I DIDN’T LOVE riding on Steve’s motorcycle, but he wanted to show me something. So, one afternoon when little Eli was down for a nap and Baa was reading Peter a book, I wrapped my arms around Steve’s T-shirted torso and off we zoomed through the emerald community, turning onto Chantilly Road, then up a steep driveway. At the top, branching off to the right, was the private entrance to a barely visible house. To the left was a large lot with only the remnants of a brick fireplace standing in the shadowy outline of a house that had probably burned down during the disastrous 1961 Bel Air fire. The site was spectacularly beautiful, lined with tall eucalyptus trees, which had either escaped the blaze or grown in the nearly twelve years since the house last stood.
I can’t say I didn’t know what Steve had on his mind. And even though it made absolutely no sense financially, the thought of having a home in this dream of a spot was jump-up-and-down exciting. Truth was, we had two children and lived in a rather small house, so having a larger place was not a bad idea. But I wasn’t working regularly, and Steve had no career at all, so building a fantasy home at that particular moment couldn’t have been a completely good idea either. Yet that’s what Steve wanted to do: build a house. He was like a kid in a toy store, determined to get what he wanted. And no matter how many reasons I gave as to why we couldn’t and shouldn’t, he’d come back with reasons why we absolutely could and should: He would build half of it himself, be part of the construction crew, devote his life to it, stressing the point that he knew all about our finances and was positive it was a good investment. I wouldn’t have known a good investment from a hole in the ground, plus I remained frightened of anything financial and therefore had no idea how much money we actually had. Part of me wanted to feel as if Steve knew what he was doing, that he could handle this part of our lives while I concerned myself with taking care of the kids and making a living. Which meant building a career, not a house.
Perhaps this was the beginning of the end for our relationship and if we had just stayed in our little place with the mountain view, the marriage would have survived. But we sold it in order to buy the lot on Chantilly Road, and when Peter was three and Eli not quite six months, we moved into a ramshackle rented house on Topanga Beach, where we would live while the home was being built. And in spite of the fact that the beach house seemed to be made of cardboard, it had a large wooden deck directly on the sand and was a mind-boggling place, as long as you were looking out toward the ocean. Inside, everything was tattered and falling apart, including my marriage.
The Chantilly construction moved forward, though I still don’t know how. Maybe I was just overwhelmed with the lives of two little boys, but I don’t remember seeing any architectural drawings or participating in the hiring of people, and I rarely visited the site. If it hadn’t been for the large round rocks collected from all over and stacked in piles to be taken to the lot, I would have forgotten we were building anything.
As if he were on a treasure hunt, Steve would wander up and down the beach looking for the half-hidden dappled gray boulders, some huge and all of them smooth from sand and water. He would then find a way to drag or roll them back to our place, usually with little Eli tucked in a backpack the whole time. Unlike how he was with his first son—leaving most of the daily care to me—Steve kept Eli by his side as he worked around the rented house. It was as if Eli, who looked so much like his father, belonged to Steve, whereas Peter, who looked so much like his mother, was mine.
As for me, the few jobs I was being offered were either uninteresting or ridiculous, and the need for money, accompanied by the fear of everything being taken away, haunted me like a recurring dream. Steve and I both laughed at the half-hour pilot I was offered called The Galloping Gour-miss—a takeoff on a popular daytime cooking show, The Galloping Gourmet. Then the laughter faded, and he raised his eyebrows with a shrug of maybe it’s not so bad. When I immediately passed on the project, I could feel his impatience, hinting that perhaps I was too picky. But sweet Jesus in heaven, can you imagine going from The Flying Nun to The Galloping Gour-miss? I could feel the nails being hammered into the coffin of my career. It’s one thing to quietly learn your craft, unnoticed until that breakthrough moment, but I’d already used up my “on-the-job training” pass, and my fear of losing the house that didn’t even exist was nothing compared to my fear that acting would be taken away.
I had to reinvent myself, to go away and not be seen until I had the right role and was skilled enough to play it. I accepted whatever jobs I thought wouldn’t attract too much notice, like hosting the ridiculous Miss Teen USA pageant, a few TV guest spots, and even some game shows. But each notch down was physically painful, as if a chunk of my body was being lopped off. Next, I’d be doing a personal appearance at Jocko’s bird sanctuary in Hawaii. How could I listen to the part of me that felt most alive when I was onstage or in front of a camera, take care of it, allow it to grow—and still be the sole financial support for my family? All while fulfilling Steve’s dream of building a house?
Unconsciously, I felt I had to make a choice between these two loves of my life. I began to move away from the comfort of my childhood sweetheart and chose my love of acting. That’s the love affair I focused on.
After I performed a scene from Jean Anouilh’s Antigone at the Actors Studio one night, Lee cautioned me to take care of the emotional part of my brain, to guard that it didn’t close up. He advised that I learn techniques for allowing expression without aiming directly for a specific emotional response, usually leading to a predictable performance. He then suggested I speak with him during the break, which of course made my heart lurch.
From the very beginning, people at the Studio considered me to be a teacher’s pet, and even though that perception continued to grow with good reason, it didn’t keep me from feeling intimidated of Lee. I could see how he treated actors he felt frustrated with, those who perhaps needed a kick in the pants to help them hear what he was saying, or ones who simply rubbed him the wrong way, and I was always relieved to not be one of them. And it was true, Lee did seem to keep his eye on me. Not obviously, but I could feel it. Often, he would say something to the class, then nod at me to make sure I’d understood.
“Get into therapy,” he told everyone one night after commenting on a scene with only a few preoccupied sentences. “If you’re blocked as a person, you’ll be blocked as an actor. You have to know how to use yourself. You are your own instrument of expression and you have to keep it finely tuned.” He used musicians as examples, like Vladimir Horowitz with his piano or Yehudi Menuhin with his violin, how they knew every inch of their equipment, were constantly practicing exercises to keep themselves and their instruments aligned. Actors should connect with themselves in the same way, he said, adding that they needed to know their physicality and habitual behavior, their history and emotional landscape, to own the information that would allow them to interpret a character through their individual uniqueness. “The pianist plays all the same notes,” he’d say, “yet it’s the way he plays… that something only he can add… his particular awareness of what he’s doing.” The great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker once said, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” But you have to know what you have lived.