5.
THE LIST.
Jane Fonda. Ally Sheedy. Joan Rivers. Paula Abdul. Lindsay Lohan. Sally Field. Princess Diana. Anne s.e.xton. Karen Carpenter. Anna Freud. Mariel Hemingway. Audrey Hepburn. Portia de Rossi. Meredith Vieira. Victoria Beckham. Kelly Clarkson. Felicity Huffman. Mary Kate Olsen. Catherine Oxenberg. Sharon Osbourne.
Sally Field and I are the same age. We"re both actresses. We live and work in Los Angeles. That"s where the similarities end, or so I thought. I"ve met Joan Rivers, Lindsay Lohan, Felicity Huffman, and even Audrey Hepburn. It didn"t seem like we had much in common. I remember when Meredith Vieira interviewed me for The View. She was the kind of a.s.sured professional I admired. It"s hard to believe we suffered from a mutual obsession. How is it possible I share a mutual past with Mary Kate Olsen, a person forty years younger and $100 million richer? Jane Fonda? The Jane Fonda? Come on. When I was introduced to Victoria Beckham at a party Katie Holmes gave in her honor, I couldn"t begin to imagine who she was or the world she moved in. And yet each and every woman whose name is listed above shared the same secret. The difference? I chose to keep it to myself until now.
More Looking inside the brown paper bag only to find a green apple, six pennies, four cherry suckers, and one Tootsie Roll Pop was way too disappointing. Why no Snickers or 3 Musketeers? With next to nothing to show for ringing neighborhood doorbells, shouting "Trick or treat!" in a gypsy costume, I worked the Randy front and conned him out of his candy by promising he could sleep in the top bunk for a week.
The next night I snuck into the kitchen while Mom and Dad were watching Milton Berle on TV. Just as I was about to s.n.a.t.c.h a handful of Hydrox cookies, I heard Dad"s voice. "Diane?" Many tears later, I tiptoed to the hideout where I"d stuffed Randy"s Halloween candy and ate the remains. No one found out.
You have to understand, Mom rarely bought brand names like Hydrox. Her budget did not include Hostess Twinkies, 7Up, Frosted Flakes, or, my favorite, Challenge b.u.t.ter. Dinner, for example, was a generic affair. We ate a lot of meat loaf, spaghetti, hamburger patties with catsup, and ca.s.seroles-way too many ca.s.seroles. For dessert it was usually three oatmeal cookies apiece. Dad helped himself to as many as he wanted. Night after night I watched with envy as he ate his fill. Extra treats came at the beginning of the week. For instance, on Monday Mom gave me a whole piece of Wrigley"s Doublemint gum. On Wednesday the tight allocation of resources forced her to hand out half a piece. By Sat.u.r.day it was a measly quarter. I continued to twist Randy"s arm, but the rewards were hardly worth it. My first real success came at Willard Junior High School, where I used my personality to convince several friends in dumbbell English to fund my need for Refresho ice cream bars and Fifty 50s.
Magazines, one of my ancillary fixations, fit neatly into the mix, starting with McCall"s, a fifties version of Martha Stewart Living. I had no interest in the fun activities on the back page for little girls. No, what I liked were the color pictures of smiling women selling Campbell"s soup and Pond"s face cream. They were pretty, and best of all they never changed. That was neat. Life magazine was neat too, because it told stories with photographs, but what really knocked my socks off was the first time I saw Miss Audrey Hepburn on the cover. She wasn"t pretty. She was beautiful. In fact, she was perfect. I began to notice disturbing things about my eleven-year-old body. It was too big in the bathtub. I didn"t like that. And people in real life weren"t always attractive, even Mom. That was concerning. But, worst of all, I began to understand the troubling concept of comparison. When I compared myself to Audrey Hepburn, something was off. My features were not symmetrical. I wasn"t pretty. At best, I was an affable-looking thing. Yuck. As I got older, it became painfully clear my appearance would always be a work in progress. I began to ponder solutions in the rearview mirror of our station wagon. The right side of my face was better than the left. Okay, not bad. If I kept my mouth slightly parted, I looked vulnerable. Vulnerable was good. By applying these new methods I was beautiful-well, not beautiful, pretty. Not really pretty, but attractive, definitely attractive. Along the way, I discovered fashion magazines like Mademoiselle and Vogue. They taught me to focus on my body as well as my face. I began to dress in a sixties version of hip. I wore miniskirts with white boots, and glittery box-shaped dresses, and even swinging ready-steady-go pantsuits. I painted my eyes with black liquid eyeliner, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. I glued on false eyelashes and kept ratting my hair as if it would compensate for my failing face. I don"t know why I thought I could pull off perfection-obviously it was absurd-but I kept trying.
All my half-baked forays into the world of beauty never held a candle to the lure of food. I was a closet glutton, waiting for a future where I would get what I wanted and MORE. That future became the present when I was cast in Hair just after I"d graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse. You can imagine how wildly out of the ordinary it was to find myself gossiping with Melba Moore about whether it was true that Janice gave birth to her baby on LSD in Gerry Ragni and Jim Rado"s dressing room after the show one night. Hair offered too many options. The entire cast was given a free trip to Fire Island, with lots of peyote. If you took your clothes off during a performance, you received a fifty-dollar nightly bonus. When Hair tribe member Lamont Washington died in a fire after he fell asleep with a lit cigarette while smoking in bed, the message of peace and love seemed beside the point. There was too much infighting and confusion thrust upon wildly talented yet inexperienced young people who didn"t have the advantage of counseling, me included.
Instead of making friends, I retreated to Tad"s Steakhouse and indulged in the $1.29 steak dinner. The thing about Tad"s was, I could eat all I wanted. While my cast mates were smoking gra.s.s, I was eating Carvel soft vanilla cones in between matinees and the evening show. My big break came when Lynn Kellogg, the lead, left to do an episode of Mission: Impossible. I filled in. After the first week, Michael Butler, the producer, called to tell me I could have the part if I lost weight. At five feet seven and weighing in at 140 pounds and gaining, I hightailed it to Dr. Paul, who, for fifty dollars a shot, would inject me with vitamins-speedy vitamins. I stuck with it long enough to lose ten pounds and land the starring role of Sheila, of "Good Morning Starshine" fame. With such good news, I rented a studio walk-up on West 82nd Street and got my first phone.
