Then Again - Diane Keaton [56]
Warren, now a friend, would remind me I was a movie star. Focus on that. I didn’t listen. Cindy Sherman had arrived on the scene and, with her, the decade of appropriation. I wanted to be part of it. I kept telling myself I was an artist. The awful truth was, no matter how hard I tried, I was an actress who hadn’t been in a comedy since Manhattan in 1979.
On the Road
I took some of Warren’s advice and went looking for a movie to produce. After reading Somebody’s Darling, the story of one of the few bankable female directors in Hollywood and her best friend, I took the train to Washington, D.C., and met my own soon-to-be-friend Larry McMurtry at his store Booked Up. Larry, with his feet on the desk, listened to my pitch. Not skipping a beat, he said he’d give me the option and he’d write the script too. Six months later it was finished. That’s the kind of guy Larry is. My agent secured a meeting with Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount, who did not mince words when she told me the project was not commercial. That was it for Somebody’s Darling, but not for my friendship with Larry.
Every other month or so, I would hop on the Amtrak to D.C., where Larry and I would hit the streets in his Cadillac. As usual, I had a creative task that consumed me. One time it revolved around a series of photographs on taxidermied animals. Leave it to Larry to know some people who owned a pair of stuffed sheep joined at the hip. Traveling became a metaphor for our friendship.
On one of our road trips through Texas, I told Larry about my dream of living in Miami Beach, where it was forever humid and hot. Sometimes, I told him, I thought about moving to Atlantic City or Baja California. Then again, what I really wanted to do was pack it in and move to Pasadena near the arroyo, right by Greene and Greene’s Gamble House. Larry listened with a Dr Pepper in one hand, the steering wheel in the other. When we found ourselves on the outskirts of Ponder, Texas, a big sign told us that Bonnie and Clyde had been shot within the city limits. Warren Beatty—my high school crush; my Splendor in the Grass. It was impossible to wrap my mind around the fact that we met, became intimate, and spent a year making Reds. Drifting back to 1967, I remembered Mom’s home movie of Bonnie and Clyde, starring Randy as C. W. Moss, Robin as Bonnie, Dorrie as Blanche, and me, Diane, as Clyde Barrow. I had outright refused to be Bonnie. Hell, no. I didn’t want to be Bonnie. I was going to be Warren Beatty. Who in their right mind wouldn’t? And that became our central problem. I wanted to be Warren Beatty, not love him.
The facts of my life felt more surreal than any dream. As we passed through Ponder, I rolled down the window. Out of the dust that enveloped our silence, Larry’s words started coming and going. “It’s so plain in Nebraska, I can’t tell you, it’s just totally plain. Last week I crossed the Missouri on a tiny toll bridge and the little old woman toll keeper was so lonely, she made me stop and eat a doughnut with her. ‘It’s punk here in the wintertime,’ she said. ‘I sit here all day just grinding my teeth.’ ” Then he’d be quiet for a while and begin again. Larry was a born storyteller. I think about those times, the lull of the engine, the endless horizon, and Larry’s words dangling. It turned out we shared something the filming of Somebody’s Darling could never have given us: a friendship and the road.
Memories
Dear Diane,
My book has a total of three pages. So far my diggings have turned up a bit of pain I can’t avoid but funny remembrances too. Many thoughts I kept so private dwell on my anger toward authority figures that never came out as anger. Writing this is not a pleasant pastime; in fact the book is seldom touched, because I’m trying