Which Lie Did I Tell? (4 page)

I hear from Chevy, too—he had thought by this draft the loneliness of invisibility would be a little more clearly set out.

Back to CAA I go. “Listen to me,” I inform them again. “
There’s going to be a train wreck and I’m in the middle.
” (In point of fact, there was a little reality here in addition to my paranoia: Ivan had met with
Bruce Bodner, Chevy’s manager, partner, and protector, and pretty soon it was not a love nest.)

Here is what CAA told me. “Bill, do you know how many packages we have made? Do you realize we have changed the industry with our packaging skill? Just go write the third draft and we promise you this:
it will all sort itself out.
”

Round thr—ooops, draft three. Talk with Ivan, hopefully make things better, chat with Chevy about the loneliness of invisibility, back to New York and write and write, and in truth, whenever there was a chance to toss a little loneliness into the flick, I did so.

And do you want to know why? Because Chevy had a valid point. How could you deal with this material without discussing the awful reality of what it would be like if no one could see you? If you were, I guess, the ultimate freak on Earth?

But this had to be considered too—Olivier was not playing the lead. Young Brando was not playing the lead. Or Cagney.
My
truth was this: I had no problem investigating the loneliness of invisibility,
I just didn’t want to investigate it with Chevy Chase.
Bright as Chase was, he had not gotten famous playing drunks or scientists or death-row convicts, he had become so playing a goof who had trouble with stairs.

Draft three made its way to both powers. Ivan wanted to go into production. Chevy stood his ground.

I made my standard run at CAA. “Have I ever mentioned a fucking train wreck to you guys?” I inquired. “Well, run for cover.”

They smiled and chortled and reassured but I could see in their eyes I was not the loony of a few months before.

Ivan went to the Brothers Warner. Your pick, he told them, knowing they had to pick him. Me or Chevy?

They picked Chevy.

I think I quit first but I really don’t remember; it was probably a dead heat. Half a dozen years later, Chevy came out in the flick. My name is mentioned among the writers. I have no idea if it should have been, since I never saw the movie. I have blocked out so much of that period, but a couple of things I do remember.

One is that I was cheated for the first time in decades of movie work.

Understand this: all the sleaze you’ve heard about Hollywood? All the illiterate scumbags who scuttle down the corridors of power? They are there, all right, and worse than you can imagine.

But Hollywood is one of the last of the handshake businesses.
I don’t think I have ever signed a contract before my work was finished. You just know you are going to be reimbursed whatever you were told you would be. Studios may have their creative accounting, sure, but they don’t rob you up front.

Mark Canton was head of production then and he flipped when Ivan and I quit, but Ivan was much too powerful for him to do anything about. I wasn’t, and he refused to pay me for work handed in. His message was essentially this: Sue us, we’ve got lots of lawyers, how many do you have?

I remember being shocked when this happened. Pissed, too. Finally a settlement was made, not even remotely a fair one. When you hire me, you are hiring my work and my time. Never happened since.

The second memory is something I think I said. (I read in a magazine that I did, although I have no real recollection of it.)

Chevy and Bodner tried to bring me back after the fiasco. For one final whack at the material. To write into the script what was so important to them. (Class, repeat after me: the loneliness of,
riiiiight,
invisibility.)

They were both gentlemen and I listened. Then I got up, said this:
“I’m sorry, but I’m too old and too rich to put up with this shit.”
And left.

Wouldn’t that be neat if it was me … ?

Here is how the novel
The Princess Bride
happened.

I loved telling stories to my daughters. When they were small, I would go into their room and stories would just be there. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t think much of what I do is very terrific, but, my God, I was wonderful those early evenings. Stuff just
came.
I knew that because the girls would sneak out and tell their mother and she would say to me, “Write it down, write it down,” and I told her I didn’t need to, I was on such a hot streak I knew I’d remember.

All gone, of course, and of all the stuff I’ve done over almost forty-five years of storytelling, more than anything I wish I had those moments back. Doesn’t matter, really. Woulda shoulda coulda … At any rate, I was on my way to Magic Town around 1970, and I said to them both, to Jenny, then seven, and Susanna, then four, “I’ll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”

“Then that will be the title,” I told them. And so it has remained.

