Then in 2004—and for no apparent reason—the evil spell was broken. Instead of standing stock-still, I was flooded with my need to run away: to pack my bags, my boxes, my son, and disappear. I sold my lovely, perfectly situated Brentwood home for a perfectly disgusting five-bedroom house at the top of the Malibu mountains, a house as isolated and hard to reach as I was. But hell, I would have moved to a deserted island if it hadn’t been for Sam. Now sixteen, with his two last years of high school to finish, he had become my connection with the world. I may not have wanted to love him, but I did, and just like it had always been with his brothers, I would have turned myself inside out for him. But unlike how it had been with his brothers, I’d lost the strength to leave him when I worked, simply couldn’t do it anymore. So I carted him with me. Starting when he was not quite six months old, Sam was my location sidekick: in Louisiana for Steel Magnolias, in San Francisco for Mrs. Doubtfire, in South Carolina for Forrest Gump. He and Baa even traveled with me to Israel, where we stayed for three months to shoot Not Without My Daughter.
But after each film—some more successful than others—the feelings of accomplishment would quickly disappear, drizzling out through an invisible crack inside me, a crack that seemed to be growing. Even when my movie career was securely chugging along, even before the first stall—dips that always occur—I began to feel defeated. It was like I was looking for it, waiting for it to happen, wanting to believe the same words about myself that I’d worked so hard to erase from people’s minds long ago; that I was trivial, uninteresting, a lightweight. I believed it about myself whether anyone else did or not, and I was constantly looking for someone or something to make me change my mind… about me.
Trying to protect little Sammy’s ears at a very loud wrap party with Olympia, Shirley, Dolly, and Julia. The stupendous women.
During a social gathering in 2005, Steven Spielberg took my arm, pulling me to the side, and as we stood in the corner he explained that he’d purchased the film rights to the wonderfully dense Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. He wasn’t sure how long it would take to find the perfect writer, but once that screenplay was in his hand, he said emphatically, “I want you to play Mary Todd.” To portray the much-maligned, mentally challenged Mrs. Lincoln in a film directed by one of the most creative filmmakers who has ever lived was an opportunity I felt with every cell in my body. Yet I remember faking an excitement I couldn’t quite find, as if I’d already seen the movie of my life and knew the ending. When I walked away that day the droning voice inside my head warned, Don’t start wanting that. It will never happen!
I don’t know if I had accurately foreseen the future or if I became my own self-fulfilling prophecy, but throughout my fifties I felt crippled with grief because the love of my life was dying. Not a lover, or a husband. My work. I was forever saying to myself, This is what you’ve got and who cares? Does it really matter? Do you need to be in prestigious films, in leading roles? Just find some work, somewhere, and if it happens to be a character in a story worth telling, fine. If not, suck it up and do it anyway. And somehow, I did, earning enough to give all three of my children the education I had longed for my whole life. Then, when Sam was heading off for his freshman year at NYU, and Peter and Eli were launching their own careers and marriages, were becoming parents themselves, when I was turning sixty and felt like the sinking ship on which my whole family was standing, I agreed to do another television series, Brothers and Sisters, once again on ABC.
I’m not sure why I pushed Baa to live with me, don’t know that I wanted her there any more than she wanted to be there. For months I had been telling her that it was time, that she would probably be living with me at one point so why not now? There had been little episodes, like the time she mistook superglue for eye drops, or when she showed up at my house hobbling on a swollen foot that was black and blue to the ankle, laughing it off with a shrug and a flimsy explanation. Times when Princess and I would roll our eyes at each other, wondering if she’d been under the influence of alcohol or only accumulated years. And though she’d had a bout with breast cancer in her early seventies, she had long since been cancer-free and was a strong, independently capable eighty-three-year-old.
Besides that, my mother loved the small home I’d purchased for her ten years before, a prefab metal house in a gated community nestled above Zuma Beach. But I would sometimes wonder why she even had the place, since it stood empty most of the time. All she needed was the hint of an invitation and there she’d be, in my driveway dragging the suitcase out of her car and into my house to stay with Sam, or eagerly standing at the back door waiting for Peter and his two little girls to arrive for a sleepover. And if she wasn’t at my house, then she was at Princess’s place in the Valley, looking after Maggie, my niece, who was a full-of-life teenager.
Maybe I thought Baa would put a dent in my loneliness. But that couldn’t have been my reason for pulling and prodding her to live with me, or at least not the obvious one. I’d long to see her, to talk to her about the kids or life’s little dramas, but eventually I’d feel that same ol’ tug. I’d sense her eyes searching my face for something and I’d turn away, annoyed and uncomfortable. She must have been aware of the raw edge between us, but we never talked about it, and over the years it had grown, festering into a gnawing wound that I couldn’t find or heal. Always I felt it was my fault, that I lacked patience, or was a control freak, or simply resented having to support her. Constantly juggling my fear of money with the cost of private schools and universities—undergrad and grad—and trying to be the safety net for my sons, while all the time looking after my mother’s needs, was an anxiety-filled circus act. And jabbing at me was my conviction that I was a rotten, selfish person for feeling anything but gratitude toward her.
Even so, a year after I moved into my snake-infested, coyote-friendly retreat, and shortly after I began filming that fourth series, my mother reluctantly left her tiny place near the ocean, giving it over to Eli and his newly pregnant wife. With a clenched jaw she moved in, jamming everything she owned into one room and spreading out into the rest of the house—as though she actually lived there—only when my granddaughters would arrive. As soon as they stepped inside, before I could give them a hug, Baa would re-create that infuriating walky-walky world, a world that I could never join, and our old tug-of-war was back.
I began to dodge her, to wait in my bedroom upstairs so I could sneak, robber-like, into the kitchen as soon as I heard the pop of her bedroom door closing. And there was always the pop of doors closing, a door-slamming opera that echoed through the house from early morning till late at night. I never knew if it was a loss of hearing on her part, or a conversation meant for me to interpret. And if it was, then what was she saying?
June 25, 2007
Tonight. I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when Baa’s report came in and after she hung up the phone we just stood there, staring at each other. It seems that Baa has several small growths?… tumors?… in various locations all over her body—remnants of the breast cancer she beat ten years ago, or so we thought. The doctor reassured her that there are countless drug options available, treatments that they’ve had some success with, and advised her to start immediately. “Well,” she said after a while, “it had to be something, sometime.” Then laughed, saying she was just happy she wouldn’t be slowly losing her mind. That was one disease she didn’t want. “Okay, there you go,” I said. “Thank God for small favors.” I put a big glass of red wine in front of her and when she went to call Rick and Jimmie, I called Peter, then Eli, and finally Sam.
She knocked on my door around 9:00, said she wanted to be with me and that she was a little bit drunk, maybe. She was a lot drunk maybe. I told her to get into bed and we could watch TV, but instead we ordered books for her online. Everyone has to face death sometime, she said to me with a slur. I told her it was a good thing she was drunk. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve always been uncomfortable when she’s messy drunk like that, but tonight I tried to let it go, to move past it, to let her be fragile. She’s scared I guess and wanted to be with me. I’ll remember that always. It’s going to be hard to understand all that I feel about her. I’m going to lose her.