You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  JUSTIN IS GOING OVER A list of things and mentions an email from a Paul McMann. “He says you know him?” It takes a few seconds and the word screenplay and then it clicks.

  McMahon, I say to Justin, the man I met on Mulholland, yes. I’m trying to help him with a project.

  I think to myself that I have truly been remiss, although, given the book clubs…I ask Justin to respond with my apologies, that I promise to get to it. Then, Never mind, Justin, I say, I’ll do it myself. I send the email to Paul and mentally file a note. I’ve got to read his script. And I’ve got to get Howard to read it, too. I know I’m not going to trust my own reaction till I get his yes or no.

  SAM WAS DRIVING WEST ON Fountain when he asked Howard for some advice. He put the question: Stanford or Berkeley. Howard was struggling to position his visor against the morning sun flooding the windshield.

  “What the hell’s the matter with Columbia,” said Howard, squinting to cover his surprise.

  “Dad,” said Sam very patiently, “I like California. My third choice is Occi. Jon and I went a couple months ago. We compared courses, the teams, all that stuff.”

  “Well, if you’ve made up your mind,” grumbled Howard, surprised as well at the research, proud Sam was being serious about it. Personally, said Howard, he’d take Stanford, but nothing wrong with Berkeley if Sam chose his subjects carefully.

  Sam held the wheel easily, accelerated from the light. But what did Howard and I want him to be? he asked. What did we intend for him?

  Howard blinked.

  “I’m just wondering,” said Sam, oblivious to the effect he was having. He sighed, very teenager. “God knows you guys have ideas about everything.”

  I have always thought Howard did wonderfully when it came to Sam’s future. We never dictated a word. We never told him what he must or mustn’t be. We pointed out certain options and certain directions. Years ago, Howard had read Sam a passage from George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, and later that day, when they’d gotten home and Sam was out of earshot, he told me he’d found himself heading right for it as an anchor. He knew Sam would remember. In fact he suspected Sam’s question had come from it.

  Eliot’s Daniel is freshly returned from his Young Gentleman’s tour of the Rhineland with his Eton tutor, and he presents himself in Sir Hugo’s library on a morning, and asks “What do you intend me to do, sir?” Naturally if Sam ever called Howard “sir,” Howard would choke.

  Howard had always indicated to Sam that he would have to make his own money, and I had said the same thing, much more directly and much more often. At the same time, Howard argued to me, he didn’t seem the sort of kid you had to worry would be corrupted by his parents’ bank accounts, and I carefully agreed. He appeared solid. We never caught him showing off. He rarely coveted the expensive toys that surrounded him and quickly shook off the episodes of jealousy when they arose. We had given him a decent allowance, increasing with his age and experience. ‘ “Perhaps,’ said Sir Hugo, ‘I had better tell you that you may consider yourself secure of seven hundred a year.’” And so, said Howard, as they crossed Mansfield Avenue, we would pay for either Berkeley or Stanford. Graduate school, we would pay tuition; room and board would be his responsibility. Obviously we would ask that he live modestly. We would ask him to study, to be serious. No live-in girlfriends; that was nonnegotiable.

  OK, said Sam.

  As for what Howard “intended”? Well, said Howard, whatever Sam wanted to be. Howard comes by this sort of liberalism naturally. Yes, he had some ideas. He mentioned journalism and sports agenting. (“‘You might make yourself a barrister,’ said Sir Hugo to Daniel, ‘be a writer.’”) Howard brought up, well, studio work. (“Or take up politics,” says Sir Hugo. “I confess that is what would please me best. I should like to have you at my elbow, pulling with me.”) But he said to Sam, You will do what you want, and you will be the one to find out what that is.

  I am inclined to be more directive, but I found that Howard’s point of view had, at some moment, become indigenous to me. Perhaps because I had read it in a book.

  And still the boy Deronda says nervously to Sir Hugo, “‘I hope you will not be much disappointed if I don’t come out with honours.’” And Sam said, basically, the same.

