Driver's Education (23 page)

1974: Los Angeles

By Colin A. McPhee

I saw her again when we'd both become adults, when she read for a role in
The Family Room
during a casting session that took place in an overlit office on Wilshire. I might not have recognized her if it hadn't been whispered—not just by me, but by many others—that she was the most terrible actress we'd seen that day, which was saying something special, because all we'd seen that day were terrible actresses.

But first:

I'd come west from Sleepy Hollow when I was twenty-seven and I was determined to write movies. I could have stayed in New York, but the city had started to drag on me: While walking along Fifth Avenue, or Park, or Madison, I'd begun to feel suffocated in the shadows of the skyscrapers—a skyline that, trapped by constant clouds, seemed like a giant inhalation itself. In Manhattan, I treaded the sidewalks nervously, overly aware of the city's brawny muscle. A person was expected to speak quickly, to get to the point; if what you had to say couldn't be said by the time a breath ran out, chances were you were saying it wrong.

I took to L.A. instantly. For the first time in years, I felt I could breathe. I often found myself making circles around the trunks of palm trees just because there was space, just because I could. On weekends, I would climb into Laurel Canyon and pick my way through the mismatched
architecture of the homes. Long, low ranch houses set improbably into steep slopes. A Mediterranean villa sharing a tangle of bougainvillea with a Japanese pagoda. A medieval castle whose towers grazed the red tiled roof of a Spanish mission. I breathed in all of it—all of this aggressive stab at recreating the Actual that resulted in some monstrously beautiful Artificial. Then afterward, once the sky had turned neon, I'd make my way to the ocean. I'd stand at the edge of piers and in the middle of boardwalks.

I rented a five-hundred-square-foot studio apartment on Gower and Afton that had a view of the Hollywood sign on days when the smog had blown out across the Pacific instead of against the hills. There was a small kitchenette with a refrigerator that the landlord said was new, but nevertheless smelled of plastic and fish. I bought a futon, and also a small writer's desk from a secondhand store on Fairfax after the salesman convinced me—too easily—that John Osborne had once owned the piece. My mattress I wrapped in two sets of sheets and set it, frameless, on the floor. I refused to close the window. I painted the room's grey walls white, and I plastered them with posters that Earl had allowed me to take from the Avalon.
The Graduate
and
The Sting
and
Paper Moon
and
Chinatown
. Then, above the tub in the bathroom:
Jaws
.

For three years I had a job sorting mail at Capitol Records. Mostly the envelopes I opened contained requests, demands, receipts. I'd pass the note to the appropriate party; would move on to the next parcel, the next package; would stripe my hand with another paper cut. A handful of times each day, though, there'd be a fan letter. Some hand-scribbled note for the Sylvers; a seventeen-year-old's gushing review of the latest Buzzcocks. Stationery for Bob Seger—graffitied with a sloppy lipstick imprint of a kiss. And these, sometimes, I'd steal. I'd bring them back to John Osborne's desk in my apartment on Afton. Before I began writing each night, I'd curve out the letters in the salutations with a felt-tip pen; I'd change “Cole” to “Colin,” “Maze” to “McPhee.” I didn't know a thing about music and I'd never played an instrument, but I don't think I particularly cared what they were being praised for, so much as the fact that they were being praised.

My script,
The Family Room,
was sold two days before I turned thirty
by an agent named Sammy who felt obligated to represent me after I'd gotten his alcoholic cousin a job in the Capitol mailroom. To celebrate, he took me to a Mexican restaurant on Beverly Boulevard called El Coyote, where we drank watered-down margaritas from glasses the size of soup bowls. There was a mariachi band that bobbled through the room, and as its members sidestepped in the thin alleys between the tables their sombreros knocked and snagged upon the low-hanging lamps. I remember having the unsettling feeling that in the wake of this good news I wasn't asking the right questions—or, that I wasn't asking any questions at all. Which was preventing Sammy from what he did best, from what I was paying him to do, which was, namely, to answer my questions.

