Shockaholic

The Senator

What else was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah! About the time I went on a blind date with a senator from Connecticut. (No, sorry, it wasn’t Joe Lieberman.)

In 1985, I was filming a TV miniseries—a now almost quaint form of entertainment (currently being singlehandedly kept from extinction by HBO) that unspooled its yarn over a contained period of several life-altering nights. This particular miniseries, which set out to tell the story of how the Frenchman Frédéric Bartholdi came to build the Statue of Liberty, answered to the imaginative name of… wait for it… Liberty. It starred, among others, Chris Sarandon, Frank Langella, Dana Delany, LeVar Burton, Claire Bloom, George Kennedy, and me. I played Emma Lazarus, the gal whose sonnet, “The New Colossus,” appears on a plaque on Lady Liberty’s base: “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled hunchbacked masses yearning to be free, fun-loving, and straight-backed—or, if not actually straight, then gay, as befits an immigrant mincing stylishly through Ellis Island.” I may be misremembering some of the words, but hopefully you get the gist.

Liberty was shot on location in Baltimore, a semi-stoned throw from Washington, D.C. At some point while the weeks of filming marched majestically monthward, a producer friend from L.A. suggested that I look up Chris Dodd, who, in addition to being his buddy, was also a U.S. senator.

At the time I had become less discriminating than I might have been about the projects I subjected myself—as well as a potentially agonized audience—to. Not quite thirty, my filmography included not just Shampoo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and the Star Wars trilogy, but also such seminal classics as Hollywood Vice Squad (I played a policewoman out to take down a child pornographer) and Under the Rainbow, considered to be the Gone With the Wind for the under-four-foot-six set. (One review described it as “a ‘what-if?’ comedy that poses the question: ‘What if 150 people auditioning to play the Munchkins in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz were staying in the same hotel as some Nazis and a group of spies?’”) If you look it up on the Rotten Tomatoes website, you’ll find this prominently displayed excerpt from that review: “A peculiar career choice for Fisher.”

Liberty, though, had some class. I mean, it was written by Pete Hamill, which was nothing to sneeze at, right? (And where does this phrase “nothing to sneeze at” come from, and why is it such a negative? I often consider sneezing at things as a tribute of sorts.) So, having recently graduated completely healed and normal from my first stint in a rehab, and appearing in an almost perfectly respectable piece of work, I found myself driving from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to have dinner with Chris Dodd, this senator who I knew virtually nothing about.

Nor did Senator Dodd—like most people, then, now and always—have any idea who I was in the wide, wide world beyond this cute little actress who’d played Princess Leia. And, what did it matter? That is who I was. Maybe not to myself, but then I won’t be consulted on that future day when my death is reported and a picture of Princess Leia will appear on television with two dates under my absurdly bewigged face.

The senator was not a handsome man, but he was far from unattractive. Probably in his early fifties, he had, as I recall, the reddest of cheeks, the whitest of hair, and the bluest of eyes—an American face!—and there was a merry sort of force that twinkled out of these eyes. Merry, alert, and intensely engaged in making the most of this world, for himself and even others, be they his Connecticut constituents or girls from the west, newly sober and inclined to adventures outside the norm, whatever that might be.

So there I was, being driven around the iconic sights of our capital by an actual bona fide senator, and what I was noticing was that Senator Dodd’s skin began pale and smooth at his brow and flowed serenely past his cheekbones, with his chin continuing unhindered by jawline through to his neck and beyond, smoothly, to the rest of him.

But while he may not have been a gorgeous man, this was a powerful man—a man used to getting and making his own way—and powerful men of any sort don’t have to be movie star handsome as long as they remain powerful. And it was clear that Chris Dodd was in for the long run.

I sat beside him in his unassuming car, enjoying the ride as the senator drove me around the capital, proudly providing me with a brief history of each formidable site we passed in the gathering twilight. We took in the Supreme Court, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and even the U.S. Mint. So much to see! So much to learn! Especially if you didn’t know all that much to begin with. Now, I freely admit to having rather large gaps in various areas of knowledge. Hopefully less now than then, but most of my life I’ve found myself tumbling over one area or another along the way that I felt I perhaps should—but didn’t—know about, and at this point in my life government was one of them. And, as you will now see, it was a decidedly cavernous gap.

