PART IV

In the Thick of It

The fate of the world hangs by a thin thread and that thread is the human psyche.

CARL JUNG

 

In the first months of 1971, I completed work on The King of Marvin Gardens; Neil attempted to sabotage the shooting; I won awards for my acting; fame took up residence in my life; Jefferson was exploring his new relationship with my first husband, Bill; I tried to serve divorce papers on Neil, who I was convinced was capable of anything in his derangement; and I met William Friedkin.

All of these threads were intertwined and weaving a pattern for the next decade of my life, but I could not see the pattern. I was inside of it. I was caught, trapped within the forces at work, all the while naively chirping about how well things were going. There was much darkness ahead of me, but for the moment I was enjoying the light shining on my closed eyes.

 

 

My friend Jim Butler wasn’t a divorce lawyer, but he offered to handle my divorce for me. I had very little money at the time. He drew up the papers and we tried to serve Neil during the time I was in Atlantic City and New York, but Neil always managed to elude them.

Back in Los Angeles, I started looking for work. I was offered a movie with John Wayne, which I turned down because I didn’t like the script. I was being considered for a few films that were being cast, but the big casting coup was for the lead in The Exorcist. I had read the book and knew this would be a challenging role in a big movie. Warner Bros. was interested in me and set up a meeting with the director, Bill Friedkin. I called Friedkin’s office and told him I felt meetings in offices were stilted and formal. I asked if he would mind coming to my home. He agreed and our meeting was set for February 23. On February 22, the Oscar nominations were announced. I didn’t want to get caught up in waiting for my name to be announced, so I asked a friend to drive to the beach with me that day. I sat quietly staring at the ocean; I meditated and prayed that I stay in touch with what was real and eternal, and not get swept away by what was illusionary and ephemeral. Not that this was easy. This is when I learned the lesson that temptation does not appear to us as an evil-looking devil in a red suit. That is something we run from. Temptation appears to us in the guise of our desires, all the glitter and glamour of distractions that keep us from focusing on what is eternal. This day made me wonder about Jesus in the wilderness. How did the devil appear to him? As a gourmet chef come to end his fast? A beautiful woman to please his body? Or was it something even more insidious? Like something that would be most debilitating of all? Something that would cause him to fall into spiritual pride, which, for Jesus, I can imagine, would be the deadliest of all sins, as well as the greatest temptation. This is not to say that delaying my knowing whether I got a nomination was in any way to be compared to Jesus’ time in the desert. But just that when you choose not to identify with the immediate flow of events—not to get caught up in the world’s attention, be it praise or approbation—you create a space, a space where you can sit quietly; a kind of time out of time when you just might wander in the desert with Jesus for a few minutes and contemplate what it might have been like for him, instead of greedily lapping up the feast set before you that’s sure to lure you into the sin of gluttony for illusion.

In the afternoon when I walked into my house, it was filled with dozens of bouquets of flowers, and Adela had a long list of phone messages. That’s how I knew I’d been nominated.

Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson were nominated, too. When I won the New York Film Critics Award, the first person I called was Cloris. She said, “This might be hard for you to believe, but I am as happy that you won as I would be if I won myself.” I told her that it was not hard for me to believe because I felt the same way. Now I called her to congratulate her on her nomination. We were truly happy for each other. This was very important to me, because it belied the stereotype of women, especially actresses, as jealous cats, but I also think because after all the competition I’d felt from my mother, it was good to have a female friend who wanted the best for me and wasn’t threatened by my getting it.

Bill Friedkin came for tea the next day at four P.M. and we chatted in my living room for two hours. I liked him. He was smart, cultured, knowledgeable. He had a vacuum-packed quality—high energy, but concentrated and contained. He also had a great sense of humor. He’d seen The Last Picture Show as well as Alex in Wonderland and seemed genuinely interested in me. At the end of our meeting, he said, “I’m not going to string you along on this, Ellen. Frankly, it’s between you and Anne Bancroft. I’m leaving tomorrow for ten days location scouting in Georgetown and then I’m going to New York to meet Bancroft. I’ll make up my mind right away and let you know.”

I thanked him for his candor and he left.

Three weeks later Billy called me from New York. “Bancroft is out,” he said. “I ran into her on the street shopping, and she looked rotten.”

“Well, Billy, that’s not fair,” I said. “I look pretty rotten when I’m shopping, too.”

Billy said, “These are the jokes! That’s the way it goes!”

In the three weeks in which I was waiting for Billy to call, I was visited by Bill Alexander. He was thinking about selling his business and moving to Los Angeles. I think he was considering whether he could fit into my life in Los Angeles, and at some point he must have decided that he couldn’t because he left abruptly and returned to Detroit. Jefferson was crushed and couldn’t understand what happened. It awoke in him his feelings about Neil. He was crying a lot, and I finally said to him, “Okay, you ain’t got a conventional setup of a mommy and daddy in a nice little house. You gonna cry about it or make the best of it and have substitutes like I do?” He really responded to that. We packed up the car and headed for Sequoia National Park, where we took a cabin for a few days and licked our wounds in the quiet of the ancient trees. Jeff loved the trip and we came home happy.

Hank called from New York to say that Neil was hitchhiking across the country and I should expect to see him. I still hadn’t managed to serve him with divorce papers, so although I was uneasy, even fearful of his heading our way, I hoped that this time we could manage to get the papers served. For Jeff’s safety, I had to get Neil legally disconnected from him.

Bill Friedkin asked that I meet with William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist. Again I requested we not meet in an office and Blatty suggested a little park in the Valley. We met there and sat on the grass talking. The first thing he said to me after we shook hands was, “I feel this is kismet.” Soon I was in negotiations with Warner Bros. to play Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist.

Two days after my meeting with Blatty, Neil walked up to the front door of our home. Per Jim Butler’s instructions, I admitted him calmly, invited him in, and offered to make him some coffee. As he sat in the living room, I ducked out of the kitchen and into the bedroom and called Jim’s office to notify him that Neil was there. Jim was in court, but his staff would round up the papers and someone to serve them. I was instructed to keep Neil there until someone arrived. It took four hours for all that to happen. During that time, Neil was quite calm, as he could be when he was not in the midst of a paranoid attack. I don’t remember what we talked about during that period, except that I asked about his family. I’d heard that his grandmother and his uncle Brad had died recently on the same day.

I do remember one moment in this conversation because it was the second time I intentionally tried to hurt Neil. We were talking lightly when Neil referred to our sex life with a twinkle in his mad eyes. It was my cue to engage in sentimental appreciation of our sexual adventures. But I was in no frame of mind to engage in any hint of sex talk that might make him reach for me. So when he asked for my agreement that our sex was always great, I wrapped my sword in a cloak of nonchalance and said that I didn’t think it was.

“Really?” he asked surprised. “I always thought we had a great sex life.”

“So did I,” I said, dropping the cloak, and aiming my sword directly at his heart, “but now that I’ve had other lovers, I see that it wasn’t much.” I meant to wound, and I did. I would spend the next thirty years grappling with the shame of intentionally hurting a sick man.

Eventually the young man from Jim’s office arrived. He handed the papers to Neil, who took them innocently and then was told that he had just been officially served with divorce papers.

Neil looked at me with surprise and disappointment on his face. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You were just keeping me here for this.”

I nodded.

I remember that moment so clearly. It wasn’t so much that I intended to hurt Neil; it’s more that I was willing to, or some part of me rose up and put that sword in my hand. It really wasn’t him I was thinking about. It was myself and the game I was no longer willing to play.

This was my dark side in action. It’s always difficult for me to admit to my dark side—it doesn’t fit with my self-image, yet it can be a powerful ally. Bringing that dark side into the light as an ally, keeping it at hand and conscious to call on, not for evil, but for my own spiritual work and psychological health, actually creates more love and light in my life. It’s like marshaling all your forces to do what you have to do. And I had to do it. But there was hell to pay: It sent Neil into a full-blown paranoid attack.

The next day a journalist and photographer from Life magazine arrived for an interview and photo shoot. I had just admitted them into the living room when suddenly Neil appeared in a rage calling me a cunt and whore, yelling that I had opened my cunt to every man in town. I called the police. Neil left. So did Life magazine. Neil then went to Bob Rafelson’s office and hid in the bathroom. When Bob came in, Neil jumped him, accusing Bob of having sex with me. He threatened to “get” everyone who had slept with me in the past year.

I spent the day trying to get Neil committed. I went to the police, the hospital. I was told he had a right to his privacy. I called his family to see if they would help get Neil into a hospital. His mother yelled at me, “If you persist in trying to take my son from me, I’ll see to it that your son is taken from you.” I was chilled to the bone that she would be willing to wreak her vengeance on her own grandson.

I went to the district attorney’s office and filed formal petitions to have him hospitalized. But they would have to see Neil behave in a way that was a threat to his own life or mine. I said, “You mean, if he tries to kill me I should call you and keep him doing it until you arrive?”

“That’s right,” they said helpfully.

A few days later, I spoke at Valley State College. Life magazine came to photograph that. I gave the interviewer the name and number to call at the county hospital in case Neil showed up. I was now under siege. I was afraid he would turn up anytime, anywhere.

The next day Bill Blatty took Jeff and me out to visit Tippi Hedren and her husband, Noel Marshall, who had just established a compound for wild animals. They had a pride of five lions they had raised since birth in their home in Sherman Oaks. The cubs were now eight months old, full grown and too big to keep at their house, so they were moved to the compound in Thousand Oaks and were living in a large cage. When we arrived, Noel and Tippi entered the cage and the cubs jumped all over them. I stayed outside, a little cautious about being in a confined space with five lions. They were let out of the cage and leapt happily about, enjoying their freedom. We walked for a while through the trees until we came to a clearing with some picnic tables. Lunch was brought out and we sat at the tables with Tippi and Noel’s kids and their friends. It’s a little disconcerting to eat with lions trying to snatch your ham sandwich. They’d put their giant paws on the table and try to grab some food. Noel would punch them hard and make them get down. I’d been used to eating with dogs with bad manners, but protecting my food from hungry lions was a new one.

After lunch we headed toward the cages. We were walking along a dirt path overhung by trees when suddenly one of the lions leapt from a branch onto Jeff, knocked him to the ground, and pretended to maul him. As I screamed, Noel pulled the lion off as he assured us it was how lions played. It was one of their jokes. Some joke. Jeff did not join in on the joke. He took it very seriously, repeating over and over, “Why me?”

When the lions were rounded up into their cage, Tippi discovered that one of the cubs, a female named Nidra, had gotten wet while they were out playing. She decided not to let the young lion sleep outside that night. She put her in the car and took her back to their house. When we arrived there for dinner, Jeff was playing with all of the many kids present. I was sitting on the couch in the living room. Nidra was roaming around the house like a giant house cat when suddenly she jumped on the sofa and, laying her head in my lap, grabbed my thumb and began to suck it as she soothed herself to sleep. The roof of her mouth was like very rough sandpaper, I have the singular pleasure of reporting. Not too many people have this information who have lived to disclose it. Several times as she slept I tried to retrieve my thumb, but each time I did, Nidra grasped at it and held it fast as she sucked herself back into lion dreamland.

Easter Sunday was the following week and the Friday after that was the court date for our divorce hearing. With Neil now completely identified with Jesus Christ, I was anxious about what he might do to reveal his assumed divinity. I decided I’d better get Jeff to a safe place. Bill Alexander invited him to Detroit for his Easter vacation. I was happy to have Jeff in a place where Neil couldn’t get at him.

On April 4, Jim Butler told me he’d spoken to Neil’s cousin, a lawyer named Toots, who was going to represent Neil in court. He said he planned to ask for visitation rights. I said I’d be surprised if that was all he did. I was right. The next day in court Neil’s lawyer asked for complete custody of Jeff, stating that I was an unfit mother and asking the court to subpoena my psychiatric records. Jim stepped forward and offered a personal observation to the judge that he’d never seen a better relationship between a mother and son. Neil also asked for the $10,000 that BBS was giving me (all the leading actors in The Last Picture Show were given a small percentage point). I had no money in the bank, I owned no home, and I was the sole support of my son. I was asking for nothing from Neil except to be legally divorced. I was shocked at his behavior, but even more so at his family, whom I knew to be behind this. The court ordered Neil to submit to psychiatric examination and reappear in court in seven weeks.

The Academy Awards ceremony was five days away and I was struggling to achieve clarity about the whole competitive Oscar circus. I decided not to attend the ceremonies. Not because I didn’t want to win, but because I did. I could feel just how strong in me the desire was and it didn’t seem healthy. It was like a greedy animal that I knew needed to be tamed. The only way I could think to tame it was to detach myself from that desire and not go. It seemed like a spiritual test not to lust after winning.

At the time, that was my thinking. But I must ask now, was it not also guilt?

In the culture in which I grew up, a woman was supposed to be shorter than a man, make less money, have less, say less, and be less. And any woman who did not stay within that boundary was a castrator; she would emasculate a man, ruin him, perhaps even drive him crazy. Is that what I’d done? I don’t think I asked myself any of these questions consciously; however, they may have been roiling beneath the surface and affecting my decisions without my knowledge.

I did not attend the Academy Awards ceremony.

I struggled with the decision until the last moment. I even attended the rehearsals. I saw my name pinned to the seat where I would sit. Something about it seemed so cruel. Each one of the names pinned to a seat represented a life that had fought to get to the point where they were doing good work in a good film. Five of us in each category were cited, but only one would win. The others would be losers. It seemed so unfair. And a loser by dint of one vote or a thousand. Didn’t matter. A loser. It just didn’t feel right to me. When I called the producer of the Oscar ceremonies and told him I wasn’t going to attend, he said, “But what if you win?”

“Then I’d like Cloris to accept for me,” I answered.

“Oh, no,” he said sounding slightly horrified. “We can’t have any losers on stage.”

And there it was.

But Cloris wasn’t a loser. She won! I was home watching it on television with my friends and I felt so happy for her. Bill Alexander called immediately from Detroit to console me. I tried to convince him that it wasn’t necessary. That, in fact, I was having a great night with my friends because it felt like a graduation day for me.