The Toilet Down the Hall Diane"s room is hard to describe. It"s long and narrow. The tiny kitchen is curtained off with burlap. Inside is a blue chipped bathtub and washbasin, a stove to cook on, and a closet for clothes. The walls are collaged. A very small refrigerator stands alone in the corner, working very hard because it needs defrosting so badly. Worst of all, she shares a toilet down the hall with three other tenants. Oh, dear. This is worrisome; so much for abandonment and discomfort.
When Mom and the kids" visit was over, it was goodbye, Dr. Paul; I saved an extra 150 dollars a week and said h.e.l.lo to ten pounds. What if Michael Butler came to the show? What if he saw I"d gained the weight back? What if I got fired? One night after several charbroiled steaks at Tad"s, I overheard tribe member Sh.e.l.ley Plimpton talking about someone she knew who deliberately regurgitated in order to stay thin. How disgusting. How awful. How interesting. I have no memory of the first time I tried to throw up. I do remember taking a day here, a day there, to explore the effects. In no time at all I was committed to three unordinary meals a day. Breakfast took an hour; lunch two; dinner three, which added up to a time-consuming six hours a day spent processing food.
It was Sunday brunch at Grossingers seven days a week. It was breakfast with a dozen b.u.t.tered corn m.u.f.fins dipped in Chock Full o"Nuts coffee, plus three orders of fried eggs over hard with bacon, and a side of pancakes topped off with four gla.s.ses of chocolate milk. It was lunch to go, including three b.u.t.tered steaks with salty charbroiled fat on the side, two and a half baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, a black-and-white malted with hot apple pie plus two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts from Schrafft"s. Dinner began with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of french fries with blue cheese and catsup, and a couple of TV dinners. For dessert it was chocolate-covered almonds with a quart-size bottle of 7Up, a pound of See"s Candies peanut brittle sent from home, M&Ms washed down with mango juice on ice, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three Marie Callender"s frozen banana-cream pies. I learned to throw up so fast it had no effect. At first there was no problem with vomiting or its aftermath. I didn"t need help stimulating the gag reflex. I had it under control. No fuss, no muss.
It was always the same: After the first too-good-to-be-true bites turned into the third and fourth, adjustments had to be made to re-create the original taste. When that didn"t work, the menu reverted to reliable standbys like toasted white bread with b.u.t.ter and strawberry jam. When that took a dive, there was another switch, and another and another. The more I ate, the more disenchanted I was with the results. It didn"t matter, because the impact of the first few bites triumphed over all setbacks.
My new life was labor intensive. Think of hauling all that food in all those brown paper bags up a flight of stairs and into the darkness of my room on West 82nd Street. Think of the tiny un-defrosted freezer/refrigerator and the yellowing cabinets slid open to an ever-changing array of canned goods and baked items. Think of me throwing my body into convulsions three times a day with a box of baking soda standing on the floor next to the toilet. It was as numbing as it was compulsive.
After six months of knocking off twenty thousand calories a day, I became hypoglycemic. I had heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, and low blood pressure. I was dogged by sore throats. All of which created unwanted activity-namely, calls to doctors and trips to the pharmacy for over-the-counter Ex-Lax. Dr. Stanley Darrow, my dentist, found twenty-six cavities in one visit. Soon my front teeth had to be capped. More work. More pain. But worse were the psychological effects. I became increasingly isolated. I didn"t think about friendships. I didn"t acknowledge the shame. I was busy ignoring reality. I had work to do.
Woody Allen and I met in the fall of 1968 at the Broadhurst Theatre while I was auditioning for Play It Again, Sam. We read together. He was funny but not intimidating. I got the part, or, as Woody teased me and I used to say, "I created the role of Linda Christie." Play It Again, Sam was a showcase for Woody"s talents. My husband, d.i.c.k Christie, played by Tony Roberts, and I took Allan Felix, played by Woody, under our wing. After he was dumped by his wife, we encouraged him to date. Unbeknownst to us, he was also getting help from Humphrey Bogart, who appeared to him during failed dating attempts with gorgeous women. Allan and Linda, both insecure, fell for each other.
During rehearsal, I fell for Allan as scripted but for Woody as well. How could I not? I was in love with him before I knew him. He was Woody Allen. Our entire family used to gather around the TV set and watch him on Johnny Carson. He was so hip, with his thick gla.s.ses and cool suits. But it was his manner that got me, his way of gesturing, his hands, his coughing and looking down in a self-deprecating way while he told jokes like "I couldn"t get a date for New Year"s Eve so I went home and I jumped naked into a vat of Roosevelt dimes." Or "I"d rather be with a beautiful woman than anything else except my stamp collection." Things like that. He was even better-looking in real life. He had a great body, and he was physically very graceful.
As in the play, we became friends. I was a good audience. I laughed in between the jokes. I think he liked that, even though he would always remind me I wouldn"t know a joke if it hit me in the face. But I knew behavior, and his behavior was way more interesting to me than jokes could ever be. Woody got used to me. He couldn"t help himself; he loved neurotic girls.
While I continued to try to convince him that I was more than a goofy sidekick, many of our conversations-even those centered on my favorite subject, me-were distracting. I was all too often pulled away by a commitment that overshadowed my crush on Woody Allen. For instance, let"s say he wanted to see a three o"clock screening of The Sorrow and the Pity at 59th and Third. How could it work? There was no time to cash my paycheck and get to Woolworth"s on 86th before it closed at seven P.M. I was running out of Kraft caramels, Boston baked beans, and bubble-gum cigars in a.s.sorted flavors. Besides, the 59th Street theater was too far away for us to have a chance to stop at Gristedes. It"s pathetic that the demands of bulimia outshone the power of my desire for Woody, but they did.
On the surface, all was going well. Woody slowly began to see me as something more than a gal pal. Our relationship wasn"t off and on, but it wasn"t exactly committed either. Even then Woody was the most disciplined, hardworking, dedicated, organized, and-ironically-resilient person I"d ever met. On a daily basis, he practiced his clarinet, appeared in the play, read all the works of Tolstoy, and wrote new jokes for appearances in Vegas at Caesars or in Reno, where Frank Sinatra Jr. opened for Sir Woody of Allen at the medieval-themed Cal Neva Hotel. He was always busy, so nothing much was required of me. I moved a few things into his new penthouse apartment, but I kept my studio on 82nd. When it got broken into, the police advised me to put bars on the windows. I didn"t listen. What did I care? The apartment was there for one thing only, to implement my routine.