As we made our way from our tour of the monuments to our assignation at a nearby Georgetown restaurant, I turned to the senator, who I was now being encouraged to address as “Chris” (rather than, say, “ball sack” or “RuthAnn”) and said, “So, Chris, I was wondering, how many senators are there, actually?” It was probably only his intention to sleep with me that kept him from laughing mercilessly. (When I phoned my mother later that night and told her what I’d asked him, she was appropriately horrified. “Oh dear, how could you? Everyone knows there’s one per state!”)

Anyway, after having been reacquainted with what it meant to be a free American by a genuine hoping-to-get-reelected (and, in the shorter term, laid) senator, it was time to meet our fellow dinner companions—two other couples, half of one of which was also a senator. And not just any old senator, but one considered by many—and certainly by those who had no idea how many senators there even were—to be the senator. Yes, that’s right. Ted Kennedy.

Also with us—and by “us” I mean “them”—was Ted’s girlfriend of the moment, a very pretty blond girl, appropriately demure and/or well-bred, named Lacey Neuhaus. I don’t remember Senator “Call me Chris” Dodd’s having alerted me to the impressive identity of our pending dinner companion, but I have to assume that he did, as he had only just met me and so couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be struck dumb by the close proximity of someone of Senator Kennedy’s mien.

Completing the round six-seat table, nestled in a dimly lit private room on the second floor of this very exclusive restaurant in the virulently charming neighborhood of Georgetown, was a lovely married couple about whom all I knew at the time was that they lived next door to Ethel Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate. Given the exclusive area of town they called home, and given the ease with which they conducted themselves in the current American royal company, I had to assume that they were extremely wealthy, intelligent, and well-connected people. I do recall that they were also charming, and not just because they appeared to find me so. (Their names have escaped the often-unlocked cage of my memory.)

Though the lines between show business celebrity and political prominence have frequently blurred, the chasm between the skill set required to distinguish oneself in Hollywood as opposed to Washington is fairly vast. Despite this, all too often the two disparate worlds of the well-known not only overlap but have been known to actually fuse, resulting in hybrids that have provided us with mutations along the lines of President Reagan and Governor Schwarzenegger.

This mutual attraction between our political leaders and our entertainers has led to numerous instances of what might be described as crossbreeding. President Kennedy’s White House dalliances with Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to Virginia senator John Warner. Jane Fonda’s marriage to Tom Hayden. Debra Winger’s relationship with Nebraska governor Bob Kerrey. Linda Ronstadt’s “seeing” (and presumably hearing, speaking to and even feeling) California governor Jerry Brown. And now it was my turn to contribute to this overlap, however briefly and insignificantly.

Chris and Senator Kennedy, I quickly learned, could be snatched from us at any moment, summoned back to the Senate floor for a vote, so we were united in this limbo between food and drink and the potential pressing call to attend to the running of our country. I was impressed. So with the shadow of “the floor” looming over our little gathering, the two senators held forth, fifth, sixth, and beyond, while sipping red wine and consuming appetizers.

Senator Kennedy was particularly eloquent. I don’t recall his subject matter, but I do remember it was of a topical, political nature. Shocking, I know. It occurs to me that Nicaragua had something to do with it—that was the country Americans argued about at the time—but I can’t be certain. (Of pretty much anything lately, when it comes to memory. But there’s the swap: out goes the depression, propelled by friendly electricity, and with it go all manner of recollections that at one time might have stayed put.) But I do remember marveling at him, if that’s an appropriate expression.

What I’m trying to say is, this was surely a remarkable human. I mean, obviously you don’t get to his position in the world by accident or without merit. (At least this is what I believed before the arrival on the scene of alarming creatures such as George W. Bush.) Well-spoken, extraordinarily intelligent, poised, thought-provoking—he was a statesman in every sense of the word. I was intimidated by him, in awe of him, overwhelmed. He had something, for want of a better word, heroic about him.

Not that Chris Dodd lacked these qualities. On the contrary, you could see why they were such good friends. In effect, these men were as close as you might get to royalty in America. And there I was, a few cards short of a royal flush, as the senators held forth on all manner of important issues of national and international consequence, dominating the table. The rest of us were witnesses to these compatible political gladiators. But as the meal wore on, the dynamic began slowly shifting. Not dramatically, just ever so slightly.

