A Lotus Grows in the Mud (20 page)

S
omething extraordinary happened to me during shooting of the final scene of
The Girl from Petrovka.
The guards were about to take Oktyabrina away to Siberia for a life of hard labor, but they allowed her just a few moments to say farewell to her boyfriend, Joe Merrick, played by Hal Holbrook.

As an actress, you never know if the emotion you need to draw on is
going to come, or even where it comes from, but it was truly there that day. Standing there handcuffed in a snowy courtyard in the middle of Vienna, I began to speak my lines when suddenly I was completely overcome.

“If only I hadn’t been so stupid,” I said, barely able to get the words from the script out. “We could have loved long ago. Then there would have been so much more to remember.”

Inside, I was holding back a primordial wail at the injustice and the pain of my character’s suffering. I felt such incredible sadness that this light spirit I identified with so deeply had her life so tragically ruined. I could see this beautiful light being snuffed out, as I suspected little Sofia’s would be snuffed out one day.

Those moments in an actor’s life are magical, and you can never retrieve them. They are a gift. It doesn’t take away from the fact that we all worked hard at re-creating the reality, but those instances of real emotion come from somewhere else, somewhere deep within us.

I learned so much in Russia. I learned about humanity, about the importance of family, about religious and spiritual repression. I witnessed what people truly value—the tomatoes grown on a windowsill were worth more than almost anything to them. It is so important to get a different perspective in life, to see what other people have or don’t have and what they consider to be valuable. Possessions ultimately do not make us happy, nor does the obsession with acquiring more and more material wealth. How much is enough?

The Russians I met gave me a sense of humility and taught me about resilience in the face of what was, from my perspective, a very difficult life. They had so little. Yet some of those I met seemed to be just as satisfied and connected to their lives as those of us who have so much more.

This paradox has now been proved through research into the science of optimism and hope and the level of satisfaction in people’s lives. People in countries with greater poverty and deprivation often have a very high sense of well-being and satisfaction, while those in Westernized societies such as our own are—believe it or not—way down the scale.

Some wonder how people can be so happy when they have nothing.
But in Russia, and for the first time, I saw that what one has or doesn’t have is an entirely relative concept. The joy of having my hair washed, the taste of a sweet cherry tomato—that is not “nothing.” For the first time in my life, I began to see that material wealth really doesn’t automatically bring a sense of well-being or contentment.

Most of all, I learned from a ten-year-old girl that no matter what your situation, you can always have your special place in your special corner of your room or your heart where you can still dream your dreams and feel wonder over something as simple as a seashell.

T
he little yellow Bug chugs its way up the mountainous curves of Colorado, working its way to see me, my father at the wheel. It is 1975, and I’m doing a film with George Segal, called
The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox,
and I have got Daddy a seat in the orchestra that plays beneath the stage on which my character, Bluebird, performs.

I can’t wait for him to arrive. My dad and I have done several shows together already. He was in my first TV special,
Pure Goldie,
for NBC. He played his fiddle while I danced. We even did a comedy routine on that show, proving that he was funny even when that little red light came on beneath the camera.

Nor could I resist putting him in my one and only nightclub act at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas. We stayed in Elvis’s suite and had a blast. I love nothing more than being on the stage with my dad, and here we are again.

I spot his car driving up the pass to the location. He is looking for me through the windshield, hands draped loosely over the steering wheel as always, eyes eager with anticipation. I run out into the street that has been turned into a town from the 1800s. I am in my barmaid’s costume, which is high-cut, low-slung and with fake plums hanging all over it. My hair is piled high atop my head and adorned with a feather bluebird. I forget what I look like as I run to him.

“Daddy!” I yell as I dart in front of his car. I watch him start to smile, drop his head between his arms and then peek up as I rush to his window.

“Go, you must be kidding. Is this how you look these days?”

He loves all of it: the work that I am doing, the business of acting. I can see how proud he is through his joking bright blue eyes.

“Come out, Daddy,” I say, opening his door and grabbing his arm. “Come out and meet everybody.”

“Where should I park?”

“Just leave it there. Don’t worry. Just come inside the saloon; I want you to meet the crew.”

He saunters out of the car, Fred Astaire–style, and glides beside me in his one-step, two-step dance. Inside we go. I am proud to show off my father. I tickle inside when either of my parents shows up on one of my sets. It is so much fun for me, and so grounding.

Someone whisks him into the makeup trailer and transforms him into a man from the Gold Rush days. With his hair parted down the middle and his baggy trousers and shirt, he steps out looking like Alfalfa from
Little Rascals.

“Oh, Daddy! I wish Mom could see you now.”

He gives his high-pitched laugh as he slinks down the street, grinning from ear to ear. Beaming, I follow him into the saloon.

