I had a crush on Lynn. He was good-looking, wore an ascot, and was really dainty, like if you breathed on him he would fall over like a feather in the wind. Lynn used to call me his love apple, and we would make out on the crew’s bus.
If I’d been in high school instead of doing shows with my mother, I’d have had appropriate venues for my adolescent feelings to emerge. I would have lived a life as a teenager, but since I wasn’t living that life, I kept having crushes on gay men.
Besides Lynn, there was also Albert, who was a dancer in the Broadway show Irene with Debbie. He was attractive and gay (although in my uninformed opinion you wouldn’t pick him out as gay), and we used to make out in the dressing rooms. My mom knew about this, so what the fuck was that about? I was only fifteen, and I was jailbait, and my mom said, “If you want to have sex with Albert, I’ll watch if you like so I can give instructions.”
To be fair, my mom was really distracted then—her whole life was falling apart, so she was trying to anchor it by providing some admittedly and/or eccentric motherly love.
There aren’t many perfect moments to air out a story like that, so I’m fairly certain Terry Malick heard about Lynn and Albert and my mom. He seemed the type of person who was interested in hearing just about any weird story you had that left you feeling frightened and alone. He did a lot of improvisation in his films, so these interviews may have been his way of determining if his actors were comfortable in their own skin. (I’m someone who’s very comfortable in my own skin. I just wish there wasn’t so much room at times for that comfort.)
We had several such meetings together before Malick had me read with John Travolta. John was famous then from his television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. It seemed to be understood that John had the “inside track” for the lead role in Days of Heaven, and, in the few times we read together, John and I had great chemistry. Like two beakers containing flammable liquid, we bubbled along together comfortably. If John starred in Days of Heaven, would I star alongside him? Things were looking good for me.
And then, for some reason, John couldn’t do the film. So John was out and Richard Gere was in. I read with Richard Gere. Let’s just say our beakers didn’t bubble with compatibility. So now I was out and Brooke Adams was in. My potential career as a serious-ish actress was—for now anyway—at an end. It would take more than a cameo in The Blues Brothers to get people to stop thinking of me as Princess Leia.
Days of Heaven was a wonderful film and perhaps would’ve de-Leia’d me a little, but my very, very light cross to bear would always be that I would be known as Princess Leia and not as That Girl Who Was So Good in One of Terry Malick’s Early Masterpieces.
I auditioned for other films (Grease and The Fortune) and then I applied to two drama schools in England. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art would have none of me, but the Central School of Speech and Drama—whose notable alumni included Laurence Olivier, Harold Pinter, and the Redgrave sisters—said yes.
This was what I’d been selfishly waiting for: the chance to stop living at home with—or even in the same country with—my newly divorced and newly broke-ish mother. As a bonus, I got real acting experience, which I’d never had, partly because I still wasn’t so sure that I wanted to be an actress. But maybe it was something I could do without a high school diploma or accredited skills of any kind whatsoever—a job that would pay me enough of a wage to let me go out into the world and start what I would laughingly come to call my own actual life.
When I began attending Central I was seventeen, and the youngest student there. It was the first time I actually lived on my own. I was finally away from my mother (whom I’d happily live off of but not with), in an apartment I was subletting from a friend, where no one could be disappointed in me—and if someone oddly should be, I didn’t care, because they weren’t related to me.
upside down and unconscious with yellow eyes
George Lucas held his auditions for Star Wars in an office on a lot in Hollywood. It was in one of those faux-Spanish cream-colored buildings from the thirties with dark orange-tiled roofs and black-iron-grated windows, lined with sidewalks in turn lined with trees—pine trees, I think they were, the sort that shed their needles generously onto the street below—and interrupted by parched patches of once-green lawns.
Everything was a little worse for the wear, but good things would happen in these buildings. Lives would be led, businesses would prosper, and men would attend meetings—hopeful meetings, meetings where big plans were made and ideas were proposed. But of all the meetings that had ever been held in that particular office, none of them could compare in world impact with the casting calls for the Star Wars movie.
A plaque could be placed on the outside of this building that states, “On this spot the Star Wars films conducted their casting sessions. In this building the actors and actresses entered and exited until only three remained. These three were the actors who ultimately played the lead parts of Han, Luke, and Leia.”
I’ve told the story of getting cast as Princess Leia many times before—in interviews, on horseback, and in cardiac units—so if you’ve previously heard this story before, I apologize for requiring some of your coveted store of patience. I know how closely most of us tend to hold on to whatever cache of patience we’ve managed to amass over a lifetime and I appreciate your squandering some of your cherished stash here.
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george gave me the impression of being smaller than he was because he spoke so infrequently. I first encountered his all-but-silent presence at these auditions—the first of which he held with the director Brian De Palma. Brian was casting his horror film Carrie, and they both required an actress between the age of eighteen and twenty-two. I was the right age at the right time, so I read for both George and Brian.
George had directed two other feature films up till then, THX 1138, starring Robert Duvall, and American Graffiti, starring Ron Howard and Cindy Williams. The roles I met with the two directors for that first day were Princess Leia in Star Wars and Carrie in Carrie. I thought that last role would be a funny casting coup if I got it: Carrie as Carrie in Carrie. I doubt that that was why I never made it to the next level with Carrie—but it didn’t help as far as I was concerned that there would have to be a goofy film poster advertising a serious horror film.
I sat down before the two directors behind their respective desks. Mr. Lucas was all but mute. He nodded when I entered the room, and Mr. De Palma took over from there. He was a big man, and not merely because he spoke more—or spoke, period. Brian sat on the left and George on the right, both bearded. As if you had two choices in director sizes. Only I didn’t have the choice—they did.
Brian cleared his bigger throat of bigger things and said, “So I see here you’ve been in the film Shampoo?”
I knew this, so I simply nodded, my face in a tight white-toothed smile. Maybe they would ask me something requiring more than a nod.
“Did you enjoy working with Warren?”
“Yes, I did!” That was easy! I had enjoyed working with him, but Brian’s look told me that wasn’t enough of an answer. “He was . . .”
What was he? They needed to know! “He helped me work . . . a lot. I mean, he and the other screenwriter . . . they worked with me.” Oh my God, this wasn’t going well.
Mr. De Palma waited for more, and when more wasn’t forthcoming, he attempted to help me. “How did they work with you?”
Oh, that’s what they wanted to know! “They had me do the scene over and over, and with food. There was eating in the scene. I had to offer Warren a baked apple and then I ask him if he’s making it with my mother—sleeping with her—you know.”
George almost smiled; Brian actually did. “Yes, I know what ‘making it’ means.”