You or Someone Like You (5 page)

I did not dare look at Howard. I could feel him holding his breath while his brain was shouting. Howard was twenty-five.

The only question Bennett asked directly, indeed almost immediately, was: “You two are married?”

“Oh!” said Howard. “Yeah!” He indicated France with a chin. “Delayed honeymoon.”

Cerf nodded warmly at me. (“Such a lovely English girl,” said Phyllis to Howard.) I found them very sweet. I held up my poor little diamond ring, which I adored, so they could admire it.

We got home and started packing up our cramped apartment in Greenwich Village and moved to West 70th and Amsterdam. My mother flew across the Atlantic to help. She thought our brownstone “kind of
dark
, Anne.” She looked around with raised eyebrows.
She
was from the
East
Side. She helped me cover everything in drop cloths and plan the tiny patch of soon-to-be garden out back as I rollered the walls with a daffodil cream I'd seen in a Macy's catalog.

Howard walked to Random House's offices in the Villard Mansion on Madison near 50th Street. Within days he knew them all—Donald Klopfer (who trained him), Jason Epstein, Jim Silberman, Bob Loomis, Sally Kovalchik, who did the “how to” books. They all
had two-digit phone extensions then. He used to play kick-the-can in the hallways with Howard Kaminsky, who helped him develop the movie sales. Kaminsky was Mel Brooks's cousin, and Howard worshipped him. He met people at Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf. He basically lived on the phone—it was considered a bizarre job, neither publishing nor movies, a hybrid of the two that at first only Howard and Bennett understood—and he had to earn people's trust. Bennett gave Howard the phone numbers of a few of the studio heads to start him off and introduced him to the writers, who didn't exactly know what to do with him. Philip Roth actually thought he was an agent. Saul Bellow thought he was an editorial assistant and would call to ask him to run a manuscript down to Saul's friend so-and-so on Bleecker, which of course Howard did.

And he met Shawn of the
New Yorker
at a party on East 88th, and from Shawn to the writers, and then Bob Gottlieb and the writers Gottlieb hired. They were interested in Howard because Howard, as Mark Singer once put it to me, “kept the writer's entrance to Hollywood, like Cerberus. But,” said Mark, “with only one head.”

I loved that image. Howard guarding some fiery hole on East 50th leading to Paramount.

Through Mort Janklow, Mike Ovitz heard of Howard, and called him, and Bennett, after thinking it over, said absolutely, Howard should interface with Creative Artists Agency. CAA was constantly searching for material for the movies, and Howard would ensure that material would come from Random House. He prepared his pitches, walking into their meetings holding a book in his hand. “Your next blockbuster,” he would announce. He explained to them why it was a perfect vehicle for this or that client, a career maker, and so he started getting to know the actors. CAA was doing surprisingly well, and Howard was flying more frequently to L.A. “He's gone a lot,” observed my mother but left it at that. Through Mike, the studios noticed him. The idea of this hybrid literary-to-film job he was doing was no longer so strange. Howard came home and looked at me
sideways and said, “So. What would you think?” One of the studios had made an offer. Executive in charge of new properties. He was elated. They had said, in essence: Be our book eyes.

Howard would say in the future that his job descended directly from Samuel Goldwyn because it was Goldwyn who first tried to marry literature and movies. The semiliterate Eastern European immigrant, desiring the elevation of his art through literary good taste, hired as a screenwriter the dignified Belgian Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck spoke no English, and Goldwyn, as he would have been first to acknowledge, spoke no Belgian. Hollywood legend has it that Maeterlinck's first effort for his new employer was an adaptation of his own novel,
Life of the Bee
, and Goldwyn ran from his bungalow screaming “My God,
the hero is a bee
!” Still, Goldwyn liked having the author around the lot. He proudly pointed him out to everyone who stopped by as “the greatest writer on earth! He's the guy who wrote
The Birds and the Bees
.”

I started packing up the brownstone.

In my driveway, the light was becoming golden with evening as they listened to me. I frowned. I asked the three of them, who've worked with Howard for years: Howard never told you any of this?

