Watch Me: A Memoir (2 page)

Jack gave me a variety of nicknames. I started off as “Fab.” As in “The Big Fabulous,” which became, with a German accent, “Ze Bik Fabuliss.” This was because when I first came to Los Angeles, Jeremy and Kenny used to say “the
most
fabulous” all the time, a habit that I had adopted. Then, I don’t know why, my name developed into “Toot,” rhyming with “foot,” or “Tootie,” which became “Tootman Fabuliss.” Then it became “Ze Bik,” and then simply “Mine,” or “Minyl.” Jack had nicknames for most people. Warren Beatty was “The Pro.” Marlon Brando was “Marloon.” Fred Roos was “The Rooster.” Arthur Garfunkel was “The Old New G.” Jack had a thing about names. He liked Harry Dean Stanton’s name so much that he wrote it somewhere in every film that he did. So, whether it was his initials on a prison wall in graffiti or carved into a tree in a Western, if you look closely at this period of his movies, you’ll see
HDS
somewhere. He called Michelle “Rat” in the nicest way possible. His car, a magnificent Mercedes 600 the color of black cherries, was christened “Bing.”

One of the first things I noticed about Jack was that he had a great many people around who performed all sorts of functions for him. On Saturdays the guys would all sit in the TV room at the back of the house and drink beer and eat hot dogs and watch sports all day. Jack might leap up to demonstrate a slam dunk. As long as he had a friend sitting by, nodding his head, a smile decorating his face, life was good. I think, for the most part, that’s all Jack needed. In some ways, he was a man of simple tastes. A receptive and appreciative audience always charmed him.

Others had the job of helping Jack keep his life running smoothly. He called his assistant, Annie Marshall, “My staff.” The daughter of the late actor Herbert Marshall, Annie was tall, dark, and pretty, brilliantly funny, neurotic, and smart as a whip. There was Helena Kallianiotes, who was a complete mystery to me at the beginning. Helena was “Boston Blackie”; born in Greece, dark and brooding, she had mahogany eyes, a waist-length snarl of black hair, and a compact, lithe body, and had been a belly dancer in Boston. She was also a great cook, and provided the Mediterranean food at Jack’s party. She was a fascinating woman, complicated, intense, and secretive. The writer of
Five Easy Pieces
, Carole Eastman, a very good friend of Jack’s, had seen Helena dancing in the late sixties and had been so impressed that she’d introduced Helena to Jack and the director, Bob Rafelson, who gave her a small but memorable role in the movie. Knowing she was at loose ends afterward, Jack offered her a position looking after his house. She was living there when we first met, at his party, and eventually moved to a house that he acquired next door.

Helena wasn’t really a housekeeper. She was Jack’s chief
of staff, to a degree, although there was often confusion about the running of the house, as Jack would appropriate many people to perform the same task. Helena was also the keeper of his confidences and trust, and always had Jack’s best interest at heart. Sometimes they had fights, and he would blame her if something broke down or went missing; she took some heat but was always fiercely loyal to him.

*  *  *

During my first months in L.A., I spent a lot of time at Kenny Solms’s house, alternately nursing and bullying my friend Jeremy, who had developed a very high temperature but refused to discuss his ailments. At one point, Kenny and I decided to drive him to the nearest emergency room, at Cedars-Sinai. He was terribly ill and ultimately needed an operation.

I was riding Cici’s horses in the mornings up at Will Rogers Park, then going into Beverly Hills to visit with Kenny while Jeremy was in the hospital. Sometimes I would stay at Kenny’s house, and together we would enact scenes from
A Little Night Music
for our own personal amusement. We liked to believe our version of “Send in the Clowns” was nonpareil, and our performance became something of a daily ritual that I greatly enjoyed.

*  *  *

After Jeremy recuperated, I decided to rent a place with him high up on Beachwood Drive under the Hollywood sign, opposite a rustic little riding school that, for ten dollars an hour, would rent you a horse you could ride on a trail over the pass to Glendale. There you could hang a feed bag on the horse and halter it to a post while you ate tacos and drank beer. The house itself was Spanish, with white walls and yellow
trim around the windows, cool inside, with tiled and wooden floors, alcoves, rounded portals, and French doors leading to a central courtyard. Upstairs there were balconies overlooking the garden, and my bedroom was a perfect little white box. Cici gave me a selection of housewarming presents, including a Sony record player, beds, chairs, tables, and lamps. We had a lot of fun parties in Beachwood Canyon, but because it was the beginning of my relationship with Jack, I was spending my nights more often than not at his house on Mulholland Drive, then taking taxis in the early morning down Coldwater Canyon across town to Beachwood. My practice was to arrive at the house and start washing the dirty dishes soaking in the sink from the previous night.

