You or Someone Like You (14 page)

Howard is good with the stars. We are standing somewhere behind the actress who has gotten her name above the title, who has just stepped out from the long black car. I watch Howard's face flicker
with the flashes aimed at her. She is escorted by her new agent. She has just dropped her previous, longtime agent for him, for his youth, and for his aggressiveness, which she believes she needs now, and for his looks and his clothes, and he has made hot professional love to her. Then, back at the curb, another car door opens. A younger actress emerges, the one they've run on the covers instead of her, the one she didn't get along with on the set. (This is what they've written in the tabloids.) The cameras swing away from her, back toward that car, the voices move in a vast wave from her, creating a void where she is standing, she is in free fall, and she needs an anchor.

But the young agent is not an anchor. His talent is pyrotechnics, not strength. A sea of whispers rises around her, she falters, one or two cameras, smelling blood, swing back now. They would love to record her as she drowns before them on that linear pool of red. But Howard is moving. The studio security know him, he passes through them like smoke. From nowhere, it seems, Howard slips his arm through hers, sets her ringed hand onto his tuxedoed wrist. To the young agent's shoulder Howard briefly applies what looks like a fatherly hand; it serves to separate the agent from the star. His arm in hers, he begins to walk her down the long carpet to the theater's doors. Had she heard the story, Howard murmurs to her, his mouth close to her diamond-tipped earlobe, of Jean Harlow's meeting Margot Fonteyn? The two divas hated each other on sight, but it was a movie premiere, and the cameras were watching. (The star remembers to relax her face. She grips Howard's arm.) In front of the reporters, murmurs Howard, Harlow was pure sweetness, and it was “Oh, Margot this!” and “Oh, Margot that!” (He maneuvers her perfectly into place, stand, stand, turn slightly, stand, so they can get their shots.) Except that Harlow pronounced it “Mar
gotte
,” with a hard consonant. (He looks ahead, catches security's eye, and they prepare to open the front doors.) “Mar
gotte
, darling!” Finally Fonteyn leaned over to Harlow, not quite out of reach of the microphones, and murmured “Oh, darling. Actually it's Margot. With a silent T. Like Harlow.”

The glow blossoms onto her face again. She regains her composure. The two of them pass into the cinema with elegance and grace, and none of those watching dare to breathe, because they are in the presence of a star.

The person truly unimpressed by celebrity, says Howard, is impossibly rare. He himself claims to be susceptible to it, but I've never believed him.

I abhor the fear that is a plague here. I despise the vanity and the wanton waste and the vast and utterly boring emptiness, the breathtaking unoriginality of their meretricious visions. I am aware of the Terror that rules their moral situation, but Jane Austen has already told us about it. The emptiness is on view for us all to gaze at, their Plexiglas castles on their hilltops, the baubles in their garages, and their spectacular parties. The sad littleness of their rudeness and intimidation, the sinister, garish motifs of their grossly false friendships. As Anita Loos tartly observed, in the 1920s “the stars were moving out of the Hollywood Hotels and beginning to live in their own private houses with servants, most of whom were their peers in everything but sex appeal—which pinpoints the reason for the film capital's mass misbehavior. To place in the limelight a great number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth is bound to produce a lively and diverting result.”

Everyone is inside the cinema now, waiting for the movie to start, and Howard is watching over things. The director of photography is relaxed as a cat. An associate producer fairly shakes with agitation, wondering about the critics. That asshole from the
L.A. Times
? It's a fucking vendetta, Howard, that guy! Howard just nods, his eyes locked on the director across the room. The director gets physically ill at premieres and is trying to appear stoical.

I remembered something I'd always mean to tell Howard. That I'd read a description of all this in a book on God. “Yeah,” he said. “What was it?”

“Millions fuse the real lives and the screen lives of movie actors, assign the combination an importance greater than any they concede to the real human beings whom they know, and then suffer the melancholy consequences. Their flesh is sad, alas, and they have seen all the movies.”

“Nice,” Howard replied. “Mallarmé?”

Yes. (An update of Mallarmé's great lament: “The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.”)

The distributor's trembling fist grips the forearm of Howard's dark-blue suit. “Howie, that bitch wants to fire our publicist.” Howard removes the fist but speaks reassuringly, leads him forward like a calf.

