My Mother Died On Screen But Survived Hollywood

An early memory of mine: My father calls me over to the television, points to the screen, and tells me, “Look, it’s your mother.” I see her, my mother, certainly my mother, beautiful, young, standing on the edge of a rooftop pool in a canary-yellow bathing suit, in full eye shadow. I’m watching her image through a telescopic gunsight. She dives in the pool and lazily does the breaststroke until, finally, a shot is fired. It hits her back. Her body flips over in the pool, her mouth a perfect gasping oval, and blood billows from the wound. My mother gurgles as she drowns. Free jazz plays.

I know that my mother, my actual living mother, is in the kitchen as I’m watching this, but the scene I’m watching is also alive, and the thought of her being murdered, particularly somewhere as wonderful as a swimming pool, overwhelms me. My belly hurts. I cry with my mouth open. I don’t want to stand. I don’t want to sit. My father laughs and calls me by my nickname: “Buzzy, it’s a movie!” I know that, though I can’t say it through my tears, but I also know that somewhere, on some timeline, my mother is dead. She’s been shot by a man on a roof with a long black gun. Some loser without a face. My father, definitely drunk, calls to my mom, who comes to comfort me. Her soft hair, her good smell, and her long arms come too. But I sense for the first time, discernibly, that much of her is unknown to me.

My 19-year-old mother had recently started modeling when she shot the iconic opening scene to Dirty Harry. In it, she’s snipered by a psychopathic serial killer named Scorpio in a rooftop pool. Other than feeling awkward trying on many bathing suits for a male stylist, having him choose one that was so “busty,” she had a wonderful time. She says all the men on the set—and it was all men on the set, obviously––were perfect gentlemen. “Didn’t Clint Eastwood kiss you when the camera stopped?” I ask, having her recount the story on a recent phone call. I remember her mentioning that detail when I was a kid. Action was called, and “Detective Harry Callahan” crouched next to her blanketed, recently murdered corpse. Cut was yelled, and Clint Eastwood leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. “Oh, yes, he did kiss me!” she tells me, sounding embarrassed, “but that was just a bit of fun.”

Recently, I looked at the Dirty Harry Wikipedia entry to see if it mentions her scene. Indeed, the first line of the plot section describes a woman getting snipered in a rooftop pool by a psychopath. She is not credited. It’s a legendary scene in a movie, an opening described in Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation, and yet she is unnamed almost everywhere, her purpose reduced to an anonymous but iconic moment of violence, perpetually dying but looking good while doing it. In some ways, it’s a portent to what happened in her career, which started off swimmingly and ended abruptly––but not to what happened in her life.

There’s always been a narrative around my mother in her family: She makes questionable choices. She’s a flake, but we love her! From a young age, I remember getting the message from family members that she’d all but thrown away her career, gotten door service to the gates of heaven, said fuck it, and decided to walk back out. Her career moves weren’t the only choices people questioned; her love life was another oft-maligned arena. She and I had a close but fraught relationship during my adolescence. I resented the volatile men she seemed to center our lives on and that we were often in financial distress––so there were times when I agreed with these assessments of her character. There’s still plenty I wish had been different back then. But even as a kid, I intuited that it was more complicated than I knew, that her chaos stemmed from somewhere I couldn’t quite reach yet. As an adult, I began understanding from the inside why a person might do things that seem like nonsense at best, dangerous at worst. I could relate to her in that way. The things I didn’t understand about her relationships or the pivots she made in her career––she had her reasons. I started to ask her about them.

Growing up in a rich suburb of Los Angeles, my mom was fascinated by show business. She went from being a toothy string bean of a kid with uneven bangs to a real head-turner. She became driven early, took acting classes in early high school, then landed a Disney movie by responding to a print ad in the Los Angeles Times. Her 5-foot-10 height was a deterrent to casting her in lead roles, so while visiting a friend in Connecticut, my mom went into New York City on the train one day, walked into Seventeen magazine, and asked the people there if she could model. They told her absolutely, and they connected her with a talent manager in California. Within her first year, she had done magazine spreads, TV commercials, print ads, and Dirty Harry. Two big-time modeling agents came out to L.A. to woo her. She signed with Eileen Ford and moved to New York City.

When summer hit during her first year in New York, my grandmother came out to visit my mom. My mom had just received a great payday from a Maybelline TV commercial, and she felt charmed. The two of them borrowed a convertible and drove out to Long Island, where Eileen Ford had her weekend place; she threw fancy parties out there, all very socially curated. Directors, business people, actors, models—Ford hosted 12 or 15 people at a time for an entire weekend. At dinner, my mom sat next to a charming man. All she could remember about his connection to Ford was that he “read as rich” and had previously dated a model. My mom and the man flirted throughout the meal, then he asked if she wanted to go for a car ride down to the beach. She thought they’d take a walk, gather shells, watch the waves recede. Instead, he pulled over someplace remote, locked the doors of his car, slid over to her side of the front seat, pressed himself onto her, and raped her. She punched at him and yelled no. He didn’t stop. He finished. They drove back. My mom went up to the guest room at Eileen’s where she was staying with my grandmother. My grandmother chatted with her, asking how the car ride was. It was fun, my mother told her from the bathroom, where she was trying to wash the night off.

