Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (6 page)

I left my car with the valet, walked into the elevator, and immediately ran into Nancy. Just my luck. Just my fucking luck. And of course she was chipper and tall and attractive. “You look good,” she said. I smiled, knowing she didn’t mean it. She hated my hair. When the elevator door opened, I bumped into Adam Venit, one of the agency’s partners. Where was my hat when I needed it? Then Maya Forbes, the writer-producer, and her husband, Woody, came over saying, I don’t know—something positive about my appearance, I think. But of course I can’t remember a compliment, any compliment. It all goes to prove there is no God. But at least I didn’t wear the hat, which was getting a much needed break.

Dex was in the water with 299 other people who weren’t thinking about their hair. They’d been swimming for fifty minutes so far. Hair was not on their minds, I was reflecting, when I suddenly remembered last night’s dream. It all came back as Dexter approached the harbor.…

I was flying over a city with lots of churches. The moon was full. Winged people were flying beneath me. I think I was in heaven. I noticed that I had wings too, only mine were
black. I asked an angel for a mirror, and screamed when I saw I had no hair. None.

To dream of flying, says
The Dictionary of Dreams
, denotes marital calamities. To dream of flying through the heavens passing the moon foretells famine, wars, and trouble of all kinds. To dream that you have black wings portends bitter disappointments. To dream that you’re flying on top of church spires means you will have much to contend against in the way of love, and you will be threatened with a disastrous season of ill health, and, worst of all, the death of someone near to you may follow.

Great! Fine! Forget it. Clearly, there’s no relief. I decided to resign myself to baldness, even though I don’t really know if I am balding. Yes, my hair is thin, but I can’t tell whether I’ve lost enough to have female pattern baldness; nor am I sure there was a problem to begin with. The glaring possibility is that I may have deluded myself. I am an actress, after all. I still have an active imagination, and I’ve succeeded in driving myself to distraction, but over what? Thin hair. Not good enough.

After a fifty-eight-minute swim, Dexter came in fourth. She’d overcome five-foot swells in an ocean littered with jellyfish, seaweed, and a few intervening seals. I watched her struggle out of the water and stumble from the shoreline to the finish line. I forgot about my less than seriously big hair, my
lifelong struggle, my disappointment and took in the moment, not the future or the past, just the sheer wonder of standing barefoot on a beach watching my daughter receive her fourth-place ribbon. I thought about my own approaching finish line. The way I see hair goes like this:

I have enough to last a lifetime. Dexter has enough to last three lifetimes or more. Our four-and-a-half-hour excursion to Oceanside and back was not meant to be a recap of my hair dilemmas or to compare Dexter’s, much less anyone else’s, hair with mine. It was not planned to be taken up with envy, the green kind, or wigs, bald caps, hats, and female pattern baldness. But, in my defense, sometimes my mind has a mind of its own.

As I watched Dexter receive her ribbon, her long dirty-blond hair was still wet, still thick, and still perfectly straight. What a beauty, I thought. I had to smile. I couldn’t help myself. What a beauty. I felt my smile grow, not just for her but for all the beautiful hair in the world—Mom’s chestnut mane, and Dorrie’s and Robin’s big hair, and Stephanie Heaton’s blowout, and Stefanie
Hart to Hart
Powers’s as well, and Cybil Shepherd’s, plus Zooey Deschanel’s, Jessica Alba’s, and Caroline Kennedy’s untamable mass of hair, in fact all those Kennedy gals’, including Maria Shriver’s, and what about the endless
Martha Stewart Living
covers, documenting
Martha’s full head of hair throughout the decades, and Angela Davis’s Afro, and even Natalie Portman’s shaved head in
V for Vendetta
. How about that for fighting back? What beauties, I thought, each and every one, all and more, in their own way. I had to keep smiling in awe.

If you’re like me, always looking for a way to understand how your father played into who you are, warts and all, it makes sense that you’d look to where he spent much of his life. For me and my father, that’s the ocean.

I found myself sitting on a bench staring at the Pacific with my old dog Emmie and her friend Speed, a hangdog basset hound, both of whom soon took off after a rabbit. It was eight in the morning. I’d already dropped Duke and Dexter off at
the bus stop for school. The ocean spread below me, from the Santa Monica Pier, with its Ferris wheel dressed up in Halloween lights, all the way up to the edge of Malibu.