  Howard made a face, waved this away with one hand and put the other to his eyes. Luckily they were at a stoplight, because he grabbed Sam and kissed him hard on the head. Sir Hugo says, “‘No, no. I should like you to do yourself credit, but for God’s sake don’t come out as a superior expensive kind of idiot, like young Brecon, who got a Double First, and has been learning to knit braces ever since. What I wish you to get,’” quoted Howard gravely from Eliot’s novel, “‘is a passport in life.’”

  “They don’t offer that,” said Sam, turning right toward the hills.

  “Yes,” said Howard firmly, “they do.”

  OUR FRIENDS HAVE ALWAYS TOLD me that press attention functions microbially. The one-celled creature suddenly becomes two, which become four. Howard assumed it was the Hollywood Reporter piece that generated the article in Entertainment Weekly.

  It was by critic Gary Susman. Gary had not attended the clubs—he hadn’t, in fact, ever asked to—but he clearly knew many of those in them quite well. He said, in fact, that I had changed his view of filmmaking. He did not say how, which disappointed me. I was interested. The article reported a breathless account of a secretive book club for the Hollywood elite. It made me sound like a guru. The aura of exclusivity was carefully appointed, a paparazzi photo of me in sunglasses carrying dry cleaning into the house over my shoulder. I have to say, the photographers were very quiet. I had no idea they were there. If they had just asked, I would have certainly posed for a shot or two, outside, without the dry cleaning.

  When Us magazine called, they said they wanted to take a “different approach,” which was to photograph me in my home. I said absolutely not. Well, would I talk with a reporter? I put them on hold and asked Justin what he thought. He said, “Are you kidding?” as if it was obvious. They sent a nice young woman, and Consuela brought lemonade to the garden, and I found it surreal. The piece wound up consisting of literary recommendations by actors, most of whom I had never met. What Will She Choose Next? Sandra Bernhard was quoted as saying she didn’t fucking care, she hadn’t fucking been invited. Bette Midler proposed D. H. Lawrence for some unusual reasons, and it started me thinking—I actually went back to take another look at Sons and Lovers, though I am conscious of Max Beerbohm’s evaluation of Lawrence: “He never suspected that to be stark staring mad is something of a handicap to a writer.” Perhaps. I sent Bette a note. Howard worships Beerbohm; Joseph Epstein once delighted Howard by telling him that Beerbohm “took out Freud with a single sentence: ‘They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?’” Bette enjoyed that.

  Justin interrupted me with a slip of paper, quickly jotted: “Jane Sarkin. Vanity Fair.” He mouthed “Line 2.”

  Hello, Jane.

  Hello, Anne.

  It was to be a cover, she said. (Oh, honestly.) No, no—they had just come out of the editorial meeting—a cover, a cover, she repeated the word, incredulous, which I found rather amusing seeing that it was she who was trying to convince me, not the reverse. Ludicrous, I said to Howard. (He agreed but shrugged.)

  Julie Weiss, the Vanity Fair art director, called four times. “Anne Rosenbaum at Home.”

  “Why not?” said Howard. “It’s your home, show it off.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, Howard, it’s invasive, that’s why not!

  But I was so bewildered, and so intrigued, that I agreed.

  “And,” Julie added, “Howard would be in some of the photos, naturally.”

  I covered the receiver again, ran this by him. Yes?

  “Sure,” he said.

  Fine, I said.

  “And,” (papers ruffling) “now, you two have a son?”

  My tone of voice must have finally taken, because she moved
immediately to the stylist.

  David Margolick arrived from New York and was very pleasant, and quite handsome with his gray wavy hair, and direct. Did I agree I was very opinionated? I said I supposed I did. Good literature is strong opinion, intelligently expressed. ( Water, please, I said to the waiter. Thank you.) Complexity of opinion does not dilute its strength, incidentally. And then there are various styles.

  David ordered a salad. “And you?” He glanced at the attentive waiter, back at me. “Nothing? You’re sure?”

  Honestly. I’m not hungry.

