Where the Truth Lies (9 page)

It played rather well. Especially with Lanny, who both laughed and eyed me with interest. I’d heard the above speech virtually word-for-word more than once, which is why I could recite it so well. Imagine it said by a fairly pretty girl in her twenties with nice lips, a really cute haircut, and a knowing way with her eyes. It played rather well.

Down the aisle Helen and Kim wheeled the American Airlines beef trolley. Helen, obviously the Carver, now had on an apron and gloves and looked quite a lot like Sue Ann Nivens. The flight attendants asked us the searching questions they had no choice but to ask: “Rare, medium, well? Horseradish cream or au jus? Chives, sour cream, butter, and would you like any—” The plane bumped a hard bump, like we had gone over a very big log in the road. Only of course there was no road.

Then this huge plane made a collective noise like an old clock shop being hit on its roof by a giant’s hard fist. Helen, carving beef for the other center table, now looked down at her left hand. A neat line of blood appeared where the carving knife had sliced along it nicely.

“Shit,” said Helen, watching the blood racing out of her hand. “Oh shit. Karl?” The plane bounced (bounced? yes) down and up. TheFASTEN SEAT BELT sign wentbing.

We were rocked suddenly to the hard right, then hard left. If we’d been on a train, I suppose we would only have felt we were rounding two hairpin curves twisting around a mountain. But of course we weren’t on a train. A few drinks fell very quietly off the trays of those seated at the windows. We suddenly remembered that we were not in some pleasant Lawry’s The Prime Rib on La Cienega Boulevard but in a long metal tube, a javelin being self-hurled at a height nature had never intended any of us to achieve. We lurched again, this time a bit sickeningly to the stomach. Helen, Kim, and Karl raced the beef trolley up the aisle, hitting Reuben with a corner of the cart as they did so, and secured it somewhere near the galley.

The wall phone upon which Helen had been notified of Lanny’s arrival rang a series of bell tones. I remember once being told that six bells was the captain’s command that every stewardess must take a designated seat, even if it meant throwing a passenger out of it, so that they might be best positioned to save others after the crash. Had I just heard two sets of three tones or one set of six? Helen listened on the phone and nodded. She then spoke over the P.A., using the phone as her mike.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain says we are encountering unexpected turbulence and we ask all passengers to return to their seats.”

Making matters worse was the fact that theNO SMOKING sign immediately went on with a pleasantding. I only associated “no smoking” with the first moments of takeoff and the last minutes of landing. Surely that couldn’t be good. I hated thatding. The people who manufactured the device that made thatding weren’t on the plane with me, damn them. Where was my upstairs lounge now? If anyone could have broken my fall, it would surely have been the overweight couple to my right.

Lanny, Irv, Reuben, and I were seated at a circular table that was turning and shuddering as if at a séance. I would have suggested we join hands and try to contact the dead, but I was afraid we’d have a more direct connection any second now. Reuben was no longer smiling but was doing his best to hold on to the tabletop. Irv just sat with a grim set to his mouth as if his teeth were clenched, which they most likely were. His fist was wrapped tightly around his glass. Most of his Cutty Sark and soda had spilled onto the tablecloth.

I looked at Lanny, feeling panic rising within me. He smiled in a breezy manner. “You really don’t have to worry,” he said. “I know it feels scary, but try to keep in mind that the engines are lifting and sustaining a two-hundred-ton airplane—that’s the ridiculous part. A seventy-mile-an-hour head wind isn’t going to make this baby break a sweat.”

I guess I didn’t look convinced. He cupped my hand with his. “I’m a pilot myself, Bonnie. Believe me, we’re fine.”

Despite having researched Lanny a bit, I had not known he was a pilot. This I found more reassuring than the part about lifting two hundred tons of metal into the air. After all, for this technological hubris, surely the buffeting we were now receiving was God’s version of a good spanking. I was terrified about that last spank, the “one for luck.”

I thought about telling him who I really was. It would be nice to share a secret with him. An act of communion. “You know, I’m not a second-grade schoolteacher and my name is not Bonnie. I’m the journalist who wanted to do a book about you and Vince.” That’s what I would say. But I didn’t.

