It was the summer of 1996. Randal Kleiser had asked me to join his many friends in the making of his film It’s My Party. It was a very personal story. Randal had been estranged from his partner of many years who was now dying of AIDS. It was a film about their reconciliation and about his partner’s decision to find a way out through a suicide party, with all his loving friends and family around him. Eric Roberts played the boyfriend. I was Eric’s Greek mother. In the cast were Randal’s friends Margaret Cho, Marlee Matlin, Olivia Newton-John, and Greg Harrison as Randal. We shot it in Randal’s house, so the intimacy was distracting.
I was staying in the guest bedroom at our friends Steve and Annie’s yellow house on Stone Canyon Drive, up the street from the Hotel Bel-Air. Joey and I had stayed often with Steve Verona; the little room with its four-poster bed and little TV was familiar and comfortable. The veranda overlooked the pool and the gardens.
Joey wasn’t with me. I felt isolated in a new way and a very uncomfortable way. I couldn’t seem to get inside my own skin. I hated parties with lots of people, and that’s what the set was to me. I loved the desperation of my character in the script, but couldn’t seem to hang on to it. I developed shingles, blisters on my shoulders and down my back. I was up most of the night putting calamine lotion on the hard-to-reach places. I stayed in my little trailer on set as much as I could.
At Steven’s house I sat on an outside dining room chair, staring at the green pool on a cold, gray California day. Something bad was happening to me. I was losing feeling. The last time I felt close to this was at the end of my marriage to Arnie. I felt cold and scared. The migraines were also frequent. The last time I’d stayed in this room, Steve and Annie had given us a party. I’d had an incessant migraine and shot myself full of Imitrex. Suddenly I couldn’t move or speak. Joey opened the door to get me downstairs where everyone was waiting. He took one look at me and called our doctor, who told Joey to meet him at the hospital. I thought I’d had a stroke. I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t speak. I could only look at Joey. Nothing came out of my mouth.
He called an ambulance, threw a blanket over me, and half carried me down the stairs to the car. I smiled at my friends clustered at the bottom. I felt apologetic, silly, dumb. The doctor met us at the hospital. It wasn’t a stroke, he said. It was a migraine episode, not uncommon. I had overmedicated myself with the Imitrex, taken three times the normal dose.
That had been a year ago. I’d had shingles, migraines, and now this new bizarre blank feeling.
I felt like I was walking through the film. I didn’t feel connected, and most of the time I didn’t feel like Eric’s mother. I did not feel like a good actress. I didn’t feel much of anything but fear.
When it came time for the scene where Eric says good-bye to his friends and to me, I stayed in the living room while he went to his bedroom to take the pills that would give him the death he wanted, before AIDS took over his body.
I had lost Nicky Dante to AIDS. Nicky, who danced with Joey in St. Louis, in the chorus, and co-wrote A Chorus Line. Joey, Belinda, and I celebrated the New Year with Nicky in Rome in 1984, the year before his death.
I sat quietly in the living room of the set till the crew returned and the cast was in place and Randal called “Action.” As they started moving Eric’s body past me—I feel dizzy as I write this—out of me erupted this sound, this roar, this scream, with hot tears washing, falling—of terror, longing, denial.
The last time this sound came out of me was when I ran into my mother’s surreal hospital room, looked at her troubled pale face with the frown between her eyes, and it washed over me that I couldn’t save her, that she was gone.
There was no holding back that eruption. No saving it for the close-up. I was carried away, and it was gone. It was probably my one true moment. It was probably inappropriate for the scene—too big, too raw, too ugly, too lifelike.
• • •
Right after finishing the film, Joey, Mary Beth, and I were invited to the Moscow International Film Festival. Mary Beth was close to Nikita Mikhalkov, the great Russian film director. We flew to gray Moscow. The Russian films were pretty dismal except for Mikhalkov’s documentary about his blond daughter, following her each year from her childhood on.
Nikita had a big, big personality, a big, expansive, handsome, vodka-drinking, peasant-song-singing, speechmaking, Russian maleness. He was filling the big hall in the ravenous drinking, dancing party afterward. He was flirting with Mary Beth. She was rosy with pleasure. Joey was pleasantly loaded. I went outside. The air was cold, cold. There was a wooden bridge, a wooden table, and two chairs. Dark brown. Mary Beth and Joey came out onto the bridge, leaning up against it as they talked. “Mary Beth,” I called. She turned, walked over, and sat down. Mary Beth was and is my best friend. “Mary Beth, I’m in trouble,” I said. “I’m floating away.”
At home on West End Avenue, I went to one haughty psychopharmacologist, then a doughy psychopharmacologist. He gave me a whole Zoloft in his office. Within a few minutes I’d passed out on his carpet. I could feel myself losing consciousness. When I came to, he hurriedly put me in a cab and sent me home. I’m on a regular dose of Zoloft now. I bless it. I have a lot of complex problems, but losing myself isn’t one of them. For better or for worse, I’m right here.