Some Can Whistle

by McMurtry, Larry

She shrugged again. “All you do is talk to women,” she said. “You ought to understand why I give up.”

  “Well, I don’t understand it!” I said. “You’re twenty-two years old. You’re healthy. You have two beautiful children. You even have a father now.”

  “Sort of,” she said, shrugging again, the way the young shrug when they want you to know they feel hopeless.

  “Not sort of,” I protested. “There’s nothing sort of about it. I love you very much. There’s nothing I wouldn’t try to help you with.”

  “I don’t feel like no daughter,” she said flatly. “It’s more like I’m just one of your many girlfriends.”

  “T.R., you aren’t just like one of my many girlfriends—and there aren’t really that many, anyway,” I said. “We’ve just known one another a few days. I can’t make up for all that time in a few days. But I am determined to make up for it. Maybe in a year you’ll know I mean it. Maybe then you’ll feel like a daughter.”

  I was beginning to feel hopeless too, though. Her conviction was stronger than my conviction. At that point Muddy appeared in the door. Like the kids, he seemed merely to be checking the weather, and, like them, he immediately found it to be stormy.

  “Go away, fuckhead!” T.R. yelled. “I’m talking to Daddy.”

  “Good lord,” Muddy said ruefully, and walked away.

  “Finish telling it,” T.R. said. “Did you fuck her again or not?”

  “No,” I said. “We weren’t really successful lovers even when we were lovers. I don’t know why that would matter so much to you.”

  Again the shrug, which I was beginning to hate. Thinking of Jill was not easy for me, either, though I didn’t try to explain that to T.R. The roiling surf of middle age had drowned Jill and me—at least it washed us apart. Our efforts to renew our friendship fell sadly flat. For one thing, “Al and Sal” took off. Within six months I was the new genius of television. The press could not get enough of me. No A-list party was complete without me, whereas, listwise, Jill had sunk so far down the alphabet as not to be countable at all. The town just forgot her. She became one of the hundreds of gifted, half-famous or once-famous people living out their days in Hollywood. Five years without really working is like a century in that town—Jill Peel’s name, once one of the most respected in the movie community, became as exotic as Theda Bara’s, or Francis X. Bushman’s.

  Jill quite rightly felt some bitterness about her own neglect, and, quite understandably, some resentment of my blinding success. She knew what I had once wanted to be—not a television writer. She remembered my old standards; indeed, she had helped me to form them and knew how far beneath them I was actually performing. Still, I was performing; I was never going to write The Magic Mountain but at least my energies hadn’t failed. Those world-famous one hundred and ninety-eight episodes did get done.

  I asked her to dinner a few times. We were polite to one another, but there was a deadness. The only live thing was Jill’s resentment—sometimes she let a little of it out, stuck me with a small barb, but mostly I just heard about it from other people. Jill said this about you, I would hear. Jill said that about you. Little comments she had made or was said to have made got back to me.

  It was sad. I could not see Jill without realizing that I cared about her, but I didn’t know how to express the caring, really. Besides, I was busy; one can do episodic television or one can do life; it’s impossible to do both adequately. Jill and I bumped into one another here and there for the next year or two; I sensed that she was a little sad about us too, more sad than angry, probably, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

  Then, to my great surprise, she called one day and asked a favor.

  “I’ve found a script I want to do,” she said. “It’s really good, Danny—the first really good script to come my way in ten years. I want you to help me get it done.”

  “I’d love to,” I said at once. “You want me to come by your house and get it?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said, with a note of panic in her voice—the notion of me in her house was clearly not something she wished to entertain. “I’ll just send it over.”

  “Send it over, I’ll read it tonight,” I said.

  “I want you to be executive producer,” she said. “The story’s a little grim. But you’re the emperor of television now. If you say you’ll produce it it might get done.”

  “If it’s as good as you say it is, there’ll be no problem,” I said.