The next night I had dinner with Cloris. She was radiant with happiness. Many people came to our table congratulating her and I felt deeply pleased for her. There was a freedom in this. I had broken free of bonds that had been tied around me when I was very young. It was the notion that whatever someone has, especially another woman, means that I have less. That was certainly one of my mother’s covert messages. But I had just discovered that I was not less than I was, no matter whose shelf the trophy sat on. I was still me. I was intact. Cloris and I talked about all this and she told me that Ann-Margret, who also was nominated and had won the Golden Globe for her wonderful work in Carnal Knowledge, sat behind her at the Oscar ceremony. She had brought her father out of a nursing home to sit beside her. Cloris said that when her name was called, Ann-Margret took her father’s hand and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

 

 

My first day of shooting was a scene that took place in the office of Dr. Klein, one of the many doctors Chris MacNeil consults regarding her daughter. Because the MacNeil house set wouldn’t be ready for more than a month, in the meantime we shot all the scenes off that set. After two weeks, we ran out of doctors’ offices and Fordham University sets, so we went on hiatus.

During this time I learned from Henry that Neil was in a mental hospital. His father put him there after Neil gave him a black eye. When the blows landed on his parents instead of me, they were ready to admit he needed hospitalization. While in the hospital, Neil received the first of many shock treatments he would have over the years.

Finally, on October 6, the house set was ready. It was beautiful. Billy insisted it be furnished with real antiques and fine art. There was a Degas on set and other valuable pieces. There was an original watercolor by Erté that I admired. At the end of the shooting, Billy took it off the wall and handed it to me. It hangs in my dining room today.

The first scene we were to shoot was my introduction in the movie, me waking up in the morning. Joe Fretwell, the costume designer, and I had picked out some white satin pajamas at Bonwit Teller for this scene, but when we showed them to Owen Roizman, the director of photography, he thought they might be too “hot,” too bright on camera, and suggested they be taken down a bit. So Joe dyed them a pale pink. But on the day we were to shoot, they didn’t look good on me. The color was too close to my skin color; I looked washed out. I hemmed and hawed in my dressing room trying to figure out what to do—be a good girl, as was my habit, and not say anything, or risk making trouble. I decided it was my entrance into the movie and it needed to be right. I brought my concerns to Billy. He flipped out. He canceled shooting for the day and demanded to know who was responsible for ruining his day. I was near tears and begged Billy not to call off shooting, just solve the problem and not blame anybody. During this tearful plea, I saw Billy scrutinizing me, watching my nose and eyes turn red and blotchy and calculating that if this continued, he wouldn’t be able to photograph my face. It was a many-layered exchange, and I saw Billy decide that he couldn’t yell at me. I cried too easily and ruined my face. He’d have to be careful. He never yelled at me again. Everyone else, to be sure, but if he was going to blow, he would actually tell me to leave the set and go to my dressing room. We were able to get new pajamas and shoot that day.

Six days later, The King of Marvin Gardens was shown at the New York Film Festival. The audience gave it a very warm reception, but the critics received it like toxic waste. It would be almost twenty years before it was released on video and appreciated for the original, eccentric, and artistic work that it is. Many people, including me, consider it to be Jack Nicholson’s best work. In my opinion, everything he is credited for in About Schmidt he did earlier and better in The King of Marvin Gardens.

We shot in New York for two weeks, then made the move to Georgetown to shoot the exteriors in the beautiful autumn light. The owners of the house allowed us inside to make our entrances and exits. Little did they know what they were in for. After the movie opened, their house became so famous and attracted so many tourists that they couldn’t stand it and they sold it. The new owners soon learned what problems they’d purchased and, after one or two more sales, it became clear that no one could ever live there and the house had to be demolished.

On Election Day, 1972, we shot Father Karras’s leap from the window and subsequent fall down the stairs. Between setups during the long wait, I watched election returns with Billy. Nixon won by a landslide. For the rest of the shooting, every day in the makeup room, we read in the newspaper about the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the revelations of Deep Throat, and the unraveling of the Nixon presidency.

Before we left New York, Billy had warned us that the problem of shooting in Washington is that it is wedged between two major airports. The longest period without the sound of an airplane overhead was one and a half minutes around three A.M. on a Sunday morning. That meant that everything we shot in D.C. would have to be looped, lip-synched, back in the studio. I had a long difficult emotional scene coming up where I walk with Father Karras and ask him to perform the exorcism. I knew I’d wobble and burble my way through it with small stops and starts and repeated syllables because that’s the way we talk in life. Only when I get on the looping stage and I see the transcript of the scene do I realize what kind of sounds I make while shooting the scene. It’s pretty funny to read, actually. I knew this scene was going to be a bear to loop, but I didn’t want that to inhibit me. I didn’t want to tidy my speech so it would be easier to loop. In the scene I’m questioning Father Karras about exorcism, but not tipping my hand about why I want to know; I have a black eye under my dark glasses because my daughter has just slugged me and her behavior makes it hard to conclude anything else but that she’s possessed. All that has to be hidden from Karras, but present for the audience. When I finally break down and tell the priest who it is that needs an exorcism, I say, “Father Karras, it’s my little girl.”

Later Blatty would tell me that when he was preparing his book on the filming of The Exorcist, he discovered that the line in his script was, “Father Karras, it’s my daughter.” He said, “I didn’t realize you changed it to ‘little girl.’ Then he added generously, “That’s much better. I always loved that line. I didn’t realize I didn’t write it.”

We got the scene. Billy was happy. We went out for a hamburger and beer to celebrate.

My diary tells me that during this meal I spoke to Billy about an article I’d read about Margaret Fuller in Ms. magazine. She was the great transcendentalist friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson who had a brilliant mind and, for a nineteenth-century woman, an amazing life. I thought her story would make a great film, but this diary entry is significant because it tells me I was beginning to examine my own attitude toward the feminine. I was reading Ms. magazine. Gloria Steinem, God bless her, started us on a brand-new path. My generation of women was awakened in the seventies by Steinem, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and other writers who promoted the radical idea that a woman is an equal human being to a man; not equal in abilities, tendencies, talents, hormones, interests, or propensities, but simply equal in value. Different, but not less. This glimmering that was planted in my brain at this time would blossom fully for the next two years and be expressed in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore when Alice says, “I mean, it’s my life. It’s not some man’s life I’m helping him out with.” That was a true awakening for me. I thought women were assistants. You find a man. He’s got the life and you help him out with it. The fact was that even though I was supporting myself and my son and I was becoming famous, I still had no sense of myself except in relation to a man. In other words, I had no self. It was at this time that I began to grow one.

 

 

After The Exorcist finished filming, I began seeing an orthopedist, a chiropractor, and a massage therapist for my back. This was the beginning of a long line of doctors and practitioners who would treat my back and the arthritis that developed in the scar tissue. Although I’ve been angry at Billy for this, I don’t blame him. If I had to shoot that scene today, I would insist on padding on me and the floor. I would not allow anybody to yank me so hard. I would take care of myself. I didn’t know how to do that then. That was not Billy’s fault. Billy would do anything to “get the shot.” That was his priority. I knew that about him. I just didn’t yet know how to defend myself in the face of that fact. I do now.

The scene in which the bed throws Linda and me around did not please Billy when he saw it in the dailies. We reshot it. He still didn’t like it. We shot it again. It was on the schedule every day for the rest of the picture. Any time we were done early, we would reshoot that scene. Five times it was reshot. After my back was injured, I could only do one angle, then lie down until the pain went away before I could do a second angle. Finally, near the end of shooting, Billy accepted what he saw in the dailies.

Every day we got another day behind schedule. As we were about to go into the shooting of the exorcism, we were forty-seven days behind. Noel Marshall, Blatty’s manager and the executive producer, told me that Billy had spent $9 million over budget. He said we would have to do about $37 million worth of business before it could be considered a commercial success. He told me it would have to be the fourth biggest moneymaker of all time before he and Blatty made a nickel. The three top commercial successes at that time were Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music, and The Godfather. We would have to come in right behind these three to break even.

When I questioned Billy, he answered, “So what? I’ve never yet heard one person in the world say, ‘Let’s go see that movie playing on the corner. I hear it came in on time and on budget’!”

The film made $126 million in its first release. For decades it was the fourth-biggest-grossing film of all time. It made millions more when it was rereleased twenty-five years later.

Jack MacGowran, who played the director of the film Chris MacNeil was shooting in the movie, and who was pushed out the window to his death by Regan, left to do a play at Lincoln Center when he was done shooting his scenes. In The Exorcist, Chris finds out that he is dead when the assistant director of the film she’s making comes to her house and tells her. Four weeks after Jack finished, Terry Donnelly, the assistant director of The Exorcist, called to tell me Jack had died of influenza. I remember saying, “Why does it have to be you that tells me?” The synchronicity was too spooky. Synchronicities are defined as meaningful coincidences. According to Jung, they happen when the inner world and the outer world line up. We were teeming with them.

The shooting of the exorcism began, and like everything else in this movie, it took longer than expected. Chris isn’t in this scene. I dropped by Billy’s office to see how it was going. He was beside himself. He’d had to call off shooting for the day. Max blocked on a line. The line was, “The power of Christ compels you!” Max was an atheist. The power of the unconscious is amazing.

Billy said heatedly, “On a list of a hundred things that could happen on this picture, number one hundred would be that Max would—no—number ninety-nine would be that Max von Sydow would be anything but great in this movie. One hundred would be that he’d freeze on a line.” He was wild with frustration.

The next day Max came through and he was, in fact, great in this movie.

They began shooting the exorcism in mid-February. They finished on April 29. It had taken so long that I reread The Exorcist to get back into it before I reported back to work.

In the meantime, I found a house that I loved on the Hudson River and moved out of Manhattan. I didn’t have much—a bed and some towels. During this time my mother called to tell me that my biological father was in the hospital and not expected to live. She gave me the number of the hospital in Florida. I had long been thinking that I didn’t want to go on carrying my anger at my father. I believed that forgiveness was healthy for the soul. I didn’t want my father to die unforgiven. I called his hospital room. After I told him who I was and asked how he was doing, he said, “You know that time you wanted to borrow money, I didn’t really have it, but I’m doing better now, so if you need any…”

I didn’t remember wanting to borrow money, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I just said, “Well, that’s all in the past now. Let’s just forget the past.”

“I’m going to leave you my house,” he answered.

“Thanks, Dad, but why don’t you leave it to Jack? I don’t really need it. I’ve been doing pretty well.”

“I know you have,” he said. “I hope you haven’t been making any of those dirty movies.”

I took a deep breath. I knew from my brother Jack that my father had never seen any of my films. Even when Jack, his wife, and daughters were all going to see The Last Picture Show, and they asked him to go with them, he declined, saying he wanted to “remember her the way she was.”

I said as evenly as I could manage, “No, actually I’ve made some very good movies.”

“I know you have,” he answered. “I don’t even know why I said that. I’ve never been a prude. I’ve always believed in free love. I have no regrets. The only regret I’ve ever had was that I didn’t make it with you when I had the chance.”

I dropped the phone away from my ear and let it hang in my open hand. I looked around the empty room. There was not even a chair. I was sitting on the floor. I didn’t know how to end the conversation. I put the phone back to my ear and said, “Okay, then. Hope you feel better. Goodbye.” I hung up and sat there a long time in the silence and emptiness just looking at the phone in disbelief.

We finally completed shooting in New York. Billy left with the crew for Baghdad to shoot the opening scene with Max. After 224 days of principal photography, this epic was on film.

 

 

Friends of friends contacted Buckminster Fuller and told him I was interested in his great-aunt Margaret. Bucky’s schedule was filled for the rest of the year, but he had some layovers in airports and was willing to see me. His secretary gave me the choice of a one-hour layover in New York, two hours in Boston, or five hours in Chicago. I took the five hours in Chicago. I couldn’t resist five hours with the smartest man in the world all to myself.

We met at his hotel in Chicago for breakfast and afterward went to the airport together. Bucky was then seventy-seven, but he looked as hairless and pink-skinned as a newborn baby. His eyes were bright, although his vision was poor. He told me he had been born cross-eyed and wasn’t operated on to correct that condition until he was four years old. He said when he was a child he could see the trees, but not the veins in the leaves of the tree. I asked him what it had done to him.

In his deep voice and rapid-fire speech, he said, “It taught me to think in generalized principles.”

He told me about his great-aunt Margaret, the whole history of the Fuller family, and many other things. At one point I took out a cigarette and asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

He looked at me with kindness and said, “Oh, I don’t mind for myself, darling, only for you.”

I put the cigarette back in the pack.

I said meekly, “You don’t smoke, huh?”

He held up his hands and examined them almost reverently and said, “No. I, being a human being, am the most sensitive sending and receiving mechanism ever designed. And I wouldn’t want to do anything to interfere with that sensitivity.”

I had stopped smoking many times before, but I had always started again. Soon I would stop for the last time, now that I fully appreciated the deepest possible reason to stop. Also, my mother’s fourth husband, Winsor Meals, of whom I was very fond, was a heavy smoker and had contracted lung cancer. It was a long, painful death. These two men aided me in my effort; at last, I quit.

Bucky and I were to remain friends until his death ten years later. I spent time with him and his wife, Anne, at their home in Maine and got to know his daughter, Allegra, and his granddaughter, Alexandra. He was a great friend and teacher. Slowly, one finds unique ways to fill that father-shaped hole in the heart.

Bucky was a world-class sailor and one day in 1981 he took me sailing in Penobscot Bay. Afterward, we had dinner in a local restaurant. Bucky turned over his paper placemat and on the back of it, he wrote down this poem:

WHY “YOURS TRULY”

I’m not yours

You’re not mine.

My years of life

Are seventy-nine.

Mysteries deepen.

I opine.

Curvaceous, silkaceous, sylphaceous you.

I’m neigh efficacious.

What may we do?

I can’t eat you

And have you too.

Let’s enjoy laughter

And wisdom too.

You’re eternally lovely.

The truly you.

You can’t see me

I can’t see you

But we may know one another

And sometimes do.

Then learn that we both love

Only all that’s true

Wherever we both love

The truly you.

I’ll love you forever

The truly you.