In my quiet living room, the directors listened in silence. They know these evenings. One of them sighed and made a comment. I found it particularly perceptive. He had touched this heat, he told us. Of the blond, handsome movie star who years ago he'd intimately orbited, he said: “As if glancing at a menu, he was able to choose his life.” He had been spellbound. “The truth is, the temperament and impossible behavior of stars are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties. Modern deities should be no different.”

But they'd drifted apart, he said. He came, on one of these white-hot evenings, to watch the star from the back of the theater at yet another premiere, the top of that famously casual, ever-boyish blond head visible as it moved down the aisle. (They all knew who he was talking about. It was his saying this that surprised them; these people have a rule: Never, ever bring up failure.) Watching in that white dark, a line of Falstaff had come to him.
King Henry IV
,
Part 2
, act 5, scene 5. He put on his reading glasses. Falstaff is watching the coronation of the new king, his former bright intimate, and murmuring to console himself for the stretch of this dark, unfamiliar space between them:

When they have gone and my living room is empty but for Howard and me on the sofa, I will mention this to Howard. He will take a Miltonian view. He will appreciate the Falstaff reference but, at the same time, shrug and comment of the movie stars, “Even when you're with them, you're not with them.”

I will decide that the following week I will give my producers—how could I not—“Ozymandias.” Shelley, 1818. I know. Too obvious. But they will love rereading the poem. Each perfect, cruel line will feed their narcissism. The plush suites off Lankershim and Alameda, the law offices on South Rodeo and Wilshire, the glass fortresses in Century City. The hearts that feed. The wrinkled lip and sneer I saw on Howard's face in his office on that cool afternoon.

In the early dawn hours, while the world is still bluish and I am driving my powerful car very fast and alone on Sunset in the desert's chill, I sometimes look up to see the billboard men in their blue jeans scaling the sheer concrete sides of the tall buildings above Sweetzer, and I see the forty-foot-high faces looking down on the cold, empty concrete. Their names are written in letters as high as people. The workmen peel down their faces and strip away their names in tattered rolls. The movie having closed, the stars disappear. Nothing lasts in this desert.

 

FOR MY FIRST LINE PRODUCERS
group, I give them
Crime and Punishment.

I give them this particular novel because a literary agent mentioned to me once that since it was published in serial form and on deadline, like Dickens and much nineteenth-century fiction, some of the facts got flubbed in the process. So I have Justin send out an email. “In
Crime and Punishment
,” asked my message, “where are Fyodor Dostoyevsky's continuity errors?”

Two of them find the first one almost immediately: Dostoyevsky puts the office of Porfiry, the police detective, on the fourth floor, and some eighty pages later it reappears on the sixth. Jennifer will call me to say that in a people-watching item, the
Los Angeles Times
has reported the producers' names.

 

THEY ASKED ABOUT THE ACCENT.
One of them thought I was Australian, but then Americans are almost completely incapable of distinguishing non-American English accents. And—how many languages did I speak? Wait,
Chinese
, right?

Right.

I don't know why I've kept the degree of British phonetically that I have. People think it's on purpose; it isn't. Things stick with me. My German, which is rudimentary, has a marked French accent. I suppose it's the order in which I learned the languages. (I explained that we were in Paris for fourteen months, an eternity, before my father was again transferred, to Bonn, and I switched schools for, it seemed to me—I believe I was twelve—the three hundredth time.) The Spanish I learned because when Consuela came to us, she spoke no English at all. I bought a small Spanish grammar book and spoke with her and it came quickly.

My Italian is good. My father was on special diplomatic assignment in Milan for a year (my mother put me in an Italian school that time), although all his assignments seemed oddly special. Howard thinks he was MI6, and that's what he always told Sam in a melo
dramatic whisper. “Sam, your grandfather was a spy!” I think it's a fun idea, father as James Bond. I never saw any direct evidence for it, even when, as a girl, I myself suspected it and snooped among his papers. I assume he was an ordinary diplomat, but I admit that is only a default assumption; he had a strange, secretive life in a multitude of strange, constantly shifting places, and I've often thought of contacting British intelligence and simply asking. My parents are dead; perhaps MI6 would give me an answer.