I scooped up puddles of salsa with paper-thin chips before Sammy suggested—desperately—that we order another round of drinks.

He ran a finger along the rim of his glass, gathering salt.

“They're thrilled with it. The folks at the studio,” Sammy said. “It's practically all they talk about.”

“Really? That's great. That's just so great.” A chip broke in half in the salsa; I used the tip of my thumb to try to fish it out without him noticing. “What are they saying about it?”

“That they're thrilled.”

Our waitress, a blond midwestern-looking woman in a
quinceañera
dress, set down two plates piled with tacos set up like dominos.

Sammy picked away the things he didn't like—cilantro, red onions, fatty pieces of beef. “They love how inventive it is. How imaginative.”

I said, “That's exactly what I'd want them to say.”

But it wasn't inventive or imaginative. At least not in my mind. And that was intentional. For more than a decade—since Clare dissected the projector at the Avalon; since I listened to my father con his way through a series of imperfect stories—I'd swapped out the Fantastic for the Real. I no longer concerned myself with boys who slipped into movie screens, or with bloody Viking battles. Certain directors I used to idolize—Kubrick, Fritz Lang—I now dubbed as withering hacks; I've still never seen
2001: A Space Odyssey
. I wanted a world that I could see, and so I turned to realism. Cinema verité. I obsessed over Rouch,
and Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard. I wrote whole scenes—whole goddamned
scripts
—about feeding a dog. About drying the dishes. About a couple taking four hours to make a single bed.

I didn't want to create any new worlds. All I wanted it to do was wipe the grime away from the window we were already looking through in the first place.

So I think that above all else, I was proud of
The Family Room
's truthfulness. Of the basic familiarity of its subjects: a son, a daughter, and a father deciding what to do with the mother's étagère after her sudden, unanticipated death. As the objects—tiny urns, crystal sculptures of animals, a chipped piece of coral from the Indian Ocean—were removed from the case and parsed out, so were the fragile bonds that had been barely keeping the family intact.

Sammy sucked tequila from two cubes of ice. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Dustin Hoffman?”

“No.”

•  •  •

And as I said—she came to the casting call for
The Family Room
, which the film's producers asked me to attend. In a single day she read along with five hundred other girls for the part of the daughter, Kate. I suppose I should've recognized her when she was first called into the room, but we'd changed so much since the Avalon. I'd grown into myself and had worn my skin, while she'd learned how to piece together her beauty, I think: she took bits of it from other people and created an allure that seemed to envelop her, instead of inhabit her. Lips painted to look fuller, pushed-up breasts, and sleeveless tan arms. Legs like daggers that I couldn't stop staring at. When she looked at me, I smiled, just like how I'd been smiling at everyone else. I read the new name on the top of her résumé, and I returned to my notes.

But then she read. The side that we'd given the actresses to read was a monologue in which Kate, sitting in a darkened family room with her brother Max, recounts the day her mother came home with a small Baccarat statue of a lioness sleeping with her cub.

She said, “I remember when she showed me this.” She pantomimed
holding the crystal piece with two hands. “She told me,
That's you and me, baby. That's you and me.
” She bit her upper lip and brought her right hand to her chest, fluttering her fingers along the base of her neck.

The casting director removed his glasses and stopped her. “Let's start over.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Let's try it again. And this time, try not to do that hand thing—the fingers against the neck.” Then: “It's very . . . I don't know, it's very Faye Dunaway in
Network
.”

“Oh,” she said. “All right.”

She began the scene again, but the casting director stopped her a second time—now, just fifteen seconds in.

“And that—that was very Ingrid Bergman.”

She smiled nervously; she crossed her heels at her ankles and teetered to the left. “Was it?”

Twice more: too Diane Ladd, too Jane Fonda.

The casting director slipped his glasses back on, balancing the frames on his beaked nose. He said, “Thank you, Ms.—”

“Moore.”

When the door had closed behind her, I leaned over to one of the producers sitting next to me and said, “I think I know that girl.”