“Places, everyone!” yells the first assistant. “Let’s get this shot before lunch.”

I take my place behind the curtain on the stage. Daddy, sitting in the orchestra pit, takes his fiddle out of his case, and we are off. The music starts, the curtains open and I stand center stage, gyrating my hips, shaking what assets I have and beckoning men seductively. Throwing myself across a table, I begin to sing, “You can eat my cherry, cherry, cherries, but please don’t eat my plums. You can taste my berry, berry, berries, but please…”

Halfway through my act, halfway through trying to play a desirable sexual animal, I glance down at my father. He is looking up at me in horror, his face half frozen in a smile. Oh my God! I think, suddenly embarrassed. He’s never seen me like this before. All the while I can hear his thoughts. What is she singing? What is my daughter doing now?

Rut Hawn was a Southern gentleman from Little Rock, Arkansas, with values straight out of the Victorian era. His mother had four boys
and no girls, all of whom treated her like a queen. My father was always uncomfortable discussing sex or anything having to do with it, much less joking about it.

When I was young and feeling the hormone wave envelop me, I started dressing differently and putting on my pink frosted lipstick and black eyeliner. Daddy was the last person I wanted to see me walk out the door. In fact, I would race past the back room where he was reading a paper or watching TV so that he wouldn’t.

“Wipe off that lipstick!” he’d yell, his nose all wrinkled up as if he smelled something stinky. He really didn’t want me to grow up and be like the other girls.

I remember when I snuck out of the house once to go to a sock hop at the Armory in Silver Spring, Maryland, telling my folks I was going to a friend’s for the night. There were about a hundred and fifty kids there from all the other schools, and it was dance, dance, dance, the music blaring, arms flying.

In midjump, Jean Lynn hissed, “Goldie! Your dad’s here!”

I froze.

I looked up and saw my father, his limp hands dangling from the sleeves of his full-length brown gabardine coat. His eyes searching madly for yours truly. He spotted me. His pursed lips meant business. A man of few words, he said, “Get in the car, Goldie.” We drove home in silence. He was more hurt than angry. I had lied to him. How could I do that? I thought, the guilt eating me up inside. There were no harsh words spoken, no curfews. Disappointing my father was punishment enough.

I
finish my song, “So please don’t eat my plums…,” shooting my father a guilty look and rolling my eyes. He shrugs his shoulders and he mouths, That’s show business!

Daddy and I wave at the entire crew as they drive back down to Denver to nestle in their comfy hotel rooms at the end of each working day. They leave Central City the ghost town it really is, with just a few crazy locals and us left. Not for us the five-star hotels. We are braving it out in a ramshackle Victorian house with no heating and bad plumbing I
have rented on a dirt road. Each night, we walk up the road toward our castle in the crisp night air, nine thousand feet up, nearer heaven than I have ever been.

Feeling chilly, I wrap my arm in his. The crew has scattered sawdust all over the set streets, and it crunches beneath our feet. There is still a smell of horses in the air. Along the way, we stop and look in the windows of the perfectly preserved stores. Walking past the Helen Hayes Theater Company, I say, “Daddy, just imagine what it would be like if we really lived here and this was our home. Wouldn’t it be neat if life was this simple and every morning we could wake up in the mountains?”

“Yeah,” Dad replies wistfully, “gotta stop and smell those roses, Go,” as we turn onto our little dirt road.

Back at the house, my father hands me a steaming cup of freshly brewed coffee.

“Thanks, Dad,” I say, warming my hands around the cup.

He pulls up a rocking chair and sits down next to mine on our front porch. Cocooned up to our noses in layers of sweaters, we sit side by side and watch the sun dip below the horizon.

“Go, I want you to hear me out,” Daddy begins, and I know that I am in for a long haul.

“If they drilled a hole in the Santa Monica Mountains, it would create a vacuum that would empty out the whole damn basin of the smog,” he tells me. “See, it would create a suction that would vent out in the desert.”

“But then the desert would have smog, Dad.”

“Yeah, well, let them worry about it.”

I laugh. I have heard the story a hundred times, and I never tire of it. I know he’s half serious, if only someone would put his crazy idea into action. And then he talks about other things, about how he wishes my sister didn’t have to work so hard and how he wishes my mom would get out more instead of sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking and gossiping with her relatives. He tells me of his ideas for movies he wants to write. He repeats stories about his travels. How, as a young boy in the thirties, he hocked his violin on the way to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where he had been offered a scholar
ship, to buy a saxophone. How he taught himself how to play and got a gig with a band.

“Did I tell you about the time I was on my way back home to Las Vegas and my car broke down in Death Valley?”

“I don’t remember,” I lie, eager to hear the story again.

