April 9
Montreal
Carol phoned from New York. After Dark wants a piece on her...can I do it? Sounds great to me. She was asked today to do an Italian-American co-production movie by Nanni Loy, director of Divorce Italian Style.

April 10
Montreal
Bill Como says he'd love for me to do the piece. I'll leave for New York tomorrow. Carol went back to see Mr. Loy; next visit he wants her to come in tight blue jeans; he wants to get a good view of her in character costume.

April 11
Eastern Airlines Flight 103
I first met Carol at Professional Children's School. I was in my senior year and she was a freshman: fourteen, in short skirts and Courreges boots; singing, dancing and acting. She tried out for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie all that year, got pretty suicidal about it, and started dressing in black. She was studying with Bill Hickey at the Herbert Berghof Studios.
Her mother is a dancer, eurythmics teacher, and songstress; her father, a successful architect who designed a couple of high schools, fancy private homes, housing for banana workers in underdeveloped countries, and won a Fulbright. They'd lived in Cleveland, Paris, and Haiti before moving to New York.
It was about a year and a half before Carol's career got going. She finally landed a part in her much-desired Brodie and went on the road with Tammy Grimes forever.
She's only twenty now- and worked hard to get there.

April 11
New York
Norma Stoop met Carol for the first time this evening. Bill was making spaghetti. Norma said, "Carol, you wre painted by Botticelli." There is hardly a person involved in the visual arts who doesn't flash just that. Carol's beauty is soft and very painterly.
She is quiet and sensitive; easily hurt. She's friendly and warm, usually in a child-like way. She can appear to be beautiful or plain; she will be submissive and yet stubborn; the dichotomies in her nature may sometimes be manic, but they are always low-key.
Carol is an actor. She is image-conscious but aesthetic. She has a poet's ease with the introverted side of herself. She may appear to be a loser or a star, a dreamer or a worker, very high but always with feet touching the ground.
She can be loose with those she loves. And she loves those who touch her at her center. To find her center is to love her. To try to describe her center is to fail. All that I've been trying to say, Carol says in any frame of her movies.
I loved Wedding in White: saw it twice. The second time I enjoyed it more. The pace is plodding, the dramatic unfolding inevitable. It was with this knowledge that I enjoyed myself so thoroughly the second time. Fruet (writer-director), Leiterman (director of photography), Carol, Donald Pleasence, and Doris Petrie are loving and honest in their attention to detail. This is the kind of work that helps us learn to see- which makes us want to learn.
The film won the Canadian "Best Picture{ award this year.
L: what do you think about the film?
C: i want it to be better. 'cause of time and money pressures we couldn't work as sensitively as i would have liked. the producers got the film in for under a quarter of a million dollars. there was not a womb-like feeling on the set or the sense of security i felt working with mike on carnal knowledge. working delicately demands that. it's good work, but could have been even better.
Working with Pleasence and Doris Petrie was good experience. she describes much of her work in those terms. Richard Leiterman, according to Carol, was one of the essential reasons for the film's poser and uniqueness. He contributed much of the knowledge of film technique. He and Bill Fruet formed a solid team, working to get the desired performances and battling the union in order to finish their film.
She wants to work again and again with the same people, building very much a communal working group.
Jack Nicholdon is one of Carol's favorite actors. She was with him in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and again in Hal Ashby's Last Detail. Although hers were not leading roles in either picture, she felt a total and scrupulous involvement with each film and with the other actors.
Nicholson is an actor who she feels is remarkable in his ability to tap explicitly and specifically his emotional range with the knowledge of how to channel those emotions on film. Carol feels he has helped her find ways to involve the audience and make them attentive to detail. One look form an actor can help the whole audience to see.
You hear the same complaint from Carol so common to young actors today: you can no longer work twenty-five films a year- the Hollywood heyday is a time past. Therefore there is a tremendous pressure to do it all on your first few films. Actors like Carol want to act more than want to be stars.

