Sometimes the photographs looked like another person altogether. By the time they’d been retouched, there were no flaws, asymmetry of any kind. Things you didn’t know you had were eliminated from your face. I’m still shocked at what Kodak did on the full-length cutout of me that stood in drugstores to introduce the first Instamatic camera--there wasn’t a dimple or ripple of flesh. The countertop version had a mechanical arm that swung the camera up and down, rubbing an unfortunate line across my face. I inherited the cutout that my grandmother kept in her garage (she said “Hi” to it every time she pulled in), and one year my caretaker stuck a Santa hat on its head and a sign that said MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL. I still have my original “Breck girl” portrait too, an idealized vision of a woman, all misty and dew-eyed like a Stepford wife. These relics seem to migrate to my home in Memphis. Maybe they talk to one another when I’m not around, like the toys in Santa’s workshop that come alive at night.
I was clueless about the future beyond modeling, but not out of contentment with the status quo--I was frantically trying to figure out what was my Job in the universe. Stewart Cowley was opening a talent division to maneuver models into lucrative television and film work. He suggested that I meet a man who’d made a violent, low-budget, successful movie and was preparing to direct the sequel. The gold-leafed hotel suite was far more sumptuous than I expected for a B-list mogul. Stewart brought me upstairs but left quite abruptly, whispering “I’ll be right back” while I arranged myself on the sofa. As we were talking, Mr. B-list took my elbow and steered me to one of the tall windows overlooking Central Park. Then his hand moved from my elbow to my shoulder, he leaned in close and thrust his tongue down my throat. Naively, I asked what was going on.
“‘This is a scene in the new film,” he said. “I thought we’d rehearse.”
I pushed him away saying, “I don’t think this is working for me,” just as I heard a knock at the door signaling Stewart’s return. I made an excuse about needing to be somewhere else, and the moment we were in the hallway, I hissed, “Don’t ever leave me alone with one of those creeps again!” I never knew whether his sudden departure was prearranged or an innocent mistake.
With the memory of that lechery still fresh, I learned with some trepidation that Roger Vadim had offered me a screen test for a film called
Peryl,
and I insisted that a chaperone accompany me to Los Angeles: my booker at the agency, Donna DeCita, whose sister is Bernadette Peters. We stayed in the grizzled old Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where some of the regulars were wandering around the lobby in their bathrobes. Because there was no script yet, I was instructed to rehearse a scene from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. I sat on the lawn reading lines with Vadim’s assistant, who then drove me to Malibu for the screen test. Vadim was tall and slender with thinning hair, a creamy shirt that he said was made of Egyptian cotton. Three years of Memphis high school French didt help me understand a word as he conversed with a French actor named Christian Marquand (also tall and slender with thinning hair), whose home we were using for the audition. I definitely knew what the term
ménage a trois
meant and was glad for the chaperone.
Most of the test consisted of filming me, with no sound, dancing to the Rolling Stones singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” (The old-time Hollywood producers, many of them German, would refer to this as “M.O.S.”--mit out sound.) The film never got produced; I was told that the financing fell through. But I had started something interesting with the assistant (younger, hairier, and shorter than either of the Frenchmen), and as my friend Wanda used to say, “How do you know if a shoe fits unless you try it on?” A few weeks later, I lied to John Bruno and flew to San Francisco for the weekend. The assistant picked me up on a motorcycle and strapped my suitcase to the back. I kept looking over my shoulder as we rode, expecting to see the highway littered with my bras and underpants. Vadim later offered me a role in
Pretty
Maids
All
in a Row, but the character was set to die, early and gruesomely, in the girls’ rest room of a high school. I declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat, and my acting career was stalled at the gate.
IT’S A NOD TO THE HYPERREALITY OF THE FILM BUSINESS
that everybody in Hollywood knows the maxim: no names on location. Cast and crew conspire in an implicit acceptance and discretion about the phenomenon of musical beds, about who is seen emerging from which star’s trailer or which grip’s room at the Motel 6. The set is like an office Christmas party, where indiscretions are absolved when the party’s over, or like the miniature village around the model trains that I coveted as a child, a bantam community assembled for fun. Everyone has a common purpose, everyone is paid to be creative, and everyone can pretend to be someone else. It’s a dreamscape of sorts, basically free of familial and adult responsibilities. I was twenty years old when I entered that world, mischievous and recklessly self-absorbed.