Bucky Fuller

Very special copy for Ellen Burstyn

Sept. 11, 1981

Penobscot Bay, Maine

When I first met Bucky in 1973, I certainly didn’t know who the “truly” me was, but I was doing my best to find out. I listened closely to what Bucky was saying to me at our first meeting. He told me his definition of the universe was: a series of only partially overlapping simultaneous events. For instance, the first star in the handle of the Big Dipper is a live show that took place one hundred years ago. The second star in the handle is a live show that took place two hundred years ago, and on through the whole constellation, with some stars being a live show that took place as long as two hundred million years ago.

I mused on that one, trying to get a clear picture of it. I got it, but the full reality of his insight would come to me with the help of my dog.

A few years previous to this event, I’d read a book called An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne. He said that our dreams are made up of images from our daily lives, past and future. He wrote that in sleep we have the ability to move around in time and pick up images from events that will happen in the near future. He suggested that it was possible to experience this by conducting an experiment that involved keeping track of your dreams consistently every morning for three months. At the end of each week, you were to review the week’s worth of dreams and see how many images appeared in your dreams from events that occurred after the dream. In the third month of the experiment, I had a very vivid dream. I was walking down the center aisle of a large cathedral with a hole in the roof like the hole in the roof of the Pantheon. Rain was streaming down through the hole in a cone shape into the aisle, and I had to pass through it. The rain was luminescent. I don’t remember the other details of the dream, but that image was very intense. I had a strong feeling that that dream and specifically that image were the culmination of the experiment.

Blossom’s husband, Maurice Tuchman, the curator, had mounted an exhibition of contemporary artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that I very much wanted to see. It was so popular that we decided I should visit the museum on Monday, when the museum was closed, to enjoy the show without the crowds. I felt sure that on this day that I was going to see the image of “a hole in the roof like a hole in the roof of the Pantheon.” I assumed it would appear in the exhibition. And sure enough, toward the end of our tour, there was a tabletop construction of a coal mine, with a cart on a track. The track retreated from the eye in perspective, just like the aisle in the church. Above the cart, as though in the ceiling, was a hole. Through that hole poured light coming down in rays made of string that formed the cone shape around the cart and on the track. I stood in front of the exhibit for a long time, thinking that here it was, the image that proved the experiment, and yet I felt not quite satisfied. It was a coal mine, not a cathedral.

Blossom and I left the museum and went back to her house. We sat on the floor around the coffee table in the living room talking about our husbands and particularly about Neil and his mental illness. Blossom got up to go into the kitchen to make more coffee. I stayed sitting on the floor. Suddenly Blossom popped out of the kitchen with an impish expression on her face, holding a book with two hands. On the cover was a beautiful painting of Jesus ascending in celestial light. The title of the book was the one word, Light. Years later when I asked Blossom why she’d brought out the book, she said, “Because we’d been talking about Neil’s Jesus complex.” But that was not what I saw at the time. The moment I saw the book I knew the line “a hole in the roof like a hole in the roof of the Pantheon” was in that book, and I read Blossom’s impish expression like she was a djinn who was delivering to me this extraordinary culmination of the experiment. I leaped up and took the book from her. “That’s it!” I cried. “It’s in there!” I scanned the pages for the phrase. After a while, it was time to pick up Jeff from school and I still hadn’t found it, so Blossom let me borrow the book. I hurried off, picked up Jeff, stopped at the grocery store, went home, put the food away, got dinner in the oven, and settled down to continue my perusal of Light. Not only was the line there toward the end of the book, there was even a sketch of the hole in the roof of the Pantheon with the light streaming in, just as I’d pictured it.

When I moved to New York to shoot The Exorcist, my housekeeper Adela and her children came from California to live with us. After the film was shot we moved out to a house on the Hudson. One day I drove into Manhattan and stayed with my friends from Chamonix, the Friedlanders, for a few days. Jeff came with me. On the third day we drove home and when we arrived, I wondered why Bernard had not greeted us. When I asked Adela, she said, “Bernard not here. I thought he with you.” He’d been gone for three days. Apparently, he tried to follow me into the city. I was in a panic. I spent the next few days calling and searching the nearby animal shelters and calling ones that were farther away. None of them had a dog matching Bernard’s description. I knew dogs were only kept ten days and then they were destroyed. After a week had gone by, I was beside myself. I had to find him, but how? I didn’t know where else to turn. Finally, I decided I’d tried everything I knew on the physical plane. It was time to call on the metaphysical.

That night as I lay in bed, I focused my attention on Bernard. I held him in my awareness and eventually fell asleep. I dreamt I was looking for Bernard. There was a lady with a small brown wiry dog in her arms. I asked about the breed. She asked if I wanted him. I said, “No, not yet. I still mean to find Bernard.”

I woke up knowing that Bernard wasn’t dead and that I must find him. Again I called the shelters near my home and added ones within a twenty-mile radius. A man who picks up strays in a neighboring town referred me to a kennel in Closter, New Jersey. When I walked in, there was the lady with the small brown dog in her arms from my dream. So was Bernard! He was so excited when I took the leash that he ran to the car, pulling me over and dragging me through the gravel.

If my inner universe is a microcosm of the macrocosm, then the first star in my constellation would be the dream experiment that I did in 1970, the second star would be my desire in July 1973 to understand who I truly was. The third would be Bernard forcing me to go inside to search for him, which, if this were all a dream, would represent my instincts. The fourth would be Bucky’s handing me that poem in 1981 that speaks of what is truly me. And the fifth star would be me writing this book now, putting all of this together and seeing the story of my own development and all the “only partially overlapping simultaneous events.” In this “now” moment, all those individual stars are constellated in my inner universe and the resultant understanding of the whole is this: if you want to know who you truly are, the answer won’t be found in the outer world; you must go inside and see where your instincts lead you.

 

 

A few months later, I closed up my house in New York and moved Jeff, Adela, her two daughters, Pamela and Cynthia, Bernard, my three cats, Georgie Baby, Moses, and Maria, back to Hollywood where I rented a house with Bob and Lelia Rudelson. I hired a tutor for Jeff, whom I was taking with me on location for the film I was about to make.

During the filming of The Exorcist, Warners screened the dailies and sent a message through my agent that they would like to do another film with me. They began sending me all the scripts they owned that had any role that I could conceivably play. Reading these scripts was an education. Every woman in them was either the victim, the understanding wife of the hero who was out saving the world, or a prostitute or some other style of sex object. There was no script where the woman was the protagonist. Stories were about men, and women played a role in the man’s story. But it was not what I was experiencing myself. There was a movement, an energy that was igniting the consciousness of women. I saw it all around me; I was reading about it and it was flowing through me as well. I wanted to make a movie about that.

Billy had introduced me to his agent, Tony Fantozzi, and soon Tony was representing me. It was Tony who found Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Bob Getchell. We sent it to John Calley, the head of production at Warner Bros. He liked it, too. There was only one problem. David Susskind had an option on it. However, the option was due to run out in a few days. He had no deal set up at any studio, so there was a good chance he wouldn’t renew. But on the last possible day, he picked up his option. That meant we couldn’t buy it from the writer but would have to deal with David Susskind, whom I knew slightly. He had a reputation for being difficult to work with and I wasn’t particularly eager to go into business with him. So Tony called him and said, “I represent Ellen Burstyn. She’s interested in doing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

“No, I’m doing this movie with Anne Bancroft,” Susskind said.

“We have a green light from Warner Brothers to make it with Ellen Burstyn,” Tony said.

“That’s what I said,” Susskind answered. “We’re making this movie with Ellen Burstyn at Warner Brothers.”

John Calley asked me if I wanted to direct it myself. I wish I’d said yes, but I just didn’t have the confidence to do that. Instead, I told him I wanted “someone new and exciting” to direct. I called Francis Coppola and asked him if he knew a director who fit that description. Francis told me to go see a movie called Mean Streets.

Calley set up a screening of it for me. Warners owned it but hadn’t released it yet. It was directed by Martin Scorsese. I sat in the screening room in awe of the raw talent of the director, as well as its two unknown actors, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.

The only problem was that there was only one girl in the film and she had a minor role. I asked for a meeting with Marty. I sat in John Calley’s office at Warner’s and in walked this short, bushy-browed, high-strung New York Italian guy. He had a nervous laugh and an air of discomfort about him. He perched on a chair. I told him how much I liked his film, then I added, “But this film I want to make I’d like told from a woman’s point of view. What do you know about women?”

“Nothing,” he said pleasantly, “but I’d like to learn.”

His intelligence beamed through his face. We went to work together.

I told Marty that I wanted to do my own singing and piano playing. I had six months to brush up on my piano and get over my block about singing. I lined up both piano and singing teachers and began.

We started casting. I wanted as many members of the Actors Studio as we could cast; I wanted a level of reality throughout the film that I knew actors trained by Lee Strasberg would be able to achieve. I read with all the actors who auditioned. Marty agreed that we should have as many women in positions of authority as possible. Marty hired my friend Toby Rafelson as art director, a rare title for a woman in those days. Then he hired Marcia Lucas (George Lucas’s wife) as editor. On January 3, 1974, we found a wonderful “Audrey.” Her name was Jodie Foster.

 

 

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is the story of Alice Hyatt, who lives in Socorro, New Mexico, with her surly husband and eight-year-old son, Tommy. She tries to please her husband every way she can, but he will not be pleased. He is killed in an accident while driving his truck, leaving Alice with very little money and the care of her son. Improbably, she decides to return to her home in Monterey and resume her pursuit of a singing career. She and Tommy set off for California with Alice trying to pay their way by singing in small clubs. She manages to get one job, and has an affair with a man who turns out to be married and violent. Alice and Tommy flee to the next town, where Alice can land a job only as a waitress in Mel’s Diner. While working there, she meets David, the owner of a small farm, and they fall in love. Now Alice must choose between marrying David and abandoning her dream of returning to Monterey to become a singer, or leaving him and moving on toward her goal.

It was a wonderful, funny, dramatic script, but Marty is the kind of director who likes to play with the script in rehearsals and see what the actors can bring to it in improvisations. Kris Kristofferson was set to play David. Marty also cast, as Alice’s friend Flo, my old friend from Bruce Dern’s acting class, his then wife Diane Ladd. Six other members of the Actors Studio, including Harvey Keitel, were cast, too. We rehearsed for two weeks, fleshing out the characters and the text, and finally encountered the one big problem—the ending. I wanted Alice to pursue her dream. In the original script, Bob Getchell had Alice marry David. That struck me as a conventional “happily ever after” ending that ought to be changed. We tried it many different ways. As the rewrites were coming in to us, they were also going to John Calley at Warner Bros. When the new ending came in, I got a call from John who said in a friendly tone, “I like all the changes in the script except one, the ending.”

I explained to him my reasons for Alice not surrendering her goal to “the man.” John said no. “This script can’t have an unhappy ending,” he said. “We already made a movie last year with an unhappy ending, Scarecrow, and it didn’t make any money.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that if she ends up with a man, it’s a happy ending, and if she doesn’t, it’s an unhappy ending?”

“What I’m telling you is that if she doesn’t end up with the man, we ain’t making the movie.”

That was not a friendly tone.

“Oh,” I said.

So Marty and I agreed that that was our big problem. How do we have her move out of her husband’s house (the very meaning of the title), hit the road, encounter an even more violent masculine figure, learn something about herself—who she is, what she wants—and end up in another man’s house, without compromising the integrity of our work or what we were trying to say about a woman’s search for independence?

That scene got rewritten and rewritten and we just couldn’t get it. Finally it was the day before it was scheduled to be shot and still we had no scene. We rehearsed the next day’s shooting at the end of each day. We were doing an improv on the scene trying to find the way I could give up my dream of going to Monterey and still have it be a good thing, not a surrender to patriarchal values, when suddenly Kris Kristofferson, playing David, said, “Come on, I’ll take you to Monterey.”

It was like the room was suddenly filled with sunshine.

“You will?” I said, feeling a smile break out on my face.

“Sure, I don’t give a damn about that ranch. Come on.”

We had broken through. We’d found the change in consciousness that everything in the movie led up to. The man was willing to support the woman in her aspirations. What she wanted was important enough for him to make a sacrifice. What a concept. Notice that I hadn’t come up with that solution—“the man” did. Kris had to release me/Alice from the bondage of the old way of thinking. In real life, I wasn’t there yet. Thank God for Kris. He was smart and awake enough to see what Alice—and I—needed.

This was a very powerful lesson for me. I was the shepherd of this film. I use that metaphor because there wasn’t a title for what I was. I should have been executive producer. That’s the title I would have gotten if I asked for it, but I didn’t ask. “Oh, I don’t need credit,” I demurred. “My acting credit is enough.” If I’d been executive producer, I would have been part of the deal when it was sold as a television series and had a piece of what John Calley told me were the “mega millions” Warner Bros. made from the television series, of which I had no part. So I was an actress in a film that I had brought to Warner’s, sold to them, and hired the director. That’s what a producer does. Why didn’t I ask for credit? I was asleep—asleep to who I was and what my value was. I did not value myself enough to see that I was the engine that was moving this machine. I was getting this movie made about a woman awakening to the process of living her life as a primary, not a secondary, person. I was in the embryonic stage of giving birth to my own self in life, but it would still not have occurred to me that a man would suggest changing his life to support the woman’s desires. After all, she was only a woman.

I had asked Marty what he knew about women, and he answered, “Nothing, but I’d like to learn.” Well, me too.

One of the tasks of adulthood, in my view, is to look at what has been laid down in our brains early on and decide whether we want to keep that as part of our worldview. Certainly anything that got programmed in as a limitation of our possibilities needs to be examined and consciously kept or rejected. For instance, when I was a schoolgirl, I was in the glee club and was often asked to sing solos. When I was around twelve, I decided I’d like to take singing lessons and perhaps pursue singing as a career. I told this to my mother who said, “Let me hear you sing.” I went to the piano in the dining room and opened the sheet music of “If I Loved You.” I played the opening chords and sang the first line. From the kitchen came my mother’s voice. “Awful!”

