Whatever happened to the Oscar-nominated star of Raging Bull? Cathy Moriarty drops a few hints about her lost decade.
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It doesn't happen to doctors or lawyers or teachers or busdrivers. They don't leave work one day and just disappear. They might call in sick, they might change offices or firms or schools or routes, but they don't evanesce like dew in the desert. Not so with actors. Actors vanish. A confluence of forces can push them from the screen, from the mind, seemingly from the landscape. Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.
One of the disappeared was Cathy Moriarty. Remember her? Plucked from obscurity at age 18, an Oscar and Golden Globe nominee for her work opposite Robert De Niro in Marty Scorsese's 1980 masterpiece, Raging Bull? She went on to do Neighbors in 1981, and then...what? A void. A silence. A gaping hole in the filmography.
I wondered what had happened. Had she gone off to raise kids and kumquats in the Valley? Had she holed up in a dingy Hollywood apartment with her cats and her cheek-bones and her limited store of memories? I hadn't a clue. Few did. Calls were made. Feelers put out. We heard she was living in a small apartment in Beverly Hills. She wanted to talk about her comeback. A breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons was arranged.
I sit at a corner table and wait. She walks in. Tall, blonde, still easy on the eyes. The voice husky and mellifluous. She slides her cigarettes and lighter onto the table.
"No smoking section," I say. "Do you want to move?"
"No, I'll try to make it," she says. No trace of the Brooklyn accent. She orders coffee and a dish of strawberries. Two middle-aged Hollywood hucksters suddenly materialize. One guy introduces himself and reminds Cathy that she met him and Robert Davi in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. She pretends to remember. When he leaves, she says, "I know Robert Davi, but I don't know that guy, and I've never been to Utah." But hey, that's okay. If people are seeing her where she's never been, that's got to be better than not being seen in places where she is. That's the way it was--up until last year.
"I've come a long way," she says. "I've been around forever...okay? Almost 13 years. And I'm starting to accomplish things. I'm where I'd like to be." As if to reassure herself, she says--and will continue to repeat, like a mantra, throughout the interview--"I'm in control, I'm happy. I'm at ease. I'm calm."
In the past ten years, Moriarty appeared in a total of three movies, and chances are you've only heard of two of them. Now, suddenly, she's been jump-started. In the past 12 months she's made three more movies--all of them with people you've heard of. If she keeps up this pace, she might soon have a sandwich named after her at the Stage Deli.
The first new film is Indian Runner, a 1960s era drama written and directed by the noted actor-pugilist, Sean Penn. Moriarty says, "Sean called me and said, 'What will it take for you to do this picture?' I said, 'Ask me.' "I ask her about Penn's managerial style and social skills. After all, we're not talking about Robert Bly here. Moriarty will dish no dirt. "He knew exactly what he wanted," she says. "It was a pleasure working with him." Uh-oh. I can sense we're not going to be rubbing up against much hard-edged reality here.
Moriarty seems surprised when I ask what Indian Runner is about. She hesitates and worries her brow. She seems stumped, which surprises me. After all, I'm not asking her about the refinancing of Poland's national debt. Maybe she read only her own scenes and has no idea what the story is about. Maybe she's forgotten how to do publicity. When I give her this opportunity to type her film, all she can say-- after some very long moments pass by--is, "God...it's a film about people." As opposed to, say, a film about protons? Given this precis, I decide to forego asking about her two other films, Soapdish, with Sally Field, Kevin Kline, and Whoopi Goldberg, and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, with that man for all period pieces, Armand Assante.
Instead, I ask Moriarty if we might take a walk back in time to see both how it all began and what went wrong. For she has, in a sense, been reborn. The last ten years have been painful ones, emotionally and physically. If, as she says, her winning the role of Vickie LaMotta in Raging Bull was "her ticket to heaven," it hasn't been a direct flight.
