How to Save Your Own Life (23 page)

This is the land of the Big Deal, of pay or play, of millions one year and bankruptcy the next, of meetings, meetings, meetings (interrupted by an occasional movie), of much talk and very little action, of hustle and hassle, greed and guile.

The license plate I saw on a Rolls parked outside the Beverly Hills Hotel the night of my arrival summed it up: GREED. Britt was not that honest.

“I want to make a really quality movie of your book,” she said in the hotel suite (where we were eating our sumptuous room-service meal of roast rack of lamb, carved by the
maître
d' himself, assisted by a flunky).

“I think we should get Truffaut or Ingmar Bergman—or maybe even John Schlesinger to direct,” Britt said, chomping down on a mouthful of lamb. She was nervous about her date later—and, with many apologies, she wanted to eat and run. I could almost see her brain ticking. She had done her bit for me (picked me up at the airport). Now it was time to attend to herself. Pretty soon she was gobbling a chocolate mousse (Britt ate lots of chocolate but never got fat—a sure sign of demonic possession) and reapplying her blood-red lipstick and running off to her late-night date with a man whose live-in girlfriend just happened to be away for the weekend.

 

I was left alone in the suite, waiting for my hotel-room panic to claim me—but somehow, it did not. I inspected the rooms, showered, turned down the covers of my bed, piled up the numerous pillows, and then went to have a look at my terrace, which overlooked the deserted swimming pool and cabanas. The air was balmy and mild. I was calm. I was delighted to be alone, delighted to have experienced an entire transcontinental flight without a moment of terror, and unequivocally delighted to be in evil, awful Los Angeles.

While I was out on the terrace, the phone rang. Though I was momentarily annoyed at having my reverie interrupted, when I picked up the phone and heard Holly's shaken voice across three thousand miles of telephone cable, I knew something serious was up. It was four in the morning in New York. Crazy as Holly was at times, she was not given to late-night long-distance dialing.

“What's up?” I asked cheerily, as if that way I could eradicate whatever was bothering her.

“Am I crazy, Isadora?” Holly asked. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Of course not,” I lied.

“Come on, this is
serious.
I want you to tell me if you think I'm mad.”

“What's ‘mad'?”

“That's no sort of answer and you know it. I don't want cheap semantics or cleverness, I just want to know whether you've ever detected in me any sign of real insanity—not imagination or the sort of things I paint or anything like that—but delusions, conjuring up things that aren't there,
that
sort of thing.”

“No,” I said firmly, trying for the life of me to remember whether it was true or not. “No, absolutely not.”

“Well,” Holly said, sounding relieved, “for the last couple of days—I don't know why I didn't tell you this before you left, but I guess it sounded too weird—I've been thinking almost constantly of Jeannie Morton. I know this sounds insane, but it's almost as if she's here with me in the loft, hovering over the plants, watching me paint, a definite
presence.
I keep going to her books, reading them, painting some more, feeding the cat, reading a poem of hers, painting, thinking about her—but all the time I'm agitated, as if she's trying to tell me something, as if she's here, and all the time I'm also thinking I'm crazy, and that I have to call you, but I don't know if you're in L.A. yet, and I'm also afraid you'll think it's weird.... So finally (and you know I
never
paint people) I take out a clean canvas and one of the jacket photos of her—the one where she's sitting in her solarium with the white angora cat on her lap—and I start doing a
portrait
of her. I
know
I'm not playin' with a full deck, but as I paint it, oddly enough, the room gets calmer, the agitation lifts, it gets peaceful again.... So I go on painting till I'm very tired (I used Seymour as the model for the cat, but Jeannie I painted from the photograph, at least I hope I did) and then finally, I'm so exhausted I fall asleep without any Valium even —which is some kind of
first
for me. And then—
this
is the weird part—I
dreamed
about her and she looked just like herself and talked like herself and she said something very strange which I don't understand at all but maybe you will ...”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Tell your friend to use the notebook.' And she was very firm about it, very definite, like a command. Then I got up and called you.”

