One day, Godard sneaked into Burgess’s room and short-sheeted his bed. I noticed that the director seemed to derive satisfaction from provoking people, but, fortunately for me, his pranks were generally directed toward men.
Burgess had an easy, unpretentious sophistication that I admired. Unlike me, he was no stranger to the avant-garde. He had made his Broadway début in Eva Le Gallienne’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in 1930, and through the years had worked with everyone—Kurt Weill, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir. Still, Burgess found it disconcerting that he would prepare the lines Godard had given him the night before and then arrive on set to find that Godard had thrown them all out. Burgess didn’t mind the experimental—he only wanted to be let in on the process. These kinds of games can feel infantilizing to an actor, and it was only thanks to his good humor that he didn’t abandon the production the way Mailer had.
Over dinners at the hotel’s white-tablecloth restaurant, which overlooked Lake Geneva, Burgess and I speculated about what our inscrutable director was up to. Burgess, a wine aficionado, would order the best bottles on the menu—a Château Pétrus ’82, say—which greatly impressed the staff. We were joined often by my friend Angie, sometimes by Julie, and at least once by Sellars (whom I’d since forgiven). Burgess wore a variety of jaunty caps over his shock of white hair and regaled us with stories about his life. His light-blue eyes were sharp, and twinkled the way I had once imagined Santa Claus’s did. At the time, he was planning on writing a memoir disguised as a book of wines he’d enjoyed through the years. My favorite anecdote was when, as a young man, he was “summoned” by Tallulah Bankhead to her suite at the Gotham Hotel, in Manhattan. “That’s when you really knew you’d arrived!” he told us with a roguish grin. He wore his nicest suit, thinking that he was going to have a tête-à-tête with Bankhead. She greeted him at the door completely naked, a champagne glass in hand and a bacchanal raging behind her. “Burgess, dahling!” she cried. He said that one thing led to another, until eventually he found himself with her in flagrante in one of the bedrooms.
“And then, just before the petite mort, she whispers in my ear, ‘Don’t come inside me, Burgess dahling—I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!’ ” he said. “And the champagne she was drinking was . . .” Honestly, he made the Brat Pack seem like a bunch of Mennonites.
Godard never dined with us. It’s a shame that he sequestered himself from everyone, because, considering how much he revered cinema and old Hollywood, I have a feeling he would have loved Burgess’s stories. Looking back on it now, I think he was actually a bit shy, trapped in his mind. Perhaps the only way he could make sense of anything was to film and edit it.
One day, about halfway through the shoot, Burgess reported to me that there was fake blood on the bedsheets in the room where we were filming, and asked me if I knew anything about it. I didn’t.
“What do you think he’s up to?” he mused. I figured it was another one of Godard’s jokes, a prank meant to get under Burgess’s skin and rattle him—turn him into the blustery, confused old man he had envisioned as Lear. Years later, however, I found out from this magazine’s film writer Richard Brody, in “Everything Is Cinema,” his 2008 biography of Godard, that the blood was meant to symbolize Cordelia’s virginity. Brody’s analysis confirmed something I had heard from Mailer a decade before: that Godard had been exploring the idea of a sexual relationship between Lear and his daughter. That was never a consideration in my mind on set, but I came to understand later that it was part of the reason Mailer had left the production (apart from having the script he had written thrown out by Godard).
In 1998, I had run into Mailer at a party, and as soon as I mentioned the Godard film his eyes bulged and he grabbed my arm to lead me into a quiet vestibule so that he could tell me his side of the story, which was basically that Godard was a monster. Mailer told me that he was offended by the incest angle, both because the director had cast Mailer and his daughter Kate in the roles and because he was using their actual names. Godard had been furious when he lost his Lear, and he was no less forgiving when he cut the finished film, choosing to leave in much of what he shot of the Mailers during the opening credits and adding a withering voice-over in which he refers to Norman sarcastically as “the Great Writer.” After ten years, Mailer was still incensed, and it seemed that the act of recounting Godard’s audacity was both painful and pleasurable to him.
