I'll Scream Later (No Series) (22 page)

I was panicked; the ticket agent just shrugged. I couldn’t hold up production. Every lost day would cost money. If something else was going to go wrong on this production, I didn’t want to be the reason for it.

So, in what has to be the most expensive three-day holiday in my entire life, we found a private jet that I could charter for $2,000 thanks to my American Express card that flew us to Guadalajara. Then we took the taxi ride from hell—nearly four hours of back road to San Miguel and on to Pozos, mostly after dark, at a fee that could probably have bought me a brand-new car.

I still can’t quite believe we managed to do it—two chicks, one Deaf, neither of us could speak Spanish—but we were back before sunrise. Or at least before my call time.

In the end, Mazatlán turned into another great memory.

The Man with the Golden Mask,
not so much.

It was released in France and Japan, but never in the States. The one videotape I have of the film is in French. But working on the movie did give me a lasting friendship with Jean Reno—and that was definitely worth the price of a misadventure in Mazatlán.

My $2,000 jet ride

O
NE OF THE
few commercials I’ve done was for Whiskas. It featured my beautiful orange shorthair, BJ (named after Billy Joel, of course), and my black cat, Booty. It was shot inside the Blue Jay Way house, while David and I were still together.

Now BJ and Booty were great cats, and we were close, but they had never been trained—not in the way most animals that are featured in ads or movies are. We spent hours rolling balls of foil over different surfaces to try to entice them to run in certain directions. We tried string: “Chase the string, BJ.” “Go after the ball, Booty.” They were having none of it!

In the end, the cats cooperated enough, and the ad agency got enough footage to turn it into a beautiful spot with a short story arch that simply said BJ and Booty could understand me as I signed, and I could definitely understand them when they wanted Whiskas.

I loved the creativity of the writers on that ad; it was a perfect example of how if you understand the possibilities, deafness can be turned into an asset rather than an issue. They shot my signing as if it were a ballet—focusing on the beauty of the movement.

Someone once asked what was the greatest barrier I faced in Hollywood. It wasn’t my deafness as much as the many closed minds. I remember answering that I hoped that anyone I might work with could see beyond the deafness to everything else about me.

One of the projects I very much wanted to be considered for was Jane Campion’s
The Piano.
It was a remarkable script—the story of a mute Scottish widow who with her child is dispatched to a primitive New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century for an arranged marriage. She communicates by writing and by signing.

Jane and I had a meeting and I thought it went well. I came away thinking the door was open. But Jack drove her back to her hotel, and on the way she told him she just couldn’t see me in the part. As Jack tells it, she said that after
Children of a Lesser God,
she didn’t think anyone in the audience would be able to forget I was Deaf.

Those are the kind of arguments that drive me crazy!

If you get inside the character’s skin, of course the audience will get past anything and believe whoever you are. Al Pacino, blind in
Scent of a Woman;
Patty Duke as blind and Deaf Helen Keller; Daniel Day-Lewis with cerebral palsy in
My Left Foot;
Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man;
Javier Bardem paralyzed in
The Sea Inside;
ditto Tom Cruise in
Born on the Fourth of July;
ditto Jon Voight in
Coming Home.

The list is endless, and those are the extremes. On the most fundamental level, that is exactly what is expected of all actors with each role we are given—take the character, slip inside the skin, and make the audience believe it.

In Jane’s mind, I could have been wrong for the role for many reasons. I just hated that I was crossed off for consideration for that one.

Holly Hunter would ultimately get the role and win a well-deserved Oscar for an exceptional performance. Jane would take home an Oscar as well for her screenplay, and Anna Paquin would win in the supporting actress category. I loved the film, but I will always regret that it got away.

T
HAT WAS CERTAINLY
not the first nor the last time I would encounter the many misconceptions that people have about what it means to be Deaf. Depending on the moment, it makes me want to laugh, cry, or throw up my hands in sheer disbelief.

In 1995, I wrote a letter to Ann Landers. She had written a column about a reader who was losing his hearing. He’d written to her saying that if he had been given the choice, he would have opted to go blind rather than Deaf, writing, “Sight cuts you off from things, loss of hearing cuts you off from people.”

