by Owen Thomas
“Boy, gotta love that.”
“Okay, I know, I know, but she’s resourceful. You can make her real. In the penultimate scene you’re strapped to one of the seats in the plane that’s headed for Washington. It’s a heroic role. More of a co-equal lead, really, than a supporting role.”
“Do I have to fly the plane?”
“Don’t know. Read the script. I know there’s a parachute scene, so maybe not.”
“Sex?”
“Strongly implied. Maybe audible. Nothing visual.”
“Nudity?”
“They’re thinking brief and from the side. Could change. You’ve shown more.”
I was silent for a moment, contemplating the floor. “Terrorism, huh?”
“A movie for our times.”
“Hardly Katie Finn, is it?”
“Look, doll, Katie Finn was a great role. Katie Finn launched you. Peppermint Grove was a great vehicle to get you nominated but it didn’t get you the little gold man.”
“And this will?”
“Probably not, but you never know. Point is, you’ve got to keep moving. Don’t become one of those independent art house robots. Variety, Tilly. Like the magazine. Variety. Every few years go ahead and sign up for the latest Jane Austen rehash, but don’t make that your bread and butter. There will be another Peppermint Grove, I promise there will. Okay? I promise. But wait for the right one, kiddo, and in the meantime, keep broadening your appeal as an actor who can do it all. You need a romantic comedy under your belt too. You’ve never had a blockbuster action role and Simon’s right on this one, Tilly. Pryce Point is a great place to get your foot in the door.”
All I could do was sigh. It was not like I had anything else competing for my attention and Milton Chenowith was lacking neither persuasive ability nor timing. He leaned across the desk and handed me a sheet of notepaper.
“Here, take a look at the starting line up.”
“Zack West?”
“The Golden Boy himself.”
“Holding on to that bit of information, were you?”
“I know how to lay it out, doll,” he said mischievously. “He’ll be a huge draw. Huge. This thing really can’t lose.”
I kept reading. It was an impressive roster of who’s who.
“They’re all on board?”
“Most of them. Although you know how that goes. Most of them are a sure bet I think. Cecil Abrams doesn’t fool around or pinch his pennies. And on board or not, I’ll tell you this, kiddo, they all want a piece of it and they’re not all wrong. And their agents aren’t wrong about this. You don’t want to be left out of this one.”
“They want me for the role?”
“You’re not alone in the field. But you’re on the list. Lots of your contemporaries would like a crack at Dr. Sienna Price.”
“And Zack.”
“Yes. They all want time with the Golden Boy.”
“You know his real name is Zel? Zel something?”
“Wippo. Zel Wippo. Hey, wouldn’t you?”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Neither should you. Zack’s about as big as they get right now. This thing can’t lose, Tilly. Let Simon set it up.”
“Who am I up against?”
“They’re not talking, but I’m sure you can guess. No one you can’t beat.”
I looked around at the faces staring back at me from the walls. “You mean no one that you and Simon represent.”
He let out his Ed McMahon chortle and leaned back in his high leather chair exuding his implacable charm. The Duke looked down with that wry sideways smile.
“You’re a pistol, Tilly,” he said. “You’re a tough cookie all right. But I don’t see the world that way. Whose idea do you think it was to get Jimmy Stewart to do The Shootist? Think I represented Jimmy Stewart? Of course not. But I knew it would be good for John, so I made it happen. Don’t you worry about who I represent. I’m in your corner. What do you say we give this one a shot?”
We looked at each other for a moment, me at him and he and the jowly Marion Morrison back at me, until I finally broke under the weight of his gathering smile.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’ll read the script and let you know.”
“Absolutely. Make sure it feels good.” He gave me a wink. “And if it doesn’t feel good, come on back here so I can talk at you until it does feel good.”
