Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty Page 5

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Why do you wear all that black stuff on your eyes? I’d like to see the real Diane. The Diane Diane.”

  Pissed off, I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re not into raccoons. Correct me if I’m wrong—weren’t you hired to pull the curtain up, not pull actresses aside and give them advice on their appearance? I don’t recall asking for beauty tips from Mick, the stage manager. As for all that ‘black stuff,’ it’s none of your business what I do with my eyes. I will tell you one thing: I’m not going to suddenly wake up one morning and see the real Diane, the Diane Diane. You know why? Because I am the real Diane. And the real Diane’s intention is to flaunt her eyes in smoky blackness for as long as she can.”

  That’s what I wished I’d said. Instead, in typical Diane style, I smiled! I like to blame Dad, who told all us kids early on, “When stuck in a tough situation … run.” I bet that’s not what Chester Hall, the barber, would have done. But then, Dad never knew Chester Hall, who may or may not have been his father. There was no father to help Dad “man up.” That was left to Grammy Hall, who was part man anyway. Dad did the best he could. He ran. And so did I. I ran, too.

  I ran to Los Angeles as soon as I got a call from my agent telling me the producer of a new Rock Hudson series called McMillan & Wife wanted to see me for a role. I was twenty-four years old. The meeting turned out to be a giant lovefest. The producer adored me. He even wanted me to come back for a makeover. The next morning I was ushered into a brightly lit room, where a makeup man named Dan began to scrutinize my face. “We’re going to have to do something about those eyes,” he said. “They slope. They tell a sad story, not the happy story needed for McMillan and Wife.” He elaborated on the folds of my eyelids, telling me they hid the natural crease, causing the lower portion of the lid to go unseen. “Okay, I’ve got it,” he said. “I know what to do. Imagine Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.”

  Dan got down to business, applying pale green eye shadow to my disappearing upper lids. He painted wing-tipped curlicues at the ends of my eyes. That’s when he said I might want to consider a surgical intervention. He also wanted me to know that he’d deliberately decided not to use black eye pencil inside the bottom lids because, frankly speaking, it was “aging,” especially considering my “Asian eyes.” After what seemed an interminably long time, he finished with a flair and gave me the hand mirror. When I looked at twenty-four-year-old Diane Hall from Orange County who went to New York City to become an actress, hopefully in the movies, that Diane, the one I’d grown up with, was gone.

  “Huh, Dan, can I speak to you for a moment? Look, I know it was a horrible shame the door opened and there was dreary-eyed Little Miss Me. Sorry about that. Granted, it was unfortunate you were stuck with a pair of ‘hooded eyes’ only a mother could love. But did you really have to turn me into a wide-eyed Kewpie doll? Painting swirly tails at the ends of my eyes is not going to make me Cleopatra, and why Cleopatra in the first place? Here’s what kills me. Here’s what I can’t get over. I looked pretty enough to win the honor of a makeover. I just wasn’t pretty enough to avoid you. And, by the way, with all due respect, I’m twenty-four years old, not forty-four, the new twenty-four. I actually am twenty-four. So don’t tell me eyeliner is aging, ’cause unlike you, I’m too young to be aging. I know there’s no chance in hell I’m going to make the cut. But guess what, Dan the makeup man, you will not have the opportunity to chime in because … I’m out of here, you big jerk.”

  That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I sat in the producer’s office with Dan as the producer oohed and aahed over my transformation before escorting me out the door. The next day I got the call from my agent saying they loved me, but they were going in a different direction. The Susan Saint James direction, to be exact.

  Suddenly Speed joined Emmie in barking at Prince, the Great Dane, who loped off in his version of a run and knocked over the warning sign. I had to laugh. If only Dad could sit with me one time before the bench slides into the trailer park below. If he were here, I could open the conversation with something harmless, like how funny Speed’s ears look dragging through the dirt, or wasn’t it a shame it took so long to wax our Hobie surfboards back in the day, and what ever happened to Boomerang, our first speedboat. That might be nice. I’d be sure to leave out the summer I got burned in another way: the summer I saw my first penis. I say “burned” because after that initial “glimpse,” like in the Alicia Keys song, this girl was on fire. All I did was walk into our tent and there was Dad’s friend Jim, with his organ exposed. It happened so fast I couldn’t take in the details. I wanted to, but despite the current unpopularity of Sigmund Freud and his even less popular theory of penis envy, I have to say the power of his penis struck an envious note in me. Even though I’ve had some long, hard looks inside Taschen’s The Big Penis Book, the picture of Jim changing out of his swim trunks looms, like Goya’s black landscapes engorged with screaming monsters, hell, fire, and damnation. For me, the penis will always be a source of wonder, and fear. But, of course, Dad and I could never talk of such things, partially because he had one, partially because he was my father, but mainly because it was a risky conversation for two people who didn’t know how to speak to each other even though we shared a pair of identically shaped eyes.

