What falls away : a memoir (19 page)

MO M I A F A R ROW

clopedias heavy in my arms, I stepped into my Wooden House on Lake Tashmoo.

My brother Patrick and his wife Susan, pregnant with their second daughter, were moving in with me, an arrangement we hoped would be mutually beneficial. Following three-year-old Justine as she raced through the icy rooms, we got our first look inside the house. Only then, hearing the wind squeeze angrily through cracks in the pine walls, did we realize that the cabin had neither heat nor insulation. We lit a fire and spent those first winter weeks in our CalifiDrnia coats, stapling bags of insulation onto the walls and ceiling. At night I lay in my new Sears bed, studying the enigmatic inscription on each insulation bag, "CERTAIN TEED SAINT GOBAIN," and I felt at peace with life's mysteries and grateful to have finally found my home.

That winter I returned to New York to film John and Mary. Despite my admiration for Dustin Hoffman, the project turned out not to be a particularly rewarding one for me artistically, but the Wooden House on Martha's Vineyard was everything I'd hoped for, and more.

What I recall most about the making of that film was that during it a relationship was forming, via telephone, with Andre Previn. We had had mutual friends in California and I'd seen him there occasionally, along with his wife. But when we bumped into each other by chance at a party in London, circumstances had changed: I was no longer with Frank, and he was, for the most part, living and working there, as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. When he visited New York I introduced him to Dali, but my unpredictable old friend didn't like Andre, and Andre didn't much care for him either. On all matters, mclud-ing this one, I sought Dali's approval. Nonetheless, the minute John and Mary was completed, I joined Andre in Ireland, where he had rented a cottage m the hills near

WHATFALLSAWAY Ml

Clifden; he had wanted to take me on a holiday, and I suggested Ireland, since I hadn't been there in eight years. It was the first time we had spent more than a couple of days together and he was wonderful. A raconteur second to none, he had, it seemed, read every book ever written. He loved modern art, which I knew nothmg about, he was a jazz pianist and a classical pianist, a composer and a conductor. Andre was so quick, he arrived before he even left. And he was more interested in me than anyone had been in my life. I kept thinking how much my father would have liked and enjoyed him. In the west of Ireland we walked along country lanes and across damp fields, and we took a trawler to the Aran Islands. Within two purely delightfial weeks he had ruined his shiny, pointed green shoes, but we were making plans for a lifetime.

I had returned to Martha's Vineyard, and Andre was back in London, when I discovered I was pregnant. I'd always imagined I wouldn't be able to have babies—that to hatch an actual child inside the body I had closely observed throughout my life would surely be beyond my powers of will and personal magic.

"I hear you knocked up my sister," said my brother to the telephone. Andre was calling from England.

"Get out. Out!" I chased him out the door. And the phone said. How terrific, I will love you more than ever, more than anyone ever and forever. And hearing that, I loved him too, even though I barely knew him.

As a kid, I feel I threw up my fair share; still, nothing prepared me for the great throwing up of that pregnancy. What I remember most vividly about that time is hanging over a toilet watching the watery remnants of a Ritz cracker swirl into the vortex.

It was also during those months that Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant and as pure and sweet a human

being as I have ever known, was murdered by strangers. "Why?" Roman kept asking as we walked around and around Elame's restaurant.

Months before it made sense I bought tiny clothes, read and reread every book available on pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and babies. I memorized Dr. Spock, ate chocolate, and named and renamed the baby. All this time Andre was in England, and since our two weeks in Ireland, I had scarcely seen him. I was lonely and I began keeping a journal.

September 4, 1969 Martha s Vineyard To My Child,

It is late at night and I am in bed, in my little pine house at the edge of the woods, on Lake Tashmoo. My brother Patrick and his wife Susan and their two daughters are asleep in another part of the house. Foghorns roU through silence. Your father is working in England. We are in the midst of such joy because you are coming. You are only three months along—^just a little firm bulge, but already I love you. I think of you all day and eat healthy foods and I have stopped smoking, and with all my heart I hope there will someday be for you a world of peace and understanding.

October 12, 1969 Andre is doing concerts all over the world. He writes almost every day, and it's wonderful that he calls so often, but I wish I could share this time with him, and all these new feelings and thoughts . . .

