But Enough About You: Essays (6 page)

How did this happen, I wonder? As a child, my summer chores included weeding my mother’s marigold bed. She called it a “bed,” but at the time it seemed as vast as the entire state of Connecticut. It did not instill in me a love of gardening. To this day, I cannot hear the word
marigold
without breaking out in hives.

If you yourself have not yet been ensorcelled by Horta, Goddess of the Garden, and turned into a haunter of the local nursery, let me report that as hobbies go, it’s less expensive than collecting antique biplanes or Andy Warhol soup cans, but dirt, though dirt, does not necessarily come cheap.

When the landscape architect Le Nôtre presented the bill for the gardens of Versailles to Louis XIV, a shadow is said to have eclipsed the features of the Sun King. My own little patch of earth is as Dogpatch, comparatively speaking, but like
le Roi Soleil
, I went ashen when presented with a bill for sixty bags of cedar nuggets.

“Nuggets,” I quipped to the fellow behind the counter. “I must say,
that’s
apt.” As you can see, I’m something of a wag.

He did not riposte, but then he was busy on the phone with the Fraud Alert Department of American Express, which was no doubt demanding zip codes, blood types, social numbers, and maternal birth dates. Once home, I placed each “nugget” individually about the garden with care befitting Murano glass mosaic tiles.

We of Hibernian persuasion have internalized the adage that to be Irish is to know that sooner or later the world will break your heart. But I have made a corollary discovery: The gardener, too, knows that Nature—and all the gods—is in conspiracy against him.

Squirrels, I am now aware, devote every waking hour between October and May to rooting out the bulbs that you laboriously interred in October. The bulbs, that is, that you ordered from exotic mail-order houses; that you soaked overnight in a homemade atomic elixir containing the most potent capsaicin-laden peppers known to science. While I prepare this fiendish brew, I wear latex gloves, face mask, and eye goggles. Saddam Hussein would have paid good money for my formula.

That sound you hear in my garden? That would be the squirrels, expressing gastronomic satisfaction as they dine, chittering, “Cayenne and habañeros! Sublime!
Magnifique!
”

I wonder: What countermeasures did the burghers of Amsterdam deploy against their squirrels during the seventeenth-century Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania? Did grown men weep on discovering that a squirrel had noshed on a tulip bulb worth more than the value of their house? It is not impossible that the arquebus- and sword-wielding soldiers in Rembrandt’s celebrated painting
The Night Watch
were protecting tulip bulbs from seventeenth-century tree rodents. How gardening widens one’s intellectual horizons.

Gardening is said to be a calming pursuit, yet there you find yourself, reaching for a pencil with which to scribble down the 800 number in the infomercial with the guy injecting compressed gas into gopher holes and then igniting it, causing thousands of divots to shoot violently into the sky, along with the remains of the very unpleasantly surprised gophers. How does the poem go? “One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” Right.

In my next dispatch from my backyard Eden, I will discuss strategies and options after Hurricane Sandy has deposited fourteen cubic tons of sea salt on your perennials and fifty-year-old ornamental cedars. Hint: You’re going to need a lot of gypsum.

—
ForbesLife
, April 2013

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats put it, before heading off to Rome to cough his life out in a
pensione
overlooking the Spanish Steps. According to my anthology, “To Autumn” is the most popular poem in the English language. And here I thought “Casey at the Bat” had that distinction. Well, I’m not a bit surprised: Everyone’s a sucker for fall. If you grew up in New England, as I did, this was when you knew you were in the Right Place.

That apple smell, those burning leaves. Those younger than me—an ever-growing cohort—have no memory of setting a match to the piles of leaves our parents made us rake up. The Environment Police put an end to that, on the grounds that that rich, musky smoke would bring about another millennial winter. Such a distinctive smell, those smoldering leaves made. I’m reminded of it on bright sunny days when my ten-year-old sets fire to a leaf with his magnifying glass. It takes me back forty years. Rakes have been supplanted by blowers. The delicate
scritch-scratch
sound of tines combing the grass has been replaced with eardrum-straining turbines. Lawns now sound like the flight deck of aircraft carriers.

