My Life So Far (with Bonus Content) Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  PREFACE

  ACT ONE GATHERING

  CHAPTER ONE BUTTERFLY

  CHAPTER TWO MY BLUE GENES

  CHAPTER THREE LADY JAYNE

  CHAPTER FOUR TIGERTAIL

  CHAPTER FIVE WHERE’D I GO?

  CHAPTER SIX SUSAN

  CHAPTER SEVEN HUNGER

  CHAPTER EIGHT WAITING FOR MEANING

  CHAPTER NINE TURNING POINT

  CHAPTER TEN DOUBLE EXPOSURE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN VADIM

  CHAPTER TWELVE THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN BARBARELLA

  ACT TWO SEEKING

  CHAPTER ONE 1968

  CHAPTER TWO THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?

  CHAPTER THREE COMING HOME

  CHAPTER FOUR SNAPSHOTS FROM THE ROAD

  CHAPTER FIVE KLUTE

  CHAPTER SIX REDEMPTION

  CHAPTER SEVEN INSURRECTION AND SEXUALITY

  CHAPTER EIGHT TOM

  CHAPTER NINE HANOI

  CHAPTER TEN BAMBOO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN FRAMED

  CHAPTER TWELVE ADIEU, LONE RANGER

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE FINAL PUSH

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN I’M BAAAAAACK!!!

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE WORKOUT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN GHOST

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN SYNCHRONICITY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ON GOLDEN POND

  CHAPTER NINETEEN CLOSURE

  CHAPTER TWENTY MAKING MOVIES

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE GIFT OF PAIN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO PHOENIX ON HOLD

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE TED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A CALLING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARNINGS

  ACT THREE BEGINNING

  CHAPTER ONE SIXTY

  CHAPTER TWO MOVING ON

  CHAPTER THREE LEAVING MY FATHER’S HOUSE

  EPILOGUE

  FILMOGRAPHY

  ENDNOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PREFACE

  If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

  —HANNAH ARENDT

  The past empowers the present, and the groping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

  —MARY CATHERINE BATESON

  I was born December 21, the shortest day of the year. I’ve always seen a year as a circle, with December settled down at the bottom, like 6 on a clock. Then, when the new year starts up again, I see myself moving upward, counterclockwise, till, twelve months later, I’ve come full circle, back to the bottom again, to that shortest of days. On the day in 1996 when I turned fifty-nine, I realized that, assuming I live to be ninety, give or take, the next full circle would raise the curtain on my third act.

  I’ve had a career both in film and theater for more than forty years, and I know something about third acts. Haven’t you ever been to a play where the first two acts seemed confused, then along came the third act and pulled it all together? Ah-ha, you said to yourself. So that’s what that scene in the first act was leading to! Or, conversely, the first two acts can be brilliant, and then in the third, things disintegrate. However, the third act is definitely key, the payoff that pulls the seemingly random bits and pieces of the first two acts into a coherent whole.

  The big difference between life and acting, though, is that in life there’s no rehearsal and no “take two.” This is it; better get it right before it’s over.

  To have a good third act, you need to understand what the first two have been about. To know where you’re going, you must know where you’ve been. Call me a control freak, but I don’t want to be like Christopher Columbus, who didn’t know where he was headed when he left, didn’t know where he was when he got there, and didn’t know where he’d been when he got back. So on my fifty-ninth birthday, I knew I had some serious thinking to do.

  In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.” Quite right. But when I talk about figuring out my third act, I’m not talking about making plans. I’m talking about being disciplined enough to learn what my past has to teach me, brave enough to take those lessons into my heart—to own them—and to commit myself to doing what is necessary to make them a part of my future. This is hard.

  I once saw a quote from dancer/choreographer Martha Graham framed and hung on a wall in a ballet studio. It said DISCIPLINE IS LIBERATION. At first that seemed like an oxymoron—isn’t liberation the opposite of discipline? But discipline here doesn’t mean tightness and rigidity, or punishment for wrongdoing. It means being so committed and so fully contained that you can let go; so deeply connected that you can detach; so strong that you can be gentle. Liberation takes intentionality, deliberation, courage, and—yes—discipline.

  I think of the tremendous discipline it took the great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev to be temporarily liberated from gravity and soar through the air. I think of Greg Maddux, for many years the Atlanta Braves’ outstanding pitcher, and the discipline that went into his ability to stand on the mound at the bottom of the ninth inning of the World Series and be physically and mentally relaxed.