The glorious thing about turbulence is that it rarely ebbs away in incrementally smaller bumps and milder jostling. It usually just stops, like a poltergeist’s tantrum. This did just that. Suddenly all was calm, all was bright. TheFASTEN SEAT BELT andNO SMOKING signs went out. Reuben immediately proffered Lanny’s cigarette case toward me, but I indicated that I had my own. He then offered it to Lanny, who snatched at a cigarette. Reuben slid Lanny’s lighter across the table to him and Lanny lit up shakily. “Jesus,” he muttered.

“What?” I asked.

“I hate flying,” he said.

“Well, how do you pilot a plane if you hate flying?”

He took another drag on his cigarette. “Who pilots a plane? I just said that to make you feel better. Sorry, didn’t mean to lie.” He put out his cigarette half-finished. “I hate flying.”

Irv called out, “Waitress?” to Kim, who was making the rounds. I could see by the galley that Karl was wrapping a bandage around Helen’s hand. Helen looked pale. I didn’t dislike her as much as I had.

Kim stepped over to us. Irv held his glass out. “Cutty rocks, please? A stiff one.”

She nodded acknowledgment of the order, then said in a low tone to Lanny, “Mr. Morris, I know this is a terrible imposition, but we could really use your assistance back in economy.”

Irv spoke up. “Mr. Morris is a passenger, miss, and his privacy is—”

“I understand and I’m very sorry, but we are permitted by FAA regulations to request any assistance that a passenger may be able to provide in an emergency. Physicians, technicians, amateur pilots—” She turned to Lanny. “We have a passenger who’s hysterical.”

“Great, she can be my head writer,” said Lanny. He unbuckled his seat belt and slid away from the table. “Fuck,” he muttered. He acted as if he’d had to do this before. He turned to me and beseeched, “Keep me company?”

I nodded and rose, somewhat unsteadily, owing to both the wine and the previous few minutes. Reuben also started to rise, but Lanny said, “No, Reuben, you see that Irv gets his drink and find out if the stewardess who cut herself could use some of your first-aid training.” (Lanny later explained to me that Reuben had been a combat medic attached to the Philippine Scouts during World War II.)

Kim led us quickly back to the crowded economy section. Toward the rear of the right aisle, a big, middle-aged woman was being pinned down by a stewardess, whose knees were planted on the woman’s shoulders. The passenger was disheveled and emitting grunting sounds as she struggled. “You have to calm yourself now,” said the stewardess, whose name tag readBARBARA . The passenger cried out, “I can’t breathe, my lungs have collapsed!” and tossed Barbara off her. Racing up the aisle, she screamed, “I have to get off the plane!” and rammed into Lanny, who’d placed himself in her way. He winced at the impact but embraced her. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s with all the commotion, missy?” he inquired in a fabulous impression of himself.

On the movie screen in front of us was the image of Michael Caine. The in-flight movie had obviously been started before the turbulence had hit. Lanny nodded toward the screen and whined in his trademark adenoidal voice: “Hey, usually I think when you make this much noise at the movies, you get thrown out of the theater, but usually I think the theater isn’t at twenty-eight thousand feet, huuuuh?”

The woman froze. “Lanny Morris,” she said. Starstruck awe suddenly outranked panic. She searched his face. “You’re thereal Lanny Morris. You’re on this flight?” she asked somewhat redundantly.

“If I’m not, missy, the in-flight movie is in three-D, what’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Dolores Kreutzer,” she said. “You’re my biggest fan.”

He smiled and said in his singsong voice, “You would be surprised how many nice people say that, although I think they mean it like the whole otherwise, huuuuh?” He did an upward portamento on the “huh.” He was no longer the Lanny Morris I’d been dining with.

Dolores clutched at his arm. “I got scared, I was afraid …”

“Of the bumping and the not nice with the hurting and bouncing, huuuuh?”

“You wouldn’t let me die, would you, Lanny?” she asked like a child.

He switched to his Vegasy, virile voice. “Sweetheart, I haven’t died with an audience since the Concord. You think the Lanny-Man would let anything happen to you? I’m your biggest fan, remember? C’mere, hug-hug. Hug-hug.” He embraced her. She trembled in his arms, in a completely different fashion than her thrashing hysteria. He patted her back and soothed, “Okay, Scooter, you gonna let Lanny get you to New York safe and sound now?”

Stewardess Barbara chimed, “There, Dolores, you hear that? Lanny said everything’s okay, so everything’s okay now, right?”

I thought it was wonderfully absurd that the stewardess voiced such credence in Lanny when he hadn’t been given barometric readings, weather updates, or the flight plan even, huuuuuh?