Ripeness is all, as Lear would say, and fall is when ripeness happens. While I was growing up, Dr. Bell lived next door. He had a magnificent vegetable garden, and by September his tomatoes were red and heavy on the vines. We would sneak in after dark, armed with a purloined salt shaker, and sit and gorge. We ate his corn raw, each kernel exploding with sugar juice. My mother used to serve us acorn squash with puddles of butter and brown sugar. As a child, I found this a credible delivery system for a foodstuff named “squash.” Pumpkins made a hollow
thunk
when you tapped them. Gutting them was never my favorite part; the stringy innards clung tenaciously to the sides, so you had to shave them off. Back then most Halloween jack-o’-lanterns had quaintly similar eyes, noses, and mouths. Now I buy carving templates that transform your pumpkin
to look like it was designed by the special effects crew of
Halloween 5
. What hasn’t changed is the toasty smell of the candle-scorched insides, the thrilling pagan feel of the night.

People from other parts of the country who came to New England in the fall said, “Aren’t the trees beautiful this time of year!” I shrugged. The trees were exactly what they were supposed to be this time of year. Nothing unusual in that. (Yankee
snobisme
.)

We would drive up to New Haven for the Yale-Harvard game. This was my introduction to tribalism. Those blazing autumn sunny days and the blue and crimson banners snapping in the wind seem vivid now. During the final down of one close game, I remember my father telling me that it was sad, because this was the last time these players would be on a football field. Looking back, it seems to me apt that my first intimation of mortality was imparted to me by my father at the time of year when things start to die.

Thanksgivings we drove up to Sharon, in northwestern Connecticut, my grandparents’ house. When we arrived, I would tumble out of the rattly diesel Mercedes and race into the house to make mischief with cousins. As there were fifty first cousins, the opportunities abounded. In later years when I was older, the ritual was to hunt pheasant on Thanksgiving morning. Not much fun for the pheasant, but walking through those fields, listening to the tinkle of the dogs’ collar bells, is one of my happiest memories. Of those Thanksgiving meals, I remember the pearled onions in cream, mince pies, and bottles from my grandfather’s celebrated wine cellar being brought up and decanted. Some of these had been maturing since the First World War. Sometimes after it was poured into glasses a half-inch of purple mud would settle at the bottom. My aunts and uncles would ooh and aah over these pourings, but we of the younger gen caught them wincing and puckering when they drank.

Then, always too soon for me, it was time to go. These partings wrenched, for a full year might pass before I saw my cousins again. The good-byes in the crepuscular gloom of late November afternoons were, I now understand, rehearsals for later, more final, partings.

—
Boston
, October 2002

The
Wall Street Journal
reported a while back that Tom Clancy went as ballistic as a
Red October
submarine because—brace yourself—the director filming one of Mr. Clancy’s novels placed a reef in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, for reasons of plot.

My first reaction was that this was surely so much
Sturm und Drang
in a teacup. But then I realized I was only being churlish. And worse, jealous. I had just recently gotten word that one of my novels had run aground—yet again—on a reef somewhere in Hollywood. It had been languishing nearly a decade in what is euphemistically called “development hell.”

The novel was called
Thank You for Smoking
. Mel Gibson had optioned the rights to it in 1993, before it was published. It would be more accurate to say—as we Hollywood types do—that “Mel’s people” had optioned it.

Mel’s people couldn’t have been nicer. In our first phone call, they could barely contain their enthusiasm. “This will be Mel’s next movie. Absolutely.” This was an assertion I would hear many times over the coming decade. Eventually the thrill somewhat wore off.

The problem, see, was that Mel and his people got themselves hopelessly sidetracked with two absurd and inconsequential projects. One was called
Braveheart
—I’m told that it sank without a trace at the box office. What was the name of the other? . . .
The Passion of the Christ
. Another commercial stinkeroo. Crater City.

