atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (16 page)

“Well, you could just do the… a little… just a little here,” Angela patted under her chin with the back of her hand to demonstrate. “And here, the eyes. That’s just fatty tissue. That’s nothing. He takes pictures first. And he blows them up, oh, poster-size. That’s what the operates from.

“I know, like you’re not even there while he’s operating!” I said. “I went for a consultation once. I just wanted that, what you got—just the eyes. He did his own photography. He told me to grasp my eyelids in the middle, squint, pull them out, and let go. The lids stayed out there reaching into the room about fifty feet, frozen in three-dimensional folds, trompe l’oeil effect for the poster. Then he clicked away and said he wanted to do all kinds of other things, too, like move my scalp around because my brow had fallen. I hadn’t even known my brow had fallen!”

“Oh, go to my guy. You’ll love him.”

“I can’t bear the idea of black-and-blue. I think I would get very black-and-blue. Maybe I’ll go over Christmas—kill two birds with one stone.”

“If you could get in,” Angela said. She took a compact out of her purse, powdered her nose, then positioned the mirror slightly to her left and said, “Look at that old lady tottering around behind me. She looks like she’s on her last legs, going to fall over any minute. Maybe we’d better… oh, she got a table.”

Art lovers were eyeing us unpleasantly.

“Here’s what I truly, deep down, feel, I think,” I said, dragging Angela back to the subject. “Beautiful women get face-lifts so they can stay beautiful. Character women don’t need them.”

“Well, you don’t need one.”

I looked at Angela to see in what she had meant by that remark, but she was scavenging in her purse for loose change.

“It’s important to get old and look cheerful, not tired,” I said. “If you’re old and tired-looking, people get nervous and, of course, they’re not going to see you.”

“Oh, I absolutely agree with you,” said Angela. “The best person to be around is a jolly old one.” Now she was searching the floor for a coin she had dropped.

I thought of Munch and The Scream. My ears were ringing, and silver zigzag circles from too much coffee danced in front of my eyes. At any minute, I was going to go blind.

“Can I have your autograph?” The waitress offered a pen and a paper napkin for me to sign.

“Sure.” I read her name tag, wrote “Best wishes to Jo Anne,” and signed it, leaving a small blot for an e on the porous napkin so that my name looked like Peggy Pop.

“Thanks. I really like your work,” she said. “I can’t remember what I’ve seen you in, but I recognize your face.”

“Oh, good. Thanks for asking.”

“That’s okay. I hope you don’t mind, but we really need your table, and you’ve been sitting here forever.”

“Sure. We were just going,” I said.

“I have to call Thayer again,” said Angela.

“I know.”

“See if he needs a ride,” we said together.

Angela disappeared into the crowd.

That’s what I was going to do, disappear like the dinosaur I had to walk by to get to my car. That dinosaur had a lot more wrinkles than I did. I wanted to reach over, pat her, and tell her that wrinkles were fine. Stop worrying. But of course she wouldn’t be able to hear me. She was busy sinking into a tar pit.

I looked at the sky. A storm was coming. My watch said quarter of four. If I didn’t dawdle, I could beat the road rage home.

Acting with Olivier 

LA. Mid-eighties. A baby backyard behind a small Hollywood bungalow off of Melrose. Ten a.m.

I was watering crabgrass, so hot from the sun that it burned my bare feet. Half the water evaporated before it hit the ground, and the rest sent up steam when it landed. I thought of my father paying me fifty cents a basket to remove crabgrass from our lawn in Montclair. Breathing was torture as the air burned the inside of my nose with every breath. To quench my thirst, I picked a honeysuckle blossom, only to find that its nectar had turned sour. The old man next door was peering over the fence, doing his ten a.m. ogling. It was desperately quiet except for the birds fighting in my fig tree and the occasional plane flying back to New York.

I cursed the pain as sweat dribbled into my eyes, left some salt, and trickled on down my neck. “I’m an actress, for Christ’s sake!” I yelled. The birds left immediately. The old man laughed.

I summed up my life for myself. I was chained to a mortgage because Frank, my real estate friend, had told me, “Otherwise the government gets all your money.” What money?

I’ll take the taxes. I didn’t have a job, would probably never work again, was in California acting hell, and had an old man laughing at me!

The phone rang. I reached through the barred window and seized it. It was my agent with the brush cut.

“Do you want to go over to Fox for a part in The Jazz Singer?”

“Sure.”

“It’s only one line, but it’s a scene with Laurence Olivier. You’d be playing his nanny.”

“His what?”

“His nanny. They’ll see you and Angela Crockett. Shoots this morning.”

To act with Olivier—oh, my God. He might give me a tip that would change my acting life. What the hell—my life. For once, I was in the right place at the right time, watering my lawn. What luck.

