Seducing the Demon (16 page)

I remembered that Inge had once told me that when Arthur first asked her out, she was reluctant to go because he seemed to be in so much trouble. She believed in the maxim
Never fuck anyone with more troubles than yourself.
He was living at the Chelsea Hotel, post Marilyn Monroe, and was so depressed that Inge worried. She dated him against her better judgment and fell in love with “the integrity of his mind.” It was easy to fall in love with. He was what he seemed. His writing and his self were not divided. Arthur’s integrity was everywhere represented in his memorial service—and his friendships. Fame had not turned him into an asshole.

Some great writers are bastards. Some are towers of narcissism. Arthur had a gift for friendship that was born out of his fierce modesty. He was a carpenter as well as a playwright, and the two informed each other. Rebecca Miller read a poem of her father’s that was both about playwrighting and about carpentry. Arthur speaks of the wood he is fashioning into a useful object: “I endure even as I disappear” is the last line.

Tony Kushner pointed out that Arthur believed “when you speak, God is listening.” Edward Albee remembered that Arthur thought writing was only worth pursuing if it had “relevance to human survival.”

Memorial services are important for the living rather than the dead because they make us ask ourselves,
Have we done everything we’re supposed to do?
Time is running out. We’re next.

“I am sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in,” George McGovern remembered Arthur saying. He said it while Vietnam raged, but it’s even more relevant now. “Attention must be paid,” as Arthur wrote in
Death of
a
Salesman.
For writers as well as other people, “integrity of mind” is the most important attribute.

We live in a time when the most exalted lie most blatantly and nobody seems to care. Integrity has become an old-fashioned word. Integrity of mind is not even sought by most writers. As William Sloane Coffin said of Arthur Miller, “his absence is everywhere present.”

Poet Honor Moore quoted Arthur as saying, “When life disappointed me, I always had my writing.” Writing was not a choice but a need.

 

 

One summer in Venice, two decades ago, I ran into Anthony Burgess, sitting at a café on the
fondamenta
in Giudecca and spinning tales for a British camera crew. He was filming a documentary for U.K. television. I stayed to listen. I knew Burgess through our French translators, Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier, and he had been a fervent champion of my work—particularly my eighteenth-century fantasy,
Fanny.
Burgess was always worth listening to. His erudition was astounding. So was his wit.

After the filming, I invited Burgess and his wife, Liana, to a party my friend Liselotte Hohs, the artist, was giving for me. Anthony came, received the praise of his Italian and American readers, but stayed only an hour.

“I have to write,” he said, and he disappeared back to his place on the Giudecca. Liana stayed.

Anthony was forever running back to his room to write prose or compose his daily music. He was incapable of not writing. Then he developed cancer and died.

Last summer, after I spoke about him at the first Anthony Burgess Symposium in Manchester, England (his birthplace), his widow Liana warned my husband: “Don’t let her write so much. Writing shortened my husband’s life.”

“I couldn’t stop her from writing even if I wanted to,” Ken said. “Besides, it makes her happy.”

“Life is more important than writing,” Liana said.

“I hope not to have to choose,” I said.

 

 

No one in America is immune to show business. Maybe no one in the world is. We all hope our boring lives will be transformed by the thrill of performing for other people. And fame, riches and everlasting love will follow. For me there has been some truth in that. But not in the way I first thought.

Even babies respond to the camera with gleeful exhibitionism. My grandson Max shines when the camera comes his way, so did Molly. So do my nieces and nephews. The camera creates a magical transformation. It’s not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. From the Lascaux cave painters to the latest plump-lipped, skinny-hipped starlet—the need to duplicate our loves and fears is irresistible. Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.

Dolphins, whales and chimps don’t seem to have this need—though their intelligence may be higher than ours. I certainly hope so. We have shown ourselves to be a delusional, self-destructive species.

