Diane Keaton at the Dam

A Glimpse of a Free Spirit

I’ve had a few surprising celebrity sightings in my life: Madonna, so tiny, so blonde, eating next to me in a dimly lit Moroccan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; Flavor Flav making his glacial way through Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Las Vegas while everyone behind him was forced to stand around and wait; Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt at the height of their romance, hailing a cab on Park Avenue South. But none were more surprising than the time, a few years ago, I saw Diane Keaton at the Hoover Dam.

It was late spring or early summer; I remember the day as bright and sweltering, as Boulder City tends to be at that time of year. She was dressed as she almost always was (I want to write ‘is’—I like to think of her outfitted fashionably in the afterlife), in clothing that covered her arms and legs, right down to the ankles and wrists. One might have mistaken her for a member of a conservative religious group, except she was far too stylishly attired. I like to imagine she so thoroughly swathed herself in layers because she belonged to the same sect I do—that of people who don’t like the naked feeling of having their limbs tickled by breeze. On this particular day, she wore a full-length black coat with a cut and trim that hinted at its expensive designer origins; a long, white, oversized button-down oxford with upturned French cuffs; and black lace-up combat boots. She was walking down a set of concrete steps in that getup on that hot, sunny day, accompanied only by a tour guide and someone I guessed was her assistant.

I’m thinking of this moment now, tonight, as everyone I know mourns this woman who was one of the most universally beloved actresses ever: for the soft gravitas she brought to the Godfather movies; for her whimsical, effervescent embodiment of Annie Hall, the character Woody Allen based on her; for her multiple turns as the classy, soulful, comedic muse of Nancy Meyers and her lush worlds. I’m thinking about this small, fleeting moment because it told me a lot about who Diane Keaton was. A wildly famous person who could have cocooned herself away but was still curious and open enough to travel to Nevada and take a tour of a massive, concrete hydroelectric power plant. A person who wore winter clothes in the heat of summer, a beautiful woman in Hollywood who didn’t care about looking overtly sexy, a consummate weirdo who, with elegance and charm, sidestepped all norms. “I’m an oddball,” she once said, about never having married. “I remember in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.’”

My whole young life, people would tell me I reminded them of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. I didn’t always take it as a compliment. I assumed they meant someone who was neurotic, inarticulate, and discernibly strange, someone who let her sentences trail off and didn’t own any summer shorts or sandals because she couldn’t abide the feeling of exposed skin or the horror show of visible feet. But as I got older and came to accept myself, with all my quirks and flaws, I began to feel a special affinity for the actress. People loved Diane Keaton because she was delightful, magnetic, and talented, but also because she didn’t merely come to terms with her obvious eccentricities, she owned them—they were arguably what made her famous, after all. She was a quiet but genuine nonconformist in a world that has so few of them. A Hollywood celebrity who took an afternoon to tour a dam. A true free spirit who made the rest of us feel free.