Ask Me Again Tomorrow (16 page)

As I sat there, I remembered a prayer that my mother and I would say together at bedtime:

During this stay at the ashram, I had a unique experience. While I was chatting with a fellow visitor, Ma’s assistant, Sudha, handed me a small vial; it was from Ma, water from the font of the Black Madonna, and Ma wanted me to drink it. Just as I swallowed, I heard a deep rustling sound. I looked up and saw a huge owl flying over me. I couldn’t help connecting the water with this bird of wisdom, hoping it was a sign. Someday, wisdom would come.

After I returned to L.A. and went back to work on
Dad,
I received a script from a Greek-American screenwriter who I agreed to meet with. During the course of our meeting, it turned out she had worked as a translator for the controversial archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. I asked that she introduce me.

Marija Gimbutas was a feisty, clear-headed, and brilliant woman. She was an impeccable scholar with a sense of humor and a reverential respect for the mystical. When we first met she was skeptical about me: after all, I was a movie actress. But she soon realized that my interest was genuine, that I wanted to learn more about her and her work.

Marija’s book
Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
is considered a classic text, spearheading the study of Goddess cultures and prehistory as a legitimate discipline. Through her scholarship, Marija created a portrait of life during prehistory. She showed that in Goddess cultures, there was no separation between the secular and the sacred, and that societies were built around the realities of the cyclical nature of life: the processes of birth, death, and regeneration. These civilizations enjoyed a long period (several thousand years) of uninterrupted peaceful living, and they predate the ages of weaponry and male-established hierarchical systems. What first struck Marija was how no weapons were ever found from earlier cultures, which were highly sophisticated and productive. They were built on patterns of sexual equality and nonviolence. Central to these cultures was a queen or priestess who encouraged and promoted unity and an understanding of the divinity within all living things. Her work had a major influence on my thinking, and meeting her turned out to be one of the most important encounters of my life.

During the time I was in L.A., I got a call from a speakers’ bureau asking if I would appear as the keynote speaker at a women’s expo, a daylong series of seminars and talks on women’s issues. I was intrigued, and not at all sure what they wanted me to talk about, but I had a sixth sense about it and decided to do it.

Two hours before I was to speak, I was frantically trying to write an outline for a speech about how hard work had brought me success, or something—anything. What on earth did I have to say to a roomful of women I didn’t know? After two hours I had written only a single paragraph.

With this one short paragraph in hand, I walked onto a stage to face an audience packed with women of varying ages, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds, all of whom were looking at me with great expectation. Clutching that slip of paper, I made my way to the podium and began. I read my paragraph, and then just started talking.

I began talking about the Oscar and the role of Rose Castorini. I spoke about how strange it was to be an overnight sensation—after working for thirty years. I shared some highly unglamorous details about show business, including how frustrating it had been to confront the ethnic thing on a day-to-day basis. How my agent would get calls from people who said, “Can she speak English?” or “Will she change her name?” And these were just for auditions. I talked about living from paycheck to paycheck, month to month, and how I nearly went broke during my first weeks in New York. But I also talked about how, after I signed my first Broadway contract, I treated myself to a steak and baked potato at Tad’s Steakhouse.

I talked about all the time I thought about quitting but stuck with it anyway. About being scared to try new things and doing it anyway. About the years of therapy and different approaches and how it was all part of the mix.

Some of these women had never worked outside the home, others had worked since their early teens, and most had devoted their lives to raising their children and supporting their spouses (if those spouses had stuck around). All of them wanted to know how I had managed—in their eyes—to have it all. They wanted to know how I had managed to have a career as an actress while also having a family and holding a marriage together. My first response was (and always is) two words: Louie Zorich. I told them the only way I could do any of this was because my dreams were supported by a man who loved me and wanted me to be happy. I also told them that having it all is an illusion, or at least “all” means the good and the bad. I told them about Louie’s accident and how it decimated our family. And how we came back from it.

They asked me what the high points of my life were and I said there were three: Christina, Peter, and Stefan.

As I spoke, I saw heads nodding in recognition and heard murmurs of affirmation. Meeting and talking with women has helped me to know and understand that in a very real way, I am no longer an outsider.

As I was expanding my circle of women friends, the most important woman in my life began to drift away from me. My mother was doing odd things: she would put the paper towels in the oven to dry. She was starting to forget and misplace things. She would eat only toast. She began to forget our names. I tried to ignore this, to chalk it up to old age, but we couldn’t ignore it for long: it was especially painful for my mother. One day, while Louie and I were sitting in the kitchen, my mother burst through the door, clutching her hair and shouting, “My mind! My mind! What are we going to do about my mind?” Just as suddenly, she stopped, looked at us, and very sensibly announced, “What am I telling you for? What can you do about it?” Little by little, she was losing the independence she had held on to so proudly.

