Joseph Anton: A Memoir (94 page)

Padma’s immediate family (her mother had gone back to her stepfather after a couple of months’ separation) lived in deeply unfashionable
West Covina and she had attended La Puente High School—in a neighborhood so unsafe, she told him, that every day after school she ran all the way home and didn’t stop until she got there—so that was yet another version of the city for him to explore. Even in Hollywood he remembered the sadness of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories about a broken-down screenwriter, and had enough of the ghoul in him to go looking for Cielo Drive and the ghost of Sharon Tate. He was still feeling like a convict recently sprung from the pen and so for him one of the great treats of the city was the thing that many other people hated about it: driving. He hadn’t been able to drive himself for years so he rented a car and drove for hours, learning the city streets and the labyrinthine canyons, going up the Pacific Coast Highway and down to the Million Dollar Hotel, and if the freeways were jammed he drove the back roads and anyway was happy to sit in traffic and hum the old Pointer Sisters song “Fire” (
I’m ridin’ in your car / you turn on the radio …
), which he remembered because it had been a hit when he came here as a young advertising copywriter to make commercials for Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy and rode around the city escorted by a couple of Beverly Hills cops in mirror shades who thought they were Starsky and Hutch (“You want me to stop the traffic for you? You sure you don’t? Because I could stop the traffic real easy, you know!”). Now there were no cops and he was living with a beautiful woman in her West Hollywood apartment on Kings Road between Beverly and Melrose while their New York place was being fixed up, and there were days when life felt very, very good.

The apartment was small, so he often worked at the library in Beverly Hills, happily anonymous, and because he loved local history he plunged into the city’s past and found out that the angels in the city’s name were the ones in Saint Francis of Assisi’s first, very small church, the Porziuncola, and learned about the fabled Lizard People, who had lived in tunnels under the city thousands or hundreds of years ago or maybe just last week. For a brief moment he wanted to write about G. Warren Shufelt, who in 1934 invented some sort of vibration machine that actually
found the tunnels
, which could be accessed from a basement in the central library and ran all the way to Dodger Stadium and then, after his great discovery, and before he could show the tunnels to anyone
else, the great Shufelt
mysteriously totally disappeared!, and was never seen again!, I mean, what
happened
to him?
Hmm, he thought, on second thought, maybe writing about old G. Warren wasn’t such a good idea.

Hollywood was a small town inside a big city and for five minutes a new arrival such as himself became the flavor of the month. The film director Michael Mann invited him to dinner and they discussed a project for a movie about the Mexican border. The movie star Will Smith told him about being taught by Muhammad Ali to do the “Ali Shuffle.” The producer Brian Grazer invited him to his office to ask if he wanted to write a movie about his life. A few years earlier he had heard from Christopher Hitchens that Milos Forman thought a Rushdie movie could be a great companion piece to his other free-speech film,
The People vs. Larry Flynt
, but that hadn’t sounded right, and nor did this. If he told his story, he said to Grazer, he would do it in a book first. (He also liked being in Hollywood without being in the business. It was, well,
cooler
. The moment he signed a screenwriting deal he would be just another employee.)

He had lunch with Christopher Hitchens and Christopher’s big fan Warren Beatty at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Can I say,” Warren Beatty said to him, “that when I saw you at dinner at Mr. Chow the other day you were with a woman so beautiful that it made me want to faint?” In those days he trusted her completely, so he replied, “I’ll call her. Maybe she can join us.” “Will you please tell her,” Beatty said, “that Warren Beatty is here and he thought she was so beautiful that it made him want to faint.” She was in her car, impatient, when he called. (She hated driving.) “I’m having lunch with Warren Beatty,” he said, “and he says to tell you that he thinks you’re so beautiful that it makes him want to faint.” “Shut up,” she said, “I don’t have time for your jokes.”

Once he had convinced her that he was telling the truth she did join them, and deliberately did nothing to doll herself up, arriving in sweatpants and tank top and looking, of course, as if she might make Warren Beatty faint. “You’ll excuse me,” the legendary lover said to him, “if I make a fool of myself over your lady for five minutes. After that we can go on having lunch.” It was probably just as well that Annette Bening existed, he told himself, otherwise … well, never mind. They went on having lunch and that was that.

Carrie Fisher, his closest friend in Hollywood, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, was uncertain about Padma. She gave a party so that he could meet, in particular, Meg Ryan, who might be more suitable, and whom he liked very much, even if she did keep saying (three times), “You know, people are
so wrong
about you!” But then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru industry, and suggested she might profitably read Gita Mehta’s book
Karma Cola
. “Why are you so cynical?” she asked him, as if she genuinely wanted to know the answer, and he said that if you grew up in India it was easy to conclude that these people were fakes. “Yes, of course there are lots of charlatans,” she said, reasonably, “but can’t you discriminate?” He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.

The commute between West Hollywood and Pembridge Mews was brutal and the divorce, which had become too ugly to describe, the great difficulties being made about his access to his little boy, which drove him insane, the escalating cost of fixing the New York place, which turned out to be in much worse shape than he had thought, and Padma’s changes of mood, which were so frequent that he was happy if things stayed good between them for two days consecutively, all had to be dealt with through a dull glaze of jet lag. And one day in L.A. he heard the news he had been awaiting with dread for some years. John Diamond had died. He buried his face in his hands and when the woman who said she loved him asked him what the matter was, and he told her, she answered, “I’m sorry you’re sad, but you’re just going to have to be sad until you’re not.” At such moments he thought he couldn’t stay with her for another two seconds.

But he stayed. He stayed for another six years. When he looked back on those days through the disillusioned eyes of his post-divorce self he didn’t fully understand his own behavior. Perhaps it had been a form of obstinacy, or a refusal to destroy the relationship for which he had destroyed a marriage, or an unwillingness to emerge from his dream of a happy future with her, even if it was a mirage. Or she was just too goddamn gorgeous to leave.

