Diane Keaton: Here I Am

He was right, though. The world never stopped changing around Diane Hall. One minute, it seemed, she was eating 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 days, Diane Keaton, as the name on her Actors' Equity card soon read, stressed over every penny (rent, $98.32; singing lessons, $40 a month; dancing lessons, another $30) and, as she revealed in her memoir, developed a nasty five-year bulimia habit that left her with 26 cavities and an emotional hole much harder to fill.

"With bulimia, I never expected sympathy or for people to understand," she says now. Keaton has both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee as she talks. "What I cared about was the secret I kept. It felt like a burden. I never told my mother. But when I finally told my sisters many years after the fact, they weren't that shocked. My sister Robin said, 'Yeah, you ate a lot of hamburgers back then.' It's amazing how the dark secrets inside us don't matter much to the outside world."

Then again, some secrets hold more power than others. In the 1970s, on a visit home, she came across her mother's scrapbooklike journal. Keaton was already a superstar. She exploded onto the scene in the original Broadway production of Hair, scored a monumental movie hit with The Godfather, and was on her way to winning a Best Actress Oscar for Annie Hall. But what she found in her mom's journal cut through the glitter. An entry dated August 2, 1976, read: "WATCH OUT ON THIS PAGE. For you, the possible reader in the future, this takes courage." Then came an entry full of vitriol about Diane's dad — or "you frigin' bastard," as Dorothy labeled him. It wasn't until Dorothy's death in 2008 that Keaton found the courage to look again at the journals — 85 in all — and the torment hidden within.

On the outside, Dorothy was just another suburban housewife ( her glory moment was winning the "Mrs. Los Angeles" pageant for homemakers in 1955), but inside she felt trapped by domesticity, by her failures as an aspiring writer and photographer, and, in later years, by "that strange and cruel disease" that took away her memory.

"Reading her journals was really difficult," Keaton says, her voice softening. "I felt for her so much. Though we were very close, I got to know her in ways I never thought of." Keaton hadn't realized the extent to which her mother stifled her own ambitions or used Keaton's dad, who was occasionally abusive toward Dorothy, as a scapegoat for her lack of success. The more she read, the more Keaton would "get all upset about my mom, and the sense of frustration she felt," she says. "But also about how selfish I'd been, how I didn't always address her as a person, how I failed her sometimes."

One passage in particular still pains Keaton to ponder. In 1975, fearful that her mind was starting to give way to dementia, Dorothy wrote, "I'm no one to anyone. People look at me and see a midlife woman on the downhill slide. 55 is approaching. My brain is getting thinner. If there's one thing I don't want to lose, it's my ability to think. I feel old and intolerant. It's like I'm shutting the world out."

At 66, Keaton could not have a more different view of life than the one her mom had.

"If anyone embraces the world around her, it's Diane," says Lawrence Kasdan, who directed Darling Companion. "When you consider she's been a leading lady for 40 years, it's remarkable how much vibrancy and determination she has." He tells the story of a scene where Keaton and Kline are caught in a rainstorm in the wilderness while searching for their runaway mutt. "We shot in a downpour in the woods, and it was freezing cold," Kasdan says. "Diane's character ends up sliding down a hill and landing on her butt. She insisted on doing her own stunts. She got soaking wet and filthy but managed to do this very intimate scene at the end with Kevin. She's different from any person I can think of."

Sarah Jessica Parker, who befriended Keaton while filming the 2005 comedy The Family Stone, says, "Diane has never subscribed to the conventional way of doing things. She's endlessly curious and lives boldly. It doesn't matter if she's at dinner with you or on the Today show, she's going to tell you what she thinks. It's never to shock or show off. It's just, Diane is who Diane is, unapologetically."

That's for sure. Any conversation with Keaton is a slightly skittery affair, popping quickly from topic to topic, and each new subject stirs Keaton's passion as much as the last.

"My thinking about plastic surgery is this," she says the second the question comes up. "I haven't had it, but never say never. Because when you do, you are definitely going to go there. I said I would never have intercourse before I was married, and I did. I said I would never go to a psychiatrist, and I spent much of my life in psychoanalysis. I've done all kinds of things I said I wouldn't do and, of course, now I'm glad. Thrilled."

For a long time Keaton believed she would never have kids, but all that changed when she turned 50. Happily-ever-after wasn't in the cards with the three great loves of her life: Allen, Beatty, and Pacino. "I never found a home in the arms of a man," she writes in the book. Asked now what held her back from ever getting married, Keaton is cryptic. "I think it was just my whole life. How I responded first to boys and then to men. It had nothing to do with reality." She adds: "Relationships are hard. You're lucky if you find someone."

But instead of being alone, Keaton filled her home with love. Dexter and Duke entered her world as Dorothy was fading from it. Simultaneously, Keaton became increasingly attuned to the realities of being an older mother herself. "I'm very aware that my dad died when he was 68, and my mother was in her early 70s when her brain really started to go," she says. "When I think about my kids in their 20s and 30s, and me in my 70s and 80s, I worry about that, definitely. I want to be there for them. I want my body and mind to stay strong, and to share all these life lessons. But I also know they need to have the freedom and independence to learn on their own."

Not that it's easy to stand back. "You see them growing and perceiving and changing," Keaton says. There's a look of awe in her eyes. Being a mother is a joy, but " love is work, too," she says. "It takes everything I have sometimes to not snuggle with Dexter. You know, at 16, you don't want to be snuggly any more. Sometimes I can pat her hair. Or if I'm lucky, I get a hug."

Dinner is Keaton's favorite time of day. With swim-team practice done and all eyes off gadgets, phones, and computers, the three Keatons sit and talk. "Oh, sure, I drive my kids crazy with, 'What do you think about this? What did that mean to you?' They're like, 'Stop, Mom!' So I'm learning to say less now." You can tell by her suppressed grin that Keaton isn't succeeding. "That's right. I'm learning to zip it up." Now she's laughing. "Well, I'm trying, at least. I really am."

Keaton's dream project isn't another book or movie, though she admits she'd love to find "a really out-there role where I let it all hang out. Get totally enraged. Go to an extreme. I have not really had that opportunity, and I hope it will happen." She's also not yearning for romance at the moment. "It's not something I can visualize right now. The best relationships develop out of friendships. That's the shame. At this stage I don't correlate any of the friendships I have with sex, and, honestly, once you bring sex into a friendship — Ooh! Whew! Oh! — that's a slippery slope into disaster."

So she channels her passions into building a house. Known locally for her restoration efforts, Keaton now wants a new challenge. "The easy thing — and part of me wants to do this — is just to go buy a house and redo it, but I've done that already," she says. It's much harder, she says, "to create something out of thin air. I never want to stop growing and learning."

A thoughtful look comes over Keaton's face. For the first time in the long conversation, there's silence. Not that it lasts. It never does with Keaton.

"Let me tell you the best part about getting older," she says without prompting. "The best part is that I'm still here and, because the end is in sight, I treasure it all more. That's why I don't worry about crying in a scene anymore. Now it comes easily. I know the emotion's all there." She smiles — but, in fact, a shimmer in her eyes suggests Diane Keaton is feeling something right now. "You have to live life all the way, you know? Take risks. Do things you can't imagine. 'Cause, hey, why not, right?"