When my first novel developed a buzz—in galleys— all sorts of new people burst into my life. The wonderful composer of Gypsy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Funny Girl and hundreds of songs I loved, like “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Let It Snow,” “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and “The Things We Did Last Summer,” Jule Styne was by then a pretty old guy—but he entertained me at Sardi’s with his dreams of a musical based on Fear
of
Flying. “Isadora dances onto the stage, where seven couches are lined up in seven colors. She lies down on each couch in turn and sings her troubles to seven psychoanalysts, who get up and dance with her before she dances offstage.”

He mimed it for me in the aisles around our up-front table, while all the Sardi’s gawkers gawked. Jule was cute and short and lecherous and I was mad not to take him up on it. It would have made my father so happy. It would have made me so happy to work with such a huge talent. But my agent discouraged me, saying there was no up-front money in musicals, and I was dumb enough to listen. Who cared about up-front money? Certainly not I. I have always disdained cash in favor of credit. Perhaps I even feel guilty when I make too much money. Money has never principally motivated me. I knew that my father gave up music for money and always regretted it. I was determined not to do the same. Besides, the movie deal my agents had in store wouldn’t finally make me much money anyway, as it turned out.

I was romanced also by the producer of The
God-
father and the producer of
Judgment at Nuremberg
—but I was blind and deaf. At that point (1973), I was mostly confused. Some reviews were great and some were so vitriolic they made me wince. I had left the academic world and found a jungle so red in tooth and claw that I was astounded. Not that the academic world is kind. No world is kind. But I was buffeted between praise and blame, and in those days I had no idea how to cope.

Jule Styne may have seemed elderly to me, but he had another twenty years of big hits in him. Instead, I listened to the people at ICM, who wanted me to meet a certain Julia Phillips, who had just won an Oscar for producing The Sting.

Julia flew in from “the Coast” to meet me. (She probably had other fish to fry, but this was how my agents presented it.) Enter Julia, a short, spiky-haired bundle of energy who could not sit still, and smoked, as my grandmother used to say, “like a chimney.” Julia was tough, smart, obsessed with herself, saw the whole world as a battlefield and had a serious drug problem. But that was long before I understood anything about drug problems.

When she crossed her legs and sat in a chair, she couldn’t stop shaking her crossed leg. When she started talking, she couldn’t stop. When she started working, she couldn’t sleep. Had I known anything at all, I would have recognized the signs of cocaine addiction.

She was pretty, with a squarish face, brownish hair and bright green eyes. She talked tough. She bowled me over with her moxie. She seemed to have no doubts in the world about herself or anything. Who could tell it was the cocaine talking?

Hollywood was rife with cocaine in those days. Nobody saw the big picture—the ruined lives, the car crashes, the bloody noses, the fried brains.

So Julia and I started working in her suite at the Sherry-Netherland. We took my novel and broke it down into scenes on index cards. We laid those index cards out on the floor and tried to decide what was essential and what should go. As we worked, Julia fielded endless calls—from her husband, from her studio head (a certain David Begelman, who later shot himself in a hotel room), from her lawyer (a certain Norman Geary, who also later shot himself), from her mother, from her father, from her daughter’s nanny. Julia was one of those people for whom phone calls are public statements to those who are compelled to listen. Since the advent of the cell phone, there are many more such people. But I had never before met one.

I listened in awe as Julia was ferocious to her studio head, her lawyer, her nanny, her mother, her husband. I was horrified, but my demon was impressed. My demon had always whispered to me that I would be thinner and richer if I took less shit from people. Here was a woman who took shit from no one.

This was 1973 and times were a-changin’. Like Billie Jean King, competitive women wanted to take on their male counterparts and win. Julia seemed to embody that change. She was a woman who called the shots. And she was smart—in a brassy sort of way. No graduate school for her. She had jumped feetfirst into the world of work—publishing, then movies. As my agents said, she was a “comer”—mentioning only later that they also represented her.

