I moved out of Des Artistes and into another East Village studio I could barely afford on the salary I received from two grand ladies as their personal assistant. They both lived on opposite sides of the Dakota, a creepy Gothic building on West Seventy-Second Street, perfectly cast as where Mia Farrow gave birth to Satan in Rosemary’s Baby. The Dakota was completed in 1884, before there was an Upper West Side and only grazing cattle surrounded a mammoth apartment building in the middle of farmland. There was very little development above Fourteenth Street in those days, and people said the building was so far away, it might as well have been in the Dakotas.
Both doyennes lived across from each other, separated by a large interior courtyard. One of the ladies, Susan Stein Shiva, was the daughter of Dr. Jules Stein, who founded MCA and owned Universal Studios. On my way to her apartment, I would often share the elevator with John, Yoko, and their toddler, Sean. John always nodded a hello and called me “young man” in a cheeky formal way, as if we were in on his joke together.
I was too shy to tell him that I treasured a photograph of me shaking his hand at a charity event where rich kids had lined up all the way down Benedict Canyon to meet the Beatles. It was during their first American tour, and they sat on stools for hours shaking hands with children as a photographer snapped shots every fifteen seconds so everyone would get a picture.
In mine, Dominique, who was only four, is seen curtsying to Paul, and I am meeting John, who for some reason looks as thrilled to meet me as I him. Alex was before us in line and had just met George, his favorite Beatle, who was spiritual like him, but the picture was taken just moments after and shows a woman steering him from the line. In the way a single image can trump reality, Alex’s memory of that day is that the woman who steered him away kept him from meeting any of the Beatles and only Dominique and I were allowed. When my brother would later lose his grip on reality, his rage over the injustice of being denied what Dominique and I experienced grew to epic proportions. It was unfair, because his sister and I got all the breaks. He could rail at me about it, but never Dominique.
I was fortunate to still own an image of my favorite Beatle smiling at me through his Ray-Bans, holding out his hand as if astonished to see me, with an expression that said, “Holy hell, mate, what the fuck are you doing here?”
I never did tell John about that photograph and what it meant to me, but I wish I had. Two years later, I would be in an off-Broadway comedy playing a demented youth who kills a celebrity to become famous. One night after a performance, I biked to a deli on the way home and heard on the radio that John Lennon had just been shot in front of the Dakota. Not believing it could be true, I got back on my bike and madly pedaled, as if under a spell, all the way uptown, until I reached the building. I arrived no more than an hour after the shooting, and a crowd holding candles, drawn by the same calling as me, had gathered outside. It was then that I heard he’d been murdered by a fan who, like the character I’d played earlier that evening, wanted to be famous. The next day I begged the producers to let me out of the play, but they refused. The show went on, but I couldn’t reprise the humor I’d once found in the funny little murderer I’d played, and never got a laugh onstage again.
I hadn’t known anyone who’d died a sudden and violent death before, and though of course I didn’t actually know John, I’d grown up with him, and imagined that he was once happy to see me, and, with countless others, I wept in front of the Dakota until sunrise as if everyone I ever loved had died.
On the day I met John Lennon for the second time, I also met Susan Stein Shiva, who made me audition for a job she described as her “social secretary.” She handed me a thick leather Filofax and told me to call the person at the top of the page and invite them to a party she was to give.
I dialed the number and said to the person who answered, “This is Mrs. Susan Stein Shiva’s office calling for Mrs. Onassis. Is she available?”
I waited for the former First Lady to pick up, the same lady I’d once made a paddle for so she could spank her son John-John. I clocked Susan’s approving expression out of the corner of my eye. So far, so good.
“Yes, hello, Mrs. Onassis,” I said when she came on the line. “I’m calling at the request of Mr. and Mrs. Shiva to invite you to a dinner party on October twelfth at eight o’ clock at their home at the Dakota.”
Mrs. Onassis got a pen and told me about a possible conflict but said she would try to move things around, and as she spoke I responded to her every sentence in a quiet, poncy tone, “Ohhhhkay…oohkay…oooookeeeedokey…allrightythen,” and concluded with, “We will look forward to seeing you then, Mrs. Onassis.”
I hung up, terribly pleased with myself, and looked to Susan to see how I did.
She considered me closely before saying, “Lose the ‘okeydokey’ and you’ve got the job.”
Across the courtyard lived my other paycheck, an aging Southern actress named Ruth Ford, who on December 8, 1980, placed the first call reporting shots fired outside the Dakota. She was once a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and had been a close friend of William Faulkner’s since her college days.
When I worked for Mrs. Ford, she lived in a ten-room apartment with her lover, the writer Dotson Rader, who was thirty-one years her junior, and they hosted dinner parties for a Mount Rushmore of playwrights and artists. Dotson was boyishly handsome and, while a student at Columbia, had made ends meet by cruising Port Authority Bus Terminal as a male hustler, adventures he would later recount in a wonderful book called Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things.
One of my tasks was to ape Ruth’s signature on eight-by-ten stills of her in a 1943 movie called Adventure in Iraq for the few movie buffs who still remembered the film. If there were fan letters, I would answer them in Ruth’s grand Southern tone as if I were thanking Ashley Wilkes for attending my tea dance. My other job was to bartend her dinner parties, which were raucous affairs that required a skill set different from forging the signature of an aging starlet.
