Up Till Now: The Autobiography

obvious that she wasn’t after me at all.
    During dinner I had asked her if she would ever come to L.A. Absolutely not, she said. She was much too busy. So instead a few days later I called and invited her to the South Pole.
    I had been invited to accompany a world-renowned nature photographer on a camera safari to Antarctica. They were going to fly me to Patagonia and we would sail from there. It was a two-week trip and I could bring someone with me. “You can have your own cabin,” I said. “It’ll be a great adventure.” Then I added, “An opportunity like this may never again happen in our lifetime.”
    Of course I was talking about the trip to the South Pole. Of course. She said, “I have to figure out the pros and cons. I’m going to write them down.” Well, that was efficient. And she called me back and said, “The cons have won. It’s just not practical.”
    She was talking about the trip to South Pole. Actually, she really was.
    Eventually I turned down the offer. The prospect of being alone in the Antarctic, perhaps the most isolated place in the world, was a lot more than I was ready to face. But perhaps a month later I had to go to New York for a long weekend. Again I invited her, and I used those very special words, “separate rooms.”
    While I was there my New York agent, Carmen La Via, asked meto participate in a fund-raising event for a young girl with cancer up in Albany, about a three-hour drive from the city. I suggested Liz spend the day at a spa in the hotel, but she volunteered to come with Carmen and me. Our conversation in the car that day was about life and death, and she expressed such empathy and humanity, and by the time we got to Albany we knew each other. The rest of that day was equally magical. The fund-raiser was held at a bowling alley. There were three hundred bowlers there and several thousand bowling alleys across America participating on some sort of closed-circuit network. I hadn’t bowled in fifteen years. I picked up a ball and threw a strike. It was amazing. Then they auctioned off my bowling ball for several thousand dollars. After the event Liz and I walked around and found a toy store that had stayed open later than normal. We’d heard that this little girl was not permitted to see her dog and missed it terribly. She had shown us pictures of him. In that toy store we found a stuffed dog that looked just like her dog. We bought it and went back to the hospital.
    Carmen did not come back to New York with us. It was a cold night and the heater in the limo didn’t work, so we snuggled in the backseat. As we passed an open field I asked the driver to stop. The field was covered with fresh snow just glistening in the moonlight. We walked into the middle of the field and I kissed her for the first time.
    It all seemed too perfect. Liz wondered if it was some sort of elaborate setup. And then she realized it didn’t make any difference because she was freezing. On the ride home she slept in my arms.
    From New York she went with me to Belle Reve, my horse farm in Kentucky. I knew she was confused. As she explained, she had never been with an actor before and she was scared, because she didn’t know how to determine whether an actor is acting or telling the truth. If I was really a good actor, she said, she couldn’t know that I was being truthful.
    How could I respond to that? Convince her I was a bad actor? Incredibly, I had found the woman who fulfilled all the criteria on my list. It was some sort of miracle: I’d made a list of all the qualitiesI needed in a companion and suddenly there she was in front of me. I had been describing her without knowing her. I had to convince myself not to be fearful. I had to grasp this opportunity and I had to urge her to grasp it too, because it was not going to happen again. While we were in Kentucky I asked her, “Have you ever thought about getting married again?”
    Not that I was thinking about it, of course. Not me, not really. It was just conversation, what movies do you like, pass the salt please, you interested in getting married? Okay, perhaps I was rushing things a bit; I was talking about marriage and she was still wondering whether or not she should be going out with me.
    But I couldn’t resist. Since Nerine’s death I hadn’t been able to regain a foothold on life. I’d been drifting through the days and the nights...the nights were dreadful. Thoughts of death and loneliness visited me every night. I was