In Cantonese, interestingly enough, I am utterly invisible. By accent, obviously. Not English at all, purely Cantonese, except for an inexplicable hint of Mandarin (which I don't speak at all) in my slightly Beijing “r.” Seven-year-olds—my age when we arrived in Hong Kong—absorb grammar like sponges but will not necessarily become phonetically native, and China's northern “r” is almost weirdly American. I listened to the servants and to my ya-ya, eavesdropped on the Star Ferry, and followed Cook around the market as she haggled. All of this from the top of Victoria Peak, where we had an apartment with the most breathtaking Hong Kong view. The view was virtually free, since the apartments, which were quite modest and functional, were owned by the British government and given to its officials. Nineteen fifty-four to 1958 were lovely years to be in the colony, when the British ruled, the expatriates played polo, the Chinese had their unknowable lives in their fragrant mazes of alleys and noodle shops, and we understood everything.

The Chinese hate not being able to categorize me. (Who is she? they mutter to each other in the greasy fluorescent-lit dumpling palaces of Los Angeles, the walls white ceramic tile. What does she want?) I order a soup, dispute a check, and they give me suspicious looks and twist the conversation, not very subtly either (they are Chinese, after all), to try to make me say things like “dental floss,” which they think is hard for foreigners to pronounce. It is, but not for me.
Nga h'cxin.
I say it and smile sweetly at their sullen reactions until one
of them laughs, declaring victory in my favor. I give them no ground, ever, no foothold. I remain free from their expectations. It was very important to me as a girl. I am not in-nor out-group. I am always myself. A year of hanging around Cook, and I was able to entirely escape their categories, the expectations they could nail on one, and I did so loving it. They glared at me and said with distaste, “
Lei-goh lui-je ye-gang mo je-gai geh gun-yuen
.” This girl, her own origin-lacking. And talked snottily of seven thousand years of history.

I said to them, “
Lei-goh lui-je ye-gang ghai-fong-jeo je-gai geh gun-yueni.
” This girl, origin-free. Or more literally, This girl is liberated from the idea of origins.

THE QUESTION OF WHICH RELIGION
in which to raise Samuel was not one we ever discussed. There was no need.

Rarely—a bar or bas mitzvah, maybe—we go to synagogue together. There, Howard is the object of omnipresent feelers. “Howard!
Great
to see you here. You're joining the temple!” It is a question. Sometimes, when they know about me, the interlocutor, jocular and earnest, avoids looking in my direction. “Nope,” says Howard pleasantly. After Yom Kippur, people drop hints. “Howard, we didn't see you in shul.” Or “So Howard, listen, ever tried Temple Adat Shalom?”

“No,” says Howard pleasantly, “I don't think so. Anne”—(turning to me)—“have we ever tried Temple Adat Shalom?”

No, I say, we never have.

“Nope,” says Howard. “Never have.”

Then my mother found
The Lord Is My Shepherd
in Camden Market just after Sam was born, and that solved my question about his cultural education. I simply read him the biblical stories, Old and New Testaments, as literature.

Howard, on the other hand, read Kipling to Sam. He mentioned it once at a PolyGram meeting.
Kipling
? said a talent manager, with
a severe frown. Very not-done. Racist.
No
, Howard had responded slowly. Kipling once said he worshipped “The God of Things As They Are,” which meant he was a brutal realist. But race? Kipling's poetry is “not,” as an English friend once put it to me, “just chaps in pith helmets keeping the wogs at bay on the Northwest Frontier.” Here was a man who intimately knew Hinduism, a theologically justified racialist social order. One was born this caste or that one: Brahmin, Shatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Thakur, Prabhu, Kayshth, Untouchable. The color of the skin went (surprise) downward from light to dark. And Kipling is quite pointed about opposing it. Howard used him to teach this to Sam. I gave my agents the poem we'd years ago given our son and asked Billy Lazarus to read it.

The agents were surprised to hear this from Kipling, but, without thinking about it too much, they all nodded vigorously in the usual self-congratulatory way and said how much they liked it. It's the sort of thing Americans automatically take as self-evident truth.

I take it as a self-evident truth as well.

Kipling was as far textually as Howard went into religion. A few years ago we were approached by two of those smiling zombielike people who asked about “our faith.” Sam replied, “We worship the French fry,” and Howard enjoyed that. When Kabbalah arrived, to blossom and wither inside the industry like every other fad, Howard met it at first wordlessly. People in meetings at Paramount enthused
about their Hebraic scholars, lunches at Imagine and Amblin where they plumbed the cryptic mysteries of the Kabbalist texts. He said nothing. “It's great, Howie!” I'm sure it is, he replied. “Have you
tried
this?” (He was in some meeting with three Triad agents.) “It'll unlock secrets for you, seriously.” Hm, said Howard genially. The agent to Howard's left—his rabbi guru had, after months of study and thousands of dollars, pinpointed his Hebrew consonants
daled
and
nun
, which gave
dan
. “So, see?” he explained to Howard, according to Kabbalah, for him any word with “dan” in it held power. You had to find the words. That morning he'd been pondering “laudanum,” “a mysterious and powerful opiate.” And “danburite,” “a mysterious rare mineral contained in crystals.” And, of course, “danger,” a rich semiotic vein.