During the last years of his life, Dad lived on Cove Street in Corona del Mar, in a three-bedroom oceanfront board-and-batten cottage with his wife of forty-seven years, Dorothy. When he sat on his deck under a Pottery Barn umbrella, he was separated from the ocean by ten feet of concrete decking atop a weathered seawall. I was separated from the water by a sliding cliff. Dad’s view of the ocean was in his face. Mine was an all-encompassing panorama below me. Dad and I didn’t have too many things in common. Well, that’s not true; we did have one thing in common: the shape of our eyes.

Dad never spoke of my eyes, his eyes, or the nature of what eyes see. He spoke
to
me, not
of
me: “Okay, Diane, I want to know what the hell you were thinking when you crashed your mother’s Buick station wagon into my work car, which happens to be property of the city of Santa Ana.” Or: “Diane”—pause—“if you want to hone your math skills, you need to pay attention, for God’s sake.” He pontificated on important life lessons like “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Or: “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” And his ever popular
“Diane, I’ve told you a million times, look before you leap.” Staring into Dad’s eyes was like going before God. Even when I wasn’t in trouble they had a Do Not Enter aspect that kept his vulnerability as far away as the horizon line separating the ocean from the sky.

When I was a little girl, Dad’s eyes were blue, bright blue. When I was a big girl, Dad’s eyes had plans. They had ambition. They seemed to look to the future for an answer. When I was in my twenties, Dad’s eyes sloped down from the weight of various skin cancer extractions. I wondered if living with all those scars had an effect on his relationship to the sun. Mom worried that his blue eyes were fading. He needed sunblock. She asked him to please wear dark glasses. At the beach, he would have none of it. When Dad turned fifty, his eyes seemed to have stretched out like the elastic in an old pair of pajama bottoms. Could it be they were falling from the weight of so many responsibilities?

There was no explanation for their shape. One thing for sure, they didn’t come from his mother, Mary, who had prominent lids. Maybe they came from his father, Chester Hall, a barber who was murdered in a union dispute outside Kansas City in the late 1930s. That is, if Chester Hall was in fact Dad’s father. When Dad turned sixty, his eyes started drooping so fast they touched his cheeks. I doubt he was happy
about it, but he was a man, and men didn’t have vanity issues—at least that’s what Dad said. To him, his eyes just were, and that’s all there was to it.

Not so long ago I found a snapshot of Dad at age sixty-seven. I compared it with the photograph of me at the same age pinned on Duke’s bulletin board. While Dad’s eyes look out in truth, mine are hidden behind blue-tinted, black-framed glasses. I’ll say this: I’ve mastered shielding my eyes. But on closer examination, I decided, there was no hiding. Hidden in plain sight was the shape of Dad’s eyes in my own. His eyes were playing havoc with my schemes of deception. My eyes are aging exactly like his.

As soon as Emmie returned from chasing the rabbit, I grabbed her muzzle and gave her a big fat kiss. We both looked out over the magnificent horizon. God, is it beautiful here or what? The good news is, our bluff on Asilomar Street offers an unobstructed view of the ocean five blocks wide. There are no $8 million homes blocking the panorama because the bad news is, the earth underneath us continues to move. The most recent landslide sent part of the bluff falling onto the Aloha Courtyard Trailer Park, thirty-five feet below. Beyond the bench I’m sitting on is a sign that says, “Warning! Hazardous Conditions. Do not enter.” Dad would have said, “Don’t buy near a landslide area. Don’t live in the hills. Don’t marry a
bum.” But he was kind enough never to criticize my many attempts to hide the shape of my eyes.

The insults began backstage during a matinee of Woody Allen’s Broadway play
Play It Again, Sam
. Our stage manager Mick pulled me aside. “Diane, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you something.”

“No, go ahead.”

“Why do you wear all that black stuff on your eyes? I’d like to see the real Diane. The
Diane
Diane.”

Pissed off, I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re not into raccoons. Correct me if I’m wrong—weren’t you hired to pull the curtain up, not pull actresses aside and give them advice on their appearance? I don’t recall asking for beauty tips from Mick, the stage manager. As for all that ‘black stuff,’ it’s none of your business what I do with my eyes. I will tell you one thing: I’m not going to suddenly wake up one morning and see the real Diane, the
Diane
Diane. You know why? Because I am the real Diane. And the real Diane’s intention is to flaunt her eyes in smoky blackness for as long as she can.”