I traveled to Greece during a break in shooting the film
Ruby Cairo
in Egypt. I wanted to see where my mother and father came from. Karavella, the village where my mother was born, is in the southern part of Greece, known as Mani. Life there is anything but easy: it’s all about hard, physical work and scratching out a basic subsistence living. Even knowing this before I got there, I was stunned by how barren it all was—rough-hewn streets of small houses built around a tiny square, one little store, and a small church. As I made my way around town asking, no one remembered the Christos family name. The main square was knee-deep in mud and water, and a local shopkeeper, a very old and frail man, told me that recently the town’s only water main had broken. I met three women and we started to talk. I asked them what had happened to the village. One of them chopped the air with her hand and cried in Greek, “God has hit us!” I felt at home. I realized they all had hazel eyes—just like mine, which is unusual for Greeks. As this recognition set in, I began to weep. One of the women moved closer and began to stroke my arm.

From Karavella I went to Mytilene, the island where my paternal grandfather and grandmother were born. The first thing I saw was a sign that said
The ancestral home of Michael Dukakis.
I asked a group of people in the street where this home of Michael Dukakis was and they pointed to the top of the hill. I paid a young boy a dollar to show me the way.

The house consisted of two rooms, one on top of the other, with a teeny stairway connecting them. The cooking was done outside. The man who had originally bought the house from my grandfather still lived there—he was ninety years old, and blind. I walked back to the town square thinking of my grandparents as newlyweds, living in that house, then moving to Turkey and then fleeing…to the United States.

I wanted to see more of the island they had come from. Erosso, in the southwestern part of the island, is famous for being the summer home of the poet Sappho. I had read about her and wanted to see this place. While I was there, a woman recognized me and said there had been an announcement on Greek television that Olympia Dukakis had to call her home in the United States. I found the nearest pay phone and dialed Montclair.

T
HERE WAS A
crisis with my mother. She had been running out of the house in her nightgown and stopping cars in the street. She was calling 911 to report men breaking into the house to rob and kill her. She was out of control.

Apollo had flown back from L.A. and once he saw the situation, he realized our mother needed twenty-four-hour care and had to be put in a nursing home. He wouldn’t do it without talking to me.

I argued with him, as he knew I would, but then Peter got on the phone and told me that he’d been unable to leave the house, leave her alone, the whole time I’d been gone. “Mom,” he said, “it’s gotten really bad. I can’t live like this.” I’d been in denial about the extent of my mother’s condition, but when I heard Peter’s voice, I realized it wasn’t fair to him or anyone else. So over the phone, from Greece, I agreed we should find a home for my mother.

Because of her diminished mental capacity, my mother qualified for the special Alzheimer’s unit of the best local nursing home. The care she received was superb. The nurses were especially compassionate. Almost immediately after being admitted, she seemed to improve. She even regained her sense of humor. When I would come to visit, she’d be surrounded by other patients. When she saw me, she’d go through a very elaborate and theatrical good-bye, raising her arms and saying, “Friends, I must leave you now: my daughter is here.” Then she would wave like the queen of England, grab my arm, and in a low, sinister voice she’d say to me in Greek, “Olympia, let’s get out of here!” and off we’d go.

We’d walk around the neighborhood, singing Greek songs together. Though often she couldn’t remember my name, I always felt like we connected when we were singing. Soon, though, she couldn’t remember how to sing and I had to sing alone.

In 1992 I went back to Omega for a week, along with three actress friends, Leslie, Remi, and Joan, with whom I’d been developing the Goddess material. We were going to do a workshop for women over forty based on the characters and conflicts from the myth of Inanna. This would be the first time we presented this workshop, and while we were all acting teachers, this kind of work would be a new experience for us.

One of the participants was Madie Gerrish, a psychologist specializing in family therapy and bereavement. We became good friends. And I continued to do non-Goddess-related work.

My agent called one day and said he was sending over a biopic about Frank Sinatra. About an hour later, an enormous package arrived at my door. Tina, Frank’s daughter, was producing the movie and wanted to get the project into production as quickly as possible. They offered me the part of Frank’s mother, Dolly Sinatra. The offer was very, very generous. I was intrigued.

The script was close to a thousand pages long, and I spent the rest of the day and well into the evening reading about Frank’s life. When I was done I reviewed just Dolly’s scenes; that didn’t take too long. I looked up at my assistant Bonnie, who simply raised an eyebrow to ask, “Well?”

“I can’t do this,” I said. “There isn’t a part here.” Then I lifted the phone book–sized script and heaved it over the side of my desk, where it landed with a clang in the metal wastebasket.