On a summer evening, in 1978, the actor Joe Pesci walked into a disco called "Hoops" in Mount Vernon, New York and saw a picture of Cathy Moriarty in a bathing suit. The disco had a beauty contest every summer, and that year Cathy had won the first prize of $100. Pesci, already cast as Jake LaMotta's brother in Raging Bull, was struck by the resemblance between Cathy Moriarty and Vickie LaMotta, Jake's second wife. Pesci arranged a meeting between Scorsese, De Niro, and Moriarty, who, at the time, was four months out of high school and working as a receptionist in the garment district.
Moriarty tells me that she doesn't like the way this story has been told over the years, because it makes it sound like her getting the role was a fluke. "It ignores the fact that I had wanted to be an actress since the age of 14 when I saw Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday," and the fact that she had been going to open casting calls that were advertised in Backstage magazine. In other words, she was "not just a receptionist who looked great in a bathing suit." Moriarty gets defensive--and ruffled--as she continues to discuss it. It's one of the few times during the interview when real emotion ripples her placid, almost blissed out, facade.
"Joe Pesci... fine... a nice man... funny... but everyone knew, in town, I wanted to be an actress, and, uh, everyone knew these people were in town and were looking for someone. It's great Joe Pesci...yes, of course...said that, but I sent my picture to the casting director, and if I didn't have something, I never would have gotten to meet Mr. Scorsese and Mr. De Niro. I worked many long months rehearsing before I got the part. And I think I did a good enough job [in the film]. I backed it up." The critics agreed. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, wrote, "Miss Moriarty comes across with the assurance of an Actors Studio veteran. Either she is one of the film finds of the decade or Mr. Scorsese is Svengali. Perhaps both."
Moriarty was 19. She hired an agent and moved to Los Angeles. She was quoted, at the time, as saying, "My second movie will really be important." Since her first film was so good it would be widely hailed ten years later as the very finest of the entire decade, Moriarty needed extraordinary luck to find another film half as good. Instead, she found Neighbors.
Neighbors started shooting just a week after she had attended the Academy Awards ceremony. The project teamed her with two of the hottest comedians in the business, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Her director was John Avildsen, who, a few years before, had taken a piece of proletarian swill, Rocky, and turned it into an Oscar winner. The package seemed created in CAA heaven. Choosing to do Neighbors instead of one of the other projects being offered was, Moriarty says now, "not the greatest idea." She would be the last actress to work with Belushi who was, by this time, bloated with drink, drugs and hubris. Moriarty claims she never saw Belushi snorting cocaine. When I ask if Belushi was out of control, Moriarty gets indignant and says she doesn't want to talk about someone who's passed on. Well, okay, this is obviously not an easy subject to discuss, but the air of huffy indignation seems to me a trifle disingenuous. It does have the desired effect however: it closes the door on the topic of drugs. Moriarty could have stopped there, but like any good actress, she senses that she hasn't milked the scene, and she leans forward to remind me in a hushed, sanctimonious tone that the anniversary of Belushi's death is in a week or two.
Neighbors was an attempt at black comedy starring two TV sketch artists and parodists who knew next to nothing about black comedy. John Avildsen had no idea how to pull Belushi and Aykroyd and Moriarty into a working ensemble. The movie is painful to watch. Moriarty says, "I took the role because I wanted to show my versatility and do a comedy. My thick accent in Raging Bull hurt me--people kept thinking that's all she could do." She? Moriarty immediately notices her use of the third person. "She. I keep referring to myself as some-body else. People kept thinking that's all I could do. Which is wrong."
Moriarty was desperate to prove that she had all the tools. But the truth was she didn't. She had had little formal training, her resume consisted of one film in which she played a character very much like herself, and apparently there was no one around to offer guidance during this critical period or to remind her of John Barrymore's famous line that dying is easier than doing com-edy. One can only wonder what could have happened to Moriarty if she had come along in the days of the stu-dio system, when studio ex-ecutives would have known that here--like the young Lauren Bacall or Kim Novak-- was a diamond in the rough. A voice coach would have been hired. She would have been groomed and brought along in roles written for her. But when Moriarty was the hottest property in town, in 1980, the studio system was long gone. The person she turned to for love and guidance was a man named Carmine D'Anna, whom she'd met at a hockey game. He became her husband and manager.
