I directed three TV movies in 1994, not happily. It was a life-changing year. I was directing material that made commercial sense but was not connected to my brain or to my heart in any deep way. When an actor works on an inconsequential job, they do their work and go home. A director is imprisoned within the project for the duration and responsible for everything in front of and behind the scenes. It’s an overwhelming job. When I was working on the projects that I was excited to bring to an audience, I couldn’t do enough, be enough. I was bathing in the experience. But in this one year, I was to do a very commercial film for our company, which was fine, but on the next two I was working for outside companies. So when I wound up in trouble and disconnected, which I was a lot of the time, I couldn’t take it out on Joey. He wasn’t there.
I was alone. I was a director for hire. And I wasn’t good at it. All of the outlets I had as an actor were gone; the emotion, the highs, the lows, the anger that had a place to go in acting was bottled up inside me as a director. I had to sit and take notes from well-meaning producers and network executives, people who were for the most part really simplistic. As an actor they wouldn’t have dared to approach me. As a director, I was their girl, and replaceable. That world really suffocated me. There are people born with a certain kind of resilience, like poker players who hide their hands and play the game and manage to walk away from the table with the winnings. I’m not one of those people.
Seasons of the Heart was the last happy experience I had with a TV movie that year. I was working with Joey producing. I was safe.
Reunion was a stressful shoot for me. The director turned out to be kind of a fifth wheel on this production. It was Marlo’s baby, an outlet for pent-up passion, of which she’s always had a huge inner reservoir.
I felt frustrated. All the TV movies I’d directed had been conceived by me, or had been dramatizations of a documentary I’d desperately cared about bringing to a wider audience. I had a short fuse. I finished up the second movie and left to take on the third movie of that year, Following Her Heart, with Ann-Margret as the star. In Texas.
She is a real angel, eager as a child to explore and to please. I’d recruited a good cast, with good friends: Brenda Vaccaro, Scott Marlowe, and for Ann-Margret’s love interest—who else? George Segal, whom I had just finished directing in Reunion. Dougie Milson shot it. Everyone, including myself, rose above the material, but I had a big bad thorn in my side the entire time, and as I’m discovering as I write this, I don’t take orders easily. Ever since the blacklist and fighting to reestablish myself, I’m bad at being told what to do.
The producer running the show was attached not to the network, but to the Canadian deficit financier. She was young, nasal, ubiquitous, and, in every scene, would stand tapping her foot, looking at the watch on her wrist. “I’m gonna pull the plug,” she’d warn. “I’m gonna pull the plug.”
I’d get distracted, angry, want to throw her off the set, but it was her company’s set. Ann-Margret would ask, “Am I all right? Am I doing something wrong? Is there anything you want to tell me to do?” Roger, her husband, was there protecting her. I couldn’t say, “Yeah, get rid of the yenta producer!”
The very last scene of the shoot—it was probably two a.m.—as we set up for the very last shot, the producer showed up. She tapped her foot, looked at her watch. “I’m gonna—” I jumped in, my arms outstretched in joy. “Pull the plug! Please, pull it.” I grabbed a plug with the cords attached and held it toward her. The crew picked up on it. “Pull the plug, pull the plug!” They clapped and danced. She stared at us, not amused. We were gasping with laughter and relief. We were tired and crazy, and this was good-bye after a long, tense month together. The producer stood her ground, her arms crossed, till we lit the last scene and shot it, and put our arms around one another, knowing we would never be part of this particular family again.
• • •
After directing three TV movies in a row, I was exhausted. Our friend Dyson Lovell offered us his house in L.A. while he was in London, which gave us a chance to see sorely missed close friends.
One night I woke up, had to pee, walked across the bedroom, went up two steps to the bathroom, still half-asleep, started back to bed, and blacked out as I sensed my body hitting the wall on the other side of the bed. I opened my eyes to see Joey and two ambulance attendants looming over me. Our dear Dr. Derwin met us at the hospital. My heartbeat was irregular. Atrial fibrillation.
A very peculiar and frightening feeling. My heart was no longer the heart I had taken for granted and relied on, that had been a really great friend. Now it was literally failing me. Maybe the past year had been too much for both of us. Or maybe all of my life had been too tough on one little organ.
Back in New York, I heard of Marianne Legato, a doctor who specialized in women’s heart problems. She became my doctor for everything, and she felt the only way to avoid big complications, since my heart refused to stay in rhythm, was to put in a pacemaker. In 1994 I was booked into Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights, where I’d gone to high school. Wires were put into my heart up to the left breastbone. The wires were attached to an oblong silver case, the pacemaker, which was placed in the cavity right below the collarbone.
That first operation hurt. Twenty years ago, pacemakers were man-sized, and mine felt like a big rock in my little shoulder space. I could feel it bang back and forth under my skin (that’s why Dr. Legato was so fervent about women’s medicine). Joey, who hates, hates hospitals, shaved LEE into his hair to make me laugh. I was in the Milstein Pavilion. The Milstein had a big charming room for guests and patients to hang out in. In the afternoon, a pianist played standards and light pop on the big black grand piano. Directly across from the music room, Sunny von Bülow lay in her room. I think she was there for sixteen years altogether. Fed, bathed, changed, never coming out of her coma. I wondered if she could hear the piano playing Cole Porter.
My room faced the Hudson. The window was big and had a window seat. I would sit there all day as I did in the window seat in our apartment on Riverside Drive when I was growing up. Watching the water, looking at the changing Jersey shoreline and traffic crossing the George Washington Bridge.
The year before, I’d gone to two heart doctors at Columbia Presbyterian. One was a South American who’d developed a new system for regulating heartbeat that was too complicated for me to understand. Mary Beth, a doctor’s daughter, was with me. “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked this charming doctor. “If it doesn’t work, eh—you die!” He laughed holding out his hands.
Dr. Mehmet Oz practiced at Columbia Presbyterian. Someone arranged for an appointment for Mary Beth and me. As we all now know, Dr. Oz is God. He is as good as he is beautiful. He is also a great listener and sensitive to frightened women with scary hearts. He sealed the deal on the pacemaker.
I accept the process of aging by thinking of myself as a “former beauty.” But I am old in real years, and kept alive by this little clock inside me, this pacemaker that Dr. Schneller said is doing ninety percent of the beating of my heart, and he’s almost ready to put another inside me. That would be my third or fourth pacemaker—what a medical miracle.