Experts A century ago, women struggled with mental problems like hysteria and anxiety, not bingeing. Today, mental-health experts believe bulimia is related to social cla.s.s, income, education, the occupation of parents, and an introverted personality, which causes high rates of phobias, alcoholism, anxiety disorders, and panic attacks. Bulimic women differ from depressed women because they"re more likely to be overweight and to have overweight parents. Apparently, parents with high expectations create an atmosphere that fosters eating disorders. Lack of parental affection is one of the main reasons bulimics soothe themselves with food.
Spare me. I can"t stand the ease with which experts blame parents, especially mothers, for their teenage daughters", slash soon to be young adults", slash middle-aged women"s, slash angry old ladies" food addictions. Come on. I"m sorry, but my mother was nothing if not affectionate. And, by the way, dazed is the word I would use to describe the effects of indulging in an eating disorder. The facts are the facts, but the reason one becomes bulimic is more complex than overweight mothers, which Dorothy was not.
Mom made every effort, particularly in the early days, to present a cheery worldview. She gave me everything I wanted-at least, as much as she could-but years of keeping things bottled up had their effect. Before I left home, the undertones in her silence were obvious. I must have been fourteen the first time I heard Mom and Dad fighting behind the closed door to their bedroom. I remember rushing to Randy"s room, where I caught him stuffing Playboy pictures of bare-breasted women under his bed. Panicked, I asked him if he heard Mom and Dad yelling about getting a divorce. Did he? Did he? His response was to run away, leaving me with their not-so-m.u.f.fled screams. Did this incident make me more susceptible to fulfilling a future of MORE, so much MORE? I don"t know. Even if, early on, Mother had had the privilege of partic.i.p.ating in the revelations of the a.n.a.lyst"s couch, would my insatiable hunger have taken a backseat to a less pathological method of satisfying my needs? It"s hard to say.
October 31, 2009, would have been her eighty-eighth birthday. Last Halloween she"d been dead for six weeks. This year it"s been four hundred and nine days and nights without my mother. I thought time was supposed to heal all wounds. As I wait for Dexter to come out of swim practice, in my Tahoe Hybrid parked at the top of Santa Monica City College, overlooking the local graveyard, I can still see Daphne Merkin"s plaintive face in the Polo Lounge this morning, whispering, "Diane, don"t you think they"ll come back to us? Don"t you think they"re coming back, our mothers?" Daphne ... I wish. I wish they would. All of them. All the mothers.
Packing It In Woody didn"t have a clue what I was up to in the privacy of his bathrooms. He did marvel at my remarkable appet.i.te, saying I could really "pack it in." Ever vigilant and always on the lookout, I made sure he never caught me. This is not to say that Woody was oblivious to my problems. He knew how insecure I was. It must have been annoying as h.e.l.l to be the brunt of my constant need for support and encouragement. After Play it Again, Sam closed, I couldn"t get a job. It seemed like every audition was lost to either Blythe Danner or Jill Clayburgh, who weren"t "too nutty." A year came and went without work. When I landed a commercial for Hour After Hour deodorant, where I wore a tracksuit and bit my husband"s ear, saying, "Hour After Hour ... it won"t wear out before the day is over," I hit bottom. The bingeing was off the charts. What would Woody think if he knew my secret? Why couldn"t I get a job? I kept fixating over something Lee Ann Fahey, another aspiring actress, said about "making it" before you"re twenty-five. I was twenty-five. What was I going to do? It wasn"t enough to be Woody"s washed-out Ali MacGraw girlfriend. What was going to happen? Should I quit? Woody suggested I see an a.n.a.lyst named Felicia Lydia Landau.
Monday through Friday I walked up Fifth Avenue to 94th and Madison; got on the elevator of the nondescript red brick building; pressed the b.u.t.ton to the sixth floor; made my exit, walked down the narrow hallway, and pushed the buzzer outside Dr. Landau"s office. When she opened the door, I would say h.e.l.lo and hit the couch. Once on my back, with the ceiling as my horizon, I was ready to map out the history of my neurosis. We couldn"t have been a more unlikely pair-me, the firstborn daughter of a sunny-looking family from Southern California; she, a Jew from Poland who escaped on the eve of Hitler"s invasion.
After another year of throwing up, intermittent joblessness, and learning how to talk to the ceiling with my back on a couch, I finally blurted out, "I stick my finger down my throat three times a day and throw up. I"ve been throwing up for years. I"m bulimic. Okay? I have no intention of stopping. Ever. Why would I? I don"t want to. Get it? I"m not stopping. That"s it. End of discussion. And nothing you say will ever convince me to change. I hope we"re clear on this. We"re clear, Dr. Landau, right? Right! Okay!!"
Six months later I stopped. One morning I went to the freezer and didn"t open a half gallon of rocky road ice cream. I don"t know why. I know one thing though: All those disjointed words and half sentences, all those complaining, awkward phrases shaping incomplete monologues blurted out to a sixty-five-year-old woman smoking a cigarette for fifty minutes five times a week, made the difference. It was the talking cure; the talking cure that gave me a way out of addiction; the d.a.m.n talking cure.
Secrets I used to think of myself as an attractive victim, a sort of sweet, misunderstood casualty. No one mistook me for the fat woman in the freak show. But I was. And I got away with it. I became a master, as well as a fraud. My secret, with all the little secrets it sp.a.w.ned, encouraged a broad spectrum of subterfuge. I lied to myself, and I kept lying. I never owned up to the truth of bulimia"s predatory nature. Yet I gave five years of my life to a ravenous hunger that had to be filled at any expense. I lived under the shadow of isolation in a self-made prison of secrets and lies.
In a culture where confession is a means to broader economic horizons, coming clean at such a late date is not only suspect but anticlimactic. I wish I"d been brave enough to tell Mom before she became entrenched in the uncertainty of Alzheimer"s. I told my sisters recently. Dorrie was sympathetic, and Robin remembered I ate a lot of hamburgers back in the day, but neither had much curiosity. Who cares thirty years after the fact? n.o.body, really. The thought of becoming number-what?-seventy-five on a "Famous Bulimics" list is like aspiring to footnote status in a file labeled "Eating Disorders." Why bother? I guess partly because confession is at the very least an admission of guilt and partly because there"s a humbling aspect to recognizing footnote status. I know "coming clean" is not going to deliver the flattering picture I prefer to roll out with great effort year after year. I don"t expect sympathy. I don"t expect commiseration. I don"t expect to be understood. What I expect is to be released from the burden of hiding.