I told my agent I thought it best that I pass on the project, but asked him to thank Tina for thinking about me. He called me back to say that the producers would double their original offer if I would reconsider. At that point, I thought it would be downright ungrateful of me not to take the offer, part or no part.

I called my friend Mary Lou Romano, who had spent her entire life trying to get rid of her North Jersey Italian accent. I taped her reading all my lines and listened to the tape over and over again. I began to enjoy the energy and aggression inherent in this dialect.

Dolly Sinatra, as it turns out, was quite a woman: she was feisty, in your face, authentic. She was also an immigrant struggling for a foothold in this country. She was even a bit of an outlaw. In the twenties she performed abortions for local girls “in trouble” and she’d dressed like a man to get into the fight clubs when her husband boxed. Later on, she worked for the local Democratic Party machine, delivering key blocks of votes as a ward captain. From her hairdresser I learned that she always looked like a million bucks. In the end playing Dolly Sinatra was great fun for me, and I was even nominated for an Emmy Award for my performance.

A few years after completing
Sinatra: The Miniseries
, I got another call from Tina’s production company. She was producing a television movie called
Young at Heart
about a widow who had shared a passion for Sinatra’s music with her husband, Joey. In the final scene, Frank is supposed to appear at her birthday party. He was supposed to take me into his arms and say, “Joey sent me.” After our first take, he whispered in my ear, “I’ve got a little money left—wanna run away?”

Then Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City
came into my life. I was offered the role of Anna Madrigal, the transsexual landlady. This was not only hugely flattering but a stroke of great luck, as actresses on both coasts wanted to play this part. Maupin originally wrote the stories in serial form for the
San Francisco Chronicle
(à la Charles Dickens), and in these remarkable vignettes he created a universe set around an apartment house in the seventies and eighties. It was a time of discos and drugs, and Maupin wrote about it all via a vivid kaleidoscope of characters that included gays and straights, men and women. At the heart of Maupin’s city is Anna Madrigal, a middle-aged woman who used to be a man; a free spirit who owns a rambling, charming apartment building, 28 Barbary Lane, somewhere in the heart of San Francisco, where many of the other characters end up living. With the same tenderness she lavishes on her marijuana plants growing in her garden, she tends to her tenants, all of whom are searching for happiness and identity.

Alastair Reed, a British director, directed the series. He told me not to read the books before filming, so I didn’t. I did read books about transsexuals, though, which were tremendously moving. After a few days of rehearsals, Alastair and I talked about how we viewed Mrs. Madrigal. We both agreed that she was a happy person; she wasn’t suffering from her decision.

Yet she’d been deeply unhappy as a man, unhappy enough to have what some people even in 1993 considered an unthinkable procedure to change her sex. She’d found a way to survive herself. She reminded me of Rose Castorini, who could look in the mirror and say, “I know who I am.” But she also reminded me of
me
. I always knew I had male and female energies within me, but I had silenced everything that was vulnerable and female until so recently. I hadn’t felt entitled to it. Learning to embrace it, to value it, was a struggle I was very much in the midst of.

No matter how much I thought I understood the character, I knew I needed to talk to someone who had gone through the experience. Through a member of the cast, I was put in touch with a therapist living in Los Angeles who had been through the same operation as Anna. I called and invited her to breakfast.

When she walked into my hotel room, the first thing I noticed was that she didn’t seem ill at ease or apologetic or as if she had anything to prove. After a few minutes of small talk over coffee and croissants, I started to ask her questions. “I’ve read how difficult the process is, both physically and psychologically, to change from a man to a woman,” I said. “To change your body so dramatically, to get rid of organs, create new ones, take hormones, to turn your life inside out, to suffer through all the emotional issues afterward—what made you go through with it?”

Without one second’s pause, she said, “I always wanted the friendship of women.”

She explained that it was women’s friendships that she’d always felt deprived of as a man. “When women talk to each other, they talk in a special way.”

This insight was on my mind in one of the first scenes, when Mary Ann Singleton, played by Laura Linney, moves to 28 Barbary Lane and Mrs. Madrigal invites her over for a visit. The script called for us to talk in the living room as we examined various knickknacks that Mrs. Madrigal had collected, but I had a different suggestion.

“Let’s move the scene to the bedroom,” I said. I wanted to flop on the bed with Laura. Put women in a room with a bed and they’ll naturally gravitate to it. It’s a sign of their easy intimacy and comfort with each other. If the scene in question was supposed to highlight our burgeoning friendship, then the bed would be the place to do it. In the end, Alastair agreed with me and asked the stage crew to make us a bed specifically for the scene.

Another scene took place on the porch with Chloe Webb, who played Mona Ramsey, another tenant in the building who eventually turns out to be my daughter. I found myself sitting as a man would sit. My makeup artist, who has worked with me for many years, called my attention to it. “You sure you want to sit that way?” he asked. “It’s so masculine.”