I left my agent and The Duke and went home. I did not entirely know my own feelings, which seemed alien and agitated in my thoughts. I pretended to read the newspaper. I scoured my sink. I blended fruit. I called my mother and fully regretted it before she answered, incapable of patience enough to endure my father’s latest insensitivity. I ended the call too abruptly, which only made me feel guilty. Or, at least more guilty, for there was already a layer of remorse in my heart before I had even dialed the number. I could not explain it, but it was there, like a shadow or a smell.
I scoured the sink again. Milton had been right; I was fresh. I was optimistic and on fire with my own future. I was burning – consigned to a brightening pyre that could be seen from farther and farther away with every passing year. The promise of forward movement after so much waiting was exhilarating. But for all of its affirming, helium-like qualities, it was an ephemeral, hollow sort of joy that filled me and whenever I allowed myself to become still and quiet in my life, I felt stalked by desolation.
The sun was high and bright in the sky and there was still time for a run. I changed clothes and headed off to Griffith Park, the top down and my hair whipping. Pryce Point lay in the seat next to me, flapping in the breeze and chattering about itself.
Griffith Park was one of the few places in Los Angeles that never quite felt to me like it was of Los Angeles. It is an urban oasis of sorts, lacking the inauthentic airs and graces of its environs. An oasis, but never quite the manufactured, manicured, movie-set oasis of the kind scattered throughout the city; the kind made mostly for tourists and the exported image that made Los Angeles as much a product as a location.
Griffith Park was different. Never mind that the venerated Hollywood sign – that quintessential American emblem that Angus Mann always said with a hint of tragedy defined America more, in the end, than the Constitution or Statue of Liberty – is stuck into the forested hills of Griffith Park like a cheesy “My Name Is:” convention sticker. Never mind that the park has, itself, starred in countless films, from Birth of a Nation to Rebel Without a Cause. Never mind the L.A. Zoo and the Greek Theater and the tourists. And, as with so many actors, never mind the scandal and the inglorious headlines, for even if accurate, they do not reach the depth of truth. Griffith Park was different.
I ran my usual route, a combination of paved and dirt trails that comprised a patchwork circle of about three miles. I started back for the car but still felt oddly restless and unsatisfied. I doubled back, negotiating a phalanx of well-appointed baby strollers, and headed uphill for the observatory.
The park had been a gift to the city back in 1896 by self-made millionaire and silver mining magnate turned philanthropist, Colonel Griffith J. Griffith. A fortune-hunting pioneer of epic dimension, Colonel Griffith left his native Wales as a young boy and came to America where he taught himself mineralogy and learned the industry of precious metal extraction. Largely from his work developing the silver mines in Chiluahua, Mexico, he quickly built a fortune and a reputation that was testament to America’s promise as a gateway to unregulated environmental plunder.
Griffith’s acclaim as a boundlessly generous city founder suffered an ignominious death when he attempted to murder his wife by shooting her in the eyeball with a pistol. In a trial rivaling the worst Hollywood script, gritty and independently wealthy Mrs. Griffith survived the assault, hired a special prosecutor from Sacramento, and testified in person at her husband’s trial. She described not only his murderous intent, but also his state of mind, which could be readily implied from his accusations that Mrs. Griffith
had been conspiring with the Pope in a plot to overthrow Teddy Roosevelt. After two years in San Quentin, Colonel Griffith emerged to face a scornful public, which, in its collective disdain, ultimately voted to rename Griffith Peak to Mount Hollywood. He died in 1919, several years after giving the city another $100,000 to build an observatory on the uppermost plateau of the park. The city accepted the gift and built the observatory, but denied Griffith’s atonement. Lore holds that when he was buried, lines of people formed at his headstone, which to this day is darkened along its edges with stains of urine.
