by Paula Guran
We shook hands. I got in the car and went back to the hotel.
The time difference caught up with me that night, and I woke, utterly and irrevocably, at four A.M.
I got up, peed, then I pulled on a pair of jeans (I sleep in a T-shirt) and walked outside.
I wanted to see the stars, but the lights of the city were too bright, the air too dirty. The sky was a dirty, starless yellow, and I thought of all the constellations I could see from the English countryside, and I felt, for the first time, deeply, stupidly homesick.
I missed the stars.
I wanted to work on the short story or to get on with the film script. Instead, I worked on a second draft of the treatment.
I took the number of Junior Mansons down to five from twelve and made it clearer from the start that one of them, who was now male, wasn’t a bad guy and the other four most definitely were.
They sent over a copy of a film magazine. It had the smell of old pulp paper about it, and was stamped in purple with the studio name and with the word ARCHIVES underneath. The cover showed John Barrymore, on a boat.
The article inside was about June Lincoln’s death. I found it hard to read and harder still to understand: it hinted at the forbidden vices that led to her death, that much I could tell, but it was as if it were hinting in a cipher to which modern readers lacked any key. Or perhaps, on reflection, the writer of her obituary knew nothing and was hinting into the void.
More interesting—at any rate, more comprehensible—were the photos. A full-page, black-edged photo of a woman with huge eyes and a gentle smile, smoking a cigarette (the smoke was airbrushed in, to my way of thinking very clumsily: had people ever been taken in by such clumsy fakes?); another photo of her in a staged clinch with Douglas Fairbanks; a small photograph of her standing on the running board of a car, holding a couple of tiny dogs.
She was, from the photographs, not a contemporary beauty. She lacked the transcendence of a Louise Brooks, the sex appeal of a Marilyn Monroe, the sluttish elegance of a Rita Hayworth. She was a twenties starlet as dull as any other twenties starlet. I saw no mystery in her huge eyes, her bobbed hair. She had perfectly made-up cupid’s bow lips. I had no idea what she would have looked like if she had been alive and around today.
Still, she was real; she had lived. She had been worshipped and adored by the people in the movie palaces.
She had kissed the fish, and walked in the grounds of my hotel seventy years before: no time in England, but an eternity in Hollywood.
I went in to talk about the treatment. None of the people I had spoken to before were there. Instead, I was shown in to see a very young man in a small office, who never smiled and who told me how much he loved the treatment and how pleased he was that the studio owned the property.
He said he thought the character of Charles Manson was particularly cool, and that maybe—“once he was fully dimensionalized”—Manson could be the next Hannibal Lecter.
“But. Um. Manson. He’s real. He’s in prison now. His people killed Sharon Tate.”
“Sharon Tate?”
“She was an actress. A film star. She was pregnant and they killed her. She was married to Polanski.”
“Roman Polanski?”
“The director. Yes.”
He frowned. “But we’re putting together a deal with Polanski.”
“That’s good. He’s a good director.”
“Does he know about this?”
“About what? The book? Our film? Sharon Tate’s death?”
He shook his head: none of the above. “It’s a three-picture deal. Julia Roberts is semi-attached to it. You say Polanski doesn’t know about this treatment?”
“No, what I said was—”
He checked his watch.
“Where are you staying?” he asked. “Are we putting you up somewhere good?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m a couple of chalets away from the room in which Belushi died.” I expected another confidential couple of stars: to be told that John Belushi had kicked the bucket in company with Julie Andrews and Miss Piggy the Muppet, I was wrong.
“Belushi’s dead?” he said, his young brow furrowing. “Belushi’s not dead. We’re doing a picture with Belushi.”
“This was the brother,” I told him. “The brother died, years ago.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like a shithole,” he said. “Next time you come out, tell them you want to stay in the Bel Air. You want us to move you out there now?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m used to it where I am.”
“What about the treatment?” I asked.
“Leave it with us.”
I found myself becoming fascinated by two old theatrical illusions I found in my books: “The Artist’s Dream” and “The Enchanted Casement.” They were metaphors for something, of that I was certain, but the story that ought to have accompanied them was not yet there. I’d write first sentences that did not make it to first paragraphs, first paragraphs that never made it to first pages. I’d write them on the computer, then exit without saving anything.
I sat outside in the courtyard and stared at the two white carp and the one scarlet and white carp. They looked, I decided, like Escher drawings of fish, which surprised me, as it had never occurred to me there was anything even slightly realistic in Escher’s drawings.
Pious Dundas was polishing the leaves of the plants. He had a bottle of polisher and a cloth.
“Hi, Pious.”
“Suh.”
