Seducing the Demon (20 page)

I wish I could remember who introduced me to Noel, but in those days people were constantly calling me to say, “You must meet my friend.” Sudden fame makes you popular in ways you may not have experienced before. And I never
thought
I was famous, so I always believed these people wanted to be friends. I was Ms. Gullibility. New notoriety is no place to make new friends.

A lot of the new “friends” wanted me to write a “really tasteful” erotic movie. Or they wanted me to have a “really tasteful erotic talk show.” Even I could see through that. But Noel wanted me and Jonathan to meet his lions. That seemed innocent enough.

So we drove out to Palmdale in the desert. There, in a cyclone-fenced preserve, with caves and savannahs and cliffs within, there lived a pride of lions that were to star in Noel’s forthcoming movie,
Roar!

Jon and I watched speechlessly as Noel went in among the lions, roared and raised his hands at the big yellow lioness, cuddled her cubs and walked among the others with all the insouciance of an ancient Christian who knows he has God’s blessing. He greeted them all by name, tickled them behind the ears as if they were just big Labradors and emerged triumphant from their midst, saying, “Now you try it.”

At that point in my life I would try anything—the more self-destructive the better—but with lions I hesitated. Then Noel explained to us that he had bought them because, in trying to film his movie about a family whose dream was to save lions in the wild, he’d discovered that the trainers were more difficult than the beasts. They fought among themselves, were political and conniving, making it impossible for him to shoot the movie, which was to star Tippi and Melanie and himself. He had been working on the movie for at least a decade. It was a labor of love. He believed that it would be the ultimate statement about man and beast, man and God, and that it would change the course of environmentalism and therefore history.

We talked about lions. Jon and I stalled before entering the lions’ den. Noel theorized about the training of wild beasts and the necessity to roar at them, never show fear and appear to be taller than they. He promised it was perfectly safe to go among them. Still, we hesitated.

Noel was a showman, the Belasco of Palmdale, but Jon and I were writers. Noel goaded. We hung back.

“The only thing to fear is fear itself,” Noel announced, as if he had invented the phrase. “Fear is the enemy. Fear is not your friend. Fear is how the world beats you. Conquer fear and you conquer everything. It’s perfectly safe.”

And to make his point, he went in again and brought out two cuddly lion cubs, which he put in our arms, smelling of the pungent wild but soft as kittens. The cubs were happy to nestle in our arms while Noel snapped Polaroids. Then he suggested we go in.

Convinced by his charisma, we did tiptoe into the den for a few moments, posed with the lioness and her cubs and exited fast, trying not to show fear.

Later, when we showed the Polaroids to Howard and Bette Fast, they had the desired effect.

“Are you kids insane?” Howard asked. And Bette, pale anyway, blanched.

 

 

How we got from the lions’ den to Noel’s lawyer’s filing a lawsuit on my behalf against Julia and Columbia Pictures on the grounds of fraud is all a blur.

“We’ll file the suit, they’ll give us the rights back and then we’ll make the movie,” Noel said. It was sorta like: “We’ll go into Iraq and the people will throw rose petals at our feet.”

Of course the opposite happened. Columbia, then run by David Begelman—“the old riverboat gambler,” as he called himself—was utterly unimpressed by the ploy. Julia was infuriated. The result was years of litigation, a court case that plunged me into a bottomless depression—of course I lost—and legal bills that became astronomical.

American authors have no right to insist on quality films being made of their work. This is not France. We have no
droit moral,
which allows French authors to protest that that an adaptation defiles their work. Noel vanished. The movie was moribund. Jon and I moved to Connecticut, got pregnant and eventually married. And Howard and Bette followed. All we had to show for our folly were a few pictures of us with lions and hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal bills. I have done stupid things in my writing life, but this was the stupidest.

To get as far as I could from the seductions of Hollywood, I decided to write my eighteenth-century romp,
Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout Jones.

It took me five years and it saved my life. Sitting in the Beinecke Library in New Haven, holding the Boswell Papers in my white-cotton-gloved hand, I came back to myself. No more lions, no more lawsuits, no more snakes slithering out of the foliage. I was back in the safety of the library, dreaming of Fanny becoming a witch, a highwaywoman, a pirate, a high-class courtesan in eighteenth-century London. She was my female Tom Jones, my innocent orphan, seduced into all kinds of terrible trouble, who finally grows up, discovers herself heiress to a great estate, rediscovers her true love, writes her memoirs for her daughter and lives happily ever after—until, of course, John Cleland pinches her life story and distorts it into
Fanny Hill.

That Molly was born on page four hundred and something, that she had bright auburn hair just like the heroine I’d created, healed me and made me whole.

The novel received a front-page rave in
The New York Times Book Review.
It brought me back to the period I’d loved most in college and graduate school. It reactivated my sense of satire, my ability to laugh, and the balance between writing and private life.

I had closed the door on Hollywood forever. Or so I thought.

So the movie was never made. Begelman committed suicide; Noel finally made
Roar!
(his wife and stepdaughter were mauled in the process); and Melanie became a big star. Chief executives came and went at Columbia. Goldie and Barbra got too old to play the twenty-nine-year-old Isadora. (The tragedy of the actress, according to Strindberg, is growing older.) Women went out of fashion in Hollywood, crept back, then went out of fashion again—at least as subjects for films that would appeal to twelve-year-old boys. The book kept selling anyway, became famous in Croatia, Poland, Korea and Taiwan and was pirated in China. Women in all these disparate places wrote to say they thought that Isadora’s story was the story of their lives. I marveled over this—how alike women’s feelings were in such different cultures.