Allegra came to visit with me sometimes at Beachwood Drive on weekends. Once I dressed her in my grandmother Angelica’s Edwardian gown that I had salvaged from St. Clerans, and tried to take her picture in a hammock, but she was reluctant and camera-shy; even at nine, she reminded me so much of Mum—loyal, sensitive, sweet, and wise, but without the advantage of having had our mother for long.

Jeremy and I planted a pretty garden at Beachwood, full of foxgloves and forget-me-nots, wisteria, chrysanthemums, passion flowers, and dahlias. Jeremy started to keep quail in the back yard, and we had a lovely pair of resident raccoons and their babies. We vowed one day to have a farm together, a place where we could be totally free and creative, and make a haven for animals.

One morning when I entered the kitchen, I met an extremely handsome young man with black hair and dark eyes. His name was Tim Wilson. We smoked some grass and bonded instantly. He told me that he was studying Transcendental
Meditation. That summer Jeremy, Tim, and I planned out our dream farm on paper, drawing a map describing where each of us might live, what our animals might be, where each of us might have ponds and plant gardens. Eventually, this would become a reality.

*  *  *

There was a nascent western branch of the New York clan in Los Angeles. A lot of people were making the shift—Berry Berenson, Pat Ast, Peter Lester, Juan Fernández, Dennis Christopher. European friends, too, were making the journey west. There were about ten places to eat in town—the Bistro, Trader Vic’s, Perino’s, Chasen’s, the Cock’n Bull, La Scala, Scandia, the Old World, the Source, the Brown Derby.

Things happened at a leisurely pace. Unlike New York, where the pavements abounded with energy and purpose and everyone seemed to have an objective, Los Angeles was filled with friendly people who seemed content to hang out at home in tracksuits and kaftans, waiting for good things to come to them, or those who relied on whimsy for advancement: A girl in a pink Corvette had her own billboard opposite Schwab’s pharmacy. Her name was Angelyne; she had blow-up breasts and seemingly did nothing other than advertise herself. Andy Warhol had just originated the idea that everyone in the world could be famous for fifteen minutes.

Up on the Strip, the hot clubs of the moment—the Roxy, the Whisky, and the Rainbow Room—were all owned by Jack’s best friend, Lou Adler, who was president of Ode Records, and his partner, Elmer Valentine; they catered to a young, hip crowd. But we also celebrated Groucho Marx’s eighty-second birthday at the Hillcrest Country Club. Groucho had a companion
and secretary, a woman called Erin Fleming who, along with the young actors Ed Begley, Jr., and Bud Cort, was helping him to come out of retirement. As I recall, he sang “Animal Crackers” and made a pass at me before he temporarily lost consciousness.

CHAPTER 2

D
uring the four years I spent in New York, I had achieved top status as a model and worked for the best photographers and designers in the world. I had grown used to hearing that I was “exotic” and “high-fashion.” These were not necessarily attributes that would work to my advantage as a model in Southern California, where tanned blondes with big smiles were the order of the day. I did not think it was likely that I’d be booked for toothpaste ads or Clairol commercials, and decided I would not offer myself up to rejection and disappointment. I was still smarting from the collective drubbing I’d received for Dad’s movie
A Walk with Love and Death
, in which I had starred with Assaf Dayan. But I believed that at some point I would take up the reins and become the actress I had always wanted to be. So, grateful to Dad for helping me out for a few months, and to Cici for her generosity, I, too, joined the ranks of the cheerfully unemployed—but not for long. If I was out of place as a model in L.A., I still fit the bill in New York: a few months after my move to California, I accepted an invitation to go back east to do shows for Halston and Giorgio Sant’Angelo.

On the day of my departure, Jack offered me a ride to the airport and took me to lunch before my flight. We arrived at the airport early, and he waited until I boarded the plane. He
was going to join me in New York in a few days, and from there he would go on to Europe to make
The Passenger
, with Michelangelo Antonioni.

