Seducing the Demon (19 page)

“I have notes for you,” she kept saying. But somehow she could never find them. Things kept coming up—dinners, parties, babysitting crises. Still, I thought we’d get to work eventually. And before long, it was time to fly back to New York together.

“We’ll take the red-eye.”

“The what?”

“The last plane that gets you to New York at dawn.” I was learning a whole new vocabulary with her. “Red-eye,” “projects,” “pay or play,” “A-list, B-list,” “green light.”

“Just wait till
Fear of Flying
gets the green light,” she said. “Then we’ll really have fun.”

“How does that happen?”

“An A-list director attached. And a star. It will all come together at the party tomorrow night. Don’t wear your usual
schmatte.
This party is totally A-list.”

“You never told me about the party.”

“I forgot. But Streisand is coming and Goldie Hawn. They both want to play Isadora.”

I panicked. I had nothing to wear.

 

 

Somehow, I got packed (we were leaving for LAX right from the party), laid out what I thought was my chicest dress and said my good-byes to Jon Fast and his parents, Twinka Thiebaud, and Henry Miller and his kids.

My clothes were all wrong. The women would be wearing skin-tight jeans, skimpy silk tops and Elsa Peretti Diamonds by the Yard. They would be carrying Hermès bags, towering over me in platform shoes. The New York shabby-poet style I affected in those days (to hide my success from the grad students and literati who were my friends) might be O.K. for the 92nd Street Y and poetry seminars with Mark Strand and Stanley Kunitz at Columbia. But it was dowdy by Hollywood standards. And I was way too
fat
for Hollywood. I vowed to go on a strict diet immediately. The Coast was unforgiving of women’s looks. Facials and expensive haircuts were de rigueur. We were not yet up to face-lifts—most of us. Nor breast implants, nor chin implants, nor skin resurfacing. But the clothes and the grooming were all expensive.

Every metier has its rules of attraction. Young Hollywood in the seventies was no different. Only certain handbags would do (Hermès, Gucci). And the pearls my mother had bought me in Japan were too conservative. Besides, I had neither my personal hairdresser, my personal facialist nor my personal drug dealer.

Parties scare me anyway. But parties with A-list stars? I knew how to chat up people in my own milieu, but what on earth would I say on Mount Olympus?

Naturally, I got too drunk and stoned—as I used to do in those days—and afterward I couldn’t remember what I said to anyone. Not Goldie Hawn, not Barbra Streisand, not Warren Beatty. In fact, I was afraid to even greet Beatty because his sexual reputation preceded him. And Steven Spielberg, incredibly, was not yet legendary—just a promising young director. And my childhood friend Nessa Hyams was there—the first woman executive at Columbia. So I should have felt comfortable. But I was not.

Julia kept coming by saying, “Look who I brought for you. Look who came out for you.” It was her achievement to get all these people together in one room. It was a testament to her power. People met at parties are hardly people met. Everyone is acting. Everyone is on. Everyone is there for reasons other than friendship. But I still have no idea why I was so naive and gullible. I think it was because of my father and what I thought he wanted me to be.

Now I know that famous people are as hungry for reassurance as I am and that actors are, if anything, more fearful than writers. I have come to love the vulnerability of actors, the visual brilliance of directors. But then I knew nothing. I thought they were judging me when in fact they were terrified I was judging
them.

We flew home on the red-eye to a dismal dawn in New York. I never return home without Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” playing in my head. But I was no longer sure where my home was. Wasn’t it with Jon? Was it with Henry?

For the next few months, I lived with Allan but kept up a clandestine correspondence with Jon. I have saved the letters for Molly—if she ever decides she wants to read them. Probably not till she’s fifty, and who knows if I’ll be around by then. If I am, I’ll be eighty-six, and even though I come from a long-lived family who can say what I’ll remember, if anything. My family is also famous for memory loss.

Since the fundamentalist Christians are awaiting the Rapture and the Misleader-in-Chief is armed with nuke-u-lar bombs (and is enough of a dry drunk to use them),
none
of us may be around.

If you are, Molly—and I pray you will be—please read them laughingly and be kind. Without them, you wouldn’t be here.

Julia and I continued our endless transcontinental conversations. Jon and I secretly talked all night—from midnight (when Allan was asleep and it was 9 p.m. in L.A.) till three. After eight years of marriage to someone “who talked like a telegram—as if the words cost money,” as my grandfather said, these conversations were balm to the loneliness in my marriage.

What did Allan think? What did he feel? To my shame, I never even considered him. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to leave.

There was no question that as soon as Jon found a house for us to rent, I’d take off. Maybe
I
didn’t know it, but all my close friends did.

Deep in the recesses of my brain, I was trying to choose between Hollywood bling and the life of the noiseless, patient writer flinging filaments out of herself, hoping they’ll catch somewhere. I was making a choice and I didn’t even know it.

 

 

It was January before Jon and I (still not divorced from Dr. Jong) moved to Malibu, to a rented house at 25321 Old Malibu Road (left turn at the Malibu Pharmacy, where you got your meds, and proceed up the beach road till you come to the end). On a rise opposite the houses directly on the beach, we lived on a short street populated by middlingly successful rock musicians, struggling screenwriters and out-of-work actors who had always wanted to live “at the beach.” It was the first time in my life that I lived where most of the people stumbled out to their mailboxes at ten or eleven wearing their terry-cloth robes.
Nobody
had a real job. It was reassuring.