“Some guy picked me up in his Maserati…”

I cut him off. “His name wasn’t Stu, was it, Daddy?”

He laughs. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, my car broke down in Death Valley too, you know, except I gave someone a ride. I never told you that story.”

“Oh, anyway, as I said, Go, hear me out.”

I let him go on telling me about this man who picked him up, and how he told him he was Goldie Hawn’s father. How he tried to prove it by pulling a picture of me out of his wallet. Trouble was, I was only three years old.

“And what did he say, Daddy?” I ask again, prompting him.

“I couldn’t get him to believe me!” He laughs. “He thought I was crazy. He floored the Maserati and never spoke another word.”

We sit in silence for a while, drinking our coffee. Tilting back on his rocker, Daddy points to the derelict wooden house opposite ours. The shutters hang off their frames like the broken wings of birds. The wooden picket fence has collapsed onto itself like a set of old dominoes.

Mists of steam rising from his lips as he speaks, Daddy says, “People throw things away before their time. Look at that fence over there. You know, that fence was made from an old tree that once stood somewhere on the earth. Even though they cut the tree down, they made a fence out of it, so that it is still alive and useful.”

I look at Daddy and can’t help but wonder if he is talking about himself.

He goes on. “Things can always be recycled and used in other ways.”

“Well, I think that fence could definitely be recycled, Daddy!”

He laughs, his eyes twinkling. “I’ll get right on it tomorrow.”

We sit in silence for a while longer, rocking in squeaky syncopation.

“I guess it’s time to turn in,” Daddy says, getting up.

I kiss him good night and go to my room. Through the walls, I can
hear his radio playing. The comfort of knowing he is lying there, listening to his talk shows, sends me off to sleep.

D
addy isn’t required every day on the set, or in every shot, and when he’s not needed he disappears into the frozen countryside, like the will-o’-the-wisp he is.

“Where did Daddy go?” I ask the crew. “Hey, did anyone see Daddy?”

“Well, I saw him walking down Main Street about an hour ago, Goldie, holding some stick with a weird thing on the end of it.”

“Oh God, not his metal detector!” I cry. He carries that crazy metal detector wherever he goes, hoping to find some old piece of junk someone has dropped along the way. Then, with a hammer or a bit of wire and some nails, he’ll make something out of what he has found. It might be an ashtray fashioned from a rusty old carburetor—his “nicotine art”—or a recycled scrap made into a plant pot for the garden. Every evening when I get home, he shows me what he has come across with childlike wonder.

I think of all the crazy things Dad has invented in the past, like his home heating system utilizing Mom’s vacuum cleaner. Or the alarm he concocted that blasts Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
every time somebody turns the front doorknob. Or his homemade air-conditioning unit for his car, a huge cylinder strapped to the window that blows water-cooled air only when he reaches 47.5 mph.

My father is a gentle man, a philosopher and a dreamer; he is as light as air and just as refreshing. With his blue, blue eyes and the looks of a forties crooner, he is terrible at business and hopeless at being a husband, but he is great fun to be around. People regard him as eccentric, and, I guess, weak, because my mother is so domineering. He has always seemed more vulnerable and more perishable, but in many ways he is the stronger of the two: a survivor. He tells people with self-effacing honesty, “I’m not eccentric. I am just an unusual man who does unusual things.”

Not long after I first left home, Daddy left home too, after almost thirty years of marriage. It was as if he was secretly waiting for the right moment. His departure was masked as a decision to go west for work,
but he never really came back. Instead, he became the gypsy fiddler, feigning to look for work, roaming the country in his Volkswagen Bug, recording his encounters with strangers, playing golf and dropping in on us from time to time.

He was happy enough, and endlessly self-entertaining, but my poor mother was left home alone with no children, no husband and the bitterness of never having lived the life she dreamed of. There was a continent of regret and guilt between them.

When I look at my relationships with my parents, I think it was a gift, or maybe just survival, to be able to see them separately, because to see them as one would have been a very dangerous illusion.

I
hurry home from the set, hoping to find Daddy on the front porch waiting for me. As I round the corner, I smile with relief. There he is.

“Hey, Go!” he yells. “Slow down. You might miss something.”

I steady my pace, and he yells, “How was your day? On a scale of one to ten?”

“A ten,” I yell as I skip happily toward him. A big, fat ten.

That night, sitting on the porch, watching the sun disappear behind the old house, we sit in silence, our chairs creaking in some sort of mismatched harmony. Staring out at the bitter Colorado landscape, I rock back and forth until it becomes like a meditation to me, just being by his side. A lot of the time, my father just sits there next to me, silently thinking. When he opens his mouth to speak, I turn to him in anticipation of each nugget of wisdom he shares with me, the little nuggets I am stringing into a priceless necklace.