Nothing but crickets on his end, which didn’t matter because I couldn’t hear anyway, my hand was shaking so badly the phone was never fully on my ear, always beside it or under it, pressed too hard, too soft. I tried to keep it still by holding my elbow with the other hand. Maybe his hand was shaking too. I doubt it.
‘My bodyguard will come get you.’
A bodyguard? Ugg, he just called again. He’s going to be late. Swell.
‘I’m a gentleman, thought I’d call my date.’
‘Is this an actual date?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are you gonna bring me a corsage the color of my dress?’ And there was nothing.
Now I wait… tick-tock, tick-tock. I wonder how many actual dates I have been on in my life? Not many.
August 28
Then the curtain went up. I walked through the dreaded lobby with the bodyguard, Pete… something or other, out the hotel entrance into the parking lot. I was standing on the top step. Where was he? There, leaning in a car window talking to the people inside, part of our group. I had imagined we would be alone. He seemed much smaller than I had thought, maybe ’cause I was standing on three stairs. He’s handsome but different. Wearing my black velvet pants and orange—slightly see-through—blouse I stamped my feet in a wide “come and get me” stance. He sauntered over, grabbed me. He must have felt my heart. I could no longer be responsible for it.
He was incredibly charming, adored at the time for being who he was: a funny, self-deprecating good ol’ boy. A normal guy on a big ride and getting one hell of a kick out of it. But he was also a man engulfed by a massive wave of seemingly instant notoriety, a sex symbol, and when this tsunami of the collective unconscious slammed into him, he couldn’t breathe. He also couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t articulate how it made him feel both empowered and terrified. He had been brought up by his very southern, well-meaning parents to act like a man, and he spent his life trying to prove to his father that he was a man worth loving. He once told me that when he was a senior in high school, the varsity football team—of which he was a proud member—won the state championship. It was a hard-fought, emotional win, and when Burt—or Buddy, as he was called—stood on the field with his victorious team, he started to cry. That inflamed Big Burt, his father, who thundered onto the field to slap his son upside the head. Buddy needed to act like a man, a real man.
And now that man had become the heart’s desire of all the people who wanted a dream figure, the quintessential definition of masculine pulchritude to emulate or fantasize about. But the human inside that dream figure was just a good-looking, ordinary person, frantically trying to fulfill everyone’s expectations and always waiting for the Big Burts of the world to smack the daylights out of him if he failed. He tried to hide everything about himself that he saw as being imperfect, to camouflage himself, which meant that he got locked into the stressful trap of faking it. In my own way, I knew what that kind of public pressure felt like, but my solution had always been to isolate myself, or to hide behind my children or in the Actors Studio, or just to put my head in the sand. But Burt seemed to wallow in it, both loving the focus and spinning from its assault. By the time we met, the weight of his stardom had become a way for Burt to control everyone around him, and from the moment I walked through the door, it was a way to control me. We were a perfect match of flaws.
It was instantaneous and intense. Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a preprogrammed behavior as if in some past life I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man. On our second date we were no longer with a group of his friends but had dinner in his suite—at a more expensive hotel than mine—and except for Norman, his wardrobe man, who constantly walked in and out of the connecting rooms, we were alone. Burt started to fill me in about his life, the kind of thing you do when you want someone to know who you are. And as I started to tell my side, little bits of me, I began to get subtle—or not-so-subtle—hints that he didn’t want to know. That he wanted me to be who he thought I was, and not who I truly was. Immediately, I started clamping down on myself, stuttering when I admitted I’d been living with someone, as if confessing a transgression. Seeming caught off guard, he paused, then said that he was unaware, not discouraged but disappointed. And whether he meant it that way or not, I interpreted his disappointment as disapproval, and felt embarrassed. Without hesitation, I threw sweet Coulter under the bus, telling Burt that I hadn’t been happy with my live-in entanglement for some time, as if the situation had been thrust upon me against my will.
On the set with Burt.
Gently, Burt began to housebreak me, teaching me what was allowed and what was not. If I wanted to tell him what I’d accomplished or talk about my children, or Lord knows, disagree with him about anything, he’d listen glassy-eyed for a moment, maybe offer a distracted comment or two before turning away. Then with a grimace of pain, he’d bend from the waist as he pushed his fingers into his rib cage, quietly belching over and over while gasping for air. Whatever I had wanted to say would be halted by the urgency of his odd attack and the wordless accusation that I was somehow the cause of it. I felt as though I’d been smacked with an invisible newspaper. Automatically, I began to sift my thoughts through a mental sieve, checking for hunks of information or feelings, even words that might trigger another bout, and then preemptively, I’d discard them. I eliminated talking about my struggle with work and money, about Lee and the Studio, about my children and how I ached for them. He disapproved of my prolific use of swear words—something I dearly loved (and still do)—so I eliminated them too. I knew early on never to mention the men who had been in my life, and later became terrified of running into somebody I might have known, whether sexually or not. Burt would pinch my face in his hand, demanding I tell him who the guy was and what kind of relationship I’d had with him. No matter who it was, if I knew him well or only barely, I’d lie with my heart racing as though I’d been caught at the dinner table with pink lips. Feeling that I should, I shared with him only the sunny parts of my childhood and eliminated the darker ones. I eliminated most of me, becoming a familiar, shadowy version of myself, locked behind my eyes, unable to speak.