What Movies Made Me Do

by Susan Braudy

  “How’s your work?” I asked.

  “I had a showdown with that High Episcopalian putz from Salk,” he began.

  I loved hearing his voice, husky with feelings, a little high-falutin; these native New Yorkers broaden their a’s and drop their r’s. I smiled at him, clasping my hands under my chin, listening. I was dying to avoid the fight sizzling under our conversation.

  “He’s stealing my Indian molecule assistant, but he can’t take two goddamn years of research and my government grant with him. If the kid goes to Salk, he goes naked. I’m afraid all the work I’ve done will come to nothing after all these years.”

  I suddenly remembered how, when we first met, Barry hypnotized me at a dinner party with those suffering intelligent eyes. He wasn’t thin or young, but he wove word spells, describing his work on the mysteries of the brain in glittering and passionate scientific patois. The next day I played old rock-and-roll records and dreamed of introducing him to my mother. She’d love discussing books with a bonafide Nobel laureate-to-be.

  Now he tossed his fork onto the table. “I can’t believe it, you’re not listening,” he accused. “We have got to talk.” My heart sank. I knew this Salk intrigue by heart.

  “I was thinking about the night we met.” I blushed.

  “Don’t sweet-talk me,” he snapped, “like some meretricious movie mogul.”

  “I can’t win with you.” I sagged over my cleared plate.

  “I needed your advice,” Barry added balefully. “But you were out of the office all day.” He admitted my expertise only in office politics. It wasn’t a big moral compliment. He looks down his nose at movies. I think he envies the glamour.

  “I was out working.”

  “Your job is ruining us. That’s the big problem.”

  “I’m in trouble,” I blurted.

  “Oh, my dear.” His whispery voice shook with elegant hysteria. “Tell me what the bastards did now.”

  Tears smarted my eyes. He was being kind.

  “Well, I’m worried. Anita didn’t take my calls today. And Michael Finley’s going to find out. It’s not like her.”

  “Nobody in their right mind spends nine million dollars to make a movie.” He cut a corner of his baked endive. “Maybe she ran off with Jack what’s-his-name, your trampy star.”

  “Jack Hanscomb? No way,” I said too fast.

  In the middle of any discussion Barry likes his little jokes. Everybody in the world knows Jack’s last name.

  “Admit it, you’re drawn to that man,” Barry said.

  “I’m not that dumb,” I lied. For once he had me. He has a fantastic picture of me as sexually uncontrollable; because he’s attracted to me, he believes all men are.

  Barry was saying, “Well, just call the police, a woman like Anita doesn’t disappear off the Israeli coast. It isn’t Nazi Germany.” He chuckled. Any whiff of a reference to the Holocaust satisfies him profoundly. “Forget the movie, find yourself some serious work.”

  I flashed anger. “I spent the last three dinners fixing your Salk fight.”

  “Keeping score?” he asked. “How generous.”

  I closed my mouth. Maybe I’d just call Jack Hanscomb and ask him. At least he’d get it about why I love movies. I pictured him oiled and skinny and scowling at me on a beach in loose white bathing trunks. Anita made him lose twenty pounds to play Jesus.

  “Tell me what you think our personal problems are,” Barry demanded like a teacher.

  “Not tonight, please,” I begged.

  When the check arrived, I said wistfully, “Want to share a chocolate mousse?”

  “I’m finished eating,” Barry said, “and I never eat mousse. Isn’t there somebody in your past who was always ministering to the wrong need?”

  He had wheedled a portrait of my mother out of me when I was angry at her, and now he was using it against me. I watched him studying the check. Barry wanted a modern career woman who venerated him like an old-fashioned patriarch. I was crazy enough to love him, but I couldn’t do it much longer. He was so complex. He had a child’s mood swings. Why can’t the hurt-child part of a human being flake away like dry skin, especially if the adult part succeeds so well?