That’s what I wished I’d said. Instead, in typical Diane style, I smiled! I like to blame Dad, who told all us kids early on, “When stuck in a tough situation … run.” I bet that’s not what Chester Hall, the barber, would have done. But then, Dad never knew Chester Hall, who may or may not have been
his father. There was no father to help Dad “man up.” That was left to Grammy Hall, who was part man anyway. Dad did the best he could. He ran. And so did I. I ran, too.

I ran to Los Angeles as soon as I got a call from my agent telling me the producer of a new Rock Hudson series called
McMillan & Wife
wanted to see me for a role. I was twenty-four years old. The meeting turned out to be a giant lovefest. The producer adored me. He even wanted me to come back for a makeover. The next morning I was ushered into a brightly lit room, where a makeup man named Dan began to scrutinize my face. “We’re going to have to do something about those eyes,” he said. “They slope. They tell a sad story, not the happy story needed for
McMillan and Wife
.” He elaborated on the folds of my eyelids, telling me they hid the natural crease, causing the lower portion of the lid to go unseen. “Okay, I’ve got it,” he said. “I know what to do. Imagine Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
.”

Dan got down to business, applying pale green eye shadow to my disappearing upper lids. He painted wing-tipped curlicues at the ends of my eyes. That’s when he said I might want to consider a surgical intervention. He also wanted me to know that he’d deliberately decided not to use black eye pencil inside the bottom lids because, frankly speaking, it was “aging,” especially considering my “Asian eyes.” After what seemed an interminably long time, he finished with a flair and gave me
the hand mirror. When I looked at twenty-four-year-old Diane Hall from Orange County who went to New York City to become an actress, hopefully in the movies, that Diane, the one I’d grown up with, was gone.

“Huh, Dan, can I speak to you for a moment? Look, I know it was a horrible shame the door opened and there was dreary-eyed Little Miss Me. Sorry about that. Granted, it was unfortunate you were stuck with a pair of ‘hooded eyes’ only a mother could love. But did you really have to turn me into a wide-eyed Kewpie doll? Painting swirly tails at the ends of my eyes is not going to make me Cleopatra, and why Cleopatra in the first place? Here’s what kills me. Here’s what I can’t get over. I looked pretty enough to win the honor of a makeover. I just wasn’t pretty enough to avoid you. And, by the way, with all due respect, I’m twenty-four years old, not forty-four, the new twenty-four. I actually am twenty-four. So don’t tell me eyeliner is aging, ’cause unlike you, I’m too young to be aging. I know there’s no chance in hell I’m going to make the cut. But guess what, Dan the makeup man, you will not have the opportunity to chime in because … I’m out of here, you big jerk.”

That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I sat in the producer’s office with Dan as the producer oohed and aahed over my transformation before escorting me out the door. The next day I got the call from my agent saying they loved me, but they
were going in a different direction. The Susan Saint James direction, to be exact.

Suddenly Speed joined Emmie in barking at Prince, the Great Dane, who loped off in his version of a run and knocked over the warning sign. I had to laugh. If only Dad could sit with me one time before the bench slides into the trailer park below. If he were here, I could open the conversation with something harmless, like how funny Speed’s ears look dragging through the dirt, or wasn’t it a shame it took so long to wax our Hobie surfboards back in the day, and what ever happened to
Boomerang
, our first speedboat. That might be nice. I’d be sure to leave out the summer I got burned in another way: the summer I saw my first penis. I say “burned” because after that initial “glimpse,” like in the Alicia Keys song, this girl was on fire. All I did was walk into our tent and there was Dad’s friend Jim, with his organ exposed. It happened so fast I couldn’t take in the details. I wanted to, but despite the current unpopularity of Sigmund Freud and his even less popular theory of penis envy, I have to say the power of his penis struck an envious note in me. Even though I’ve had some long, hard looks inside Taschen’s
The Big Penis Book
, the picture of Jim changing out of his swim trunks looms, like Goya’s black landscapes engorged with screaming monsters, hell, fire, and damnation. For me, the penis will always be a source of wonder, and fear. But, of course, Dad and I could never talk of such things, partially
because he had one, partially because he was my father, but mainly because it was a risky conversation for two people who didn’t know how to speak to each other even though we shared a pair of identically shaped eyes.