Smoke and Mirrors

I sat outside in the courtyard and stared at the two white carp and the one scarlet and white carp. They looked, I decided, like Escher drawings of fish, which surprised me, as it had never occurred to me there was anything even slightly realistic in Escher’s drawings.

Pious Dundas was polishing the leaves of the plants. He had a bottle of polisher and a cloth.

“Hi, Pious.”

“Suh.”

“Lovely day.”

He nodded, and coughed, and banged his chest with his fist, and nodded some more.

I left the fish, sat down on the bench.

“Why haven’t they made you retire?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you have retired fifteen years ago?”

He continued polishing. “Hell no, I’m a landmark. They can say that all the stars in the sky stayed here, but I tell folks what Cary Grant had for breakfast.”

“Do you remember?”

“Heck no. But they don’t know that.” He coughed again. “What you writing?”

“Well, last week I wrote a treatment for this film. And then I wrote another treatment. And now I’m waiting for . . . something.”

“So what are you writing?”

“A story that won’t come right. It’s about a Victorian magic trick called ‘The Artist’s Dream.’ An artist comes on to the stage, carrying a big canvas, which he puts on an easel. It’s got a painting of a woman on it. And he looks at the painting and despairs of ever being a real painter. Then he sits down and goes to sleep, and the painting comes to life, steps down from the frame and tells him not to give up. To keep fighting. He’ll be a great painter one day. She climbs back into the frame. The lights dim. Then he wakes up, and it’s a painting again . . .”

“. . .and the other illusion,” I told the woman from the studio, who had made the mistake of feigning interest at the beginning of the meeting, “was called ‘The Enchanted Casement.’ A window hangs in the air and faces appear in it, but there’s no one around. I think I can get a strange sort of parallel between the enchanted casement and probably television: seems like a natural candidate, after all.”

“I like ‘Seinfeld,’ ” she said. “You watch that show? It’s about nothing. I mean, they have whole episodes about nothing. And I liked Garry Shandling before he did the new show and got mean.”

“The illusions,” I continued, “like all great illusions, make us question the nature of reality. But they also frame—pun, I suppose, intentionalish—the issue of what entertainment would turn into. Films before they had films, telly before there was ever TV.”

She frowned. “Is this a movie?”

“I hope not. It’s a short story, if I can get it to work.”

“So let’s talk about the movie.” She flicked through a pile of notes. She was in her mid-twenties and looked both attractive and sterile. I wondered if she was one of the women who had been at the breakfast on my first day, a Deanna or a Tina.

She looked puzzled at something and read: “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll?”

“He wrote that down? That’s not this film.”

She nodded. “Now, I have to say that some of your treatment

is kind of . . .contentious. The Manson thing . . .well, we’re not sure it’s going to fly. Could we take him out?”

“But that’s the whole point of the thing. I mean, the book is called Sons of Man; it’s about Manson’s children. If you take him out, you don’t have very much, do you? I mean, this is the book you bought.” I held it up for her to see: my talisman. “Throwing out Manson is like, I don’t know, it’s like ordering a pizza and then complaining when it arrives because it’s flat, round, and covered in tomato sauce and cheese.”

She gave no indication of having heard anything I had said. She asked, “What do you think about When We Were Badd as a title? Two d’s in Badd.”

“I don’t know. For this?”

“We don’t want people to think that it’s religious. Sons of Man. It sounds like it might be kind of anti-Christian.”

“Well, I do kind of imply that the power that possesses the Manson children is in some way a kind of demonic power.”

“You do?”

“In the book.”

She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.

“Well, I don’t think the studio would see that as appropriate,” she said.

“Do you know who June Lincoln was?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“David Gambol? Jacob Klein?”

She shook her head once more, a little impatiently. Then she gave me a typed list of things she felt needed fixing, which amounted to pretty much everything. The list was TO: me and a number of other people, whose names I didn’t recognize, and it was FROM: Donna Leary.

I said Thank you, Donna, and went back to the hotel.

I was gloomy for a day. And then I thought of a way to redo the treatment that would, I thought, deal with all of Donna’s list of complaints.

Another day’s thinking, a few days’ writing, and I faxed the third treatment off to the studio.

Pious Dundas brought his scrapbook over for me to look at, once he felt certain that I was genuinely interested in June Lincoln—named, I discovered, after the month and the President, born Ruth Baumgarten in 1903. It was a leatherbound old scrapbook, the size and weight of a family Bible.

She was twenty-four when she died.

“I wish you could’ve seen her,” said Pious Dundas. “I wish some of her films had survived. She was so big. She was the greatest star of all of them.”

“Was she a good actress?”

He shook his head decisively. “Nope.”

“Was she a great beauty? If she was, I just don’t see it.”

He shook his head again. “The camera liked her, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t it. Back row of the chorus had a dozen girls prettier’n her.”

“Then what was it?”

“She was a star.” He shrugged. “That’s what it means to be a star.”

I turned the pages: cuttings, reviewing films I’d never heard of—films for which the only negatives and prints had long ago been lost, mislaid, or destroyed by the fire department, nitrate negatives being a notorious fire hazard; other cuttings from film magazines: June Lincoln at play, June Lincoln at rest, June Lincoln on the set of The Pawnbroker’s Shirt, June Lincoln wearing a huge fur coat—which somehow dated the photograph more than the strange bobbed hair or the ubiquitous cigarettes.