One evening Ruth and Dotson hosted a small dinner for their close friend Tennessee Williams. The only others invited were Henry Geldzahler, a powerful art critic, and Truman Capote, the ungrateful guest at my father’s Black and White Ball. Ruth bought me a Brooks Brothers shirt and a clip-on bow tie for the occasion. I stood at attention in the dining room in front of a makeshift bar, while a Nepalese butler, who would one day inherit the ten-room apartment from Mrs. Ford, solemnly served a meal left untouched, as the guests preferred booze over food. They drained their glasses faster than I could fill them, and by the time the plates had been taken away, everyone save Ruth Ford was totally bombed. Tennessee had taken to calling me “boy” to get my attention, and soon the others followed suit, running me ragged.
“Boy, another refreshment on the double,” and “Boy, a little less ice in the next one ifyouplease,” they chimed, finding my struggle to keep up with their orders hilarious.
Truman led the handsy charge when I leaned over to reach his empty glass and he pinched my ass, making me squeal like an Elizabethan barmaid. My yelp really brought down the house, and every drink I delivered after was rewarded with someone grabbing, patting, or fondling any of my body parts below the belt. Ruth was the only one not laughing, nor did she seem to notice the discomfort of her $2.50-an-hour employee. I might have laughed at the first one or two reach-arounds, but soon blamed myself for somehow encouraging their drunken rowdiness.
When Tennessee managed to get a handful of both my balls, Ruth spoke for the first time since dinner had been served.
“You know, Tennessee,” she drawled, “this ‘boy,’ as you call him, happens to be the nephew of Joan Didion, whom I always thought you were rather fond of.”
Tennessee’s hand snapped away from my crotch as if he’d been bitten by an asp. Embarrassment drained his complexion, and he pushed away a glass of vodka on ice in self-revulsion. After composing himself, he looked me directly in the eye.
“Young man,” he began, “though I don’t know your aunt well, I adore her words and deeply apologize for my disgraceful behavior. Won’t you please sit with us.”
He grabbed an empty high-back chair and told Truman to “scoot over.” His apology impressed me, and I joined the group with no ill will. I had been groped by men since my earliest teens, and though I realize a younger generation has felt lifelong trauma from similar abuse, I had no such reaction, and accepted my abashment as the price for being young and attractive. I pass no judgment on that generation or my own.
When I called Dominique the next night, she shrieked, “You met Tennessee Williams!” totally blowing past the ass-pinching part.
“I wish I had your life,” she sighed.
A silence followed her kind but disingenuous remark. What wasn’t said was that I wished I had her life. My frustration as a mostly out-of-work actor included the added bonus of envying my sister’s blossoming career. She had recently gone from job to job, guest starring in television series even I couldn’t be snobby about. Mike Nichols hired her to be in Family, which he produced, and she’d starred opposite Ed Asner in a Lou Grant episode. A prominent talent agency had signed her, though one needn’t have been an agent to know she was on the path to stardom. I still lacked representation and relied on a trade paper called Backstage for open casting calls to audition for roles that had already been cast. “Are you crazy?” I’d yelled at her a year earlier when she called, thrilled with excitement and expecting me to be thrilled that she had decided to become an actress.
“It’s a terrible profession. You’re just going to get hurt. Every day someone is going to hurt you.”
Dominique inherited the family Irish temper and would take on anyone if she felt cornered. Her disappointment in me, and her anger at my reaction, was volcanic, and we yelled back and forth until exhausting ourselves.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I’m an asshole. I’m happy for you. You’re going to be amazing. But it’s going to take a while, so you have to be patient. Look at me, I’ve been doing this for a few years and have yet to catch a break.”
“Maybe we’ll be the next Lunts,” she said slyly.
“Or Barrymores,” I offered.
“The Osmonds,” she snorted.
“The Allman Brothers.”
“Shaun and David Cassidy!”
We giggled like a couple of dweebs, but our fantasy about someday being a famous brother-and-sister act starring in movies together was no joke, at least to us.
In two years our dream to work together would almost come true when the director Tony Richardson asked if we’d consider playing siblings in The Hotel New Hampshire, based on the book by John Irving.
“Consider?” we both exclaimed to Tony. “Of course we’ll do it.”
“Well…read the script first,” he said mysteriously.
When we did, we understood why he asked us to “consider” playing brother and sister: the roles in Irving’s story required that we not only have an incestuous relationship but also fuck countless times on-screen until our attraction for each other runs dry.
Dominique and I could barely look at each other when we’d finished reading the script. The picture of us doing these unspeakable things took days to scrape from our minds, and we called Tony to pass on the first movie either of us had ever been “considered” for.
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said when we told him. “It was just a thought.”
One afternoon in 1984, I sat in the back row of a near-empty Rialto Theatre in Times Square to see The Hotel New Hampshire. Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster played the incestuous siblings, and they had lots of scenes where they kissed with tongues and fiddled around naked under the sheets. I laughed out loud, alone in the dark, imagining that Dominique was sitting next to me, both of us rolling in the aisles at the sheer ridiculousness of us playing these parts. When I stopped laughing, I got out of my seat and left the theater before I started to bawl.