  My old school chum Anita wouldn’t get into such a pickle with Barry. I smiled ruefully. She has a good life and she’s very single. She gets cozy with some new guy in a rented picture-book Connecticut farmhouse, then like clockwork after two years, she calls me, sheds three tears, packs her bags, speeds back to New York—and bingo, she’s free again. The men never know what hit them. She just likes to be alone when she germinates a movie. I was worried sick about her. I called her in Israel five times today. She’s been there for thirty-nine days directing Prophet. I got the money from the studio after we got Jack Hanscomb to fall in and make the package. He plays Jesus. I developed the script, hired Anita, and now I’m supervising the shoot. If she’s still working on it.

  Anita and I have both gone far in the last twenty years. She’s directed eight television movies plus six documentaries and last year she won an Oscar, now sitting in her guest bathroom, for best short-subject documentary.

  She has refused to touch a movie she hadn’t developed and written—until my project. I spent six years convincing her to do it. Then she awed the other studio executives at our meetings; instead of talking about below-the-line expenses and rolling break-evens, she cited Aristotelian catharsis and Plato’s pure forms. Her publicity policy is no interviews unless she’s the magazine cover. Her last television documentary about a battered faculty wife was reviewed all over the world.

  But that film was made six years ago. There are lots of rumors about why she hadn’t worked on a feature since. People whisper opium, nervous collapse, but only I know how blocked she is as a writer.

  A year ago I sat up all night in the living room of her penthouse overlooking Fifth Avenue. Usually a producer brings the package to the studio, but I was working overtime.

  “Honey, it violates my artistic credo,” she said, inhaling her twisted marijuana cigarette.

  “It’s your shot at the big screen,” I said. “Your big break.”

  “I like my millions of television viewers,” she shot back, “and I write my own stuff.”

  “You’ll never work again if you keep waiting for the muse.”

  “That’s encouraging.” She flounced over to her telescope at the window. She always wears stiletto boots to compensate for her shortness.

  “You should work,” I said doggedly, “you’re a major talent.”

  “You talk like one of those philistine money people.”

  “I want to make this movie. It’ll sell in all the major world markets, and it’ll show millions of teenagers how Jesus’ message grew from Jewish guys in the Old Testament.”

  “Carol, you’ve been reeling me in for years, trying to get me involved, asking me story questions, making me think Jesus was like some Jewish graduate student.”

  I tried to look surprised.

  “Your ego’s all wrapped up in it, mine isn’t,” she continued, aiming the long instrument at the streaky pink sunrise over Central Park. She shook her head. “On the other hand, I’m sick and tired of making prime-time dramas about some modern woman trying to choose between a charge account at Bloomingdale’s and orgasms.”

  “Let’s remember your first love, Cecil B. De Mille,” I coaxed. “You’re a Jew, you’ll be striking a blow against anti-Semitism all over the world.”

  She made a face. “Don’t be such a megalomaniac, and remember, De Mille was a terrible anti-Semite. But this story’s got legs—first an immaculate conception in a time of political upset, then a visionary Jewish boy preaches love for his fellow man, and everybody witnesses his summons to heaven. Then the story lives two thousand years as the underpinning of major religions, with people killing each other over it from time to time. Nobody’d believe it if Spielberg invented it as a kid’s fairy tale.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Don’t forg
et the new part is that it’s for the young-adult market and Jesus is supposed to be very sweet and Jewish and hamish.”

  “Closed set.”

  “I can’t even visit?”

  She shook her head. After she signed on, everybody at the studio was bitterly disappointed. She ignored Michael Finley when he asked to have lunch with her. As studio president, Michael hoped to drop her name to powerful agents while he passed on their projects. He feared her because he considered her an intellectual.

  Actually, she outfoxed everybody. She’s a bigger star-spangled glitzball than Mae West. She loves everything about movies I do—power fights, career gambles, killer hustlers, creative stuff, happy endings, money, and glamour. Before she left for Israel she drove me around Manhattan in her unheated antique cream Rolls while she complained about losing her anonymity. That day she was wearing her old Bryn Mawr freshman blazer over a silver lamé jumpsuit. “You’re the last of the movie queens,” I told her.

  Then I waved goodbye while her cape sucked wind on a runway at Kennedy Airport. She was deep into pre-production—studying Renaissance paintings and screening Bresson and Rossellini’s religious stuff. She had filled two cargo planes with old American movies on cassettes, hundreds of paperbacks, props, new German computerized cameras with video screens, and cartons of diet Dr Pepper. We made a deal with the Israeli government to shoot exteriors in the Old City of Jerusalem and do half of the principal photography on a small desert island off Tel Aviv where we restored an ancient Roman town.