I knew that was not the case. Certainly my own life, which has
been so enriched by family, colleagues, and so many friends, is a testament to the power of human connection. I wrote in a letter published that July:

I have dozens of examples, but just consider this one. I’m flying cross-country with Jack, headed to a project on the East Coast. We are in first class, always a nice perk. The stewardess comes along handing everyone menus—this was back in the old days, you know, when airlines still served food.

I was discussing something with Jack, which meant signing. That caught the stewardess’s eye. Then I watched as she became flustered, then confident. She walked back to me, smiled, plucked the menu right out of my hands, and scurried away. Back in a minute, looking proud of herself, she handed me a menu with no words and covered in bumps.

I looked at Jack. He looked at the menu, then signed “Braille,” before handing it back to the stewardess and politely explaining that I wasn’t blind. I simply couldn’t hear.

Another time I was set to do an interview for CNN. I was sitting with the woman who was going to interview me, and just seconds before we went live, she leaned over and said, “Marlee, I have to tell you, my dog is Deaf.”

Suddenly we were live and I was sitting there looking absolutely stunned—eyes wide, mouth open…I guess she thought we had a lot in common now.

In the early years of my career, anytime I went onto a set for the first time, I needed to find a way to quickly break the ice with a lot of people. You may know the director and one or two of the actors,
but you’re generally facing an extensive crew whom you’ve never met before in your life.

The last thing I wanted was for them to be intimidated by me—that is death on a set, you need the crew to feel comfortable.

And so I found the perfect icebreaker.

I’d hand out this book called
Signs of Sexual Behavior,
which demonstrated how to sign most of the major dirty words in our language. After that, for the first couple of days, the cast and crew would get a kick out of signing insults and bad words to one another across the room.

Then, as with everything else, people got bored and moved on. But the payoff for me was that they began to feel that I was approachable, just another actor, which I am.

E
VERYONE WHO WORKS
in this town has a long list of projects that came close to happening, only to collapse along the way. They tend to be moments you meet with either heartbreak or relief. There were several in my life that I so wish we’d been able to make.

Jennifer Beals and I were set to do a film together in 1989 called
A Reasonable Doubt,
long before the TV series
Reasonable Doubts
was even a glimmer in producer Robert Singer’s eye. It unraveled, as I remember it, due to financing. It would take about fifteen more years before we would end up working together on
The L Word.
And not only did we have a great time, but it turns out that we mesh well in scenes.

Another project was being developed for me and Jennifer Grey called
Most Wanted.
Jennifer had become a friend and I know we would have loved working together. Our sensibilities and our senses of humor just clicked.

A fantasy-love story called
Fox
was set up at Paramount and was close to a go when it was derailed by the writers’ strike in 1988, which ground the town to a halt for five long months. I’m really sorry that one didn’t get off the ground.

Fox
was set in England—a love story between a gent and a woman who moves between human and animal forms—think
Ladyhawk
only with foxes.

Then I would meet producer/director Robert Singer to talk about a network drama series he was developing. A young, aggressive DA named Tess Kaufman, would be paired with a burned-out cop, Detective Dicky Cobb. Singer hadn’t even considered that Tess might be Deaf, but after meeting me, he decided that’s exactly what Tess should be.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1991 I started getting to know Tess Kaufman, another character who would change my life. I was twenty-six and had snagged a role costarring with Mark Harmon in a new NBC drama,
Reasonable Doubts.

Series television is its own special beast. I had seen it from a distance, watching David Kelley wrestle it to the ground each week, so I had a sense of how demanding and unrelenting it could be. If you’re lucky, you’ll get twenty-six episodes a year. It looked as if I was going to be lucky, and I couldn’t wait to step into the belly of the beast.

For the first time in my career,
Reasonable Doubts
was going to mean more than a great creative challenge and a huge audience; it was going to be steady work, and just about any actor will tell you what a precious commodity that is.

Press attention swirled around the project since this was the first network prime-time series to feature a Deaf actor in a leading role. I’m sure I told the story a thousand times that year of meeting the show’s executive producer, Robert Singer, who had never envisioned the role for a Deaf actress until he met me. He was simply looking to cast two strong actors—one male, one female—and build the show around the conflict, tension, and attraction that could spark as they worked shoulder to shoulder to do the right thing in the weekly courthouse drama.

