Hating Olivia: A Love Story (29 page)
Hopefully the torturous route to a worldwide audience for
Hating Olivia
will inspire another struggling writer on the road.
It can happen. It did for me.
by Mark SaFranko
F
OR SOME REASON,
Dack Lambert felt uneasy. Coming to Paris was his idea, but now that he was here, he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to be.
It was early spring. The reason for the jaunt, he’d told his wife, was that he needed to see Silverburg. It was part reunion, part business. Silverburg had been living in Paris for a long time now, decades, and he’d produced a couple of Dack Lambert’s first big features, including a slick caper that had established him as a bona fide movie star. The movie had been shot in Paris, and it remained one of the key works in the Lambert canon. He and Silverburg were talking about a new project, a return to glory of sorts for both of them, he explained to Mercedes, something he could really believe in, sink his teeth into. These days such things were hard to come by.
It had all been a lie. Yes, he was seeing Silverburg, but they were talking about movies and the future only incidentally. Silverburg had nothing on his plate except for distant dreams, for one thing, and for another, Dack Lambert was only interested in coming to the City of Lights for recreational sex. The simple fact was that it was hard to get around anonymously in America, even if you were a star well into middle age. Those infernal paparazzi could slither out from under their rocks at the damnedest times and screw everything up. So his idea—a brilliant one if he had to say so himself—had been to fly over to Europe by himself, wander the streets and pick up one or more of those delectable French girls and enjoy himself—and her—in relative privacy. Something like that. It was remarkable that more guys in his position didn’t think of it. Well, maybe they did. He’d read somewhere that Joe DiMaggio liked to visit Europe, where no one knew him, and consort with prostitutes.
Nevertheless, now that he was here, there was that strange uneasiness….
Back at home things were tiresome, to say the least. Mercedes was Dack Lambert’s fourth wife, twenty-five years his junior, and together they’d
produced three children that he was bored with. Young as they were, they already regarded their father as nothing more than a bottomless piggybank. The uglier truth was that he was tired of his wife too. After all of his attempts at monogamy and matrimony, it still wasn’t working. Dack Lambert needed something different on a consistent basis; this time he finally accepted it. He knew that his wife wasn’t thrilled that he was traveling by himself—she might even have been suspicious of his motives when he left L.A., though he’d given her no reason for it in the years they’d been together—but as the undisputed economic power in the marriage (she was nothing but a middling real estate agent when they met, and, most important, not a celebrity), there wasn’t much she could do about the decisions he made. And after all his earlier failures at wedlock, he’d made sure this time that his attorneys had drawn up the prenup heavily in his favor in the event Mercedes decided to do something stupid.
On the second night, after his jet lag had abated, Dack and Arthur Silverburg met for dinner at a small, unpretentious restaurant known for authentic home-style French cuisine around the corner from his hotel in the 6th.
“I’m out of the business,” sniffed the producer with a mixture of self-pity and annoyance as he spread a napkin over his lap. With his thinning white hair and sagging, wrinkled face, he looked every one of his eighty years. It was a shock to see what age had done to the man—and would soon do to the movie star.
“Mm,” grunted Dack. He knew all about it already; he knew more than the producer had ever given him credit for.
“Oh, I know my name will be attached to the two new pieces of garbage coming out later this year, but I’m through. The business nowadays is shit, you know? Kids running around blowing things up. I mean really, every thirty seconds something has to blow the fuck up. Get this. I sat there with a stopwatch recently and actually timed the explosions? Every thirty seconds! And the goddamn thing ends up winning an Oscar! They call that movie-making? In my book that’s nothing but crap!”
Silverburg was getting all worked up, which amused Dack. It’s just the fucking movies, he thought. He went on half-listening and digging at his cod-and-mashed-potato pie. It was a simple dish, but downright exquisite. He could never find anything like this back in the States.
