What Movies Made Me Do (2 page)

I waved again. A waiter wheeled the dessert cart between us. Tonight I was late because my boss at the studio in Hollywood had kept me on the phone trying to sleaze out of spending seven hundred thousand to build two period sets on our Burbank soundstage. I kept watching the minutes tick by while Michael Finley shouted things like “Cheat the exteriors! Find a big synagogue, it’s Israel, for God’s sake, and work on the production values. The hay looks like goddamn plastic.”

Michael Finley hates my supervising the movie. I fought for years to get that privilege as a New York executive. I’m doing my best on
Prophet
—that’s the working title of my first production. Daily they pouch me Polaroids and budgets on an El Al jet. Thank God Michael doesn’t know I haven’t talked to our director, my old pal Anita, since yesterday morning.

Unfortunately, my secretary missed Barry tonight at his Princeton lab. I have no other men, I have a full-time career. Barry doesn’t trust me. He’s jealous of my boss. He’s jealous of my job as east coast executive at the studio. I hurried past a crowd of tourists to get to him.

These days I am at the top of the movie business, slugging away in the thick of studio politics. I was a respected film critic, and after struggling through the industry I am finally supervising the movie I dreamed of. I run an office, sign my own checks, and pay my rent and medical bills. I have amazing orgasms, and I groom myself like a great beauty. I was a gawky, gigantic, and wall-eyed graduate student. Now I am tall and thin with lots of fierce dark hair, a full mouth, and jittery eyes with dark smudges under them.

I inched around the dessert cart to kiss Barry hello. His
lips shook with reproach. Sitting down, I began stammering excuses. He fixed his wise, beautiful, and pained eyes on me, made me all the more moist by his contact lenses.

“My wife never kept me waiting.” He was off and running.

“She loved you unconditionally.”

“That was her weapon,” he sighed. This was the real problem. His divorce was coming through this month, after years of separation.

“She still loves you, Barry,” I said.

“I don’t want to discuss it,” he said. No woman’s love could please him. We both knew it. He was a shy man, full of shame and pain about sex. But as long as we were struggling to make a relationship I knew he wouldn’t stray from me, no matter how much he pushed me away, or pretended to be sleeping his light unbreathing sleep after we made love. He was as fearful of casual sexual encounters as any woman of my generation. He’d been faithful to his wife for twenty-two years.

“My dear, I have no appetite. I am in despair.” He worked his fingers into his eyes.

I took his wrists from his face and kissed both palms. “What are you thinking?” I whispered.

“Man is the only animal who knows he’s going to die,” Barry pronounced.

“Wrong,” and I hugged him around the neck, “man is the only animal who knows chocolate candy tastes great with caramel and nuts.”

He hugged me back finally with reassuring squeezes. “Oh, my dear,” and he laughed, “my dear, dear girl.” He rocked me a little in his arms. “I wait for you, as Kafka once said, like an ox. I wait for you forever. It’s your birthday night, don’t fret. Let’s talk about us. How’s my forty-year-old?”

“Defeated.” I brushed his lips with mine again. “I don’t like being forty, I never expected it.”

He rubbed my nose with his. “I know, dear, and I’m afraid I’ll die before I finish my research. I know what we are,” he whispered, “we’re two cowardly ghosts rounding a corner and bumping smack into each other. We jump up and down and shout ‘eek.’ It’s something supernatural. I recognize you and we both want to flee as fast as our legs can carry us.”

Before I could answer, the waiter slipped a cardboard wine list under Barry’s nose. Barry loves performing, he likes me to listen. The waiter’s wrists stuck out from the sleeves of his jacket. I gulped ice water. I had the funny feeling the restaurant had gone down. “I just want a glass of white Burgundy.”

“Darling, Carol, leave it to me, please?” Barry raised his eyebrows at the waiter. The man coughed nervously.

“Certainly.” When the waiter left I covered Barry’s clenched fist with my hands. “I’m glad you chose this restaurant. I came here years ago all by myself to celebrate my twenty-first birthday.”

He clasped my fingers back. “My darling, it’s your night, don’t fret.” When he touched me I knew he loved me.