Angela. I could get there before she could. She was probably out driving Thayer somewhere and getting lost. She didn’t have a chance. I didn’t even comb my hair. I could do that and put my makeup on in the car. When I drove past Angela’s apartment, I saw her car parked outside. She’d be late. She later told me she was throwing up at that moment from the excitement.

The assistant director was waiting for me at Soundstage 22. He handed me a script and told me to look it over as he bustled me inside. A small man lounging in a director’s chair, wearing a tennis pullover and double-thick, dark-rimmed glasses, spoke to me.

“Go ahead. Let’s hear it,” he said.

I took a good breath and read: “You can’t go in there. He’s sleeping.”

“Fabulous,” said the director.

“Wait—ah, wait a minute,” I said. “We’re not in the, uh, same room, and he’s asleep. I thought we were going to be in a scene together… Lord Olivier and, uh…

I…”

“Oh, honey, don’t worry your pretty little head. We’re gonna improvise this scene.”

His glasses reflected the light so I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Listen,” he said, “we had a fellow in here last week—just brought him in for a bit, no lines, nothing. He improvised. He was here six days. Turned into a terrific cameo. D’ya improvise?”

“Uh, yes.

“Marvelous. Take her to wardrobe, and we’ll get started. Have you had lunch? Get her some lunch, Fred. We’ll call you as soon as we’re set up.”

As we went to wardrobe, I saw Angela heading toward us. I stifled the impulse to hide.

“Hi, Angela.”

“Oh, hi, Peggy. I’d stop to chat—” She almost tripped on a cable, caught herself, and laughed. “I’m on my way to an interview.” She took off in a flurry of red hair and curves.

“Good luck!” I called as she waved.

Because the nanny’s outfit was too small and there was no time to let it out, I had a salad for lunch. Then I got made up by a man called Shotgun who tried to sell me a tube of makeup base he’d invented, which he claimed doubled as an excellent toothpaste. His hands shook, and he said I should do my eyes myself. I thanked him and went to my dressing room, where I unbuttoned the waist of my uniform, lay down, and fell asleep from the stress.

Fred knocked on the door, saying, “Here are the rewrites, honey.” He handed me an entire script and was gone. I leafed through it, looking for additional scenes with the nanny, but there were none. I skipped back to page ninety-four, where my line had been before lunch. There was no sign of it. I went looking for Fred on the soundstage, and—oh, my God—there was Olivier in a yarmulke and bedroom slippers. He walked past me, maybe eighteen inches away, and nodded. I beamed back at him and almost started to curtsy. No words were exchanged. Then he started talking to the director. I eavesdropped and heard the thrilling English accent.

“—about the fellow playing my brother.”

“Yes, sir,” said the director.

“He’s very good, you know, but you see, he’s doing a—” Sir Lawrence sucked in his breath before he went on as if to accomplish an extremely delicate task, hoping to convey that it was not his habit to tread on another director’s territory. “He’s doing a very subtle Jewish accent. And, ah, we have that scene together, you see, where I’m dying… on the bed, don’t you know, and talking to him with my, ah, music hall, so to speak… the way I do, and we’re in the same family, you see, and well, I’m going to sound like… ah, what can I say? Sort of, ah… sort of, ah… sort of… a ham! Do you know what I mean?”

“I’ll take care of it, Sir Laurence. You needn’t worry about that.”

“Oh, thanks so much, old chap. Hmm. Well, it’s on to four o’clock. So I think I’ll be going home, eh?”

“Fine, fine. See you tomorrow.”

“Righto.”

Olivier headed back past me, didn’t nod and was gone. I went back to my dressing room and looked in the mirror. I was still there.

Fred pounded on the door. “Get touched up and come quick as you can to the set. They’re waiting for you!”

My heart clutched, my breath stumbled and my head fought the dizziness. He had scared the shit out of me.

Shotgun had disappeared. I grabbed a powder puff and patted.

When I got to the set, a small hallway on a platform at the top of some stairs with no railing, I found actors, cameramen, and crew crowded together, rehearsing the scene. I stood here and there, unable to find the director I had read for that morning. People were acting all around me. I was in the way. I got trapped in a corner and couldn’t get out. The director’s voice over a loudspeaker cut into the confusion.

“There are people on the set who don’t belong there,” he said. “I wish they would leave.”

Everyone stopped. An extra coughed. A small path opened up for me. My ill-fitting white shoes from wardrobe squeaked on the floor as I slunk out.

In the dressing room, I took off my nanny costume. The assistant director apologized to me. He promised I’d get paid. I reassured him that he was a good person. I got in my car and drove home to finish watering the lawn, a task that one actually never can finish because LA is a desert.

But What Did You Do out There? 

