Through His Eyes

by Emma Dibdin

  ‘Now it’s just a matter of finding the right lead,’ he says, as though to himself. ‘We’re already out to a couple of people, and now we’ve got Debra on board to direct they’d be insane to say no.’

  He asks me for advice, then, explaining that as a young woman I’m probably more in touch with who the exciting young actresses are. When I give him a few names, he asks, ‘Did you ever want to be an actress?’

  ‘Very briefly.’ Even this is a stretch – I wanted to be an actress in the most abstract sense of wanting to be in Hollywood at any cost, and when I was young and didn’t know better I thought acting was the only way to do it. Never mind that few things make me feel sicker than being looked at by a crowd.

  ‘You still could. You’ve got the bone structure for it.’ He considers me, actually walking around me in a semi-circle. ‘You remind me of a young Lauren Bacall. Darker hair, but other than that.’

  ‘Unfortunately I’m a terrible actress,’ I say lightly, with a laugh. ‘Too self-conscious. I could maybe do voice work. Put me in a small, poorly lit booth and I’m happy.’

  ‘Talent matters a lot less than you’d think. And your voice isn’t your best asset.’

  The energy shifts. Or else I’m becoming aware of what the energy has been all along.

  ‘So, are there any other projects you’re able to discuss at this stage?’ I ask, walking away from him towards the window in what I hope is a casual way. ‘You know there’s this spec for a dark, modern Little Women remake, it’s been knocking around the Black List for years. I heard a rumour that you might be optioning it.’

  ‘Might be. Might not be.’

  ‘How about the Nina Simone biopic?’

  ‘We gonna go through the entire Black List, script by script?’

  I smile, indulgently.

  ‘Fair enough. If you can’t discuss any more specifics, is there anything else about your vision for Panorama that you think is important for me to highlight?’

  ‘I think we covered our bases. You?’

  I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten to ask some questions, several questions, and after Clark I can’t let this interview end early. I can’t let this one slip.

  ‘Do you mind if I check my notes? It’ll just take a second.’

  Schlattman picks up my digital recorder from the coffee table, regards it for a beat, looks from it to me as though daring me to protest. With a long beep, he presses the Off switch, ending the recording.

  ‘Now that you’ve got what you need,’ he murmurs, handing the recorder to me, ‘let’s talk about what I need.’ Dialogue worthy of a Scion production. His fingers trace along my jaw and my cheek and down to my collarbone, and then he is cupping my breast, and I imagine it. Saying yes to him, letting him close the final inches between us and kiss me with dry, desperate lips, pull me against his fleshy stomach and slip a hand beneath the hem of my dress. I imagine giving in, for just long enough to be repelled.

  ‘I’m going to leave,’ I tell him quietly, but he’s already moving towards the door and it takes me a long beat to realize what is happening here. What may be about to happen here. He reaches the exit and stands between me and it, his expression nonchalant, and as I stare at my bag and shoes behind him I try to weigh my options, try not to let my thoughts race.

  ‘You should stay,’ he says, casually, as though it’s a suggestion.

  ‘I should leave.’ The bathroom is back behind me, maybe ten feet from where I’m standing, and these luxury hotel rooms always have an emergency phone installed in the bathroom. He’s out of shape, drunk, but would I have time to run there and lock the door behind me, and if I do that I’m officially turning this into a chase. My heartbeat is in my ears.

  ‘Lot of women in your position would reconsider.’

  I force myself to laugh, force the atmosphere in this room to shift back into the familiar, the cordial. ‘I guess I’m not like a lot of women. I really do need to leave, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ he replies. ‘Either way, I trust you’ll keep this between us.’

  I don’t reply. Instead, I move slowly towards him, around him, watching him from the corner of my eye as I pick up my bag.

  ‘You’re a rising star, Jessica. Even in a dying field, that’s something. I’d hate to see your career end prematurely.’