“How do you know the friend was me?”

“You're the only friend I
have,
dummy. Listen, Isadora, does that
mean
anything to you?”

“I'm thinking,” I said. “Wait—could you hold the wire a second? I think someone's at the door...”

“It's Jeannie,” Holly said, terrified.

“Don't be ridiculous.”

I went to my suitcase, pulled out the red-marbled notebook and returned to the phone.

“No one there,” I said, “just some drunken producers in the hall...”

“Thank God,” Holly sighed at the end of the long umbilicus. I opened the notebook to the first endpaper, where I was relieved to find no words but the ones that had been there before.

“I think you've just been working too hard,” I told Holly reassuringly, reassuring myself too. I leafed through the notebook with my free hand and in the sewn centerfold I saw something I hadn't noticed before:

It was unmistakably Jeannie's handwriting. But more than that, it was unmistakably Jeannie's
voice
.

“Listen, Holly, I will
not
sit here and listen to this supernatural nonsense. You just miss her, that's all. I miss her
too.
Haunting by another name is love.”

“Hey—I like that. That's a good line. Did anyone ever tell you you should write greeting cards?”

“Very funny.”

“I mean it. You might even attempt a best seller someday, go to Hollywood, earn big bucks. It sure beats painting ferns.”

“Do you think you can go to sleep now?”

“I think so, I feel fine, really I do, it was just a passing lunacy.”

“Will you call me immediately if you get upset again? Call collect, it's on Britt, she can afford it better than you can.”

“I think I'm okay now.”

“Good.”

“I love you a lot,” Holly said.

“Me you too. Call me anytime if you feel weird again. Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Lots of hugs and kisses.”

“To you too,” she said.

And we blew a bunch of transcontinental kisses and hung up.

 

Britt put me through hell. In the week that followed, I got to know her, and what I got to know, I did not like. She was incorrigible, kept me waiting four and five hours for meetings, stayed for an hour or two, and then raced off to some boyfriend's house, leaving the bedspread in my hotel room scum-bled with crumbs of marijuana and traces of cocaine.

She had me marked as a sucker, and she was right. Who else would have come to Hollywood for the price of a plane ticket and hotel bill? Who else would have worked days and days on outlining a screenplay that turned out to be wrong in concept, wrong in construction, and unplayable—because it was a botch of my book and her directives and because the truth was that at that point, neither of us knew anything about what we were doing. “Trust me,” Britt said. And I did. Oh I am very good at trusting all the wrong people.

I knew
I
was ignorant, but I assumed Britt knew what
she
was doing. So I did what no writer should
ever
do: I put my words in her hands. I took instruction from her. I let her tell me what to write. And my naivete set me up for disaster. The screenplay that resulted represented neither my book nor Britt's idea of a movie. It was a pastiche of mistakes.

We worked at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Britt's office on the back lot of Paradigm Pictures, at her mansion in Beverly Hills.
Worked
is a rather strong word for what went on. It was impossible to get Britt's attention for more than ten minutes at a time. She paced, smoked, snorted, answered phones, made dates, took breaks, left me baby-sitting with her two neurotic Lhasa Apsos, sent me shopping for food—and, in general, treated me like a menial or a personal secretary. I was so astounded by this treatment that I could barely find the words to protest. Nobody had ever treated me that way before. Did Britt
know
what she was doing or was she totally unconscious? I suspect the latter. Whenever I got up the courage to hint to her that I wasn't her caretaker, her wet nurse, her nanny—she broke down and cried, telling me she was my friend, telling me she loved me, telling me she identified with me completely and would never, never,
never
want to do anything to hurt me. By fits and starts, we managed to take apart the whole of
Candida Confesses
and break it down into scenes on index cards. Then we started crawling around on our hands and knees, arranging the scenes on the floor of the hotel room. My whole life on index cards under our knees! As we took the book apart, I realized that I would have to take my life apart the same way. But whether I would ever be able to put it back together again was another story.

