Smoke and Mirrors (12 page)

“The stars of the old times: They was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses and when you met them, they were
still
huge. People believed in them.

“They’d have parties here. You worked here, you saw what went on. There was liquor, and weed, and goings-on you’d hardly credit. There was this one party . . . the film was called
Hearts of the Desert.
You ever heard of it?”

I shook my head.

“One of the biggest movies of 1926, up there with
What Price Glory
with Victor McLaglen and Dolores Del Rio and
Ella Cinders
starring Colleen Moore. You heard of them?”

I shook my head again.

“You ever heard of Warner Baxter? Belle Bennett?”

“Who were they?”

“Big, big stars in 1926.” He paused for a moment. “
Hearts of the Desert.
They had the party for it here, in the hotel, when it wrapped. There was wine and beer and whiskey and gin—this was Prohibition days, but the studios kind of owned the police force, so they looked the other way; and there was food, and a deal of foolishness; Ronald Colman was there and Douglas Fairbanks—the father, not the son—and all the cast and the crew; and a jazz band played over there where those chalets are now.

“And June Lincoln was the toast of Hollywood that night. She was the Arab princess in the film. Those days, Arabs meant passion and lust. These days . . . well, things change.

“I don’t know what started it all. I heard it was a dare or a bet; maybe she was just drunk. I thought she was drunk. Anyhow, she got up, and the band was playing soft and slow. And she walked over here, where I’m standing right now, and she plunged her hands right into this pool. She was laughing, and laughing, and laughing . . .

“Miss Lincoln picked up the fish—reached in and took it, both hands she took it in—and she picked it up from the water, and then she held it in front of her face.

“Now, I was worried, because they’d just brought these fish in from China and they cost two hundred dollars apiece. That was before I was looking after the fish, of course. Wasn’t me that’d lose it from my wages. But still, two hundred dollars was a whole lot of money in those days.

“Then she smiled at all of us, and she leaned down and she kissed it, slow like, on its back. It didn’t wriggle or nothin’, it just lay in her hand, and she kissed it with her lips like red coral, and the people at the party laughed and cheered.

“She put the fish back in the pool, and for a moment it was as if it didn’t want to leave her—it stayed by her, nuzzling her fingers. And then the first of the fireworks went off, and it swum away.

“Her lipstick was red as red as red, and she left the shape of her lips on the fish’s back. —There. Do you see?”

Princess, the white carp with the coral red mark on her back, flicked a fin and continued on her eternal series of thirty-second journeys around the pool. The red mark did look like a lip print.

He sprinkled a handful of fish food on the water, and the three fish bobbed and gulped to the surface.

I walked back in to my chalet, carrying my books on old illusions. The phone was ringing: it was someone from the studio. They wanted to talk about the treatment. A car would be there for me in thirty minutes.

“Will Jacob be there?”

But the line was already dead.

The meeting was with the Australian Someone and his assistant, a bespectacled man in a suit. His was the first suit I’d seen so far, and his spectacles were a vivid blue. He seemed nervous.

“Where are you staying?” asked the Someone.

I told him.

“Isn’t that where Belushi . . . ?”

“So I’ve been told.”

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 Provost.”

“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.

I took the number of Junior Mansons down to five from twelve and made it clearer from the start that one of them, who was now male, wasn’t a bad guy and the other four most definitely were.

They sent over a copy of a film magazine. It had the smell of old pulp paper about it, and was stamped in purple with the studio name and with the word
ARCHIVES
underneath. The cover showed John Barrymore, on a boat.

The article inside was about June Lincoln’s death. I found it hard to read and harder still to understand: it hinted at the forbidden vices that led to her death, that much I could tell, but it was as if it were hinting in a cipher to which modern readers lacked any key. Or perhaps, on reflection, the writer of her obituary knew nothing and was hinting into the void.

More interesting—at any rate, more comprehensible—were the photos. A full-page, black-edged photo of a woman with huge eyes and a gentle smile, smoking a cigarette (the smoke was airbrushed in, to my way of thinking very clumsily: had people ever been taken in by such clumsy fakes?); another photo of her in a staged clinch with Douglas Fairbanks; a small photograph of her standing on the running board of a car, holding a couple of tiny dogs.

She was, from the photographs, not a contemporary beauty. She lacked the transcendence of a Louise Brooks, the sex appeal of a Marilyn Monroe, the sluttish elegance of a Rita Hayworth. She was a twenties starlet as dull as any other twenties starlet. I saw no mystery in her huge eyes, her bobbed hair. She had perfectly made-up cupid’s bow lips. I had no idea what she would have looked like if she had been alive and around today.

Still, she was real; she had lived. She had been worshipped and adored by the people in the movie palaces. She had kissed the fish, and walked in the grounds of my hotel seventy years before: no time in England, but an eternity in Hollywood.

I went in to talk about the treatment. None of the people I had spoken to before were there. Instead, I was shown in to see a very young man in a small office, who never smiled and who told me how much he loved the treatment and how pleased he was that the studio owned the property.

He said he thought the character of Charles Manson was particularly cool, and that maybe—“once he was fully dimensionalized”—Manson could be the next Hannibal Lecter.

“But. Um. Manson. He’s real. He’s in prison now. His people killed Sharon Tate.”

“Sharon Tate?”

“She was an actress. A film star. She was pregnant and they killed her. She was married to Polanski.”

“Roman Polanski?”

“The director. Yes.”

He frowned. “But we’re putting together a deal with Polanski.”

“That’s good. He’s a good director.”

“Does he know about this?”

“About what? The book? Our film? Sharon Tate’s death?” He shook his head: none of the above. “It’s a three-picture deal. Julia Roberts is semiattached to it. You say Polanski doesn’t know about this treatment?”

“No, what I said was—”

He checked his watch.

“Where are you staying?” he asked. “Are we putting you up somewhere good?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m a couple of chalets away from the room in which Belushi died.”

I expected another confidential couple of stars: to be told that John Belushi had kicked the bucket in company with Julie Andrews and Miss Piggy the Muppet. I was wrong.

“Belushi’s dead?” he said, his young brow furrowing. “Belushi’s not dead. We’re doing a picture with Belushi.”

“This was the brother,” I told him. “The brother died, years ago.”

He shrugged. “Sounds like a shithole,” he said. “Next time you come out, tell them you want to stay in the Bel Air. You want us to move you out there now?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m used to it where I am.”

“What about the treatment?” I asked.

“Leave it with us.”

I found myself becoming fascinated by two old theatrical illusions I found in my books: “The Artist’s Dream” and “The Enchanted Casement.” They were metaphors for something, of that I was certain; but the story that ought to have accompanied them was not yet there. I’d write first sentences that did not make it to first paragraphs, first paragraphs that never made it to first pages. I’d write them on the computer, then exit without saving anything.

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?”