Then Again - Diane Keaton [58]
It’s hard to love someone you’ve never known, but it’s easy to long for someone you’ve seen idealized to the point where you think you’re in love. When you grow up, you’re supposed to be able to distinguish between fantasy and real affection. For instance, I know Gregory Peck isn’t going to enter my life and become an intimate part of it. Most people know that, and by the time they reach adulthood, they don’t want Gregory Peck anymore. But if Gregory Peck touched them once—he touched me once—he remains a very vital part of their makeup. The ideal image of him takes on many dimensions. He becomes a representation of the frequently frustrated longings of adolescence, all those things you wanted to believe life was going to place at your feet.
After Still Life was published I received a letter from Gregory Peck. He wasn’t pleased. He thought the book was stupid. On top of that he didn’t appreciate being compared to a stuffed animal. It was such a lame, kitschy idea, he hoped I wasn’t the mastermind behind it. He ended by saying my heartfelt introduction was total crap.
It never entered my mind that Gregory Peck might feel bad about looking almost real in front of a fake backdrop. I was busy patting myself on the back for a book Gregory Peck dismissed as camp, and how, miracle of miracles, it captured the essence of taxidermy and how it was going to put me on the map—which one I’m not sure.
Gregory Peck is on my long list of regrets I hope to be forgiven for. I’m sorry I carelessly held him accountable for some publicist’s brainstorm. I’m sorry I picked an iconic photograph that shed light on his stiff upper lip and abiding lack of affect, which hounded him throughout his career, like my own eccentricity hounds me.
In the Meantime
I talked to a woman at Hunter’s Bookstore who had just spent 3 days cleaning out her deceased aunt’s huge Victorian house. The aunt, a spinster, had died at age 86. She saved everything ever given, sent, or found. When asked why, she said that it gave her pleasure. She wouldn’t care what happened to it after she died. Her niece bought a box of heavy-duty trash bags and without sympathy pitched all of it into the dump. It was as if I was hearing this for a specific reason. All the writing I do, and all the words on paper I put away, and all the little inspirational messages I cut and save that I feel were written and directed to me and me alone, don’t matter. After I’m gone, I won’t care whether the family reads any of it or tosses all of it in the dump. There are some words I would want them to read though: the ones detailing my thoughts and feelings about each of them; how much I loved them, what it was about them that was so special to me; those five people who will be doing the pitching.
Imagining Heaven, the Ultimate Coming Attraction, 1987
It took a year and a half to make my documentary, Heaven. The reception was unanimous. I suppose the most painful rejection came from Vincent Canby of The New York Times. “Heaven, a film by Diane Keaton, is the cinema equivalent of a book that’s discounted to $19.95 before Christmas with the warning that it will be $50 after. If you respond to that kind of come-on, you may respond to Heaven. One’s torn between wanting to kick the film and wanting to protect it from wasting all this money.”
Heaven was a promise I’d longed for as a little girl. I knew I was afraid to die, but if I had to, I wanted to go to heaven. The epiphany came thirty years later, when I visited the Mormon Tabernacle visitors’ center in Salt Lake City with my friend Kristi Zea. Entering the dome-shaped hall, we saw what I can only describe as a coming attraction, featuring smiling people in white robes floating in the sky. Even Kristi agreed it was a strange juxtaposition of images that could inspire only a surrealist. I may not have been a surrealist, but I was inspired. I called my producing partner Joe Kelly. I had an idea.
We got permission to see 16-millimeter copies