Godard didn’t try using Burgess’s and my real names in the movie, as he had with Norman and Kate. He must have known that he would have met with the same resistance. But, anyway, Burgess wasn’t my real father. Both of us were mature enough to have handled the interpretation—it wasn’t as if he was asking us to do a sex scene—but, clearly, he didn’t want to take the chance. Perhaps he just enjoyed the clandestine, the getting away with something.
All the clothing I wear in the film is indeed from what I brought with me, with the exception of a thick, heavy white linen nightgown that I have on in the scene in which Cordelia dies. Spoiler: she dies in Godard’s version, too, but not much else corresponds to the original text. Aside from a few lines that I quote from “King Lear,” much of the Shakespeare I was asked to read was either from a sonnet (Sonnet 47, which Godard handed me to read into a boom mike while I perched on the edge of the tub in one of the hotel’s bathrooms) or, as I recall, from Joan of Arc’s lines in “Henry VI, Part 1.” Godard’s whispering narration in the film, which overlays the sound, gives an impression of what it might be like to hear voices, as Joan of Arc did, although I’m not sure if that was his intention.
During filming, I would sometimes ask Godard questions, like “Why is it such a small crew?” I had never done a film with so few people before. On “King Lear,” a lighting adjustment would entail just moving a table lamp from one surface to another. “It’s not necessary. These big film crews, c’est ridicule. . . .” he said, scoffing. “You don’t need so many people to make a film.” This may be partly true, but it’s also possible that by 1987 Godard didn’t command the kind of budget that would have allowed him to hire a large crew, even if he had wanted to. He was also essentially an introvert who didn’t like to be around too many people. Small crews are easier to control, and in order to work with him you had to submit to his vision absolutely. This couldn’t have been more different from my experience with other directors, particularly John Hughes, which had always felt collaborative.
When I watch “King Lear” now, I’m struck by how extremely still and vigilant I seem. My back is straight and at times it almost looks as though I’m in a photograph—until I speak or move. Godard was exacting about every single gesture, and I found that it was easier to do precisely as he liked. Once, before I filmed a scene of Cordelia waking up in bed, I asked if he wanted me to wake up slowly, and he looked at me as if the question were absurd: “No, you just wake up. Don’t act.” He expanded on this a little, telling me that in American films people were always acting, which to him was a cardinal sin.
I wish now that I had talked to Godard more, but I confess that my own shyness prevented me from doing so. I was intimidated by him. To me, the French were authority figures—they were my professeurs in high school.
Toward the end of the shoot, Godard mentioned that he deemed everything I did in the film completely authentic except for one moment. Of course, I was instantly riveted, and I asked him which one.
“I’ll tell you when it’s over,” he said.
I didn’t forget. When I finished my scenes, I approached him to ask which moment, and he told me that it was the scene in which Cordelia lies next to her father, dead. This was completely nonsensical, since it was the last scene that I filmed—it hadn’t even been shot when he made the comment. So maybe my gender didn’t render me entirely safe from his mischief.
After filming ended, Burgess, my friend Angie, and I flew back to the U.S. Burgess navigated us through the airport, barking out orders in the voice of the Penguin.
At the age of twenty-four, I followed through on the promise I’d made to my younger self and moved to Paris. When I told my French boyfriend that I had been in a Jean-Luc Godard film, he was stunned. In 1995, looking someone up on IMDb wasn’t really a thing, and by then “King Lear” had reached a kind of mythic status in France for not having found distribution there. I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, but supposedly tomatoes were thrown at the screen at Cannes when the film premièred. I was never asked to attend the première. I saw the film with a couple of friends after buying a ticket to a showing in a mostly empty movie theatre in Los Angeles, where it played for a very short time. It was just as confusing to me then as it had been when I filmed it. Seeing the completed film didn’t clarify anything—even now, the fact that in 2012 Richard Brody put it first on his list of the “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” still bewilders me. In the theatre in L.A., I was surprised to see that Godard had kept the part with the Mailers, and I had to laugh at his nerve.