“If I crash withyou, Lanny, it was worth it,” Dolores gushed. “May I have your autograph?” She reached into a nearby seat pouch and pulled out the plastic laminated card showing how to adopt the brace position and where to exit the plane in case of a landing on water. I could see Lanny anticipating a problem. He looked down the aisle and, of course, every eye was on him and everyone was murmuring, “That’s Lanny Morris” to each other, which sounded an awful lot likepeas and carrots, peas and carrots.

“I’m afraid my pen won’t write on plastic,” said Lanny.

She reached over to a seat pouch for the airline’s magazine,Sky Trails, and held it out to him. “To Dolores,” she requested.

Lanny knew (and I could see that he knew) that the instant he reached for his Scripto Admiral, he was a doomed man. As he scrawled his signature on the magazine, it seemed like half the passengers rose and came at us. We’d made the mistake of backing up into the center front row, directly by the movie screen. Before we could rethink this strategy, they were closing in on Lanny and me from both sides, crushing us against the now-buckling projected image of Charles Bronson and Michael Caine.

Lanny looked at me grimly. “Won’t you join me in my worst nightmare?”

Stewardess Barbara, still in the aisle, was uselessly clapping her hands and asking everyone to return to their seats. I barked at her, “Tell the captain to turn on theFASTEN SEAT BELT sign.” Barbara nodded and retreated to a wall phone by the large emergency-exit door. I tore the seat cushion off a vacant chair in front of me, grabbed the life jacket beneath it, and found the vest pocket that had a standard-issue emergency whistle in it. I blew it hard and its shrill sound quieted the crowd for a moment. Above me, theFASTEN SEAT BELT sign went on with a pleasantding. Barbara spoke over the public-address system: “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Anderson has again put on theFASTEN SEAT BELT sign. Please return to your seats now or be in violation of federal regulations and subject to arrest and prosecution.” Barbara put this over well, and the passengers moved back to their seats.

As they began to sit, Barbara undid all the good she’d just done by announcing, “Now if you’ll all remain seated, I’m sure Mr. Morris will be glad to sign any autographs by coming around the plane to you, starting with this left aisle and then back up the other!”

Lanny’s shoulders instantly went limp, and he gaped incredulously at the stewardess. Some part of his brain turned up a back burner of loathing in his eyes. Barbara actually flinched when she saw it.

As you can imagine, Lanny spent most of the rest of the flight making the rounds of the heavily booked plane. Everyone over the age of twelve had something to tell Lanny about what their cousin thought of him or how they had seen him at his first professional performance. Lanny was polite and feigned interest in each related story, but he didn’t seem to receive any inner gratification from the worship of the crowd. Walking this gauntlet was simply a professional obligation that he discharged honorably and without complaint. To him, things like this, regrettably, came with the deal.

If it was odd that I stayed with Lanny throughout his Grand Promenade of economy, he didn’t seem to think so. As a journalist, of course, this was great stuff for me to observe, seeing how Lanny dealt with his public on a one-on-one basis. But Lanny didn’t know I was a journalist. I guessed he was accustomed to having a woman at his side who was pleased to be photographed in the same frame with him, bearing the identifying tabloid caption of “current companion.”

Irv and Reuben eventually came back to see what had happened to us, and each tried in their own way to get Lanny out of signing autographs for every person on the flight. But Lanny said the usual things about harm having already been done and putting toothpaste back in the tube. (My greatest wish is to see the day when toothpasteis successfully put back in the tube, but then again, I’m a hopeless dreamer.) Irv returned to first class to talk with Helen and the captain and also to make sure the airline’s press office informed A.P. and U.P.I. of Lanny’s generous intervention with hysterical Dolores and autograph session with the other passengers.

I was able to pretty much be myself around Lanny, with the exception of every factual detail of my life. Lanny himself was a genuine surprise to me. His private humor turned out to be quite low-key, but for the occasional horrendous pun, and he could talk for as much as five minutes without feeling the compulsion to make a joke. He had that self-taught intellectualism common to many celebrities; “smart” words likeegregious andubiquitous were used and pronounced with pride, as if they’d been learned recently and were making a special guest appearance in his conversation. All in all, he was not only unlike his public image and what I would have expected … he was also nothing like the voice I’d heard in the memoirs I’d read. Why would that be?