But never mind the scandal and the headlines and the rumors, which, even if accurate, have no relevance to my life or remembrance. Here is what is important. Five times the size of Central Park in Manhattan, Griffith Park spans four thousand acres of woodland terrain stretching over chaparral-covered hills, beneath sunlit canopies of oak and walnut and lilac, split by deep rock canyons and seamed with trails that loop and meander and climb to a summit looking down upon the glass and steel of Los Angeles proper. The Griffith Park of my memory was an oasis of genuine green earth bordering a rising sea of smog, violence, celebrated vapidity, illusion, techno-idolatry, and mendacious, break-neck profiteering. Colonel Griffith’s legacy was, for me at least, a place of natural communion; a welcome respite from all that was Hollywood.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, with a suitcase, a useless English literature degree and a job offer to write for a reputable but overstuffed book review quarterly called The L.A.Q., I lived in a run down apartment building in Monterey Park, sandwiched between Alhambra to the north and East Los Angeles to the South, within ear shot of Interstate 10 and one stiff breeze away from the EPA Region 9 landfill baking in the sun on the far side of the Pomona Freeway. It was less of an apartment complex than a go-to housing project run by the County of Los Angeles Parole Board and the adult film industry. Car-pooling sign-up sheets to and from Van Nuys were commonly pinned above the mailboxes. There were daily brawls and screaming fits, and a colorful, screeching assemblage of squad cars in the parking lot on roughly a monthly basis. Cockroaches abounded.
Second only to the tiny Rancho Park cubicle where I worked, the Vista Sol Apartments complex was the worst habitat of my life, and emblematic of the hopelessness of my post-graduate options. I very nearly left within three weeks to return to Ohio and to take up again with my parents, which, at the age of twenty-one, was as good a measure of desperation as I could have ever conceived.
I stayed for six months before escaping to a four-plex in Westwood, a fortuitous change of location that coincided with my “discovery.” One is “discovered” in Hollywood. There is no resisting or circumnavigating that concept in show business. All that you were or ever have been is merely an inconsequential prelude to discovery, the point at which life is supposed to really begin. Lana Turner was born at the Schwab’s lunch counter on Sunset Boulevard. I was born in the home of a bent pipe cleaner of a man named Orin Twill.
Orin was not a movie producer and ours was not a typical you ought to be in pictures sort of encounter. He published a trade journal with a small but respectable circulation within investor circles, Second Take, was devoted to discussion of emergent trends in the American film industry. At the time of our brief acquaintance, Orin was polishing up a book he had written synthesizing the economic, cultural and political forces that, to Orin’s way of thinking, were simultaneously nourishing and co-opting the independent film movement. The L.A.Q. had been provided an advance copy and I was assigned to work on the review.
I remember Orin’s book – though I have forgotten its long, analytic title – as a loosely constructed, highly anecdotal work relying so heavily on interviews with the movers and shakers in the independent film movement that it was more a self-portrait of that movement than anything approaching an objective analysis. The L.A.Q. review of the book made this point rather strongly, and while the review was not published under my name since I was only an assistant, I felt bad enough that I never quite had the courage to contact Orin until several years later, after everything had changed.
My first and only actual meeting with Orin was for an afternoon at his modest but clean and precisely furnished home in Culver City. The door opened to reveal a tall, lanky man, completely bald, with an unfortunately long and sallow face that initially reminded me of a central casting butler at some haunted mansion. The sides of his face were drawn, as if by collapse, into the hollows of his mouth and his chin was an angular prominence that seemed to stretch his skin tightly around his skull. Fortunately, the familiarity of Orin’s voice came immediately to his rescue. I quickly found that he had an inner kindness and smart, lively eyes and a smile that deconstructed any resemblance to a ghoulish manservant.
We sat in his study, lined to capacity with books and smelling faintly of cedar wood and aging paper, at a desk that was not really large enough to accommodate us both. Over iced tea and, of all things, bits of pickles and cheese, he explained to me the thesis of his work. He spoke in a slow, measured cadence, choosing his words carefully, seeming to weigh them on his tongue before he let them out into the light. When I asked questions, Orin focused those deep-set eyes from beneath the shelf of his brow, regarding me with an intensity far beyond what my query required, as though he was taking some measure of the qualities in me that had coalesced to produce the question, or as though he was working on his own questions on a vastly different and more personal subject.
