I'll Scream Later (No Series) (16 page)

Meanwhile, despite incredibly tight security, somehow my entire family managed to talk their way into one of the pressrooms backstage. My publicist at the time, Alan Burry, looked at all these milling Matlins and said, “What is this? Ma and Pa Kettle go to the Oscars?” Hey, I loved having them there. Their love and support has always been important to me, but on this night it meant the world.

B
ACKSTAGE
I
WAS
also waiting for word on who would win Best Actor. Bill was nominated, as well as Paul Newman for
The Color of Money,
Bob Hoskins in
Mona Lisa,
James Woods in
Salvador,
and Dexter Gordon in
Round Midnight.
I know, looking back now, that Bill’s chances of winning back-to-back Oscars in the same category were small. As many had predicted, the Oscar went to Paul Newman. I don’t think he was there that night, and I’m sad that I never had a chance to meet him.

Oscar night is always a long night for winners. There are the mass interview sessions, where you face a huge, hungry pack of reporters asking questions. There are hundreds of photographers—so many bulbs flashing that you can literally feel the heat they generate as you get close to the room. Then you hit the television press. There’s the Governor’s Ball and the round of parties after. All in all it’s exhausting, but in a terrific, this-really-rocks kind of way.

The interviews and Governor’s Ball over, I slipped into the back of our limo, kicked off my shoes, laid the Oscar by my side, and finally relaxed, letting it all sink in. Though it was late, we were headed to Spago’s on the Sunset Strip to catch the tail end of Swifty
Lazar’s annual Oscar bash. Bill got in and sat across from me, and what happened next will forever be etched into my memory.

“Well, you’ve got that little man beside you,” he said, nodding at the Oscar.

“Yes.”

“What makes you think you deserve it? There are hundreds of actors who have worked for years for the recognition you just got handed to you. Think about that.”

My face just fell. I was stung, crushed, hurt. A churn of emotions was running through me.

I had hoped for better from Bill, that he would have had enough love and empathy on that day to allow himself to be happy for me, just this once. When Jack got in the limo, Bill turned to him and asked him to start looking into getting me enrolled in core classes at NYU right away. This was crazy. My head was absolutely spinning. I didn’t have the energy to analyze what that implied.

I got little sleep that night. I had an early interview poolside at the Bel-Air with
Good Morning America.
When we’d wrapped that, my mother arrived, purse in one hand and toting my Oscar like a dumbbell in the other.

“What do you want me to do with this, Marlee?” she said just as she walked past Kathleen Turner. I cringed, figuring Kathleen would probably have a suggestion or two about what she could do with it….

The next day, Bill headed back to the East Coast, while my family and the Oscar headed back to Chicago. Gloria, seven-year-old Zach, and Jack all stayed over an extra day, and we celebrated by going to Disneyland. We checked out of the Bel-Air Hotel that morning and stayed in a Howard Johnson motel that night.

At Disneyland, I think we rode all the rides at least once, screamed on the Matterhorn, giggled through Pirates of the Caribbean, ate junk food until we were ready to explode, waited in line with everyone else, and laughed all day long. It was one of the best days ever. I’d highly recommend it to any Oscar winner postceremony; it plants your feet right back down on the ground.

I
N
1987, H
OLLYWOOD
wrapped me in its embrace. On January 30, the day before the Golden Globes, Paramount Pictures and
Life
magazine came together to do a photo shoot celebrating the studio’s seventy-fifth anniversary. More than sixty of the studio’s stars of film and television came to participate, and I was invited to be a part of it. I was thrilled. I headed to JFK Airport for the flight to L.A.

There’s always time to kill in an airport, and while Jack and I were waiting, I noticed a girl about my age with her head buried in a book, and a stack of more books beside her. She was striking—with a mass of dark curls, a fantastic leather jacket, and jeans. I looked harder. “Oh my gosh, Jack, it’s Jennifer Beals from
Flashdance.
I’ve got to meet her.”

She was going to Yale at the time, and I didn’t know what she was majoring in, but I knew she was a photographer and the book she was studying was about photography. I was hesitant to disturb her, but I wasn’t going to pass up this chance.

I walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Marlee Matlin.” She looked up, smiled, and said. “Nice to meet you,” then went back to studying. After we boarded the plane, she slept most of the flight.

I was starstruck, really starstruck.

When we saw each other again at the big bash for Paramount, somehow we connected like old girlfriends, as if we’d known each other for years and years. She’s from Chicago, too—I think if you have those Chicago roots, there’s just something about the city that binds you together. Although Jennifer will razz me that she’s really from Chicago, I’m just from the burbs.

The stars that Paramount assembled that day were unbelievable, from Robin Williams to older stars such as Fred MacMurray, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, and Elizabeth Taylor. It was crazy. Robert De Niro, Danny De Vito, Al Pacino, and Gregory Peck were milling around. And of course, Henry was there. He’d just about grown up on the Paramount lot for years along with the rest of the
Happy Days
cast.