  Our love didn’t include hugs and kisses, and I remember only a few times when I held his hand like other girls did with their fathers. This made our eyes—not what we saw, or how we engaged the world, but the concrete, undeniable shape of our eyes—all the more meaningful. Like I said, it makes sense that if I’m looking for a way to understand how my father played into who I am, of course I’d find myself sitting on a bench twenty-three years after his death, trying to see beyond the blue of the ocean into the once living blue of my father’s eyes. It’s a risk worth taking. And I take it every day. Even if I’m distracted. I never fail to think of the boy who loved the ocean, the boy who grew up to be the man with the house sitting on the edge of the continent. Sometimes I imagine combining Dad’s eyes with mine. Together they’d slide so far down the hill they’d touch the ocean below. Only he and I, and maybe hangdog Speed, know the joy of the rise before the beauty of the fall.

  Dad must have spent fifteen years of his life looking at the largest body of water on earth. I think of all the times he dove off the cliffs of Palos Verdes and Divers Cove. I think of him stretching his feet against the sand on Rincon and Dana Point and Zuma Beach and Topanga, too. I think of him surfing at Salt Creek Beach, and camping at Doheny State Beach. I think of the sound our Buick station wagon made as he drove across the train tracks to San Clemente. I think of the chair he sat in at the old house across the bay from the Balboa Fun Zone, in Newport Beach. I think of that same chair with Dad in it, at his new house, the last house, the house overlooking the mouth of the bay at the tip of Corona del Mar. Where did it go?

  Dad didn’t leave a record of what he saw, or the way he saw it. Yet nearly one-quarter of his life was given to the art of looking. All those grabbed hours, those sunburned moments collected over a lifetime of observations shared with no one but himself. He must have known that the ritual would disappear when he did.

  Sometimes, to help kick-start one of our imaginary conversations, I play back our one milestone memory. I’ve told it before, but it’s the only one I have. It was 1963. The curtain had fallen on Santa Ana High School’s production of Little Mary Sunshine. My rendition of Nancy Twinkle’s “Mata Hari,” a song about a spy who brought men to their knees by “doing this and that-a” had just given me the only standing ovation of my life. On the way to change out of my costume I saw Dad approach from backstage. He stopped in front of the red velvet curtain, stepped in close, and looked me straight in the eyes for what seemed like an eternity. He did not speak, yet his face, lit by the blue of his eyes, told me a story. It was not the story of a father who repeatedly reminded his daughter to plan ahead and use her noggin. All plans had been temporarily canceled. This father’s face pa
led from the glow reflected in his eyes. This father told the story of a daughter who, against all odds, had suddenly landed on the sacred ground of “right,” even though her “right” was a multitude of “wrongs.” She would put these wrongs to good use in a venue she would continue to pursue for the rest of her life. Performing. It would be the only time I would see my father’s face beam with pride for the very wrongs that made me right; by this I mean my endless tears, the vague distractions, the awkward hesitancy, and my annoying brand of being “so sensitive that you’re insensitive.” Just like the standing ovation, it was the first and only time Dad looked at me with unabashed joy.

  I’m still trying to convince myself that the identical shape of our eyes must mean we were not opposites. We must have shared feelings and dreams and fears, too. We must have. It’s true I collect objects of beauty, like John Stezaker’s collages, while Dad collected jars full of nickels and dimes. I love the G-Wagen. Dad was consumed by the gas he saved with his Toyota 4Runner. Dad thought function was beauty, not form. I choose form over function every time. On the functioning front, Dad tried to make me do things right, like “plan ahead” and “look before you leap.” But there was always something wrong interfering. That is, until Little Mary Sunshine. Dad didn’t write his thoughts down the way Mom did. There is no evidence. My investigation into our similarities is nothing more than conjecture. All that’s left is the ocean he stared at, and our tumbling eyes. It doesn’t give me much to go on.