While living in France, I noticed that the people I met in the French film business seemed to define themselves as being either for or against New Wave cinema, Godard in particular. The newest crop of filmmakers was decidedly anti-intellectual. “Oh, he’s a bore,” a famous French comedic actor told me. “It’s everything that’s wrong with French film. The incessant navel-gazing.”
For my part, I couldn’t stop thinking about Godard. He was like a puzzle that I could never put together, but couldn’t quite put back into the box, either. My friend Victoria Leacock, the daughter of the cinema-vérité pioneer Ricky Leacock, and I got the idea to do an interview with him as a short film and call it “Waiting for Godard.” We decided that Victoria would film me as I took a train from Paris to Switzerland, and talked about the filming of “King Lear.” Once there, I would find Godard and ask him what the hell it was all about. We figured that the “waiting” in the Beckett-inspired title meant that we could do the film whether Godard agreed to be interviewed or not. “Call it ‘En Train de Filmer,’ ” my French boyfriend suggested. “Trust me. He’ll love the wordplay.” Victoria’s dad had formed a company with the American documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, which was nearly bankrupted in 1969, after Godard walked out on a film in which they were heavily invested. Her father had always told her that this led to the demise of Leacock-Pennebaker. We both had questions.
I took the chance and, using the French title my boyfriend had suggested, sent a letter to Godard’s office in Rolle, Switzerland—like a message in a bottle. Not long afterward, my boyfriend and I were awakened in the middle of the night by that distinctive monotone drawling on the answering machine, agreeing to do the project.
In the fall of 1995, Godard and I met for lunch in Paris at a café just off the Champs-Élysées. I brought him a cigar. He smiled and tucked it into the breast pocket of his tweed sports coat as if he’d been expecting it. To me, he looked more or less the same as when I’d last seen him, though somehow smaller and less imposing. I was shocked to see him pour water into his wine before drinking it, but I didn’t comment on it. We chatted about recent films. He didn’t think much of “Pulp Fiction,” the movie of the moment. “Not authentic,” he declared. (That word again!) However, we both liked “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” a more obscure film by the French Canadian director François Girard. This time our conversation was conducted entirely in French, which was still difficult for me, and I struggled between the formal vous and the familiar tu. He didn’t ease my discomfort. On the contrary, he almost seemed to relish it. This wasn’t exactly surprising, since the tutoyer question was significant enough for him to include a line about it in at least one of his films. In the 1964 movie “Band of Outsiders,” Arthur (Claude Brasseur) asks Franz (Sami Frey) about a woman, Odile (played by Anna Karina, Godard’s former wife and subsequent muse), whom they both covet: “Have you used the tu with her yet?” When Franz says no, Arthur boasts, “I can have her whenever I want.” Words mattered to Godard—he was obsessed with them, in fact, and although younger generations had been chipping away at the formal usage for years, Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t having any of it. He was the most formal formalist I’ve ever known.
What was surprising was a moment, striking in its vulnerability, when he confided to me that he had been “moved” by my letter and told me that other actresses—American actresses, he implied, mentioning Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda—had never wanted to have anything more to do with him. I made a mental note to ask him more about this when Victoria and I shot our film, but then a job took me back to the U.S. for months, and our film was put on hold. I try not to have too many regrets in life, but not having pursued the making of this short film is one of them.
That day, at the end of lunch, after we left the restaurant, we walked out on the Champs-Élysées together. The autumn sky had already started to darken, and the neon lights of the stores and restaurants on the boulevard were just beginning to fluoresce. He asked where I lived, and I told him in the Marais, across from the Winter Circus.
“Near Père Lachaise,” he remarked.
“Yes,” I said. “Not too far.”
We strolled for a bit, as Belmondo and Seberg had on that same street thirty-six years before.
“What’s your favorite part of Paris?” I asked him on impulse. Without hesitation, he gestured toward the grand boulevard. “This. This is Paris for me.” ♦