Deep Inside Sylvia Miles' Shrine to Herself

A week later, tapes in hand, I'm back chez Miles. The photographer's due here in an hour, and Sylvia's dressed for the occasion in an alarmingly low cut shirt and black tights. She heads into her kitchen to put up a pot of coffee and I inquire about the firearm mounted above its entranceway, remarking that it looks odd in a Manhattan apartment. "It's a sawed-off shotgun," she gaily acknowledges. "I bought it when I had a house in Woodstock so that people would see it from the street and be afraid to break in."

Miles's living room is rich in African furnishings, cowhides, and animal skulls that imbue the place with a hip primeval look. Propped against a wall is a long stick with a big round head at one end. It resembles some kind of a jungle scepter. "My acting partner [yes, the macaroni and cheese guy] gave me this hideous fertility thing that he bought," she explains from the kitchen. "It's one of those African things that you pay $85 or $100 for. He gave it to me thinking I would love it. But I hated it, so I gave it to Mark Kostabi to fix up. He painted it white and added these African drawings."

She pours the coffee into a couple of Fred Flintstone mugs, makes her way past a set of African stools that have been fashioned from bamboo, and settles down on the couch that had been her bed as a little girl. She reaches behind it and produces a beautiful Chinese box with wooden inlays. "This was a gift from my friend Tennessee Williams," she says, opening it to reveal a set of backgammon pieces. "I had to take up backgammon to distract myself from chess. I had become too much of a chess bum." Chess bum? "You know what that is," she says testily. "I played in tournaments and all of my games were annotated." She gestures toward a framed chess column from The New York Times. "They thought that game of mine was interesting enough to reprint it."

En route to the opposite end of the apartment, we pass the trophy-room/bathroom which is plastered with framed citations that include a pair of Academy Award nominations. "Everybody wonders how I can keep this stuff in here without it getting ruined by the steam," she says. "The truth is that I don't shower. I usually take baths, and whenever I have to wash my hair I open the windows and finish quickly before everything gets steamed up."

Sylvia leads the way into her bedroom, one of those places in which everything seems to be out on display. Masks hang above her closet, animal skins are scattered around the room and draped over an exercycle. Her dresser is covered with rhinestone jewelry and on the opposite end of the room is a printer's box loaded with knickknacks and miniature paintings. She takes one out and explains its origin. "I was walking through Covent Garden, and a guy yelled out, 'You're my favorite actress,' and he gave this to me. But on the back he wrote, 'To Sarah Miles.' I took it and I said, 'Am I your favorite actress or is Sarah Miles your favorite actress?' " She smiles but seems to be tiring of this guided tour with its incessant questions, particularly with the photographer slated to arrive at any moment.

She reaches for a small stack of snapshots and begins explaining them: "This is a photograph of Tennessee Williams. Here's a picture that I bought off of an autograph hound for $5." It's a shot of Miles standing alongside Shelley Winters. "I bought it so that I could prove that Shelley is heavier than me. Here I am posing with the other cast members of The Last Movie." Did she think the movie was really great? "Well," Miles says in a rare moment of diplomacy, "it was eight hours long."

Suddenly the entire day seems to be grating on Sylvia Miles's nerves. While her personality has already swung from friendly to hostile and back again, it seems to be veering dangerously close to open hostility. When she starts explaining the things on a wall in her bedroom - more Warhol prints, another painting by Mark Kostabi, and a rendering of her living room - she points out that two years ago the wall was all but empty. I wonder out loud what she'll do when she runs out of usable wall space. This, for some reason, irrevocably sets her off. "You ask such dumb questions," she explodes. "Somebody gave me that, a painting of my apartment, so I had to put it up. What should I do? Throw it away?"

Now she's sputtering and upset and making me feel like a kid I once saw rooting around in a bush for a football only to mistakenly pull out a hornets' nest. "If I'm nice enough to share my life with you, don't question it to the degree that it starts to aggravate me. See? My voice is rising, and you stop being a guest and visitor in my home. Ordinarily I give everybody much more than they get from anybody else. I'm sure that what's-his-name never spoke to you for this long. John Waters. And if he did he didn't have that much to say anyway. He's not that articulate about anything. I'm sure nobody gave him any of those things in his house. Those are things he went out and bought because he collects. This is my life, this is the museum of a famous actress in the 20th century. At the moment you're privileged to look at my things, but don't make me feel uncomfortable."

As the photographer sets up in the next room Miles winds down, though her voice remains tense as she singles out various items and announces their importance: a globe filled with plastic snow that Tennessee Williams sent, a turtle skeleton that was a gift from a fan, a portrait done by an artist friend of hers. "She did paintings of me and Madonna I'm supposed to throw that away?"

A few minutes later the photographer is ready. Sylvia brightens. "One minute, C.B.," she melodiously calls out, mimicking a contract player preparing to face DeMille's lens. She fixes her lipstick, seats herself on one of the African stools, and smiles like crazy into the camera.

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Michael Kaplan is a frequent contributor to these pages. He wrote the November cover story on Winona Ryder.

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