OUT ON a LIMB Read online

  So this book is about a quest for my self—a quest which took me on a long journey that was gradually revealing and at all times simply amazing. I tried to keep an open mind as I went because I found myself gently but firmly exposed to dimensions of time and space that heretofore, for me, belonged in science fiction or what I would describe as the occult. But it happened to me. It happened slowly. It happened at a pace that apparently was peculiarly my own, as I believe all people experience such events. People progress according to what they’re ready for. I must have been ready for what I learned because it was the right time.

  I had made about thirty-five movies—some good, some bad, and from each I think I learned, although, not surprisingly, more from the bad ones than the good ones. I had traveled all over the world, sometimes as a private person, usually unrecognizable (because I wanted it that way), and sometimes as an entertainer (where I wanted to be recognized), either publicizing one of my films, shooting a television special, or touring with my live show. I loved performing live because it enabled me to feel the audiences; what they were thinking, where their interests lay, their differing senses of humor. But mostly I loved meeting new people and crashing head-on into foreign cultures until I learned to meld into them comfortably.

  I developed a kind of home-away-from-home circle of friends. They were people in the arts—performers, movie people from every country that made films, writers (I had written two books myself about my travels and adventures in life and they had been translated nearly everywhere), heads of state, prime ministers, kings and queens (my political activism had been duly reported, pro and con, all over the world too). I was a privileged person, there was no doubt about that. I had worked hard for my success but still I felt lucky and as I said, privileged to be able to meet and converse with anyone I wanted to, from Castro, the Pope, the Queen of England, and other dignitaries, to India’s sick and dying, or revolutionary peasants in the barrios of the Philippines, or Sherpas in the Himalayas, just to name a few.

  And the more I traveled and met people, the more my social and political conscience became activated. And the more it became activated, the more I found myself identifying with the “underdogs” as my father defined them. But as I pointed out to him, most of the world could be classified as underdogs. Anyway, I found myself thinking a great deal about what was going wrong in the world. You can’t avoid it when you actually see the destitution, the starvation, the hatred. I began traveling when I was nineteen, and now, at mid-forty, I could objectively say things had steadily progressed downhill. To me, democratic idealism seemed to be no longer possible because people who were part of the democratic way of life were apparently more concerned with serving their own interests and were therefore abusing their basic philosophy of the well-being of the majority. Not many people were addressing themselves to international ethics. “Political thinking” in the world seemed to be based on the dual fields of power politics and material economics, with solutions expressed in terms of graphs, charts, polls, and industrial programs that ignored the individual human being.

  Somewhere on the planet at all times there was war, violence, crime, oppression, dictatorship, starvation, genocide—a global spectacle of human desperation and misery. Meanwhile, leaders worldwide continued to examine the problems solely in terms of the problems themselves without recognizing their true relationship to a larger and more universal necessity—the deep-seated need to achieve an enduringly peaceful state of mind on an individual basis, with all the broad implications that that would entail. They had temporary solutions for permanent problems. Or, as Dad would say, “they are putting Band-Aids on cancer.”

  I found myself in endless discussions all over the world about whether mankind was fundamentally selfish, self-serving, and concerned primarily with the attainment of more luxurious creature comforts and personal gain. I found myself saying that maybe personal selfishness and competition were detrimental not only to happiness but even to personal success. It seemed to me that even though the world powers recognized the need for a unity of human interest, they always recommended more highly competitive economic policies to achieve that end, which could only lead to human conflict, discord, and inevitably larger wars. Something was surely missing.

  Then, as I continued to travel, I noticed that something was changing. People I talked to began to speculate on what it was that was missing. The tone of our conversations shifted from dismay and confusion to a consideration that the answers might lie within ourselves, as though the self-created plight of mankind had nothing whatever to do with economic solutions. We began to speculate on the inner search for what we as humans really meant. What were we here for? Did we have a purpose or were we simply a passing accident? That we were physical was obvious. Our physical needs were, in theory at least, the priority concern of governments and leaders. That we were mental creatures was clear too. The world of the mind, the mental dimension, was attended to by education, arts, sciences and the halls of learning.

  But were we all not also spiritual? I found that more and more people were focusing on the question of our inner spirituality which had for so long been starved for recognition. Did confusion stem from the fact that spirituality was not only obvious, but invisible? The religions of the world didn’t seem to explain or satisfy our spiritual needs. In fact, the Church seemed to divide people more than it unified them, whether one followed Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism. Indeed, the world seemed to be moving into an era of Holy Conflict, what with the violent rise of Islamic pride in the Arab world, of self-righteous Christian fundamentalism among the so-called moral majority in America, and of militant Zionism in Israel.

  I found myself in touch with a network of friends all over the world who were involved with their own spiritual search. We asked questions about human purpose and meaning in relation not only to our physical perspective of life on earth, but also to our metaphysical perspective in relation to time and space. It began to seem possible that this life was not all there was. Perhaps the physical plane of existence was not the only plane of existence. The marvellous possibility existed that the real reality was much more.

