Dance While You Can

CHAPTER    1
 
 Hollywood Freeway
 
I sat in my car on the Ventura Freeway going to work at five o’clock in the morning in order to beat the traffic. Everyone else in town seemed to be doing the same thing. The usual speed limit observed was sixty-five or seventy miles an hour. We were doing two.
 
I looked out of my window. A creeping civilization on wheels surrounded me. To the left a man ate yogurt out of a container, anxiously stirring some kind of fruit from the bottom. I thought of the dancer’s guilt I used to feel when I went over my calorie quota by doing the same thing. I would have been better off with plain yogurt. Denial was necessary to success somehow.
 
To the right of me a woman had her window down and a smile on her face. Puccini came from the front seat in glorious stereo. She had the right idea. If this was going to take eons, she’d spend it listening to Madame Butterfly.
 
I moved around in my seat trying to give myself a back adjustment. This was going to take a certain kind of centeredness.
 
For thirty-five years I had negotiated these freeways in early morning soggy mist on my way to the movie studios. I had adjusted to them as a gradual lesson in patience. Or had I settled? Was I like the fish that had learned to survive on the pollution of Lake Erie? I was appalled.
 
I looked up and over the cars ahead of me. I had to imagine what the skyline of Burbank looked like, because I couldn’t see through the smog. I couldn’t see the mountains either. I felt suspended in time in a polluted morning soup. California had been so glorious when I first came in 1954. This freeway hadn’t even been constructed. It was, instead, a main thoroughfare that allowed Khrushchev, after his visit to our Can-Can set, to see the future of the San Fernando Valley and how it worked. I remembered he had said something about our not needing to be afraid of him and the Soviets: “You will bury yourselves from within.” Is this what he meant?
 
I chuckled to myself and thought of the scene around the table in The Magnificent Ambersons when Orson Welles, as a fictitious Henry Ford, described a litany of potential disasters that might result from his new idea. Perhaps the car was not the best invention for man. At that moment, I imagined what it would be like if the “Big One” hit right now. In the event of an earthquake, I’d be inundated by yogurt, Puccini, carbon monoxide, and air that I could feel more than I could breathe.
 
My stomach turned over with a very slight little quake of its own. It must have been the fruit I ate, I thought to myself. Or was it nerves?
 
I was inching my way along to Warner Brothers, a studio where I had never before worked, to be part of a film that had high-powered talent, high-priced actors, a budget one could easily come in under, and a schedule that would be as luxurious as the catering table.
 
Beginning a new film was always a new adventure for me, but as production time passed, it usually became a kind of boring, tedious exercise, sprinkled with the sporadic thrills of the scenes that went particularly well. The long waits between setups got on everyone’s nerves; it was always hurry up and wait, particularly in the morning. I never liked getting up early in the morning: I was a night person, seeming to come alive after the sun went down. “Moon energy,” someone told me once. “Moon energy is female.” Women sparkle at night.
 
I took a deep breath, a kind of a deep memory sigh. I couldn’t smell anything, not even the fumes. I had lost my sense of smell the previous January with some strange Asian brand of the California flu. “I probably created this to endure the freeway,” I thought. I remembered just a few weeks ago being in an elevator where five guys with pinkie rings were smoking fat stogies, and it hadn’t bothered me one iota. Previously I could smell a person with a cigar a mile away, particularly one with a pinkie ring. Having no sense of smell has its advantages. But I missed being able to smell the sea air and the pungency of seaweed when I walked out on the balcony at Malibu. The ocean sustained me in California. I could feel my blood run smoothly from the twenty-five postures of yoga I had done on the balcony as the sun rose. It was worth the price I paid in the loss of an extra hour of sleep.
 
I turned on the radio, AM980 on my dial, all the news all the time. “You give us twenty minutes, we’ll give you the world,” it continually reminded me. Another hostage had been taken, more corruption in government, a drug bust to the tune of twenty million dollars, a new report that said cholesterol was not bad for me. And Gorbachev had made yet another extraordinary advance in the cause of democracy behind the Iron Curtain. Would the Soviet Union ultimately reap the same fruits of democracy that seemed to be our inheritance on this particular day of freedom in the land of prosperity and openness?
 
I sighed again with a kind of hope and pleasure that I had somehow survived it all, and had yet another good job, and was still here, as the song I would sing later on in the film triumphantly insisted.
 
Yet movies had not been really interesting to me for some time now. I didn’t like the small talk in between setups: “Where did you eat last night?” “I’ve seen a new store with a great bargain in shoes.” “I found ribs with a sauce that doesn’t have any sugar in it.” Blah, Blah, Blah. I seemed to be the only one interested in meaningful talk these days, which was guaranteed to cause people to either vague out or be intimidated. The “vague glaze” was always followed by the instant need for a coffee or a smoke. I played a game with myself deciding who would vague out and who would be interested by talk about the way the world was going.
 
In any case, we could never become involved in a deep discussion, because at any moment we might be called to work. The hurry-up-and-wait syndrome could play havoc with “bonding” with anyone on a movie set. To arrive early or on time and not be used for hours didn’t seem fair to me. It seemed to be a waste of time, and it was on that level that I found being on a film emotionally draining.
 
I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the pages of the scene we would shoot on this first day. I had a nearly three-page monologue. Maybe that was why my stomach was upset. Up until last year, I had not spent much time learning lines. Somehow I could always manage when I got to work. But lately either the gray matter was going, the attention to specifics reduced, or I was suffering from what I jokingly called “Actor’s Alzheimer’s.” I also knew that the director was a stickler for having every word correct. I picked up the pages, finding it not at all difficult to read them as I was driving. I didn’t know which was slower, my memory or the traffic.
 
I had been gifted with what we call in the business “a part and a half.” It was fabulous. In fact, I guess you could say it was reminiscent of some of my own life. I was playing a movie star who was still hanging in there, still working, with a daughter who was also talented.
 
The day before, we had rehearsed in the home of the movie star on whom my character was based. I was completely unprepared for what I faced when I walked into the living room of her “Beverly Hills House.” There on the walls, peppered with museumlike memories, were pictures of the real me taken from magazine covers, portrait sittings, movie stills, premieres, awards ceremonies, live performances, from my childhood and adolescence—even a shot of me from the chorus of the subway circuit of Oklahoma! when I was sixteen years old that I had forgotten existed. I had suddenly been translated into the character I was playing, while my mind was flooded with memories of my own real career in the theater and films.
 
My eyes had filled up with the overwhelming impact of this pictorial reminder of my own show business past, and although I have no problem looking at events in many past lives, here I was overcome with reminiscences of this life. I had gotten to the rehearsal early and wandered through the rooms of Doris Mann’s home, allowing myself to wallow in the emotional feelings of certain red-letter events that beckoned to me from the past. I was in some kind of time warp as the images triggered fast-frame memories of my experiences.
 
I looked at a cover of myself and Clint Eastwood and remembered the day on location in Mexico under a tree, 116 degrees in the shade, when he had become impatient with his horse and belted the animal in the nose. At first I was shocked, but then I remembered thinking, What can you expect from a Republican? I had mellowed since then, not only about Clint, but about Republicans.