Right in the middle of a welcome and wonderful time, both of us suddenly felt wetter than we should. The lights were off. I reached across, turned them on, and screeched. My bed looked like a massacre. Blood was everywhere. I leaped up and ran to the bathroom for a towel or wet sponge or just to get out of there and hide. Standing on the cold white tiles of the clean bathroom floor, I hung my head and chanted, over and over, “I don’t believe this. I can’t believe this happened now!” When I had the courage to return to the bedroom, Roland was already balling up the sheets he’d stripped off the bed and was whistling to himself. When he saw me, he dropped the bundle of white on the floor and spread his arms like an opera singer. “I love dramatic women!”
The next morning he had to leave very early for a meeting. A couple of hours later when I opened the front door to pick up the newspaper, a large empty box of Tide laundry detergent filled to bursting with a hundred red roses was there on the step. The note taped to it bore Roland’s abominable handwriting, in a quote from Anna Karenina, my favorite noveclass="underline" “His heart stood still at the nearness of his happiness.”
Some months later Arlen asked if I would consider becoming her personal manager, professional adviser, whatever I wanted to title it. The salary would be three times what I was making and the work as she described it would be challenging but not difficult. Much of it was similar to what I was doing at the studio. Still, I was initially hesitant. But I knew, through living with her, that the more famous she became, the more puzzled and disturbed she was by a world that never stood still long enough for her to stop being dizzied by it. From me or someone else, she definitely needed help.
At the dinner where Roland was supposed to help me decide whether or not to take the job, he proposed marriage instead. He said at that particular moment he didn’t care about the fate of Arlen Ford; he cared about us, and that was all he wanted to discuss. I said I already knew I wanted to marry him and had for a long time. Which shut him right up. But later, after we had hugged and toasted each other many times with good champagne, I returned to the subject by quoting the adage about choosing your job more carefully than you do a spouse because you’ll be spending more time with it.
Of course there were dangers involved, especially now that Roland and I were going to marry and the connection between the three of us grew even more intimate (or claustrophobic). However, in the end I said yes, for all the obvious reasons, but mainly because Arlen said she needed me and meant it. Never for an instant had I forgotten what she’d done when I needed her most. I would give the job a try. At the end of six months, if it wasn’t working, either of us could push the ejection button. But she asked for a full six months. She believed it would take at least half that time for us to get used to working with each other, then another three months to get used to working together against the world. Six months.
It turned into seven years. In that time, among other gulps and hurrahs, I learned two things. One, be suspicious of anyone who uses his or her middle name in a professional capacity: Mark Gary Cohen, Susanne Britanny Marlow, Blah Blah Smith. For too long it seemed that any time we had contact with one of these trilogies it came to nothing but disaster. The doctor who delivered our son had three names and I almost died because of his incompetence. Poor Arlen got involved with several three-name producers and the resultant films were debacles or were forgotten in a week.
The other thing I learned was when something drops, never try to catch it before it hits the ground. Let it fall. If you don’t, you’ll catch the wrong part or edge and hurt yourself. Naturally this applies to both objects and people, including me. In those seven years, I had an affair and would not listen to my good husband, who kept trying to catch me as I fell into dishonesty, ugly silliness, and making those who loved me suffer. It ended only when I realized I was about to smash onto a floor of terminal selfishness and desire. I survived, but didn’t deserve to.
So it was ironic that I was the one who kept trying to catch Arlen as she fell in so many different ways. The movie world is made up of fabulously successful people who never believe their victories are genuine. Judging from the enormous and often instantaneous turnover of fates in those high places, they’re right to be unsure.
I particularly remember going with Arlen to a party at Malibu Colony jam-packed with the famous and powerful. The biggest shots gravitated to the living room. At first glance it appeared to be a relaxed gathering of the gods in jeans, swapping funny tales about the business. Yet all of them wore a kind of tensed-jaw, ready-to-spring expression. Their stories were great, but each one had to be bigger or funnier than the last. These people weren’t listening to one another; they were planning what to say next time they held the floor. It was exhausting to see them all straining for love and attention. It was as if they were trying to suck every bit of air out of the room. I stood up and went outside.
Sadly, Arlen was one of those straining people. She had begun as an actress who made it on talent and beauty. But then the movie community, and later the world, said, That’s fine but what else do you have? She was indignant. I’ve given you everything I am. Where do you get off asking for more? They were silent, but the time came when her new films didn’t do so well, and people quickly began talking about her in the past tense.
She panicked, and her personal life began careering around like the ball in a pinball game. There were bad, self-destructive love affairs, which in one case resulted in her spending three weeks in a rehab center for cocaine abuse. And other unbelievably wrong decisions that led to ugly celebrity behavior; she was on the covers of sleazy magazines that cater to the failed, the furious, and the miserable. The photograph of her coming off a plane at Rome airport with an ugly snarl on her face and an arm cocked to punch the photographer… Was that really Arlen Ford the movie star? Looking so old and hysterical? The woman we all once wanted to be or have? Falling without trying, she gave them what they wanted. Enough to make them indignant and fascinated with her again, but now for the wrong reasons. She showed she was human, and we’re always more comfortable with people than with gods.
The grand finale came not from death or drugs but a tuna fish sandwich. One night after returning from a party, Arlen switched on the light in her living room and discovered a middle-aged woman sitting on the sofa holding a wrapped tuna fish sandwich in one hand and, in the other, the crowbar she’d used to break into the house. “You’re so skinny in your films, Arlen. I knew you’d want this. Eat it.”
There was no place left to hide, not even her own home. So she luckily did something very smart: dropped out for a year, moved to her beloved Vienna (alone), and went house hunting. She bought an enchanting Jugendstil jewel on the outskirts of Weidling, a sleepy little village about six miles from Vienna. Her place sat on a hill in the middle of a vineyard with a panoramic view of the Danube. It was lovely but in appalling condition, and by the time she finished renovating it, Arlen had spent almost as much for the repairs as for the house itself.
Her letters from that time (at the beginning she forbade us from calling unless it was an emergency) were only about rebuilding a house in a foreign country whose language you barely understood. She dyed her hair henna, wore no makeup, and enrolled in a beginner’s German Course at Berlitz four days a week. When she wasn’t overseeing repairs or studying verb tenses, she drove all around Austria in her new car. Her descriptions of buying wine in small towns on the Hungarian border, with names like Rust and Oggau, were classic. She ate wild boar on a snowy December evening in a Tyrolean restaurant that dated back to the fifteenth century. She floated down the Danube in a kayak past castles and a ruin where Richard the Lion-Hearted had once been held prisoner. She was stopped on narrow mountain roads by horse-drawn hay wagons or farm children leading their herds of fat cattle, bells clanging, slowly across her route. Friends were townspeople, the couple who ran the local Tabak, an old man who raised hawks in the Wienerwald.