  I put my shoes on and scrabble for the door handle blindly, and leave the room without once turning my back on him. The few carpeted yards from door to elevator are a blur, and on the way back down to the lobby, I gradually become aware that my bag is vibrating against my hip.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hi, Jessica?’

  ‘Clark?’ My voice is too high and uneven, but I’d know his anywhere. ‘Hi. Sorry, I’m just— give me one second.’ Everything is moving too fast, the metal walls vaguely unsteady around me, but this call is now the only thing that matters, and everything else can wait.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’

  ‘No! It’s fine.’ Breathe. And I hold in my next breath for several beats to try to steady it. The marble lobby spreads itself out before me as the elevator doors finally open, everything wide and bright and warm, and I can hear him clearly now. So close. ‘Sorry, I was in an elevator. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. To clarify: what exactly do you want from me?’

  ‘I still want to write up our interview. I can just do it as a Q&A, a short write-around intro, very much still focused on the house. All I need from you is a few follow-up questions, because I was caught off guard that afternoon and didn’t get through everything. You can have copy approval. We don’t need to go into what happened, if you don’t want to. I can turn it around fast, publish it online before the weekend.’ I stop short of mentioning the Oscar voting deadline again. Don’t oversell.

  ‘I’m happy to do it. Can we do it over lunch tomorrow, El Coyote?’

  The sickness in my spine lingers, the ghost of Schlattman’s fingers prickling on my skin, and for a moment I want to say no. But there is no comparison between these two men; Clark is not trying to lure me into anything. I’m supposed to be at Nest tomorrow, the beginning of my final week there, but this matters more. If I deliver this interview, no one will remember anything else, certainly not the long Tuesday lunch I took at short notice.

  ‘Sure. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right? You sound a little distracted.’

  ‘I had a strange night. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  His voice a hum in my ear, and I feel unsteady again. What exactly is he asking me? I wonder, if I told him to come here right now and meet me, whether he would do it. Whether I have developed some kind of allure, a new poise that makes powerful men take notice.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I say instead, murmuring, playful. And he says yes, you will.

  Clark Conrad Is Building Himself A Fresh Start

  Published January 19, 2016 on Nest.com

  By Jessica Harris

  There’s a room in Clark Conrad’s house where he keeps his trophies. It’s a modest, cosy library, its walls lined with overflowing bookshelves and family photographs, and inside a cabinet with his Emmys, his Globe, his Oscar. Crucially, this room is tucked away at the very end of a long corridor where few guests would ever have reason to go. This is not a man who needs the world to see his awards.

  ‘I’ve personally always found a good character to be a fantastic place to hide,’ Conrad tells me, as we sit on the deck of his newly renovated Laurel Canyon home. ‘Giving a good performance is really the opposite of being seen.’ Notoriously press-shy, the forty-five-year-old Conrad is as warm and affable and genuine in person as you’ve heard. But it was that desire not to be seen that propelled his move to the canyon from Beverly Hills, where he previously lived with his wife of twenty years, Carol. While he ironically calls it ‘the ultimate embodiment of ego… the desire to look down an
d see everything spread out beneath you’, it’s clear throughout our conversation that Conrad’s real priority is privacy, for himself and especially for his younger daughter Skye, who has her own wing of the house.

  Oscar-nominated for the third time this year for his mesmerizing performance in the biopic Armstrong, Conrad sat down with Nest.com to look back on his career to date, and look forward to his new chapter in the canyon.

  Q: How long did you own the house for prior to starting the renovation?

  I bought it back in 2001, right around the time my show [Loner] was wrapping up. I’d just hit my thirties and I knew I wanted something more permanent, something that felt like a home and not a crash pad, but it was a bit of a fixer-upper. I liked the idea of having it as a project, but I never really had the time to put into it, and so I would just lend it out to friends when they were visiting, and stay here sometimes at weekends. For long stretches I would forget I owned the place at all.