But I did want to sit like that. In every episode, I tried to find at least one moment in which the mannish side of Mrs. Madrigal could emerge.

This program was wildly popular—several other seasons followed the original—and also generated more controversy than we ever imagined. A Christian fundamentalist group assembled all the “unseemly” moments on a videotape and sent it to Jesse Helms and his colleagues in Congress in an effort to block funding for PBS. As a result of the pressure from the religious right, some television stations pixilated certain scenes; others refused to show the program at all. Yet at heart, the series is simply about a group of young people trying to figure out who they are, and to connect with each other. Mrs. Madrigal is central to all their lives because she’s figured out how to live in the present. She doesn’t dwell on the past, and she’s no longer postponing her life, waiting for something to happen in the future. She’s alive in the moment, alert to all the possibilities of life. Mrs. Madrigal, who has transformed herself, knows that
life
is transformative, and that sometimes the old has to die so that new life can emerge.

In the meantime, my mother was becoming so frail, so tiny. She was beginning to withdraw from us in ways that we knew were irreversible. She rarely spoke, and when she did, she was talking to people who were gone—her parents, her brothers and sisters, my father. She no longer knew us. During one of Apollo’s visits from L.A., we went to see my mother, and as she sat in a chair, Apollo began to rub her feet. I stood behind her and massaged her shoulders. Apollo began to weep, and all of a sudden my mother slowly raised her fist and said, in her fiercest voice, in Greek, “Tighten up on yourself!” And again she was silent.

A few weeks later, Peter and I went over to take her out for a walk. As we wheeled her out into the sunshine, she lifted her head and, turning her face toward the sun, said, “The sun loves me!” I marveled that within her small world, she could still find love. I thought of the hot summer days she would take us to the ocean and realized that she still took comfort in a loving universe.

Over the course of the next year, I was to lose the three women who had been my most important guides and teachers. First, I lost Marija, whose long battle with cancer finally came to a close. I flew out to see her when she was in the hospital. She was being fed intravenously, but this didn’t stop her from eating the spinach pie I had brought. She wanted to know what I was up to, what I was working on. I told her that I was still trying to figure out how to bring the Goddess work to the stage. She pointed her finger at me and said, “Do it, Olympia! Just go do it!” She introduced me to other women who were visiting her during those last days, women like myself who had been inspired by her work. She wanted us to connect with each other, to become friends.

My friend Madie, whom I’d met at the Goddess workshop at Omega, came to visit with her partner. We talked about my mother and I told them how her body was deteriorating, as well as her mind, and the feelings I still had: my fear of her anger, how I’d resisted her and finally pulled away, and how I’d never been honest with her—never told her how much I’d resented her trying to shame or beat me into submission.

Madie said, “You’ve got to tell her.” I fought this idea. “My mother’s ninety-three, she doesn’t even know me. It’s my problem now.” Madie pressed it and I said, “Visiting hours are over.”

“Visiting hours are never over,” she said, and we drove to the nursing home.

My mother was lying in bed on her side, so small and thin, like a pencil under the sheets. I gently shook her awake and said, “Mother, it’s Olympia.” Without opening her eyes she said, “Olympia, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” This was the first time she had said my name in months. Immediately I started to cry. Then Madie spoke: “Alexandra. Olympia has something to tell you.” My mother said, “What is it, darling?” I told her how I’d been afraid of her when I was young, that her anger really scared me. She never moved or opened her eyes, but said, “It was a difficult birth.” The connection between the difficulties of my birth and her subsequent anger had never occurred to me. It was her way of telling me that she had done the best she could. Still crying, I told her how important she was to me, how much she had given me, that I knew how deeply she loved me and I loved her just as deeply. Then Madie whispered, “Tell your mother that it’s all right to go.” I told her. I told her I was fine, she could go now. Louie and the children were fine. She immediately asked about Apollo and I told her he and Maggie and Damon were fine. “It’s all right, Mother. You can go whenever you want.” With her eyes still closed, she tucked her hand under her cheek, lifted her free hand and opened and closed her fingers, like a child waving, and said, “Bye-bye. Bye-bye.”

Over the next several weeks, my mother’s condition worsened and she was moved into the hospital. Her heart was failing. The doctors told me that if I didn’t allow them to place a shunt in her chest, my mother would die. Even though I had promised her we would uphold her living will, this really shook me and I called Apollo. “You know what she wants, Olympia.” I had to let her go. But I was determined that my mother wouldn’t suffer. The same doctors who wanted to perform an invasive procedure were now reluctant to give her pain medication. I was livid. The nurses overheard this conversation and one of them came to me and said, “Don’t worry: we’ll take care of her.”