Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty Read online

  As life would have it, Sam slipped into the background until ten years later, when I inadvertently came across his face on a fifty-cent eight-by-ten glossy I bought at the Rose Bowl swap meet. The photograph was not exceptional except for one thing: Sam’s face. That damn face. A day doesn’t go by without a glance his way.

  Gary Cooper also came to me in motion, but he wasn’t beautiful. What he was, was old. I saw him walking a dusty town’s deserted street toward four killers in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 motion picture High Noon. The movie was told in “real time,” a time where events happened at the same rate that my ten-year-old eyes experienced them. Everything about the movie seemed super real. On Gary Cooper’s wedding day to Grace Kelly, he had a choice: he could either ride into the horizon with his pretty new bride or stay and face the killers. As a girl I didn’t think about Gary Cooper’s looks, or the difference between Grace Kelly’s age and his. I didn’t care. Would he ever see her again? Would he die? Did he have to be so brave? I remember their goodbye. I remember Tex Ritter singing “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’.” I remember crying. Looks weren’t the issue. Courage was. I didn’t know that courage was a form of beauty, but I must have felt it.

  Imagine my surprise when I discovered Cecil Beaton’s photograph of a thirty-year-old drop-dead-gorgeous Gary Cooper. Beaton did more than document the awe-inspiring good looks; he somehow captured Gary Cooper’s awkward lack of calculation, his sweetness. Sometimes I compare the portraits of Gary Cooper and Sam Shepard. One photograph is of a man my age, still alive, still Sam. The other is an image of a legend I never met. Gary Cooper’s photograph is the work of an artist. Sam Shepard’s photograph is just another glossy eight-by-ten. Both, however, set off memories of milestone moments in movie theaters.

  John Wayne’s is the youngest, most irresistible face framed behind glass. It’s ironic that he would become the ultimate symbol of the American male. There’s no hint of aspiration in his expression. He seems almost perplexed by the idea that someone is taking his picture. How could a football player from Glendale have imagined donning a big old ten-gallon hat for some guy with a Rolleiflex dangling around his neck? Before Gary Cooper and Sam Shepard, it was John Wayne, the Duke, who would walk through the western landscape and into the heart of Joan Didion, who describes him best: “We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’ As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls that is still the line I wait to hear.”

  All three men came and went as they walked through time on the screen. All three acted out stories written for the entertainment of the masses, particularly women like me. All three are icons. Now they’re incarcerated on my wall, where their beauty continues to evolve. Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Sam Shepard still take me to Joan Didion’s “bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” They still give me hope for a house that can never be—a home that exists only in my dreams.

  Warren Beatty is not one of the prisoners on my wall. He is a person I loved in real time, not reel, and not in a photograph. Real-life Warren was a collector’s item, a rare bird. He lived in a three-room, eight-hundred-square-foot penthouse on top of the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Littered with books and scripts, the place was not fancy. Yet he owned an unfinished Art Deco estate on a hilltop, and he claimed he was going to make it his home. He was always late and always meeting people, and always, always, always working on a script. He had aspirations I couldn’t begin to contemplate. You have to remember, I was Annie Hall. At that point I was happy to act in movies, not produce, star, and direct them while contemplating a political career. One moment Warren was stunning, especially from the right side; the next, I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. These variables kept me curious. Was he a beauty or wasn’t he?

  Yes. Warren was a beauty. That stood out with particular intensity during our bittersweet breakup. And wouldn’t you know it, it revolved around a photograph I saved but couldn’t find to put on my wall.

  I was in Germany working on George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl in the early eighties. It was a difficult shoot. Picking me to play a British actress who finds herself embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was bad casting. Picture the poster: a silhouette of Diane Keaton with unusually well-endowed curves leaning against a semiautomatic rifle. Today you can buy it on eBay for a dollar ninety-nine, which is just about what The Little Drummer Girl made at the box office.