That was it! I couldn’t carry a tune after that. My ear went dead. One of the things I wanted to accomplish in Alice was to unlock that block and reawaken my ability to sing. It didn’t have to be great. Alice wasn’t a great singer. I just wanted to be able to sing on key and deliver the song as best I could. I worked for months on that. The final recordings were a patch job of different takes, but I did it. I did my own singing and piano playing in the film with a lot of help and augmentation. But I did it.

 

David Susskind arrived in Tucson, where we were filming, and looked at all the dailies. He asked me to have dinner with him. I no longer remember what he said to me at dinner, but whatever it was, I reported it to Marty, who banned Susskind from the set. We never saw him again. From the very beginning, Marty exhibited that kind of authority. He has incredible energy on the set and gets everyone revved up to their most activated creative energy. Marty’s sets sizzle with creativity. He decided to shoot the opening scene with Alice as a child in Monterey—as a kind of homage to The Wizard of Oz. When the film was cut together and he showed it to the powers that be at Warners, Marty came out seething. He told me they wanted to cut the first scene. He was pacing like a madman.

“What did you say?” I asked.

He stopped pacing and this young director making his first Hollywood studio film said pleasantly, “I told them to take my name off the picture.” Of course that didn’t happen. Marty knew how to play hardball. That’s one of the things you learn on the streets of New York.

 

The Exorcist opened in December 1973. Billy and I attended a sneak preview in Los Angeles before the official opening. As soon as the lights dimmed, we grabbed each other’s hand and held on tight throughout the film. We knew very quickly that the film worked. The audience collectively held its breath and exhaled together at the end of a scary scene. When they had to laugh to stabilize their equilibrium, we knew we had accomplished something powerful. They were scared. But nothing prepared us for the enormous reception the film received when it was released. I remember being in the kitchen of my Hollywood house making coffee as the early news on television showed people lining up for four hours in a blizzard in Montreal waiting for the movie theater to open.

While I was shooting Alice, The Exorcist opened in Tucson. I decided to invite the crew to see it on our day off and have dinner afterward. I had heard about people fainting during the film, but I assumed it was during one of the scarier scenes. It was at this screening that I saw they were fainting at the medical procedure where Linda gets a needle in her neck and blood squirts out. At that moment a woman got up from her seat, ran up the aisle, teetered, and fell to the ground. I got up and ran to her. She was out cold. Other people came and stood around us. I was kneeling beside her, holding her hand in mine and tapping it, trying to get her to wake up. Soon I saw her eyelids flutter and I knew she was about to regain consciousness. Then I realized: This woman is going to open her eyes and the first thing she sees will be my face! She’s going to think she’s died and gone to hell! I quickly turned to the nearest stranger and said, “Here, take her hand!” I slipped away quickly before she could see me.

I was nominated for an Oscar for The Exorcist while I was shooting Alice, but I assumed I wouldn’t go to the ceremony because of my schedule. I was in every scene but two in Alice, and I was working fourteen hours a day, six days a week, but John Calley insisted I go and sent the Warner Bros. jet for me.

The film garnered ten nominations, including Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Jason Miller, and Best Supporting Actress for Linda Blair. Billy told me there was an intense telephone campaign waged by the more conservative members of the Academy who were shocked by the film. I wasn’t sure this rumor was true, but Billy believed it. Anyway, none of us won except Blatty for Best Screenplay, and Robert Knudson and Christopher Newman for Best Sound.

In the Golden Globes we did better—Billy won Best Director, the film got Best Picture, and Linda got Best Supporting Actress. Blatty won this one, too, for his screenplay. Max von Sydow and I were both nominated for an award, but neither of us won. We got zilch.

But the film is a classic and has lasted longer and is shown more often today than any of the films we were in competition with at that time.

 

There was a scene in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in which I’m having an affair with Ben Eberhardt (played by Harvey Keitel). His young wife (Lane Bradbury) comes to see me and asks me not to continue because he’s been missing work and they need the money for doctor bills for their baby. In the midst of this, Ben appears, breaks through the door, and punches and kicks his wife out the door. Then he grabs me and threatens to break my jaw. Harvey was absolutely terrifying in this scene. I didn’t have to act. As a matter of fact, I had a hard time controlling myself through the scene. It was like too many scenes in my life with my mother, Lou, and then Neil. It triggered a terror that was still in me. We were working on the scene all day from different angles, so I tried to distract myself between setups.

To calm myself, I decided to read a script I’d been given that was written by the wife of a producer. It was a chronicle of what it was like to be married to a man who was constantly having affairs with young actresses. This producer was a man, very powerful in Hollywood, who several years before had propositioned me. He said if I went to bed with him, he would try to get me a role in a film. I’d turned him down, but sitting on the stage reading his wife’s story, I felt the whole sexual culture come crashing down on me. I identified with her, with the young actresses, with the wife of Ben Eberhardt, with Alice, who was having an affair with a man she didn’t know was married. All of Neil’s affairs were present in the moment—all of the liaisons I’d had with men I knew were married, all the times I’d gone on location and seen crew guys who were married set up housekeeping with the local waitresses while they were away from their wives, and all the other forms of cheating and infidelity were rising up from that denial, and they were screaming at me, pounding me, laughing maniacally at me like the Furies. And the penalty for speaking the truth was violence. When I accused Neil of things that were simply true, he raged at me and called me oppressive. All of this was raining in on me and I couldn’t suppress it. I was overwhelmed by the breakthrough of that truth. Husbands cheated on wives and women were supposed not to see it, and if we did we were smashed in the face.

These were not thoughts I had during the scene, they were feelings that were erupting out of control, against my will. We shot the master, several medium shots, and a few closeups. I was a wreck. Harvey was beyond scary. I went to the makeup trailer to get my makeup repaired as it was at the beginning of the scene for a different angle. Bob Westmoreland, the makeup artist, managed to put my face back together, but it wouldn’t hold. I started crying again. Soon my mascara was off, my eyes were red and swollen. We tried again, but soon gave up. I couldn’t stop. I was trembling, sobbing, then laughing—I was hysterical. A whole lifetime’s worth of tears was coming out. After an hour and a half, I was nearly calm enough to try again when Toby Rafelson entered the room. Toby had lost her beloved daughter, Julie, the previous year. I knew she had come in to comfort me, but I shouted at her, “Oh no, Toby. I can’t see you.” As the tears started smearing what was left of my mascara, I shouted, “Go out. Go out.” Toby hurried back out the door. But it was too late. I was off again. Soon we just had to call it a day. They shot what they could without me and I was sent home.

 

That summer of ’74, I bought the rights to a book called Silence of the North by Olive Frederickson. It would take me five years to get it made. My agency found me a producer to be my partner named Murray Shostak. When we had agreed on most all points, Murray said to me, holding up an admonishing finger, “But Ellen, I must have final word.”

It is the same thing Neil said to me before we got married, “I must win on a bump.”

I would love to write that I said, “No, Murray, this is my project. I brought it to you. I must be executive producer and have final word. If you can’t live with that, we can’t be in business together.”

But I didn’t. I nodded my head to “the man” demurely and turned my project over to him.

We learn from our mistakes. This was one of mine that I repeated over and over until I got it right. I’ve heard it said that when you make a mistake and don’t learn from it, the next time you have to repeat that lesson, it will be even harder. How many times was I going to have to learn not to turn my power over to a man just because he was a man? How many times? Too many.

I had gone to Lee Strasberg to learn how to act and he taught me well. That’s what I knew how to do. On the stage I did not surrender. I stood my ground. I functioned well. It was offstage that was the problem; in life, in relationships. There I had no such teacher. I grow impatient with myself as I write this. Why did you need a teacher, I want to shout at myself back then. Wasn’t life itself your teacher? Couldn’t you figure it out for yourself? But it is that inner voice, that harsh, critical, disapproving voice that still speaks in me, that was always my enemy. I still wrestle with it even though I have learned to limit its power over me. You can slay the enemy outside, but when it is within, you can’t kill it without killing yourself. You must learn to master it. Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote a wonderful book about the three paths of spiritual life: the path of the prophet, the path of the martyr, and the path of the master. I had no aptitude for either martyrdom or prophecy. It seems I was going to have to learn mastery. And the spiritual warrior’s greatest challenge is mastery of self.

 

While I shot Alice, I was reading Studs Terkel’s book Working. It was a collection of interviews with different kinds of people about their jobs and their attitudes toward working. I remember one man who was a bricklayer said that he had to be careful how he laid each brick. Each one had to be perfectly aligned with the next. If he allowed even one brick slightly out of line, it would bother him to the point that he would drive his car for blocks out of his way to avoid that brick. That kind of integrity is part of us all. And when it gets lost or falls away, it bespeaks of a loss of grace that is innate in us. I see it on sets today. Young actors don’t study at the same level of intensity that my generation did. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions to this, but in my experience, the attitude toward work has suffered in the last twenty years. And it’s not just in acting. Most professionals I talk to are reporting the same thing: doctors, musicians, workers of all kinds. Terkel’s book made me want to put in a scene where someone compliments Alice on being good at her job. When she first had to take a job as a waitress, she felt it was demeaning, but I wanted to show her having pride in her work after a while, whatever her work was. We shot the scene and it was in the first cut, but it didn’t make final cut. The first cut was three hours long and many of our “favorite darlings,” as Tennessee Williams said, had to go. When I look at the film, I still miss that scene because the setup remains. When Alice says she took a job as a waitress, she covers her face in shame, as though being a waitress or any job at all is demeaning in itself, when truly the only demeaning thing is to do a bad job at whatever you are doing. That’s where the disgrace is, not in the job itself.

Kris Kristofferson had made only one other film and just couldn’t accept the fact that he was an actor as well as a musician. After every take he would cringe. One time after one of his close-ups, he winced and said, “Oh man, that was dog shit.”

“What was?” I said.

“The look I had on my face,” he answered, cringing more.

“Well, what are you looking at your face for? Why aren’t you looking at mine?”

Light streamed through his intelligent eyes.

“Let’s do one more, Marty,” he called out.

Then I saw him look at me in the scene and actually connect. He was wonderful.

Kris was a Rhodes scholar and a very popular musician. While we were in Tucson, he gave a concert. The next day I asked him how it went.

“Bad,” he replied.

“What was bad?”

“Everything,” he laughed and winced. “My playing, my singing.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t act. You can’t sing and you can’t play the guitar. What can you do?”

“I’m a poet,” he said. No wince there. He truly was a poet and he knew it.

Kris and I had a scene together in his kitchen after Alice and David have made love for the first time and are slightly tipsy from wine and giddy from sex. Marty had us improvise the scene and I told a story about my brother Jack and me when we were kids. Kris and I were very relaxed in this scene together. For me, it’s the best scene in the film; the most real and the best example of what Marty’s kind of directing can do. The actors are really alive in the scene, nothing about the scene feels static, tight, or rehearsed. That’s the level of reality I aim for and just once in a while, the script, the director, the actors, and the camera are all in sync and can strike just the right chord.

My son Jeff played the next-door neighbor’s son, Harold. My friend Lelia Goldoni played his mother. In the film, coming home from my husband’s funeral, as I got out of the backseat of the car, Jeff was in front. I touched his shoulder and ad-libbed, “Bye, Harold.”

Jeff, without missing a beat, said right back, “Bye, Alice.” It was so strange to hear my own son call me Alice. The Fondas, the Redgraves, the Barrymores must experience that all the time. But it was just one treasured moment for me. When I look at the film these many years later, it still touches my heart.

We finished the picture and headed home. When Jeff went back to school he found new friendships had been formed, new cliques assembled. He was an outsider. He told me that he didn’t want to go on location with me anymore. He wanted to stay in school. That was sad news for me, but Jeff was old enough to make that kind of choice and I had to honor it.

Around this time, Lee Strasberg asked me to serve on the board of directors at the Actors Studio. He also asked me to begin to moderate the acting sessions. I didn’t feel capable of doing that, but he insisted. I owed so much to him and the Studio, I wouldn’t say no. But I was one wobbly moderator when I started. One day I said to Lee, “Sometimes when I’m talking to an actor, I think of something I want to suggest to them and then I go, Wait—is that ‘Method’? I don’t think it is.”

Lee answered, “Always rely on your own experience, dahling, and you can’t go wrong.” That is the best advice I ever got from him or anyone else.

J. W. Dunne says that the brain is a machine for the education of the soul. And that our experiences are what lay down the tracks in the brain with which to teach our soul. To me, experience is both a teacher for the soul and a tool to use in teaching others.

 

In September, back in my home on the Hudson, Neil found me. I’m not sure how, but he did. He was ranting. He claimed he’d seen a bus with a number on it that was the first three numbers of our address in Hollywood and two of the numbers from our phone number in New York. He was sure that this was a message from me that I wanted to talk to him. I assured him that I didn’t and asked him to leave. When he refused, I called the police. This was the beginning of a pattern that lasted for five more years. He would arrive any time, day or night, in an agitated state, sometimes declaring his love and wanting me back; sometimes to beg my forgiveness; and sometimes to threaten my life. It always ended with the police coming to take him away. Sometimes they put him on a bus for Manhattan. Sometimes he would be so unmanageable, they would take him to the state psychiatric hospital, where he stayed until he calmed down and then they’d release him. Soon he’d be back and we’d start all over again.

 

There was a bizarre contrast between the success and glamour of my public life and the terror and trauma of my private life. I needed something to help me stabilize the two extremes. A call came inviting me to visit Iran.

I’d always been drawn to the poetry and mysticism of the Middle East. I was asked to be a member of the American contingent to the Tehran Film Festival. The Shah had inaugurated the festival just a year before and my friend Fred Haines’s film of Steppenwolf was to be in competition. I also knew there was a strong Sufi presence in Iran and I felt excited to connect with the people there. I said yes.

I had no plan for how to find a Sufi group. I suppose I might have asked Pir Vilayat or Reshad, but I’d never heard either of them mention connections in Iran, although they often spoke of groups in Turkey and India. Besides, I had faith in the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I knew I was ready for my next step, whatever that was. I counted on the teacher appearing.