  Even as I hung up I realized I had said four fatal words. “There’ll be no problem” is nothing one should ever say, or even think, in Hollywood. In those hills live nothing but problems.

  The script came and indeed was wonderful, though grim. It was about teen-age suicide and was set in England. The setting was a problem in itself, but with this script I thought it might work in our favor. America wasn’t going to want to see American teen-agers killing themselves; English teen-agers they just might accept. I made a few calls and got good responses, and, in the euphoria even a conditional yes can produce in Hollywood, Jill and I almost recovered our friendship. We set to work on the script, which had a few problems, and we worked well. Jill’s mind had lost nothing—it was a needle, perfectly adapted to stitching up holes in scripts. That was not too surprising; what was surprising was that my mind had not lost much, either.

  “It’s not dead, it’s just been sleeping,” Jill said, in reference to my mind. For some three weeks we were almost our old selves, meeting in the late afternoon to eat and work on the script for an hour or two. We even laughed some. We cast and recast the film, and as we worked Jill’s energy grew. She got her womanly shine back, too; guys began to look at her in restaurants, and her name once again began to pop up in the trades. We settled on a studio, arranged the workings of a skeleton of a deal; Jill went to England to find locations and audition British actors. I was going to follow her as soon as “Al and Sal” shut down for its hiatus.

  I felt confident, and Jill did too. We talked transatlantically all the time; the production was beginning to take form. The day came when all that was needed was for the studio to say go, and instead, to my dismay, they said stop. It might have been predicted; would have been predicted if I had ever stopped to think clearly about the matter for five minutes. But I hadn’t done that, of course. Drunk with the success that had already been mine for a few years because of “Al and Sal,” I assumed they wouldn’t dare stop one of my projects.

  But they did.

  It was a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. Projects get to the starting line every day in Hollywood only to have the starter refuse to fire the gun. I knew that perfectly well, and so did Jill; we had seen it happen hundreds of times, and yet we had convinced ourselves that I was powerful enough that it wouldn’t happen to us. That was merely hubris. Naturally I had taken the project to the studio where “Al and Sal” was being produced; the show had made the studio hundreds of millions, and even then, in its next-to-last season, was not doing badly. It was reasonable to assume they’d let somebody who’d made them hundreds of millions make a twelve-million-dollar movie.

  Reasonable but wrong. They said no. At first I was polite. I reasoned with the studio head; then I went over him to the president of the giant multinational that owned the studio. Both were very polite, but the answer was still no. Jill’s film was not going to happen; or at least it was not going to happen with that company.

  “The emperor of television has no clothes,” Jill said when I told her this news. “So what next, Emperor? Do I have to come home?”

  “Don’t you dare come home,” I said. “Take a little holiday. Go to France for a few days. Go to Italy. This is not the only studio in town. I’ll make us a deal somewhere.”

  Jill did as she was told and went to France. In the meantime, I went to Paramount, Fox, MGM-UA, Columbia, the lot of them. And the lot of them said no. I couldn’t even engineer a trade-off: Jill’s picture in return for some big PG comedy or somethi
ng that they might want me to produce, direct, write. Plenty of PG comedies were available, but no one would touch Jill’s picture. Finally I had to tell her to come home.

  Because of that fiasco, what ground we had regained as friends was ultimately lost again. It wasn’t my fault that the picture hadn’t been made; I did everything I could do and kept on doing it long after Jill herself had given up. But the town didn’t yield, and Jill and I fell out of synch again. It wasn’t really that she blamed me for the failure of the project—she was a fair woman and never said a critical word to me about my handling of the matter.

  In the process, though, another disappointment, and a big one, got attached to me. Once the film project failed to work we were faced again with the fact that we had sort of failed to work too. There were no more cheerful dinners. When I ran into Jill I always felt nervous, depressed, guilty. Her new glow had faded; she seemed dim and distracted. I would get worried and call her and then find that I had nothing much to say to her. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was drawing again. Jill had always drawn beautifully; art, not film, had been her first calling.