“I didn’t mean to ruin your plans,” I said for the third time. “Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

“The truth is, you don’t care enough,” he mumbled, but he sat there squeezing my fingers for a long minute before he put his napkin back on his knee. We munched rolls in time to a repressed Bach violin solo. I suggested we both order brains in black butter sauce, in honor of his work mapping the mysteries of the human brain. He believes he’s going to solve the mind-body problem by proving the brain just another body part, and there is no soul.

When they arrived he stabbed a forkful and pursed his
lips distastefully. “Awful,” he said. Another strike against me. The brains were overcooked and rubbery, not the ambrosia I remembered. Some memories are better than trying to repeat the experiences.

I recognized the solemn Bach as something Barry played. Better not mention it now. He was once a child prodigy and still owns a Stradivarius violin. But his fingers slowed from lack of practicing. When we first fell in love, he swore he’d sell his violin and buy me and him and my dog Rocky a large cooperative apartment. Better not mention that either.

He was keeping time with the music, his chin making little nods.

“How’s your work?” I asked.

“I had a showdown with that High Episcopalian putz from Salk,” he began.

I loved hearing his voice, husky with feelings, a little high-falutin; these native New Yorkers broaden their
a
’s and drop their
r
’s. I smiled at him, clasping my hands under my chin, listening. I was dying to avoid the fight sizzling under our conversation.

“He’s stealing my Indian molecule assistant, but he can’t take two goddamn years of research and my government grant with him. If the kid goes to Salk, he goes naked. I’m afraid all the work I’ve done will come to nothing after all these years.”

I suddenly remembered how, when we first met, Barry hypnotized me at a dinner party with those suffering intelligent eyes. He wasn’t thin or young, but he wove word spells, describing his work on the mysteries of the brain in glittering and passionate scientific patois. The next day I played old rock-and-roll records and dreamed of introducing him to my mother. She’d love discussing books with a bonafide Nobel laureate-to-be.

Now he tossed his fork onto the table. “I can’t believe it,
you’re not listening,” he accused. “We have got to talk.” My heart sank. I knew this Salk intrigue by heart.

“I was thinking about the night we met.” I blushed.

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” he snapped, “like some meretricious movie mogul.”

“I can’t win with you.” I sagged over my cleared plate.

“I needed your advice,” Barry added balefully. “But you were out of the office all day.” He admitted my expertise only in office politics. It wasn’t a big moral compliment. He looks down his nose at movies. I think he envies the glamour.

“I was out working.”

“Your job is ruining us. That’s the big problem.”

“I’m in trouble,” I blurted.

“Oh, my dear.” His whispery voice shook with elegant hysteria. “Tell me what the bastards did now.”

Tears smarted my eyes. He was being kind.

“Well, I’m worried. Anita didn’t take my calls today. And Michael Finley’s going to find out. It’s not like her.”

“Nobody in their right mind spends nine million dollars to make a movie.” He cut a corner of his baked endive. “Maybe she ran off with Jack what’s-his-name, your trampy star.”

“Jack Hanscomb? No way,” I said too fast.

In the middle of any discussion Barry likes his little jokes. Everybody in the world knows Jack’s last name.

“Admit it, you’re drawn to that man,” Barry said.

“I’m not that dumb,” I lied. For once he had me. He has a fantastic picture of me as sexually uncontrollable; because he’s attracted to me, he believes all men are.

Barry was saying, “Well, just call the police, a woman like Anita doesn’t disappear off the Israeli coast. It isn’t Nazi Germany.” He chuckled. Any whiff of a reference to the Holocaust satisfies him profoundly. “Forget the movie, find yourself some serious work.”

I flashed anger. “I spent the last three dinners fixing your Salk fight.”

“Keeping score?” he asked. “How generous.”

I closed my mouth. Maybe I’d just call Jack Hanscomb and ask him. At least he’d get it about why I love movies. I pictured him oiled and skinny and scowling at me on a beach in loose white bathing trunks. Anita made him lose twenty pounds to play Jesus.

“Tell me what you think our personal problems are,” Barry demanded like a teacher.

“Not tonight, please,” I begged.

When the check arrived, I said wistfully, “Want to share a chocolate mousse?”

“I’m finished eating,” Barry said, “and I never eat mousse. Isn’t there somebody in your past who was always ministering to the wrong need?”

He had wheedled a portrait of my mother out of me when I was angry at her, and now he was using it against me. I watched him studying the check. Barry wanted a modern career woman who venerated him like an old-fashioned patriarch. I was crazy enough to love him, but I couldn’t do it much longer. He was so complex. He had a child’s mood swings. Why can’t the hurt-child part of a human being flake away like dry skin, especially if the adult part succeeds so well?