I missed New York. I had to stop reading The New York Times because of my longing and need to be back there, hustling and bustling with the rest of them. The running around of it, bumping into friends on the street, getting the news, the mass of culture, the worlds in the Met, the music ringing out of Lincoln Center, the seasons—blasting me in the winter, caressing and arousing me in the spring, beating me up in the summer, urging me on in the fall.

In LA the sun doesn’t shine; it glares until night comes, a clap of blackness, bypassing twilight, giving no warning. It’s a city built on sand, the entertainment capital that was to be the envy of the world, yet the weather—the freak storms, fires, floods, and mudslides—cannot be tamed, and the people rebuilding in their wake every year on the same sites cannot change.

Between jobs, I battled my restlessness and the flaws in my character. I learned to play an inner game of tennis. To do this, you have to get rid of your inner critic and live completely in the moment. I actually accomplished this once, and it was an extraordinary experience. I returned every ball with beautiful form, seeing each one as it approached, breathing in as I drew back my racket, breathing out as I swung, never taking my eyes off the ball, staying connected to it as if I were riding on it for the whole trip until it was returned to me, united with it until my opponent missed. I had a sense of satisfaction, completeness, and even joy at this. My teacher Zach asked me, “How did you do that?”

I threw my racquet in the air and yelled across the net to him, “I got rid of my critic! I got rid of my critic!”

“Tell me how!” he said, to reinforce the progress.

“I told him to wait in the car.”

Zach almost fell over laughing. His feet kicked up in the air and he clicked his heels in front of him. My critic was a man, and he hadn’t left at all.

I tried to even up my personality with a more sensitive approach. From a book, I learned to draw using the right side of my brain. First, I copied a picture that was upside down before looking at it right side up. The process made me nauseated and irritated. When I turned my picture around, I was amazed to find that I had drawn a really good copy of a man, full figure, sitting in a chair. The drawing was quite complicated; had I tried to copy him right side up, all my opinions and preconceptions about what I was seeing would have ended in chaos spilling off the page. However, not knowing what I was looking at, because it was upside down and unrecognizable, made me really “see” for the first time like an artist. It was thrilling. Then I drew a picture of a very wrinkled paper bag and was so impressed with it that I put it on the refrigerator as if I were a parent. My friends started referring to it in passing as Peggy’s paper bag.

I got interested in photography and took a lot of pictures, which gave me the opportunity to look closely at people, to study them without appearing impolite, playing little scenes with them to make them be spontaneous. Afterward, I realized that the pictures I took were really always of me. They didn’t look like me, but they were united by a certain style that I felt was mine: focused, real, relaxed, thinking about something specific, and, consequently, intriguing.

I spent Saturday mornings at the master class of the current acting guru and watched people take their clothes off in thoughtful, private-moment exercises. On Sundays, I went to the beach.

A salesman came down from San Francisco to hold seminars on how to channel information from the universe. He had combined sales promotion techniques with EST and Silva Mind Control. The first seminar was held in Beverly Hills and had attracted four hundred people. Early on, he went into a trance and spoke to various people in the room. He said “Don’t worry so much, Peggy.” I was flabbergasted. I thought, This guy’s got my number, all right. I looked around to see if everyone was staring at me before I realized that, out of four hundred people, there were bound to be a few named Peggy. I thought, Who the heck doesn’t worry?

The salesman had a staff of older ladies in wigs who sold four-thousand-dollar crystal earrings at the break. People were buying them. They were supposed to make the owner more attractive to the spirits. When I asked one of the staff members why they all wore wigs, she said, “We work such hard, long days and all, we don’t have time to do our hair.”

At dinner, we went Dutch, and the richest woman at the table ordered the fifty-six dollar salad. Everyone else had something different. When the check came and the money was collected, we were fifty-six dollars short. There was a fuss and a lot of recounting, but Mrs. Richest Woman at the Table held her ground and never owned up. Her friend put in the money for her because she felt sorry for this woman, whose husband was never home anymore.

I like classes, so I take a lot of them. Every time I take a class, it’s as if I expect to find the answer I have missed along the way. But what I have missed along the way, I have found, is only what I have missed along the way. It isn’t the answer. I know that now, but there was a time when you couldn’t mention a subject without my saying, “I took a class in that.” From celestial navigation to weight lifting, go through the alphabet—I took a class in it.

In LA, I took a screenwriting class that producers also attended in order to learn how to receive a writer’s pitch. I learned there that most people write in teams. It’s too lonely pasting index cards on the wall according to a prescribed formula, writing it all up by yourself, and in the end having the whole thing rewritten by strangers. Cartoon drawing, a Los Angeles City College adult extension course, was fun except that the students quickly became a group of extremely competitive six-year-olds trying to be proclaimed the best by the teacher. I learned how to grow roses and create a Zen garden. I went to spiritual retreats and took a trip to Findhorn, a New Age community in Scotland where I discovered synchronicity and how old I had suddenly gotten.

I bought a house.