  How, I asked, can one not be in awe of Oscar Wilde’s opinionated snottiness on every imaginable subject? Take art. Samuel Johnson humbly praised Shakespeare, writing, “Shakespeare is above all writers the poet of nature, the poet that, like Hamlet, holds up a faithful mirror of manners and life.” Wilde responded, “This unfortunate aphorism about art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.”

  David jotted rapidly and managed to eat lunch at the same time. I, with my elbows on the Lucques’s table, playing absently with a bracelet, was slightly uncomfortable with the method of it; sometimes he wrote, his notebook laid next to his fish knife, sometimes he didn’t. It seemed random. Please, I said, it’s getting cold. He smiled. He said he’d eaten cold sea bass before.

  Annie Leibovitz stopped by the restaurant to look at me. She sat with us for a few minutes. The only thing she said was, once, “Anne, could you look left a little.” I lifted my chin, and she said, “Mm hm.”

  “Wasn’t there,” David asked, “some controversy over your politics? George Eliot?”

  Ah. Right. Well, I had—unintentionally—begun a conversation about feminism: I’d assigned Middlemarch. I’d said that in my view George Eliot had perfectly described in the character Dorothea Brooke virtually every woman “building a career,” in Eliot’s prescient phrase. Of these women, she wrote, in 1871 (notice that, in updated language, this is exactly what you read last week on the same topic), “Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal”—the career—“and the common yearning of womanhood”—children, staying at home—“so that the first was disapproved as extravagance and the other condemned as a lapse.” Remarkable.

  When I read the quote, there had been a collective intake of breath from everyone in my garden, then a visceral, disgusted reaction from a woman from Roadside Attractions. There was no “common yearning of womanhood,” she said. “Jesus!” That (she said) was just “sexism.”

  I said that “sexism” was possibly the most overused, and therefore useless, word in the damaged American lexicon after the now-meaningless “racism.”

  How could I say such a thing? she demanded. Did I believe women were actually biologically different from men?

  Obviously women are biologically different from men, I said, including neuropsychologically.

  Well!…she said, nonplussed. Well, then—so I believed women were inferior?

  Don’t, I snapped, be ridiculous. I was now very seriously annoyed.

  But, she said, George Eliot—! (Heads were moving back and forth between us.)

  George Eliot, I replied, was making an empirical observation anyone not clinically insane recognizes as perfectly obvious. All cultures create social ideals for men and for women—what each should do, feel, value, wear, et cetera—and at the same time to varying degrees these mirror what men and women actually are, how each is evolutionarily programmed to feel and think. But biology is not necessarily prescriptive.

  And as for literature, literature is not, and George Eliot is not, about politics. Literature, well done, illustrates the reality of human nature.

  She glared at me.

  Although obviously, I added, ignoring the truths of literature in our laws and customs and politics is silly.

  It became a debate, and after they left the debate continued both at an afternoon pitch meeting at Miramax and at what became a quite volatile client conference at Endeavor. I didn’t gather this information. It flew at me. This is what they’re saying, Anne. And this. With the name of each person saying it. In Los Angeles, gossip comes with an index.

  I was right, no, no, I was wrong, I was deluded, I was retrograde, I was “sexist” (of course), no, I was not sexist but realistic. I had guts (said a handsome young defender of mine heatedly; he had a political thriller coming out next month from Paramount), and if she (the one who said I was sexist, she had a three-picture deal with Sony and a vengeful look on her face) would just read Dorothea Brooks’s character correctly—!

  She had read it correctly, she said, but he, a male, was incapable of seeing that Eliot was merely reflecting a socially constructed sexist norm of her time and culture, not a biological universal, and no wonder he never dated anything not clawing its way up the Wilhelmina roster.

  He: Utterly untrue, not to mention insulting, and frankly it should be obvious to everyone not a prisoner of her time and culture. (He meant liberal Hollywood.) (She: Oh, please!) Hadn’t she felt, exquisitely delineated in every anguished passage of Eliot’s prose, all that complex, conflicted shit women feel when boarding yet another flight to New York or London before the kids have even woken up—

  “There was also,” said David to me in the restaurant, “your views on making moral judgments.”