The series was set in Chicago, but we were shooting on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, just a few miles from my house. Something about stepping onto a backlot always reminds me how much I love being a part of this industry. Studio executives, directors, produc
ers, actors, and crew may be in various stages of sheer panic, but you don’t really feel it unless you’re in the room.

Walking through the corridors between towering soundstages, or down streets where classic movies have been filmed, I’m always struck by a kind of peace and quiet you can find there. It really does feel a million miles away from the reality that waits outside the gates. But then, of course, you find yourself in the room and everything from exhilaration to panic is waiting for you right around the corner!

The idea of a Deaf attorney might sound far-fetched, but I found a top-notch one in Michael Schwartz, who was living and working as an assistant district attorney for New York at the time. NBC made arrangements for us to meet—flying me to New York from L.A. and Michael up from Washington, where he happened to be. The network put us both up at the Plaza Hotel, and we had dinner together.

Michael remembers, “I was in the appeals bureau. My job was to save the convictions, but NBC was fascinated with the trial bureau. With that in mind, I talked to Marlee about what I did and also what it felt like to work in an aural world where everybody else was hear
ing. I wanted to help her feel that this job was very doable; that what they were talking about could be believable. I was doing it.”

The next day Michael took me to meet his boss, the NYC district attorney, and to show me around his office so I could get a sense of the place where he spent so much of his time. The DA was then and still is Robert Morgenthau, now approaching his nineties. He is arguably one of the most powerful men in Manhattan, with long ties to the Kennedy family. Michael was surprised at how well the meeting went:

“Robert is a wonderful man, but very powerful, a kingmaker. Most people, when they meet him, genuflect. When Marlee and I walked in, she immediately noticed two photographs, one with the Kennedys and one with his children. She started asking about the photos, and Robert was thunderstruck by how at ease she was with him. Marlee was just herself and he took right to her.”

Michael and I had been introduced a few years earlier in El Paso at a National Association of the Deaf conference. We had a mutual friend in the legendary Bernard Bragg—writer, actor, mime, and a founder of the National Theater of the Deaf, where Michael had spent a year before beginning his career in law.

Deaf acting pioneer and friend Bernard Bragg

I had first met Bernard when he visited the Center on Deafness in Northbrook, and as with Henry Winkler I talked to him about my dreams of becoming an actor.

Bernard recalls, “It seems just like yesterday when I first became acquainted with Marlee, who participated in my weeklong theater workshop. She was eight at that time and we did some improvisational activities together, which enhanced learning. My first impression was that she was free-spirited and eager. When it was time to say good-bye, she was the last person to leave the room.

“‘I have a question,’ she asked. The expression on her face was thoughtful. I said, ‘Yes, what is it?’ After a moment of hesitation, she signed to me, ‘Can I become an actress?’ I smiled and replied, ‘Why not? Just do it!’ And little did I ever dream that I would be looking at her on TV twelve years later when she came onstage to receive her Oscar.”

Bernard was a true groundbreaker, the first Deaf person to have a show on television. Called
The Quiet Man,
it aired in the Bay Area and featured Bernard, who had studied with Marcel Marceau, as a mime.

And in another strange coincidence, Jack remembers serving as Michael’s interpreter when he argued a case before the New York State Supreme Court in the years before Jack and I met and began working together.

From Michael I got a firsthand glimpse of the pressures on any assistant DA in a big city. Heavy caseloads, tragic stories, lives gone terribly wrong. And always that search for justice.

I’ll never forget one scene because it spoke to the way you have to measure your emotional investment in each case. The case on this day was exceptionally prickly, with a man’s life hanging in the balance. Mark’s character, who worked in tandem with Tess as an investigator, turned to me and said, “You need to care less.” I looked at him and shot back, “You need to care more.” With Tess, I was always walking that emotional high wire.