Maybe The miracle of getting over bulimia is almost as strange as being its slave. Nothing remains of my former craving. If anything, I have a borderline mistrust for the whole process of consumption. I haven"t touched meat in twenty-five years. I"m not remotely drawn to the preparation of food. I"m not hungry. I"ve had it all, and I"ve had enough. When I was a bulimic, constantly balancing the extremes of impulsivity and control was sort of like performing. After I stopped throwing up, acting-my lifelong chosen profession-came back into the picture. I started to study with Marilyn Fried, who helped me rediscover the world of expressed feelings. My commitment became more intense than it was when I was too young and too f.u.c.ked up to take advantage of the opportunity I was given at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
Sandy Meisner used to make arcane p.r.o.nouncements about how much better our acting would be when we got older and had more experience. Now that I"m the age he was when he stressed the necessity of being more mature in order to become a fully realized actor, now that life has become so much more engaging, if unfathomable, it"s hard to believe the acc.u.mulated knowledge I"m ready to give isn"t what audiences are always interested in. I guess life is always throwing curveb.a.l.l.s. Like bulimia, acting is a paradox. Unlike bulimia, acting is a wild ride, shared in the company of other actors. Even though "living truthfully in the given imaginary moment" is not always what you had in mind, it"s always a great adventure.
These days I"m trying to learn to listen with the hunger I once reserved for my obsession. The talking cure saved me, it"s true, but listening may help me become part of a community. Maybe becoming one of many by doing something as simple as adding my name to a list of bulimics-famous, not so famous, and not famous at all-will give me the courage to cross a threshold that could transform me into the kind of Atticus Finchtype person I always wished I could be. Maybe. Anything"s better than the self-imposed loneliness I endured in secret.
Here"s to the names, all the names, on that long, long, long, long, long list of ordinary women: names like Carolyn Jennings, Stephanie Armstrong, Allison Kreiger Walsh, Kristen Moeller, Lori Henry, Margie Hodgin, Gail Schoenbach, Sharon Pikus, and now Diane Keaton Hall.
6.
THE UPHILL CLIMB.
VERSUS THE DOWNHILL SLIDE.
Grin and Bare It There was my career. There was Woody. There was Dr. Landau. There was the record of my dreams. There were my obtuse journals with the list of quotations punctuating my concerns. "I used to worry about being like this. Not knowing more. But now, now, I don"t worry anymore." (Sixty-year-old Coney Island resident) "Please stand a little closer apart." (Michael Curtiz) "You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw." (Diane Arbus) "I wanted to be many things and greatness besides. It was a hopeless task. I never managed to learn to really love another person; only to make the sound of it." (A suicide note) "Look, you don"t have that much time." (Walker Evans) In New York I started making collages again. There was the series called "Grin and Bare It," with pictures of rotting teeth overlaid with captions like "I never knew teeth could be so interesting" or "This middle-aged patient was presented at the oral surgery clinic with the most p.r.o.nounced case of black hairy tongue ever examined at our inst.i.tution" or "Hutchinson"s Teeth is thought to be an oral manifestation of congenital syphilis." There was the black sketchbook I called "Death Notices." On each page I cut out a photograph of a person from a magazine, erased their face, stamped "Death Notices" across the surface, and glued a random name underneath. Whew!! Finally there was a spate of little notebooks ill.u.s.trated with sentences from vintage books I bought at the 26th Street flea market. "I am raving." "Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt." "Who am I?" "We all die." "The vicious Cycle of Obesity." " "Don"t," she said, holding her ground. "Don"t do that." " What can I say except it"s all too true.
Most of my creative endeavors were nothing more than glorified basket-weaving, another form of insurance against a relapse with a two-pound box of See"s Candies peanut brittle. I don"t think my artistic solutions to psychological problems were the same as Mom"s collage work, journals, and photography. I was lucky because I was young and had more outlets to help overcome my struggles or, at the very least, live with what Dr. Landau termed "anxiety neurosis." On the West Coast, Mom was sailing into the wind alone.
Every cultural experience came to me by way of Woody Allen, my boyfriend. He took me to the movies, where we saw Ingmar Bergman"s Persona and Luis Bunuel"s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. On Madison Avenue we looked in the windows of Serge Sabarsky"s gallery of German expressionist paintings. We walked to the Museum of Modern Art and saw the Diane Arbus exhibition curated by John Szarkowski. I took a cla.s.s in drawing and silk screening. I learned to print my photographs. With Dr. Landau, I examined Then versus Now and Now because of Then. She introduced Freud"s "p.e.n.i.s envy." Feminists claimed it labeled women as failed men. We took to discussing envy. It turned out I had a fair share of green to examine before I could understand many of my emotional shortcomings.
I still longed for a mother"s guidance and found an ideal subst.i.tute in Landau. She wasn"t the charmed listener Mom was. We didn"t hang out at the kitchen counter and share laughs. But she made all the difference. There was no hand-holding as she tried to hammer in the futility of distorting fantasy into reality by quietly paying attention to my steady stream of talk.
Landau knew the world was populated with OTHERS, not just Diane Hall of Orange County. She was a great rep for all the people in my life. Her goal was to help me come to terms with my grandiose expectations. Landau"s theory that reality was more exciting than fantasies went in one ear and out the other. Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me. As much as she tried, and she tried hard, I never found a home in the arms of a man either.
I finally moved out of the 82nd Street studio with its bathtub in the kitchen and found a new apartment at 73rd and Third. Being three thousand miles away from Mom helped me deny any guilt I had over abandoning her. I was in a new business, the business of battling my self-inflicted wounds with activities that kept me away from the toilet down the hall. But more than anything there was ...
My Career In 1971 I was cast in Efrem Zimbalist Jr."s series The F.B.I. Here"s what I remember. Nothing-except the producers checked my background before I was hired, to make sure I wasn"t a criminal.