Howard considered gravely and then brightly suggested “dandruff.” He looked around the antique cherrywood table. “A mysterious and powerful seborrheic condition.”

As for Sam, he had from the very start had ideas of his own, thank you very much. When he was five, Howard had read the Adam and Eve and serpent story to him. Sam was at that point obsessed with defining, in all narratives, who was “the bad person,” and so Howard asked him whether in that story there was a bad person.

Sam thought about it very gravely. “Yes,” he said, his face serious.

“And who was that?” asked Howard.

“God,” said Sam.

 

WE ARE DESCENDING IN THE
elevator with David Remnick. It is a year ago. The air-conditioning is freezing. Howard has come to New York for a meeting because there is sudden interest in L.A. in one of David's pieces.

Immediately on arriving, Howard had ducked off to Alex Ross's office to negotiate this evening's logistics. Howard loves Alex, loves that he is the music critic. I have never possessed whatever madness
is necessary to be an opera fan, and so it suits me that he is happy trundling off with Alex to the Salzburg Festival. The two of them get their hotel rooms and spend the week hearing Kurt Weill and lieder and Mussorgsky and Ernest Chausson's Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer. “The musical version of Cannes,” Alex once explained it to me, not altogether kindly, “a glamorous watering hole for classical super-stars and tycoon sophisticates and tourists sharing in their aura.”

“Tonight?” Howard had asked, sticking his head in the door. “Quarter to eight,” replied Alex, “in front of Will Call,” and threw him out. From there he went to find David. I waited outside the office, reading about threats to the world's food supply. Parasites, pollution. They emerged, twenty minutes later, talking about David's article, which now may become a movie, and we go to the elevators.

“The Afterlife” was about Natan Sharansky's imprisonment by the Soviets and then, after he'd emigrated, about his political career in Israel. David wrote it several years ago—“but,” says Howard, “you never know when they'll discover what”—and David is recalling the tiny, freezing cell in Perm-35. Sharansky'd take a cup of hot water, says David, put it on spots all over his body to warm up. David taps his fingertip on his shirtsleeve to indicate it.

“I'm telling you,” says Howard emphatically, “it's a long shot, OK? But there are people interested, and it matters. I've talked to him”—(Natan)—“and I've talked to Avital”—(Natan's wife)—“a lot to her actually. He's interested. She's not crazy about the project.” Howard and David share a look. “Avital's religious—”

“Yeah—” says David.

“—so, you know….”

“Uh-huh—” David, nodding, is holding the elevator door for me but concentrating on Howard.

“—so Avital talked a lot about the religious issues, Jewish law, the way that would be presented.”

David is ambivalent. “Natan did support a conversion law that effectively disenfranchised half of world Jewry,” he admits. “His per
sonal political survival depended on his caving in to ultra-Orthodox ultimatums.”

Howard says, “Yeah.” David wouldn't, Howard indicates, necessarily need to bring this up with Natan. I notice Howard seems to be lost in David's comment about the conversion law for a moment. He comes out of it. “Look, they're open to discussing it,” he says, then, “By the way, I liked the way you opened the piece—”

“The hats.”

“Yeah, when he makes aliyah.
Very
nice,” says Howard. “Tribeca likes it.”

“Did you like the hats?” David asks me, intently, just as I enter the revolving doors to 42nd Street ahead of him. The first interest had come from Jane Rosenthal, she loved it, and HBO and Participant were quite serious, so David is now having to rethink things in terms of the screen. Howard actually thinks it less of a long shot than he's letting on, but with David he wants to err conservatively. David looks at me through the doors, impatiently, each of us in our moving slice of glass as the air-conditioning disappears into early summer in New York.

Actually I haven't read it, I say when David emerges; they sent a copy to Howard's office.