Having recently entered the wide world of recovery, I was in a feisty sort of mood. I used to call my drug-taking “putting the monster in the box.” It would reduce the spectacle of my personality to something a little more socially appropriate. But now that drugs were out, so was the monster.

It’s not as if I didn’t know my place, or thereabouts. But just because I knew it didn’t mean I could be counted on to stay in it. I meant to be this respectful, newly sober girl in her late twenties, but, sadly, these intentions weren’t meant to be realized. This night, while I wasn’t looking, my cute little monster tiptoed out of her box and waited to see who would have the nuts—or be nuts enough—to take her on.

Wine continued to be served—I drank Coca-Cola—and meals were ordered. I sat quietly and listened, hoping perhaps to learn something, but more importantly to remain as charmingly unobtrusive as possible. Knowing very little of current, and not-so-current, events—“So, how many senators are there, actually?”—I wasn’t eager to further embarrass myself. I remember Kennedy’s date being rather quiet as well. Along with Ethel Kennedy’s charming neighbors, we were kind of innocent bystanders to this happy accident.

Then suddenly, their pagers went off! A series of beeps was followed by a cryptic exchange, which was most likely a secretary (as they were still referred to in those days) informing them that they would not be returning to the floor that evening. All right, then! Relax and let fly. And fly they did! The red wine was replaced by vodka tonics—they went from the grape to hard liquor, the type that softens any sharp edges that might still be standing guard. Now that they were officially off duty, they let their elder statesmen graying hair down.

As I said, at the start of the evening I had been in awe of them. Who was I to contribute to a conversation being conducted by such lofty, learned men? Men who ran things. Men who talked the talk. Men who not only knew the law, but wrote it! Surely I was as out of my depth as I ever would be. It wasn’t even my depth, it was theirs! I was sinking to the bottom of this erudite, senatorial swamp as they rose higher and higher with each cocktail. These were important men who could argue with the president if they wanted! And who was I but some dumb girl who had never graduated from high school? Not only that, but an actress currently filming some movie. Not even a real movie, a TV movie. Something that would eventually fade into that void where all the streams of images eventually flow, a stagnant pool of all unremarkable entertainment.

Oh, sure, I’d been in plenty of movies, but the films were important, not me. Even with Star Wars, the character I played was famous. We just happened to have similar faces. Still, I wasn’t thirty yet and I’d had quite a colorful life, if viewed from a generous, all-American slant. But perhaps it was best to keep my mouth shut, lest my lack of education and breeding blow my cover. There was also the business of my sobriety. Having abused my access to the altered state, I was consigned to sip my Coke and watch these amazingly educated and entitled men—now temporarily relieved of their senatorial responsibilities—indulge in Washington’s brand of hard-core happy hour.

And who could blame them? Who could blame anyone who’d put in a hard day’s work keeping our nation’s government working? It was only natural to want to take leave of at least some of your senses, and these men had so much sense to start with. Surely, they could easily afford to take leave of an ample store of it without causing too much notice.

So, in the darkened private dining room, we all sat around our white-clothed, silver-set table and listened as these once-noble voices now laughed and, accompanied by a soundtrack of clinking and swirling ice, devolved into bawdier tones. Suddenly, Senator Kennedy, seated directly across from me, looked at me with his alert, aristocratic eyes and asked me a most surprising question.

“So,” he said, clearly amused, “do you think you’ll be having sex with Chris at the end of your date?”

Wow. How did we get here from… well, essentially anywhere? What had I done to provoke his eloquent scorn? To my left, Chris Dodd looked at me with an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face. To my right, the really nice couple said nothing, trying to pretend they hadn’t heard what we all so clearly did hear. Senator Kennedy’s blond girlfriend, sitting to his right, nonreacted accordingly.

What was he doing? Why had he asked me that? Could it be that he meant to cause me an untold amount of embarrassment? What other explanation was there? Why ask someone a shocking, taunting question like that unless it was your intent to make that someone look and feel like a fool?

No!