No, they said, with some amusement because obviously I didn't have the faintest idea how Howard behaved with them. “You know, Anne, Howard doesn't really talk much about himself.” And after a moment one of them added, not at all unkindly, “He's like you that way, yes?”

I hadn't known this about him. I suppose he is, I said. They realized that I had always taken Howard's easy friendliness with them, his colleagues, as friendship. They realized that I had not known that he was rather circumspect with them. They watched me learning these things about my husband.

Very warmly they kissed me good-bye on the cheek. Their car keys were tinkling cheerfully. They called, “See you in a few weeks!”

I went inside and thought about our next meeting. Well! Next time, I decided, I'd cut some fresh flowers from the garden.

 

THEN THERE IS WHAT I
did not say.

When Howard and I arrived in Los Angeles in 1979, I was, I realize in retrospect, in shock. The sun was pouring down like the rain in London. Unlike London, there was no context for anything. Stuart called from Brooklyn. “So! Anne. L.A.”

I replied, with an eye on Howard, who was emptying boxes, that L.A. was “the ninth circle of hell.” Stuart misunderstood me to say that Los Angeles was “the nicest suburb of hell.” He repeated this to Howard, who readily acceded to the description.

Almost immediately I said to Howard that they were all ridiculous. I actually said (I'm embarrassed to admit it now) “all.” They certainly all
seemed
ridiculous; I have learned over the years that this is not the point. First, Hollywood people are ridiculous and they are not. More important, even the dullest and crassest of them have a certain startling animal perceptiveness. Who would imagine that pathological narcissism could foster such external awareness? Howard took David Geffen to lunch one day, and David, his eyes taking in the entire restaurant, snorted, “These are people who talk on the phone all day.” But perhaps because of this, they are deceptively febrile with words. Counterintuitive, to my mind. Utter disdain for the written word and still this immense value put on language.

But I had to learn this.

We would walk in the front door. “Oh, Howard, good, you're here.” “Howard, haven't seen you in ages!” “Hey, kid, come and meet a friend of mine who works with Lew.” “Great to see you, Howard. Oh, hello, Anne.”

Hello.

Sit at the Hollywood dinner party listening to one more reference to one more deal, another drama being played out at another
studio. You are sitting next to the producer of the kind of movie where, Howard says, you not only have to suspend disbelief, you have to stab and gang-rape it. To amuse yourself, if you are, say, only recently arrived, if you have left the West Side of Manhattan for the nicest suburb of hell with a young husband who was only a few months ago avidly discussing Shelley and Donne and is now equally avidly following the crafting of a vapid sitcom (and, yes, if you're trying to understand being faced with this young man you thought you knew who is revealing an unguessed-at capacity for what he himself calls “crap”—how to interpret him now, here where all is cars and valet parking and no one reads), you just might express ever so slightly too much enthusiasm for the utterly vapid sitcom characters being created before your eyes. If you generate a slightly wild-eyed enthusiasm for the idiocies trotted out by a breathtakingly ambitious recent Harvard graduate, one more self-serious Jewish boy from an urban eastern suburb (who looks disconcertingly like your own recent Columbia graduate Jewish husband from an urban eastern suburb). If you evince an ever-so-slightly condescending fascination toward yet another facile adagency concept that they confuse with narration and plot as they present it to you with a gravity fit for Spinoza—then it would be understandable for you to imagine that your sarcasm was sailing right over their well-groomed heads.

Howard told me gently that I was wrong. In the cocoon of our already relatively nice car, returning from a dinner party that had run much too late thrown by moneyed people in a large house where, as my friend Ellie Trachtenberg once put it to me, the cuisine was haute and the conversation trash, he told me that I was wrong. That their little antennae were picking up all sorts of signals I would have thought beyond their wavelengths.

Hm, I said. And then: Really? Those people?

“Your incredulity is adorable,” said Howard.

Don't be patronizing, I said, my incredulity is completely sincere.