“Lovely day.”
He nodded, and coughed, and banged his chest with his fist, and nodded some more.
I left the fish, sat down on the bench.
“Why haven’t they made you retire?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you have retired fifteen years ago?”
He continued polishing. “Hell no, I’m a landmark. They can say that all the stars in the sky stayed here, but I tell folks what Cary Grant had for breakfast.”
“Do you remember?”
“Heck no. But they don’t know that.” He coughed again. “What you writing?”
“Well, last week I wrote a treatment for this film. And then I wrote another treatment. And now I’m waiting for . . . something.”
“So what are you writing?”
“A story that won’t come right. It’s about a Victorian magic trick called ‘The Artist’s Dream.’ An artist comes onto the stage, carrying a big canvas, which he puts on an easel. It’s got a painting of a woman on it. And he looks at the painting and despairs of ever being a real painter. Then he sits down and goes to sleep, and the painting comes to life, steps down from the frame, and tells him not to give up. To keep fighting. He’ll be a great painter one day. She climbs back into the frame. The lights dim. Then he wakes up, and it’s a painting again . . . ”
“ . . . and the other illusion,” I told the woman from the studio, who had made the mistake of feigning interest at the beginning of the meeting, “was called ‘The Enchanted Casement.’ A window hangs in the air and faces appear in it, but there’s no one around. I think I can get a strange sort of parallel between the enchanted casement and probably television: seems like a natural candidate, after all.”
“I like Seinfeld,” she said. “You watch that show? It’s about nothing. I mean, they have whole episodes about nothing. And I liked Garry Shandling before he did the new show and got mean.”
“The illusions,” I continued, “like all great illusions, make us question the nature of reality. But they also frame—pun, I suppose, intentionalish—the issue of what entertainment would turn into. Films before the had films, telly before there was ever TV.”
She frowned. “Is this a movie?”
“I hope not. It’s a short story, if I can get it to work.
“So let’s talk about the movie.” She flicked through pile of notes. She was in her mid-twenties and looked both attractive and sterile. I wondered if she was one the women who had been at the breakfast on my first day, a Deanna or a Tina.
>
She looked puzzled at something and read: “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll?”
“He wrote that down? That’s not this film.”
She nodded. “Now, I have to say that some of you treatment is kind of . . . contentious. The Manson thing . . . well, we’re not sure it’s going to fly. Could we take him out?”
“But that’s the whole point of the thing. I mean, the book is called Sons of Man; it’s about Manson’s children. If you take him out, you don’t have very much, do you? I mean, this is the book you bought.” I held it up for her to see: my talisman. “Throwing out Manson is like, I don’t know, it’s like ordering a pizza and then complaining when it arrives because it’s flat, round, and covered in tomato sauce and cheese.”
She gave no indication of having heard anything I had said. She asked, “What do you think about When We Were Badd as a title? Two d’s in Badd.”
“I don’t know. For this?”
“We don’t want people to think that it’s religious Sons of Man. It sounds like it might be kind of anti-Christian.”
“Well, I do kind of imply that the power that possesses the Manson children is in some way a kind of demonic power.”
“You do?”
“In the book.”
She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.
“Well, I don’t think the studio would see that as appropriate,” she said.
“Do you know who June Lincoln was?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“David Gambol? Jacob Klein?”
She shook her head once more, a little impatiently.
Then she gave me a typed list of things she felt needed fixing, which amounted to pretty much everything. The list was TO: me and a number of other people, whose names I didn’t recognize, and it was FROM: Donna Leary.
I said Thank you, Donna, and went back to the hotel.
I was gloomy for a day. And then I thought of a way to redo the treatment that would, I thought, deal with all of Donna’s list of complaints.
Another day’s thinking, a few days’ writing, and I faxed the third treatment off to the studio.
Pious Dundas brought his scrapbook over for me to look at, once he felt certain that I was genuinely interested in June Lincoln—named, I discovered, after the month and the president, born Ruth Baumgarten in 1903. It was a leatherbound old scrapbook, the size and weight of a family Bible.
She was twenty-four when she died.
“I wish you could’ve seen her,” said Pious Dundas. “I wish some of her films had survived. She was so big. She was the greatest star of all of them.”
“Was she a good actress?”
He shook his head decisively. “Nope.”
“Was she a great beauty? If she was, I just don’t see it.”
He shook his head again. “The camera liked her, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t it. Back row of the chorus had a dozen girls prettier’n her.”
“Then what was it?”
“She was a star.” He shrugged. “That’s what it means to be a star.”
