I Blame Dennis Hopper (27 page)

It was bittersweet for me, because in many ways I thought Howard was the glue to Denise. He encouraged her metamorphosis and mine. Our scenes evoked the innocence of experiencing things together for the first time. Allison joked that the motto of the first week for me was either naked or crying. Is this Tuesday? I must be naked. Wednesday: crying. Thursday: naked again. I said to Eric, “I feel like I'm being initiated, being naked with Eric Stoltz.” All our scenes had a quiet give and take; at times it felt so natural that I wasn't aware we were acting—or that we didn't have clothes on! Howard was my first on-screen love. I looked into his eyes and always felt safe. I did not want to say goodbye to Howard and the wonderful actor who played him, Eric Stoltz.

“Since I lost the power to pretend / That there could ever be a happy ending.” So sings Elvis Costello in “God Give Me Strength,” one of the wonderful songs from the memorable soundtrack of
Grace of My Heart
. I later asked Allison how she came up with the idea of bringing together Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach for “God Give Me Strength,” or Carol Bayer Sager and Dave Stewart, or bringing Joni Mitchell or Lesley Gore, into the mix. And she said, “I was in a hotel room, and I made a list of all the songwriters from the Brill Building and another list of all the current songwriters.” Allison's innovation—much copied since—was to make music that sounded as if it had been written in the past. Her thought was “The era is over, but we're going to give you a little more.” Since this was a movie about songwriters from the past, why not pair them up with songwriters of the present? She said, “When I told Karyn Rachtman, the music supervisor, this, she put her head in her hands and said, ‘Allison, that's a great idea, and it's going to be very hard to do.'” Not with Allison. After all, she's a woman. She made it look easy.

And now a real road trip story. A few years after we finished the movie, I lost touch with Allison. She was in L.A., and I moved back to New York to do some theater. It was 2002, and I was on a road trip with some friends. We decided to stop in Elko, Nevada. There was a motel that had caught my eye called the Thunderbird. I loved the giant neon winged eagle outside and said, “Oh, we have to stay here.”

We cleaned up and decided to grab a bite at a Mexican restaurant near the motel. We walk in, and I hear this scream. It's Allison Anders with her daughters and her mother. We couldn't believe it. We embraced, and I said, “What the hell are you doing in Elko, Nevada?” She said she was on a road trip from Kentucky to L.A., and it was the closest restaurant near the motel where they were staying.

I told her I was on a road trip, too. And I said, “Wait, are you at the Thunderbird?”

“Yes,” she said. The enormous neon sign of the winged eagle had caught her eye.

We were staying at the exact same motel, and eating at the exact same restaurant at the exact same time, on completely separate journeys. We never lost touch again, and the journey that began with
Grace of My Heart
continues to this day. I'm not sure about the ending of this female-road-trip movie, but the middle has been fantastic.

They screened
Grace of My Heart
in 2011, many years after its initial release, at Cinefamily, in L.A.; it's a retro movie theater where both Allison and I have a residency programming films. I thought it was a lovely gesture but feared that probably three people would show up. I decided to ride my bike there, very low-key, but as I approached the theater, I saw this long line outside. And I was thinking, What are all these people doing here? It was completely sold-out. Allison and Eric Stoltz and I did a lengthy Q&A afterward. We talked for the first time about some of the deleted scenes and the hope that someday they would be restored.
Grace of My Heart
has endured in a way that even I can't explain. When people talk about it, they almost start to cry, as if it's personally about them. That makes me so proud, because that is what we set out to do. Make a personal film, with some music, some style, some romance, maybe a man or two to cry over, which seems like it was made in the '70s.

In short: a woman's picture.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

You're a Tuning Fork

Marty surveys the damage in the aftermath of Storm Marlon: Two
A.M.
at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

I have met and worked with so many great actors. I'm always asked who my favorite is. It's not quite a fair question because I met the greatest actor of all time. The actor who towers above all other actors because all actors imitate him in one way or another. Marlon Brando. Really, in my opinion, he invented the modern technique of film and theater acting—sometimes called The Method—which has not changed to this day. But this isn't a story about acting. This is a story of perhaps my biggest show business regret:
not
having sex with Marlon Brando. Oh, and learning that I am a tuning fork.

A few months after
Grace of My Heart
came out, I was in Los Angeles shooting a wonderful little independent film called
Wedding Bell Blues,
directed by Dana Lustig and starring Julie Warner, Paulina Porizkova, and John Corbett. A little
Wedding Bell Blues
trivia: Look for the scene in which I am wearing a
Mean Streets
T-shirt, which was a little homage to Marty, who was my boyfriend at the time. Marty was coming to Los Angeles to receive the John Huston Award for Artists Rights, and I was wearing his T-shirt in a low-budget movie—but hey, that was our relationship. My hotel digs for
Wedding Bell Blues
matched our indie budget, so I was thrilled to move into Marty's more glamorous suite at the Beverly Wilshire for a few days.

Between changing hotels and working on the film, I was scattered. I grabbed my Cynthia Rowley dress out of my overnight bag and I had an egad moment. The dress was not suited for a black-tie event. It was microshort and sparkly. A sense of dread and insecurity washed over me. Why hadn't I brought something more appropriate? What would Marty think? I was getting ready in one of the gigantic marble bathrooms, and Marty poked his head in to check on me, looking impeccable, of course, in his Black Label Armani. I said, “Is this cheap-looking?”

“No,” he said. “You look cute…”

I said, “I know I
look
cute. What about the dress?” He was standing there, and I could tell something was on his mind, because he didn't laugh, and Marty is the
best
laugher.

I asked again, “Are you sure this dress is all right?”

