Carol Sobieski brought The Neon Ceiling to the Red House for me to read. The writing was beautiful. I thought of it as the first indie movie written for TV. I identified deeply with the woman she’d explored, a housewife with a twelve-year-old daughter, married to a dentist for whom she could do nothing right. Couldn’t look right, think right, talk right. I knew her cold. Frank Pierson was set to direct. Frank was a golden Hollywood writer: Dog Day Afternoon, Cool Hand Luke, Presumed Innocent. He was also a neighbor, in Trancas, one beach up from us in Malibu. He dropped off his rewrite of Neon Ceiling two nights before we were to start shooting. I read it. I didn’t sleep. I stayed up until agents stirred and I called mine, Jack Gilardi. I told him to come to the Red House. I couldn’t do the script. He called Frank, and they arrived together.
I told Frank, “I won’t play this woman. You’ve killed her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t recognize the character Carol wrote. I don’t recognize the marriage. In your draft the dentist is married to a spoiled neurotic who makes his life impossible—and is a rotten mother to boot! The whole insight into that relationship is blown! Who is that character?”
Frank: “Well, she’s based on my sister-in-law.”
“And you hate her?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, get some other actor to play your impossible bitchy sister-in-law, who makes life hell for her poor dentist husband!”
I felt that whatever bad times Frank had had with women had been completely imposed on a character written by a talented woman, containing revelations about her own life. Her insight didn’t come from observation; she’d been there, had lived it.
At some point I saw this awareness register in Frank’s eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I got it. Wrong script for my sister-in-law.” I breathed. He breathed. It was Frank’s first directing job. He could not have been more discerning or sensitive and was a true friend, for life.
We filmed Neon Ceiling deep in the desert. The scene when I, as an always inadequate wife and mother, take my wise twelve-year-old daughter and run away from home and husband was liberating.
It was, of course, the story of my life with Arnie and Dinah, which was why I fought so hard for Carol’s vision of her script. As I, as the character, drive away from home, a Bach chorus comes on the car radio, and my daughter and I sing along triumphantly as we head out on a new life, as unprepared as I had actually been when I left Arnie. We drive for hours into the desert. At the end of the day we spot a gas station. The gas station owner is Gig Young, who kindly gives a hungry, faint mother and her child a place to spend the night.
Gig, an elusive, charming Hollywood guy, a natural actor, was born for the part. The character, a loner who has this home-slash-gas station-slash-diner deep in nowhere, has created a fantastical ceiling out of all the old neon signs that used to exist: cocktails bubbling in different colors, motel signs flashing on and off. When it’s dark out and the regular lights are turned off and the neon lights are turned on, it’s his vision of magic, the world he wants to live in. Gig and I, both of us hiders, hidden people, find a common soul in each other—much to the devastation of my twelve-year-old daughter, who’s developed her first romantic crush on Gig. Lovely?
I, as the character, spend my days in his rocker on the back porch, looking at hot desert. Sand and sky, nothing more. As happens with some film or theater experiences, the desert went from city-dweller boring, incomprehensible, to seductive, fresh. The scent of the sand, of dry heat, the shimmer, the light, the calm entered me. My eyes opened to the way artists saw this endless, changing, subtle, powerful life-scape.
At lunchtime, a group of thirty or forty dark shapes stood on the dunes against the sky, watching us eat. They were Sioux Indians. Their leader, a fortyish woman, Louise, came to our caterer and asked that the tribe be given our leftovers to take back to their families. She was firm. She did not want garbage, but food that was untouched, food the cast and crew could not stuff into themselves, food that had not yet been put on plates. Virgin food. Our producer agreed, and so it was that the Sioux became a part of our new lives in Pearblossom, California.
Louise became a friend. It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten how that group of Sioux ended up in the desert, but it was clear that life for them there was hard and unsustaining. I had dinners with Louise and her husband in their cabin. She was elegant and proud; when shooting was over, she gave me one of her poodle’s pups. Nusski, she told me to call him, Sioux for something. Noble? Dog with Soul? Nusski was all that.
I took him into the limo that would drive us home, his warm, plump, silver-haired body lying on my chest all the way to the Red House in Malibu, inhaling his sweet puppy smell.
Nusski was a great, great friend till he died, twelve years later, after we’d moved back to New York. Like the Sioux woman who gave him to me, kind, loving, full of valor. I cherish his memory and miss him always.
And Gig Young, a decade after The Neon Ceiling, killed his twenty-one-year-old wife and himself. Despair, I thought. That great sadness of Gig himself, which he covered with such great charm in Neon Ceiling. Despair and desperation.