Read Watch Me: A Memoir for Free Online

from her head before a scene. This story became magnified and amplified in the retelling, but I believe it held up filming for a day or so.
    On my father’s last night of shooting, I came to set again. Annie had agreed to meet me at the Luau in Beverly Hills before going out to location. We ordered a fortifying cocktail and headed for Chinatown. Night had fallen, and when we arrived on set, I could see through the window of Dad’s trailer a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya on a table. I knocked on his door and he called for me to enter. As soon as I did, I was met with a cold reception. What had taken me so long? What had I been up to?
    They were taking a long time to light the scene. It wasto be the horrible denouement of the film, involving Noah Cross and his daughter. Fact and fiction sometimes blur, and it began to dawn that Dad was practicing on me. The crew broke for supper. It was about one o’clock in the morning. Dad and Annie and Jack and I were in the back booth at a café, having egg foo yung for dinner. Dad dropped a noodle on his lapel but didn’t seem to notice. Jack reached over delicately with his chopsticks. “Let me help you with that, John,” he said good-naturedly. They wrapped the final scene at 5 A.M.
    *  *  *
    Jack took me to Aspen in the winter of 1973. There were no ostentatious mega-chalets or dress codes, makeup was considered corny, and we never dreamed of putting on a snowsuit. We lived in blue jeans and stayed at the beautiful rustic mountain home of Bob and Toby Rafelson in Castle Creek. Bob had directed Jack in several films, including The King of Marvin Gardens and Five Easy Pieces . Jack called Bob “Curly” and Toby “Bums,” names that have stuck to this day.
    It was through them that I met Paul Pascarella, an artist who drew birds and buffaloes and burned and tooled leather and deerskin. Jack bought me a poncho painted like a thunderbird, which I wore with the gray fox-fur stole and Borsalino hat he gave me for Christmas. Paul was one of the best chefs I have ever come across. His dinners were a harmonious assortment of ingredients shopped, picked, hunted, and found. He was a shaman in the kitchen, and a lovely skier.
    I hadn’t skied since I was sixteen, in Klosters, where Tony and I went on winter holidays with our mother as children. I remember following Paul downhill in the still, cloudy silence of the mountains when the visibility was flat or when snow was falling and the moguls were hard to see. He’d make widearcs and long, sleek traverses, as though moving to music. Occasionally, I would fatigue and totally lose control skiing, humiliating myself once in a doubleheader by crashing into Teddy Kennedy and then crossing over Martina Navratilova’s skis as she was preparing to descend; to her credit, she simply arched an eyebrow. Roman came to Aspen that winter as well. He wore red-and-white racing spandex and was an excellent athlete.
    Jack was introduced to Aspen by the fourteen-year-old daughter of his acquaintance Art Pfister, who owned Buttermilk and Ajax mountains. Her name was Nancy, and she was a wild child, a free spirit, and an amazing skier. A few years later, Nancy found a perfect house for Jack above a beautiful beaver pond in the Maroon Bells. In those days there were at least eight pubs on Main Street. After our last descent of the evening, we’d go to the bar at the Jerome Hotel for Irish coffee. Ads proclaiming Hunter Thompson’s run for sheriff were prominently displayed on the forest-green walls.
    I liked Hunter, but he frightened me, and there were myriad stories about his wild behavior out at Owl Farm in Woody Creek. And yet Hunter might make an appearance on a winter’s evening, shuffling through the snowbanks into the house, legs bare to the freezing cold, in flip-flops and madras shorts, for a quiet Jacuzzi or a gentlemen’s conversation with Jack and Bob Rafelson over a good bourbon, without incident. I always considered this a miracle,