  No matter how hard I tried to look butch holding an Uzi assault weapon or to master an English accent, I failed. To make matters worse, Warren and I weren’t speaking. On my days off, I would wander around Munich feeling sorry for myself. One Sunday at a flea market I came across a big picture book on the films of Warren Beatty. I bought it. Back in the hotel room, I cut out a picture of Warren from Bonnie and Clyde, folded it into small squares, put Warren in my jacket pocket, and brought him to work the next day. Before a particularly emotional scene, I took it out, unfolded Warren, and touched his face with my fingers. When I put my lips to his, all those months of straining for a crumb of feeling came flooding back. That’s what Warren’s face on the page of a broken-down book printed on cheap paper did to me before I shot a scene from The Little Drummer Girl.

  At some point I lost the photo. In a way, I’m glad I did. It doesn’t belong with my other convicts. Warren was not a fantasy to ponder. I knew him well. He was not a mystery to contemplate. Sometimes I wonder if he enjoyed his beauty. Did he like what the mirror reflected? He knew that his pretty face, set on that masculine body, blessed with a great mind, would continue to seduce legions of women with incredible success decade after decade after decade. But did he know that, like all gifts, it came with a price tag?

  A question for Warren, and all of my inmates: When did they begin to worry about time’s effect on their faces, if they did at all? What was it like for fifty-one-year-old Gary Cooper to see his close-ups in High Noon? What was it like for “the Duke”? Tom Cruise, who turned fifty-one recently, is on the eve of losing his looks. Brad Pitt is forty-nine. Johnny Depp is fifty. How are they dealing with the first signs of loss? Warren Beatty, now seventy-six, and his pal Jack Nicholson, at seventy-six, have let it go. They’re over the hump. Al Pacino, too. Maybe letting go is the only graceful thing to do. My face was never in the same league as my prisoners’. There’s nothing extra … ordinary about it. It’s okay. Not bad. Normal. I’m a pretty, good-looking woman. In a way, my loss has been a gain. Someone has to play the hopes and wishes of women in my generation. I was never a shocking standout like Warren. I was no Julie Christie. I was, as one person described me … “a washed-out Ali McGraw.”

  My daughter, Dexter, has never heard of Gary Cooper. She knows Jack Nicholson because I made a movie with him. I was a little surprised when my friends Sandra Shadic and Lindsay Dwelley, both in their early thirties, told me they’d never heard of Gary Cooper, either. When I showed Sandra Cecil Beaton’s photograph, yes, she found Cooper beautiful, but not in a significant way. Lindsay agreed that Cooper had a kind of masculine appeal. Dexter shrugged when I showed her. I guess it’s a question of how you see people, how you picture time and place. Maybe it’s also a question of age. For example, on Dexter’s list of the twenty-five hottest men, Taylor Lautner is one, Justin Bieber two, Zac Efron three, and Robert Pattinson rounds off four. She did throw in one oldie: thirty-six-year-old Orlando Bloom. To prove that these
five men were the sexiest men on earth, she showed me a cluster of tweets from other girls who had their own ideas about the hot twenty-five:

  “Number seven should be switched with Justin Bieber.”

  “awesome list, when i first told my friends how hot Tom Felton was they didn’t believe me, and now im like, hahahahah.”

  “good list i think zac efron is the hottest.”

  “robert Pattison is the BEST.”

  “Taylor and Robert are both Gorgeous.”

  “Alright no offense to zac efron but this is a disgrace to taylor lautners name! he should have been number 1!!!!”

  “You should add Oliver Jackson Cohen too. He is so handsome!”

  “I admired most Robert Pattinson.”

  “Taylor Lautner is Soooo Hot. He is Number 1 too me. i love him so much.”

  Poor Orlando Bloom didn’t even make the cut.

  Once it was me looking at my number one really neat coolest ever man, Fess Parker, also known as Davy Crockett, wearing his coonskin cap on the back of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box. Later it was a signed photograph from James Garner, then starring in Maverick, and another from Edd (Kookie) “Lend Me Your Comb” Byrnes from 77 Sunset Strip. After that it was James Dean and Marlon Brando. Then Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Later it was the crumpled photograph of a man I’d once loved cut from an old paperback movie-star book. Now it’s forty-eight men hammered to my wall.