I also got a guest-starring role in Mike Connors"s big hit series Mannix. My first shot from the episode named "The Color of Murder" was a two-page monologue. As a gun-toting murderess, I had to scream and yell my way down the middle of a huge warehouse with nothing to hold on to until I broke down and confessed. Terrified, I burst into tears and asked to be let go. "Touch" Connors, as he was affectionately referred to from his old days of playing basketball at UCLA with coach John Wooden, asked everyone to leave the set and walked me through the scene as many times as I needed. I fell in love with him. Not every big star is kind enough to take the time with a frightened young actress. Touch is still hanging in at eighty-six with his bride of more than fifty years, Mary Lou.
In 1972 there was my big break-or so I thought-with the movie of Play It Again, Sam. Susan Ans.p.a.ch, who starred opposite Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, joined the cast. I was fascinated by her mysterious manner, until the day she came up to me and told me to stop smiling so much. It would create more laugh lines.
Here"s what I can"t forget about the first G.o.dfather: d.i.c.k Smith, the Academy Awardwinning makeup artist; and Al Pacino. It was d.i.c.k Smith"s idea to stick a ten-pound blond wig on my head, where it sat throughout the entire movie like a ton of bricks. I hated that wig almost as much as the red lipstick and starched broad-shouldered suits Theadora Van Runkle designed from the period. I didn"t have a clue why I was cast as an elegant WASP. I"m convinced I would have been let go if it weren"t for the fact that Paramount begged Francis Ford Coppola to fire Al, until they were blown away by the rushes of Michael Corleone"s a.s.sa.s.sination of Captain McCluskey. Somehow I managed to slip under the radar. It wouldn"t have made that much difference if I was replaced or not. I was just a blond-wigged WASP in the G.o.dfather"s world.
I met Al Pacino at O"Neals" bar near Lincoln Center. He had been named the Most Promising New Broadway Star in the critically acclaimed Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? We were told to get to know each other before we auditioned for The G.o.dfather. I was nervous. The first thing I noticed about Al was his nose. It was long like a cuc.u.mber. The second thing I noticed was the kinetic way he moved. He seemed nervous too. I don"t remember talking about the script. I remember his killer Roman nose sitting in the middle of what remains a remarkable face. It was too bad he wasn"t available, but neither was I. Even so, for the next twenty years Al Pacino would be my only recurring "unattainable great."
In 1973 Woody Allen directed me for the first time. It was Sleeper, and it was a piece of cake until the day Woody decided he wasn"t happy with a scene we were about to shoot. He went into his trailer and came out a half hour later with a new script. His character had become Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire and mine was Marlon Brando"s Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando? Besides being introduced to Mr. Brando at the reading of The G.o.dfather, the only encounter we shared was when he pa.s.sed me on the set and said, "Nice t.i.ts." That wasn"t going to help. Then I remembered On the Waterfront and the line "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a b.u.m, which is what I am." I repeated it over and over and over before starting to memorize the lines. In the end Woody and I performed our Streetcar parody. But the memory of Terry Malloy"s "I coulda been somebody, instead of a b.u.m, which is what I am" is what remains.
Then There Was The G.o.dfather: Part II I was scared as I waited for Francis and Al to rehea.r.s.e what I now refer to as the "It was an abortion" scene. I told myself I didn"t care about The G.o.dfather or Al Pacino, but I did. Especially about Al Pacino. He was going with Tuesday Weld. Jill Clayburgh was out, or hovering, like so many others. Things had skyrocketed for Al. He had become an iconic, larger-than-life figure on billboards all over town. He was Michael Corleone. He was Serpico. At the time of the rehearsal we weren"t speaking, or, rather, he wasn"t speaking to me. Maybe I said something to hurt his feelings, I don"t remember. In any event, before our supposed altercation, I managed to worm my way into his good graces by teaching him how to drive in the parking lot of the Cal Neva Hotel in Lake Tahoe.
Al was uncomfortable with the location of the brakes, and he couldn"t comprehend the difference between the left- and the right-hand blinking signals. Worse, and far more dangerous, he kept his foot on the gas pedal no matter how many times I told him to press the brake if he wanted to stop. This made for a lot of laughs but a very uncertain ride. In some ways Al reminded me of Randy: He was so sensitive that he was insensitive to his surroundings. I know that sounds like an odd description for the G.o.dfather, but sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by wolves. There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at home eating alone standing up. He did not relate to tables or the conversations people had at them.
We rehea.r.s.ed the scene as if everything was fine. When Francis got around to shooting it, every take felt completely unexpected, especially Michael Corleone"s slap. That was one of the most compelling things about The G.o.dfather: the appearance of formality that masked the raw violence exploding in scene after scene. Recently I went to a screening and fell in love with Al all over again. The whole package. You know what I came away with? It was better he"d been raised by wolves. It was better he couldn"t drive. It was better he didn"t love me and got mad without an explanation. It was worth it, all of it, just to be in that scene with him, just to feel his face against mine. I was Kay, in a role I never related to yet gave me what little I know of Al Pacino. For me the G.o.dfathers, all three of them, were about one thing-Al. It was as simple as that. As for the role of Kay? What epitomized it? The picture of a woman standing in a hallway waiting for permission to be seen by her husband.
Journal Entry-d.i.c.k Smith, 1974 It"s early. They put me in room 404 at the Sheraton in downtown Los Angeles across the street from MacArthur Park. I have a view. I like the room. It has bay windows. Below I can see people come and go; Francis in his limo, Dean Tavoularis in his Mercedes. Only blocks away twenty-four people were killed in a fire last Friday.
I"m sick about the scene. Francis will be up soon. I"m scared. d.i.c.k Smith has his makeup brush close to my face. I know I have to stop writing. He insists the actors sit still in the makeup chair. I wonder if he was like this with Marlon Brando. I can smell an orange being eaten by his a.s.sistant. I see steam from the water boiling in a pot.
d.i.c.k Smith, 2011 Belmont Village, a retirement residence in Burbank, is home to ladies who dine at five-thirty, at least a dozen heroes from World War II, a few youngsters in their sixties, a host of elderly men and women struggling in their late eighties, and now the artist and poet, my brother, John Randolph Hall. On the door to Randy"s one-bedroom apartment is a sign: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. I"M LEARNING HOW TO THINK. And he is.