I took Henry with me. The American contingent to the festival included the director John Frankenheimer and his wife, John Forsythe and his wife, and Ron Ely, the tall blond Adonis who played Tarzan, which was the most popular show on Iranian television at the time. Everywhere masses of children followed him down the street making the Tarzan call. Police had to escort us to control the crowds, who were begging Ron to make the Tarzan call, but he just smiled at them. Finally I asked him why he didn’t satisfy their wish. He shrugged his massive shoulders and said, “I can’t.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He whispered in a helpless voice, “I’m dubbed by a Swiss yodeler.”

One of the film festival officials told me that The Exorcist had not played in Iran because each of the three times they tried to dub it, the dubbing cast got too frightened and couldn’t complete it.

After a few days in Tehran, we were taken to the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. Parts of the city had been restored, but other parts were still an archeological dig that looked eerily like the opening scene of The Exorcist. Our group was led into an ancient tomb and John Frankenheimer looked at me and said, “It’s just too spooky being here with you.” The group laughed uncomfortably, but soon hurried out of the tomb.

Next we visited Isfahan. It was astonishing. I saw people in tribal robes with bright red hair. My guide told me they were a tribe of Jews who had migrated to Iran hundreds of years ago and managed to keep their ethnicity intact over the centuries.

Walking down the street, I stopped at a red light. Next to me stood a shepherd with his entire flock waiting for the light to change. The man was dressed in a robe as in biblical times, with a modern suit jacket over it. Two eras met in this instant as we waited for the light to change. I noticed a stick in his hands lightly touching the shoulder of one of the sheep. When the light changed, he lifted the stick an inch or two and immediately the sheep started off across the thoroughfare; the rest of the flock following like…well, like sheep.

In Isfahan, I stayed at the Shah Abbas, an old graceful hotel built around a central court that was a magnificent garden. Peacocks, the symbol of the Shah’s lineage, walked slowly around it, lifting their feet high and unfurling their gorgeous tails. At night I heard a lone bird sing a haunting song from the silence of the garden. I recognized it immediately—it was a nightingale. You need not have heard that song ever before in order to recognize it. Even the first time, it’s like an old memory rising from our long-forgotten home in paradise.

The people I met in Iran were some of the most sophisticated, cultured and gracious I’ve ever known. From them I learned that when the Arabs conquered that part of the world, only Iran maintained its original Persian identity. The people speak of their Persian heritage with pride, and it is this connection to the Persians, one of the most advanced peoples of the ancient world, that sustains them, no matter their ruler.

Iran is the only place I’ve ever visited where the poet is the most exalted being. When a revered poet dies, he is not buried in a cemetery, but his tomb is placed in a public garden where people come to visit and sit and listen to his poetry being read, softly, in Farsi. I visited Hafiz’s tomb in Shiraz where the pathway to the tomb was lined on either side with every variety of rose, trimmed at nose height so that as you walked, roses gently brushed your cheeks and you inhaled their intoxicating scent, each aroma slightly different from the one before. At the end of the path I entered an open-air garden with a long rectangular reflecting pool. Sitting on a worn stone bench, I watched in the dark blue water of the pool the white clouds move across the sky, making changing patterns of reflected light in the deep shadows.

Back in Tehran the festival was nearing its close and I still hadn’t connected with any Sufis, although I’d asked all the Persian people I met if they knew any. No one seemed to. I knew they were there, I just didn’t know where to find them. Sufism originated as the mystical branch of Islam, the inner esoteric teaching, therefore there are no Sufi temples or mosques to happen across on the street. There is usually just a private group led by a particular teacher, most often in his home.

Finally, on December 4, the festival ended in a huge and rare snowstorm. We were scheduled to leave on December 5. Henry and I planned to fly to Jerusalem. I was so disappointed that I had failed to connect with a Sufi group. We got up on December 5, packed and went downstairs to leave. The hotel lobby was a riot. People were milling about, talking excitedly. The airport was closed. The roof had collapsed under the weight of the snow. Nobody could leave Iran until it was repaired. No one knew how long that would take. I recognized surrender time when I saw it and I asked if we could keep our rooms. We could. We cancelled our hotel in Jerusalem and unpacked our bags. That night Fred and Francey Haines asked us to join them and an American journalist at a Persian vaudeville club. We sat in the balcony and watched the acts. With our party was a Persian woman named Sharoo. One of the acts was a comic in a long white woolen robe.

The audience was laughing happily at his jokes. I asked Sharoo to translate. She said it was very difficult to translate because his jokes were inside jokes for Persians. She said, “This man is a dervish. I don’t know if you know about that.”

“Yes,” I exclaimed. “You mean he is a Sufi?”

She was surprised to hear that an actress was initiated into a Sufi group in America. She then told me she was with a group in Tehran and would be glad to introduce me to her teacher the following day.

The next day was December 7, 1974, my forty-second birthday.

In the afternoon Sharoo took Henry and me to meet Dr. Elahi, known as Shah Bahram. He and his family lived in a beautiful, quietly elegant house. We were shown into an upstairs room, where a small group of people was gathered around a low round table. Nescafé was prepared and served in small cups. Shah Bahram was a man in his forties who had an air of sophistication, grace, and focused energy.

Henry and I were treated as honored guests, which is usual in any Persian home, and also is a Sufi tradition. Over the next few days I was to learn Dr. Elahi’s story. He grew up in this house with his older brother and his younger brother. His father, Nur Ali, was Pir, or teacher, of a Sufi group known as Ahl-i Haqq. Nur Ali, now called after his death Hazrat Elahu, had died the previous October without naming a successor. Everyone waited for a sign to come, signaling who that would be. The assumption was that it would be the eldest son. Finally, months after Hazrat Elahu’s death, his sister had a dream wherein Hazrat Elahu appeared and named his middle son, Dr. Elahi, who was living in Paris with his wife and children and teaching surgery at the Sorbonne. Dr. Elahi promptly left Paris, moved back to Tehran with his family, and became the spiritual leader of this dedicated group.

Dr. Elahi spoke softly to us, “I do not care if you accept me as a teacher or not, but because you are here, I would like you to leave here today with at least the knowledge of how to recognize a real teacher.” He said, “First of all, a real teacher will be an example of his teaching. He will not say one thing and live another way. What he tells you that you must do, he is already doing himself. Also a real teacher’s teaching will show in the lives of the people around him. As Jesus said, ‘By his fruits ye shall know him.’

“A real teacher will really solve problems. For instance, if a man comes to the teacher and tells him that he is in love with a woman, but she is already married, by the time the man leaves, he will no longer love the woman.”

Then Dr. Elahi said, “If you are interested in the work we do, I ask you to give up five things: smoking (anything), tea, pork, alcohol, and judging.” It was a very strange list. Tea was easy; I was still drinking coffee. Pork was not difficult because I wasn’t a big meat eater. Smoking was more difficult because, although I’d given up cigarettes by then, I still smoked grass. That one took real effort. So did alcohol. I’d had two vodkas at lunch, not realizing they were my last. In the coming year I was about to face the most successful year of my life, winning both the Oscar and the Tony, and other awards as well. There were countless parties and celebrations. And I attended them all without one sip of champagne or any other stimulant. I was absolutely sober; therefore I was able to avoid getting caught up in the bubbly atmosphere that enormous success splashes over your inflating ego.

But it was the fifth thing that Dr. Elahi asked me to give up that required true spiritual effort. I tried not to be judgmental, but I caught myself over and over again not only judging others, but I had a deep pattern of judging myself. If a person hits us over the head and takes our money, are we not to get angry, call the police, and call him a thief? I couldn’t quite understand it. As a matter of fact, it was nearly a year later, in a conversation with Pir Vilayat, that he helped me to define the difference between judging and discernment.

You discern when a person cheats you or steals from you. You report him or her; you avoid contact with him/her. You don’t put yourself in a position where that person can rob you or cheat you again, but you don’t judge that person. It is not our job to judge each other because we don’t have all the facts or information about the person’s karma. They act out their own destiny and make their own mistakes that they will either learn from or not, but that is their path, not ours. We can’t even judge ourselves. Who knows what mistakes we need to make in order to learn the lessons we came here to learn? And if we learn them, how are we to judge what we had to go through to come into the light of understanding?

The night before we left Tehran, we attended the Zikr, a Sufi spiritual practice that translates as “remembrance of God.” The women were in a separate room from the men, but with the connecting doors open between us. There were around fifty women in our room and seventy-five men in the larger room. The musicians were also in the room with the men, but right next to the open door between us. They started playing softly and slowly the background rhythms for the Zikr. The people began the prayer quietly at first—La ilaha ill’ allah hu—There is no God but God. I had been taught the Zikr by Reshad in London and had done it for my morning practice when I was on the mountain at Pir Vilayat’s camp. As the chant went on, the musicians increased the tempo and the volume. The intensity of the prayer grew. It felt like the energy was rising to the breaking point; that something would erupt. The women around me were swaying and many were crying. I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. It felt strangely exciting, but somehow dangerous. Then just as it reached the point that I felt the whole room could explode, the musicians decrescendoed and slowly the energy was brought back down and we reentered a more normal state. I had never taken part in a collective energy that moved to that height of intensity. I felt exhilarated, mystified, unsettled, and slightly scared. All around me women were crying, and I could see they’d had a profound experience.

Soon a barefoot servant came in dressed in a white tunic and tight white pants laced around his legs. He carried a basket of fruit and gave two oranges to each woman to bring home to her children. The women received the fruit from this man as though he were a high dignitary. He presented the fruit like an offering and they bowed their heads as he placed it in their hands. Something about this man compelled me to watch him as he moved about the room. I didn’t have an opportunity to ask about him until the following year, when I returned to Iran for my second visit.

As we filed out of the prayer room, the three sons of Hazrat Elahu stood at the door saying good-bye to each of the participants. Dr. Elahi introduced me first to his older brother, a kindly and quiet-looking man. Then I met the younger brother, who was strikingly beautiful, as one could imagine Jesus looked if pictured with the black hair and dark eyes he probably had instead of the blond, blue-eyed image passed to us through the German tradition. As he held my hand and pierced me with his gaze, another man who was leaving bent to the ground and kissed the shoes of the man whose eyes I was looking into. Growing up as an American in a democracy, I was both startled and slightly uncomfortable to see this man on his knees kissing another’s shoes. But the eyes I was looking into did not flinch. They continued to hold mine. I could not interpret his gaze, but I felt sure he was reading my discomfort and did nothing to assuage it. It was mine to deal with. I was the one seeking my own path far from home. Not him. He was where he belonged. Was I? I wasn’t sure. But I was intrigued with these people and asked the film festival organizers to invite me back the following year.

After the Zikr, Dr. Elahi told me that his aunt would like to meet me. This was the sister of Hazrat Elahu who had the dream wherein it was announced who would be the successor. She was bedridden and few people got to see her. She was highly regarded by all of the members of the group, and it was a great honor to be invited into her bedroom. Sharoo and a few others were allowed to attend with me. We were ushered into her bedroom. She was sitting up in bed fully clothed. The group stood around her bed and she spoke in Farsi. She took my hands and spoke a few sentences. Soon we took our leave so as not to tire her. Outside her room, Dr. Elahi said to me, “She said that the Master is very pleased that you have come.” “The Master” is how they affectionately referred to Hazrat Elahu. One assumes he continued to appear in her dreams.

I tried to be open to what was happening, but I also didn’t want to romanticize it. I felt drawn to these people and, at the same time, unsure that I belonged there. I just knew I wanted to know more.

We prepared to leave Tehran. Henry had been with me at all of the meetings and I could see that he responded to Dr. Elahi, but after the very first meeting, he grew very moody and went into one of his withdrawals from me. We barely exchanged words, although we were together twenty-four hours a day. On December 10, we flew the eighteen hours back to New York in complete silence. At JFK Airport, Jeff was waiting for me with his tutor. Henry walked away and got a taxi. That was it. At our first meeting, Dr. Elahi had said, “If a man comes to a real teacher and says he’s in love with a woman, but she’s married, by the time he leaves the teacher, he won’t be in love with the woman anymore.” I’d been married three times. Henry was Catholic. I think he took Dr. Elahi’s example to heart. Our push me/pull you, on again/off again troubled relationship was over.

 

After the success of The Exorcist and filming Alice, I decided it was time to return to the stage. I put out word that I was looking for a play, and Kitty Hawks, daughter of Howard Hawks and who was an agent at that time, sent me Same Time, Next Year by Bernard Slade. I loved the play and agreed to do it. Upon my return from Iran, the producer, Mort Gottlieb, told me they’d selected Charles Grodin as my partner and asked that we meet to see if we liked each other, as the play was about a twenty-five-year love affair, and had only these two roles.

As I remember it, I drove into Manhattan, picked up Charles, and drove him out to my house on the Hudson River for the afternoon. Charles and I liked each other immediately and decided that we highly approved of the casting. When it was time to drive him back to his apartment, I said, “There’s just one thing more you should know about me. I have an ex-husband who is schizophrenic and stalks me. He could appear at any time and the police need to be called to take him away.”

Charles, who is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, looked at me with a face of wonder and said, “See now, what you just said has erased everything you’ve said today.”

My last diary entry for 1974 was on December 19:

Had meeting with Chuck Grodin, who is very smart, talented, funny and I think we will do just fine together.

Went to Rudolf Steiner’s to see The Nativity. Jeff was “the first shepherd.” Once he made a mistake and said, “Whoops.” Everyone laughed. It was the highlight of the night.

I am feeling very good about not smoking or drinking. As a matter of fact, I feel like I am finally becoming me.

Forty-two years old and it is the first time in all these notebooks and diaries that I wrote a sentence like that: I am finally becoming me. What I see now is that the feeling of connectedness to self only came to me when I stopped smoking and drinking. Those habits that had made me feel more at ease socially were the very things that were keeping me from being comfortable with myself.

But I had a long way to go before I understood the difference between myself and the Self.

 

We began rehearsals for Same Time, Next Year on January 20, 1975. We were upstairs in the old rehearsal hall of the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, before it was refurbished. Gene Saks was directing. From the start, Charles and I wrangled with the author, Bernard Slade. It was a very funny play, but it was about a long-term extramarital affair. Doris and George are married to others, yet they meet one weekend a year for twenty-five years. It was a lot to expect an audience of mostly married people to accept. Onstage we often talked about our spouses, Helen and Harry, who would prove to be very important offstage characters. One insensitive remark about either of our spouses and we could lose the audience’s sympathy. It was very tricky. I could sense when we were headed for dangerous territory, but Charles was even more sensitive to that than I, so much of our rehearsal time was spent haggling over this issue. One day, as Charles and I were standing onstage arguing with Bernie, we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Neil, ranting and raving.