  When my marriage ended last year, it forced me to re-evaluate. I know that it’s become very faddy to talk about mindfulness, and meditation, but I cannot overstate how important it’s been to me. Being out here in the canyon, up above the fray of it all, just felt like the right move, and it’s made me re-evaluate what my priorities are.

  Q: What was your guiding principle as you went through this renovation?

  We didn’t change much structurally. It was really more about knocking through some walls, turning two small rooms into one big, bright one, like in the living room. Giving it more flow, as [my architect] Jerome says. I tend to get antsy if I don’t have enough light, and these canyon houses can be dark if you don’t plan them right, so adding the skylights made a huge difference. I hadn’t realized it, but I think that was a big part of the reason I never wanted to spend any time here. It was dingy, and now it’s open and light-flooded.

  Q: The wraparound pool is a very unusual feature of your house. What inspired that?

  I wanted to see if it could be done. I thought about just building a little lap pool, which would have got the job done, but I have a strange pet peeve about having to turn around mid-lap. It always feels like slamming on the brakes to me.

  Q: You’ve appeared exclusively in movies for the last seven years. Would you consider going back to television?

  Sure, for the right project. The kinds of movies that I made when I was first starting out after Loner, your mid-budget dramas, your romances, those are all pretty much gone. Now if you’re not making a blockbuster, you’re making an indie, and most actors like to live somewhere in the middle ground. I’m not interested in superheroes, maybe because I feel as though I’ve already covered a lot of that territory with Loner. I mean, that character wasn’t a superhero, but he was this guy who wore his daytime face as a mask, and lived with this secret burden of responsibility.

  Q: How about that Loner revival that’s been rumoured for a while?

  Absolutely not. This industry needs to learn how to let things lie. This constant drive to revive existing properties because there’s theoretically a built-in audience, it’s so short-sighted and so motivated by fear. We have to keep making new things, because at some point we are going to run out of things to revive.

  Q: The biggest addition you made to the house was a separate wing for your daughter, Skye. What inspired that decision?

  I don’t think any teenage girl should be forced to share space with her parents unless absolutely necessary [laughs]. And she concurs! No, the truth is she asked me whether I would consider it, because she didn’t want to move out but she did want to have her own space, and I thought it made sense. I didn’t want her moving out either – I wanted her close by, especially given how much space we have here – but I also understood her impulse to fly the nest. This felt like a good compromise, where we could live together without being under each other’s feet all the time.

  Q: Skye recently injured herself, which led to an extended hospitalization. How’s she doing?

  First of all, I want to say how grateful l’ve been for the outpouring of love and support that has followed this awful moment in my family’s life. It has been a very, very difficult year, and all I can say is that my daughter Skye is a really extraordinary young woman. She’s doing much better, she’s taking care of herself, and her future couldn’t be brighter.

  Q: You experienced a lot of loss early in your life. What impact does that have on you today?

  I suppose everything that happens to you, certainly before the age of ten or so, affects the kind of man you grow up to be. My parents’ passing certainly unmoored me, to a degree, and ever since then I’ve lived a pretty rootless existence, as a lot of actors do – nomadic. With this renovation, my goal was to create a house for the first time that really felt like a home, as opposed to a temporary base. I want to give my daughter a better life, a more stable life, than the one I had.

  Q: You were married for twenty years. How are you adjusting to the single life?

  With difficulty. Carol was my soulmate, in the truest sense of the word, and there will never be a day when I don’t miss her, and miss what we had together. But the truth is that I’m not sure human beings are really supposed to be together for life. One of the most valuable things Carol ever taught me was to accept change; that the only real constant is change. So I suppose in my life now, whether it be my work life or my dating life or whatever, I try to embrace that, and try not to worry about being so in control of everything. I’m never going to be perfectly Zen, but I guess you could say I’m cautiously experimenting with Zen.