Every Sat.u.r.day Randy and I walk to Foster"s Freeze for a soft vanilla cone. And every Sat.u.r.day we see d.i.c.k Smith sitting in one of the chairs that line the back of the lobby. d.i.c.k Smith, the Academy Awardwinning makeup artist, lives at Belmont Village too. Last week Randy"s knit cap was pulled low. Mine, a bowler, hit the rim of my gla.s.ses. As we got on the elevator, so did d.i.c.k Smith. I knew he didn"t like hats, but when he said, "Take that hat off," I said, "Thank you, d.i.c.k, but I"m keeping it on." That was when he reached over and grabbed Randy"s hat off his head.
d.i.c.k never liked hats. It"s hard to understand. But then, it"s hard to understand why Gordon Willis, the cinematographer of all three G.o.dfathers, hated makeup artists like d.i.c.k Smith. Make no mistake about it-d.i.c.k Smith hated Gordon Willis too. It could be that Randy and I, hidden underneath the security of our hats, brought back his resentment of Gordon Willis, or even of Marlon Brando, the jokester. Maybe d.i.c.k Smith"s award-winning prosthetic makeup had been ruined one too many times by Mr. Brando"s notorious antics or the gray fedora he wore when Don Vito Corleone died in his tomato garden.
All I know is, d.i.c.k Smith is back and he still hates hats. Marlon Brando came back too. Nine years ago I was walking down a hall at the UCLA Medical Center when I saw him shuffle toward me as he held on to a companion. There was no "Nice t.i.ts" this time. He looked at me blank-faced. d.i.c.k Smith, in the early stages of Alzheimer"s disease, looks at me every Sat.u.r.day. What does he see? An inappropriate woman with an equally inappropriate man walking through the lobby of his home, wearing hats? I know what I see-a home inhabited by a host of unique individuals who will in all likelihood soon enough become part of what Duke refers to as the Sea of White Crosses.
Love and Death Throughout the filming of Love and Death, Woody wrote to me. I was his endearing oaf. He was my "White Thing." Although his body was fit and well proportioned, he treated it like it was a strange a.s.sortment of disembodied appendages. His feet never touched the ground. He was constantly in the care of one doctor or another. We were quite a couple, one more hidden than the other. We both wore hats in public, and he always held my hand or, rather, gripped it without letting go. People were to be avoided. I had him pegged as a cross between a "White Thing" and the c.o.c.kroach you couldn"t kill. We shared a love of torturing each other with our failures. He could sling out the insults, but so could I. We thrived on demeaning each other. His insights into my character were dead on and-duh!-hilarious. This bond remains the core of our friendship and, for me, love.
Greetings Worm, We have enough rehearsal time, but not as much as in L.A. Still, I think Love and Death will be easier than Sleeper as there is not a lot of ... falls and spills and water stunts ... Our dialogue exchanges should be brisk and lively ... but we"ll get into that ... so snook.u.ms ... speak with you soon.
Also finished 1st draft of 2 New Yorker pieces. Hey! My book-Getting Even-is a hit in France. Go figure. You remain a flower-too, too delicate for this harsh world & Dorrie is a flower & your mother is a flower & your father a vegetable & Randy is a flower in his way & Robin is a cat. And I remain a weed.-Will call.
Woody Greetings Worm, I am jettisoning some old socks in my travel bag to make room for some idiot"s sunflower seeds. Guess who? You, my pal, are my cross to bear.
So they"re all saying I"m a genius-but you know better, you little h.e.l.lgrammite. Are you sure they"re not calling me the "White Thing?" "And he changes his underwear to sleep in." And all the things you call me rather than genius? I am tortured with the most incredible dreams of s.e.xuality that revolve around you and a large 2E BRA that speaks Russian.
That genial wit and good egg, Woody Lamp-head,-simpleton-oaf- I have decided to let your family make me rich! It turns out they are wonderful material for a film. A quite serious one, although one of the three sisters is a fool and a clown. (I think you can guess which, ducky!) I didn"t send you a big letter because you"re coming to Paris soon. I wonder if your observations about my family clock them as weirdly as I see yours? Do you have insights into my father & mother? I can imagine. The blind perceiving the blind. Last nite I had a tender dream about me & my mother. First dream of her in years. Wonder why? I wept in the dream & ate my laundry. Just kidding-I ate her boiled chicken which tastes worse.
Love from the fabulous Mister A, a man with healing humour.
Mom and the Downhill Slide, 1975 I"m sitting in the TV room in my blue, white-trimmed robe with my hair in hot rollers so I can go to my one day a week afternoon job looking acceptable. Why am I a compulsive conformist? Why do I always wear a scarf at my neck? Why am I always sprayed down with a controlled hairstyle? Why do my shoes always match my pants? Why do I always flash the stiff, put-on smile for pa.s.sersby? Why do I do this? I don"t know. I feel like I"m under a foot of oppression as I take my last sip of coffee and my last drag off the Parliament cigarette. I don"t smoke. Why am I doing this?
Last night was the start of a continuing awkward and permanent silence. d.a.m.n it, I have such waves of insecurity. I"m no one to anyone. People look at me and see a midlife woman on the downhill slide. 55 is approaching. My brain is getting thinner. If there"s one thing I don"t want to lose, it"s my ability to think. I feel old and intolerant. It"s like I"m shutting the world out. I don"t like it. I really must not drink so much alcohol.
It all started Easter Sunday. Jack and I went to Mary"s to help her tackle the ordeal of tax returns, which she had refused to pay. As expected, she opened the door and started in on the d.a.m.n Government. It took Jack hours of pain & anguish while Mary stood over him justifying her refusal to file a California tax return, even though she"d received several notices about past discrepancies. Jack warned her repeatedly that she"d been playing with fire. Mary wouldn"t listen. "Let them come to the door. I don"t care. I"ll just play dumb. That"s what I"ll do. I"m not afraid." Jack almost lost it. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Mother, just let me get on with this. I"m tired & I don"t want any more c.r.a.p."
I brought a pot roast, but all she did was complain about that too. Iowa is the only place with tender beef. And as for food in Los Angeles. Forget it. Only cafeteria style tastes any good at all. Then she started in on Randy and his poems. "What do his poems mean anyway; who ever heard of writing about celery? It ain"t a poem you can understand, like Roses are Red. I don"t know what he"s talking about. I don"t get it." And then as if to torture me she kept going on, "What exactly does Robin do besides take care of people who are dying?" And, "Does Dorrie like that Peter guy? What nationality is he anyway?" And, "What about that Diane, flying all the way back to N.Y. before Easter? Doesn"t she want to be at home? I guess she hates flying, huh? Touch of Jack showing there. Oh well, it"s a weird old world." And ... And ... And. All I thought was, What happened? We used to do family things on Easter. I"d make brand-new outfits for all the kids. We"d go to church. I"d cook. We"d all be together, Dorrie, Randy, Robin, and Diane ... all of us together. So many things have changed. When I think back on my four children, I remember each little warm body meant something to me I could never put into words; never.
