Cathy Moriarty: Disappearing Act

The way Moriarty tells it, this was a marriage in which she played Persephone to Carmine's Hades. Besotted by her youth and beauty, he spirited her off to Malibu and held her in a captivity of sorts. Though Moriarty did not want to go on the record discussing her seven-year marriage, she did drop a number of hints suggesting that Carmine had much to do with her disappearance. Speaking of her career choices during those years she says, "I made mistakes. I let other people influence me and make decisions, sometimes without my knowledge. I can't say there were parts I was offered and turned down, but there were meetings for parts that I didn't go to, meetings I should have gone to, meetings I was advised against going to. I listened to that advice." She shakes her head in disbelief at her own tale. You realize how completely Moriarty lost her identity in the marriage when you hear her say things like, "I like being independent, I like doing things myself, I'm an instinctual person." During her marriage she was neither independent, nor did she trust her instincts.

"So--I messed up," she says. "I put time into some-thing that didn't work out. Sometimes you get caught up living something that's not true. The people around you, the people you're involved with, are not the right people." I ask her why her. friends didn't come to her aid and say, "Cathy, you've got to go to this meeting," or "You've got to get out of this marriage." Moriarty says, "I didn't have that many friends during the marriage. I kept bad things to myself. The friends I had I never talked to about...anything." There were parts that Moriarty did want and avidly pursued (the Jessica Lange role in Tootsie was one), but, she says, "I just didn't get them."

When Moriarty decided to stop sleeping with the enemy, Carmine hired Marvin Mitchelson, the well-known Tinseltown divorce/"palimony" lawyer who specializes in lightening the portfolios of Hollywood stars. Since there are no children, I assume Carmine is going after Moriarty's assets, which reportedly include part ownership of a La Cienega Boulevard sports bar called Alzado's (as in Lyle, the former N.F.L. lineman). In the past, during the long, long wait between roles, Moriarty worked as a maitre d' at the place, and one night Mitchelson came in and Moriarty had to seat him. He seemed to enjoy the irony, she says.

The divorce proceedings are still proceeding. As Moriarty discusses the case, even off the record, she gets animated and flushed. Finally she just blows her stack, and in an angry voice uses a compound word to describe her ex-husband. It's a common noun that also names a bodily part that everybody has. There's no trace of her mantra now, so I decide it would be the better part of valor to just segue to another topic altogether. I bring up the most talked about movie of her career-- the one that was never made.

In 1985, Moriarty won a coveted role in The Two Jakes. "I met with [writer-director] Robert Towne, we rehearsed, I had my wardrobe, I cut my hair six inches, I lost weight, and then they shut down production." According to reports at the time, the shutdown had to do with Towne's contention, on the first day of shooting, that one of the two Jakes, Robert Evans, couldn't act. Nicholson, who was friends with both Towne and Evans, was unable or unwilling to mediate.

"How do you recover from something like that?" I ask.

"That one hurt. I cried a lot." It seems unnecessary to ask if she cried a lot more when the film was finally revived a few years later--without Evans, Towne, Kelly McGillis, or Moriarty.

As if her miserable marriage and The Two Jakes fiasco weren't enough, Moriarty was a passenger in an auto accident that left her with a back seriously out of whack. Despite the on-going pain from her injury, she took a leading role in White of the Eye in 1987, a low-budget thriller directed by Donald Cammell (last heard from when he directed Demon Seed in 1976) and co-starring David Keith. Contrast Cammell and Keith with Scorsese and De Niro and you realize how badly her career had been mangled.

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