The old guy rattled on, about the wonderful collaborations he’d had with Dack Lambert way back when, and how they didn’t “make ‘em like they used to anymore.” But Silverburg was wrong. It was shit back then too, thought Dack. It had all been shit, only shit of a different color, but he didn’t dispute the erstwhile executive. He didn’t care enough.
“When you’re here,” Silverburg reminded him for the second or third time, “you really should go around and see Polanski. I think he’s between projects right now. He gets lonely … I know, because I’ve run into him a few times. He tells everyone he loves Paris and all, but it’s bullshit. Why the hell do you think he keeps fighting to get that child rape conviction overturned back in the States? He doesn’t give a damn about clearing his name. He wants back into the action,
even at his age. Though you’d think that young wife of his would be enough to keep him content, right …? ” The men exchanged a leer.
A few minutes later Dack’s brain was tired. He was weary of listening to the old man maunder. And he wasn’t about to look up Polanski. He knew the exiled director would never use him in a movie, and he really didn’t care whether or not he made another anytime soon….
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation…. ”
The lady, petite and dressed in an understated outfit that reflected nothing short of perfect continental taste, was standing behind Dack’s chair. She was older, not quite as old as Silverburg, but in her eyes was the world-weariness of someone who’d seen pretty much everything there was to see in life.
“For Christ’s sake—Sylvia.”
Of course she and Silverburg knew each other! They were in fact old acquaintances. Sylvia Rensick ran a prestigious PR firm on Madison Avenue, and her husband had once upon a time been the European editor in chief of a great, but now defunct American magazine.
“You know Dack, of course…. ”
Of course she knew Dack. Didn’t everyone?
“Oh my gosh—Dack Lambert! I’m one of your biggest fans…. ”
As Dack had come to realize over the years, it was both true and it was hokum. So much existed only in the minds of these people. They projected their own fantasies onto him, fantasies he couldn’t possibly live up to, and it provoked a reflexive aloofness in him when he was forced to deal with them. At the same time, he couldn’t stop himself from glomming up the attention like a starving dog. In some hard-to-explain way he’d come to depend on the adulation to keep him alive.
Sylvia went on about a “boutique” division that she’d established that catered to established movie stars like himself, and how the next time he was in New York he just had to stop by and chat with her about it. If she was lucky, she giggled like a girl, maybe she could sign him.
And of course he said he would. He always said yes to everything, so long as it was scheduled for some indeterminate point in the future. It was a carryover from when he was a struggling actor all those years ago.
Eventually the two old friends said good night. Silverburg wanted to get together with Dack again before he left town, and they agreed to a loose plan, but Dack couldn’t care less if he never saw the producer again.
He went out into the late March night and instead of heading straight back to his hotel, decided to walk. He felt a tad drunk from the two bottles of Alsatian pinot noir, a little disoriented in the dark, sinuous cul-de-sacs near the restaurant, and he immediately proceeded to get lost. In his pocket he carried a tourist map, but he preferred to rely on his own instincts. He found himself outside the Church of Saint Sulpice, where there was a great deal of activity, with bodies coming and going through the huge, ancient doors.
He decided to duck inside. It appeared to be the aftermath of a concert; musicians were packing their instruments away, and people were strolling
around the great baroque house of worship ogling historical artifacts and gazing at the ceilings and stained glass.
Dack shuffled up and down the naves doing the same. It felt good to be out of the cold and damp. Since he was the furthest thing from religious, the mummery and flummery of the iconography meant little to him. And he was still plagued by that same sense of unease he’d experienced when the car had brought him in from Orly. Being in a church only exacerbated it….
On the streets again. It was Paris itself, he decided now, that was making him feel so odd. Dead—that’s how he felt. But alive too. With every step he took he experienced an ominous sensation of “eternity,” though that didn’t quite capture it either. It was something else … some mystical duality that was impossible to put into words….