The first snippets are gone. A couple of pages maybe, maybe a little more, sent from the Beverly Hills Hotel to home. Since it was to be a kid’s saga, the early names were silly names: Buttercup, Humperdinck. I’m sure those pages weren’t much. I have never been able to write in Southern California. (My fault, of course. I find it just too, well,
wun
derful. There was a time, before the recent madness, when people actually thought of L.A. as being that,
wun
derful.

Wandering now, I suppose nothing surprises me more than Los Angeles’s becoming a place people
leave.
For the first half-century of my life, it was, he says in as cornball a way as he can muster, the American dream. Walls closing in? Just drive to the western ocean, you’ll be fine. For me, abrasiveness helps, so I have always written in New York.

Anyway, the early pages disappeared. As did the notion of writing something for my ladies. At least consciously. (I don’t understand the
creative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort
not
to understand it. I don’t know what it is or how it works but I am
terrified
that one green morning it will decide to not work anymore, so I have always given it as wide a bypass as possible.)

There is a story of Olivier after a particularly remarkable performance of
Othello.
Maggie Smith, his Desdemona, knocked on his dressing room door as she was on her way out of the theater and saw him staring at the wall, holding a tumbler of whiskey. She told him his work that night was magic. And he said, in, I suspect, tears and despair, “I know it was … and I don’t know how I did it.”

This relates to me in but one way:
The Princess Bride
is the only novel of mine I really like. And I don’t know how I did it.

I remember doing the first chapter about how Buttercup became the most beautiful woman in the world. And the second chapter, which is a rather unflattering intro of Prince Humperdinck, the animal killer in his Zoo of Death.

But then I went dry.

The nightmare of all of us who put words on paper. I stormed around the city, wild with ineptitude, because, you see, all these moments had already happened in my head—the sword fight on the Cliffs of Insanity, for example; Inigo and his quest for the six-fingered man, for example; Fezzik and his rhymes—but I didn’t know how to
get
to them, had no way to string them together. And I could feel the window of creativity starting to close. We move on, we move on, it’s okay, we’ll find other stories left to tell …

But I didn’t
want
to tell other stories, I wanted to tell
this
one. And I couldn’t find a way. I suppose the most desperate I have ever been was when I was twenty-four and done with grad school and done with the army and about to become an accursed copywriter in some ad agency in Chicago when I wrote my first novel,
The Temple of Gold,
in three weeks. It was a couple of hundred pages long and I had never written anything more than thirty and I remember thinking, when I was on
this page
or
this page
or
this page
, “I don’t know where I am, all I know is I’ve never been here before.” But the book got published and suddenly I was what I always dreamt of but never thought I’d be, a writer.

Then I got the idea of the “good parts,” that the whole
Princess Bride
story would be an abridgement of another, longer, book.

That made the novel possible.
My
book would be an abridgment of an earlier book, written by
S. Morgenstern. Morgenstern’s book would
be one my father had had read to him by his father when he was sick (in the movie it’s the grandfather reading it to me) and from which my father read me only the good parts because he didn’t want to bore me.

Which meant I could jump wherever I wanted. I was free. So I did the opening chapter which explains how I got sick and my father started reading to me—

—and then I started to fly.

For the only time, I was happy with what I was doing. You can’t know what that means if, most of your life, you haven’t been stuck in your pit, locked forever with your own limitations, unable to tap the wonderful stuff that lurks there in your head but flattens out whenever it comes near paper.

The most startling creative moment of my life happened here. I remember going to my office and Westley was in the Zoo of Death (the Pit of Despair in the movie—budgetary reasons), and he was being tormented by the evil Count Rugen, who got his Ph.D. in pain (or would have, but doctorates didn’t exist then, this was after education but before educators realized the real money was in diplomas). Westley is strapped in The Machine and Prince Humperdinck roars down and turns it all the way up and Inigo and Fezzik are on the way to the rescue when the Deathscream begins and they track it and as I was going to work that morning I kind of wondered how I was going to get Westley out of it. I sat at my desk and had coffee and read the papers and fiddled a while. Then I realized, I
wasn’t
going to get him out of it. And I wrote these words: Westley lay dead by The Machine.