So Howard describes David's opening to me. The Lubavitchers have felt fedoras. The Moroccan Sephardim wear multicolored skullcaps. The Modern Orthodox Zionist has a small knitted
kippa
, a slightly larger one means a right-wing settler. A black velvet model is ultra-Orthodox. And then there was Sharansky, who wasn't much of any of this except he wanted to be Israeli. When the Soviets freed him (Sharansky was the most famous political prisoner of his day), and he got on a plane to Israel, “people were betting whether or not I would put on the
kippa
,” Natan had told David, and added with an irritated grimace, “because it is impossible for Israelis to stay in one room together if they haven't got their headgear coordinated.”

“Taxi.” Howard's pointing at the sky, glaring toward the street.

“He put on an Israeli Army hat,” David says to me with a laugh. “It solved the identity problem. Thanks, Howard.” The taxi has slammed to a stop. David slides in. “299 Park,” he says to the driver, then to us out the window, “Allegiance to the national institution, the army. It was a secular statement, so it said, ‘I'm secular.' But it covered the head, so it said, ‘I'm not completely religiously indifferent.'”

“I'll call you from L.A.,” says Howard. The taxi driver, who is wearing a Muslim tupi on his head, hesitates, sniffs the traffic, leaps into the flow.

“I admire that,” Howard says, looking after the yellow car. “Great solution.” He glances with irritation at the sky. “Christ, it's hot as hell, and it's not June yet.”

Why admire it?

Howard says, “Sharansky's smart.”

That's why?

He focuses on me now. He asks, “What's a better reason?”

I say, I suppose it seems to me that the question is inherently silly. Playing political chess with these factions, each one madder than the next.

“It is silly,” says Howard, logically, “but if you have to deal with it.”

But why should one have to deal with it, I say. Why should one have to put up with this kind of ridiculous garbage.

He is getting the slightest bit impatient with this. “That's the way things are, Anne,” he states.

That's precisely my point, I say.

 

FOR THE SCREENWRITERS, MY INITIAL
choice was (retrospectively) so obvious it refused to jump out at me. One thinks “screenwriter” as one goes through lists and pages, brow creasing,
one thinks (with a grimace) “writing…” and then “well,
creativity
” and then “oh damn it all,” and then it stands up on the page and waves at you. Light verse. Nonsense writing. Of course.

The persecution complex is so deeply rooted in the Hollywood screenwriter and the parameters of their lives so tenuously lived between studios, directors, and stars, all positively barking and all viewing the writer as a sort of personal Rorschach blot, that Mark Singer once described Hollywood to me as “where the writer is that laughable schmendrik so low in the food chain he gets flossed after breakfast.” I assumed nonsense verse would catheterize them. Sure enough, they loved it.

We began with Edward Lear (1812–1888). I rummaged around in the basement book boxes marked “Sam, childhood” in green Magic Marker and found the copy I'd picked up in London, a later edition of Lear's 1846
Book of Nonsense.
The original was printed for children, but my edition had already transitioned to adults. (Sam, at six, had been put off by the lack of pictures.) I'd had Justin photocopy it, carefully. Akiva Goldsman handed out the copies. I asked a writer with an action-comedy in preproduction to read “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear.” Mind the meter, please.

Their appreciation was purely neurological, reactive; discussion was limited almost entirely to an unspoken sense of complicity. I did get a clear-cut reaction to “Cold Are the Crabs,” which begins with the blissfully incoherent mess

and careens contentedly along through the lusciously meaningless “
tardy film of nectar fills / The ample bowls of demons and of men
” to end, with brilliant aplomb

It was, one of them said, what he thought every day while driving on the Santa Monica Freeway, these shadowy scenes in the dark.

I repeated their comments to Anthony Lane, and he got interested and wound up writing a piece on the subject. He noted of light verse that these very British constructions are “indeed funny but also curiously macabre in their imperturbable accounts of disasters, cannibalism, and murders.” My writers agreed. That, too, reflected their experience. To them Lewis Carroll (I found the dates: 1832–1898) “encapsulated” the movie pitch: the randomness, the weirdness, the pell-mell rush forward, the brutality. I'd made a mistake with Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (you know it:
“
The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things, Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages and kings
”), which ends with a calculatedly and breathtakingly cruel deception-cum-genocide of a group of oyster children. The mistake was reading it to Sam at age six, for of course he grasped all of the horror and none of the linguistic gamesmanship, and sobbed for an hour, Howard glaring at me the whole time.