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.
White of the Eye is a sicko bloodfest about a woman whose husband may or may not be a serial killer who stores the organs of his victims in the bathroom, under the couple's hot tub. (Perhaps we are supposed to believe that the potpourri masked the stench.) You can't help but feel for Moriarty as she tries to breathe some life into an underwritten character in this gory, low-brow bomb. She took the part, she says, because "I got to show a lot of different emotions...fear, love, sadness, and I got to do some yelling." You realize, after hearing a comment like this, that overnight success has indeed been a curse for Moriarty. The need to be taken seriously as an actor is still gnawing at her. She still doubts her worth. And she's still choosing roles because she thinks these roles will allow her to showcase her wide range, not because they're the best roles she's offered. Moriarty was nominated for an Oscar in the film-of-the-decade because in that film she appeared not to be acting at all. Regrettably, the lesson there hasn't sunk in yet.
After the failure of White of the Eye, Moriarty underwent back surgery to correct problems that lingered from the car accident. She did not say, as she was wheeled into the operating room, that compared with comedy, this is easy, but she could have. Her life, at this point, seemed an example of Murphy's Law. She could have taught an extension course on what not to do in Hollywood.
I asked her how she made it through all the tough times. "When all else fails, and you're really down...all you have is your family. They'll never let you down. You can go back no matter what." Her parents--who were born in Ireland--had seven kids in nine years. They still live in New York, and every few months, Moriarty flies back to see her siblings and her new nieces and nephews. "We order pizza and make tents and play Candyland and beauty parlor." When she talks about a recent family gathering with her proud parents at one end of the table, she gets all choked up and turns off the tape recorder. "I miss my family desperately," she says. "I miss all the new babies--the new generation."
Prayer, too, has helped Moriarty through the ups and downs of the past decade. She's a practicing Catholic who goes to services every Sunday. "You'd be amazed at who you run into in church. I was five minutes late last Sunday, and a well-known actor turned around and waved his finger at me."
"Do you confess?"
"I didn't have anything wrong to confess to."
"What would have happened," I ask, "if, 12 years ago, after all those rehearsals with Scorsese and De Niro, after the screen test and the high hopes, what would have happened to Cathy Moriarty, the receptionist in the garment district, if she hadn't gotten the role in Raging Bull? What would she be doing?" Moriarty doesn't reflect for a moment: "The same thing I am doing. Either you can act or you can't. My high school English teacher told me, 'You like being different people. You're always putting on a show. Acting is inevitable for you.' I've worked very hard for what I have. It didn't come easy..."
"Here comes the mantra," I think to myself. And sure enough, she says, right on cue, "I'm happy. I know exactly what I'm doing. I do a good job. This is great. It's a dream come true."
Perhaps, though, Moriarty knows something I don't. Perhaps her mantra has helped her get past a wasted decade and into a happier time. She recently received an unusual present from her Soapdish director, Michael Hoffman. Knowing that it was Moriarty's 30th birthday, Hoffman arranged the shooting schedule so that she was called upon to perform her most challenging scene in the film. In it her character recites one of the great tragic monologues in American drama. A monologue about unfulfilled promise and wasted youth. When she concluded, someone on the set yelled, "Happy birthday, Cathy," and the cast and crew gathered to celebrate with her. It must have been a strange moment. But at least Moriarty's no longer among the disappeared. She may no longer be Hollywood's idea of young, but she's still Hollywood's idea of astonishingly beautiful, and her life is once again full of promise.
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Jeffrey Lantos is a freelance writer who interviewed Joe Ruben in our February issue.