Jack and I were both going to stay at Ara Gallant’s apartment in New York. Ara was a friend to the boys and the girls alike. I hesitate to call Ara a hairdresser—he was more an artist who worked with hair and a creator of high-fashion fantasy; he would put three wigs on your head, and two of them might be blue—this before anyone else was dyeing their hair primary colors. Later, Ara became a photographer. He was a party giver, the center of the disco scene in New York at Studio 54. From the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, he went dancing every night with Apollonia van Ravenstein, one of the most sought-after models of the time. Ara’s apartment was on West End Avenue, with high-gloss black-patent walls and blacked-out windows, where he lived like something out of Huysmans’s
Against Nature.
I gave him the charm of Jonah in the whale’s mouth that Mum had given me so many years before, to sew onto the Kangol Spitfire hat that was his trademark.

It felt odd to arrive in New York and not ask the taxi driver to take me to my old apartment in Gramercy Park. It was evident that my state of mind was fragile; even though I knew it was absurd, I was terrified of running into Bob Richardson, worried that he might learn I was in town and show up at Ara’s to claim me. But the cab took me to West End Avenue without incident, and Ara and I stayed up talking until four in the morning.

I had a fitting at Halston’s just a few hours later, at 9:30
A.M.
, and walked across the park to Madison Avenue. It was great to see everyone, and Halston showered me with gifts of dresses and coats and cashmere—it felt like Christmas. When
I returned to Ara’s, I woke him up and replaced him in his bed, where I slept for hours. I awakened to music, and there ensued a haircutting session before dinner. Annie Marshall was paving the way for Jack’s arrival, and the legendary model Veruschka von Lehndorff had come over to the apartment for Chinese food. When Apollonia arrived toward midnight, having missed her Grand Marnier soufflé, we stayed up talking and telling stories. I almost overslept again the next morning but made it across town for the show at Halston’s. My modeling agency, Wilhelmina, called to say that I would be traveling to Europe the next week to work in London, Paris, and Milan for British
Vogue
with David Bailey. Since Jack was going to be filming in Europe, the timing was perfect.

After Jack arrived, the days and nights continued to overlap in the timeless vortex of Ara’s apartment. I did a catwalk for Giorgio Sant’Angelo, which Jack and Annie attended. It was fun showing off for them. The music was “Rocky Mountain High,” the first time I ever heard John Denver. We went to a Carole King concert in Central Park with Lou Adler; A&M Records was her label at the time. Joni Mitchell was there, and she sat on the ground between Jack’s legs throughout the show. I was hurt and jealous, but I said nothing about it until later on, when I confronted him. “Come on,” he said with a sigh, rolling his eyes as if I were boring him to tears, “she’s just an old friend.”

Ara’s was a refuge for many of us; he was a fantastic host. He introduced Jack to beautiful models, and in turn Jack would go to Ara’s parties. Of course, after I met Jack, this posed a not inconsiderable problem for me. But those evenings could be extraordinary, resembling dream gatherings that people conjure up, in which they say, “Oh, I’d want Churchill and
Gandhi and Elizabeth Taylor to be there.” Like when Mike Nichols brought Jackie Onassis over for dinner, and when Veruschka, Carol Kane, the beautiful model Susan Forristal, Art Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Lou Adler, Annie, Jack, and I would all be seated in the mirrored dining room eating delicious Szechuan food prepared by Ara’s chef, Billy. Billy pronounced Mike’s name “My Nichols,” which we all found hilarious; needless to say, it stuck. In that short week, I met people whom I would know for the rest of my life.

Mike Nichols had a party at his apartment for the cast of
Uncle Vanya
, starring the British actor Nicol Williamson. I had known Nicol in London when he played Hamlet and I was understudying Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia. But we did not reacquaint; he played piano downstairs all evening as the cast sang along, “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?” I wore a Fortuny dress of Mum’s that night and showed Mike a picture of her that I kept in a silver locket around my neck.

Before I departed for London, Ara threw another party. Joni Mitchell came and wrote a song about it later, “People’s Parties.” Apollonia van Ravenstein was there. Jack called her “Apples only.” Apollonia and I were quite good friends and had often modeled together in London and New York. She had been crying that night—laughing and crying, it was hard to figure out which or why. She had balanced a lampshade on her head; tears were pouring down her cheeks. The night before I left, Jack and I spoke about Bob Richardson and Mum and Michelle Phillips and us. He held me in his arms, and I told him that I loved him and he said that he loved me, too. After I left for London, Jack was to stay at Ara’s for several days before heading off to Munich to start filming.