When we got home Dorrie called to say she wasn"t coming down. I tried to read, but couldn"t get Dorrie out of my thoughts. Why doesn"t she come see ME? I tried to rub the thoughts out. I started to think of actions I wanted to take, but rationalized I shouldn"t. I kept thinking if I"m so miserably maladjusted to this life, my absence would only be felt for a short time. And anyway, my responsibilities with the family are over. They no longer look to me for guidance. It"s more like I"m the one they"re stuck being responsible for. My company isn"t sought after. Whatever I have allowed to happen has also brought on this horrible lack of confidence. I"m intimidated. I have no one to tell my concerns to, NO ONE. I"ve let myself come to a very sad state, not only sad, but stagnant. I try to talk to Jack but I can"t. He doesn"t care. He doesn"t want to LISTEN.
I have a secret longing to set out alone & do what I want to do. Why don"t I? It would be better than driving with Jack to the foreclosure auction, like I did last week. The radio kept blaring out the awful news of Idi Amin executing dissenters in Uganda. I asked Jack where the dial on the AM radio was-he kept pointing to the switch b.u.t.ton. "Dial, Dorothy, DIAL." "Don"t shout at me!" I said. "I"m NOT shouting at you." Then silence.
We drove past South Coast Plaza Shopping Mall, where the new I. Magnin"s is going up near Bullock"s. We were silent as we drove past Long Beach, past Downey, past the City of Commerce, and on to Torrance. I saw an overturned truck when we reached the Magnolia off ramp. It didn"t register because there was so much anger in me, all I could think about was the fact that I can"t live according to Jack"s list of rules anymore. I"m sick of being smothered by all the talk of real estate, and taxes, and how to buy, and Money, Money, Money. We pa.s.sed a Motel 6 sign next to a Lutheran church, next to a Jewish temple, next to a used-car sales lot, where I saw Toyotas, Ford Torino wagons, Chevy Vegas, Pintos and Datsuns, and still we were silent. We pa.s.sed a man in the driver"s seat teasing his hair into a stand-up position. A plane landed at LAX. It was hot. The auction started at 10. I wanted out.
I"ve created this solitude. I"m drowning in the worst depression I can remember. I"ve always tried to hide my feelings. Things, even little things, seem to dislodge my frail grip on the handle of positivity. I completely succ.u.mb to the dark side. At one time I fought with all I knew to prevent these unwelcome attacks. I did a great deal of pretending. I would say to myself, "I"m not depressed, I"m not-I"m not." I kept covering up, pushing back, denying, in an effort to appear "normal." When the kids were alone with me, I would be attentive, involved, interested, and warm. When Jack got home from work the pretense began-fake actions and words in order to present a calm unruffled atmosphere. Someone I can"t remember once said, "No one gets mad or even raises their voice in your household." What an indictment, but at the time I considered it the achievement of a good mother.
And Finally ...
This will be strange because I am going to be honest. By honest, I mean I won"t leave out details like I usually do. I"m sitting in front of the fireplace-a fire is burning; burning one of our dining room chairs. I"m a bit shaky, but I"m not lost, frustrated, erratic, or illogical. The chair has almost burned away. I don"t care. Last night all my framed photos were thrown. There"s splintered gla.s.s everywhere. The flowers Diane sent are all over the floor. The table has a big gouge. I have red bruises on my face. There are black and blue marks on my arms and legs. Where in h.e.l.l are WE HEADING?
I can"t vent like Jack does. This is the key to our mismatch. My anger comes out in cold unbearable behavior. It eats on him until he explodes. I don"t know why I constantly practice challenging Jack. It"s so out of hand. He says the salad at Coco"s is good. I turn quiet, because he didn"t say, "But not as good as yours." He asks if I trimmed the bush in the garden and I say, "Why do you want to know?" He asks where I"d like to eat, I say, "I don"t know." He says, "Well, how about Dillmans?" I say, "We always go where you want to go." He says, "There"s a program on TV that sounds good." I say, "I read it wasn"t that great." He says, "What"s for dinner?" I say, "You"ll like it." He says, "Typical Dorothy answer." Then I"m mad all evening. I don"t know how many times I"ve told myself that n.o.body really has my welfare in mind but me. My care is in the hands of ME.
Jack left me a note. "I wish to h.e.l.l you"d leave me." I called and told him I wanted to, just as soon as he figured out how to do it. BULL s.h.i.t. I"m angry. I feel totally misunderstood. I know things will never get better. When I think of Jack, something gets ahold of me. I do NOT want to complain. I WILL NOT-but I WANT better. This is my right and, in a funny way, my responsibility. I need stimulation. After a life of working and planning for the family ... I need others. My head gets too lost when it"s only me hanging around the house all day, every day. After last night I thought I would kill myself rather than go through the torture of losing my mind.
From Diane Mom, the brain fed you an overload of negative data, which you held on to for dear life. Why couldn"t you stop beating up yourself or the people around you-i.e., Dad? It must have been hard to take into consideration what it was like for him to come from a money-driven, half-crazy, fatherless home, complete with Mary Alice Hall as Mother. The effect of such an upbringing did not make Dad an easygoing liberal-minded kind of guy. Don"t think I don"t remember his entrances and how they disrupted the mystique we created with a kind of dreaded reality. Dad was the enemy we kept close. It wasn"t just you, it was all of us.
As the recipient of whatever public validation there was to be gleaned from the business of civil engineering in Orange County, Dad was dynamic. You went a different path. You read Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in a river, and Anne s.e.xton, who locked herself in a car and turned on the engine. You had a poet"s appreciation of language, a beautiful face, and an irresistibly alluring, almost inhuman amount of charm, but these gifts didn"t sustain you. By the time 1975 rolled around, your best friend-your journal-became the only release. Our little gang of five had all but dissolved. You were writing your story, I understand, but, Mom, did it have to be so distressing? When was everything going to get better? When were the positive thoughts written in longhand going to reappear?