I felt sorry for Mel, but at the same time couldn’t help thinking,
You have only yourself to blame, my friend.
We never actually met, but as an honorary Mel person, I feel justified calling him “friend.” The real tragedy, of course, is that if we actually had become friends, I might have been able to stop him getting into the car that night and getting arrested for driving while anti-Semitic.

So on reconsideration, I now feel Mr. Clancy’s pain over that
reef-mad director. Really, the gall of these so-called auteurs. Philistines. Let’s hope he never gets to direct Proust’s
Remembrance of Time Past
. He’d probably put a reef in the Seine next to the Ile de la Cité.

The
Wall Street Journal
article used the occasion of this artistic outrage to examine other books that were turned into movies. Remember Louis L’Amour, the great western novelist? L’Amour was the real deal, one of the most successful writers of his day. The
Journal
noted that he wrote more than one hundred books, of which nearly fifty—fifty!—were sold to the movies. One of the first was a western titled
The Broken Gun
. When it arrived on the big screen it was called
Cancel My Reservation
and starred Bob Hope.

Unlike Mr. Clancy, Mr. L’Amour was philosophical about it all. He just shrugged. He likened the process to selling a house to a new owner. The new owner, he said, had every right to redecorate. Take the money and let it go.

Ernest Hemingway, a writer of no small ego, was so embittered by his experiences with Hollywood that he formulated what could be called Hemingway’s Rule for Dealing with those Celluloid SOBs. It goes like this: You drive your car up to the California state line. Take your manuscript out of the car. Make them throw the money across first. Toss them the manuscript, get back in the car, and drive back east as fast as you can.

I had pretty much given up all hope of
Smoking
ever being made. Mel and his people seemed hell-bent on their economically suicidal obsession to make a movie about some minor fracas in Palestine two thousand years ago.

And then one day I got a call from a twenty-four-year-old named Jason Reitman. He said, “I’m the guy they hired to f— up your book.” He had me at hello.

Jason had not only read the book, but had also written a screenplay on spec (i.e., without commission). He sent it to Mel over the transom.

A few weeks later, Jason’s phone rang. It was—Mel! Calling from his private jet. (Presumably while flying from the
Braveheart
bankruptcy hearing to the
Passion of the Christ
bankruptcy hearing.) Mel told Jason that his script was “brilliant.” That it was
exactly
the script
he’d been hoping for all these years. They would make the movie together. Absolutely. And that was the last Jason ever heard from Mel.

Some years passed after my call from Jason. Then one day a friend of mine from my White House days rang.

“There’s this guy I know from Stanford Business School,” he said. “He became chief operating officer of something called PayPal, which was sold to eBay for one-point-four billion. Now he wants to get into moviemaking and really wants to make
Thank You for Smoking
. Would it be okay if he called you?”

I told my friend that my rule has always been to accept phone calls from people worth some portion of $1.4 billion and who want to turn one of my novels into a movie.

David Sacks called the next day. I said I was tickled and please, be my guest. But I said he must first call Mel’s people. And so David spent the year and a half on the phone with Mel’s people trying to wrestle back the rights.

Mel’s people explained that they had spent vast sums developing it, paying endless screenwriters to write unusable adaptations. Then there were all the Fed Exes and the photocopying and coffee and electricity and feeding the parking meter and the mocha frappuccinos and wheatgrass smoothies and cosmetic surgeries and all the rest. (In Hollywood this is called “overhead.”) David told me that they seemed to be under the impression that he had pocketed the entire $1.4 billion himself.

They weren’t being greedy. No, no. That doesn’t happen in Hollywood. As David saw it, deep down they didn’t want to sell it because—what if they did and David and Jason made it into a good movie? Mel would look like a schmuck. And if there’s one thing Mel hates, it’s looking like a schmuck. (Too Jewish.)

To make a long story slightly less long, David deployed all the skills he’d learned at Stanford Biz. And what do you know, he did it. He got the rights back.

Time went by, as time does. Nothing. I went back to assuming nothing would ever happen. Then one day I got an e-mail from a Washington friend who’d moved to Park City, Utah, to become a masseuse. The e-mail said, “Hey, great news about Aaron Eckhart!”