  Other women collect men, too; they must. Maybe their detainees are stuck inside journals, or posted on their Facebook page, or Scotch-taped to the corner of a bathroom mirror. It’s all the same, right? Well, not exactly. I’ve probably taken it a little too far, what with a floor-to-ceiling wall filled with men’s faces. At least I don’t play favorites: not Marlon Brando, not Gary Cooper, not Matt Dillon, or Paul Newman, Morgan Freeman, Ryan Gosling, Adrien Brody, not even Halle Berry’s catch of all time, Olivier Martinez, or my new addition, Jeremy Renner … no, no, no, all get equal time. Collectively they come and go in soft and sharp focus, in black and white, and color, too. They are the promise of eternity and the fun of fantasy. Sometimes they look into the wonder of my eyes. Sometimes they glide their fingers across the outline of my lips and say the same line over and over: “Diane, Diane, look at you. You’re beautiful. Do you know that? Can you see your beauty through the light in my eyes, Diane? Look. Listen to me: I will make a home for you in a place where the cottonwoods grow.”

  Once, in the early 1970s, I passed John Wayne on my way to an audition for the TV series McMillan & Wife at the Paramount lot. He seemed to be in a hurry. That was it. Several years ago I ran into Francesco Clemente. He charmingly mentioned his new project: painting portraits of interesting women like Toni Morrison, Fran Lebowitz, and Renée Fleming. Hoping that he found me fascinating too, I waited for his call. Needless to say, there is no portrait of Diane Keaton. I’ve met Tony Ward the model. He was polite. I made four movies with Sam Shepard, a mesmerizing man, but I never really got to know him. Just as well.

  In the end, there are two ways of seeing male beauty. Real or imagined. There’s the looking-in way and the being-seen way. There’s the man himself and the man I’ve made up. I’m guilty of one, and proud of the other.

  Last year I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., where I met Wolf Blitzer and hugged Colin Powell. I was in the same room with President Obama as he gave his speech. Michelle sat next to him. It was hard to get my mind around the reality of being in the presence of so many of the most powerful people in the world—that is, the people who run it and the journalists who tell the stories that help us assimilate the information. The next day I took a tour of the White House, including the Situation Room, which I found surprisingly unassuming. All those big decisions in such a small room. I saw pictures of Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta sitting around the television sets as they watched the Navy SEALs land in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. I walked over to the Corcoran to look at the paintings, and the National Gallery, too. As the sun began to set, I dropped by the Lincoln Memorial. It was cold when I got out of the car. From a distance I saw the monument lit from inside. As I got closer, there he was again, this time nineteen feet high, resting his arms on a marble chair. The great man with the unsightly face, all alone. Thank God for that face and those eyes, one looking out for man’s best interests, the other searching within for solutions to impossible conflicts. I gasped in awe. Here was the depth of beauty. And here were those same eyes looking out from inside a national monument to the memory of a great man.

  The face is our most important sensory organ. It is a compound so diverse and varied that there are no two faces alike. Yet we all share its five senses. For example, our noses take in smells. We hear with our ears. We taste with our mouths and touch with our lips. We see (one of my favorites) from our eyes. The face includes things like hair, foreheads (one, not two), eyebrows (two, not one, with as many as seven hundred hair follicles on each brow). We have one pair of lips, thirty-two teeth (for the most part), skin (a vital organ), and one chin. These make up the façade of the average human head. But the most amazing aspect of the face is its ability to show expression. More than anything, our face identifies who we are.

  I was eleven when I first looked into the bathroom mirror and felt disappointment. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint my dissatisfaction. I wasn’t ugly. But I wasn’t Doris Day. Doris Day was my idol. She sang hits like “Que Sera, Sera” and “Secret Love,” which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in my favorite movie, Calamity Jane. Played by Doris Day, Calamity Jane was shiny and blond. Pressing my face against the mirror, I tried to imagine what I would look like with yellow hair. That’s when my younger sister Robin (always annoying) started banging on the door. “Open the door, Diaps,” she demanded. (Short for Die Dee Diapers.) “What are you doing in there?”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “Get out. I need to use the bathroom now.”