  We had 251 people going over, including actors, crew, her mother, and two gifted young documentary-film makers who were in love with her and set to shoot a movie about her making a movie. The last I saw of her she was climbing the steps to her airplane blowing kisses and waving a green champagne bottle. While I snapped her picture with my old Rolleiflex, she kept shouting, “Bon voyage, Carol Young.”

  Now I watched Barry pull three dollar bills out of his wallet. I was insanely jealous of Anita; I was dying to go to Israel. “Is dinner expensive?” I asked, trying to remember what my first meal here cost.

  Barry laughed bitterly. “Why can’t you let me play the man? You want all the marbles—a woman’s vanity and a man’s control.” His moist eyes searched my face while he threw a new hundred-dollar bill on the pile. I reached out both arms, smoothing his hair. “Barry, let’s go home and try to hug.”

  His words came out in a singsong. “We have big problems and you won’t face them.”

  I clucked my tongue. He was always in pain. He loved fighting—it was sexy for him—but he was wearing me out.

  “Barry, I love you, it’s my goddamn birthday, can’t you table your injuries?”

  “Be kind to yourself,” he said in his martyred voice. Two red spots of anger stood out on his cheeks.

  Then he stood up, trying to compose his face. He kept smoothing his lapels, working up his anger.

  “Please don’t walk out, Barry. If you do, we’re finished.”

  He faced the front of the restaurant. He looked terrified, squaring his shoulders. He rushed past the maître d’ without seeing his outstretched hand. I felt like wailing like a deserted baby. I twisted to watch him push open the brass front door.

  The waiter hovered over the cash pile. “That’s it, m’dame?” he asked in Haitian-accented French. I slumped down in my seat, wanting to run out and throw my arms around Barry’s tense shoulders. Sometimes I shake him and shout how I love him, until he laughs at the silly spectacle we make.

  But tonight was different. Dammit, it was my fortieth birthday. I wiped my mouth. I was too old for this. My heart pounded. I knew he was headed for a late-night chat with his wife over their former kitchen table. My stomach hurt.

  The waiter wheeled the dessert cart, and the swirling creams and fruit tarts twinkled at me. I raised my head—I am a Hershey bar addict. “Chocolate mousse.” Nothing kills my appetite. The waiter fluttered his hands. “Enjoy.” He smiled.

  Years ago, I’d have been humiliated by Barry’s exit. I closed my eyes, sighing as the chocolate dissolved on my tongue. Heavenly.

  I licked my spoon and deposited another bill on Barry’s pile. I could hop a cab and be waiting in his lobby. But I realized I didn’t want to. I was tired of his fights. I was tired of admiring his mind and feeling unnurtured. I retrieved my briefcase and raccoon coat and went to the ladies’ room. The black tile walls glistened. I changed into my sneakers, avoiding my eyes in the smoked mirror.

  Happy birthday, baby, I told myself, as the chilling street air and wet snowflakes hit my face. I turned home, my knees aching, the end of a sugar rush from the mousse. Barry and I weren’t going to make it. Dammit, why should I bind my feet for him? The good parts weren’t worth the fights. He’ll never understand me, even though he’s got such a fancy mind. In fact, he’s a glamorous movie star of an intellectual.

  I pick the wrong men. I’m doing something wrong. My whole life I’ve been running after glamour. Barry dazzles my mind, but he’s a one-man band. As with my other former beaux, I let him pick me, he was so persuasive. I didn’t have to decide anything.

  But years ago I did propose—to my high school sweetheart—and we lasted ten years.

  Since then, I win the award for the fascinating monster collection. Before Barry was Sam Falco, a demonic movie director more charismatic than a football hero, and great on the seduction. Alas, his attention span is short—unless a three-picture deal is riding on it. I did pick up superb career management during the year we lived together.

