Charlie St. Cloud

by Ben Sherwood

  As our van proceeded through the cemetery gates, I saw crew members moving film equipment across an obstacle course of gravestones. A few minutes later, I joined them for a walk between headstones and angels reaching for the sky. The location manager had found an idyllic working cemetery that looked familiar, if not identical to the one in New England. Then I noticed a woman with a paintbrush kneeling next to a grave. Over the years, I had seen plenty of history buffs making tombstone rubbings, but she was different.

  The woman dipped her brush in a paint can and daubed the stone. It took a few seconds before I figured out her purpose. She was painting faux bird droppings on the monuments! Sometimes she splattered paint like Jackson Pollock. Other times she dotted the stones like a pointillist. On closer inspection, I noticed that the lichen growing on the granite was phony too. Then I realized the rock itself wasn’t real.

  I was standing in a cemetery of Styrofoam.

  After a little research, I learned that the production designer had ordered an extreme makeover for this graveyard. She installed iron gates at the front with WATERSIDE forged across them. Inside the cemetery, there simply weren’t enough stones and statues to fill the movie screen, so she rented carvings of a cherub and a Virgin Mary. Then she built another 250 fake headstones, complete with names and inscriptions. The art department designed these markers using images from cemeteries in New England. Then sculptors in the construction department built them with polystyrene. Next, scenic artists from the paint department transformed foam into stone. Then the greens department dressed each marker with moss and vegetation. Only a few gravestones—including Sam St. Cloud’s and George Carroll’s—were cut from real rock.

  On that first day on the set, I truly couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake gravestones. Nor could I detect the difference between real and fake rocks, as I learned when I sat down on a boulder for a rest and heard the crunch of Styrofoam underneath me.

  On the movie set with a Styrofoam boulder.

  I certainly never expected or even imagined that this day would come. The whole idea of a film adaptation seemed so farfetched. As one of my close friends likes to say: “I’ll believe Charlie St. Cloud is a movie when I’m sitting in the theater and eating popcorn.” Yet as I walked around the cemetery in North Vancouver, there was no more doubt in my mind. I had entered a world at once real and make-believe. The combination made my brain tingle. For the book, real people and places had inspired a fictional story. Now filmmakers were using movie magic to transform what I had dreamed up into a new and different kind of reality.

  While the overlapping layers of fact and fiction boggled my mind, the journey to this moment had been surreal too. A few months after September 11, 2001, I quit a great job at NBC News to write this book. It was a risky career move, but at the time everything in life felt fleeting and I wanted to give full-time writing a try. I wish I could say the novelist’s life was easy, but it wasn’t. Suffice it to say there were major creative challenges and serious professional setbacks. The route from blank page to the finished book in your hands might well be described as a near-death publishing experience. Perhaps that’s why visiting the movie set seemed so improbable and thrilling. When I called my wife in Los Angeles, she asked, “How does it feel?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “I want to hug every person I meet.”

  Quite simply, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and humility. To create the movie version of Charlie St. Cloud, it took 28 actors, 34 stunt people, and some 250 crew. And I tried my best to thank every single one, including the wrangler responsible for a noisy flock of geese, the messy bane of Charlie’s existence.

  I was fortunate to visit the production twice, once on location in the cemetery and another time on a soundstage. Each time, I relished how filmmakers turned some of the book’s tiniest details into movie reality. For instance, Major League Baseball sent three small Red Sox mitts for Sam to use when he played catch with Charlie. I watched an assistant prop master carry a brand-new red mitt around all day, rubbing it constantly to give it a well-worn appearance.

  On another occasion, the director showed me the closing shot of the film. Today, words still fail to describe the exhilarating experience of seeing Charlie and Tess literally sailing into the sunset. Seven years earlier, in the quiet of my little writing room, I had imagined these two young people on a boat aimed at the open ocean. Suddenly, they were on the screen, leaning into each other with wind tousling their hair and sails, steering a Gryphon Solo, one of the world’s fastest fifty-foot sailboats, filmed by a camera mounted on a helicopter hovering above.