If I told you how much I loved the sound of your laughter, would you have taken more pride in who you were? If, way back, I made you understand how proud I was to be the daughter of a "really, really special" former Mrs. Los Angeles, would that have made a difference? If you knew how fast I rushed home from Willard Junior High School the day Dave Garland poked his finger in my padded bra and made fun of me, would you have finally acknowledged you were irreplaceable? If I reminded you of the pleasure it gave me to hang out at the kitchen counter and watch you make your mid-afternoon snack of longhorn cheddar cheese and Wheat Thins, with sweet gherkins on the side, would that have changed anything?
Remember how we used to drive around downtown Santa Ana on Wednesday evenings after Bullock"s department store closed? Remember how I sat shotgun checking out possible "finds"? Remember how I snuck out of the car and rummaged through the trash bins to see if there were any treasures to be found? Was it as much fun for you as it was for me? Did you get a kick out of making sure the coast was clear before I shoved that really cool bathroom shelf into the trunk? We thought it was perfect, remember? But then, so were you. You were the perfect find. Could it have been more fun, Mom, driving home in our Buick station wagon back in the early days of suburbia, just us, turning an ordinary afternoon into something extraordinary? Remember how you told me about the new store in La Mirada called Ohrbach"s and how we could buy brand names for a fourth of what they cost at Bullock"s? Remember the time I was sick over not being invited to join Zeta Tee, the second-best sorority at Santa Ana High School, even though they"d asked Leslie? You told me to have patience. Zeta Tee could wait for later; besides, the girls were a little trashy, weren"t they, and didn"t the so-called "grooviest" member get pregnant? Then suddenly I"d hear, "Oh, my G.o.d, Diane, look. Diane, you"ve got to see this," or "Di-annie, check this out." I"d look and see an ordinary boy riding a bike past Me-N-Ed"s Pizza on McFadden and Bristol. It was nothing, but it was something. It was just an ordinary boy pa.s.sing by, but somehow it was unforgettable and somehow it tore me away from pressing tragedies like not making the cut with Zeta Tee.
Did you ever pat yourself on the back for your greatest gift, just being you? I"m sorry the small rewards weren"t enough. I understand great expectations. Oh, Mom, Mom, you were such a game gal in so many ways. I wish I could have made the disappointment of your unfulfilled longings magically disappear with the memory of our Wednesday evening adventures, now lost in time.
Did all that writing in all those journals make it worse? Did it exacerbate your isolation? If only we could re-edit our lives and make a couple of different choices, right, Mom? Where would it have taken us? Now I"m alone, juggling with a memoir that"s also your memoir. Would you have approved of my choices? Am I misrepresenting you? I"ll never know. I can only hope you would have forgiven me for revealing your demons, but, in my defense, you wrote it so beautifully. You would have wanted me to share it, right? I hope so. I wish it weren"t too late to go back to see what you might have felt.
Mind Priorities-April 1975 Day 1. My energy is up. Day 2. My motivation is up. Day 3. My personal drive is up. Day 4. My spiritual growth is high. Day 5. I am on a higher plane. I work at this. Day 6. I am throwing out the undesirable from my system. Day 7. I have reached a HIGH beautiful spiritual level. Day 8. I like ME. Day 9. I do meaningful things-think logically-move with grace and ease. Day 10. I love myself-am beautiful inside and out. Day 11. I am not smothered when Jack is around. Day 12. I can still maintain personal beauty and countenance. Day 13. I show love and feel stable inside. Day 14. I am bigger. Day 15. I am ready to take others" comments, realizing I don"t know their intentions or real meaning. Day 16. I am able to bounce back mentally. Day 17. I am positive. Day 18. I contribute to bringing out the very best in people I am around. Day 19. Diane, Randy, Robin, and Dorrie all fall under my mental thought waves. Day 20. Jack is on the same wave too. Day 21. I value my flashes of creative thought. Day 22. I displace negative thoughts completely and respond to events accordingly. Day 23. I am proud of my spiritual being and the growth I have in this area. Day 24. I believe my spirituality softens the harshness of reality. Day 25. I am thin, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Day 26. I am pa.s.sing through the midlife mess and making it. Day 27. I am wise to the needs of others. Day 28. I am continually gaining knowledge. Day 29. I am the beneficiary of all that I surround myself with. Day 30. I am enriching my environment in every way I know. Day 31. I am developing my mind and using it in my continuing search for knowledge.
Days of the Week Sunday the 2nd-BE HEALTHY Monday the 3rd-GET THIN Tuesday the 4th-SELL COLLINS ISLAND HOUSE Wednesday the 5th-MOVE TO NEAT PLACE Thursday the 6th-MAKE NEW FRIENDS Friday the 7th-CULTIVATE OLD ONES Sat.u.r.day the 8th-TRAVEL Sunday the 9th-MENTALLY GROW-EXPAND Monday the 10th-TAKE MORE CARE WITH- Tuesday the 11th-COOKING Wednesday the 12th-BE LESS CONCERNED- Thursday the 13th-WITH MYSELF Friday the 14th-BE LIGHTER ABOUT THINGS Sat.u.r.day the 15th-LAUGH A LOT Sunday the 16th-TALK MORE Dorothy-isms After the downhill slide, and living under the influence of Jack Hall"s "power of positive thinking," Dorothy created her own catalog of cheerful bromides to combat depression. The itemized series of pep talks and wishful pick-me-ups had a function: to make her feel better. This year was going to be different. It was the year of Dorothy"s "Days of the Week" and "What I Am Thankful For." Itemizing catchphrases as if they were wishes that would come true was like praying to a benevolent G.o.d who encouraged repet.i.tion as a means to an end-a cheerful one. Mother organized information and kept track of changes by cla.s.sifying her adages chronologically or grouping them by theme. She did not resort to the unsorted or miscellaneous. All homilies worthy of inclusion were gathered together with some criteria in mind.
She did not pa.s.s on her Pollyanna-isms, or make reference to her Mount Whitney of words, to anyone. I suspect she shielded us from her "healing business" because somewhere deep down she knew her remedies were best left unexamined. For example, once having written "I am enriching my environment in every way I know," Mother avoided a.n.a.lyzing it. Why would she? She was smart. She knew she was a harsh critic. She knew she would have been disappointed in the results. Mother"s list of plat.i.tudes rose higher and higher, all the way to the top of the biggest list of all, the "Forgotten List." Once she forgot an idea, Mother was free to rediscover it as if it was forever and always the first "I-am-ism" on the first day of the first week of the first month of the year 1975.