  I stared at wilting pink azalea blossoms in a flower shop. Forty years old and time is passing. No time left to build a family. Face it, when I got divorced I traded away a shared personal life for ambition. But ambition is like cotton candy—it looks pretty and huge until you take a bite. I dashed past several men waiting for the red light to change. I saw myself on my sixty-fifth birthday, bent over, skinny, in black sneakers and with a long cane, teetering all alone into that fancy French restaurant. Of course I’d be welcome. The waiter would grasp my arm and tears would spring to my eyes then too; nobody will have hugged me for months.

  I suddenly saw my life with a beginning, middle, and end, like a good shooting script. I broke into a run at the last traffic light, making it across in front of two accelerating trucks. Snowflakes stuck to my raccoon coat.

  Now I walked into a snow flurry and onto Central Park South, as usual the only respectable solitary woman on the sidewalk. I was three canopies from my own. I missed Anita. I missed my project. And now something was wrong. She always takes my calls.

  I sighed as I entered my austere lobby. Suddenly I didn’t want to take the elevator up the sixteen floors. No kids, no husband at home waiting to shout happy birthday. Am I a biological failure? I buried all my lonely feelings for the last decade because my marriage breakup hurt so badly. Maybe I actually became a tough cookie.

  I turned the key to my front door, and in the dark I smelled fresh laundry and felt better. Rocky, my three-and-a-half-foot woolly standard poodle, hurled himself in welcome. I dropped my briefcase to the marble floor and scratched his throat while his tongue lolled out of one side of his grinning, loony mouth. Rocky, who was named for the box-office sleeper I knew would succeed, galloped into the kitchen. I felt along the butcher-block counter for his treat box. Then the satisfying sound of his teeth crunching his birthday biscuit.

  I walked slowly into my warm living room, savoring the wood and marble floors glistening with reflected skylight, the outlines of large plants, everything in its place. I am a woman of experience working for a living in New York. I am capable of great solitude. I am almost never bored. Everybody thinks I’m sophisticated. Until tonight it was fine. John Wayne wouldn’t cry. Bette Davis would lift her head proudly while the homecoming music swelled.

  I leaned against a leafy Flemish tapestry woven by young girls centuries ago for dowries. I looked out the big windows at the snow-filled gray north sky. Look, you have had a great life, I sai
d aloud. I have sailed in gentile yacht races. I work for a major Hollywood studio. I have heard complaints more interesting than novels from other women’s husbands. But I am no longer young. I am no longer the Bryn Mawr scholarship student, the virgin bride of a college English teacher, the awed Philadelphian determined to make it in Manhattan.

  In the bedroom I slipped on my flannel nightgown and then slid under the heavy covers wiggling my toes. It’s taken years to get the room this cozy the way I like it, soft and inviting in the dim streetlight. Rocky jumped up on all fours. He turned in concentric circles until he nested at my feet, his head resting on my ankles, his tail wagging. “We still got each other,” I said, switching off the lamp, closing my eyes, listening to my rushing uneven heartbeat.

  Panicked, I fell asleep and began dreaming I was trapped inside a satin-lined coffin. I poked my finger at my eye, but it passed through the flapping skin of my eyelid into my empty skull—my brain had rotted away.

  A ringing jarred me awake. Gulping air in the dark, I grabbed at the phone.

  The operator announced Jack Hanscomb with tight Hebrew vowels, and then a man’s voice burst on the line. My throat closed with shock.

  “Hey, Carol, you sleeping?” he whispered, his voice sweet and cocky like he was lying in bed next to me.

  “Not anymore. Why are you calling me?” I was shaking. Rocky put his cold nose in my palm.

  “I hear you never wear miniskirts anymore.”

  “That was years ago,” I said, trying to wake up. “How’s it going? You steam up the camera today?”

  “You alone?”

  “Yeah, and I’m scared.”

  “You’re allowed to be scared in the middle of the night,” he said in a soothing voice.

  I must be dreaming. Jack had called me twice in the office to complain politely about Anita, but he doesn’t call me at home. It had to be serious. I flashed back to the one-night stand we had six years ago, the night my marriage broke up, when I spotted him and tailed him up Madison Avenue like a nut. I remember how he lifted my ankle to my shoulder, my knee huge and white next to his famous face. I barely felt the friction between my legs. I’m leery of him even now. He’s a huge movie star, the Prince of Charm. A real wild card.