“And therefore more adorable.” Howard looked back at the road. He said that any literary work can be measured in purely commercial terms. I pursed my lips at this. It would take me approximately a decade to admit he was right. Which was just silliness on my part. I was being a snob. Howard understood this. Me with my nineteenth-century novels, my Trollope and my Dumas—had I already forgotten that these were the commercial hardcovers of their day? (“Trollope made few claims for the durability of his own fiction.”)

As for the signals I had been emitting, imagining them lost on all those Californians, well, he had a response to that, too. He cleared his throat in the faint green light of the dashboard and quoted to me, loosely, this. It was (the point was not lost on me) from George Eliot's
Daniel Deronda
: “‘Gwendolen meant to win Miss Arrowpoint at the party by giving an interest and attention beyond what others were probably inclined to show. It followed in her mind, unreflectingly'”—I looked at Howard sharply—“‘that because Miss Arrowpoint was ridiculous, she was also wanting in penetration, and Gwendolen went through her little scenes without suspicion that the shades of her behavior were all noted.'”

He took my tensed hand. It took me all the way to La Brea to let out the breath I'd been holding.

In the end, Howard turned out to be absolutely right. Many of them are ridiculous and very few are actually stupid. One of the many oddities of this place.

 

It was quite early on that a UCLA trustee—I think we were at a cocktail party?—had asked me about my Columbia degree. “A Ph.D. in English literature.” That's right. “And Howard just earned his as well?” Yes, I said, but Howard's focus was sixteenth century, mine nineteenth. He said, “Hm!” and then, enthusiastically: There was a faculty opening. “Intro level, part-time, be warned, but it's a terrific position.”

(I paused, quite excited.) You're suggesting I apply?

“Absolutely!” he said. “Both of you.”

I didn't go on about it, but I did think a teaching position would be wonderful—we agreed it would be at least a small contribution to our income—though I was, in fact, quite apprehensive about standing up before two hundred students in an auditorium. “They'll love you,” said Howard. I wasn't sure. I balked. Howard wound up applying as well in order to push me into it. “Stop second-guessing yourself, Anne.” We submitted our fresh Columbia doctorates. Howard had written his thesis on Shakespeare's approach to adaptation from other sources, I on the intellectual origins of the Romantics.

In my very first interview, in Haines Hall on the central quad, the professor—an Americanist, he taught ENGL 179A, “American Fiction to 1900”—seemed curiously distracted, the conversation diffuse. He glanced at a paper in front of him, switched gears, and said, “You're married to Howard Rosenbaum.” Now he seemed intently interested.

Yes.

“Of Random House?”

I said yes, then,
formerly
of Random House.

“He's with a studio now, right?”

Yes, that's why we moved here.

He cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “I've written a manuscript for a book. I think its quite filmic.” He named it: the biography of an American author of several twentieth-century novels.

I was a bit off balance, so I said, A minor writer.

“Yes,” he replied, managing his irritation, “but he shouldn't be.”

Well, we'll disagree.

He knew it was not going well but still said gamely, “Maybe I could talk to Howard about it.” Looked again at the paper. “I see he's also applied for this position.”

They interviewed both of us.

The letter from UCLA, which arrived quickly, asked Howard to come in for a final interview. He found it before I did, opened it, and, after a bit, brought it to me. He cleared his throat. “Maybe I'll just tell 'em to go to hell,” he said.

I looked down at my shoes.

“Anne?”

I raised my head to him and smiled and said, Don't be ridiculous. You'll
love
teaching, you were born for it.

He paused a moment, gauging the sincerity of this. He hadn't, honestly, given it much thought, but now that it was here. “They're idiots,” he offered. He was earnest. “You're twice the scholar I am.”

Well, I said and cocked my head brightly. At least
you
know that.

I turned away and pretended to organize some papers.

“It's just because I'm more flash.” I noticed his eyes were back on the letter, rereading it. You could feel his excitement. “It's the movie studio, they're suckers for that.” He was still reading. Then he looked up at me. “And I'm male,” he added, darkly. (This I thought was laying it on a bit thick.)

I kissed him briefly. True, I said. I made a gesture as if I'd forgotten all about it.