He painstakingly walked me through the sheaves of research that he had stacked in a cardboard box beneath his computer, interview transcripts mostly, and expounded on some of the personalities that he had encountered in the course of the project. Orin referred to motion picture royalty as personalities, as though he had somehow managed to channel the essence of discarnate celebrity and avoid the distaste or inconvenience of interacting with the whole person. He loved and loathed these people simultaneously.
Robert Redford was only one example. Redford, for whom Orin had the greatest admiration and who was to be writing a forward to the book, was, nevertheless, an “incredibly difficult and unaccommodating personality” because, as Orin put it, “Bob knows what he likes and has his own way of doing things when it comes to business matters.” We spent some time discussing Orin’s mounting irritation at the lack of even a draft of the promised forward and agonizing over just how one went about reordering the priorities of someone like Robert Redford without losing the opportunity altogether.
“I mean, you tell me, just how many messages does one leave?”
As we spoke, Orin’s eight year old, mop-headed daughter – who introduced herself to me from behind her father’s leg as Miss Rosalie Twill – sat on the floor coloring quietly in the pages of a large, flat book. Rosalie, dressed in a bright yellow jumper over a pale blue tee, hummed to herself as she worked, the pink flesh of her tongue protruding first here and then there as if some curious little creature inside of her was eagerly popping out to check on her progress. Every so often, Rosalie would look up from her book, take stock of her surroundings, regard us from across the room, and then, with slow, precise movements, withdraw another assortment of wax crayons from the small wooden box at her side, re-submerging herself into a magical oblivion of her own.
I learned that Rosalie’s mother, Orin’s wife of many years, had died of an aneurism when Rosalie was barely four. With a slow, contemplative reverence for the event, Orin offered this information a good three hours into my visit, by way of explaining Rosalie’s constant presence in the study as we spoke.
“She stays pretty close,” he said, and I knew that what he meant was that their closeness and need for each other was fiercely mutual. And I understood that his need for her was still, perhaps increasingly, desperate.
“Must be tough being a single parent,” I said, not mentioning his age.
“It’s tough enough just being a parent, period. You married?” he asked, skewering a cube of cheese with a toothpick.
“No,” I said. “G
od no.”
“You’re not from here, are you?”
“No. About eight months now.”
“Thought so. Where’s your family?”
“Ohio. Near Columbus.”
“Are you an only?”
“No. Two brothers.”
“I wished we’d had the time to make another,” he said of the wife who was gone but still very nearby. “I’d like Rosalie to have a brother or a sister.”
I looked at the tiny figure tucked into her nook of shelving, busily working on something red. If she knew that we were talking about her, Rosalie did not let on.
“She’s adorable,” I said and meant it.
“Yes. One day she’ll grow up and break my heart. No doubt about it.”
“Boys,” I said with a sage nod.
He gave a laugh and scratched his bald head with his finger tips.
“No. Not boys. Hollywood. It’s how we do things here in California, Tilly. It’s how girls here betray their fathers. Boys I can handle. I’m afraid it’s the industry that will take her and have its way. It’s already seducing her and she has no idea. Her aspirations are already aligning the arrow through my heart.”
He looked at me wryly, leaning back in his chair. He ate another cube of cheese. “But then, your father must already know a thing or two about that kind of betrayal.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he moved the back of his right hand in my direction, as if performing some sort of blessing, “you’ve got that whole classical, atavistic, pre-Raphealite enchantment thing going here. You’re young and gorgeous and vibrant and living in Los Angeles playing footsies with the movie industry. You live here, but you’re not of here. You’re fresh and unspoiled. You’re a catch. It’s only a matter of time if you ask me. If your father’s heart isn’t broken already, it will be soon.”
He was joking with me, I knew, and I responded as such. And yet, there was something more serious hidden in his tone that kept me from dismissing his words.