I don’t know how he found out where rehearsals were or how he found his way upstairs in this otherwise closed theater, but as crazy as he was, he could always find me. The production stage manager grabbed Neil and ushered him out. Morty Gottlieb, the producer, then took elaborate precautions to secure the space. I didn’t know what they were, but I was assured “not to worry, it won’t happen again.”

Less than a week after we began our rehearsals, Alice opened to marvelous reviews. After lunch that day, as I sat quietly onstage waiting for everyone else to return, an image rose in my mind of me sitting in a little restaurant in Dallas on Thanksgiving, staring down at my hamburger. Now here I was, twenty-five years later, in rehearsal for a Broadway show, and the movie I put together on its way to being a success. I actually had some money in the bank; I felt I was gaining some stability in my life. For the moment, I did. Just for a moment.

In mid-February we left for Boston for the out-of-town run of Same Time, Next Year. We had only one day of rehearsal onstage with the actual furniture. In rehearsal, you usually work on a bare stage with tape on the floor to indicate walls and doors, and hard straight chairs with makeshift tables; it’s always a shock to make the transition to the set. The real furniture feels totally different from what your body has adjusted to; everything feels bigger, and very awkward. We stumbled through our only rehearsal before opening, with Bernie pacing in the back of the theater. At the end, he came quickly down the aisle and blurted, “The rhythms are all off.”

“It’s our first time onstage!” I said. “Will you get out of here and let us work!”

He took his nervous stomach and playwright’s tortured soul back up the aisle. Gene Saks calmed us down and gave us notes. We were in pretty good shape to open, except for one thing: the first-scene curtain line. The first scene takes place the morning after George and Doris have made love for the first time. They have just met the night before and are feeling guilty. During the course of the scene, as they express their guilt and talk about their marriages, they actually get to know each other and fall in love. The scene had to end with a setup for all that follows and it had to be funny. No laugh on the first-scene curtain line in a comedy is not a good thing. We opened without the laugh and spent the next two weeks looking for it. Bernie wrote a new line for each performance. No laugh. Gene Saks suggested a line. No laugh. Charles came up with several. No laugh. I suggested a line: As we say good-bye, staring into each other’s eyes, we suddenly get up and head for the bed, and I say, “Okay! But this is the last time.” Nobody liked it. We didn’t even try it.

The reviews in Boston were fantastic. Now we were ready for New York…except for the first-scene curtain. Finally, when we had exhausted everybody else’s lines, for the last performance in Boston they agreed to try mine. At last, we got a laugh. In New York for opening night, Bernie gave me a gift of a beautiful antique silver box. On the bottom it was engraved from Bernie to me, ELLEN BURSTYN, LINEWRIGHT. When I read it, he said, “You’re not a playwright, but you are a linewright.”

Charles Grodin is one of the most eccentric, talented people I’ve ever known. We had a great time playing together. Our first onstage kiss came in the second scene. In rehearsal we would play the scene up to the moment of the kiss, then Charles would stop and say, “And then I kiss her.” He refrained from kissing me until the first performance before a live audience in Boston. Then he kissed me and he really did it. I had the sensation of an electric charge moving from where our lips met, down my body, and landing smack in my number-two chakra! When we parted lips, I stood there stunned for a moment with my lips hanging out for more. The audience laughed at my great acting. But I wasn’t acting. I’d just fallen in love and it showed. After the scene, I passed Charles behind the flats and looked at him for any sign that he felt the same thing. He looked at me frankly and said, “We’ll go out after the show.” I nodded. He knew. We went out afterward. I knew I was in trouble. The show felt like a hit. Charles was an extremely complex, sensitive and, as I said, very eccentric fellow. There was no way we could have a relationship and not have it be a stormy one. There’s nothing worse than having to be in love with someone onstage that you’ve just had a fight with offstage. I told Charles how I was feeling and what I thought about it. I suggested we have our love affair only onstage. He agreed, and that’s what we did.

When I had dinner with Walter Matthau and his wife, Carol, years later, they talked about Same Time, Next Year. Walter told me that the word around town at that time was that Charles and I were in love. Walter had gotten their tickets through his agent, who asked him the next day, “What does that look like to you?” And Walter answered, “It looks like love.” His agent said, “That’s what it looks like to me, too.”

Well, it was love, but only onstage. I think it was one of the reasons people responded so well to the show. It wasn’t exactly a performance. To me, emotions are an energy and if you can bring that love energy onstage, it reaches out into the theater. The audience sat watching Same Time, Next Year and felt like they were “in love.” And they were.

When we got to New York for the first previews, I was worried about running into Neil. Even though the producer had told me not to worry, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Neil could appear at any time. Our first matinee in New York, Charles and I were onstage just before the end of the first act, standing face to face in a quiet moment, when out of the silence and blackness of the house came Neil’s voice shouting, “Ellen.” Just once. But that was enough. Suddenly the blackness of the house was alive with menace. He could shout more. He could run up on the stage. He could have a gun. We couldn’t see him, but he could see us. We were sitting ducks.

Charles and I stared at each other in terror. Our eyes widened. We continued the lines of Doris and George with our mouths, but our eyes were full of sheer panic.

Soon the scene was over and the lights went out. Shaking, we hurried offstage to the stage manager’s podium. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s under control. We couldn’t legally refuse to sell him a ticket until he made a scene. Now that he has, we can refuse to ever admit him again. We placed him in the top row of the balcony. We had him surrounded on all sides with security. As soon as he called your name, they hustled him out of there. It’s okay now. He’ll never get in again.”

That’s when I learned that since Neil’s intrusion into the rehearsal hall, we’d had security at all times. Plainclothes detectives were outside the theater at every performance. Opening night, as I entered the party with Charles after the show, I was surrounded by bodyguards dressed in tuxedos.

The opening-night performance went well up until the last moment. In the last scene, George comes to say that his wife has died. He wants me to leave Harry and marry him. If I don’t, he says he will marry an old friend of his named Connie. I refuse and we say good-bye for the last time. It’s over, he’s never coming back. When he leaves, it’s important the audience really believes he’s gone and they feel the loss of the relationship. Then George bursts back in the room, admitting he’s lied. There is no Connie. He was just trying to get me. We laugh. The audience laughs with tears still on their faces from thinking the play ended with the love affair ending. All through Boston and the previews in New York, whenever we got to that final good-bye, I cried. I believed it in the moment and never had to prepare any kind of sense memory or other device to make me cry. Suddenly, on opening night, we got to that moment and I had no tears. Nothing. I was dry. George is standing at the door saying his final lines and I’m empty. Nothing, and I’ve got no acting technique prepared to prod me. So this is what I did. I thought, Oh my God! I’m dry. I’ve got nothing. It’s opening night. And this is the climax of the whole play and I’m ruining it. The critics are here. They’ll give us bad reviews and we’ll close. So I’m really saying good-bye. Not to George. To Charles. Our love affair in this play is over. And I’ve done it. I’ve ruined the whole thing. I started bawling like a baby. The audience believed it was over. They started crying. George popped back in the door. The audience laughed with tears still on their cheeks. Charles and I embraced. The curtain came down. The audience cheered. We took our bows together. We never took single bows. As we stood looking out at the audience, we saw our children—Jeff, and Charles’s daughter, Marion—leap to their feet and applaud us as we threw them kisses. The show ran for three and a half years.

Charles and I weren’t in it for the whole run. Our contracts were for six months. That’s the longest I’ve ever done one play. And frankly, I found that by the fifth month of eight performances a week, I was having a difficult time keeping it fresh. I managed, but it took all my effort not to fall into mechanical acting. I like to keep growing in a role as long as I’m doing it. For me, opening night is just the beginning. I like to find new ideas, deeper feelings, better ways to express the character, at every performance. I don’t always succeed. I have an off night sometimes, but it is the intention that matters to me. Acting is my profession and my art form, but it is also my way; my spiritual way in the world. Sufism is not a path of renunciation. It is a path of doing your spiritual work in the world. My spiritual commitment is to do my best effort at all times, whether I am acting onstage or serving in a soup kitchen. I give everything I can possibly give. For me, giving is the vehicle of expressing the spirit within and to give a gift that is anything but your best is to disdain the divine.

So it was in this play that I had the longest opportunity to test my spiritual courage and commitment, not just to my work, but in “the work.”

The trappings of success are in fact a trap. All the rave reviews for Alice meant that the press wanted to interview me to the point of distraction from my work in the play. I didn’t read the reviews, but years later (much to my surprise) I saw a scrapbook my mother had put together of my press for this period. One said, “Ellen Burstyn is the hottest thing since aluminum siding.”

I don’t think they were referring solely to my performance. It was because Alice was the first picture to give voice to the emerging liberation of the modern American woman. We were awakening from centuries of sleepwalking to the dictates of the patriarchy, and Alice was the first film that showed just how it happened to one woman. Also the fact that I’d introduced the project to Warner Bros., then brought in the unknown director Martin Scorsese, who was soon to become a major force in American cinema, added to the fact that Marty liked to improvise and that certain events in my life were integrated into Bob Getchell’s brilliant script—put it all together and the press gave me credit for everything but hanging the lights.

Time magazine even managed to hear about my breakdown in tears after the scene with Harvey Keitel, when we had to stop shooting due to my hysteria. They wrote about it in their review as though that incident was from my life. Bob Getchell called the theater in Boston to complain. He said, “Ellen, you know that scene was exactly as I wrote it.” And it was. But it was too late. A woman getting a film made from a woman’s point of view was such a big story in 1975 that it was a watershed that opened up possibilities for other women filmmakers. That was great, but it was also embarrassing that everybody else’s contribution got short-changed.

When we learned that I’d been nominated for an Oscar for Alice, Mort Gottlieb thought I should fly to Los Angeles for the ceremony and take a day off to fly back. That would mean that people who’d waited for weeks to see the show would see the understudy. The people were expecting to see Charles and me, and I hated to disappoint them. I thought about it carefully and decided that it wasn’t right for me to go. I must confess that this moral high ground was not so difficult for me to take because I have very ambivalent feelings about awards and award shows. Part of my character loves to put on a pretty dress and go out on the red carpet and shine my false smile for the cameras. But I don’t consider that the best part of me or the deepest or most real. So when there’s a choice, I have to go with my better self. There were probably other factors, too, like guilt regarding my success and the ongoing tragedy of Neil’s mental illness.

After the performance that night, Jeff and I went over to Barbara and Ira Friedlander’s apartment and watched the Academy Awards on television. I’d asked Marty Scorsese to accept should I win, and when my name was called, everyone in the room started screaming and hugging me and slapping me on the back, so I never heard what he said.

I was very pleased with the awards that year. My friend Francis Coppola won many awards for The Godfather Part II, and though Lee Strasberg didn’t win for his performance in that film, he lost to his student, Bob De Niro. But best of all, Art Carney won for Best Actor in Harry and Tonto, in which I played Art’s daughter. After The Exorcist, Paul Mazursky had called me and said, “I wrote a part for you in my next film. It’s called Harry and Tonto, but it’s not a huge role. Maybe now you’re too big and might not want to play it.”

I said, “Not at all. I think everyone should do whatever role interests them, no matter the size. Send it to me.” When he told me it was to play Art Carney’s daughter, I knew I wanted to do it. Now on the same night I won my Oscar, my old friend from the Jackie Gleason show won his for Harry and Tonto.

Was I surprised that I won? Not really. This was my third nomination. The picture was a huge success. I was getting tons of publicity for being on Broadway at the same time. As I remember it now, I expected to win that year. But once I did win, I got very quiet inside. When the awards were over, I went into Barbara and Ira’s small dark meditation room, lit a candle, and sat for half an hour with closed eyes. I looked back at the long journey from Detroit. I saw Edna sitting on the floor at the window in the bedroom, dreaming of one day becoming a famous actress, and I gave thanks for all the blessings in my life. Some of the blessings came as gifts and good fortune. And some came as painful events that I called upon in my work and transformed into creative energy.

When Jeff and I got back home to our house on the Hudson, I tucked him into bed and read him to sleep, needing to soothe him of all the night’s excitement. Then I went downstairs, sat in my kitchen, and called my mother, Aunt Vi and Uncle Chuck, and Blossom, who typically “didn’t know it was today” and therefore hadn’t watched the Oscars.

When I called my mother, she had been watching the show on television with some friends. She told me, “I said to my friends, if she wins this damn thing, I’m going to turn cartwheels, and I did! When they said your name, I got right down on the floor and turned a cartwheel! My friends were laughing so hard.”

I waited to see if she had anything at all to say about me. Finally she did. After a quiet pause, she said, “Oh, honey, I’m so proud of you.”

When I hung up the phone, I looked around my empty kitchen and said out loud to the silence, “There, now, that didn’t take much, did it?”

 

The next day when I arrived at the theater, the paparazzi were waiting at the stage door. I always arrived at the theater barefaced, so I asked them if they would wait for me to put on some makeup. They kindly said they’d wait. When I went inside, the backstage doorman said, “There’s a call for you, Ms. Burstyn.” I stepped into his little cubicle and took the receiver of the wall phone.

“Hello?”

“Well, the alumni did pretty good last night.” It had been eighteen years since I’d spoken to Jackie Gleason, but that voice was unmistakable. It seemed strange and wonderful that Art Carney and I should win in the same year. I was very pleased to receive Jackie’s congratulations.

When I got to my dressing room, it was filled with flowers and there were stacks of telegrams. In my diary I wrote:

The press was very kind about letting me get into my makeup…but I kept them waiting a few minutes longer while I ripped open a stack of telegrams. I wasn’t reading them, just scanning the names. I was looking for one name only—Bill Friedkin. It was like the moment in Rosemary’s Baby when she pops the liver in her mouth without thinking, and then realizes what she has done. I suddenly saw myself keeping all these people waiting while I ravaged through a crowd of well wishers. There was only one smile I cared to have shine on me—one face—one name—Bill Friedkin. I stopped with the blood fresh on my lips, and said loud in my head, “He’s the most important person in the world to me!” It was a lightning flash. “I have only him in my heart that I want to share this with!”