October 19, 1969 Twins! I can scarcely get my mind around it —when they told me, I had to sit down! Already I look like Tweedledum, and there are five more months to go. I'm glad it's twins and not —I don't know, a seal, or several very large mangoes. With Susan's help I made a beautiful patchwork quilt, and now two little crib-sized ones. Andre calls every day from London but I wish he could be here. I'm reading Jane Austen, which IS perfection. I dream of babies, and count the days till I can hold them . . .

November 28, 1969 Andre says that once he is established as a conductor, he won't have to travel so much. But, obviously, if we are to have a life together, I will have to move to England; that, after all, is where his orchestra is. The thought of leaving the Wooden House is more upsetting than it ought to be.

Andre bought a house for us in Surrey. I haven't seen it, of course, although in the picture it looks pretty. He is so excited. At this point how can I say, I wish I could have helped to pick out the house; or, I was hoping it would be near water, even a trickle of a stream; or, This house here on the Vineyard means so much to me, I don't know how I will leave it.

I try to tell him everything, but maybe the phone is the reason I don't seem to be able to convey it as clearly as I feel it. Or maybe he isn't quite listening, or perhaps my hormones are clouding my perspective and I have no real point to make, or I've just been by myself too long with no one to talk to. This is ABSURD. I love

him, I miss him, and I want to be with him, and he said we could come hack to the Vineyard every summer. So after Xmas I'll move to London and have the babies there. Of course the house doesn't matter. What's wrong with me? We will be happy together.

January 4, 1970 London

I am in the flat Andre rented on Eaton Square. It is Rill of somebody else's ugly stuff. Even though the place is suffocatingly overheated, I put my patchwork quilt on the bed to make myself feel better. It looks beautiful and out of place. Andre is on a U.S. tour. A live-in housekeeper, Rossario, came with the flat. She scares me.

I stay in the bedroom anyway. The doctor says I have to be in bed until the babies arrive, and if they haven't come by February 26, he's going to induce them a month early: by then they will be big enough, he says—and so will I. I WEIGH A HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX POUNDS.

January 6, 1970 We had hoped to be married by Christmas, but Andre's wife. Dory, doesn't want a divorce, which I completely understand, most of the time. But still—a real wedding on the Vineyard, by the edge of the lake, with all my brothers and sisters, my friends and my mother, that was the dream. I even got a burgundy velvet-and-lace dress that accommodates my stomach. But I shouldn't complain about anything. Andre and I are happy, and we feel married, and someday we will be. Nothing else matters.

January 10, 1970 The time is passing unbelievably slowlv. I am so huge that hardly an\thmg is worth getting up for. Andre had to take his orchestra on tour for three v^eeks. Like all his dates, this one was fixed years ago, so he had to go. But it's hard here without him. I feel so out of context. Rossano is a powerful presence. But As letters are every-thmg, and the thought that he will be back for the babies' birth. Then ue will begin the rest of our lives.

January 12, 1970 Barbara arnved from L.A. m a wacky orange hat with bi2 holes m it. I feel miuh better, even Rossano seems less intumdatrng now. What a good and funn\' and comfortmg soul Barbara is. Nothmg ever seem^^s to scare her or get her down. I want to be like that. Ho^v does she do it?

The new house in Surrey becomes ours on the sixteenth. On that day Barbara and I will pounce on it and tr/ to make it Livable in time for the babies' arrival. I shouldn't have worried about not likmg the house, it needs some fixmg up inside—bathrooms, etc., and we don't have any furniture, but it will be wonderful. It's on fifteen acres of woodland, and there are hundreds of oak trees, and it s at the edge of the Ashdown Forest, ^\4llch is owned by the Queen, so no one can ever spoil it.

Februan- 4, 1970

Barbara has organized evervi:hing. Pamters are

at work on the house and someone is making

curtains, and carpenters are putting m book-

shelves. Andre has lots of paintings, which are still with Dory. He says he's going to put paintings on "every square inch" of the walls.

