Then Again - Diane Keaton [39]
We rehearsed the scene as if everything was fine. When Francis got around to shooting it, every take felt completely unexpected, especially Michael Corleone’s slap. That was one of the most compelling things about The Godfather: the appearance of formality that masked the raw violence exploding in scene after scene. Recently I went to a screening and fell in love with Al all over again. The whole package. You know what I came away with? It was better he’d been raised by wolves. It was better he couldn’t drive. It was better he didn’t love me and got mad without an explanation. It was worth it, all of it, just to be in that scene with him, just to feel his face against mine. I was Kay, in a role I never related to yet gave me what little I know of Al Pacino. For me the Godfathers, all three of them, were about one thing—Al. It was as simple as that. As for the role of Kay? What epitomized it? The picture of a woman standing in a hallway waiting for permission to be seen by her husband.
Journal Entry—Dick Smith, 1974
It’s early. They put me in room 404 at the Sheraton in downtown Los Angeles across the street from MacArthur Park. I have a view. I like the room. It has bay windows. Below I can see people come and go; Francis in his limo, Dean Tavoularis in his Mercedes. Only blocks away twenty-four people were killed in a fire last Friday.
I’m sick about the scene. Francis will be up soon. I’m scared. Dick Smith has his makeup brush close to my face. I know I have to stop writing. He insists the actors sit still in the makeup chair. I wonder if he was like this with Marlon Brando. I can smell an orange being eaten by his assistant. I see steam from the water boiling in a pot.
Dick Smith, 2011
Belmont Village, a retirement residence in Burbank, is home to ladies who dine at five-thirty, at least a dozen heroes from World War II, a few youngsters in their sixties, a host of elderly men and women struggling in their late eighties, and now the artist and poet, my brother, John Randolph Hall. On the door to Randy’s one-bedroom apartment is a sign: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. I’M LEARNING HOW TO THINK. And he is.
Every Saturday Randy and I walk to Foster’s Freeze for a soft vanilla cone. And every Saturday we see Dick Smith sitting in one of the chairs that line the back of the lobby. Dick Smith, the Academy Award–winning makeup artist, lives at Belmont Village too. Last week Randy’s knit cap was pulled low. Mine, a bowler, hit the rim of my glasses. As we got on the elevator, so did Dick Smith. I knew he didn’t like hats, but when he said, “Take that hat off,” I said, “Thank you, Dick, but I’m keeping it on.” That was when he reached over and grabbed Randy’s hat off his head.
Dick never liked hats. It’s hard to understand. But then, it’s hard to understand why Gordon Willis, the cinematographer of all three Godfathers, hated makeup artists like Dick Smith. Make no mistake about it—Dick Smith hated Gordon Willis too. It could be that Randy and I, hidden underneath the security of our hats, brought back his resentment of Gordon Willis, or even of Marlon Brando, the jokester. Maybe Dick Smith’s award-winning prosthetic makeup had been ruined one too many times by Mr. Brando’s notorious antics or the gray fedora he wore when Don Vito Corleone died in his tomato garden.
All I know is, Dick Smith is back and he still hates hats. Marlon Brando came back too. Nine years ago I was walking down a hall at the UCLA Medical Center when I saw him shuffle toward me as he held on to a companion. There was no “Nice tits” this time. He looked at me blank-faced. Dick Smith, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, looks at me every Saturday. What does he see? An inappropriate woman with an equally inappropriate man walking through the lobby of his home, wearing hats? I know what I see—a home inhabited by a host of unique