Various directors came forward wanting to make the movie, but by then Julia’s reputation was dashed and when she rose up threatening suit or demanding millions, they disappeared. Columbia owned it along with a lockerful of other books—by Colette, Saul Bellow and other luminaries—that would never be made. Under American law, a book is like a parcel and once it changes hands that’s it.

Your heirs have one moment to take it back—when you die—but you will never see it made while you’re alive.

From time to time there are flurries of interest. I recently learned that the brilliant creator of
Murphy Brown
has written a new script, so maybe there’s hope. I see the movie as a period piece of the seventies with seventies music—all seen as a flashback of a mother’s life told to her daughter. But I have had to detach from the fate of this book in order to preserve my sanity. I cared too much once. So now I don’t want to care at all. It’s like a painful divorce that makes you swear off love—at least for a decade.

Julia and I satirized each other in books—which made everything worse. I satirized her as a crass Hollywood coke addict and she told the world I looked like Miss Piggy. None of this helped.

In the thirty years that went by, there was no charity or empathy between us, but every time I was in Los Angeles, I wanted to call her. I was just too scared.

We had unfinished business. We had fallen in love, then fallen in hate, and now it was time for something new. I had come out to the Coast to promote one of my books and tape
Politically Incorrect
and speak at UCLA. I was staying with my brother and sister-in-law in Bel Air and I had a day off, so I screwed up my courage and called Julia.

She was happy to hear from me, invited me to her apartment in West Hollywood, and I went.

When I knew her, Julia had lived like a Hollywood princess. Now she was down on her luck. The house in Coldwater Canyon was gone, the husband was gone, the daughter was grown.

I came into a rather gaudy black-mirrored apartment near Sunset Strip.

We looked at each other. Then we hugged for a long time. She smelled of cigarette smoke and so did the whole place.

“I have an amend to make,” I said, when we moved apart. “I was wrong. I should never have sued you. I broke your heart and also broke my own. It was really a stupid and nasty thing to do. I was in a rage and I didn’t know what to do. It all seems so meaningless now.”

“I understand amends. I’ve been in and out of so many rehabs you wouldn’t believe it.”

“I believe it. I’ve been through hell with my daughter. Not to mention my own stuff.”

“I stopped the coke—but the smoking I swear I will stop soon. I’m down to one pack a day. A little wine. That’s it.”

“What happened here?” I looked around the garish apartment.

“None of it’s my stuff. My taste is better than this crap. Lost the house, but I’m working my tail off.” Her voice was very hoarse. “I’m working on a project with Matt Drudge. He’s not a bad guy. Much better than you think. Not dumb.”

And then we sat down and regaled each other with love stories, divorce stories, stories about our daughters.

Warily, we crept up on
Fear of Flying.

“Your script wasn’t a piece of shit. It had possibilities. I shoulda given you more guidance. I was a mess in those days, I thought you knew. I thought everybody would forgive me. I was wrong. Spielberg threw me off the set of
Close Encounters.
None of the guys could stand me because I saw straight through them. Then my lawyer blew his brains out, then David Begelman.”

“Drugs?”

“Who the fuck knows?”

“After
You’ll Never Eat Lunch
and Spielberg dropping me, it was downhill all the way. I guess it’s not smart to crap where you eat.”

“I did it too,” I said.

“We weren’t allowed to make mistakes like the guys were. They just keep failing upwards. Remember feminism ? Hah. Nothing’s changed.”

“Well, a few things—but not like we thought.”

“It was the times. It was the drugs,” she said.

“The sex,” I said.

“The feeling we were immortal.”

“I never felt immortal,” I said.

“I did. I wish I could get that back.”

 

 

Julia and I exchanged some funny e-mails. She was looking for the first and second scripts of
Fear of Flying.
We were going to work together again. We would make it all O.K. She signed her e-mails “Jools.” I signed mine “E.” Then there was a long silence. She was going for medical tests. They were a pain. She was sure they were nothing. Then silence.

About six months later, I woke up one morning and found her obituary in
The New York Times.
It was a kind obituary Her intelligence was noted. Her bad reviews were not quoted. She’d had cancer. She was gone.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

I grew up in a family of depressives. My grandfather used to say that the artist “carried the dead weight of the world on his shoulders.” The artist (could he have also meant the
Übermensch?)
toiled forward with heavy steps, groaning in pain like an Egyptian slave building a pyramid in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, scored by Dmitri Tiomkin or Elmer Bernstein, and managed to move that block of stone a half inch. Then came the cruel overseer to flog him back into the pit of darkness. Or something like that. By my grandfather’s definition, all talented people were born to labor in futility. My grandfather was Russian. And Jewish. But is that enough to explain it?

All the Jews of the Pale must have been marrying their cousins for generations—which to me explains not only the glut of Ashkenazic genetic diseases—like Tay-Sachs and Canavan‘s—but also the epidemic of depression. Woody Allen’s great-grandparents and mine—not to mention Philip Roth’s—sat around saying “The Cossacks are coming” for so long that their offspring had no choice but to tell jokes. Or die. The ones who survived alternated their depression with bitter humor.

Who but an Eastern European Jew could make up the fantasy of a writer in hell doomed to toss his pages into the fiery pit as soon as he writes them? The fantasy is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s—but it could have been my grandfather’s or Woody Allen’s or Philip Roth’s or Cynthia Ozick’s or mine. Futile it may be, but you have to keep doing it. Why? To ward off depression. Writing is tough, but it’s a lot less tough than depression. Which basically leads to suicide. Unless you make a joke.