  For me, discipline, liberation, means acknowledging my demons, banishing them to the corner, seeing my past and excising the old patterns and baggage to make room for stillness. It is within stillness that I will hear the small voice and know where it is leading me. Call that voice what you will, but it has always been there, although during my second act—and in much of my first, for that matter—it was too risky for me to hear it.

  It is taking discipline to liberate myself into a quieter third act, discipline in order to live with the awareness of my death.

  I don’t want to die without knowing who I am.

  Remember those toys where you’d drop some hard, dry kernel thing into a glass of water and it would expand into an underwater landscape of mystery and color? Well, for me, to be disciplined and to live with the awareness of death means taking every minute and dropping it into a glass of water and having it swell into something fuller, more complete.

  To understand why I decided to prepare this way for my third act, I have to take you back a few years, to my forties. My father was dying. I would sit by his bedside in silence for long periods of time hoping that he would talk to me, say something about what he was thinking and feeling as he was being rocked away from us to that eternal place. He never did.

  If he couldn’t come to me, I would go to him. I would focus on his face and try to put myself inside his body, become him. I remember feeling so profoundly sad for him—not that he was dying, but that he had never really been able to get close to me or to my brother, Peter. I felt sure he must regret that. I would if I were him.

  This experience taught me that I was not afraid of dying. What I am terrified of, however, is getting to that place right at the edge of life when there’s no time left, being filled with regrets, and having no time to set things right.

  Of course we always have regrets—things we’ve done that we wish we could take back or erase. I have significant ones that will haunt me forever, which I hope I have been brave enough to confront in this book. But it’s what you didn’t do that you know you should have done, rather than what you did do that you shouldn’t have done, that’s the worst: the if-onlys and what-ifs.

  “Why didn’t I tell her how much I love her?”

  “If only I’d been brave enough to address that old fear of mine.”

  I began thinking a great deal about the
se things in my late fifties. I had begun to go through deep inner changes—changes that I didn’t fully understand until I began writing this book. I realized then that to avoid regrets, I would have to start, while I was still healthy and strong, to name what those might be—and to do something about them. I needed to live consciously, and I knew it would mean facing things that frightened me—like intimacy.

  All this washed over me on my fifty-ninth birthday, in 1996. It was now or never. Fish or cut bait. In a year I would be sixty. One friend of mine said she slept through her sixtieth; another said he “went into hiding.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I hate getting old—it’s a vanity and joints thing. But I knew that I would have to do what I usually do when I’m scared of something: sidle up to it, get to know it, and make it my friend. I have made the truism “Know thine enemy” work for me many times over the years. For instance, when I was in my forties, knowing that I was approaching menopause and the inevitable changes that would bring, I spent two years researching and writing a book with my friend Mignon McCarthy, called Women Coming of Age, about how women can prepare for menopause and the aging process. When the changes did begin (much later than I had anticipated), I was prepared. I knew what was negotiable and what wasn’t.

  With all this in mind, I decided to fully embrace my upcoming sixtieth birthday by exploring what my life had been about up until then. Doing this changed me in ways I would never have foreseen. Coming to see my various individual struggles within a broader societal context enabled me to understand that much of my journey was a universal one for women—played out in different ways and with different outcomes, perhaps, but with common core experiences. This is what liberated me to write this book.

  I also realized that it was time to talk about my personal experiences during the last five years of the Vietnam War. I want to do this partly to set the record straight but mostly because of what my experiences during those years taught me—about myself, about courage, about redemption. The most important of these lessons came from U.S. servicemen, from whom I learned that although we may enter the heart of darkness, if we are brave enough to face and then speak our truth, we can change and be set free.

  Much has been said (not always in a friendly way) about the many variations of my life and how they have played themselves out in public; about the varied personas I seem to have taken on, the new faces that seemed to come with each new man in my life. I understand—now—what that was all about, and I explore it in this book. I hope that other women might see something of their own experiences in what I have to say about how a girl can lose touch with herself, her body, and have to struggle—hard—to get herself, her voice, back. Also, I believe that change can be a good thing, if you are fully in each phase and if the changes represent growth. For better or worse, I have been fully invested in each phase of my life, and I’m glad, because it enabled me to learn and grow. I hope this book will infuse the saying “Life is the journey, not the destination” with flesh and blood, because I believe that it is more joyful to embrace and be in the journey than to assume you’ll ever “arrive.”

  My life has been marked not only by change but by discontinuity. Bucking social, familial, and professional expectations, I never focused on a pot at the end of my rainbow, and I now think this lack of early focus is one of the things that saved me. Had I, out of fear or laziness or “normalcy,” done a freeze-frame on my earlier self, the self that wanted approval, well, I can tell you with certainty that I’d be sleeping through this third act . . . probably with the help of pills.