There I was, one moment talking to Olivia Newton-John, and John Travolta walks up, and I thought,
Wow
Grease
and
Saturday Night Fever
! Right here, talking to me.

“Don’t I know you?” John asked.

“No,” I said, knowing that was something I would have remembered.

“Are you sure we don’t know each other?”

“Yes, I’m sure!”

Then Olivia stepped in, playfully telling John to get over it, accept it, we had never met!

Life
magazine was doing lots of smaller setup shots, and they took a photo of me and Buddy Rogers, who had starred in the 1927 film
Wings,
the first Best Picture winner ever. He could finger-spell and told me about a friend of his from back home who had attended the Kansas school for the Deaf. I saw Karl Malden from
Streets of San Francisco
and thought about how my dad and I used to watch it when I was growing up.

It was so high wattage when it came to Hollywood royalty in the room that everybody was meeting someone he or she was awestruck by, so I didn’t feel alone. Robin Williams and Tom Cruise were talking and teasing each other up on a podium and motioned to me to come on up. I was trying to breathe, thinking,
My goodness, Tom Cruise! My goodness, Robin Williams!
In front of
everybody
they asked me to teach them a few cuss words in sign language.

So what’s a girl to do? I showed them how to sign a couple of the juicier ones, and they just broke up laughing, and of course Robin immediately began trying to use them in a dirty joke. And me, I was on cloud nine—I mean, I’m this girl from Chicago, I was nobody, I was one of the people who paid money to see these
people work, and now here I was standing in between them. It was unbelievable.

When it was time for the big photo of everyone, we were each given a number, and I think it was random. I got number fifty-three and I went to check out my chair and found I was in the front row! Jennifer came up and said, “Oh my God, we’re almost next to each other.”

She was number fifty-five. We had no idea who was sitting in between us, so she sat down next to me and we were like girls in high school gossiping about everyone. “Oh, look at them. Oh, he’s so cute. Oh,
he’s
not so cute. She’s so nice, but
she’s
not so nice….”

Then we looked up and there was Harrison Ford, holding his number in his hand, staring down on us. “I’m number fifty-four.”

Jennifer just smiled and said, “Oh, you know what, we wanted to sit next to each other. Do you mind if we just switch seats?”

He looked at us and said again, “I’m fifty-four.”

We just looked at each other, then back at him, and said, “But we really want to sit together.”

He just kept standing there, staring at us, and said again, “I’m number fifty-four,” completely calm, but not budging.

Then Danny DeVito, who was sitting on the other side of me, chimed in and said, “Oh, let the girls sit together.”

So in the photo that
Life
ran in its big Hollywood issue in April 1987, on one side of the front row you’ll see Danny DeVito, then me, Jennifer, and finally Harrison Ford, all smiling.

Tom Cruise was great to me that day and has always been so every time we’ve seen each other. He takes the time to make sure I understand him word for word when he speaks. I went up to him years later at the Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar, which is a popular space for events. He was there with his family and his two kids, and I was there for a birthday party. I wanted to say hello, but I didn’t want to intrude on his family time.

Finally, after much debate, I walked over with my husband, Kevin, and said, “I just wanted to say hi, I’m Marlee.” He gave me one of those big Tom Cruise smiles, said, “Hey!” and hugged me. He immediately turned around and introduced me to his mother
and his kids. He’s always been genuine. I’ve never seen him as the “big movie star,” just decent and kind and absolutely focused on whomever he’s talking to.

A
PRIL WAS A
whirlwind month. I flew to Chicago to make an appearance at the Center on Deafness and the Arts. What a great reunion that was, and I loved talking to the kids about their hopes and dreams. If I could give even one of them the kind of encouragement Henry gave me all those years ago, I wanted to do so.

Things were looking up on the career front. A number of projects were being sent my way to consider, and I had already signed on to join the cast of
Walker,
starring Ed Harris. At the end of the month I was headed to Nicaragua, where production was getting under way.

Before leaving, I was part of ABC’s
Happy Birthday Hollywood
extravaganza, a massive show celebrating the industry’s first hundred years, with movie clips and dozens of huge Broadway-style production numbers. Hundreds of stars from over the years were featured, so many that it dwarfed the Paramount party, and many of them were performing set pieces that were seeded throughout the show.

I was asked to be a part of the segment they did on Hollywood heroines through the years. We were all dressed in these Victorian-style, white, floor-length dresses, posed in and around an old-fashioned gazebo. Ally Sheedy introduced the group, and after everyone had been highlighted, she walked center stage and said, “And now I want to introduce the latest addition, Marlee Matlin, this year’s Academy Award winner.”

