Keaton opens up on her regrets in memoir
On her way to stardom, Diane Keaton reveals her brother was suffering
Brother & Sister Diane Keaton
Penguin Random House
Diane Keaton is here
WASHINGTON to confess.
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, while she was jet-setting around the world, collecting awards and establishing herself as Hollywood’s favourite onscreen eccentric, the actual eccentric in her family, her younger brother, Randy, was living in squalor in Orange County, Calif., being terrorized by low-flying jets and attempting to gas himself in the garage.
She couldn’t really be bothered to check in on him, never mind try to help.
“I wanted to be a movie star,” she writes in her new book, Brother & Sister. “I wanted people — lots of people I didn’t know — to love me.”
She’s still getting that wish. When Keaton, 74, showed up at Sixth & I synagogue in Washington, the heavily bifocaled crowd was there to adore her.
They had paid $40 each for a seat, a copy of the book and the opportunity to bask in her presence for approximately 45 minutes, no photography allowed, no on-thespot questions from the audience, no meet-and-greet afterward.
It was a rigid program for such an intimate topic. (“Forty-five minutes?” grumbled one woman as the crowd waited for Keaton.) But any time at all with Diane Keaton was coveted, and her fans were ready to take whatever she was willing to give.
It has been that way for decades now, but not always. Before she was an Academy Award-winning actress, Woody Allen’s muse (and lately his defender) and a Hollywood icon, Keaton was a big sister in Southern California, the oldest of four — including Randy, with whom she shared a bunk bed. They were close, even if she often thought of him as a nuisance. And she could tell that he was troubled, even back then, by the way he would breathe at night.
“I remember glancing down from my top-bunk apartment in the sky and seeing Randy’s anxious bobbing head, his fear of the dark, and his sweet if hapless face,” she wrote in her book. “Why was he such a chicken? Why couldn’t he stop seeing ghosts that weren’t there lurking in shadows?”
Brother & Sister is a reconstruction of their lives — from those childhood nights to the darkness that followed Randy into adulthood, which included alcoholism, joblessness, divorce, isolation, fantasies about violence against women and a suicide attempt — told through journal entries by Randy and their mother, along with Keaton’s recollections. The sister rises ever higher. The brother sinks ever lower.
Ultimately, it’s a story about regret. Randy is unwell now in a different way — incapacitated by Parkinson’s and dementia, confined to assisted living, unable to weigh in on his sister’s book project. In piecing together the artifacts of their separate memories, Keaton admits that she doesn’t know whether “I’ve gotten any closer to who he is and what he means to me, but I do know that I wish I could have given him more love and attention sooner.”
Love and attention for Keaton was in ample supply, however, at downtown Washington arts centre Sixth & I when she flounced onstage. The woman who had been grousing about the brevity of Keaton’s appearance cheered — all was forgiven! — and the whole crowd stood and applauded while Keaton smiled and politely waved away their adoration.
She blew into the microphone. “Is this on?”
A collective nod.
“Oh, you can hear me? That’s too bad.”
Laughter.
Keaton’s self-deprecation reads like vulnerability, but it can be distancing. She seems to want us to know everything and nothing. This encounter would be exactly as intimate as Keaton would allow it to be.
“Is there one question that you hate to be asked?” asks the moderator.
“Almost all,” Keaton responds. The audience laughs, and she blows them a kiss.
She wrote the book for us, she says, as much as for Randy.
Relatability is a goal. She knows her story — their story — is unusual: her extreme success and fame, his extreme psychological turmoil. But she says she hopes readers will still see something of themselves in it, of the challenging relationships they have within their own families.
“There are so many people who live through the pain of having a family member who doesn’t quite fit in,” she told the nodding crowd. She said she wanted to open up a dialogue about mental health and to offer herself up as a cautionary tale that could inspire people to “be better” to their loved ones sooner than she had. The final chapters of Keaton’s book are as much a love letter to her brother as they are an apology. She is sorry for abandoning him, grateful she got him back. Over the past 12 years, as dementia softened Randy’s resistance to his family and age tempered Keaton’s blinding ambition, the two began spending time together.
Every Sunday she visits. Before he was in a wheelchair, they’d take walks to get ice cream; now, she and an aide push him along. “He would see something — find a leaf or even a bottlecap — and find it fascinating,” she told The Washington Post in an interview. “All I remember about that was how special those times were with him. It was like opening something up to me. Giving me such a gift.”
Keaton wanted to return the gift by sharing those softer parts of her brother with the world. Part of her motivation in putting together the book, she said, was to give Randy’s poetry an audience. Maybe it would catch an editor’s attention. “At some point,” Keaton mused, “maybe someone will come and look at his writing and really take it and see what they feel he did with it.”
Maybe the sister could help the brother get some love and attention for himself, belatedly.