Then Again - Diane Keaton [73]
When Unstrung was selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, Disney flew me over. Susan Arnold told me not to worry: The plane was safe, we’d have a great flight, we would drink red wine. I took a Xanax instead. Once I was there, Cannes was a spectacular scene. My interviews with Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, E! Entertainment, HBO, the Toronto Star, Time magazine, and CNN were positive. Joe Roth, the head of Disney, wanted to know what my next picture was going to be. At the party, Richard Corliss’s wife talked about the theme of hands, how delicately the hands stood out in scene after scene. Wanting to end on a high note, I slipped into the official Cannes limo and disappeared into the dead of night. Inside my suite at the Carlton, a familiar sensation came back. With my Mizrahi dress in the closet, the party was over. I was alone again—this time in Cannes. It wasn’t different from any other night, except I didn’t have my dog, Josie, to pet, which, as lame as it may seem, gave me something to look forward to. Just the thought of stroking her mangy coat, grabbing her muzzle, and laying on lots of kisses made me feel good. I missed the ritual, the every-night of it, the knowing she’d be there. How was it possible that Josie—the shepherd mix who bit the mailman and attacked the neighbor’s dog, Freddy; Josie, aka Jaws, the dog I wouldn’t have wished on anyone—was the only thing I missed as I stared at the ceiling in a beautiful hotel suite six thousand miles away from my very own “yellow snapper”?
Diane’s Journal, May 29, 1995
With eight hours left on the twelve-hour flight, the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign goes on for the fifth time. I start to grip the arms of the seat. It isn’t like I haven’t been warned. The storm clouds at the airport were impossible to overlook. At the ticket counter a woman in a straw hat complained to her husband about plane connections in Las Vegas. What about taking off in a storm, lady? I tried to distract myself with Time magazine’s profile of Reynolds Price, whose new book, The Promise of Rest, had “rounded off a powerful saga of isolation.” Isolation. Did I have to be reminded I was flying alone? Where was Warren to hold my hand? I thought of Dad. He, too, found air travel intolerable. Did he feel isolated in the sky? When the plane was delayed I read “Heartbreak Motel,” an article singling out the leftover lives of drifters, boozers, and itinerant families found in motels along the Arizona border, as lightning lit the sky. There was Paul Coyle, who, after his wife left him, had the names of his sixteen children in a heart tattooed on his back. Another tattoo read I LOVE MY FAMILY. MARRIED OCT. 12, 1958, CITY TEMPLE, ILL. PAUL AND JANET COYLE. He must have figured if he died his family would find him. One thing I knew, there’d be no family finding me if, God forbid, the delayed Boeing 747 nonstop to L.A. crashed over the Atlantic Ocean.
I hate the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign. I hate it. Bouncing around at 35,000 feet is just plain horrifying. Plus, the two Xanax and the glass of wine have failed. Like a car shifting from fourth to third gear, the sound of the motor, at least to me, indicates the plane is trying to adjust to a lower altitude. Is this a good idea? Isn’t higher smoother? The stewardess tries to convince me everything is all right, but the thousand-foot drops are killing me. I imagine our jumbo jet flipping over upside down. I can see my face smashed against the window. When she launches into the old “car on a bumpy road” analogy, I wonder if she’s crazy. She can’t be serious. This is not a bumpy road. This is the air. This is being in the middle of nothing with nothing to hold on to. Sorry, but check it out. Flying is not normal. And guess what?