The Princess Diarist(3)

I got the role of Lorna in Shampoo. Lorna, the daughter of Jack Warden and Lee Grant. I basically had one scene and that scene was with Warren, who played my mother’s, and everyone else in the film’s, hairdresser and lover. My character doesn’t like her mother and has never had her hair done (i.e., slept with her hairdresser).

Was Lorna’s not getting her hair done a way of rebelling against her mother? Possibly. Was propositioning her mother’s hairdresser a way of screwing with her hated mother? Absolutely. Would Lorna have been sorry if her father found out? Probably. Or not. You pick.

In the film, I am discovered on the tennis court wearing a tennis outfit, holding a racquet, and standing next to a tennis pro who is hitting balls as I watch Warren arrive. I inform him that my mother is not at home and take him to the kitchen, where I ask him if he’s making it with my mother and if he wants anything to eat. I tell him I’ve never been to a hairdresser, that I’m nothing like my mother, and ask him if he wants to fuck. The scene ends with my proposition and we then find me in the bedroom, postcoitally reapplying my headscarf.

Why did I wear a headscarf, you most likely failed to wonder? Because I, Carrie, had short hair—the kind you get from going to a hairdresser—so I had to wear a wig to show that a visit to a hairdresser was not something that would ever be found on my schedule. I wore the scarf because the wig looked less like a wig that way. The other big question you’re probably not asking yourself is, did I wear a bra under my tennis outfit (and if I didn’t, why didn’t I)?

Simple. Warren, the star, cowriter, and producer of Shampoo, was asked by the costume department if he wanted me to wear a bra under my tennis clothes or not. Warren squinted in the general direction of my breasts.

“Is she wearing one now?”

I stood there as if my breasts and I were somewhere else.

“Yes,” responded Aggie, the costume designer.

Warren pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Let’s see it without.”

I followed Aggie to my hamster-cage trailer and removed my bra. Whereupon I was returned to Warren’s scrutiny forthwith. Once again he squinted at my chest impassively.

“And this is without?” he asked.

“Yes,” Aggie groaned.

“Let’s go without,” he pronounced, directed, charged, commanded.

My breasts and I followed Aggie back to my dressing zone and the subject was closed. My braless Shampoo breasts can be ogled on YouTube (or LubeTube), as can my no-underwear-in-space look in the first Star Wars and the metal bikini (or Jabba Killer) in the third (now confusingly known as Episodes IV and VI).

My two scenes in Shampoo took only a few days to shoot, and when they were done I went back to living at home with my mother and younger brother, Todd, hoping that I wouldn’t be living there for too much longer, as any amount of time was way too long for the now-too-hip-for-words me.

? ? ?

i had never had an audition like the one I had with Terrence Malick, the director of Days of Heaven. I recall sitting with him for over an hour and talking. Not just me talking, thank God—though I do think the emphasis was on getting to know me and what I was like. After all, I hadn’t called him into a room to meet about a movie I was making.

I remember telling him far too much about myself, a habit that would only increase as I aged. But as a teenager I didn’t yet have that big a repertoire of anecdotes. One of my best up to that time had to do with the comic Rip Taylor—he and my mom did a show together in Vegas—and his gay secretary, Lynn.

I had a crush on Lynn. He was good-looking, wore an ascot, and was really dainty, like if you breathed on him he would fall over like a feather in the wind. Lynn used to call me his love apple, and we would make out on the crew’s bus.

If I’d been in high school instead of doing shows with my mother, I’d have had appropriate venues for my adolescent feelings to emerge. I would have lived a life as a teenager, but since I wasn’t living that life, I kept having crushes on gay men.

Besides Lynn, there was also Albert, who was a dancer in the Broadway show Irene with Debbie. He was attractive and gay (although in my uninformed opinion you wouldn’t pick him out as gay), and we used to make out in the dressing rooms. My mom knew about this, so what the fuck was that about? I was only fifteen, and I was jailbait, and my mom said, “If you want to have sex with Albert, I’ll watch if you like so I can give instructions.”

To be fair, my mom was really distracted then—her whole life was falling apart, so she was trying to anchor it by providing some admittedly and/or eccentric motherly love.

There aren’t many perfect moments to air out a story like that, so I’m fairly certain Terry Malick heard about Lynn and Albert and my mom. He seemed the type of person who was interested in hearing just about any weird story you had that left you feeling frightened and alone. He did a lot of improvisation in his films, so these interviews may have been his way of determining if his actors were comfortable in their own skin. (I’m someone who’s very comfortable in my own skin. I just wish there wasn’t so much room at times for that comfort.)

We had several such meetings together before Malick had me read with John Travolta. John was famous then from his television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. It seemed to be understood that John had the “inside track” for the lead role in Days of Heaven, and, in the few times we read together, John and I had great chemistry. Like two beakers containing flammable liquid, we bubbled along together comfortably. If John starred in Days of Heaven, would I star alongside him? Things were looking good for me.