Waking up to hear the Pacific crashing haunts me. Last summer we rented a house in Santa Barbara in part because I wanted to relive those Malibu pleasures and Malibu is too built up now. I love Montecito and Big Sur and would happily alight in either place were it not that my loves live here, in the frantic city of my birth. I will probably perch in New York like a pigeon on a ledge till the floods come and the ocean rises to my terrace on the twenty-seventh floor. Remind me to bring my dinghy. It may be our only way out after the fault under the East River trembles and the sea level rises.

So I became a Malibuvian and wrote poems about the Pacific with its wildness, its red tides and its passing whales. I saw Julia intermittently, but the movie seemed stalled, which is not unusual for movies. Most writers can write half a dozen novels in the time it takes to go from the option to the movie, if indeed it’s ever made. My father used to tell me I was lucky because all I needed was “a pencil and a blank piece of paper.” He was right. It takes an army to make a film, while it only takes one monomaniac to write a novel. This is the purest freedom.

Our rented house had a large open-air central atrium and snakes occasionally slithered out—as well as scorpions and the occasional intrepid mouse. It was not what people imagine when they say “Malibu,” but we were in love so everything was delicious.

Once, we were banished from the house by a major plumbing crisis—nothing flushed—and we moved to Henry’s in Pacific Palisades. That was when I began audiotaping his recollections of the Paris years, which sound just like the voice of his books.

 

 

I would commute back to Malibu Road to see the progress of our plumbing problem and I would run into our landlord, Harry, a disheveled, gray-haired native Angeleno from Hancock Park who never ceased to be amazed by the tackiness of the beach house he’d inherited.

“They built ‘em on these concrete slabs, never thinking they’d be more than beach shacks. Sometimes they brought in the studio carpenters to do it. So they just sank the plumbing in concrete—and never even left a plan for where it was. That’s why we gotta jackhammer up the whole floor.” He pointed to the stinking ditch dividing our bedroom from our living room. It was filled with sewage. I studied it, thinking how I would describe it to Henry. Then I drove back to Pacific Palisades.

 

 

It may have been around the time we were living with Henry that Mario Puzo invited me to dinner. He was living in Malibu briefly and we met somewhere—I forget where. We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Monica that looked like a Las Vegas club.

“So whatcha doing next?

“Writing my second novel.”

“A real mistake. They’ll never forgive you.”

“But if I don’t write the second novel, how can I write the third?”

“Fahget it. Write movies—that’s where the money is. Ya know how much they’re payin’ me for
The Towering Inferno?”

“No idea.”

“Seven-fifty—and they’ll probably never use the script. I don’t care. I’ve turned the money over to my sister already. To pay off her house. It’s like printing money. But a second novel—they’ll kill you. They
always
kill second novels.”

“That’s why I have to get through it and get to the third.”

“You’re nuts. I’ll introduce you to my agent. Take the money and run. You think anyone cares about books? Who has time to read in this rat race?”

“You’re probably right.”

“You know it. I’m right. I was poor a long time. I’ll never be poor again.” He took another mouthful of Peking duck.

“You sound like Scarlett O’Hara.”

“You could do worse,” Mario said. “Besides, you’re a dame. Dames always get the short end of the stick.”

 

 

So I struggled with my second novel with Mario’s prophecy in my ears. We moved back to Malibu eventually and dealt with the imperfect plumbing.

Then one day, I picked up some tabloid and read that Julia Phillips, producer of
The Sting,
was planning to direct
Fear of Flying.
She was in a director’s workshop at the American Film Institute and she was quoted as saying that she understood the material better than any male director and there was no reason she couldn’t direct it herself. What happened to Schlesinger, Ashby, Donen? The author of the book is always the last to know.

I was devastated by this news. I didn’t know how far Julia’s drug use had gone or how much her megalomania was fueled by coke, but I knew she had promised a great, experienced director. I didn’t know that those Hollywood riffs—
we’ll get him, we’ll get her and we’ll get them
—were meaningless. I hadn’t even seen Julia for a while and I thought she was avoiding me. The truth was she had become more and more unhinged by drugs. I never knew this till much, much later.

I was seething. I should have just crept away and forgotten the film. I should have written my second novel or called Mario’s agent—or called Mario, for that matter. I probably would now. But Julia had seduced me, suckered me, romanced me with dreams of a great film, and now she’d left me flat. I consulted an ancient Hollywood lawyer whose office was in Century City and whose desk was on a raised platform even higher than Louis Nizer’s. (The exalted platform is the revenge of short lawyers.)

“There’s nothing you can do. The names of those directors are not written into any contract. Besides, the book writer is the least important person in making the movie. They own it. What they do with it is not your business. Do yourself a favor and move on.”

His advice was good and I should have taken it. Unfortunately, I met the Christian and his lions.

Noel Marshall was a former Hollywood talent manager who had produced
The Exorcist
and wanted to score again with something bigger. He had wild white hair and spoke with the conviction of a televangelist. He was married to the beautiful Tippi Hedren and they lived in a house nearest the wildest of canyons—Franklin—with a beautiful cheetah. Once, when I stayed with them, the cheetah came into the guest room and stared at me all night, crouching as if about to pounce. Cheetahs are the fastest animals on earth. Noel insisted this one was tame.

“The Egyptian pharaohs walked them on golden leashes. They were kept as pets.”

Occasionally, the most beautiful girl in the world visited. It was Tippi’s daughter, Melanie Griffith, then in her teens and already involved with Don Johnson. She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen. Her skin kissed her bones with the radiance Monet bestowed on his cathedrals. Tippi, in those days, commuted to Guatemala, where she was saving victims of earthquakes. Noel remained in L.A.