Out Came the Sun by Mariel Hemingway

Author:Mariel Hemingway [Hemingway, Mariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Actress, Biography & Autobiography, Movie Star, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9781941393239
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Regan Arts.
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

10

THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

SNIP.

I closed the scissors and a lock of hair fell to the ground. I was in Salmon, in the house I had built, sitting cross-legged in front of the mirror. I squinted at my reflection. The left side of my hair was shorter than the right.

Snip.

Now the right was too short. I went on like that, cutting on the left, then the right, then the left. It was like balancing a wobbly table—or, more to the point, failing to balance it.

Snip.

When my hair got short enough that I could see my ears, I forced myself to stop. The face in the mirror was frowning.

By the early eighties, I had been a professional actress for more than half a decade. Over that time, I had learned the rhythm of a movie, how it consumed you for months while you were shooting it, and then how you left it behind when the shoot drew to a close. But that didn’t happen with Star 80. It got into my head and stayed there. Dorothy Stratten was a character I played, but she was a real woman also, a woman who had lived sadly and died suddenly. She had been trapped, and playing her made me think about the other women who were trapped too.

I thought about my mother, how her true love was taken from her by the war and how she had to marry again, to a man who she may or may not have loved, to satisfy society’s expectations of her. She couldn’t quite bear the weight of those expectations. I thought about Muffet and how men—from my father to her husband—had always regulated her life, in theory because it protected her from herself, but with more problematic consequences too, reminding her that she was a person who couldn’t exist in a world without extremely rigid rules and patterns. I thought about Margaux and how she lived in a world like Dorothy’s world, where a woman’s value was determined largely by how she looked and how she pleased the men around her.

Dorothy had been trapped, and playing her made me wonder if I was trapped too. By that point, I had been with Robert Towne for two years or so, and while the first year had its appeal, the second year was dominated by an increasing sense of how wrong everything felt. I realized that I suited him, that he liked having a young girlfriend—for cosmetic reasons, ego reasons, social reasons—but that he didn’t suit me at all. When I would go back to Ketchum for summers or Christmas and run into other girls from high school, they would have normal lives, normal boyfriends. They’d be worrying about whether or not they should break up, or make a more serious commitment, or start a family, or take a trip, or have more conversations, or have fewer conversations. Their lives were predictable in some ways, but they seemed organic, legitimate. I just felt so out of step, as if I were spending my time performing a role that might never end.

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