The present was a latex-and-creature-fur wookie-mask, a pullover hat-to-the-neck complete with eye-holes and partly bared teeth-a perfect likeness of our motion-picture hero. "Leslie. . . !" I said. I loved it.
"Now you can tickle all your girlfriends with your soft furry face. Put it on."
"Right here at the airport in public you want me to. . . ?"
"Oh, put it on! For me. Put it on."
She charmed the ice out of me. I put on the mask, to please her, gave her a wookie-roar or two, and she laughed till she cried. Behind the mask I laughed too, and thought how much I cared for her.
"Come on, wookie," she said, brushing tears, impulsively taking my hand. "We'll be late."
True to her word, she drove us from the airport to MGM, where she was finishing a television film. Along the way I
noticed people looking frightened at me in the car, and took off the mask.
For one who had never been on a sound-stage, it was the same as being invited to the moon Complexity, that turned about the planet Deadline. Cables and stands and booms and cameras and dollies and tracks and ladders and catwalks and lights ... a ceiling so encrusted with enormous heavy lights I swore the beams would crack overhead. Men were everywhere, wrestling equipment into position, adjusting it, or perching in the midst of it waiting for the next ringing bell or flashing light.
She emerged from her dressing room in a gold Iam6 gown, or the better part of one, and glided to me across the cables and traps in the floor as though they were patterns on a rug. "Can you see OK from here?"
"Sure can." I squirmed in the stares of stagehands watching her; she was oblivious to them. I was nervous, self-conscious, a prairie-horse in a tropic jungle; she was at home. It felt to me as if the temperature was in the low hundreds; she was cool and fresh and bright.
"How do you do it? How can you act, with all this going on, all of us watching? I thought acting was sort of a private thing, somehow. ..."
"COMING THROUGH! HEADS UP!" The two men were rushing a tree onstage, and had she not touched me on the shoulder to step aside, I would have been branched through the side of a painted street.
She looked at me and at what I thought was chaos around us. "There's going to be an awful lot of waiting around while they're setting up the special effects," she said. "I hope you won't be bored."
"Bored? It's fascinating! And you're just as cool-aren't you the littlest bit nervous, to do it right?"
An electrician on the catwalk above us looked down at her and called across the ceiling, "Sure can see those mountains clear today, George! Beautiful! Oh, hi, Miss Parrish, how you doin', down there?"
She looked up and pressed the top of the gold lame to her chest. "Go on, you guys," she laughed, "Is that all you have to do?"
The electrician winked at me, shook his head. "Workman's compensation!"
She continued without so much as airown. "The producer's nervous. They're a day and a half behind. We might stay late tonight to make it up on overtime. If you get tired and I'm in the middle of something, run on back to the hotel and I'll call you later, if it's not too late."
"Doubt I'll get tired. Don't let me talk to you if I shouldn't be, if you want to study your lines. . . ."
She smiled. "No problem," she said, and glanced toward the set. "I ought to get in there now. Have fun."
Next to the camera, a fellow shouted, "First team! Places, please!"
Why wasn't she at least a little tense about remembering her lines? I'm lucky to remember words I've written myself, .without reading them over and over again. Why wasn't she nervous, with s
o much to remember?
The shooting began, one scene and then another, then one more. Not once did she look at her script. I felt as if I were a friendly spirit, watching the role she played in the drama onstage. She didn't miss a line. Watching her at work was watching a friend who was at the same time a stranger. I felt
a curious warm apprehension-my own sister, centered in lights and cameras!
Does it change the way I feel about her, I thought, to see her there?
Yes. There is something magical going on. She has skills and powers I haven't learned, and never will. I wouldn't have liked her less if she weren't an actress, but I did like her more because she was. There has always been electricity for me, pleasure hi meeting people who can do things that I can't. That Leslie was one of them pleasured me indeed.
Next day in her office, I asked a favor. "Can I borrow your telephone? I want to call the Writers' Guild. ..."
"Five five oh, one thousand," she said absently, pushing the phone toward me as she read a financing proposal from New York.