In the spring of 1970, there was a mounting pile of scripts in one corner of my apartment, so daunting that I virtually ignored them. I was content to give the movie business a wide berth anyway. The Hollywood people I’d met so far were creeps, and every model I knew was taking acting lessons. I was determined to be different. My friend Jim Rogers offered to help sift through the scripts and found one he thought I should consider. It was called
The Last Picture Show,
from a coming-of-age novel by Larry McMurtry about the lives of small-town Texas teenagers in 1951. I would be considered for the part of Jacy Farrow, the character whose imprudent promiscuity wreaks havoc with her friends and neighbors.
I went to meet the director, Peter Bogdanovich, in his suite at the Essex House facing Central Park, and my deportment conveyed an intentional lack of interest: jeans and denim jacket streaked and softened in the washing machine with rocks and bleach, Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals, and a paperback book. Zen philosophers talk about hitting the target without aiming at it, is surely what I did. I hated the idea of playing Jacy, a self- absorbed ice princess whose persona had often been assigned (erroneously, I thought) to me. She stings men and moves on, making them sexual objects as men traditionally do to women, but she never finds anything satisfying. Plus the script called for two nude scenes, which seemed anathema. Nudity as an inherently moral concept is one thing; actually dropping my skivvies was another.
Peter opened the door to his suite. He looked to be thirtyish, six feet tall but sh a high forehead, dark eyes, a shock of thick near-black hair, and a goofy smile. The immediate attraction was so strong, I was flummoxed.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Dostoyevsky,” I said.
“Which one?” he asked.
“War and Peace.”
I was so unnerved, I might have fumbled my own name, let alone Tolstoy’s. But we both laughed out loud, and he invited me to sit down. As he headed for the couch, I curled up on the floor next to a coffee table with a tray that held the remains of a room-service breakfast and a small crystal vase with a single red rose. During the course of our conversation about the film, I picked up the flower and slowly plucked the petals off one by one, making a little pile of vanquished foliage. Peter later told me that he imagined Jacy could do to any man what I had done to that rose.
Pages of a new script shuttled between Peter in California and Larry McMurtry in Texas, a virgin screenwriter who typed scenes on cheap yellow paper. They established a basic construction for the story that was not in the book (a year that spanned from one football season to the next), added some important material (like a graduation scene), and began casting pivotal roles. Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn were to play two middle-aged women assuaging loveless marriages with infidelity. Ben Johnson, who’d played opposite John Wayne in several of John Ford’s seminal westerns, turned down the part of Sam the Lion, the ethical heart of Anarene, Texas. He didn’t like the four-letter words in the script, said he didn’t talk that way in front of women and children. So Peter had Ford call him.
“Are you gonna be the Duke’s sidekick for the rest of your life?” Ford demanded.
“Well, they’ve got to rewrite the dialogue,” said Johnson.
Peter complied and called to tell Johnson that some of the objectionable language had been removed. “I hope you understand,” Peter said assuredly, “you’re going to get an Academy Award for this picture.”
“Goddammit,” Johnson said, “I’ll do the goddamned thing.”
Peter chewed on toothpicks in those days, part of his program to quit smoking, and had stopped to pick some up at a Food Giant in the San Fernando Valley. While standing in the checkout line, he saw my face on the cover of Glamour, my hair in tendrils over the collar of a pink and white shirt imprinted with the words “I love you” over and over. There was a fresh sexual threat in the photograph that made him think of Jacy Farrow. He’d considered two Texas girls for the part: one was Sissy Spacek, and the other was named Patsy McClenny until she started working in soap operas and reinvented herself as Morgan Fairchild. But I learned much later that his immediate reaction to that magazine cover was the kind of disorientation that Jacy engendered in men. If anybody ever projected an image of completeness when at the core was emptiness, it was Jacy Farrow. Peter couldn’t know it was also me.