April 12
New York
Well, in buzzes the Italian art director at 10:30 in the morning. I'm in my underwear- Watson whites- and Carol's in her flannel nightgown. He's beautifully done up in St. Tropez blues, silver hair, and as dashing as Mastroianni. Wardrobe consultation and some image particulars for Carol on the movie.
Art Director: you spoke already with the director; he told you what you have to do.
C: well, not a great deal
Art Director: not a great deal. alright. now you are practically the daughter of a very, very rich man and a person who probably lives in san francisco, but you don't like the family, you didn't like the way they live, so you have become a hippie girl and you are involved with another guy who is a basketball player, a very good one, a very famous one. now the only thing you need is just one clothes. it must be blue jeans and something on top. we will shoot in reno the moment, so it will be sunburnt, so it must be something light, right?
C: the thing that i don't know a great deal about is the character, so that i don't have a clear idea of what exactly she would be wearing, do you have an idea?
Art Director: i just told you
C: emotionally
Art Director: nothing. a really blue jeans.

Later

C: It's so crazy...reno with the italians and you were writing about it.
L: it's not really so strange
C: yes, it is
L: let's not get self-conscious
C: is it not bizarre that an italian director should cast me as a girl who emotionally is nothing and just wiggles her ass and goes about getting divorced and traveling in private planes?
L: well.....

April 13
New York
L: i'm in the sun
C: the sun is coming in
L: the sun makes me lazy
C: i hate it
L: i love it. i'm a cat. what are you?
C: you're a cat?
L: yeah
C: i guess i'm probably...what am I"
L: a porpoise
C: i don't know what i am. i'm a cat, i guess
L: i don't think so, not if you don't like lying in the sun.
C: the thing is i feel guilty lazing about doing nothing; i'm a cat with a guilt lazing about doing nothing; i'm a cat with a guilt complex; would you move over so i can lie down too.

She woke me this morning with a giggly, soft hello, orange juice, ciagarette, scambled eggs, and honeyed toast. Old flannel floral-print nightgowns she wears like drapery; her hair hangs incredibly loose (it's the thickest, most playful hair.) She kisses her Tarryton king-size and blows the smoke far away. Then kisses me gently.
We're near the park on West 75th in big rooms on a great long block of houses. The mornings at Carol's are light (and full of plans these days, busy days).

L: what's up for today?
C: we can just luxuriate in our interviewing
L: what a wonderful excuse for talking about ourselves endlessly and feeling productive.
C: y'know leonard says, the only thing which interests me is am i or am i not alone in your love?
L: it's terrible in a way
C: what a question to ask someone without first supplying your part of the answer.

April 14
New York
C: i like this couch. it's a comfortable couch. we can see the vodka bottle.
L: the vodka bottle? i notice you've been hitting that bottle
C: that bottle! i've only had one drink from that particular bottle...before the late movie last night. i fell asleep before it was over. lillian gish was in it.
L: who said saomething terrible about you and lillian gish?
C: some reviewer on tv in toronto.
L: something about your eyes being an imitation...
C: she has such wonderful eyes. do you want to see lillian gish in broken blossoms?
L: no
C: what a boring person you are
L: she looks like you
C: you don't want to look at people who look like me?
L: i know what she looks like already. i never had to see garbo because i knew viva so well
C: and jane hallaren, y'know jane roomed with viva for a while
L: when jane looks down and inward she's just like garbo; not when she smiles.
C: oh well, when i smile i look like bugs bunny
L: that's not so
C: it is; i have bugs bunny teeth
L: when you swoon you look like lillian gish, when you smile you look like bugs bunny
C: when i swoon? do i swoon a lot? what do you mean swoon? when i swoon i look like who...vincent price, elsa lanchester in bride of frankenstein
L: no, lillian gish
C: oh, lewis, what are we doing tonight? i'd like to go peter bogdanovich's lecture. my hair gets full of dust, do you know that?
L: yeah, and you're getting a little cross-eyed
C: oh no i'm not
L: a little bit
C: no, don't tell me about it. am i really
L: i think it's 'cause of all that hair
C: no, wait a minute, lewis, before i ever look at you again, have you noticed this before today?
L: no
C: you are, then i'm going to be cross-eyed and my career ended at such an early age.
L: there are parts for cross-eyed ladies with long blonde hair.
C: not a hell of a lot

gentle endings
the world has given me
gentle endings
with candlelight
weave
past me, sleep
with me
i weeave them by
my hair, the cares
i choose to give you

gentle endings.
where the child i hold
where the poem
i build, where
the womb
of silk
i mold as i let go
of all
to flow through another
gentle ending

Carol Kane