  I put my fingers in my ears, cocked my head in an attempt to mimic Doris Day’s adorable mannerisms and said, “This town ain’t big enough. Not for me and that frilled-up, flirtin’, man-rustlin’ petticoat.”

  “Mom!! Diane won’t get out of the bathroom.”

  Unlocking the door, I had a dim awareness that the best thing to do about wishing I was gun-toting, sarsaparilla-drinking Doris Day was just don’t. Don’t wish for something you can’t have. But I did anyway.

  Every month I ran to the mailbox to see if Mom’s subscription to McCall’s magazine had arrived. In its pages I learned that Maybelline Cake Mascara was “the first modern eye cosmetic for everyday use.” I discovered the theory of “Before and After,” which meant there was a before me and the hope of an after me. This was good news. I was excited for Tangee cosmetics when it presented “Bright ’n Clear,” a lipstick “for lips men long to kiss again and again and again.” Testimonials from real women, in real life, confirmed that Bright ’n Clear went on easily and magically transformed into the perfect shade for you.

  I’ll never forget the day our next-door neighbor Laurel Bastendorf said, “Diane, you know who you look like?”

  “Doris Day?” I asked.

  “Oh no, this is far better. You look like Amelia Earhart, the famous woman pilot whose plane went down over the Pacific—you know, the national heroine? You could be mistaken for her daughter.” Amelia Earhart? A flier? What happened to Doris Day, or even Debbie Reynolds? I ran home and got out the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where I found a picture of what appeared to be a man in a leather Dwight Eisenhower–type windbreaker. I didn’t want to look like a man. Still, I couldn’t deny the obvious similarities. She, too, had a high forehead; her eyes also slanted down, not up; and, of course, her face was the essence of plain.

  The slights continued to mount. Even unintended insults were humiliating, like the day I asked Mom if my eyes were green. “They’re hazel. You know that, Diane.” But the next time I looked in Mom’
s magnified mirror, I discovered my eyes weren’t hazel. They were gray, and they would always be gray. What was I going to do? I couldn’t change the color of my eyes. Even more troubling were the folds of skin that hung down over my drooping eyelids. Pressing on, I focused on what Mom referred to as my lovely auburn hair. Webster’s defined Auburn as a city in Alabama, and also as the color copper, russet, or red. There was no red, or any of its variables, in my hair. Was Mom kidding? The more I looked at my face, the more determined I was to buy a Doris Day mask. But what if there was no such a thing as a Doris Day mask? Besides, I couldn’t wear a mask to school every day. What was I going to do?

  I’ll never forget the day I overheard Mom’s best friend Willie Blandin discuss aging issues with Mom. With a Camel cigarette hanging from her red-hot lips, Willie inhaled deeply before saying these unforgettable words: “Dot, listen to me: the way to avoid bags under your eyes is to do eye exercises on a daily basis.” Maybe that was it; maybe that was the way to pick up my sagging eyes.

  I admired Willie not just because she had a million beauty tips—like “Always style your hair with a curl that flicks either up or under” and “Believe in pink.” Like Bette Davis, Willie had a high forehead. Her solution? Bangs. She tried to convince Mom to cut hers as well, claiming they would give Dot (she always called Mom Dot) a more youthful appearance. Mom would have none of it. For me, the opportunity to reduce the square footage of my forehead seemed brilliant. The problem? Mom was holding the scissors that cut my bangs. The results? Tragic. Think Depression-era bowl cut. Think Moe of the Three Stooges. What little hair I had—and I didn’t have a lot—had been destroyed. Mom’s response: “Diane, stop complaining and be proud. You have a lovely forehead, like Bette Davis.” Bette Davis?! Sorry, but enough with Bette Davis. Oh, and just to reiterate, Willie wasn’t wrong about bangs. To give credit where credit is due, it was Willie who introduced me to the idea of “Corrections.”