At the time, however, he had a simpler answer. He stayed with her because he loved her. Because they loved each other. Because they were in love.

They did break up several times in those years, for short periods, and often he was the one pulling away from her; but finally he asked her to marry him, and soon after their wedding she was the one who left. After her exit Milan, who had been the ring bearer at the ceremony, asked him, “Dad, how can such a beautiful day have meant nothing?” He had no answer. He felt the same way.

There were good moments, of course. They made a home together, decorated and furnished it as happily as any couple. “I built it with you with love and a pure heart,” she told him years later, when they were speaking again, and he believed her. There was love and passion between them and when it was good it was very good indeed. They went together to the Book Ball in Amsterdam for the publication of
Woede
, which was
Fury
in Dutch, and she was a big hit; everyone was dazzled by her beauty, the national news set its film of her arrival at the airport to the tune of Charles Aznavour singing “Isn’t She Lovely,” and then there was a panel discussion of her extraordinary looks by four salivating critics. So she was happy, and treated him lovingly, and was the perfect girlfriend. However, there were also lower, and lowering, moments, and those were becoming more frequent. He slowly understood that she was becoming competitive with him and thought he was blocking her light. She didn’t like playing second fiddle. “Don’t come with me,” she told him near the end of their time together, when they were invited to a movie awards event honoring his friend Deepa Mehta, “because when you’re there people only want to talk to you.” He told her she couldn’t choose the days of the week on which she was married. “I’ve always been proud to be standing next to you,” he said, “and I’m sad that you don’t feel the same way about me.” But she was determined to get out of his shadow, to strike out for herself; and in the end she did.

In the Age of Acceleration a newspaper column could not be written even a couple of days in advance. He had to wake up on the day his
monthly piece for the
New York Times
syndicate was due, read the news, work out what subject or subjects people were most anxious about, think of something he legitimately had to offer on one of those subjects, and write a thousand words by 5
P.M.
at the latest. Deadline journalism was a very different craft than that of the novelist and it took him a while to acquire it. At a certain point it became almost exhilarating to have to think at this sort of speed. It was a privilege, too, to have been allowed into the commentariat, that smallish group of columnists who had been anointed as the world’s opinion formers. He had already discovered how hard it was to have opinions, especially the kind of opinions that “worked” in such columns—strong opinions, intensely argued. He had trouble coming up with one strong opinion a month and he was therefore in awe of those colleagues—Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Charles Krauthammer et al.—who could have two such opinions
every week
. He was in his third year, and had already written about anti-Americanism, Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the attack on teaching the theory of evolution in Kansas, Jörg Haider, Elián González, and Fiji. He felt he might be on the verge of running out of things to feel strongly about, and suggested to Gloria B. Anderson at the
New York Times
syndicate that the time to give up the column might be approaching. She tried hard to dissuade him. Several of his columns had made an impression, she said. At the beginning of the year 2000 he had written that “the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security.” That was something he was well qualified to write about, she told him, and if he was right, and she was sure he was, then, as she put it, “the news agenda will be coming around to you, and people will want to know what you have to say.”

Gloria didn’t know, and neither did he, how suddenly and emphatically the shift she predicted in the news agenda would happen. Nobody was looking out of the classroom window toward the winged storm gathering in the playground. He didn’t know, and neither did Gloria, that the birds had massed on the climbing frame in the playground, and were almost ready to strike.

His attention was elsewhere. He had a new novel coming out in
England. On the cover was a black-and-white picture of the Empire State Building with a small black cloud directly above it, glowing at the edges. It was a book about fury, and yet its author had no idea of the fury to come.

It was his worst received novel since
Grimus
. One or two critics liked the novel and wrote about it with sympathy and understanding. Many other British reviewers treated it as thinly disguised autobiography and above more than one review there appeared a picture of himself and his “hot new girlfriend.” This was painful, yes, but in the end it released him into another kind of freedom. He had always cared, sometimes too much, about being well reviewed. Now he saw that this, too, was another version of the trap of wanting to be loved into which he had catastrophically fallen several years before. Whatever was being said about his new book, he remained proud of it, he knew why it was the way it was and still felt that there were good artistic reasons for his choices. So all of a sudden he became capable of shrugging off the obloquy. Like all writers, he wanted his work to be appreciated, that was still true. Like all writers, he was going on an intellectual, linguistic, formal, and emotional journey; the books were messages from that journey, and he hoped readers would enjoy traveling with him. But, he now saw, if at some point they were unable to go down the road he’d taken, that was too bad, but that was still the road he was going to take.
If you can’t come with me, I’m sorry
, he silently said to his critics,
but I’m still going this way
.

In Telluride, Colorado, he had to be careful how fast he walked, how quickly he climbed stairs, how much alcohol he drank. The air was thin, and he was an asthmatic. But this was a mountain paradise. Maybe the air was thin in the other Eden, too, he thought, but he was sure there weren’t as many good movies being screened in that snake-and-apple man trap situated somewhere to the west of the land of Nod.

Tom Luddy and Bill Pence, the curators of the Telluride Film Festival, each year invited a third guest curator to join them, and in 2001 it was his turn. He had selected a short roster of “personal” films to
show, including Satyajit Ray’s
The Golden Fortress
, about a boy who dreamed of an earlier life in a golden fortress filled with jewels; Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris
, about a planet that was a single mind so powerful that it could bring men’s deepest desires to life; and Fritz Lang’s silent-era masterwork
Metropolis
, a dark poem about tyranny and freedom, man and machine, restored and rescued at last from Giorgio Moroder’s electronica sound track.