My old school chum Anita wouldn’t get into such a pickle with Barry. I smiled ruefully. She has a good life and she’s very single. She gets cozy with some new guy in a rented picture-book Connecticut farmhouse, then like clockwork after two years, she calls me, sheds three tears, packs her bags, speeds back to New York—and bingo, she’s free again. The men never know what hit them. She just likes to be alone when she germinates a movie. I was worried sick about her. I called her in Israel five times today. She’s been there for
thirty-nine days directing
Prophet.
I got the money from the studio after we got Jack Hanscomb to fall in and make the package. He plays Jesus. I developed the script, hired Anita, and now I’m supervising the shoot. If she’s still working on it.

Anita and I have both gone far in the last twenty years. She’s directed eight television movies plus six documentaries and last year she won an Oscar, now sitting in her guest bathroom, for best short-subject documentary.

She has refused to touch a movie she hadn’t developed and written—until my project. I spent six years convincing her to do it. Then she awed the other studio executives at our meetings; instead of talking about below-the-line expenses and rolling break-evens, she cited Aristotelian catharsis and Plato’s pure forms. Her publicity policy is no interviews unless she’s the magazine cover. Her last television documentary about a battered faculty wife was reviewed all over the world.

But that film was made six years ago. There are lots of rumors about why she hadn’t worked on a feature since. People whisper opium, nervous collapse, but only I know how blocked she is as a writer.

A year ago I sat up all night in the living room of her penthouse overlooking Fifth Avenue. Usually a producer brings the package to the studio, but I was working overtime.

“Honey, it violates my artistic credo,” she said, inhaling her twisted marijuana cigarette.

“It’s your shot at the big screen,” I said. “Your big break.”

“I like my millions of television viewers,” she shot back, “and I write my own stuff.”

“You’ll never work again if you keep waiting for the muse.”

“That’s encouraging.” She flounced over to her telescope at the window. She always wears stiletto boots to compensate for her shortness.

“You should work,” I said doggedly, “you’re a major talent.”

“You talk like one of those philistine money people.”

“I want to make this movie. It’ll sell in all the major world markets, and it’ll show millions of teenagers how Jesus’ message grew from Jewish guys in the Old Testament.”

“Carol, you’ve been reeling me in for years, trying to get me involved, asking me story questions, making me think Jesus was like some Jewish graduate student.”

I tried to look surprised.

“Your ego’s all wrapped up in it, mine isn’t,” she continued, aiming the long instrument at the streaky pink sunrise over Central Park. She shook her head. “On the other hand, I’m sick and tired of making prime-time dramas about some modern woman trying to choose between a charge account at Bloomingdale’s and orgasms.”

“Let’s remember your first love, Cecil B. De Mille,” I coaxed. “You’re a Jew, you’ll be striking a blow against anti-Semitism all over the world.”

She made a face. “Don’t be such a megalomaniac, and remember, De Mille was a terrible anti-Semite. But this story’s got legs—first an immaculate conception in a time of political upset, then a visionary Jewish boy preaches love for his fellow man, and everybody witnesses his summons to heaven. Then the story lives two thousand years as the underpinning of major religions, with people killing each other over it from time to time. Nobody’d believe it if Spielberg invented it as a kid’s fairy tale.”

“Very funny,” I said. “Don’t forget the new part is that it’s for the young-adult market and Jesus is supposed to be very sweet and Jewish and hamish.”

“Closed set.”

“I can’t even visit?”

She shook her head. After she signed on, everybody at the studio was bitterly disappointed. She ignored Michael Finley
when he asked to have lunch with her. As studio president, Michael hoped to drop her name to powerful agents while he passed on their projects. He feared her because he considered her an intellectual.

Actually, she outfoxed everybody. She’s a bigger star-spangled glitzball than Mae West. She loves everything about movies I do—power fights, career gambles, killer hustlers, creative stuff, happy endings, money, and glamour. Before she left for Israel she drove me around Manhattan in her unheated antique cream Rolls while she complained about losing her anonymity. That day she was wearing her old Bryn Mawr freshman blazer over a silver lamé jumpsuit. “You’re the last of the movie queens,” I told her.