In the middle of my second week in California, Britt disappeared. Neither her secretary nor her housekeeper nor her estranged husband knew where she was. I waited around for her an entire day, and when it seemed that nobody else was really worried (she had done this before—and had always wound up returning—often with a new boyfriend), I decided to take a vacation too. I flew up to Berkeley to visit a college friend, and spent the flight marveling at the remarkable shapes of the mountains. I had never felt so absurdly at home in the air. Or in the world. I had never thought of Bennett so little. He was gone, my depression was gone, and my whole life seemed about to start over.

 

I checked in with Britt's secretary the morning I got back, and when I learned that she was still away, I declared a vacation for myself and did other things with my time.

I rented a car and drove to Disneyland. I drove out to Malibu by myself and stood on the beach in a Santa Ana wind, thinking about my life and testing the fortune-telling power of waves with my toes.

The ocean was an astonishing medley of purple, azure, and green, with a glittering surface of scales being played by the wind. The air was so clear that the horizon was a razor's edge halfway to Japan, and the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again.

I stood with my bare feet planted in the sand at the tide's edge and waited for the irregular lips of the waves to tell me what to do with my life. If the waves touched my toes, I promised myself I would leave Bennett.

Then I waited in increasing desolation while the waves kept missing my prophetic flesh. I stood still for what seemed like hundreds of waves, trying not to show the sea how badly it had disappointed me. Until finally it happened: one glittering cylinder of blue water crashed into white foam, sending its froth bubbling along the beach to my waiting toes, ankles, calves, and knees. I felt the wet sand cave under my arches and I knew panic—and exultation. The sea had just divorced me from Bennett.

 

Later that afternoon I had an invitation to visit a famous old American writer (formerly an expatriate in Paris) whose reclining years had brought him, like so many other frantic bohemians, to bourgeois comfort on the edge of the Pacific. Kurt Hammer had honed his underground reputation on tattered copies of his reputed-to-be pornographic novels, smuggled in through customs in the days when sex was considered unfit for print. Now that sex was everywhere in print, his royalties were fading. Censorship, which had once made him seem a modern Marquis de Sade, had receded, leaving him exposed as something of a romantic, a man in love with love—and especially in love with words.

Now eighty-seven, he spent the whole day in bed, writing and sleeping and entertaining disciples. They came from all over the world, and when they didn't come, he wrote to them in longhand on yellow pads. From his bed he communicated with the entire world! He wrote in a free sloping hand not unlike my own—and it was not unusual for him to write as many as twenty letters in the course of one day. I mailed a stack of twenty-two for him the afternoon after I visited him. They were addressed to Sweden, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, the Middle East. Kurt had been accused of male chauvinism by the women's movement, and that piqued and intrigued him. He corresponded with feminists all over the world and he admitted as often as possible that women were the superior sex. “No man lives as long as I have,” he said, “without discovering that.”

Seeing this whimsical, elfin octogenarian (with a freckled bald dome and the antic grin of a child who's just gotten into some delicious trouble), it was hard to make sense of his image as a monster of depravity and machismo.

“I'm supposed to be a dirty old man dontcha know,” Kurt said mischievously, in a voice that still said Brooklyn. “Aren't you afraid to sit on my bed?”

I giggled. He looked pretty harmless to me. “Whatever I answer, you'll be insulted.”

“I'm
beyond
being insulted. The whole world is cake to me. Every morning when I wake up, I say to myself: What? Not dead yet? Sometimes I feel so lousy I think I
am
dead. But all I ask is that the next world be as interesting as this one. I'm not
interested
in Nirvana. Nirvana is a goddamned bore. I can't think of anything
worse
, in fact. What I want are the extremes —the good, the bad, the shit, the Chopin. By the way, do you like Chopin?”