  You have done your homework, I said to him, and laughed.

  “Mm,” he said, taking a bite of bass.

  Well, the moral judgments, that was the Browning. Browning killed certainty. And I believe in this, in closing the book and wondering, “Wait—is our narrator a genius or a fool?” The Modernists say, Your man Browning is simply stating, There’s no truth, it’s all viewpoint. But I disagree, strongly, I said to David. Browning is say ing, There is truth. And we must find it. We must take what we see, and we must judge it to find truth.

  “Oh, but we can’t judge!” they argued to me at the chic bistro where we, at a large, prominently placed table, were holding our book club. “Who are we to sit in judgment?” (they argued). “Whose values should we say are better or worse? Everyone has a point of view, and all points of view are equal.”

  I said to those of them making this argument, You vote for the Republican or Democratic party, and you have absolutely no problem with imposing your party’s view on abortion on everyone else because you think your view on abortion is right. That’s Browning. And, if you’re even minimally honest, that’s you, too. I can’t abide these idiots who say “We can’t judge!” and spend their lives judging and writing checks to political organizations whose very existences are axiomatically judgments. I reiterated this at a cocktail party the following night in a voice loud enough to carry: These good Hollywood people who “didn’t want to judge,” which was not a Modernist perspective but simply the head-in-the-sand vapidity of mindless leftism. And then someone aggressively demanding of me, “Why do we have to judge?” and my retorting rather hotly, “Opposing child prostitution,” and then “Supporting separation of church and state,” adding pointedly, “Those are judgments,” and being rescued by Ilene Chaiken, who saw I needed rescuing.

  “It’s that political, then,” said David, raising an eyebrow, looking at his pad and writing quickly now.

  Well, I said, and put down my teacup. I assumed he was referring to the book club in this case, not literature itself. I smiled, briefly. Yes, I suppose it is. It became overt when we read the Dostoevsky, and it seems to be continuing.

  David said, “It does indeed seem”—he was reviewing some previous notes; I wondered who in the world he had been talking to—“that that’s what makes them most uncomfortable. Your divisions into right and wrong.”

  Yes, I said.

  I turned my teacup one way, and then I turned it the other. David simply waited. He didn’t move a muscle. Some people walked past his chair. I was finding this extremely odd. Actors and directors have told me, but I was now discovering it personally: The most out-of-body
experience one can have is being interviewed. I was anxious, but I tried not to show it.

  I told David: I said to my son, Samuel, You will judge. You will say This Is Right, and you will say This Is Wrong.

  “And?” asked David.

  Oh, I said, Sam understands.

  David wrote this down. He put away his pen, picked up the menu. “Dessert?”

  At some point, David made reference to my world being “the Hollywood elites.” I almost responded with something quite sharp, but I didn’t. I simply said, These are the people we know. The quote was dutifully reproduced in the article. It was my impression that it set straight David’s implication that I had somehow “sought out” names you saw in the coming attractions. As we waited for the valet to bring his rental car, David asked about their new passion for literature. What did I think of it all? I juggled a few variables and thought, Oh what the hell, say it. I replied that Oscar Wilde once described the basis of literary friendship as “mixing the poisoned bowl”; naturally, I said, Hollywood has taken to it like cats to cream. (I figured the ones who knew me would get a kick out of that.)

  David shifted his car keys to his left hand, got his pen out again, and wrote this down.

  The piece was not, as I fully assumed it would not be, a cover. It was, at the same time, longer, with larger and more numerous photos, than either of us had expected. “Good God,” said Howard, holding the brand-new copy of Vanity Fair at arm’s length. Then he said, “Stop scowling at me.” Then, “You think I had something to do with this?”

  I said nothing. I was peering at a photo of myself, Alan Levine, and Peter Mehlman.

  “No. Anne. I didn’t.” Then he said, “Fine, call Margolick and ask him. Call Sarkin. Call Si if you want!”