Then Again - Diane Keaton [67]
Together Again
Back in Palermo three weeks later, the tension on the set was explosive. Francis was where I left him, still sitting in the Silver Bullet, still rewriting the end. After dozens of breakups, Al and I broke up again. Masters of avoidance, we did not say hello.
It was a cold Saturday when Francis called a rehearsal in the very room where Wagner composed Parsifal. The usual suspects were gathered: Andy Garcia, George Hamilton, Talia Shire, Sofia (soon to be on the cover of Vogue), Richie Bright, Al, and John Savage. Eli Wallach came up to me. “You’re a survivor. Good for you. You’re a bright survivor.” Survivor? The lights had been hung upside down in the Teatro Massimo. Gordon Willis was fuming. As we waited for the twelfth rewrite of the ending to Godfather III, I thought about the other versions. There was one where Talia kills Eli Wallach, Al is blinded, and Andy breaks off with Sofia the instant before she is assassinated. After blind Al discovers his dead daughter on the steps of the theater, he blows his brains out. There was the one where Al is assumed dead but comes back. There was the one where he is shot but lives, only to be killed on Easter Sunday on his way to church. There was the version where Al is gunned down at Teatro Massimo but Sofia lives. None of us knew what to expect. Would this be the final, final draft or just one in a continuing series of attempts to end the saga of our erratic and entirely brilliant leader Francis Coppola?
All I remember about shooting the actual final scene to The Godfather: Part III is this: It was easy to sob. I sobbed and sobbed, then sobbed some more. It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was think of Dad. When I didn’t think of him, I thought of Al. We were back together, sort of.
I didn’t care if it would work or not. I was happy to hear him read Macbeth at midnight, just to listen to the sound of his voice. He was crazy. Crazy great. It was always “Di.” “Di, make me some coffee, hot and black.” “Di, come sit next to me so we can talk.” One night—my favorite—I listened to him tell me about being a kid on the street. He loved the fall and how the shadows amplified the broken-down brownstones. He told me the world would always be that street in the Bronx. Every beautiful thing was compared to those days, with the light shining its gold on his friends and the street. Always the street. I listened.
He hated goodbyes. He preferred to vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find him making tea or eating popcorn and plain M&Ms. He liked plain. I liked him plain. I loved him, but my love was not making me a better person. I hate to say it, but I was not plain. I was too much.
My Story of the Story of Dad’s Life
Right after I got back from finishing The Godfather: Part III, Dad told Mom to go look for a gun to kill the neighbors. “Do I have bad breath?” he said as he peed while kneeling in his bedroom, fingering the edge of the floorboard. He was terribly thin. He could barely hold a cup. He didn’t stop to look at sparrows anymore; he’d stopped walking. Dr. Copeland had been right. It was “bad.”
In the beginning of August he pretty much stopped talking too. Sometimes I would sit on the corner of his hospital bed, look out the picture window, and tell him my story of the story of his life, like the time he took us all the way to San Bernardino to a place called McDonald’s, where they sold hamburgers for fifteen cents and orange juice for five. Did he remember the giant red sign that said, Self-Service System HAMBURGERS. We have sold OVER 1 million? Did