on a sparkling day in Beverly Hills, and Diane Keaton has
practically run a decathlon already. Before dawn she was
energetically typing at her computer, fine-tuning the
afterword for
Then Again
, her endearingly unguarded best-
selling memoir about herself and about her mother’s 15-year
struggle with Alzheimer’s. At 6: 15 she woke her 16-year-old
daughter, Dexter, one of two children Keaton adopted in
infancy, and shuttled her to the bus stop. “You really should
get extra points for rallying a teenager at that hour,” Keaton
says, laughing. She swung home and got her son, Duke, 11, to
school before 8:00. “Then I did a half-hour run with the dog,
answered e-mails, looked at designs for the house I’m build-
ing, and—well, hey, can you believe it?—here I am!”
And, la-di-da, despite the morning frenzy, Keaton looks
as striking and original as she did in
Annie Hall,
showing
off her pouffy black miniskirt over leopard-print leggings
and shiny black pumps, flashing her nails—“Don’t you love
these?” she says—which shine from plaid appliqués rather
than polish. Famous for her turtlenecks (like the one Jack
Nicholson seductively scissored off her in the 2003 comedy
Something’s Gotta Give
), Keaton, who turned 66 in January,
today has chosen a black version with extra-long sleeves
that sling around her thumbs. “At my age,” she says with that
infectious smile, “I try to hide anything I can.”
The truth is, Diane Keaton is a woman willing to reveal
herself, as she demonstrates in a candid interview. She’s had
a lifetime of unimaginable success (she was nominated for a
Best Actress Oscar during four consecutive decades) and re-
markable romances (Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino),
and is frank about, well, you name it: single parenthood, dat-
ing, aging, mortality, and whatever else keeps her up at night.
“I worry all the time about everything, actually,” says
Keaton, sounding a lot like the lovably neurotic characters
she plays. “I don’t know how you can’t worry when you’re
my age.” She frets about what she calls the “memory sick-
nesses”—Alzheimer’s and brain cancer—that ravaged her
mother and father, respectively. She admits she has misgiv-
ings about being single even after all these years of being
unattached. “As a parent I provide all I can,” she says, “but I
think in the best possible scenario you need to have a man.”
42
And she acknowledges how challenging it is to juggle a still- busy career with a teen and a preteen at an age most women are feathering their empty nests with IKEA guest beds. Not that Keaton would want it any other way. “At this point in life, everything’s throwing me punches
from left and right, but it’s certainly been an amazing adven-
ture,” she says over coffee at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, a
locale that holds a special fondness for her. Years ago Keaton
used to meet Beatty in his bachelor pad on the top floor of the
hotel, a thought that gives her a laugh now. “It’s all unbeliev-
able. Every little bit of it. I look back on experiences like that
and think, ‘Did I really do that?’ It’s a big collage. A piece here,
a piece there. That’s my life.”
Keaton’s latest “piece” is a charming ensemble comedy,
Darling Companion,
opposite Kevin Kline, about a woman
who cares more for the sad, old dog she rescues than the
husband she has lived with forever. “It’s like
The Big Chill
for the AARP set,” Kline quips. “Diane displayed no vanity
or inhibitions whatsoever about being a sexy 60-something
woman on-screen.” She just wrapped another grownup
comedy called
The Wedding,
out later this year, costarring
Robert De Niro, about a divorced couple pretending to be
married again. Meanwhile Keaton, who for the past 15 years
has helped preserve several old California homes, has an
architecture book in the works for Rizzoli New York. She is
also a spokesperson for L’Oréal Paris, and late last year signed
on as the “face” for a line of clothing at Chico’s.
“I never understood the idea that you’re supposed to mel-
low as you get older,” Keaton says, her blue eyes glinting
behind tortoiseshell frames. “Slowing down isn’t something
I relate to at all. The goal is to continue in good and bad, all
of it. To continue to express myself, particularly. To feel the
world. To explore. To be with people. To take things far. To
risk. To love. I just want to know more and see more.”
in the 1950s wasn’t a
place that turned out movie stars. Oranges were the bumper
crop. The board-and-batten tract house Keaton grew up in
was surrounded by acres of citrus groves until developments
with names like Sun Estate Homes cleared them away. When
Diane, the oldest of four siblings and the most theatrical,
told her father, Jack Hall, a civil engineer, how sad she was
to see the world change around her, his characteristically icy
response was, “That’s life, Diane.”
He was right, though. The world never stopped changing
around Diane Hall. One minute, it seemed, she was eat-
ing tuna-casserole dinners and raiding Dumpsters behind
Bullock’s department store for cast-off “treasures” with her
spirited mom, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall. The next, she
was 19 and flying solo to New York City to see if she could
parlay her success playing Nancy Twinkle in a high school
production of
Little Mary Sunshine
into the big leagues.
At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in
Manhattan, she shivered in the presence of legendary drama
teacher Sandy Meisner and kicked herself as fellow up-and-
comers like Sandy Duncan landed the choice parts. In those
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