Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women (44 page)

I’m an entertainment lawyer and I met Frank Schaeffer sometime in the mid ’80s when a few long forgotten clients wanted to buy a screenplay Frank had commissioned. It was a cheesy horror story Frank had wanted to direct but was then willing to give up. We did the deal and nothing came of it. But then a couple years later Frank had another screenplay he had written and he wanted a Hollywood lawyer.

Frank remembered me from the other deal. He told me about his screenplay and I read it. It was a true story about Italians, both religious Catholics and Communist partisans, who save 92 Jewish orphans from the Germans. I read it on an airplane, and I remember being so moved, I teared up.

I also remember thinking it was amazing that someone could write a story about saving 92 Jews, and yet there was almost nothing about Jews in the script. It was all about Christian faith. That began my association with Frank Schaeffer.

The Foreigners
was one of those film projects that “almost get made.” But it had an effect on me, because it was the first time I worked so closely with a client that, after dealing with the ethical niceties being a lawyer requires, I became his producer/partner.

I’ll never forget the first time Frank visited in Santa Monica. We had a little guesthouse in the back and he stayed there and we worked on the screenplay. My son Henry was about three and he and Frank hit it off immediately, as Frank loves to read books to children.

The next big moment in our relationship came several years later when Frank asked me to read the manuscript for his first novel,
Portofino.
I was the first person, other than Frank’s wife, to read the book. Because those of Frank’s screenplays that I had read had been wildly in need of rewriting, I expected the manuscript to be a mess. But the opposite was true. I read the whole thing over a July 4 weekend, laughing out loud, and reading passages out loud to my wife, Janet. The published version of the book differs from what I read in the first draft by at most one percent.

It was in connection with
Portofino
that I learned that Frank was not what he seemed to be when it came to religion and politics. Frank had told me vaguely (“hiding his light under a bushel” to the end) that his father had been a Protestant theologian, but after reading
Portofino
I learned that there was more to it than that.

His literary agent at the time mentioned casually that “of course a lot of Christian bookstores” might want to carry the book. Given
Portofino
’s jaundiced view of Christian fundamentalism, that surprised me, and that’s
when I learned that Frank’s father, Francis A. Schaeffer, was a famous evangelical, and his mother, Edith Schaeffer, was equally prominent.

I like to think that Frank is still the boy, Calvin, in his novels, who is afraid that if he gives the English girl he loves a pamphlet about predestination, she will be “predestined” not to want to be with him any more. But then perhaps I’m one of the liberals Frank complains about who assume that anyone who lives near Boston, writes novels, and has good art on his walls has the same views they do. Maybe that intimidated him. As close as we became over the past twenty years as we wrote screenplays together and traveled to locations for films for which the money always seemed to disappear, as we read each other’s work, as we visited each other’s families, it took years for Frank to gain the confidence that I would still be his friend if he told me about his deep Christian faith.

As Frank grew to trust me more, and more freely shared his opinions, we began to enjoy our conflicts. I remember one trip to New York when I met Frank and Genie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were there to see the big Byzantine show they had in the late ’90s. In the cafeteria, we had a long argument about abortion rights. We were there to see the art, but we couldn’t stop arguing.