USA TODAY International Edition
Keaton: Mental illness ruled her brother
By all outward appearance, Diane Keaton’s upbringing was storybook perfect. The four children of Jack and Dorothy Hall – three girls and one boy – lived a comfy post- WWII middleclass life in a four- bedroom Southern California tract house with their civil engineer father and homemaker mother. Summers, the family piled into their station wagon and camped at Huntington Beach.
Keaton thrived, obviously, becoming an Academy Award- winning actress, fashion icon, photographer, real estate developer and memoirist, among other achievements. But not all the Hall children were so blessed.
In her new memoir, “Brother & Sister” ( Knopf, out today), Keaton, 74, examines her upbringing with her only brother, Randy Hall, 71, and tries to make sense of how their paths diverged, why he led “a life lived on the other side of normal.”
While Keaton was traveling the world and making movies, Randy was living in self- imposed exile and squalor, suffering violent fantasies and drinking himself into liver failure. It’s a raw, often difficult read, one that Keaton hopes will help to destigmatize serious mental illness and encourage families to discuss their experiences more openly.
“I think a lot of families go through this, and it’s sort of unwritten and unexplored,” Keaton says in an interview with USA TODAY. “And why shouldn’t it be explored? That I think is my question. Why didn’t I explore it more, why did I explore it too late?”
Keaton credits her mother with her own late- in- life pivot to writing. Dorothy Hall was the family archivist, documenting every achievement in letters, diaries and scrapbooks. After she died in 2008, that family archive would serve as the basis for Keaton’s first memoir, 2011’ s best- selling “Then Again,” which spent six weeks on USA TODAY’s Best- Selling Books list, peaking at No. 31.
Again, Keaton turns to her mother’s family archive, as well as Randy’s own extensive writings ( he was a prolific if undiscovered poet) to try to make sense of her brother. “I want to understand that mystery,” Keaton writes. “Or at least try to understand the complexity of loving someone so different, so alone, and so hard to place.”
“It’s overwhelming, just how much they wrote,” Keaton says of her mother and brother. “They were addicts, both of them. … I’m sort of a librarian.”
Keaton proves herself far more than a librarian.
In clean, piercing prose, she examines midcentury American family dynamics and gender roles. She’s also honest about her own ambitions and how convenient it was to allow them to put distance between her and her family’s problems.
“I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted people – lots of people I didn’t know – to love me,” Keaton writes. Randy, however, was the opposite. “The longer Randy lived, the more he became that Boo Radley character who lived down the street. The man the neighbors gossiped about in whispers,” she writes, referencing the feared but ultimately goodhearted recluse in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
And because this is a movie star we’re talking about, there is the occasional wild line that nobody else could write: “I found Randy sitting under a pepper tree drinking a quart of Cuervo Gold tequila in Carol Kane’s front yard.”
“I feel like my life was so involved with moving around and performing and being in these films and having that life,” Keaton says. “In a certain sense, I would say I kind of abandoned them. I was never really around; I lived in New York. Things changed when my father died in 1990, and I came home to live in California. That also was an impetus for me to participate more in the troubled life that Randy had.”
Keaton doesn’t shy from sharing just how troubled a life Randy led. She is especially candid about the violent fantasies he entertained – but never acted upon ( she’s very clear on that last point).
In one disturbing letter to his sister, Randy writes, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to actually start planning how to get a pretty woman and kill her. I did Diane, I had scenarios of doing just that. I figured I would sneak into a room where a woman was sleeping and stab her to death.”
“It became harder and harder to read what Randy was thinking,” Keaton says.
Randy, now living in an assisted- living facility with dementia, has fewer violent thoughts. As they’ve gotten older, Keaton and her brother have grown closer. Writing “Brother & Sister” didn’t get Keaton any closer to understanding the why of Randy, Keaton admits, but she is more at peace with their relationship.
“I want to have another chance at being a better sister,” Keaton writes in the book’s final pages, and she’s embracing what time she and Randy have left to do just that.
“We have a ritual where we walk around and we go and we sit at the frozen yogurt store, and we sit there and
COURTESY OF DIANE KEATON
we eat and then we wheelchair him around, and we look at the world that’s there,” Keaton says. “These things are really special to me. It’s like going to church: On Sundays, I go and see my brother.”