  On the movie set with actor Zac Efron.

  In candor, I never imagined Zac Efron in the role of Charlie. Wrecked by loss and grief, Charlie was a character who had wasted many years of his precious life. I always imagined Charlie as older and sadder. Thank goodness I’m not a movie producer. I salute Universal Pictures and the producers for realizing that Efron was a perfect choice. Young, dynamic, and charismatic, he embodies the promise of Charlie St. Cloud without the burden and loss. With Efron’s vibrant presence and performance, a sometimes weighty story feels more hopeful and uplifting. As I told Efron when we met in the cemetery in Vancouver, I’m delighted and very thankful that he took the part and filled it with vitality.

  Ultimately, life is the theme that animates this book. How do we overcome grief and loss and make the most of our time on earth? It’s a subject that has come to occupy most of my work. Over the last few years, I wrote a nonfiction book called The Survivors Club, exploring the secrets and science of the world’s most effective survivors and thrivers. Interviewing survivors around the world, I discovered even more proof that love is a powerful and universal survival tool. In my own life, falling in love with my future wife, Karen, helped unlock the stranglehold of my father’s sudden and untimely death. In Charlie’s case, discovering Tess helped him break free of the cemetery and the suffocating grip of grief.

  When I was leaving the cemetery in Vancouver to fly home to Los Angeles, one of the producers generously asked if I wanted a souvenir from the set. For a moment I thought about those Styrofoam gravestones. Then I imagined the conversation with Karen at the front door:

  “Honey, look what I brought home from Canada!”

  In the end, I asked for one of Sam’s red mitts from Major League Baseball. Our two young boys can play catch with it. Then someday, when they outgrow it, the glove can sit in my office, a reminder of the power of brotherly love and what happens when you take risks, seize life, and set your imagination free.

  Ben Sherwood

  Los Angeles, California

  June 2010

  On the movie set with the camera slate.

  BEN SHERWOOD is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist who worked as executive producer of ABC’s Good Morning America and senior broadcast producer of NBC Nightly News. His acclaimed novel The Man Who Ate the 747 was a New York Times bestseller that is being adapted as a motion picture and a Broadway musical. Sherwood’s first nonfiction book, The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, became an instant bestseller published around the world. A graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University, he lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.

  If you loved Charlie St. Cloud, read on for a sneak

  preview of another novel by Ben Sherwood

  THE MAN WHO ATE THE 747

  Also available from Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks

  FOR THE RECORD …

  THIS IS THE STORY OF THE GREATEST LOVE, EVER.

  An outlandish claim, outrageous perhaps, but trust me. I know about these things. You see, I was Keeper of the Records for The Book of Records. I sifted through the extravagant claims of the tallest, the smallest, the fastest, the slowest, the oldest, the youngest, the heaviest, the lightest, and everyone in between.

  I authenticated greatness.

  In rain forests, deserts, mud huts, and mansions, I watched men
and women bounce on pogo sticks, catch grapes in their mouths, flip tiddlywinks, toss cow chips, and balance milk bottles on their heads. They demanded recognition. They insisted on a special place in history. It was my responsibility to identify the worthy.

  In New York, I observed Kathy Wafler shaving the longest single unbroken apple peel in history, measuring 172 feet 4 inches. In Sri Lanka, I timed Arulanantham Suresh Joachim balancing on one foot for 76 hours 40 minutes. Our rules of verification are most stringent, and I made sure Mr. Joachim’s free foot never rested on his standing foot and that he never used any object for support or balance. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, I certified that Dimitry Kinkladze lifted 105 pounds 13 ounces of weights strapped to his ears for ten minutes.1 In New York, I calculated the longest flight of a champagne cork from an untreated and unheated bottle: 177 feet 9 inches.

