I'll Scream Later (No Series) (9 page)

S
O THE KID
who was smoking pot, doing quaaludes, and stealing money from her dad to pay for it graduates from high school and decides to become a cop.

I kid you not.

Up until then, my experiences in the job world hadn’t been all that great. One summer I got a job at Allstate typing and filing. Since I had spent hours and hours talking to friends and family on the TTY machine, I could type like a maniac. No distractions. Not many people could beat me.

I would zoom through piles of typing, and it took me a while to notice that the rest of the typing pool was starting to hate me. I’d finish in half a day what it took everyone else a day to do.

Then I got a job at a department store at one of the local malls. They interviewed me and I got the job as salesperson, assigned to ladies’ lingerie.

It was a disaster. Every time someone asked me something, I’d pick up the phone and page for help—it would, of course, echo through the entire store. On my first day, I was approached by a large, homely-looking woman—or at least that’s what I thought on first glance. As I tried to help her, I realized she was a he, a cross-dresser. An auspicious start.

One day my parents, who couldn’t still quite believe I’d gotten the job, came in to see how it was going. You would have thought they were with the CIA, the lengths they went to so that I wouldn’t know they were there. My dad says, “We’re sneaking in, hiding behind clothing racks, working our way closer until we could see Marlee. We had been trying to figure out for
days how she’s going to sell something, we wanted to see for ourselves.

“So we’re peeking through a rack of clothes when we see a lady walk up behind her and start talking. When Marlee didn’t turn around, that lady got so mad.”

The job didn’t last too long, but only because I called in “sick” too many times.

D
ESPITE THE DRUGS
I was doing, I was attracted for all sorts of reasons to becoming a police officer. I was really serious about it.

I can trace my interest back to a couple of things. My fascination with the criminal justice system probably got its start when one of my cousins married a cop.

He was a great guy, the kind of cop everyone loves and admires. One day he’d just gotten off duty and had stopped to help someone on the roadside, which was just like him, when he was struck and killed by a drunk driver. It was a tragedy for the family and just another thing in life that seemed so unfair—the drunk driver lives, the good guy who stopped to help dies.

The law itself always intrigued me, too, who’s right, who’s wrong, and why. How our legal system works to constantly draw the line between good and evil. And, I’d been pulled over by more than my share of police officers and saw all the power that they had over ordinary citizens. I was curious about this power thing and wanted to check it out.

But if I dig deeper into my motivations, I also think the job felt as if it would give me control, put me in charge. I had experienced such painful things in my life—the babysitter and the teacher in particular—where I had felt so powerless. I wanted to put myself in a situation where I would never feel that helplessness again.

And so I began on the criminal justice track at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. I told one of my first teachers. “I want to be a cop, like you.”

“Okay, but you know what, we are going to take a field trip, and you are going to see a prison and see if this is really what you want to do.”

So the class took that field trip, and I saw only one Deaf prisoner. An important lesson I learned from the experience is that just because we were both Deaf didn’t mean we had anything in common or could relate at all.

When that didn’t make me quit, my teacher pulled me aside and said, “Get real, you can’t be a cop—how would you talk to anyone, you’d put yourself and your partner and other people in danger.”

“Well, I could get a dog. A police dog.”

“Yeah, I’m sure the dog is going to be able to deal with the police radio, right?”

Then I thought about being a probation officer working with Deaf criminals, but there just weren’t that many, and I wasn’t looking for a desk job anyway.

I was frustrated, hitting dead ends everywhere, when my brother Marc heard of auditions for
Children of a Lesser God
by the Immediate Theatre Co. in Rogers Park, Illinois.

I
HAD BEEN
away from acting for four years by the time Marc saw this notice. Besides, I’d always acted in the safety of the Children’s Theatre for the Deaf, at the center, where everyone knew me.

This was an actual Equity production, a professional staging, actors would audition and those who were cast would be paid.

Mike wasn’t thrilled about my going back to the stage. He had plans for our future. He dreamed of us opening a shoe store together. Marriage. Children. A house in the suburbs. We fought.

“Why can’t you just be happy for me?”

All this before I even auditioned.

To my brother I was saying, “I had my stint, I don’t want to compete. Let somebody else go for it. There are far better actors than me.”

But Marc was extremely adamant. “Acting is what you love to do, it won’t hurt you to try.”