Returning to the city after that weekend, my mom didn’t feel well. Fear was her new idle state, like a skittish animal had chosen her body as the spot to nap with one eye open. She was fitful, listless, and wandered around the city on long walks, crying. One weekend, before a job she was booked on for a Monday as a dark blonde, she used Sun-In at the beach—then showed up to the shoot with her skin ruddy tan and her hair a new shade. The photographer was not happy. These kinds of things––silly things––started happening a lot. She wasn’t thinking straight, she says. She was not as motivated. She started to avoid her agent. She met a new group of friends, and some of them partied too hard. She got sick with a recurring case of mesenteric adenitis and was hospitalized at Lenox Hill. She remembers her manager, who also represented Cybill Shepherd, was befuddled by the change in her and told her that the difference between my mom and Cybill was that Cybill would cut off her grandpa’s balls if it meant she’d get a part, and my mom, well, my mom didn’t have that kind of drive. She stopped booking much, went on fewer auditions, stopped making much money. She eventually had to move out of her nice place on the Upper East Side into a place that felt like a storage unit. In the next 18 months, she decided to give up on New York and move back to California. Everyone in her life was confused, but no one thought to ask what was really going on. “I wasn’t diagnosed or anything, but I was having a nervous breakdown,” she tells me. “And I felt so guilty.” Now she knows she didn’t do anything wrong.

“Your mother is a lovable flake.” Of course, the change in circumstances, the failures, the types of choices she began to make are a mystery when the rape is removed from the narrative. It’s as though she was hit at a stoplight by a drunk driver in her brand-new BMW––then kept telling people she purposefully crashed her car. She describes trying to pursue show business again a few years later, in her late 20s, and while she still got work sometimes, it wasn’t as easy; the doors didn’t fling open as they once had. “Some things in life, you don’t get second chances,” she says. In her early 30s, my mother met my father on the set of a B horror film they starred in together. Her first memory of him was how coked out he was every day on set and that he was dating another woman. But he was also goofy, intense, theatrical. Six months later, they were married, and they stayed that way, through much turmoil and violence, for 15 years.

My mother and I talk very openly now and have worked a lot on our communication with each other, but it wasn’t always that way. Even after my dad left, things were often in chaos. A new man arrived, one I hated; we had a wild, unmanageable menagerie of pets; we moved to a random new state. While my father terrified me even in absence, I resented my mother for rearing us in environments that felt uncomfortable and unsafe and for blaming me for difficulties in the household when I would act out as a struggling kid. It was hard for me to understand why she made choices I felt weren’t in the best interest of me and my brother.

When I became an adult, my view of her shifted as I found myself drawn to men (unsurprisingly, I suppose) who were like my father: guys with substance-abuse issues and untreated mental illness who could switch from being spirited and lovable to cruel, scary, unpredictable. I, too, got involved when I should have sprinted in the opposite direction. I, too, stayed when I should have left. The more work I’ve done on myself to distance myself from those bad instincts, the more I’ve learned about the impact of trauma on a young mind—and the more compassion I have for us both. When you’ve got unhealed wounds, you can make pretty piss-poor decisions without knowing it’s happening. The damage, the resulting lack of self-esteem, the fear—rational and irrational both––is often the driving force of decision-making. When I ask my mother about certain choices she made when I was a kid, she says she was just trying to get by, she was financially unsound, she didn’t have many options, she couldn’t go crawling back to her parents. She did the best she could, she tells me. There are things she regrets. Understanding doesn’t eclipse the past or take away pain. I have spent much of my life contending with my childhood. But our relationship is in a continuous, committed state of repair.

Stories of young people sidetracked or ruined by sexual violence are an indelible part of the cultural fabric, looming, as American as the Hollywood sign. “All those women who came out during the #MeToo movement, all the Epstein girls—I know exactly how they felt,” my mom says now. She knows the rape was something that changed her life, and it wasn’t the last time she experienced gender-based violence. Yet still she describes herself as being stupid about her life choices and lacking the necessary intrinsic confidence to really make it in show business. “To me, to be a girl who walks into Seventeen magazine and asks them if she can model isn’t lacking confidence,” I tell her, and she says she guesses that’s true. She lost herself after something egregiously cruel and degrading occurred at her fancy agent’s summer party. “You were a child,” I say.

My mother’s story is not one that ends badly. It’s one of great perseverance and a unique willingness to change and grow over time, however messily. She lives happily in Vermont, a mother, a fabulous grandmother, a retiree, a partner with a truly kind husband, a gardener, a lover of animals, a true eccentric, a member of her church’s “Green Team.” Recently, I edited the Wikipedia entry for Dirty Harry. For no other reason than she deserves to be there, I added her name to the cast myself. Diana Davidson, the Swimmer.