It was then that he first had the eerie feeling that he was being followed. He was on Rue Jacob, not far from the bistro where Sartre and Beauvoir held court once upon a time, when it struck him. Sure enough, the man doing the trailing was in a trench coat, not unlike the one the actor himself was wearing, and whenever Dack looked over his shoulder, he was there. Now that he got a decent look at the fellow, he realized that he may have first glimpsed him in the church.
Dack stared. The man wasn’t young. Like himself, he had traveled over a certain hump in age. Could he possibly be a fan, someone who’d recognized him? Not likely … because why would a man of mature years want to stalk another old guy? It didn’t figure.
At every corner Dack turned the man was there, trying not to be noticed. If Dack stopped to peer into a shop window, the man did the same a few steps away. No, there was no doubt about it now—he was being followed. But why?
By the time he reached his hotel, Dack was in a nervous state. What the fuck was going on? Heart thrumming against his chest, he jumped the three steps to the lobby, stopped abruptly and swung around, surveying the winding street up and down.
Nothing. One or two bodies straggling along in the darkness of the early morning, but they weren’t his follower.
Maybe Dack Lambert was imagining things after all.
The next morning he was up and about early. Breakfast in the lobby was a croissant, a wedge of cheese, that strong, superb French coffee with steamed milk. He had no definite plan for the day except to take to the streets. He had to be out of doors, because that was the only way he could do what he’d come to Paris to do; it was all clear in his mind now, if it wasn’t before.
This was what he envisioned: he would wander the streets until he made contact with a woman. It was just a matter of time. They were everywhere he looked, one more attractive than the next. She would recognize him for who he really was—they all did at some point—and a conversation would lead to a drink, and the drink to another, and then he would be able to blot out his existence for as long as he could manage. That’s what a new woman could do for a man—expunge his very existence.
He was without a compass, without a direction, and so his movements were erratic; they were determined by nothing but the soft Parisian breezes. The Luxembourg Gardens. Rue de Rivoli. A landmark cemetery in Montparnasse….
During Dack’s perambulations, something strange happened. Whenever he encountered a mirror, whether a makeshift version formed by the glass in a shop front, or a real one in a café restroom, he was violently struck by his own image.
“Jesus H. Christ—when did I get so old?” he muttered to himself. He tried to shake it off and move on, reminding himself that only a few people on the face of the earth ever became movie stars, and that he still had something special, something few others had, no matter what his age.
In one of those encounters with his reflection he saw that man again. Over his shoulder. It was nothing but a glimpse lasting all of a millisecond, but Dack was certain it was him.
How had he found Dack again in this vast city? Was it possible his trail had been picked up straight out of the hotel?
His heart rate accelerated, the way it did yesterday, when he first registered the other’s presence, but as soon as he began to look for the man, he didn’t see him again.
Whenever he passed a cinema, and there were slews of them here, many more, it seemed, than back in America, with its marquees and billboards, he felt bitterness for the new wave of movie stars who’d replaced him. Pitt, Damon, Depp—he despised them all. Dack Lambert might still have something, but there was no question that like a world-class athlete who’s lost a step on the field, he’d been superannuated. There was nothing he could do about it. Time wreaked its vengeance on everyone.
He was walking on the Boulevard Raspail when suddenly he remembered Natalie. She’d been a wardrobe assistant on his film
Desperation
back in the late seventies. At the time he’d been separated from his second wife, and he and Natalie had an uninhibited fling that lasted the duration of the shoot. Natalie was a sweet memory.
He stopped. Could this be the building? She’d lived right here, in a second-or third-floor flat, he was sure of it. God, it looked so familiar! He checked the names of the tenants, but no, of course not, Natalie Carrere was long gone. What was he thinking?
As he watched the hordes of Parisian schoolgirls flaunting their young bodies and their cigarettes, he caressed the memory of that long-ago interlude, one like so many others he’d enjoyed over the years, when on location he would pluck a girl out of the pool of extras, or from the crew, sometimes even from the crowd of onlookers, have a good time with her and when it was over never give her a second thought. And he could do it because he was a movie star, a superior being far beyond the pale of the ordinary human.