On April 10, I received the letter from Billy that I’d been waiting for. He told me how proud he was of me, and pleased for me, and called me the finest actress in America. He told me he’d be in New York in two weeks and wanted to see me.

In my diary I wrote:

When the letter came from Billy, I knew why I had not gotten a telegram. Nothing fast. Something special. I was so glad. The letter was beautiful. I treasure it. I called him to thank him and I told him about my moment opening the telegrams. He said, “I love you, Ellen.” I said, “I love you too, Billy.” Then he added—“and I mean that in every conceivable way!”

I wondered what he meant by that. He was still involved with his girlfriend. Was he indicating a change in our relationship? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that we’d been through a very profound and difficult creative experience together and my feelings for him were deep and real. Did I want a change in our relationship? Probably. Although I don’t remember ever admitting this to myself. I had a gay friend named Bill Smith who lived with me. He escorted me to all the festivities and most of the award shows that year. I was in love with Charles onstage, but romantically I was alone. It seemed that the more successful I grew, the less I was pursued.

Jack Lemmon had presented the Best Actress Award to Marty Scorsese on my behalf and he was coming to see the show on April 10, along with his wife, the Walter Matthaus, Neil Simon and Marsha Mason, Paula Prentiss and Dick Benjamin, and Maureen Stapleton. They asked me to join them for dinner after the show. I called Jack Lemmon in California and requested that he bring the statuette to the theater so we could have a private presentation ceremony. Jack and Walter came back to my dressing room after the performance and we had a photographer take a picture of Jack handing me the Oscar—a picture, by the way, that causes me to cringe when I see it, because I was still wearing my stage wig from the show and the lace of the wig looks like a weird headband.

Then we went out to dinner. I was so impressed with this amazing collection of talented people as I approached the table and was introduced to all of them. I said, slightly awed, “How wonderful to see you all here.” Maureen Stapleton took my hand and looked straight at me with her piercing eyes. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “You’ll see all the same faces on your way down as you did on your way up!”

At dinner I sat next to Walter with the Oscar in a dark blue velvet bag on the floor between us. I was aware of it throughout the dinner. As our espresso was served, I turned to Walter and asked, “Walter, what is that down there?”

Walter answered, “Let me put it to you this way, Burstyn. When you die, they are going to say, ‘Ellen Burstyn, the Academy Award–winning actress, died today.’”

My goodness, that was succinct.

Warner Bros. entered Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in the Cannes Film Festival. One night before the show, I got a call from Marty Scorsese in Cannes. He told me that the judges would give me the award for Best Actress if I would come there to receive it. I told Marty that I didn’t leave the show for the Oscars and I wouldn’t for the Cannes Film Festival. I held firm to my conviction that it was the work that should be honored, not the honors I got for doing the work. Besides, I’d already gotten what I really wanted. The film was a hit around the world and at last audiences were viewing a story through the eyes of a woman instead of the perpetual masculine point of view. That was my reward.

In June I was asked by the Professional Children’s School in New York to pass out diplomas with Jerome Robbins to the high school graduating class. A few days before the commencement ceremony, the high school principal, Joyce McCray, called me and said, “Ms. Burstyn, I wonder if you’d do us a favor. We’ve just found out that Mr. Robbins didn’t graduate from high school. We’d like to surprise him and start the program with you presenting him with an honorary diploma. Would you do that?”

“I’d be glad to,” I replied, “but I don’t have a high school diploma either.”

“Oh, you want one, too?” She sounded just a mite peevish.

“Yes, please,” I answered politely, feeling like a schoolgirl. I almost added, “ma’am.”

So the ceremony began with me presenting Jerome Robbins, America’s greatest choreographer, and an Oscar winner for his codirection of West Side Story, with an honorary high school diploma, and then Jerome presenting the Academy Award–winning Best Actress with hers. Come to think of it, we were hardly an argument to the students for the importance of a formal education.

That spring I won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award for Same Time, Next Year. Charles also won the Outer Critics. But when it came time for the Tonys, we all waited for word. The announcements were hand-delivered to all of the nominees backstage. As soon as I got mine, I ran to Mort Gottlieb to find out who else had been nominated. The play, the director, and the writer were all nominated, but Charles wasn’t. I couldn’t believe it. He was so essential to the success of the play, more than anyone, not just for his performance, but for his good taste and sensitivity to the script. It was just awful that we all were nominated except for him. I said to Morty, “Let me tell him.”

I went upstairs to his dressing room and knocked. He opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “What’s the matter?”

“The nominations were delivered.”

“And you got nominated and I didn’t.”

“It’s worse than that.”

“Everybody got nominated and I didn’t.”

I could just nod my head. Charles was so amazing in this role. He didn’t just get a laugh on every line; he got a laugh before the line and after the line. I’d never seen anyone do that before. The audience actually laughed in anticipation of his reaction and then again at his reaction to his reaction.

Nineteen seventy-five was a great year on Broadway, and there were many fine performances from which the nominees were selected. The voters had chosen Peter Firth for Equus, Henry Fonda for Clarence Darrow, Jim Dale for Scapino, Ben Gazzara for Hughie and Duet, John Wood for Sherlock Holmes, and the eventual winners John Kani and Winston Ntshona for the Athol Fugard plays Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. There were many more choices than usual and our show had received so many nominations, Charles was sacrificed. That’s why I hate awards.

For the Academy Awards, the members of each profession nominate their peers, but for the Tony Awards, the Producers Association does the nominating—in other words, the businessmen of Broadway control the nominations. That’s why so few shows or performances that have closed by Tony time get nominated. If an actor wins Best Actor of the year in a show that may have run for months but is now closed, what good would that do the business? When Dustin Hoffman refused to do eight performances a week as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman because he didn’t think he was able to do the exacting, excruciating work of the role twice in one day, the producers withheld the nomination from him. Nobody ever deserved a Tony more.

Charles escorted me to the Tony Awards that year. When I was called to the stage, having already won the Oscar just a month earlier, I said, “I guess this is what is meant by being twice blessed.” Then I thanked everyone connected with the show, but added that “there were only two people onstage and I couldn’t possibly do what I did without the aid and inspiration of my magnificent partner, Charles Grodin. So I accept this in his name as well as mine.”

But he deserved far more.

 

When Billy came to see the show, I was happy and excited. I could feel him in the audience all night. We went out for supper that night. We didn’t discuss his letter and I didn’t ask him what he meant by it. He was still with his girlfriend and our relationship, as intense as it was, was always separate and apart from anything else in our personal lives.

I told him the story about opening night when I suddenly dried up and had to talk myself into believing I was really saying good-bye, not to George, but to Charles. “You mean you can think about other things when you are acting?” Billy asked, incredulously.

I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted. I’d said in print that Billy was my favorite director and if he didn’t know what actors put themselves through to achieve their results, then that says to me that directors (with a few rare exceptions) don’t have a clue about the actor’s creative process.

My last performance of Same Time, Next Year was October 18, 1975. By then I was glad it was over. As soon as the play closed I was back to the Actors Studio moderating the sessions every week.

It had been an amazing year. I was one of a handful of actresses to ever win an Oscar and a Tony in the same year. I also won the British Academy Award and many others. I’d been feted, celebrated, toasted, photographed, and written about over and over again. And yet I moved through all of it with a strange discontent.

I remember very clearly entering the opening-night party for Same Time, Next Year. The word was already out on the street that we were going to be a hit. From the reviews in Boston and the sold-out houses, we came into town smelling like success. The party was huge; there was an air of celebration that hovered around us. The paparazzi swarmed us, as Aubrey Beardsley said, “like bees about a bright bouquet.” And what did I wear for this triumphal march through the throngs of applauding well-wishers? A long plain black dress, no jewelry. A bare face. I looked like a nun. I tried as best I could to hide under the table, as I had when the family sang “Happy Birthday” to me at my seventh birthday party, mortified that everyone was looking at me. Was I really that shy? Still? At age forty-two and an accomplished actress? At the party, I sat in a corner with Charles, sipping my soda water as the merriment swirled in front of us, flash bulbs popping, people smiling down at us while pumping our hands. Why couldn’t I take part in it? Wasn’t there reason to celebrate? Why this sadness behind the accommodating smile?

There is a beautiful poem by the Sufi poet Hafiz that expresses it. This translation of “Damn Thirsty” is by David Ladinsky.

First

The fish needs to say,

“Something ain’t right about this

Camel ride—

And I’m

Feeling so damn

Thirsty.”

That’s what I felt like—a fish on a camel’s back, knowing something wasn’t right, and I was thirsting to find what I was missing. Not only wasn’t I enjoying all the parties I was required to attend, I actually felt there was something dangerous about all the attention I was getting. If Dr. Elahi hadn’t suggested I give up alcohol, I would probably have gotten sloshed to ease my discomfort and actually believed that I was something special, better in some way than everyone else. My ego would have identified with all the hoopla directed at me, and underneath the glare shining brightly on my false smile, my soul would wither and that which was most genuine in me would fade. I wanted to hold on to what was real and not feast on the empty calories of fame.

I was right. I was in danger. I was walking through a minefield. Each mine was another opportunity for an explosion of hubris.

Within a month of the play’s closing, I returned to Iran.

I’d requested that the film festival officials invite me back and they did. But I spent most of my time there with Dr. Elahi. I asked him why, in this period of extreme success, I could feel no joy.

He told me that it was my “nafs” that made me think I should feel joy from the achievements in the material world. The word is short for nafs-iammara, an expression used in the Koran meaning “self-commanding evil.” He went on to explain that there are two opposing forces that are in each of us: one is a spiritual force through which our soul expresses itself, the other is the force of our animal nature. They are the positive and negative poles of our being, and each needs the other. Our soul needs a body as a material garment and the body without the soul can’t rise above its animal nature. It is balancing these two forces that is the spiritual path. The nafs is our mortal enemy on this path. It is like a dangerous animal whose mission it is to turn us away from God. Its two main tools are pride and doubt. My nafs had been whispering to me that I must take pride in my achievements, but my soul had the inkling I was in danger of falling under the spell of my nafs, or “my domineering self.” In Western psychological terms, I was in danger of identifying with my ego.

Dr. Elahi also told me that he got a message from the Master that said I must not worry. I am the Master’s daughter. He loves me and will protect me and my son.

I wanted so to believe that. I wanted to feel that I was the Master’s daughter. Was it my nafs that couldn’t quite connect with the feeling? Was this the doubt Dr. Elahi referred to? I liked these people so much. I loved their spiritual sincerity. I wanted to be part of this group. But was I? I wasn’t sure.

I went with the group to visit Hazrat Elahu’s tomb. One of the young women in the group threw her body on the tomb and cried hysterically, clawing wildly at the cold marble covering the grave. Something about the intensity of the grief made me uncomfortable. It felt foreign to me, strange, as if there were something excessive about it. But I tried not to judge it.

Then, at the Zikr, as the tempo and volume of the chanting intensified, a woman next to me erupted, burst through the chant into ecstatic and/or agonized cries, her whole body trembling violently. Dr. Elahi’s wife moved swiftly to the woman and expertly laid her body on top of the woman’s jolting, crying form. She stayed like that until the woman quieted down, her face streaming with tears. Again, I had an unsettling feeling that I was a foreigner in this world.

The deciding factor for me was a call from Jefferson in tears. He was distressed and having trouble in school. I decided to return home and get him back on track.

That night, Dr. Elahi announced that the following week there would be a special ceremony at the tomb of Hazrat Elahu. He thought I should extend my visit to attend this ceremony. I told him of Jeff’s phone call, and my decision to leave a day sooner than planned.

Dr. Elahi then told me that one’s commitment to one’s spiritual training has to take priority over everything else. After all, our children are our responsibility in this life, but perhaps in another life the soul that is my son could be in another relationship to me—my mother, my father, or my enemy. He said that some souls really are our children and some children are really strangers to our souls. He urged me to honor my commitment to my spiritual work and extend my visit. I refused.

“All right, you have failed your first spiritual test,” Dr. Elahi said.

I disagreed. To me, I had passed it. I said no to this man whose approval I very much coveted; I said no to my own spiritual training in favor of my son. This was the moment when I discovered how deeply I was both American (where we honor the child over the parent) and Christian (where we consider it a spiritual virtue to sacrifice our own concerns for others).

I cried during this conversation with Dr. Elahi. I suspect because I knew this was good-bye—to this group, to my ever-hopeful wish of finding a place where I felt I truly belonged.

While I was meeting with Dr. Elahi, the closing night ceremony of the film festival was taking place. I had not attended many of the festivities and my absence was noted. The next day as I was packing to leave, I got a message that an emissary from Her Imperial Majesty, Shahbanu Farah, was coming to see me and I must wait for him. I explained that that would not allow me time to get to the airport. I was told, “Don’t worry.”

My bags were packed when my doorbell rang. I admitted the royal emissary. He wore a dark blue double-breasted suit and black shoes and had small, intense black eyes. He asked me why I wanted to return to Iran; why I hadn’t been attending the festivities; what had I been doing? When I told him I’d been spending time with the Ahl-i Haqq group, his interest intensified and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. I saw that he didn’t trust them or me; that this interview was merely preliminary and suddenly I feared that I might actually be in danger of imprisonment, although I couldn’t imagine for what. My Iranian friends had told me that the previous year the Shah’s police had rounded up all the known dissenters and put them in jail while the world’s press was in Tehran for the film festival. A year had passed and their families still had not seen them, didn’t know if they were alive or dead.

After a few more questions, I saw him decide that I was not dangerous. I was free to leave, but was now late for my plane. The emissary provided a limo from the royal fleet to take me to the airport, sirens wailing the whole way.

Three years later, in 1978, the Shah was deposed in an Islamic revolution. A Hollywood star as an Islamic revolutionary? Sounds like a movie to me. But for a moment it must have sounded like real life to Her Imperial Majesty, Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, empress of Iran.

 

My last few months at the house on the Hudson I’d been renting for a year had been a time of turmoil. Neil’s visits were so frequent and so frightful, I really couldn’t be alone.