Then there was Liz; she was auditioning, too. So it became a competition not just with other actors, but between us. Liz auditioned the day before I did.

I was scheduled to audition Saturday morning for the role of Lydia, a secondary part in the play. I stayed over at Marc’s the night before, running lines with him for hours.

Sometime late in the evening I told him to forget it, I was just not going to do this. But my brother’s persistence helped me change the course of my life.

“You’ve come all this way, Marlee, you’re here, you know your lines. Just go and try. I’ll go with you tomorrow.”

So he did. Although he got so nervous he escaped from the theater for a while, he was doing his best to support me, just as he had all those years when I was a child playing Dorothy and Peter Pan.

I auditioned and got the role on the spot. That day Marc and I celebrated. Mike was unhappy and kept saying, “What about me? What about me?” Liz didn’t get cast in the production at all. They were two very unhappy people—I was sick to my stomach that they couldn’t be happy for me.

It was my first Equity job. I made $300 a week. I was officially a professional actor, with a career.

Rehearsals started and I was having the time of my life. I’d come home completely energized by the work—and a line or two of coke—and Mike would be there angry, and often drunk. And we would fight; oh, how we would fight.

When he saw me opening night, that was truly the beginning of the end. He had never seen me onstage before—we’d started dating right after I had left ICODA—and to sit in the audience and watch me in the lights, to hear the audience cheering at the end, it was just more than he could take.

He was irrational, jealous. He argued, wanting me to quit the play, “I don’t want everybody watching you. I don’t want you enjoying yourself without me. And I’m going to lose you.”

“No, you’re not, I love you.”

But it turned out that he was right.

W
E WERE ALL
so psyched in rehearsals, and I was in awe watching the work of Janis Cole, who had the lead in the stage production of
Children of a Lesser God,
which was making its way into the heartland after an amazing run on Broadway. A few days before opening night we heard rumors that Paramount Pictures, which was looking to do a film version of the play, might be there scouting for some of the roles.

Instead, a local agent took the initiative and told the studio she’d film different scenes from the production and send a copy along. If Paramount signed any of us, she’d get the commission. So we all went to her office and she filmed several scenes and sent everything off to the filmmakers.

Randa Haines, who was set to direct the film, says, “I first saw Marlee on a videotape a Chicago agent had made; she was playing one of the kids. I remember seeing her in the background and saying, ‘Who’s that? She looks like a Deaf Debra Winger.’ So I asked the agent to make another video that featured Marlee. And that led us to bring her to New York to read with Bill.”

When the agent came back to me and said they wanted to see me doing the role of Sarah, I hesitated. The actress who was playing the role of Sarah was my friend and I had the utmost respect for her work.

“What about my friend?”

“Don’t worry,” they said.

But she was extremely hurt and angry with me. Still, I couldn’t let go of the opportunity, and the studio had already evaluated her performance by then. So I read, the videotape went back to Para
mount and Randa, and the next thing I knew they were flying me to New York to read with Bill.

Director Randa Haines (© Paramount Pictures, all rights reserved)

I will never forget the moment when Bill Hurt, big-time movie star, the actor who had taken my breath away in
Altered States
and
The Big Chill,
walked in. He was late. Apologized to everyone, said hello to me.

He was so tall and so good-looking. I was extremely taken with him; something about him was electric.

Then the scene work began. He was so impressive, so professional, clearly not intimidated or scared reading the scenes with me—I was the one who was intimidated and scared.

Then he looked at his watch and said, “I have to go now and be with my son.” He had a kite and I remember thinking,
Wow, look how he cares about his baby boy.

That was it. They didn’t say anything more to me, just flew me back to Chicago.

Meanwhile, Randa thought she had found her Sarah, she just wasn’t saying anything to me. Randa recalls, “The moment Marlee walked in the door, even though she looked like a teenager, she is a teenager, in jeans, chewing gum, there was something about her that I went, ‘Wow!’ And then we did some scenes with Bill, just sitting on a couch, and there is chemistry between them that is already exciting. As a director, you’re always looking for that. And I’m already thinking of ideas on how to help her look more like she’s twenty-five, which is what the character was. Marlee didn’t seem to have the anger and pain that Sarah had, so I started to think of ways to help her develop that emotional context.”

B
ACK IN
C
HICAGO
. More cocaine! Almost everyone around me was doing it. Waiting to hear back, doing the play, fighting with Mike. Our relationship was hanging by a thread—up and down—we were both in denial that we were crumbling as a couple.