I took a deep breath and I spoke as I signed, “There’s one actress who’s a heroine to all of us…Miss Katharine Hepburn.”

I was so nervous about how I sounded, but I know from friends who’ve watched the show that I sounded pretty much like anyone else. When you’re a Deaf person speaking aloud, that’s exactly what you’re going for—normal, ordinary, anything but different.

N
ICARAGUA
—
SO MUCH BEAUTY
, so much poverty, and a war was going strong in 1987 when I landed there for
Walker.

Sandinistas, teenagers really, with AK-47s casually slung over their shoulders, were always around. Kids and dogs, equally skinny, roamed the streets. Remnants of houses and buildings, half-crumbled by the 1977 earthquake, were still visible in the city and the countryside.

I hadn’t really realized until then how much we take for granted in America. Children were living on the street, begging for money. The people were so impoverished. So much sadness was there, but a lot of pride, too.

We stayed in Managua at the Intercontinental Hotel, and buses and taxis shuttled us back and forth each day to Granada, a little town of about four thousand where director Alex Cox had chosen to shoot the film. The route was so choked with traffic that a horse pulling a cart, women carrying baskets, men crowded on a flatbed truck, were not uncommon sights. The road was a nightmare, pitted by potholes that looked like craters. It usually took more than an hour to make the drive there with our driver dodging the holes and the people like an NFL running back.

The country was still suffering under a U.S. embargo, with ongoing skirmishes between the Sandinista and U.S.-backed contra rebels, mostly to the north of us. Two of the production’s drivers lost sons to the fighting while the film was being shot.

In a bizarre way it was the perfect setting to film the story of William Walker, a renegade American who was a bit crazy, who’d invaded the Central American country around 1855. He ultimately
declared himself president and ran the country for a couple of years before being kicked out. After two failed attempts to return to the country, he was finally executed in Honduras.

I had been intrigued by the idea of working with Alex Cox; his film
Sid and Nancy
was one of my favorites.
Walker
was a smaller independent film with a $6 million budget, but in addition to the appeal of Alex, Ed Harris was starring, and he was on my short list of actors I really wanted to have a chance to work with.

Alex and I first met in New York to talk about the movie when he was still casting the film. I should say, we tried to meet.

He walked into the hotel lobby, all coiled intensity, glanced at me, but then started running around, searching for this mystery actress he was supposed to meet. It was before
Children of a Lesser God
had come out, so I was a long way from recognizable.

He’d spotted someone who looked about the right age and remembered thinking to himself,
That can’t be her, she seems to be talking on the phone, but I wish it were. The woman is just so tremendously sprightly and interesting and beautiful
.

What he didn’t see, at least initially, was that I was on the phone with a little help from Jack.

I wasn’t sure what to expect either. I noticed a tall, skinny guy with long red hair and a droopy handlebar mustache. He was running around the lobby, wearing an old T-shirt, a bandanna, and a floppy hat. I thought,
That cannot be him
.

But then we locked glances and it clicked for both of us at exactly the same time—Oh,
you’re
Marlee! Oh,
you’re
Alex!—and we both started laughing.

I immediately felt comfortable with him. Alex was so passionate about the project, but also very much an actor’s director—despite all that intensity—patient, working from something deep inside him. I knew I could trust him. As for the running around, well, I would see a lot more of that on set.

Alex has more energy than I’ve ever seen. No wonder he stays thin, he would race around the set talking to this person, checking on that shot. One of my favorite memories is when he was really pleased with a take, his face would just light up and he’d tell us,
“Brilliant, now
that
was brilliant!” You couldn’t help but catch that enthusiasm.

My character was based on Walker’s fiancée, Ellen Martin, who had actually been Deaf. Ed and I would be signing during my scenes, but unlike in
Children of a Lesser God,
where Bill’s character essentially served as the translator, putting words to my signing, Alex planned to use subtitles. I liked that idea.

He had gotten the backing of the Nicaraguan government—some of its high-level officials had read and approved the script. That backing made just about anything possible. When Alex asked if the telephone and power lines could come down for the duration of the production so that the town would look much as it did a hundred years ago—down they came. Many of the streets were still unpaved, but a layer of dirt was trucked in to cover the central square.

Just about everything for the production had to come from outside the country, and because of the embargo, nothing could be shipped directly from or through the United States. The guns the soldiers carried in the film came from London via Russia. Even things as basic as toilet paper and the nails used to construct the sets, including a huge one that replicated San Francisco Bay on the shores of Lake Nicaragua, where Granada was nestled, were shipped in.

The days were long and hot, and the costumes were authentic—that translated into heavy wool. Some days I thought I would melt into nothing by the end of the day. The production was long, but my role as Walker’s fiancée was small—she dies unexpectedly in a cholera epidemic. So in the end, I would spend less than a month there.

