Smoke and Mirrors

They wanted the people to be more sympathetic. They wanted sharp lights and shadows, not shades of gray. They wanted the heroine to be a hero. And I nodded and took notes.

At the end of the meeting I shook hands with the Someone, and the assistant in the blue-rimmed spectacles took me off through the corridor maze to find the outside world and my car and my driver.

As we walked, I asked if the studio had a picture anywhere of June Lincoln.

“Who?” His name, it turned out, was Greg. He pulled out a small notebook and wrote something down in it with a pencil.

“She was a silent screen star. Famous in 1926.”

“Was she with the studio?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “But she was famous. Even more famous than Marie Provost.”

“Who?”

“‘A winner who became a doggie’s dinner.’ One of the biggest stars of the silent screen. Died in poverty when the talkies came in and was eaten by her dachshund. Nick Lowe wrote a song about her.”

“Who?”

“‘I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.’ Anyway, June Lincoln. Can someone find me a photo?”

He wrote something more down on his pad. Stared at it for a moment. Then wrote down something else. Then he nodded.

We had reached the daylight, and my car was waiting.

“By the way,” he said, “you should know that he’s full of shit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Full of shit. It wasn’t Spielberg and Lucas who were with Belushi. It was Bette Midler and Linda Ronstadt. It was a coke orgy. Everybody knows that. He’s full of shit. And he was just a junior studio accountant for chrissakes on the Indiana Jones movie. Like it was his movie. Asshole.”

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 4 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 semiattached 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.