One day I was walking Bernard along a quiet road when I saw a big old Victorian mansion. Beside it was the most beautiful giant tree I’d ever seen. It was far larger than the house. I gazed at this idyllic view and pictured the life that was lived there. I imagined multiple generations happily living and peacefully dying inside the gracious rooms. One generation passing on this lovely family home to the next. As usual, the truth turned out to be very different from my fantasies. The house was in terrible disrepair and the most recent owner couldn’t afford to take care of it. Soon it was on the market and, after many complications, I ended up buying the Stone House. It had twenty-six rooms, which I restored back to its original, elegant twenty-two. There were twelve bedrooms and soon I filled them with friends and writers working on scripts. Also in the house were my secretary and our housekeeper. I’d advertised for a live-in maid and no one responded. I looked for a live-in housekeeper—again, no response. Then I advertised for a household engineer and four men answered the ad. I chose one of them. Also, a young man named Michael, who had been working on the house as a painter before it was ready for me, had no place of his own, so I told him he could live in one of the upstairs bedrooms. That turned out to be a very fortunate decision. By the sheer number of bodies living together, I felt there would always be someone at home with me. And Michael had an uncanny way of being there every time Neil showed up.

When I moved from the rented house, I hoped Neil wouldn’t find me, but he did. One day, the county sheriff pulled up and Neil got out of the passenger seat. The sheriff stood beside his car and said, “I picked him up on the road. He said he was looking for his mother.”

Neil took off his hat. Underneath, his dark hair had turned gray, almost white. He said in that strange artificially deep voice he’d been using since he became ill, and pointing to his hair, “Look what they’ve done to me, babe. Shock treatments.”

All the muscles of my chest clutched at my heart. I said to the sheriff, “I’m not his mother. I’m his ex-wife. He’s mentally ill and I don’t want him here.” The sheriff took him away, but now Neil knew where I was and would stalk me and haunt me at every opportunity. He also wrote innumerable letters full of wild ravings.

He would plead pathetically for me to help him by allowing him to come back, but by then I had learned that he was beyond help and he was so violent, I was terrified of him.

One night, everyone went out except me. Michael was in the city having dinner with his mother, when in the middle of the meal he suddenly leapt up and announced that he had to leave. I was alone in bed when Neil burst through the door and right behind him was Michael, who had sped the hour’s drive back to the house without even knowing why he was rushing back. He hustled Neil out of the house while I called the police. Neil stood outside ranting loudly until the police arrived and took him away. Michael sat with me until my shaking and crying stopped and I asked him how he came to be there.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was weird. We were eating and I just had the feeling that I had to get back here fast.” Michael was tuned in to me to an unusual degree. He was like a guardian angel. He was twenty years younger than I was, but we had a very intense relationship for the next few years until my nightmare with Neil was finally over. Then Michael’s mission was accomplished and our relationship faded. But for the next few years, he was my protector and more than once saved my life.

While I was still doing Same Time, Next Year, I was approached by the Brazilian playwright Roberto Athayde to do his brilliant play, Miss Margarida’s Way. I loved the play and wanted to do it, but the concept was a classroom with Miss Margarida addressing the audience as the class and speaking directly to them as though they were pupils and inviting them to take part. It would be too perfect a setup for Neil. I didn’t dare risk it. The play was finally done in New York very successfully by Estelle Parsons.

I turned my attention to Silence of the North. It was an incredible story of bravery and courage and fed my desire to portray a feminine hero. I’d given the book to Billy to read. He liked it and wanted to direct it. He brought in Wally Green to write the screenplay. Wally was writing the script in California. When I went out there and read the first draft, I was dismayed to discover he started the film with thirty pages of Olive’s childhood. In other words, in this story that I brought to Billy, I was not in the first quarter of the movie. I went to Billy’s office and told him of my disappointment. There was so much of Olive’s story that I wouldn’t be able to tell if we spent so much time on her childhood.

Billy answered with a bit of heat, “I’m not going to begin the film with a middle-aged woman!”

I sat in the chair across from him, huge chunks of glamour clunking to the floor like crumbling plaster, lines creeping up my face like woman-eating vines, my shoulders drooping and hunching over with the weight of the burden of my many years. I said nothing. A movie star had entered the room, but a middle-aged woman exited.

Such is the fragility of the ego.

In 1977, Billy wrote a letter and told me that he felt great sorrow about the failure of Wally and himself, that when he first read the book, he believed there was a film there—and there still is. But he came to the conclusion he wasn’t the one to find it.

I was deeply disappointed, but this doesn’t seem to have affected my feelings for Billy.

Pat King later wrote a beautiful script about Olive from the book. Billy had brought Silence to Universal and I ended up making it with them, but there were all kinds of decisions made about the film by the studio that I wasn’t savvy enough to appreciate, the most destructive being to use a Canadian director of their choice who wasn’t ideal for the material. I still wish Billy had directed it, but in that period, I wanted Billy to direct everything I did.

In the spring of 1976, I went to Paris to shoot Providence for Alain Resnais with John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Elaine Stritch, and David Warner. I have a treasured memory from this picture. We were in Limoges, France, shooting on an empty estate that had once belonged to the Haviland family. It was a gorgeous old seventeenth-century house with amazing architectural details and no furniture at all. We were shooting the exteriors here, using the beautiful grounds and gardens. The inside of the house was set up with makeshift furnishings for us to use as dressing rooms, wardrobe, makeup rooms, and production offices. I had selected a lovely spacious salon on the second floor overlooking the garden as my dressing room. They’d brought in some tables and big old chairs, and did their best to make it habitable, but there was no heat and although it was springtime, the skies were dark with low-moving clouds and there was a blustery wind. We were playing like it was summer out on the grass, but we were freezing in our light clothes. The clouds kept moving across the sun and we’d stand shivering waiting for them to clear so the light would match the previous shot.

We came to a sequence that I was not in, so I ran inside while John and Dirk stayed out in the cold. But inside was nearly as cold as outdoors. I had a large old fireplace in my room, so I went out to the woods and collected fallen branches. Soon I had a nice fire going in my hearth. It didn’t heat the large salon, but if I sat close to it, I could feel its welcome warmth. I spent hours there reading, feeling sympathy for my confrères out in the cold. After a while, the dark clouds settled in for a long stay and the director of photography announced that shooting was done for the day. I heard John and Dirk coming up the wide central stairway. I invited them into my room to warm themselves by my fire. They collapsed into the chairs and held out their hands to get warm. I got blankets from wardrobe and covered each of them. Dirk said between his chattering teeth, “I’ve got some brandy in my room. Could you get it?”

I fetched the brandy on Dirk’s small round tray with two snifters, and poured them each a drink. Then I sat on the floor next to John, close by the crackling fire as I listened to these divine men tell stories about their lives in the theater. John stroked my hair as I laid my head on his blanketed lap. At treasured moments like these, one doesn’t need to have had a father. And yet I wonder what it was in me that so loved serving these two fine men? Was it something innately feminine? Do we women have some kind of gender-specific “serving” gene? Did the fact that they were both gay and great actors influence me? Would I be so happy serving and warming them by my fire if they were two chilled roustabouts? It was the nature of “the feminine” I was trying to understand in that period.

As I was exploring this issue in myself as well as historically, I came across the startling information that in our early history, before the written word, God was conceived of, multiculturally, as female. The world was spawned by a Goddess. That imagery prevailed into early Greek times and was widespread. I had only heard of God as the Father. The acceptance of this imagery presupposes a limited role in the world for everything feminine. If we are made in God’s image, and God is a man, then man is the image of the divine and woman is something lesser. But when I pictured “the divine” in feminine form, something in me was soothed. And strangely stirred.

The years 1976 through 1979 were the most active years of my life on the outer plane. On the inner plane, I was taking part in the worldwide reawakening of the long slumbering Goddess.

I began 1977 with a trip to India for the film festival in Delhi. I brought Michael along with me. I met the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, at a breakfast in her palace. She had eyes like an eagle and an intensity to match. “I’ve not seen your films, but I know who you are and what you are doing for women,” she said to me.

I told her that I’d seen a film the night before by Satyajit Ray about a middle-class Indian family that is so strapped for money that the wife decides that she must go to work. She is a very sympathetic character, but when her husband slapped her face, the whole audience applauded, including the women. I asked the prime minister why.

“Because they’re stupid!” she said. I was shocked she was willing to be so blunt about her own people. Then she softened and added, “The trouble with women in this country is they’ll believe anything a man has to say. Our first job is to educate them.”

Michael and I flew from India to Katmandu, Nepal. We were taken to see the Living Goddess. From the street, the temple looked like a building made of intricately carved wood. Once we’d passed through the low door, we were in an inner courtyard without a roof. The courtyard was filled with large bronze statues of the gods and goddesses Shakti, Shiva, and Ganesha. Children were playing on the statues as our children would play on swings and slides. One of the little boys pointed to our shoes and instructed us sternly to remove them. It was then explained to me that children are the guardians of the temples. They play here and learn all the tales of their religion. Here they are safe and at home.

A barefoot child of six or seven, carrying a baby of no more than eight months, asked me if I’d like to see the Living Goddess. I said that we would. She collected my money, the equivalent of about twenty-five cents, and disappeared into the temple while we waited in the courtyard. Soon the wooden shutters of a window on the second floor of the temple opened. There appeared a pretty child with an elaborately painted face and wearing a colorful costume. She sat at the window for a few minutes, unsmiling, allowing us to gaze at her goddessness. After twenty-five cents’ worth of gazing, hands reached from the darkness within and closed the shutters.

I asked our guide how the goddess was chosen. He said the priests from the temple went to the villages and selected the most beautiful two-year-old girl they could find. She was then brought to the temple and trained to be the Living Goddess. When the present goddess attained puberty, the new goddess took her place. She never left the temple once she was inside until her term was over.

“What happens to her then?” I asked with some trepidation.

“Oh, she’s taken to the outskirts of the city and given a little bowl to beg for food.”

“Doesn’t anyone take her in?”

“Oh, no! The people give her rice, but they cannot touch her.”

“Why not?”

“She is untouchable. A goddess. Nobody can touch a goddess.”

“How long does she live like that, as a beggar?”

“Oh, the rest of her life.”

I thought of our many screen goddesses that we are allowed to gaze on as long as they are young, and then the shutters begin to close on them. Perhaps it is not a cruel fate when, like Marilyn Monroe or Jean Harlow, they die young. Perhaps it is the kindest fate for a living goddess.

 

Varanasi is the holy city of India. There Michael and I walked down to the Ganges River before dawn and watched the sky flame red. The Ganges reflected the burning light. Sacred wild monkeys were all around and we were part of a sea of people chanting, praying, meditating, lighting incense and candles. We got on a small boat and drifted among thousands of candles floating on the water. It was an atmosphere unlike any I’d ever witnessed; fervent and heady, intoxicating with its lush colors, pungent smells, and hypnotic rhythms of the chanting all around us. Our guide escorted us to a temple whose doorway was carved with Shiva and his feminine consort, Shakti, locked in every conceivable sexual position. I’d never before known of a religion that incorporated the sexual act in its religious iconography.

The next day our guide took us to witness the sacrifice to Kali. As we slowly drove up the road to the temple, we saw people leading by rope protesting domestic animals—sheep, goats, or lambs. One boy pulled a lamb who was bleating pitifully, her eyes wide and frightened as if she knew where she was going and why. When we arrived, crowds of people were there meditating, talking, eating, and chanting. The air was thick with incense and the sounds of the chants reverberated off the rocks. In front of the altar stood two priests wearing brown rubber slaughtering aprons, splashed thickly with blood. The people stood in a line in front of each priest with their animals straining against their ropes. The smell of fresh blood and the cries of the animals filled the air. As each person stepped forward and offered an animal, the cries intensified into loud shrieks.

When I realized what I was about to see, my knees grew weak and I felt as if I were about to faint. My eyes snapped shut, but I said to myself, No, Ellen, you are here. Don’t turn from it. Witness it. I took a deep breath and made myself open my eyes. The little boy I’d seen on the road approached the altar and offered his terrified lamb as sacrifice.

The priests chatted with each other, smiling casually as they took the shrieking sacrifice, expertly stretched its neck and slit its throat. At their feet there were piles of rice studded with brightly colored flowers. As the priests severed the animals’ heads, blood poured on the rice. A woman in a bright green and orange sari scooped up a few grains of blood-spattered rice and reverently stuck it to her forehead. The priest then took the severed head to the altar and made the sacrificial offering to Kali by placing the head on the altar with the other heads. The rest of the lamb or kid was given to the family who carried it to an old oil drum filled with cooking oil that sat on a blazing fire nearby. The headless corpse sizzled as it entered the drum. Other families were already eating, pulling the meat off the bones and tossing the bones to the waiting hungry dogs that hung around the edges of the feast.

I learned that sacrifice for the Hindus is not merely to placate the gods, but actually to nourish them. The gods rely on humans for food; without the sacrifice the gods would not live and could no longer protect human beings. This is a deep and profound concept—that the relationship between humanity and the divine is one of mutual dependency. The gods created the world, but humans keep the gods alive by their willingness to sacrifice for them. In many Hindu texts it is revealed that animals were created for the good of the whole world. The animals represent the lower qualities and it is their purpose to be the means by which those qualities are exchanged through the transformation of their energy into the higher qualities in humans—the qualities of goodness and compassion. We sacrifice our lower nature to ascend into our higher consciousness. The gods always represent the highest qualities that are latent in our souls. As we sacrifice our desires and lusts for corporeal pleasures, we call forth these higher qualities and they manifest in our soul’s evolution.

In Christianity, the soul’s evolution is the gradual building up of the Christ in us. And, of course, it is Christ, the lamb of God, the ultimate sacrifice, who taketh away the sins of the world. It’s another manifestation of the same idea.

The religious philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg says, “The sacrifices and burnt offerings signify the regeneration of man by the truths of faith and the goods of love.”

One of the reasons that I am a Sufi is the Sufi’s search for truth everywhere, in all the traditions of the great religions. Over and over it is revealed that, although the form is different in each religion, the truth is always the same.