  “Ask me over sometime,” I said. “I’d love to see what you’re drawing.”

  “Well, maybe,” she said.

  “I think she knew you still wanted to fuck her and she wasn’t interested,” T.R. said. “If she said maybe, it really meant no.”

  “You didn’t know her and you could be wrong,” I said patiently. “Maybe Jill meant that she was thinking about it. If she meant no she’d have said no.”

  “Believe what you want to believe,” T.R. said.

  “You’re too harsh,” I said, wondering if young people were always harder on their fellow humans than old people.

  “Anyway, those were her last words to me,” I said. “She was killed three days later.”

  “Uh-oh,” T.R. said, looking scared suddenly.

  “She was killed in her home,” I said. “Bludgeoned to death, apparently by a burglar she’d surprised. Whoever did it took what money she had in her purse, and nothing else. The murder was never solved—or at least it hasn’t been solved yet.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. I was remembering the shock I felt when I opened my L.A. Times and read that Jill was dead. As I was reading it, people began to call and tell me. I didn’t really listen. Ahead of shock came anger, in this case. The story was at the very bottom of the first page: “below the fold,” as newspapers say. That seemed horrible to me. Jill Peel had given as much of herself to motion pictures as anyone in town; Womanly Ways was one of the few distinguished American films of the sixties. Why was she below the fold?

  I had never discussed death with Jill—even the major tragedy of her life, the suicide of her son, we’d never talked about. But the day after the funeral—her cameraman was there, her old, bereft parents, an old driver who had driven her limo during her brief heyday, a director or two, the old script girl who had been, I guess, her best friend, and a few others who looked as if they might have been from props, or makeup, a gaffer, a grip, who knows?—her lawyer called and informed me that she had made me her executor.

  My own lawyer I could hire to deal with the tiresome legalities, but there was no getting around the fact that I would, at some point, have to go to her house and dispose of her effects, such as they were.

  I put it off for a month, and then one day when I was feeling fairly strong, I drove up the little road into the brown hills, the very road I had avoided during the years of her fame and my obscurity; I took the key the lawyer gave me and went into the house. I began to tremble, I had to sit in a chair—all the love that was still there in me for Jill, the love that had never worked out—surged up and blinded me. It was a long time before I could stumble shakily around the house. If there had been anything to trip over I would have tripped over it, but Jill was a minimalist’s minimalist; the house, looked at from the inside, was as spare as her life had seemed, looked at from the outside. She had a bed, a few chairs, a work table, a small bright studio room, a little art on the walls, a closetful of paintings that wouldn’t fit on the walls, a few dishes, a pot to make tea in, a small pool, a few clothes, and two Oscars.

  In her workroom were lots and lots of drawings, from every period of her life. In looking through them I felt like a sneak. Jill had always been very private—even when we were intimate she told me only what she wanted me to know—and about nothing was she so private as about her art. Still, sad as it was, I had to make some disposition of all those drawings; I had to look through them. And there were thousands. I felt as if I were peeking under Emily Dickinson’s bed to discover those two thousand poems.

  Perhaps Jill had not really been as great as Emily Dickinson, but it seemed to me that at least she stood at the edge of greatness. The longer I spent in the studio room, poking through drawer after drawer of drawings, the more my sense of Jill’s life changed. She had put much into the effort to make motion pictures, but it seemed to me that she had put even more into this art—an art as lonely as Kafka, an art that almost no one had ever seen.