  “Dad, can I ask you something from the other side of the great mystery? How much of what you saw is what I see? It might sound crazy, but sometimes I believe I’m seeing things from inside your eyes. Am I? I wish. In three short months I will be the same age as you were when you died. I can still see the smoky blue tint of your eyes. I can still see the red velvet curtain, and the crowds parting almost as if I were Maria in West Side Story, to your Tony. Here on the bluff, looking at the ocean, I wish I could share with you a truth I’ve come to believe: It’s all in the eyes. Our eyes. Yours. And mine.”

  I’ve never known a woman who didn’t love to shop. My sister Robin is a Ross Dress for Less maven. Dorrie, my baby sister, loves North Face and Tommy Hilfiger. My friend Susie Becker is a walking dictionary of fashion, with a closet the size of a costume rental store. Carol Kane loves sacky dresses in prints à la Marni and Yohji Yamamoto. All my girlfriends love to shop. Then there’s my daughter, Dexter. She is not a shopper.

  I named Dexter after Cary Grant’s character in The Philadelphia Story, C. K. Dexter Haven. She arrived in a basket eight days into life wearing a pink ruffled dress with a white bib trimmed in red. I was ready for action. Off with the fussy garb and on with a pair of black leggings, matching cap, licorice loafers, and ebony socks. Dexter was among the first to have a Baby Gap wardrobe of gray striped onesies accessorized with plaid bibs, Vans slip-ons, and a Billabong baby trucker hat. For her first Christmas I bought her a hound’s-tooth baby boy suit and a pair of vintage cowboy boots I found at the Long Beach swap meet. My reign of terror ended when she was able to distinguish pink and purple from black and gray. As soon as she could string a couple of sentences together, Dexter let me know she didn’t take to boys’ trousers and she wasn’t going to be a princess in black. She was her own Dexter, and she was living in color.

  By the time I turned fifteen, I was my own Diane, and I was living in Black and White. It began after the annual family trip to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard, where we saw The Wizard of Oz. I was so upset I wrote Judy Garland and asked her to explain why Dorothy had to leave Kansas for Oz. She didn’t write back. But when I saw Cary Grant as C. K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was so excited I wrote to him, asking for an autographed eight-by-ten glossy. Two weeks later, a manila envelope arrived with a picture of him wearing thick-rimmed glasses that offset his dark eyes, his square jaw, and that dazzling smile. I didn’t want a picture of Katharine Hepburn, his costar, who I thought of as upper-crust. Plus, I didn’t cotton to her long gowns or shoulder-padded suits with A-shaped skirts. In fact, I felt sorry for her, and could never have dreamed that one day she would be one of my heroes. She probably had to wear corsets every day in order to have an hourglass figure. Big deal. The last thing I wanted was to be hemmed in by a twenty-one-inch waist. Katharine Hepburn must have been terribly uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why she stomped around the Lord family mansion with a snooty sense of entitlement, while Cary Grant skipped through the stuffy atmosphere in double-breasted pin-striped suits with black loafers and white socks. He wore things like white cardigan sweaters thrown ever so casually over his shoulders after a game of tennis, or a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it, “old man.”

  My “Things and Stuff” scrapbook was crammed with pictures of him in turtleneck sweaters under crisp striped shirts, and herringbone jackets over tweed pants. He wasn’t afraid of a polka-dot tie or handkerchief. He wore gray worsted wool suits with wide lapels, a waist button, a white shirt, and his collar up. I also wrote down several of Mr. Grant’s fashion tips. For example, he knew that the proper look of a tie lies in a taut knot. If not executed to perfection, the knot loses the necessary spring to arch out from the collar. He believed every man should own a variety of ties, adding that he preferred the relatively wide sort while never venturing near what might be considered “over the top.” I wrote down two of his famous quotes. Number 1: “Clothes make the man.” And Number 2: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person.” I had no doubt I could be the person I wanted to be if I applied Cary Grant’s concept that “clothes make the man”—or, in my case, “clothes make the woman.”