February 20, 1970 The English press are the pits. People are camped outside the flat. I feel depleted and trapped. I dream of babies and wait. Andre is back, but he works eighteen hours a day, and when he isn't actually conducting, he's studying scores into the night. So I hardly see him. Sometimes when he walks through the door, I feel I don't know him at all, which is scary. Our time together in Ireland seems so long ago.

When he was fifteen, Andre was accompanying Frank Sinatra on the piano, and already on his way to becoming a respected, much-recorded jazz pianist. That was about the time he began working at MGM. It didn't take him long to become a successful movie composer—his arrangements for Porgy and Bess, Irma La Douce, Gigi, and My Fair Lady earned him Academy Awards. Then, at thirty-nine, Andre confounded everyone: turning his back on Hollywood, he set his sights on becoming a world-class orchestral conductor —a formidable challenge, even for Andre Previn. And it was at this transitional point in his life that our paths converged. Now, when he was not rehearsing or practicing piano, or appearing on his own television show, or giving concerts or touring the world, Andre was poring over scores, keeping a step ahead of the massive repertoire.

I understood some of the challenges he had before him, but I had no concept, nor am I even certain that Andre himself knew, how completely consuming his professional life would continue to be. 0£ his marriages I knew little, only what he told me—there were two young daughters.

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Alicia and Claudia, from his first marriage to a singer, Betty Bennett, and none from his second marriage to Dory, a songwriter. He had conducted a discreet, separate life for some years, but did not seek a divorce until he met me. Dory Prevm experienced things quite differently, and made that clear publicly through her songs. I am sorry to have contributed to her pain.

On the day my twins were born, I got up before dawn, showered, put on just a touch of mascara, and sat on the end of the bed to wait. That's how little I understood of what lay ahead. I remember every detail—a day like this is lifted from the rest; it stands alone, etched in light. My suitcase had been packed for weeks, each tiny nightgown and blanket washed and neatly folded inside a plastic bag. What slipped my mind was that things so eagerly awaited almost always come with a hitch.

It was obvious almost immediately that inducing labor had been a terrible idea. "Never mind," I yelled, "I'll come back another time," as I tore at the IV, and tried to haul myself off the delivery table. But they fought me back down. "She looks like a child," observed a nurse, as if she were watching the news, while I moaned and raged, huge on the operating table. Eight hours later someone was slapping me into consciousness, pushing a tiny, furious baby in my face. By then I was beyond caring.

"I think she's had enough," I heard the doctor say, before dispatching me into darkness, but raised voices found me there, and before I woke I was sure that the second baby would be dead.

When the doctor leaned over the operating table to say he was just leaving for a couple of weeks, golf, I think he said, in Scotland, I said. Thank you, and I sincerely hoped he would have a terrible vacation.

I was blinking into Andre's face, trying to hold it in place as he was telling me, It's two boys, we have two sons, with no mention of a dead one.

By the time they wheeled me in to see the babies it was the middle of the night, and the nursery lights were dimmed. It would have been quiet except for one infant over in the corner under the bright light, screaming bloody murder. Andre pointed to a nice-looking baby and said it was mine. I stared. My sleeping son. He didn't look familiar. They were already pushing me toward the corner— toward the noisy baby with the reddish purple blotches on-his face. They didn't need to tell me he was mine.

**Why does he look like that?" I asked. "What happened to him?"

"Nothmg, dear," said the nurse with the chipper voice. "He wasn't breathmg on his own at first, so he just needed a bit of help. The doctor had to breathe into him and his face got a bit bruised, that's all. He's fine."

"How long?" I asked. "For how long didn't he breathe?"

"It was . . . let's see . . ." She found it on the chart. "Nine minutes."

We had to stay in the clinic for ten days. The babies weighed five pounds, fifteen ounces each, that's about the size of a shoe box. All of it, the whole thmg, was immense, overwhelming. Two small strangers, and a large one, had suddenly claimed one hundred percent of my life.

When the twins were a few weeks old we moved out to the country, to the house we called The Haven. I banished from my mind the first feelings of disappointment that it was right on the road and without so much as a fish pond. After all, it was lovely, a seventeenth-century tavern with half-moons carved out of the door frames where the barrels had been carried through, and there were beamed ceilings and beautiful, creaky floors and fireplaces you could sit in, and the woods were magnificent, giant oaks by the