  In one of the long drawers, mixed in with scores of sketches, I found a little portfolio—there were several in the studio, little groups of sketches Jill had wanted kept together. This one, though, had a title carefully blocked in: Let the Stranger Consider. I opened it; a little sheet of notepaper partially covered the first drawing. It said “For Danny”—nothing else. In the portfolio were twenty-two drawings, all self-portraits. Jill had looked in her bathroom mirror and sketched herself: in some she held a towel or a hairbrush, in others nothing; several were just her face, others were full length; in some she wore a bathrobe, in others she was nude; in all of them she was squarely facing the mirror, mostly at close range. In looking at the portraits I felt that I squarely faced her, too, in a sense: old friend and old love, a woman whose grace, like her sadness, had mostly remained unobserved, even by me, whom she might once have trusted with it. The last few portraits were spare to the point of incompleteness—one saw a feature but not the whole face or form; they were eerie drawings, made by a woman who seemed to be fading from her own view.

  I did my duty as an executor; the house and the art were sold. Some of the money went to the Actors’ Home, the rest to her parents, both of whom died within two years. Jill’s drawings I gave to UCLA, where she had studied. The only thing I kept was Let the Stranger Consider—it seemed she had meant it for me.

  Once or twice a year I looked through the album, hoping that in time I would understand what she wanted me to consider. Was it the fact that I had stayed a stranger, or was it she that I was to consider? She had been in her mid-forties when she drew those portraits; she didn’t set out to flatter herself, but neither did she attempt to diminish her own appeal—her clarity, her frankness, her welcoming attitude. I never looked through the whole album consecutively; even just looking at two or three drawings at a time made me miss her too much. More often than not I just turned to the haunting drawings at the end, where Jill was recording her disappearance, her shrinkage.

  In time I got to wondering about Jill. In the years when we were attempting to renew our friendship, I never asked her about her love life, and she never asked me about mine. I wasn’t having a love life just then, and I doubt Jill was either. I knew several of her friends, and none of them ever mentioned a guy. But maybe there had been a guy; or maybe there was about to be one. She had been private but not exactly cautious; perhaps at the end she had welcomed the wrong man.

  The woman was dead; it didn’t really matter, and yet an old boyfriend’s curiosity began to nag at me. Finally I called the detective who had investigated her death; he was bored at first, but he was also a big “Al and Sal” fan, and when he found out who I was, he obligingly looked up the file.

  “She wasn’t in the house but a moment when she was killed,” he said. “Her keys were still in the door. She probably just ran afoul of some drifting dope-head.”

  I felt embarrassed for hav
ing asked. Why had I even supposed her death had to do with a boyfriend? What kind of worm was that, what kind of apple? Did I think the violence of love produced a more acceptable end than the violence of accident? I never resolved those questions, but I did regret calling the detective.

  I finished my story by expressing that regret. T.R. sighed. All belligerence had left her. She looked very young and very sad.

  “Do you know the Governor?” she asked, to my surprise.

  “Oh, I’ve met him,” I said. “I wouldn’t say I know him. Why?”

  “I used to read about you,” T.R. said. “You know, little things in the paper, about you being at a party with the Governor.”

  “I have been at two or three parties with him,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re famous, so you could get him on the phone, right?” she said. “You can call him up and ask him something if you want to, right?”

  “I probably could,” I agreed.

  “Do it,” T.R. said. “Ask him if Earl Dee’s really out. If he’s out I want to know it. I got two babies to raise. I don’t want to end up like your friend. Just ask the Governor, Daddy. Call him right now.”

  When I put my arm around her she was shaking.

  “I’ll call him right now,” I said.

  For the first time I began to be a little worried about this dark man—Earl Dee.

  9

  I called the Governor and he gave me the name of the head of the prison board; the head of the prison board put me in touch with the warden of the Huntsville unit, who scratched his head a bit and said he’d have to call his Records department in order to locate Earl Dee.

  The warden also turned out to be a fan of “Al and Sal”; he promptly called his Records department, and within thirty minutes a young lady in Records called me back with some good news; Earl Dee was still in jail.

  “Yep, he got in a fight and slammed a cell door on somebody’s headbone,” the girl said, in accents that bespoke East Texas. “The earliest we’d be letting him out is about two months from now.”