He was convinced that not only would my lack of acting experience not prevent me from playing the role successfully, it might even enhance my work because I wasn’t coming into the process with preconceived notions about the character. I was a blank slate, fresh clay. He didn’t want me to do a screen test, but the producer, Bert Schneider, was less assured. He even dug up the test I’d made for Roger Vadim in an effort to convince Peter that I didn’t have enough innate talent to compensate for my amateur status. It was the only time Peter would ever doubt me. I was asked to do a reading in California with Jeff Bridges, who’d already been cast as Duane Jackson, the callous boy on his way to war, and two young actors who were up for the part of the more sensitive and vulnerable Sonny Crawford: John Ritter, son of the country music star Tex Ritter, and ChriMitchum, son of Robert Mitchum. Eventually the part went to Timothy Bottoms, who had just played the lead as a quadruple amputee in Dalton Trumbo’s World War I film Johnny
Got His Gun.
My modeling agent Stewart Cowley arranged for his Los Angeles representative to pick me up at the airport, where he announced, “For your first lunch in town, I’m taking you to Pinks,” a local landmark for chilidogs. I’d been to L.A. before on modeling assignments, but this was
Hollywood.
Tinseltown. Take the sunshine, mix in a little smog, and the city actually looks tan. I was anxious, excited, and hungry, wolfing down several chili cheese dogs with sauerkraut and mustard. I was fumbling in my purse for breath mints when we got to the BBS office. A young man with a lean face, receding hairline, and dazzling smile was reclining in a swivel chair with his feet on the desk, smoking a joint. I’d seen
Easy Rider
and
Five Easy Pieces
so I recognized Jack Nicholson, who lurched to his feet and made an elaborate attempt to bow in greeting, making jokes I didn’t get but laughed at anyway.
I got the job but not without Schneider’s growling insistence to Peter, “Make sure there’s a lot of nudity.” My entire salary was $5,000 for twelve weeks of work, an amount I could have earned in a week of modeling, but by this time I began to believe that the compelling story of these teenagers whose options seem so limited by their dusty small town would be painful but important to tell. By thinking back to the paintings of the bare-breasted women I’d seen in the great museums of Europe, I’d determined that the nude scenes had nothing to do with morality. But my boyfriend, John Bruno, had other ideas. “You do a nude scene and I will never marry you,” he declared. “If everybody in the world sees my future wife naked, you won’t turn me on anymore.” This from a man supposed to be so sophisticated? I was never really interested in marriage to John or anybody else: it represented a kind of indentured servitude, and I was hardly alone in rethinking the institution. The atmosphere of the late 1960s was one of sexual libertinism, from the bumper stickers that said MAKE LOVE-NOT
-
WAR to the newly endorsed forms of socializing (mate swapping, orgies, and “key parties--couples played grab bag with their car keys, throwing them in a bowl from which the wives fished out a set and went home with the owner).
I don’t need to hear Billie Holidays “God bless the child who’s got his own” to know that I had to make sure I could take care of myself in the world so I wouldn’t be beholden to men. I was disturbed by John’s possessiveness and his insistence, from the beginning of our affair, that if either one of us was in the mood for sex, the other had to comply--not a great basis for passionate lovemaking. But it was Frances Bruno who provided the final impetus for me to leave. “If you wanna do this movie, you gotta do this movie,” she said. “You know I love ya, but don’t let Johnnie hold you back.” I knew enough not to do
Pretty Maids All in a Row
and enough to do
The Last Picture Show.
Production began that October in north central Texas, a time of golden Indian summer sunlight combined with fierce freezing winds. To a large extent, we were persona non grata in the community. The locals resented Larry McMurtry’s portrayal of their foibles--when Peter met Larry’s father, the elder McMurtry said, “If you’ll pour kerosene on him, I’ll light the match--and the real town, called Archer City, was given the pseudonym of “Anarene” for the film. Our provisional home was the Ramada Inn in Wichita Falls, a two-story construction of red brick built around an unheated pool. Every day for two weeks I worked with an accent coach in my cheerless room right next to the soft-drink machine and rehearsed in the optimistically named Presidential Suite, an orange nightmare that Peter shared with his wife, Polly, the film’s production designer. Peter was twenty-three when they married, and just three weeks before filming began, she had given birth to a second daughter, Alexandra, who was left in the care of Peter’s parents in Arizona along with three-year-old Antonia.