Then Again - Diane Keaton [57]
I’m not writing about the years you kids were growing up. I don’t want to be guilty of “the good ole days” trap. All I need to do is sift through the photos of us, and I sink into a nostalgia of the WORST kind. In Memories it’s not like that; I’m writing of things that shaped me. I remember a common thought I had about not doing things my parents did when I grew up. I would make chocolate instead of yellow cake. I would laugh & talk a lot. I would keep romantic love alive. I would be loving rather than impatient with my kids. I thought these CHANGES WOULD take place—
It’s a day to speak of today—so sparkly & beautiful—Jack bought himself a 12 ft. sailboat yesterday. He is happy. We will be sailing later. I have a strong feeling of fun ahead.
Love,
Mom
Mother didn’t finish her memoir, Memories. Memories. Lost memories. Memories unfinished. A book called Memories. It was almost as if God’s will had taken over Mother’s future. I didn’t notice. I was too busy to register the significance of taking on the task of writing a memoir or to be encouraging enough to help. I don’t know if I actually read Mother’s letter. I have no recollection. I was content to assume Mom was free from the drama of raising us kids and now she had all the time she needed to devote to her artistic pursuits. Of course, I made sure I didn’t know what was going on. I had other more important things on my mind.
Sometimes this house is so quiet—I can’t figure how it got to be, or why. I walk around as if looking for noise. I speak to the cats, one at a time, or together. The windows draw me to look out; around the yard; check the pool; is the light still on or off? At another time this oversight drove me crazy. Where are all those things and people who brought their sounds to me? I don’t mind being alone. I like it most of the time. When it closes in on me a touch too much, I just walk out of the place, get in the car, and go for a drive.
Seeing as a Way of Being
After ten years in New York, things continued to stand out, like the photograph Woman Seen from the Back by Onésipe Aguado, at the Met. What does she see facing the wrong direction? I wanted to see it too. The picture was taken in the nineteenth century, yet the distance between her past and my present seemed to collapse. It’s hard to believe a woman’s back made it clear that seeing rather than being seen could be something so extraordinary, but it did. The power of photography’s ability to evoke rather than explain inspired me. Nothing has changed. Books like Now Is Then, The Waking Dream, and Least Wanted are links to artists who forged a path into their imagination. At least, that’s what it seems like to me.
Marvin Heiferman was the director of Castelli Graphics when he gave me a little show of photographs I had taken in hotel lobbies around the United States. “Reservations” included photographs of a broken-down, empty Ambassador Hotel, where Mom had been crowned Mrs. Los Angeles; the Stardust Hotel lobby, where Dad invested and lost every penny when I was twelve years old; the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach; the Pierre in New York; and the Biltmore in Palm Springs.
Thanks for Nothing
A few years later, Marvin and I decided to collaborate on a book of publicity shots from old movies. It took us to basements and warehouses throughout Los Angeles, where we hunted down large-format photographs of movie stars posed in scenes from South Pacific, Lassie, and Bigger Than Life, with James Mason, to name a few. Plowing through thousands of discarded four-by-five-inch color transparencies, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Joan Crawford, James Mason, Annette Funicello, and even Elvis. Inanimate and waxy, they looked like the taxidermied animals from the series of photographs I had taken with Larry.
I knew I was on to something major with the stuffed-animal motif. It made me think of that Roy Rogers quote, “I told Dale, ‘When I go, just skin me and put me on top of Trigger.’ ” Which in turn gave me the idea of a title, Still Life. Get it? My favorite example