awful. It made me angry and sometimes cruel. I couldn’t simply be hurt and leave it at that. So why was that praiseworthy? I became confused, left the restaurant, and went back to my hotel. For a long time I sat by the window and gazed out at Central Park. I had begun my career in New York. I was from the East Coast, yet Hollywood was now my home. In every way. And it had been for more than forty years. I did my first picture when I was twenty. But was my friend right? Was I really not jaded, dead-eyed, and shrewd? There was so much neither he nor anyone really knew. I had been naive to the point of denial. Was that because I never really allowed Hollywood to hurt me? Had I encased myself in a pleasant bubble of light while denying the darkness outside? Had I chosen to be unaware of the chunks Hollywood and some of the people around me had bitten from my heart because to acknowledge the truth would extinguish my enthusiasm?
 
My mind spun.
 
Another friend had accused me once of being relentlessly optimistic. My daughter had said I trusted too much, purposefully ignoring other people’s demons and my own as well. Now, as I stared out the window, I understood what she had meant. I had denied so much in my personal life, but that was what had allowed me to go on. Yet I was fully aware that most people in Hollywood were motivated by their own internal demons. The kings and queens of power held on to those demons as an identification. Neurosis was a protective coverlet a great deal of the time, and provided the impulse for their ambition. They were quick to reject before suffering rejection from others. No, I knew Hollywood could be a torture chamber of rejection. It could shred you, bleed you, tinker with your sanity, leave you torn and tattered along the highway of the misbegotten. And now, as I thought about my friend’s question, I remembered all the times people had said to me, “How come you keep popping back up again?” Was my longevity the result of having experienced Hollywood at arm’s length? Or had I taken pain and turned it into something else? I never wanted to adopt a mask. I feared that my face would grow into it.
 
A mask was too confining anyway. I wanted, I needed to be free … free of any image I would create. Free of dependency upon it, free of committing myself completely to it or to anything else for that matter … there it was … I wanted to be free of the long-term soul-searing pain that only comes from committing completely to something. So as snow began to fall on the park and my mind whirled backward in time, I thought, My friend is only partially right about me. Yes, I can still be hurt by Hollywood, but no, not deeply because I never honestly committed myself to the requirements of the town in the first place.
 
Instead I think I regarded Hollywood as a game. A game of expression, a game of humor, of love, of power, money, and fame. A game of created illusion where pain itself would be a choice. To me Hollywood was a place to learn, a test site for my identity, a new land where I could experience anything and evolve from it. But the game that I played exacted a high personal price. From the moment I came to Hollywood, I knew I would never be from Richmond, Virginia, again.
 
People in Hollywood are usually sophisticated in wading through certain shoals of human behavior, inept and maladroit in others. Human behavior is, after all, our business, our work, our survival: The more we understand its underbelly, the better we can play our parts. But more to the point, the more we understand ourselves, the better we are at our work. This is not an easy task because we so often enjoy playing other people in order to avoid who we are. Most of us have had therapy and, for the last ten years, have begun to understand that we are spiritual as well as physical and mental beings. This helps. We are becoming more and more conversant with the “Karma” of our behavior. Therefore, with our growing spiritual sophistication we understand the profound necessity to take complete responsibility for our words and actions. Well, maybe not complete, because we are also possessed of insecurities, envy, and jealousy; within our own creative community, we are often suspicious of each other. Therefore, even among friends, guarding the safety of one’s own heart and position is paramount. Often we feel reluctant not only to allow our hearts to be opened and examined, but also reluctant to see others put themselves in the same position. We know that sharing that kind of intimacy can lead to the agony of feeling used—and of using. Yet it becomes excruciatingly clear, all too soon, in this land of reel life, that if we can know and understand the murky depths of our coworkers, we have a fallback position for our own ultimate survival. Knowledge of self … numero uno. Knowledge of others a close second.
 
People in show business call everyone else “civilians.” That’s because we think no one else is hip enough to understand the depth of emotion in any given situation. We are an insecure yet arrogant breed. We can’t believe that any other line of work so challenges the human heart, its terrors and demons, or indeed its joys and scaled heights of ecstasy. So within our community—our social lives, our relationships, our problems with our children, our attempts to sustain friendship, even the way we conduct meetings, script conferences, and character-development talks—Hollywood people tend to revel in the belief that we are more free and more open and more explorative about ourselves in relation to our own product (ourselves) than, say, a CEO at General Motors or a guy selling baby food or tract houses. And we know that even with all our explorations of self and others we tend to manipulate what we find to suit our own individual needs. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re doing it, but we are. Manipulation is often our livelihood, our technique of choice in order to succeed at being noticed, acknowledged, and loved. Like Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, we sometimes know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
 
From the time I was six, movies have been important to me. I’m not sure why. I would sit for hours in the movie house, becoming the characters who shone down from the screen. I loved the feeling of being totally immersed in the story, the relationships, the drama.
 
Perhaps the reason was as simple as wanting to get out of the house. Or perhaps early on I had the feeling that there was, as Walt Whitman wrote, “a multitude of humanity within me,” and I enjoyed identifying with the multitude on the screen.
 
My brother, Warren, and I went to the movies every Saturday and stayed for as long as we could sit there. And sometimes sitting in the movie house wasn’t enough. Sometimes we would go “behind” the movie house and listen to the dialogue of pictures that were particularly horror-filled, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or the torture scenes from The Purple Heart. Perhaps, symbolically, we viewed these films from behind so that we could surprise-attack anything that frightened us. Perhaps we needed the option of recreating the truth the way we wanted it to be.
 
This business of rewriting the truth, of creating the reality we desired, is of course at the bottom of every thing. I think I was interested in Hollywood so early because I knew that every day of my life I was doing what they were doing every day of their lives up there on the screen. “Acting”—we were all acting. Only the movie actors knew how to do it best. Acting in relationships, acting within families, acting in jobs. It seemed to me that we were all acting out our lives according to what was in our own best interests. I know I learned very early to act my life according to how much in or out of control I was in any given situation. If I wanted something from my father, I would put my little feet together pigeon-toe style, tilt my head, and smile. I got what I wanted every time. If I wanted a boyfriend, I’d charm then withdraw, or even use my vulnerability to seem helpless and needy so that he could define a role for himself in our relationship. I acted my life very often according to my need to be loved. Not so different from how Hollywood works.