He said, “OK. I didn't want to tell you before I knew for certain, but Marlon Brando is coming over tomorrow to have lunch with me and talk about a project.” Actress looks in camera: Is he kidding?

I knew from experience that Marty was
not
kidding. One time, back at the New York townhouse, Marty had yelled up, “Put some clothes on. Mick Jagger is here.” I
thought
he was kidding, but as I tiptoed down the stairs in my nightgown, there, sitting in the living room dressed like a proper English gentleman, drinking tea, was Mick Jagger. “Allo,” he said, in his distinctive East End London drawl.

The thought of meeting Marlon Brando was just too much for my brain to handle. “Marty, I can't.”

As with everything else, Marty assured me that I
would
be meeting Marlon Brando and that it
would
be just fine. Yeah. That's what he said before my big driving scene in
Cape Fear
. I had never driven a car before, and on the first take I nearly ran over Nick Nolte and half of the crew.

“You'll be fine,” he said. “There's a script he wants me to direct. Something with him and Madeline Kahn. I'm not right for it, but I said we could talk about it. Then we'll have lunch.”

“Lunch?” I said. “He's Marlon Brando! No, I can't. It's too much.”

Marty said, “You'll be fine. Be yourself. Just don't be a phony. He hates phonies … and
don't
talk about acting! He hates that.”

Great, I thought. I'm having lunch with the world's greatest living actor. And I can't talk about acting?

I said, “Marty. I can't. I can't meet him. I just can't.” And I meant it.

There are certain movie stars you just don't
want
to meet. You prefer that they remain cinematic and unreal. That's how I felt about Marlon Brando. He was, and still is, everything to me. Besides, what on earth would I say to him that would not be fan-girl and insipid? How could I express to him that I had a poster of him on my bedroom wall from
The Wild One
? That I had pictures of him ripped from covers of old
Life
magazines that I had stolen from the basement of my local library? I had watched his films, studied his acting, sought out his television interviews, read numerous books about him. I had just finished a book he'd written about himself called
Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me
. How do you have a normal conversation with Marlon Brando after you've seen
The Godfather
or
On the Waterfront
or
A Streetcar Named Desire
or
Apocalypse Now
, or even my childhood favorite,
A Countess from Hong Kong
?

 … Excuse me Mr. Brando, could you please pass the bread, and by the way, everything I am, or want to be, or hope to be as an actor is because of you. No. Impossible. Couldn't be done. Wouldn't be done! I was literally shaking in the bathroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Marty just laughed. He couldn't understand why I was so nervous. He repeated, “You'll be fine. Don't talk about acting.” I rolled my eyes. Yeah, don't mention that I audited classes with Stella Adler in the '80s and that all she had done was talk about her most famous student—Marlon Brando.

It was time to go, and I grabbed my autograph book.

“Marty,” I said as we were walking out the door. “Do you think Marlon Brando will sign my autograph book?”

Marty gave me one of his signature scolding looks. “Be good,” he said.

“What?” I asked innocently.

I had started keeping journals and autograph books ever since the first one that Roddy McDowall had given me. He was right. I had met a lot of interesting people. My journals were packed with entries, photos, and autographs from all sorts of folks I had met and worked with. Marty never made fun of me for carrying it everywhere. And sometimes he even helped me get autographs. In some ways he shared my level of excitement, but there was a limit.

We were riding in the back of a limousine, and now I was the one grinning like a Cheshire cat in anticipation when I got my second “Illeana, be good.”

It was a term of endearment, but I knew what he meant. Both of us could easily slip from movie fan to movie fanatic. Marty had confessed that during fittings for
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
he had “acquired” a piece of James Dean's
East of Eden
wardrobe from the Warner Bros. costume department. One time we were having dinner at Elia Kazan's, and I excused myself to use the powder room. They were busy eating so I knew I wouldn't be missed for a bit. Under the pretense of looking for the bathroom, I found myself instead upstairs looking for Mr. Kazan's office. I had to see where he wrote. I found it, and it was everything I dreamed, and I confess, since I always had a camera on me—that was Uncle Roddy's fault, too—I snapped some photos of it. I got back to the table, and Marty knew I had been up to something.

He said under his breath, “Be good.”

“What?” I asked innocently.

When I was showing him the photos, I said, “I had to do it, Marty. It's history. It has to be preserved.” He shook his head at me and then of course asked for several copies of all the pictures!

We were at the event where Marty was being honored—as a humanitarian—and I'm running around collecting autographs from George Lucas to Sharon Stone in my sparkly micromini. The stunning and statuesque Sharon Stone says as she's signing my book, “Don't you look like a little starlet…” Which of course she meant
so
sweetly but made me feel with complete and utter certainty that I probably looked like a floozy at a dance hall. I suddenly felt ridiculous, walking around collecting autographs from famous people—people I knew—so I went back to the table and deposited my book there.

Marty, far from being embarrassed, asked, “Who did you get?”

“Oh, you know, some people,” I said sort of shyly.

Then he collected his award as a humanitarian!

When the evening was over, they were rushing to get us out of there, and I realized in a panic that I had left the book behind at our table. When I went back to retrieve it, it was gone. Inside were all my memories. All my wonderful pictures and poems, entries from Sean Penn and Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows, Gore Vidal, and Brian De Palma, from the Toronto film festival. An inscription from one of my heroes, Alain Resnais, whom I met at the Deauville film festival—never to be seen or read again. It was childish, but at the time, my whole identity as an actress was wrapped up in those words and pictures. I had worked with some of these folks, become friends with others. It was proof that I had made it in the movies. Now it was gone, and I was inconsolable.