  In other words, perhaps Buckminster Fuller was right when he claimed that ninety-nine percent of reality was invisible, and our inability to acknowledge that invisible reality was due to what was now commonly being referred to as our low conscious awareness.

  When I began to ask myself these questions and found a real kinship with others who were also involved in the same inner search, my life changed and so did my perspective. It was thrilling, at times frightening, and always mind-boggling because it caused me to reevaluate what being alive was all about. Perhaps we, as human beings, were actually part of an ongoing experience that continued long after we thought we died. Perhaps there was no such thing as death.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The sun was setting chilled and shimmering beyond the hills of Point Dume. I remembered standing on those hills looking into the crashing waves of the Pacific below, wondering if the human race really did get its start in the sea. The Pacific always reminded me of my friend David. Or perhaps he was much on my mind these days simply because I seemed to be arriving at some kind of turning point in my life and he was easy to talk to. What was it he had said? Something about the spiritual need for respecting both the positive and the negative in life equally.

  “It’s impossible to have one without the other,” he said. “Life is the combustion of the two. You just try to overwhelm the negative with the positive and you’ll be much happier.”

  “Sure,” I had said, “you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that … but living it is something else.”

  David was an interesting man. About thirty-five years old, he was a sweet, very gentle person, with chiseled cheekbones and a kind of soft, sad smile. I had met him at an art gallery in the Village in New York. We struck up a friendship because I found it comfortable being with him. He was a painter and a poet and ve
ry much at home anywhere because he was an observer of life. In Manhattan we’d walk for hours watching people and wondering what they thought. When he was in California, which was often, we’d walk the beach in Malibu. David loved to travel too, and he’d done a lot of it, from Africa and India to the Far East and back again to Europe and South America. He painted and wrote along the way. It didn’t cost him much because he worked his way around the world doing all sorts of odd jobs. He had been married once. He didn’t talk about it but he did volunteer one day that he used to be a “fast liver.” When I asked him what that meant he just waved his hand and said, “That’s in the past. I’m finished with the fast cars, high living—kid stuff. Now I’m alone, and happy.” I didn’t talk much about my personal life either. That was not the nature of our relationship. He was also into a whole lot of stuff I had no time for—reincarnation, past life recall, cosmic justice, vibrational frequencies, food-combining, spiritual enlightenment, meditation, self-realization, and God knows what else. He talked seriously about all that and seemingly with deep knowledge. But most of it went right by me because I was caught up in my movie scripts, my television specials, new numbers for my club act, losing weight, and Gerry. I wanted to talk to David about Gerry, but because of the circumstances, I couldn’t talk to anyone, not even David, about Gerry.

  Now, in the chill breeze, I felt perspiration dripping down the back of my hair onto my neck. My legs hurt, but it was a good feeling. I had jogged hard. It was a satisfied kind of hurt. Maybe, as David said, that was the price for everything in life. And when you reached the proper place after struggle it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

  I took a last look at the setting sun and made my way up the wooden stairs that led to the beach. I loved those wooden stairs, scarred and broken from high tides and storms. For twenty years I had used those stairs, since I built the apartment building with the paycheck I had received from my first picture, The Trouble with Harry, for Alfred Hitchcock. The first thing I did was get a loan so I could put up a building where I could rent out apartments and live rent-free myself … just in case I got hit by a truck and couldn’t work. My middle-class upbringing, I guess. Always protect against the future. You never know.

  I washed the sand from my feet under a shower at the top of the wooden stairs … mustn’t track sand into the apartment. It lodges in the carpet that the builder told me I shouldn’t install in a beach place anyway.

  I climbed the last set of stairs leading to the patio, where I stopped and looked at the Japanese garden I had landscaped myself, complete with a bonsai tree from Kyoto and a trickling stream of water that flowed constantly up and over itself. The years I had traveled in the Far East, particularly Japan, had influenced me deeply. Their Spartan sense of respect for nature moved me. Since the Japanese were so buffeted by nature, they had no choice but to harmonize with it. They didn’t believe in conquering it as we did in the West. They used it and became part of it … that is, until they forfeited their respect for nature in favor of their respect for business and profit. And when Japan became polluted, I stopped going there. I wondered how long it would be before the whole world would industrialize nature just so it could make more money. Simplistic, I suppose, but that’s how it seemed to me.

  I heard the phone ring in my apartment. I nearly tripped over myself in a lurching jolt to get there before it stopped. Phones did that to me. I’d answer someone else’s phone if it rang when I was there. Something about being efficient and prompt and tidy. I was annoyed by people who let a phone ring four times before they picked it up. Sloppy it was to me—just plain lazy and sloppy.

  I bolted through the door into the living room and dove for the phone on the floor. I had to laugh at myself. Who the hell could be that important? And if they were, they’d call back.

