Then Again - Diane Keaton [71]
After Al, I lost all semblance of Dana’s sexy confidence. The truth is I never had it, but that isn’t the point. The point is I let myself, yet again, become preoccupied with failure. Mine. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough for Al. Maybe Al, like Ronnie McNeeley back in junior high, wasn’t attracted to my face. My face was my failure.
Sometimes it’s hard to separate the concept of beauty from the concept of pretty. They’re different. Beauty is variable. It comes and goes. For example, Grammy Hall was beautiful once and only once, and that was the year she died. Natalie Wood went from pretty to beautiful in Splendor in the Grass. Anna Magnani was an ugly beauty who flung herself onto the dirt in Rome, Open City. All these women were beautiful. They were mesmerizing, but their beauty didn’t make promises. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t eternal.
If I wanted to be pretty I could put in an order for a face-lift, with an eye job on the side, and I could get rid of my Irish bulb to boot. Plastic surgeons would be happy to accommodate my needs. But then what? It’s a little late to start experimenting. And besides, pretty, with its promise of perfection, is not as appealing as it used to be. What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas. God knows, I want new ideas and new experiences.
The difference between prettiness and beauty is that prettiness—like the Avon lady knocking at your door, offering up a selection of neatly wrapped gratification—is a dead end. Beauty, flinging itself onto the earth like Anna Magnani, is alive and fleeting. I’d like to let go of pretty with no hard feelings, but do I have it in me? Beauty is not an option. Beauty is like living with questions. There are no answers. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, does that mean mirrors are a waste of time? I don’t know if I’m brave enough to live without answers or to stop looking at myself.
Life Goes On
HBO offered me the role of Hedda Nussbaum, a victim of domestic abuse whose adopted daughter, Lisa, died from a severe blow to the head given by Joel Steinberg, Hedda’s lover. I passed. No more victims for me. Instead, I restored the Wright house Dad had warned me not to buy. I took a road trip to Canyon de Chelly with Dorrie. I directed a music video called “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” with Belinda Carlisle. I took a screenwriting class at USC with David Howard, who talked about preparation and aftermath. “You’re never too old to learn, huh?” a student asked during a break. “Yeah, never too old,” I said. I met a producer named Judy Polone, who gave me a shot at directing a TV movie called Wildflower. We hired the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who went on to shoot Schindler’s List for Steven Spielberg. I cast Patricia Arquette and Reese Witherspoon to star. They were beautiful and talented. The future was theirs. Randy moved to Laguna. Al had a baby. Warren married Annette Bening. Dorrie bought a house. Robin had two children, one husband, and three rescue dogs. I kept moving.
At the Rose Bowl swap meet, Carolyn Cole, the director of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner photography collection at the Los Angeles Central Library, came up to me and wanted to know if I was interested in taking a look at something very special. Alone in the basement of Bertram Goodhue’s Egyptian revival landmark, I opened the file marked A and began a trip through two million photographs of found dogs, missing children, holdup suspects, wife beaters, cross-dressers—basically the whole kitchen sink of down-and-outers who shared a short-lived if splashy notoriety in the Herald Examiner. I found an eight-by-ten picture of Mother Anderson, who had been caught passing bad checks at Clifton’s Cafeteria while pregnant with her seventeenth child. Behind her was a photograph of Father Anderson in jail, accused of