  I feel that the very changing nature of my life helps to make my story relevant to other people and also to this modern era. Everything about our world today speaks to the need for flexibility and improvisation, yet young people still feel pressure to do life the way their parents did: deciding early on what they want to be when they grow up and committing to it. They feel there must be something wrong with them when it doesn’t work out that way. We’re brought up waiting for closure (when I graduate, when I get married, when I know what I want to do and become a grown-up), and we expect contentment to follow. Youthful dreams then give way to “reality” and we succumb to what is rather than striving for what if. Consistency can be a trap, especially if it leads to being consistently wrong rather than to stopping, admitting your mistake, and changing course.

  One thing is for sure—the genie of “continual flux” is out of the bottle. Tectonic shifts in our global socio-psycho-economic realities have made constant change the norm—consistently! I believe in the words of the Sufi poet Rumi: “The alchemy of a changing life is the only truth.” Certainly, my own life is proof that flux is often creative, enlivening.

  I have structured this book into three acts. The first act I call “Gathering,” because it was in those first thirty years of my life that I took in all that had made me me—the tools, the experiences, and the scars that I would spend the next two acts recovering from, and also building upon. The first act is also when I gathered resilience.

  The second act I call “Seeking,” because that is when I turned my eyes outward and began a search in the world, for meaning beyond the narrow confines of myself and my immediate life, asking, What am I here for? What are other people’s lives like? Can I make it better?

  The final act is called “Beginning,” because—well, that’s what it feels like.

  While the high visibility of my public life has not always brought personal peace and happiness, it has lent a certain universal quality to my various metamorphoses. In the course of my writing, I have realized that perhaps I can use this to advantage: I can peel back the surface layers of events with which you, the reader, already have an association and invite you to see them through a new lens, with new eyes.

  I moved “out of myself”—my body—early on and have spent much of my life searching to come home . . . to be embodied. I didn’t understand this until I was in my sixties and had started writing this book. I have come to believe that perhaps my purpose in life is to show you—through my own journey—how and why this “disembodiment” happens, especially to women, and how, by moving back inside ourselves, we can restore balance—not just within ourselves but on the planet. I discovered that being disembodied rendered me incapable of intimacy, and so halfway through my second act, I went on a search for that.

  I have dedicated this book to my mother. For me, this is a big deal—a way for me to begin to restore my own balance. You see, I have spent most of my life feeling and acting like an Immaculate Conception in reverse: born of a man, without aid of woman. For reasons you will come to understand, I have spent far too much energy obliterating all in my life that represented my mother. This has taken a profound toll. Dedicating this book to her marks another turning point in my attempt to live a full, conscious life.

  So here’s to you, dear reader. And here’s to you, Frances Ford Seymour, my mother—you did the best you could. You gave me life; you gave me wounds; you also gave me part of what I needed to grow stronger at the broken places.

  At age two, totally focused.

  Already the dead-serious Lone Ranger.

  My photograph for Harper’s Bazaar by Richard Avedon, 1960.

  Copyright © 1960 by The Richard Avedon Foundation.

  Plain Jane with bad hair.

  A brief stint with the jet set at about nineteen.

  (Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures Getty Images)

  With Dean Jones in Any Wednesday.

  (Photofest)

  Barbarella between takes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BUTTERFLY

  Stay near me—do not take thy flight!

  A little longer stay in sight!

  Much converse do I find in thee,

  Historian of my infancy!

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,

  “To a Butterfly”

  I SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the floor of the tiny home I’d created out of cardboard boxes. The walls were so high that all I could see if I looked up was the white-pa
inted tongue-and-groove ceiling of the glassed-in porch so common in Connecticut in the 1940s. The porch ran the entire length of the house and smelled of mildew. Light from the windows bounced off the ceiling down to where I sat, so I didn’t need a lamp as I worked on the saddle. I was eleven years old.

  It was an English saddle, my half sister Pan’s, from the time before she’d gotten married, sold her horse, and moved to New York City—from the time when we still believed things would work out all right.

  I held the saddle on my lap, rubbing saddle soap into the beautiful, rich leather, over and over. . . . Make it better. I know I can make it better. The smell of saddle soap was comforting. So was the smallness of my home. This was a place where I could be sure of things. No one was allowed in here but me—not my brother, Peter, not anyone. Everything was always arranged just so—the saddle, the soap, the soft rags folded carefully, and my book of John Masefield poems. Neatness was important . . . something to count on.