I turned the pages: cuttings reviewing films I’d never heard of—films for which the only negatives and prints had long ago been lost, mislaid, or destroyed by the fire department, nitrate negatives being a notorious fire hazard; other cuttings from film magazines: June Lincoln at play, June Lincoln at rest, June Lincoln on the set of The Pawnbroker’s Shirt, June Lincoln wearing a huge fur coat—which somehow dated the photograph more than the strange bobbed hair or the ubiquitous cigarettes.
“Did you love her?”
He shook his head. “Not like you would love a woman . . . ” he said.
There was a pause. He reached down and turned the pages.
“And my wife would have killed me if she’d heard me say this . . . ”
Another pause.
“But yeah. Skinny dead white woman. I suppose I loved her.” He closed the book.
“But she’s not dead to you, is she?”
He shook his head. Then he went away. But he left me the book to look at.
The secret of the illusion of “The Artist’s Dream” was this: it was done by carrying the girl in, holding tight onto the back of the canvas. The canvas was supported by hidden wires, so, while the artist casually, easily, carried in the canvas and placed it on the easel, he was also carrying in the girl. The painting of the girl on the easel was arranged like a roller blind, and it rolled up or down.
“The Enchanted Casement,” on the other hand, was, literally, done with mirrors: an angled mirror which reflected the faces of people standing out of sight in the wings.
Even today many magicians use mirrors in their acts to make you think you are seeing something you are not.
It was easy, when you knew how it was done.
“Before we start,” he said, “I should tell you I don’t read treatments. I tend to feel it inhibits my creativity. Don’t worry, I had a secretary do a précis, so I’m up to speed.”
He had a beard and long hair and looked a little like Jesus, although I doubted that Jesus had such perfect teeth. He was, it appeared, the most important person I’d spoken to so far. His name was John Ray, and even I had heard of him, although I was not entirely sure what he did. His name tended to appear at the beginning of films, next to words like EXECUTIVE PRODUCER. The voice from the studio that had set up the meeting told me that they, the studio, were most excited about the fact that he had “attached himself to the project.”
“Doesn’t the précis inhibit your creativity, too?”
He grinned. “Now, we all think you’ve done an amazing job. Quite stunning. There are just a few things that we have a problem with.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the Manson thing. And the idea about these kids growing up. So we’ve been tossing around a few scenarios in the office. Try this for size: there’s a guy called, say, Jack Badd—two d’s, that was Donna’s idea—” Donna bowed her head modestly.
“They put him away for satanic abuse, fried him in the chair, and as he dies he swears he’ll come back and destroy them all.
“Now, it’s today, and we see these young boys getting hooked on a video arcade game called Be Badd. His face on it. And as they play the game he like, starts to possess them. Maybe there could be something strange about his face, a Jason or Freddy thing.” He stopped, as if he were seeking approval.
So I said, “So who’s making these video games?”
He pointed a finger at me and said, “You’re the writer, sweetheart. You want us to do all your work for you?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
Think movies, I thought. They understand movies. I said, “But surely, what you’re proposing is like doing The Boys from Brazil without Hitler.”
He looked puzzled.
“It was a film by Ira Levin,” I said. No flicker of recognition in his eyes. “Rosemary’s Baby.” He continued to look blank. “Sliver.”
He nodded; somewhere a penny had dropped. “Point taken,” he said. “You write the Sharon Stone part, we’ll move heaven and earth to get her for you. I have an in to her people.”
So I went out.
That night it was cold, and it shouldn’t have been cold in L.A., and the air smelled more of cough drops than ever.
An old girlfriend lived in the L.A. area and I resolved to get hold of her. I phoned the number I had for her and began a quest that took most of the rest of the evening. People gave me numbers, and I rang them, and other people gave me numbers, and I rang them, too.
Eventually I phoned a number, and I recognized her voice.
“Do you know where I am?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I was given this number.”
“This is a hospital room,” she said. “My mother’s. She had a brain hemorrhage.”
“I’m sorry. Is she all right
?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was an awkward silence.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Pretty bad,” I said.
I told her everything that had happened to me so far.
I told her how I felt.
“Why is it like this?” I asked her.
“Because they’re scared.”
“Why are they scared? What are they scared of?”
“Because you’re only as good as the last hit you can attach your name to.”
“Huh?”
“If you say ‘yes’ to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it’s a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don’t risk losing status.”
“Really?”
“Kind of.”
“How do you know so much about all this? You’re a musician, you’re not in films.”
She laughed wearily: “I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?”
“No.”
“Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They’ve all got them.” Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and she put down the phone.
I couldn’t find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.
I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.
White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.
I stared at it gloomily.
“You okay?”
I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.
“You’re up early.”