The character as written is feisty and significant to the story. She is Walker’s moral compass, the one adviser he truly trusts. I liked that she was strong, smart, and outspoken with Walker. Her death becomes a turning point in his life and triggers his spiral toward obsession. The script was one part historical drama and one part black comedy—I hoped we could pull it off.

I spent a week filming, then went back to the States for a week for an event in New York I couldn’t miss. When I came back to Nicaragua, I was armed with a bunch of baseballs to give out to the
kids that hung around the set every day—baseball was a national passion there—and $20 bills to buy food and other necessities from one of the few stores in Managua that was well stocked and only took U.S. dollars.

The per diem money came in giant stacks that were incredibly hard to handle. At the end of my time there I gave my remaining per diem to my driver—a stack of the local currency, córdoba bills, that was about ten inches high. He broke down in tears, and someone told me later that I’d given him the equivalent of a year’s salary.

It was a good thing we were all passionate about the film because the creature comforts were few. There were no trailers; we all changed clothes in the back of the same trucks that were used to cart in supplies. The people were wonderful, but the food…well, it wasn’t great. A lot of the cast and crew were hit with bouts of intestinal viruses from the food and water there. I was spared. Jack wasn’t.

One day we were shooting in the forest and Jack told me he was dying, really dying; he had to get to a bathroom right away. The Porta Potties set up for the production were, I’ll admit, pretty disgusting. “I can’t even go in there,” he said.

His face was pale and getting paler. He was drenched in sweat and not just from the heat. I looked around and pointed a little deeper into the forest. “Just go in there, I’ll come back for you in five minutes.”

Jack is an incredible trouper in many ways. He can face down huge crowds, hostile reporters, angry studio execs. He cannot, however, use the bathroom in the great outdoors. I came back in a few minutes. He looked even more miserable and said, “I can’t. I just can’t.”

So Jack went off in search of better facilities, and I fended for myself that day. Luckily the people of Granada had embraced the production. A family took Jack in for the day, gave him the use of their bathroom, which was modest but clean, fed him Pedialyte to keep him from getting more dehydrated, and let him sleep there through the afternoon.

On set with Ed Harris

E
D
H
ARRIS
—
WHAT CAN
I say? He is the ultimate professional, always working on the craft, absolutely disappearing inside his character. And in case you haven’t noticed—great, expressive, beautiful eyes, and an amazing smile. I adored working with him.

I can look back now at the scenes we had together and they feel completely organic. He didn’t have to sign extensively, but he handled it so naturally, nothing ever felt forced.

In one scene Walker comes back and finds that Ellen has died. I’m laid out in a coffin, a rosary in my hands. I remember lying there, sweating in that wool dress with its long sleeves, high collar, and floor-length skirt, eyes closed, rosary clutched in my hands, and praying,
praying
that none of my Jewish forebearers were looking down and seeing me!

Without meaning to, I got caught up in international politics for a brief flash while I was there. Whenever I shoot in other countries or visit them, I try to take a trip to the local schools, and Deaf schools if they have them.

On my second day in Nicaragua, I spent some time at a school for the Deaf in Managua—La Escuela Centro Especialidad. I came
to see the children, who were so sweet and put on a terrific performance for me.

I learned two lessons that day. One, never forget that sign language is different in different counties—I found out that the way we in American sign a
T
is an obscene gesture there. And never underestimate the power of mixing Hollywood and politics.

I went to the school to meet the children, but Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega also came by to present me with an award. Suddenly the school was a crush of reporters and photographers, and no one wanted to shoot pictures of me with the kids.

A simple visit had turned into a political event. By morning, photos of Ortega and me were splashed across newspapers both in the United States and throughout Mexico and Central America. I’m at my most informal—wearing a
Walker
T-shirt, my hair in a ponytail—smiling and talking to the leader of a country with nothing but bad relations with my own. Suddenly everyone wanted to
know my politics, what I thought about the embargo, Ortega. I was getting hounded by the press; requests for interviews were piling up.

Who would have thought that an innocent visit to a school for the Deaf would trigger an international incident with President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua an me? (Credit: Julio Donoso/CORBIS SYGMA)

It got so crazy, the production organized a press conference. I agreed, hoping to be able to talk about the film and my character, but no one was interested in
Walker
or Ellen Martin. What they wanted to know was why an Oscar-winning actress was meeting with the president of Nicaragua. There had to be something more to the story than that I wanted to visit a local school for Deaf children.

The day of the press conference, the room was packed not by entertainment journalists, but by political reporters from all over. I was hammered with questions. What were my politics? Did I support the Sandinistas? How well did I know Ortega? What did I think of the U.S. position on the war here? It was crazy.

The entire time, photographers’ flashbulbs were going off. After a while, I simply couldn’t take it anymore. I threw up my hands and asked Jack to end it. Just end it.