Page 3:
continued
with whom Brown had a nine-year liaison that ended two years ago. It was a tumultuous, romantic relationship that ricocheted across the country depending on who was working and where. Officially, he lived in Los Angeles, she in New York, and sometimes there were long separations. "Neither of us thought it was a good idea to turn down work just to be together. I don't know if that's so good or not, but that's what was important to us.' Their status didn't change when she became pregnant. "It's the best thing we could ever have done--to bring this boy onto the planet," she says simply. "We both felt that if I ever got pregnant we would get married. But then, once we decided to have a baby, it seemed superfluous. It wasn't that I wanted to have a baby without a husband. I really didn't have any attitude about it."
By now, we are in front of a shop that specializes in costumes for children. She looks in the window on this warm spring evening, her mind already racing to Halloween. She had a baby, but now she has a 5-year-old who needs friends, school, holiday celebrations. . . stability, financial security. Brown was an actress who liked variety. She did stage and feature films ("Altered States," "Continental Divide," "A Flash of Green") as well as television. A series seemed too unvarying, too long a commitment. Now, it seems like a steady job, a normal life.
The next morning, she greets a visitor in her hotel room, still lovely in a loose, drapey skirt and blouse and no makeup. The phone rings. It is her boy friend in London, British playwright-director David Hare, whom she has been seeing (or talking to) for the past year and a half. "Thank you for your present. I loved it," she says in the warm but guarded voice people use when they are not alone. Hare is disappointed that she can't talk.
Brown is one of those women men are drawn to. She isn't a centerfold beauty; she has instead approachable, idiosyncratic good looks. When men talk about her, they use words like "warm," "intelligent," "real." Jay Tarses, who wrote and produced Molly and directed most of the episodes, says, "I want to work with her until I die." Yet Jordan and Hare felt a clear sense of danger when they met her. "Richard told me that he knew right away that I was trouble," she says. She met Hare during a Washington, D.C., production of his play `Plenty." "I loved being directed by him," she says. "I really got his notes, and he liked directing me." It sounds intimate as she talks about it, and her voice and her syntax trail off. "It's odd that people from such different backgrounds can really understand the other person's point of view."
Her own background is deceptively ordinary. "I was an only child. I grew up in Washington. My mother was a teacher; my father worked for the Government." More specifically, her father worked for the CIA. "He was gone a lot, and we would give our letters to the Agency, and get letters and postcards from all these faraway places with strange-sounding names. He started bringing back dolls, too, which were extraordinary. And his friends started to send them, too. So I ended up with the definitive CIA doll collection. They may have contained messages or plans for coups. For all I know, I was a shill for something." She never thought it odd that her father had no office parties or pals, as other fathers did. But once, as a teen-ager, she and a friend took the bus to the CIA, and announced to the startled security guards that they wanted to see their fathers.
She assumed that she would grow up to be an academic or a doctor, and she went to Madeira, an elite preparatory school for girls, whereƒâ€žat the crest of the Kennedy era--she met a lot of bright girls from liberal families, Her father was a conservative Republican, and "all of us looked like little Jackie clones," she recalls. (But she was the Jackie clone who went on to play the part in the NBC movie "Kennedy.")
She also discovered, to her dismay, that she hated school and just didn't have the concentration to be a good student. After two dismal years at -->