  When Dexter turned fifteen, she received a two-hundred-dollar gift card to Victoria’s Secret. I had to drag her into their store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where we were welcomed by aisles of boy shorts with messages like “Life of the Party” and “Unwrap Me” printed on the crotch. We passed hipster panties spelling out “No Peeking” and “Let’s Go Skinny Dipping” on the butt. At the million-dollar Fantasy Bra display, Dexter informed me she’d recently become a C cup. Wait a minute, a C? When did that happen? Just yesterday she was a solid B. Was she going to become one of those breast-implant gals who fears she’ll never be big enough? Surely she didn’t want to become an oversized Dexter cow with a couple of udders dragging on the floor? Dex kept insisting she was a C cup. I kept insisting she was a B … and that was it. End of discussion. She marched off to find a saleslady.

  Left alone, I couldn’t get over the evolution of underwear at Victoria’s Secret. Everything was so friendly. Except for those few years in the early 1970s when I didn’t wear one, I’d never thought of bras as anything but a necessity one had to address. Occasionally I come across pictures of myself from the braless days. What the hell was I doing? Soooo unattractive. And my poor little breasts. They must have been confused. At a party recently I reminisced with my old friend Elliott Gould, who said, “Oh, I remember you from the seventies—you had those low-slung tits.” Several years ago, I was about to make a movie called Because I Said So when the costume designer, Shay Cunliffe, wanted to know if I had any favorite bras she might borrow in case she needed to buy extras. I brought in several standbys from when I’d filmed The First Wives Club, a decade earlier. Trying to hide her shock, Shay gently informed me that most women toss their bras after a year.

  When Dexter came back with a saleslady named Jane, she was all fired up. Suddenly she wanted four bras and a dozen panties. This was definitely a new Dex. Passing what seemed to be thousands upon thousands of sexy boy-short panties and padded, leopard-skin bras encrusted in pink rhinestones, Jane walked us to the dressing rooms painted, you got it, pink. A stock boy almost knocked me down as he flew past with several boxes of undies to put on display. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of fantasies played havoc in his mind as he placed “Santa’s Helper” ruched panties in drawers u
nder display bins with “Eat Me,” “Come Here Often?” and “69” printed on a veritable universe of crotches.

  Unaffected, Jane measured Dexter for her cup size, taking note of her broad back. Was Dexter a swimmer? she inquired. Dexter nodded. And yes, Jane agreed, it appeared Dexter’s cup size was a C. She suggested that when in doubt Dexter might want to try both the C cup and the B. Now, that’s an expert for you. With that taken care of, she handed Dexter what could only be described as bras on a stick in every imaginable shape and style. Reassured, Dexter shut the door, while I checked out the vibe at Victoria’s. This is what I saw: I saw a family of women from varying walks of life loving their underwear. I wished sex was as harmless and free-spirited as the atmosphere in Victoria’s Secret. Not to cast aspersions, but there are women like Jodi Arias and Jean Harris for whom sex goes awry. But here in benign Victoria’s Secret, it’s easy to forget that sex is capable of bringing out such murderous rage. Speaking of Victoria, I wonder if there is an actual Victoria. If so, I’d like to meet her sometime and have a serious chat about her “Eat Me” underwear. All in the name of good fun, mind you.

  Shame permeated the ambience in the bra department of Newberry’s five-and-ten-cent store in Santa Ana, where I worked as a salesgirl in 1960. Bras were embarrassing, dreary things; certainly not fun. There were no colors. Each style sat in ugly plastic boxes, in aisle after aisle filled with other ugly plastic boxes. Women didn’t come to Newberry’s expecting a private dressing room with a lovely Jane-type saleswoman carrying her ever ready measuring tape while dispensing sage advice. No way. Buying a bra was like buying Kotex. The unattended cotton Maidenform bras had names like “Snoozable” and “Sweet Dreams.” Hardly dangerous, and hardly sexy. After hours of folding them neatly before placing them into containers, I felt nothing if not embarrassed, but also secretly curious. One day I got caught red-handed placing a 32B padded Wonderbra over my sweater to see what it would look like. Oh my God, you’d think I’d committed a crime. Mr. Olsen, the assistant manager, immediately downgraded me to a cash register in the hardware department. He didn’t understand. I’d been compelled to feel the cushioned fabric that made one’s breasts a Wonder.