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.
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 Prevost.”
“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.