This would not do. Seriously. There was no other way to look at this than completely not okay. Even if this man’s brother had been a hero. Even if two of his brothers had been heroes. Even if he, in his legislation-passing, cause-confronting way, was a hero. I was not just going to lie down and let this man moonwalk all over me.

“Funnily enough, I won’t be having sex with Chris tonight,” I said, my face composed and calm. “No, that probably won’t happen.” People blinked. “Thanks for asking, though.” A fork clinked on a plate.

“Why not?” the senator demanded of me. “Are you too good for him?”

I tilted my head, my mouth pursed, and glanced at Senator Dodd’s expectant face. “Not too good, no, just…” I shrugged. “I’m newly sober, you see, and I’d have to be truly loaded to just fall into bed with someone I’ve only very recently met. Even if that someone is a Democrat.”

Now the air around us hung back, holding itself in check to see what would happen next. But I knew that I would not let this man get the upper hand, or somehow discomfit or shock me. I had some laws and this was one. Whatever this imperious… I want to say drunk, but he wasn’t that, not yet… whatever this imperious inebriate-to-be threw at me, I’d say something right back.

“So you were a drinker?” he said. “What did you drink?”

I uncrossed and recrossed my legs. A waiter hovered with a bottle. “I didn’t drink really, so much as take pills alcoholically. And do acid. I liked acid a lot.” I smiled at him without my eyes, watching my unexpected antagonist seated opposite me.

Four sets of liberal eyes now slid from my face back to his. There was a smell of bread. Bread and chicken.

“Did you have sex on acid?”

Wow. This was serious. There was no turning back. I looked to the ceiling for help and found it. “Acid isn’t that great for sex, you know? Well, maybe you don’t.” I tilted my head, schooling him socially.

Game on.

“It intensifies everything. It complicates the simplest things and simplifies the most complex.”

Now, the Senator was watching me with mild eyes set back in his famous handsome face. All the others were watching us, riveted. I was hyperalert now, ready for anything.

“What about masturbation?”

My eyebrows raised, as my hand almost unconsciously closed around the butter knife.

“What about it?” He was about to answer when I continued on, unabashed, “Oh, do you mean do I do it? On LSD?” I squinted my eyes and peered into one of the corners of the room. It occurred to me that this was funny—funny with an emergency in it. I smiled without losing much of my footing. “Play with yourself is the term that I like best.” I spread my smile around the table generously. “You know, like playing with a child.” I looked down into my un-napkined lap and covered my eyes with both hands, then uncovered them a moment later. “Peekaboo, I see you!” I cooed down to the vicinity of my lap. “Peekaboo! You’re it! Bang, bang, fall down!” I made a gun with my thumb and forefinger and began to shoot. I felt five pairs of very astonished round eyes staring at me from around the table.

This was a circle of privileged people gathered together to enjoy their privileges. And although, as I said, in our country there’s no actual royalty—no generations of fragile fine folk sitting on thrones and wearing shiny crowns—everyone knows that if there is anything like American aristocracy, then it’s them. The Kennedys. Always seeming to be in a class all by themselves. As a priest with a thick Irish brogue once told me, “No one understands what this family goes through. I think of them as ‘the Special Ks.’”

And then there’s what I’ve heard called “Reel Royalty”—the scandal-laden kings and queens of the silver screen. It is from this seed that I sprouted. This is the heredity that claims me, informs me, defines me. This is part of what had led me—and not blindfolded—to this room in this restaurant where I was on a blind date with a senator. A senator who laughed at my pantomime of playing peekaboo with my privates, in an effort to entertain, yes, partly, but mainly to place myself outside the grasp of Senator Kennedy’s sarcasm.

Did he take me on like that because I was merely an actress by profession—a job requiring little or no intellect or education? Did he turn his blazing bright scorn on me because I looked like a willing victim?

Maybe.

I guess I’ll never know, as he has now gone from us. A great man, making those who dined with him on this night near great. But I was just a cute little thing, barely big enough to be worth tearing down with gentle teasing, let alone this full-on assault.

By now we had blundered headlong into a world of who could outshock who. Which one of us would say the thing that would stun the table into silence? Not that most of those assembled weren’t silent already, having stepped back without moving to get out of the way of the business at hand.