As we worked, Julia fantasized about the directors who would be perfect for this script—Stanley Donen, who did the brilliant
Two for the Road;
John Schlesinger of
Darling, Midnight Cowboy
and
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
fame; Hal Ashby, who’d recently directed
Harold and Maude.
Other names were bandied about, like Warren Beatty’s and Steven Spielberg’s. Julia appeared to know them and what they were currently doing. She was on a first-name basis with all of them. I was dazzled, as I was meant to be. After dealing with my book, her next “project” was to be something about UFOs with Spielberg.

“Do you know the phrase ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’?” she asked.

I didn’t. Nobody did yet.

 

 

Julia thought that
Fear of Flying
was the story of her life. I was beginning to hear that from a lot of people—including my prescient paperback publisher, Elaine Koster, who saved my book from obscurity by demanding a sizable first printing and ads and more galleys (those early uncorrected proofs circulated in the publishing industry). Suddenly there were women in the business who had the power to make books happen. There had been none of them a few years before. But a few years before,
Fear of Flying
might not have been published. Suddenly, everyone was interested in women—what we thought, what we felt, what we wanted. I remembered my college days when Anatole Broyard told us we couldn’t be writers, so I knew this sudden rush could just as easily evaporate. If women were madly in style, I knew we could be madly out of style. I took all this enthusiasm with many grains of salt. Besides, I had grown up in a family of depressives who joked to keep from killing themselves.

After the two weeks at the Sherry with Julia, I went home to start to write the screenplay while she went back to her daughter and husband in Malibu. We talked endlessly on the phone. I struggled with my first-ever script while the deal dragged on and on—with more agents and lawyers piling on all the time. Drafts of legal papers went back and forth. There were no faxes then, so bulging envelopes, sent “by hand,” were always heaped on my doorstep. Legal bills went up and up, but still there was no contract, no check. I had no idea this was the way of most movie deals.

Contract or no contract, I believed that having worked with Julia made me committed to her. It never occurred to me I could walk if I didn’t like the deal.

Plenty of other stuff was on my mind. My marriage to Allan Jong was in its death throes. Not that it ever had been good. My main. reason for marrying him was that he was a shrink and my first husband had been schizophrenic. We had practically nothing in common and he had been involved with another woman almost as long as we were together.

My novel kept hitting the lower reaches of the bestseller list—consisting of only ten places then—and going out of stock. I didn’t know it at the time, but my publisher, Aaron Asher, was in the process of leaving the company and no one had the authority to reprint my damn book. It had struck a nerve—but no one could find it. (By then, John Updike had praised it in
The New Yorker,
writing the kind of review most first novelists can only dream of.) I was dazed.

Answered prayers are, above all, bewildering. Looking back, I remember that I was more panicked than elated. I was sure I’d be hit by a bus or mugged in Central Park. That’s what early notoriety feels like—at least at first. Only much, much later do you discover some pleasures in being recognized—the good tables in restaurants, the people who swear you changed their lives—and by then your fame has faded.

And then there were fans. I never really expected to become famous for my first novel—much as I fantasized about it. I was a young poet, and poetry then as now is a recipe for obscurity. Certainly I could never have imagined the strange sort of fame the fates had in store for me. I was absolutely inundated with cries for help, sexual propositions and vicious attacks. For some people, I became representative of all that was wrong with the world and young women. For others, I was the prophet of their rebirth. It was at once disconcerting and ecstatic. I spent at least a year answering reams of correspondence from the frustrated and lovelorn before I realized that my most heartfelt replies only provoked more relentless demands. I was in danger of becoming a sort of Ms. Lonelyhearts; I had to stop.

At a distance of more than three decades, I now see demands of fame
cannot
be met. What you evoke in a fan is by its nature unfulfillable. You tap into a certain hunger, a certain yearning. It is fierce and powerful, but it has almost nothing to do with you. The more you attempt to appease it, the more furious the fan becomes. It’s the reason relations between fans and their obsessional objects can turn so dark and murderous. I had to throw the boxes of mail away before I could even think of writing again.