  9

  I sleep badly the night after the Montage, and almost every night that follows, something unsettled in my mind that won’t let me rest. This despite the fact that things are coming together; my interview with Clark is finally live, including the follow-up quotes I teased out of him over a lunch of Albondigas soup and guacamole, a lunch during which I finally realized I am no longer starstruck. My feelings around him have become something else, something deeper and less nameable.

  ‘There will never be a day I don’t miss what we had together?’ Faye texts me, alongside a crying emoji. ‘This is HEARTBREAKING. I can’t believe he said that!’ And though the reaction online has been similarly starry-eyed among his fans, though the piece has been picked up by outlets across the globe and won Nest its biggest traffic month ever, I’m nowhere close to satisfied with the final article. Even the scoops – Clark’s first real comment on Carol since the divorce, his first comment on Skye since her suicide attempt – feel to me like a failure. I had imagined a written-through profile where I described the winding fairy-tale roads leading up to the house cradled in the canyon, the sheltered deck where Clark shook my hand for the first time, the way his trademark coiffed hair and pressed three-piece suit and humble charm belied the way he spoke about his past, his need for a fresh start. Admittedly, we didn’t have as much time as I’d hoped, but with prose you can extrapolate, you can hint at things unsaid in the interview itself, and in doing so shape the way the reader interprets what quotes there are. I had so many plans, most of them not fully formed until it became clear to me that I wouldn’t get to execute them. Jackie insisted.

  ‘This was always going to be a Q&A,’ she tells me calmly, while I try to keep my breathing even and not say something I’ll regret. ‘It’s as much about the photographs as the copy.’ And sure enough, the Q&A runs alongside a very lengthy series of beautiful photographs of the house, each of them captioned by Jerome’s breathless descriptions, and I suppose that this is what Nest readers want. This is the compromise I signed up for, but that doesn’t make it go down any easier. At least I didn’t end up having to incorporate Jerome the architect into the piece; his quotes ran wholesale in captions underneath the relevant pictures. And in any case, I’ve now stopped believing that this article is the last chance I’ll have to dig into Clark Conrad.

  ‘Skye’s coming home tomorrow,’ he tells me after we’re finished with our follow-up interview.


  ‘That’s great!’

  ‘It is. It’s a relief.’ His tone implies the opposite, and I stay silent, waiting.

  ‘Her mom and her sister are out of the picture, her circle of friends is… not thrilling to me, to say the least, and I’m her clueless dad who’s the last person she wants to talk to about anything. I’m concerned she’s going to slip back into old patterns unless something changes.’

  I close my eyes, picturing her, angelic and frail in a hospital gown, though of course she hasn’t been in hospital this past week but at a ritzy rehab facility in Sherman Oaks. Angelic and frail in a rehab-appropriate outfit, then, but alone. Very much alone.

  ‘That makes sense,’ I say, and there’s an idea forming in me, close to my lips, but I don’t want to push too much too soon. ‘Does she have any friends that you like? Maybe from before she started modelling, got into that whole world?’

  ‘Unfortunately, once she got into that world, she didn’t have much interest in sustaining relationships with anyone who wasn’t.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ I pause. ‘This might be a completely insane thing to say – and feel free to tell me if that’s the case – but what if I talked to her?’

  I watch him as he takes this in, let the silence go on for as long as I can stand.

  ‘You want to talk to Skye?’

  ‘You sound sceptical.’

  ‘You are a reporter.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t mean talk to her as a reporter. I know what it’s like to be nineteen and lost.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you ever being lost.’

  If he only knew. I may be overstating the common ground between us – Skye is the kind of sharp-edged girl who would have ignored me at best and targeted me at worst had we been schoolmates, the kind of girl I went out of my way to avoid. But the image in my head of Skye wearing institutional clothes, sitting in a sparse room trying to remember reasons to live, is a scene from my past, not hers. Clark does not need to know this, does not need to know about the seven months during which I ate only steamed vegetables and Special K and one banana a day, until the dizzy spells and heart palpitations become impossible to hide and I was sent away, for a spell, for what my mother called a spa trip whenever anyone asked.