•  •  •

I tracked her down a second time in the parking lot outside the casting office—a squat grey building with two identical rows of square windows. We'd taken half an hour for lunch, and I found her leaning against a Honda, smoking a cigarette like Rita Hayworth.

“Clare?” I said as I approached.

“Colin? Shit, Colin, I knew that was you. Really—the second I walked in there I
knew
it was you.”

“You changed your last name.”

“No one wants an autograph from Clare Murkowski.”

We both commented on how surprised we were to see each other—but really, there were few other places that would make more sense for us to reunite. Given how much time we'd spent in the Avalon's darkened
theater, how much time we'd spent living in film frames, it was inevitable that we'd both end up here.

She stubbed out the cigarette and waved the smoke away from her face. When she hugged me she lifted herself onto her toes and pressed into me. Her neck, her cheeks smelled like lilac and smoke. When she finally released me, she still kept her hands on my arms. “Look at you! Some Hollywood big shot.”

“No,” I laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

She straightened the lapels on my blazer and dusted ash from her cigarette that'd landed on my shoulder. “Who knew you could look so good out of that shit they made us wear at the Avalon?”

“You're awful.”

“I mean it—those grey suits flattered no one. They made us all look like popcorn-wielding elephants.”

I laughed and she smiled and her cheeks turned red.

She said, “But really, what are you doing here?”

Two girls with folded scripts passed by, reciting the monologue to each other. “Actually, I wrote it. I'm the writer.”

“The writer!” She reached into her purse for another cigarette. “That's great, Colin. That's really something.”

“It was mostly luck, I think.”

She lit a match and cupped it against the wind.

“Oh, don't do that. Don't be so modest. Especially when you don't mean it.” She held her cigarette at chin level and the smoke framed her face, gauzing over her green eyes, her lifted cheekbones. She'd grown into her beauty, Clare. “You want to smoke? Probably not. Ron tells me that I'm the only person in this town who smokes anymore.”

“Who's Ron?”

She scratched the back of her neck with her free hand. On all sides, the sun reflecting off the windshields blinded us. “Oh—no one.”

I said, “Sure. Sure, I'll smoke.”

I took her book of matches. I slouched against the Honda and held the cigarette between my thumb and middle finger. I exhaled from the corners of my mouth.

“How am I doing?” I asked.

She studied me like she did when we were kids outside the theater. She moved the crook in my elbow to a different angle. Pushed against the insides of my thighs so my feet edged apart.

“Almost there. Almost Steve McQueen.”

We both watched as the two girls who had been running lines fixed their makeup in the reflection of car windows, as they stapled headshots to the backs of their résumés.

I said, “So how is all this going?”

“It's great. It's fantastic.” She switched her cigarette to her left hand. “God, I was horrible in there, wasn't I. I was really horrible.”

“You weren't. You were wonderful,” I lied. “They've been brusque with everyone.”

“I always get that, you know. They're always telling me that I do things like everyone else. It's infuriating.”

“Then maybe start doing them like yourself?”

“No,” she said. “No, that wouldn't work, either.”

“You never know. It might,” I told her and she kissed my cheek.

When my lunch break was over, I asked her if she'd like to get dinner.

“You know,” I said. “Just to catch up.” We'd just finished our cigarettes and had tossed the butts into the gutter.

“I think that'd be nice.”

“Will Ron care?”

She laughed and dipped her chin into her shoulder. She tucked her bangs behind her ears. Basically Marilyn Monroe in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
even though her hair was brown.

•  •  •

We met at a place on Sunset called the Rainbow Bar and Grill, which Clare told me used to be called Villa Nova, where Marilyn Monroe had her first blind date with Joe DiMaggio, where Vincente Minnelli proposed to Judy Garland. The dark walls were cut up with framed pictures of famous Hollywood types, many of whom were now dead, and I took this as a sign of the restaurant's inevitable decline to kitsch—a theory
that'd be rubber-stamped two years later when John Belushi would purportedly eat his last meal there. A bowl of pea soup.