  I snapped the photo of Jon Minnoch, the heaviest person in medical history, 6 feet 1 inch, weighing more than 1,400 pounds.2 I wrapped measuring tape around the 84-inch waists of Bill and Ben McRary of North Carolina, the world’s heaviest twins. I computed the length of Shridhar Chillal’s snarled fingernails, all 20 feet 2¼ inches. I recorded Donna Griffith’s 978-day sneezing fit and documented Charles Osborne’s hiccup attack that lasted 68 years. I spell-checked the longest word in the English language: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.3

  My specialty: all things superlative. Yet I gladly admit I am a supremely average man. In size, shape, and origins, I am the statistical norm: 5 feet 9 inches, 169.6 pounds, born and raised in the Midwest. My given name, John, is unexceptional. My family name, Smith, is the closest I come to a world record. It is the most common surname in the English-speaking world: 2,382,500 people share its distinction in the United States. I go by the initials J.J., my mother’s way of setting me apart from my father, John Smith, his father, John Smith, his father’s father, and all the John Smiths in the world.

  For all my ordinariness, I do make one claim to greatness, the kind with no official listing in The Book. Once upon a time, I witnessed the most incredible record attempt, ever. It showed me what I failed to grasp in all my years before as Keeper of the Records. I once believed the wonders of the world could be measured, calculated, and quantified. Not anymore.

  In the pages that follow, I’ve reconstructed the remarkable proceedings, presenting the facts that I myself certified. At some point, you might wish to check on these events in The Book, but alas, you will not find any mention, not even a footnote or an asterisk. Indeed, no matter how hard you search the heartland with its corn palaces and giant balls of string, you will never come upon any statue or sign marking this singular feat. There is no official monument to this achievement, no carved inscription to read, no museum or scenic detour with a souvenir stand to make you stop and wonder: Did it really happen?

  To know the truth, you must go to a town in the middle of the country where folks care about crops, family, and faith. Stay awhile, listen closely, and you will hear what sounds like tall talk about a man who ate an airplane. Yes, an airplane. Sure, it sounds preposterous, and maybe not too tasty, but drive north of town, past the windmill, over two gentle hills, and you will come upon a sloping field with rows of corn. Look beyond the red farmhouse, near the barn, and you will see a great gash in the ground.

  This indentation in the earth, measuring exactly 231 feet 10 inches, is the only vestige of the endeavor. It’s an unlikely spot, and an even unlikelier tale. Believe it just a little, though, and you may shed some of the armor of ambivalence that shields you from your feelings and leaves you sleepwalking through your days. You may discover greatness where you least expected. You may even decide, once and for all, to take a stand, to venture everything, like a farmer named Wally Chubb who loved a woman so much he set about eating a jumbo jet for her.

  They may strain credulity, bend physics and biology, but let this place and these strange events into your life and you will know a simple truth: We chase wild dreams and long for all that eludes us, when the greatest joys are within our grasp, if we can only recognize them.

  1 Please note that Mr. Kinkladze’s left ear (lifting 70 pounds 9 ounces) was considerably stronger than his right ear (35 pounds 4 ounces).

  2 For the record, Mr. Minnoch should not be mistaken for Robert Earl Hughes, for decades the world’s heaviest man, who reached a top weight of 1,069 pounds and was buried in a coffin the size of a piano case.

  3 According to the Oxford English Dictionary: “a factitious word alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust,’ but occurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word.”

  ONE

  IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT BRIDGE, THE YOUNG lovers leaned into each other with great resolve, lips clenched, arms interlocked. It was a determined kiss, neither soft nor sentimental. Stiff and clumsy, they could have been office colleagues stealing away for a moment on the easy banks of the Seine or students from a nearby école learning the steps of love.

  Not far away, behind a red velvet rope, a noisy pack of photographers jockeyed with zoom lenses, capturing the embrace. Flashes strobed and video cameras rolled while the kissers clenched, unflinching. Behind them, on bleachers, several hundred observers shouted encouragement.

  “Allez! Vive la France!” one young man cried.

