Smoke and Mirrors

“I take it that you must have heard her talk.”

He grinned. “She said, ‘Boy, can you find what they did with my wrap?’ and when I come back with it, then she said, ‘You’re a fine one, boy.’ And the man who was with her, he said, ‘June, don’t tease the help’ and she smiled at me and gave me five dollars and said ‘He don’t mind, do you, boy?’ and I just shook my head. Then she made the thing with her lips, you know?”

“A moue?”

“Something like that. I felt it here.” He tapped his chest. “Those lips. They could take a man apart.”

He bit his lower lip for a moment, and focused on forever. I wondered where he was, and when. Then he looked at me once more.

“You want to see her lips?”

“How do you mean?”

“You come over here. Follow me.”

“What are we . . . ?” I had visions of a lip print in cement, like the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

He shook his head, and raised an old finger to his mouth. Silence.

I closed the books. We walked across the courtyard. When he reached the little fish-pool, he stopped.

“Look at the Princess,” he told me.

“The one with the red splotch, yes?”

He nodded. The fish reminded me of a Chinese dragon: wise and pale. A ghost fish, white as old bone, save for the blotch of scarlet on its back—an inch-long double-bow shape. It hung in the pool, drifting, thinking.

“That’s it,” he said. “On her back. See?”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

He paused and stared at the fish.

“Would you like to sit down?” I found myself very conscious of Mr. Dundas’s age.

“They don’t pay me to sit down,” he said, very seriously. Then he said, as if he were explaining something to a small child, “It was like there were gods in those days. Today, it’s all television: small heroes. Little people in the boxes. I see some of them here. Little people.

“The stars of the old times: They was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses and when you met them, they were still huge. People believed in them.

“They’d have parties here. You worked here, you saw what went on. There was liquor, and weed, and goings-on you’d hardly credit. There was this one party . . . the film was called Hearts of the Desert. You ever heard of it?”

I shook my head.

“One of the biggest movies of 1926, up there with What Price Glory with Victor McLaglen and Dolores Del Rio and Ella Cinders starring Colleen Moore. You heard of them?”

I shook my head again.

“You ever heard of Warner Baxter? Belle Bennett?”

“Who were they?”

“Big, big stars in 1926.” He paused for a moment. “Hearts of the Desert. They had the party for it here, in the hotel, when it wrapped. There was wine and beer and whiskey and gin—this was Prohibition days, but the studios kind of owned the police force, so they looked the other way; and there was food, and a deal of foolishness; Ronald Colman was there and Douglas Fairbanks—the father, not the son—and all the cast and the crew; and a jazz band played over there where those chalets are now.

“And June Lincoln was the toast of Hollywood that night. She was the Arab princess in the film. Those days, Arabs meant passion and lust. These days . . . well, things change.

“I don’t know what started it all. I heard it was a dare or a bet; maybe she was just drunk. I thought she was drunk. Anyhow, she got up, and the band was playing soft and slow. And she walked over here, where I’m standing right now, and she plunged her hands right into this pool. She was laughing, and laughing, and laughing . . .

“Miss Lincoln picked up the fish—reached in and took it, both hands she took it in—and she picked it up from the water, and then she held it in front of her face.

“Now, I was worried, because they’d just brought these fish in from China and they cost two hundred dollars apiece. That was before I was looking after the fish, of course. Wasn’t me that’d lose it from my wages. But still, two hundred dollars was a whole lot of money in those days.

“Then she smiled at all of us, and she leaned down and she kissed it, slow like, on its back. It didn’t wriggle or nothin’, it just lay in her hand, and she kissed it with her lips like red coral, and the people at the party laughed and cheered.

“She put the fish back in the pool, and for a moment it was as if it didn’t want to leave her—it stayed by her, nuzzling her fingers. And then the first of the fireworks went off, and it swum away.

“Her lipstick was red as red as red, and she left the shape of her lips on the fish’s back. —There. Do you see?”

Princess, the white carp with the coral red mark on her back, flicked a fin and continued on her eternal series of thirty-second journeys around the pool. The red mark did look like a lip print.

He sprinkled a handful of fish food on the water, and the three fish bobbed and gulped to the surface.

I walked back in to my chalet, carrying my books on old illusions. The phone was ringing: it was someone from the studio. They wanted to talk about the treatment. A car would be there for me in thirty minutes.

“Will Jacob be there?”

But the line was already dead.

The meeting was with the Australian Someone and his assistant, a bespectacled man in a suit. His was the first suit I’d seen so far, and his spectacles were a vivid blue. He seemed nervous.

“Where are you staying?” asked the Someone.

I told him.

“Isn’t that where Belushi . . . ?”

“So I’ve been told.”

He nodded. “He wasn’t alone, when he died.”

“No?”

He rubbed one finger along the side of his pointy nose. “There were a couple of other people at the party. They were both directors, both as big as you could get at that point. You don’t need names. I found out about it when I was making the last Indiana Jones film.”

An uneasy silence. We were at a huge round table, just the three of us, and we each had a copy of the treatment I had written in front of us. Finally I said:

“What did you think of it?”

They both nodded, more or less in unison.

And then they tried, as hard as they could, to tell me they hated it while never saying anything that might conceivably upset me. It was a very odd conversation.

“We have a problem with the third act,” they’d say, implying vaguely that the fault lay neither with me nor with the treatment, nor even with the third act, but with them.