  “Hello,” I said breathlessly, wondering what the person on the other end would think I’d been doing.

  “Hellooo …” It was Gerry. “How are you?”

  I could hear the long-distance operator in the background. Gerry’s face, tumbling hair on his forehead, soft black eyes, swept through my mind.

  “I’m great,” I said, glad he couldn’t see how happy I was to hear his voice. “How’s it going with Her Majesty?”

  “We are declining in England with grace,” he joked with a twinge of serious concern I had learned to detect.

  “Well,” I cleared my throat, “grace is a quality everyone admires.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m doing what I can to prevent the ship from sinking completely.”

  I could feel him reach for a cigarette and inhale with a soft whistling sound.

  “Gerry?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s your campaign going? Are you making headway?”

  “Oh, fine,” he said. But there was a slight depression in his voice. “It’s a long, slow process. People need to be taught and educated with velvet-firm strokes. The balance isn’t easy. But we’ll talk about that when we’re together.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Will that be soon?”

  “Yes, I hope so. Can you meet me this weekend in Honolulu? I have a conference on North-South Economics.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Yes,” I said. “Will there be many journalists?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are willing to take that risk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there. When?”

  “Friday.”

  “Where?”

  “Kahala Hilton. I have to go now. I have a meeting with my Deputy Secretary. He’s waiting.”

  “Okay. Great. See you this weekend.”

  “Goodbye.” He hung up. There were never prolonged telephonic goodbyes with Gerry. His professional demeanor and habit precluded that kind of sloppiness. His personal life was another matter.

  I hung up, took a shower and drove, more slowly than usual, to my big house in Encino.

  I loved to sit behind the wheel in a California car, mosey along the wide open highways, and think. I loved to think in California. New York was so live-wired there was time only to act on instinct and for survival, which I found creative and exciting, but in California I could reflect. Of course, California wasn’t called the Big Orange for nothing. You could turn into one if you weren’t careful. So the Big Apple, for me, was a place where I could act on things that I had thought through in the Big Orange. Gerry had not been able to come to California since I’d known him.

  I remembered our first night in New York together. Actually, I had been introduced to him several times before, when I was in London and once again when he had come to an anti-Vietnam rally in New York. I had been impressed by his self-assured soft-spokenness, and his mind of quick brilliance. He was in Parliament, a Socialist, and he believed he could make England work again.

  He wasn’t pompous like so many well-educated English people I knew. In fact, he was the opposite: a big man, well over six feet, with such shoulders and arms that he reminded me of a bear who needed to hug the world. Loose and freewheeling. His body moved in a careless way and his shirt fell open when his tie was slung around his neck. When he was excited about something a thick shock of hair tumbled into his eyes. And when he paced with long strides across a room, searching for the best way to make a point, one had the impression that the room tilted with his weight. He seemed unaware of how imposing he was. Often he had a hole in his sock. His eyes were moist and black. They made me think of olives.

  When I had first been introduced to him in London I was playing the Palladium. He came backstage and I liked him. I didn’t know much about English politics but he seemed open, penetratingly intelligent, and involuntarily funny. When he left my dressing room he walked so deliberately that he fell over a chair, but not until he had first walked into my closet.

  So when he happened to be in New York a year later and called me I said yes, I’d love to have dinner.

  We went to an Indian restaurant on Fifty-eighth
Street. He didn’t eat much. He was hardly aware the food was there. And he had a habit of resting his eyes on my mouth when he needed to think through a point he was making. I thought he liked my lips but he was really only thinking about what he was going to say next.

  After dinner we walked all the way to Elaine’s on Eighty-eighth and Second. He wanted to see where my crowd hung out. I was wearing spike heels, felt uncomfortable, and couldn’t keep up with his long strides. I had a blister.

  When we walked into Elaine’s people looked up. But I wasn’t the only one they noticed despite Gerry’s rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. Anyway, no one bothered us. We had squid salad and a few drinks. We talked about New York and London and when we were ready to leave I told him I was coming to London in a week to talk about a new script and I’d call him.

  A limousine was supposed to pick him up and drive him to some political conference upstate, but the car never came. So there he was in my apartment looking at my shelves full of books on China, show business, American politics, Marxist theory, and ballet dancers. He was rattling on about the need for freedom in a Socialist society, towering over my low coffee table when his thick shock of hair fell into his eyes. And that’s how it all started. I reached up to touch his hair. I needed to know how it felt, and as simply and easily as though we had known each other for a lifetime he looked away from the biography of Marx he was holding, stared into my eyes and pulled me close to him. We held each other for a moment and I was lost. That had never happened to me before, at least not the same way. I didn’t understand it then but it was part of the puzzle I would put together later.

  When we got up in the morning I fixed him some tea and biscuits. We were sitting in my sunny kitchen. From the window you can see the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

  “You’re coming to London next week?” he asked. I said yes.