  “Courage!” a woman called.

  From lampposts on the Ile Saint-Louis, bright banners dangled. Rémy Martin, Evian, Air France, Wrigley’s—all proud corporate sponsors of the passion play. Men in natty suits surveyed the scene, pleased with the excellent turnout.

  In the middle of this bustle, J.J. Smith sat calmly at the judge’s table. He was 34 years old with wavy brown hair, a straight, well-proportioned nose, and an oval face, perhaps a bit soft at the edges. There was a certain authority about him. He wore a navy blazer with a gilded crest on the pocket, linen trousers, and sandy bucks. A closer inspection revealed a few frayed stitches on his shoulders, the hem of his jacket lining stuck together with Scotch tape, pants slightly rumpled, shoes a bit scuffed. He couldn’t be bothered with clothes, really. There were more important matters on his mind. A thick black notebook lay open on the desk in front of him. He inspected the kissers, then checked the pages. So far, not a single violation of the official rules.

  “Can I get monsieur anything?” a young woman said, batting eyelashes. She wore a flimsy sundress, and official credentials hung on a chain around her long neck. They were all so solicitous, the French staff. “Perhaps a glass of wine?”

  “Non, merci,” he said. A glass of wine would finish him off. He was an easy drunk. “Thanks. I’ve got everything I need.”

  “I’m here to help,” she said with a smile. He watched her walk away, slender in the sun.

  I’m here to help. Indeed. He mopped his forehead, sipped a bottle of cool spring water, and surveyed the Gallic crowd.

  There was something about the kissing record that always turned out the hordes. Just one year earlier, in Tel Aviv, thousands watched Dror Orpaz and Karmit Tsubera shatter the record for continuous kissing. J.J. clocked every second of those 30 hours and 45 minutes in Rabin Square, then rushed by ambulance with the winners to Ichilov Hospital, where they were treated for exhaustion and dehydration. Now, on a spring day in Paris, another young couple was poised to break the record. They were the last two standing from the initial field of 600 entries.

  Kissing was an artless record, really. There was no skill involved. Success was more a function of endurance than romance, more stamina than passion. The basic rules were straightforward: lips locked at all times, contestants required to stand up, no rest or toilet breaks. A few additional regulations kept the competition stiff. Rule #4 was his favorite: “The couple must be awake at all times.” Rule #7, though difficult to enforce, was tough on the weak-willed and small-bladdered: “Incontinence pads or adult diapers are not allowed.”

  But these logistical challenges were easily overcome. While the novices quit from
hunger or thirst after the first eight or ten hours, savvy record seekers solved the nutritional problems with a straw, protein shakes, and Gatorade. Chafed lips, occasionally an issue, were soothed speedily with Chap Stick.

  The only truly vexing problem was wanting to kiss someone, anyone, for days, to be completely entwined, utterly entangled. He once knew a woman he loved that much and would have kissed that long. Emily was a travel agent he met at the sandwich shop near work. She was a few years older, sparkly and slim. Her mind vaulted from one random thought to another, impossible to follow, then arrived someplace original and logical after all. He liked the way she kissed, gently, exploring, taking every part of him into account.

  “Kissing you is like kissing a country,” she once told him in the doorway of the travel agency. “It’s mysterious, like all the places you go and the people you meet.”

  When he proposed marriage, she accepted, but neither of them felt an urgent rush to the altar. Days, months, years went by as he chased records around the world. His trips grew longer, his devotion to The Book deepened. Then one morning, as he packed his roll-on suitcase, Emily’s good-bye speech floated across the bedroom.

  “You spend your life searching for greatness,” Emily said, handing over the ring in the velvet box it came in. “You’re reaching for things I can’t give you and I don’t want to spend my life not measuring up.”

  “But I love you,” he said. “I really do.” Her decision made no sense. By his count, their 4-year engagement hadn’t even come close to the world record, 67 years, held by Octavio Guilén and Adriana Martínez of Mexico City.