My talk with Diane Keaton is frantic before her dog almost dies. Line delays. Conversation floats. She never answered my emails. Doors are her topic. Every response has caveats. Fun, stressful, and clever. She’s avoiding her interview.
Hollywood’s most modest celebrity, 77, doesn’t do video calls. In the Book Club movie, her character struggles to communicate through laptop with best friends Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen.
She continues, “It’s always better when you don’t see me or them, because it becomes so strange, you know? It’s strange, but not horrible.” We chatter, pause, and babble again. I say phone is superior, and I’d want to hear a better sound than Diane Keaton laughing at your joke.
A pause. She believes a little is enough. “Just stop.” I don’t understand her again.
In Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton returns as Diane, a 70-year-old clumsy eccentric who likes men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” director Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, tells me via Zoom a few days later. Simms claims Keaton suggested renaming her character. “Like ‘Leslie’. It was the second day of shooting.”
In the first film, widowed Diane dates Andy García. Fonda’s bachelorette celebration takes the four friends to Italy in the sequel. Big meals, extensive montages (frocks, stores, nude statues), unending double entendre, and a huge role for Hugh Quarshie from Holby City. Booze too. Much alcohol.
I liked the drinking—is it true? “Yeah,” Keaton says. “A Lillet or chardonnay at six in the morning.” What’s her bottle count at 11am? “God, maybe 25?”
Keaton has a white and a red, but both are meant to be sipped over ice, not like the hardened wino would. She wants to continue the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part.”Diane Keaton drinks a lot and can be pushed around. Shutting up and drinking makes it easier. Ridiculous!”
The inaugural Book Club served underserved Sex and the City-loving over-60s and made eight times its budget. The Alchemist is their assignment this time after Fifty Shades of Grey shook all four ladies. It’s secondary. Fatalism appears. Keaton explains, “It’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” Gnomic pause. “Occasionally, it’s great.”
Her character’s important remark about keeping young hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through LA,” she says, again tangentially. “Which most people don’t anymore. Photographing the destroyed businesses and buildings. They’re gone!”
Why so eerie? Life haunts! You know what it is, should be, or might be. But no! Just up and down!”
It’s hard to picture. Unless you’re rich, LA isn’t a pedestrian city. Diane Keaton is extremely noticeable on the street. What’s she doing? “They don’t care. Most are in a rush and not looking.”
Does she sneak inside buildings? “I can’t. They’re locked up—I’d be jailed! You want me imprisoned? Better for you. Use this: I was chatting to Diane Keaton when I learned she was arrested for breaking into ancient establishments. Yeah! I bet.”
Keaton knows architecture well. She makes more money selling properties for Madonna than creating movies. “I think they’re more present in Italy,” she replies. They’re closer. So different from here. It’s less driven.” She Instagrammed many doors from the shoot.
Oh, God. Love doors. Uh-huh. I’m looking at them now.” She imagines the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? It makes you consider all the things we all experience. Like: I did that movie, but then something sneaked in.
“It’s just so interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that most lucky people have cars, which take you everywhere. Love my car.”
Her type?
I have a G-wagon. I’m mean. Fancy me. I’m posh. Black car. Yeah. It’s decent. Like it.”
Is she fast? “No. I like to gaze, so when I’m not monitoring the road, Mom would remind me, “Diane, don’t do that.” God, beware. Look forward. Drive without glancing around. Yeah.”
Keaton is like a carrier bird delivering Annie Hall outtakes. Her resistance to cosmetic surgery, hair colour, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck makes her stand out among her Book Club co-stars. Her resemblance to her movie self is especially unsettling now.
Holderman believes Diane’s Venn diagram is remarkable. Her worldview and wiring. She lives and acts in the moment.”
They visited the Sistine Chapel one morning. To comprehend Diane Keaton, he argues, watch her study the world. She’s captivated. Her spirit has all that texture.” She would leap up to inspect light fixtures even in banal places. As they age, many artists grow self-aware. He claims she hasn’t.
Keaton is self-deprecating. It’s understated. “Maybe she’d kill me for saying this,” Holderman replies cautiously. She knows she’s a movie star, but I don’t believe she does. She’s too caught up in the present to think about the bigger picture. No time or space.”
Keaton, the first of Dorothy and Jack Hall’s four children, was born in a LA suburb in 1946. Her father was an estate agent, and her mother won the area Mrs. America competition for outstanding women. Keaton, eight, was proud and envious when she saw her crowned on stage.
Dorothy was an 85-volume diarist, photographer, collagist, potter, and frustrated photographer. Keaton’s memoirs and essay collection are as much about her mother as appearing in iconic films, dating celebrities, and earning an Oscar.
Today, Keaton calls Dorothy “everything.” She’s great. She was my life model. She was the essence of excellence.” After Dorothy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1993, Keaton adopted a daughter, Dexter, named after Cary Grant’s character in The Philadelphia Story, and a son, Duke, four years later. She stated late single parenting impacted her significantly as she cared for Dorothy until her 2008 death and her brother Randy, who died in 2021 after years of mental illness.