Then I heard that the studio had it down to two for the role of Sarah. They would fly both of us to Los Angeles to do a screen test. I was there for a week, rehearsing with an acting coach, Jim Carrington, who was great. We shot the screen test on the last day.

It was the first time I had worked with an acting coach, really the first time I had had any formal acting training. We worked on improvisation, emotions. They were going to shoot three scenes. We worked twelve-hour days that week.

Everything was a first: I’d never been filmed before. Never worked with a crew. Never been on a soundstage, had never even seen a soundstage. Never had a director really directing me before. There was no time to be a tourist in L.A.

The studio put me up in what I guess was a corporate apartment, in a tall, white building near Franklin and La Brea in the heart of Hollywood. I shared the apartment, complete with a full kitchen, with my interpreter—who ironically was the sister of Janis Cole, the same Janis Cole who’d played Sarah in the Chicago theater production.

On the day of the screen test Jim picked me up in his snazzy
two-seater convertible. Racy cars are one of my loves, but I could barely enjoy the ride, I was so scared. But in a way it felt as if my life had come full circle—I used to come to Paramount for those summer visits with Henry Winkler, whose office was on the lot.

Someone came up to me and said they were giving me a trailer.
What’s that for?
I wondered.

I walked into “my” trailer, which had a bed and a kitchen and a huge chair for makeup. I was stunned, probably one of the few times in my life I was speechless.

So I sat in that huge chair and they started doing my hair and makeup. I started chatting up the makeup artist and said, “You know what I’m in the mood for?”

“What?”

“Pink bubble-gum ice cream from Baskin-Robbins thirty-one flavors, it’s what I grew up eating.”

The next thing I knew, in walks Bill with a pint of pink bubblegum ice cream. I was shocked. How had he found out?

He handed it to me and smiled that slip of a smile he can do, his head cocked slightly to the side, his hair falling almost in his eyes. “Hello and welcome.”

Suddenly I felt that everything was going to be okay.

T
HAT DAY
, B
ILL
and I did the fight scene that falls near the end of the film, then the bed scene—close and intimate—and another ordinary scene that escapes me now.

And I felt great!

Randa talked me through every step of the way. Everyone was cheering me on. I needed to cry, and I did. I never felt so much love and support.

My director was already plotting strategy: “I kept thinking about how to dress Marlee and how she would look in the movie—she was so beautiful and interesting and sexy, you just couldn’t take your eyes off her. There was a real spark.”

When we finished. I felt exhausted. It was the first time I had done anything this emotional: it had just sucked up everything I had in me.

I was sent off to grab something to eat, then dropped off at the apartment.

I remember Bill asking me as I was leaving for the day, “What are you doing tonight?”

My brain starts racing. I have a boyfriend back in Chicago. He’s waiting for me to call him. So I say, “Nothing really, just packing, I’m leaving for home tomorrow.”

“Let me come over at eleven. I have dinner reservations, but I’ll come over later and say good-bye.”
But for what?
I thought to myself. I needed to tell him no, that I had a boyfriend, I
have
a boyfriend. But being wooed by Bill Hurt was seductive. What would he be like? The curiosity sucked me in.

So I went back to the apartment, nervous as anything. I smoked some pot. I did some coke. I took a shower.

My interpreter wanted to go to bed, but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted to make sure she could hear the doorbell.

Bill didn’t come at eleven.

At 1 a.m. he buzzed the apartment. As soon as my interpreter heard it, she said, “Good night,” and headed off to bed.

Bill was absolutely wasted. I had never seen someone that drunk before.

He looked a little sheepish. “Sorry, I’m late.”

I was nineteen, five feet three inches, and all of ninety-eight pounds—there’s nothing like coke to keep you slim. He was thirty-five, around six feet two inches, and in terrific shape.

We sat down on the couch, and we just connected. He was wild. The sex was spectacular, and that is the one thing about our relationship that would never change. Sex with Bill was take-my-breath-away fantastic, always.

We completely fit—like a glove. It was extremely intense and crazy, and this thought flashed through my head:
Wow, I’m making love with a movie star, right here in the living room of an apartment a studio is paying for.

It was surreal.

He stayed for about three hours. We didn’t talk much, we didn’t sleep. On his way out he smiled and said, “Hope to see you again.”