Somehow, the subject of my father came up. “My father?” I shrugged. “I didn’t see that much of my dad when I was growing up. He left when I was small.” Kennedy must have asked more about my father, somehow daring or double-daring me to go further than someone would normally go. At least socially. At a table with two senators who, until this night, had been strangers to me, and those other three humans in attendance. All of us waiting to see what would happen. Just how far would we each go? Would I take the bait and reply to each all-too-intimate question? When would one of us, or the evening itself, hit the proverbial wall?

“The night before I got married I was talking to my father on the phone from my future ex-husband’s house. And my father said to me, ‘You have a great ass. You should be marrying me.’ And you know what I said?” I fixed my brown eyes on Senator Kennedy’s blue ones.

“What?” he obligingly asked.

“After thinking about it for a second, as one would, I said, ‘Thank you.’” These sorts of stories beg for a pause, while everyone tries to sort out what was just said, blinking back the thoughts forming behind our eyes.

“Do you think he actually meant that?” he asked.

“No,” I said, taking a sip of my soda. “I think he was just high and was saying things for conversation’s sake.”

I don’t believe we could have gotten to this place if I hadn’t thought, Oh, you think you can embarrass me by asking me something shocking? And what? I’ll sit there flipped to the tits, rendered speechless from the shock and awe of it?!

The senator and I stared at each other across the table. Whose move was it? Surely not mine.

“What do you do with your father that you like to do?” he asked finally, to which I responded, “Sing.” He tilted his head and rubbed his chin. “Sing, then,” he ordered me mildly. “Sing what you would sing with your dad.”

It was a dare, I swear it was. I have a clear image in my mind of sitting quite tall, or as tall as one can sit and still be quite short. I sat and opened my mouth and out came my voice, clear and bold and loud, singing a signature tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

“If I loved you,” I began—and I do have a good voice, I swear. I’d almost have to with both of my parents being singers—“Time and again I would try to say / All I’d want you to know.” Everything was quiet in the small room except for my singing. “If I loved you / Words wouldn’t come in an easy way / Round in circles I’d goooo!” And the whole time my eyes held his, his eyes holding mine right back. The others at the table were startled witnesses.

“Longing to tell you / But afraid and shy / I’d let my golden chances pass me by!”

Years later, I was in Washington at a party celebrating Clinton’s second inauguration, when a woman rushed up to me, her face shining, “Do you remember me? I was there! That night in the restaurant with Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd.”

I blinked at her. “Sure, I remember,” I said. “Who could forget a night like that?”

We were on a staircase and she was holding both of my arms, breathless and smiling bright. “We spoke of that night for ages. It was incredible. We’d waited for years for someone to take him on like that.”

So it did happen! I didn’t make it up, didn’t hallucinate it, didn’t forge it out of some gray lying part of my brain where dreams go to die. There really was a night that I sat and sang at this famous senator from New England. Sang the entire song without once breaking free from the cage of his gaze. And these neighbors of his sister-in-law Ethel, they proved it. We were all really there.

Back at the table in 1985, Senator Dodd beamed at me on my left as I sang: “Soon you’d leave me / Off you would go in the mist of day…”

“Why haven’t I met you before?” he asked me later in the car. And much later still, the good senator ran for president, and while he was running he at some point admitted—declared?—that we’d dated long ago. Probably a bid for the Comic-Con vote. “A courtship,” he explained when asked the nature of our relations all those decades past. “It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” he added.

Oh, no, I thought, when I heard about it. You didn’t. You couldn’t possibly have said something so lame. But he did. At least it was reported that he did. And hearing it, I cringed. A courtship? Is that what they call sleeping together a few times? A courtship? Or a spaced-out one? Not a relationship, that’s for sure.

“Never, never to know / How I loved you / If I loved you.”

I came to the end of the song. The song I sang with my dear old dad and now to Senator Kennedy, God rest both of their unsettling souls. The notes hung in the air between the six of us seated round that table in Georgetown a quarter-century ago.

The bill was paid. The evening was at an end. We began walking down the stairs toward the futures that lay beyond the dark that awaited us outside.

“Would you have sex with Chris in a hot tub?” Senator Kennedy asked me, perhaps as a way to say good night?

“I’m no good in water,” I told him.

And that’s where that memory ends.