Grande Dame Sylvia Miles chews out our reporter in a whirlwind tour of her apartment/museum.
__________________________________
Some people, it is said, are so hell-bent on elitist nightlife that they'll attend the opening of an envelope. Judging by her social and domestic wonts, Sylvia Miles will not only go to the opening, but she will take that envelope home, frame it, and hang it on a wall in her apartment. "It's a collage of my life," Miles says of her home in her nasally wail over lunch at a nearby restaurant. I have not yet seen the apartment, a place she alternately describes as a museum and a temple. "I need to meet you before I can let you up," she has explained. "I don't like having strangers in my home."
Looking through a couple of back issues of Movieline, Miles checks out previous pieces that have been done on the homes of John Waters and Michael O'Donoghue. With a weird kind of bravado laced with an undercurrent of envy, she observes, "John and Michael are controlled by their collections. I don't collect things for no reason. Everything in my apartment means something."
At 58 years old and with more than 30 movies under her belt - including Midnight Cowboy, Heat, Farewell, My Lovely, Crossing Delancey, and She-Devil - Miles looks like a cross between an aging starlet and an eccentric, bleached-from-gray yenta. She favors fingerless gloves, cowboy boots, and leather jackets. The years of self-mythologizing have apparently taken their toll, leaving her with a perpetual star complex; she requires a good deal of attention and everything needs to be done entirely on her terms. Even my reporting. When Miles finally agrees to allow me into the apartment, the first thing she does is grab my briefcase. "Wait a minute," I say, "my tape recorder and notebook are in there."
"I don't want you walking around in here with that briefcase. You'll knock things over."
"Can't I have the tape recorder?"
"No. Let me show you around, then you'll come back again and can use the tape recorder."
"How about my notebook," I whine, sounding like a little bit of a yenta myself. "I have to take notes."
"Of course."
True to her word, the apartment is a temple, though the resident god happens to be Sylvia Miles. Most of the wall space is covered with painterly gifts from friends (Mark Kostabi, Andy Warhol, Hedy Klineman), posters from her films (Heat and Who Killed Mary What's'ername), and things that contain her name out of context (a street sign for Miles Way and a wood-carving of an S in her foyer). A plugged-in sculpture near the kitchen window spells out "Sylvia" in neon and a matching palm tree lights up the grate of her fireplace. The way she tells it, most of the magazines piled around the apartment contain articles about her, the books that line the shelves just below the ceiling have been written by friends, and just about everything else (right down to the macaroni and cheese in her refrigerator-"My acting partner gave me it") is a gift.
Across from the refrigerator, hanging on a wall above the stove, is a fairly impressive collection of copper pots and pans. I ask Sylvia if she does a lot of cooking. "You figure it out," she says, opening her oven to reveal an equally impressive collection of tools.
She leads me out of the kitchen on a whirlwind tour of her one-bedroom apartment with its million dollar view of Central Park, promising that we'll have a more formal meeting a week later, prior to the photo shoot for this article. We pass what looks like a small sketch by Robert Rauschenberg and Miles gushes, "He gave me that. We were at a dinner and I asked him to sign the napkin. He did, then he looked at me and said, 'Sylvia, you're so cheap.' "
We stop at a closet near the apartment's entrance, and Miles reaches for a purse that hangs from a chain on the doorknob. "Andy gave me this after the opening of The Night of the Iguana," she says. Speaking softly, as if Warhol has an ear to the neighboring wall, she adds, "He thought it was made of iguana but it's really alligator."
Just as I'm about to leave, Miles decides to play a little game. She opens up the closet - which is filled to the brim but immaculately organized - to expose the leopard skin coat ("Those animal people are silly," she says dismissively) that she wore in Wall Street. She turns toward a cardboard box on the floor of the closet. "Look, I'll just stick my hand in here and see what I pull out." She hands me a clipping of her and Abbie Hoffman, then snatches it back. After that comes a photograph of her posing alongside the Andy Warhol imitator Alan Midgett. Next I'm holding a newspaper article. "What's that?" Miles asks. I tell her it's a piece about one of her plays. "Read it." I do, aloud. "Does it say that I was good?" It's more a preview than a review, so it doesn't say anything about the performance one way or the other. "Here, give me that." She replaces the article in her box and hands me my briefcase along with a few of her movies on videotape. "You better bring those back next week or I'll kill you," she says by way of adieu.
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.
____________
Michael Kaplan is a frequent contributor to these pages. He wrote the November cover story on Winona Ryder.