Michael still remembers what it was like for him all those years ago watching
Reasonable Doubts:

“First of all, Marlee is a phenomenal actress, she becomes the role, the character. And what she did in the show was groundbreak
ing—it helped people to wake up to the idea of Deaf people as professionals. That was a time and a day that I could point to and say on this day people’s attitudes and perceptions began to change. Marlee has always played an extraordinary role in terms of breaking rules, changing attitudes, perceptions. She has a historic role and she’s also concerned with the actor’s life—she has those two things and she’s always walking the fine line between the two.”

In what was becoming a pattern in my life, some in the Deaf community embraced the show, while others were angered by my signing choice. Rather than use the more common ASL, I chose English signed, which is more precise and doesn’t require the interpreter to, well, interpret—the interpreter translates exactly what you’re saying in English signs.

My rationale was tied to my character. Since Tess was a courtroom litigator, it was important that the jury or judge hear the exact words she was choosing. But this brought another flurry of outrage and debate within the Deaf community.

Bernard says, “I wrote an article defending Marlee’s choice. It was a very good and wise decision on her part. For the role of a lawyer, she needed to use specific and exact words. She proved herself to be a versatile actress by using the bona fide ASL as a Deaf mother in the recent TV movie
Sweet Nothing in My Ear.
I think it’s great that she has helped the general public see and appreciate the difference between the two.”

T
HE FIRST YEAR
of the series was heaven. But it also changed Jack’s role in my life. While he still interpreted for me in my public appearances, he was increasingly focused on building my production company into a solid business.

He never really adjusted to the rhythm of life on a set. You always have long hours of waiting while shots are being set up, or other scenes are being shot that don’t involve you. That downtime either drove him nuts or put him to sleep.

I’d get the call that they were ready for me, only to find that Jack had nodded off somewhere. I think he could sleep through anything!

Jack sleeping

The studio brought in a lot of actors who could also sign to read for the interpreter part, and one was an old friend, Bill Pugin. I had met Bill in the summer of ’87 during the Very Special Arts Festival in downtown L.A. He did a song/sign workshop every year, and we had a mutual friend in Lauren Tewes, who played Julie McCoy on
The Love Boat.

Cindy, as we all called her, said she had a friend she wanted me to meet and brought me over to Bill’s booth. He remembers, “I had all these Down syndrome kids there and I was in the middle of teaching the song ‘Day by Day.’ I saw Cindy come up with Marlee, and I waved at Marlee like I knew her. And Marlee is looking at me like ‘Who is this guy?’ I said, ‘Hey, you sign, right? Come over here and help me out.’

“She walked over and I quickly signed, ‘Hi, I’m Bill, it’s nice to meet you.’ And she just played along, got right into it with the kids. And when the workshop was over, we were officially introduced.”

Over the years Bill and I would run into each other at other Deaf events—he was a terrific signer, his older sister is Deaf, and he’s also an actor. But when I first knew him, Bill was with the National Captioning Institute helping with its closed-captioning work and doing a lot of freelance interpreting, which he has over
time built into a major enterprise with 135 interpreters working for him.

I didn’t know when I walked into the room to read with the actors auditioning to play my interpreter on
Reasonable Doubts
that Bill was in the group. I wished everyone good luck, then we started reading with each one.

Bill says, “They had Jack there to let the producers know if any of us could really sign. Marlee and I had such great fun that day, and we had what is called matching register. When a Deaf person signs, the person voicing tries to match their register—if they’re signing sarcastically or angrily, you match that tone.

“The producers liked it, said they thought the chemistry was right, but also they liked my voice and they said that was important since they knew they’d be hearing it all the time.”

In the years since, Bill has been with me on many productions, as my interpreter both on camera and off. It helps that he’s one of the most entertaining people I’ve ever been around, too.

It’s important for me to have someone on set that I’m completely in sync with. The person has to relay the cues from the director and the other actors, and to understand what the director wants to convey to me and also communicate what I need back to the director. It all has to be done in a way that no one looking at the series or movie is ever aware of that part of my process.

I also count on my interpreters to make sure no one crosses my sight lines when we’re working. Since I need to stay so focused on any visual cues or signs—the foundation of communication for me—a distraction in my line of sight, while it might not bother a hearing actor, can completely destroy my concentration.