And then there was Harrison at the door. Wow, he really looked thrilled to be there. It could happen, though, I thought. This could be the night that he smiles. I waved as I brought my warm cola to my lips, hoping it wasn’t that warm. Not swamp-in-summer or overheated-hot-tub warm. Harrison raised his hand in a gesture intended as a greeting and began making his way through the assembled group that was every minute growing larger—a social fungus, slowly and deliberately fed by the bar.
“Sure, I remember you!” I emphatically reassured someone else whom I again didn’t remember. “Yeah! I’m having a great time. Are you?”
“Hey, look who’s here,” I greeted another. “I wondered if you’d be coming. No, I’m not, I really wondered! No, I already have a drink. It does so pass for a drink. Alcohol isn’t the only thing that quenches thirst. It’s the sense-quenching component that baffles me. Say that three times fast: Sense-quenching. Sense-quenching. Sense-quenching. No, really, I can’t drink. I’ve tried, I really have given it my best shot. But really, I’m allergic to booze. It makes me stupid, sick, and unconscious really fast. So I’ve never actually been drunk—just senseless and inert. I love that word, don’t you? ‘Inert.’”
The gathering smoke transformed this nondescript accommodation into the back room of a pub near closing time—all that was missing was the pool table. Following a somewhat shy beginning, everyone came to realize that this was not some polite celebration for their forbidding boss who was all but unknown to them. This was a kind of gleeful car wreck taking place at the end of a long early-in-the-shoot week. Maybe we were already behind schedule.
A lot of the crew knew each other from other shoots, and the filming—except for a brief jaunt to Tunisia—was taking place at home. No uprooting and staying at some cheap but comfortable faraway hotel. Most of these folks would go home at the end of a workday/week/month and sit at their own dinner tables, surrounded by their loving, supportive families, and beam with barely suppressed joy at the spouse or family who took a lively interest in his or her day.
Indeed, this very issue was being discussed. “This ain’t nobody round here’s idea of fun and frolic in the workplace, right?” a crew member said. “Everyone I’ve ever worked with that’s got a brain in their bloody head would rather be in some warm nowhere-near-here spot—say, on the coast someplace where the locals are ready and willing and the ale is dark and flowing.”
“Home?” said another. “After working all the livelong day on some dark set waiting for the bell so’s you can talk above a whisper—fuck me five ways till Friday. Give me a nice remote location with some per diem to pay for a round or two in the local bar, where there’s no bloody shortage of strange but friendly quim, and we’re off to the races, eh, lads?”
Meanwhile, two members of the crew—the second assistant directors Terry and Roy—began making sport with me. “Look who we have here, boys! It’s our little princess without her buns!”
I think part of their motive was that I was essentially the only girl at this party, and it would be more entertaining to have the only girl at a party completely off-her-ass drunk than not. If it was the last thing they did, they were going to get me to drink some of that hard liquor everyone was guzzling. It became one of the main focuses of the night—let’s get Leia legless—and if I played along, it would be the most idiotic choice I could make, considering that this shindig would no doubt include everyone I knew on the film, including my bosses, the producers, and the birthday boy himself, the director.
A kind of bawdy Victorian interaction ensued, much in the vernacular. Any people who use language the way the British do—with colloquialisms like “twat” (rhymes with “fat”) and “cunt” (rhymes with everything) at their core—how could you ever tire of listening to and/or interacting with such a gang?
Well, perhaps you can, but I never have. I fell in love with London while I was at school there and have never fallen out. I love their being as bound up in their history as they are, preserving their buildings instead of razing them to the ground to make way for another big beige building with lots of windows to throw yourself screaming from. I love its accents, its exchange rates, its idiosyncratic friendly behavior, its museums, its parks you need keys for, and its colas without ice. If I can forgive a place for not making ice a priority as part of their lifestyle, that’s true love.
We all banded together and sang a hideous version of “Happy Birthday,” after which Harrison began a conversation with George. I was once again surrounded by a musty, sweat-scented, denim–and–T-shirt–clad crowd of heterosexual men. Whether it was muscle or fat that filled out their unremarkable T-shirts, they all looked various degrees of attractive to me, in part because a lot of them actually were attractive and in part because of how undeniably attractive I looked to them, just shy of being an underage girl. But come on, me, give me some credit! I wasn’t merely all that was available on the menu—I was nineteen and cute as the deuce. I can see that now, though if you asked me then, I would have said I was fat faced with a chunky body.
They kept pushing for me to have a drink, and finally the people pleaser in me took over and I agreed to let one of the crew get me one. I asked for an amaretto, the only thing I drank. It tastes like awful cough syrup—which is redundant—but at least it would be a familiar taste. I didn’t have a cough or sore throat, I rationalized, but maybe I could prevent one from coming on. One of the special effects crew cheered at my acquiescence.
“I don’t know how anyone can drink alcohol, just based on the taste,” I said. “It’s like rust. I’ve seen people swirl wine in their mouths with delight and it baffles me.”
“Me, too, luv,” one of the crew replied. “I’m in it for the effect is all—screw the taste.”
“Yeah, but when I was young, it looked so great to me—people standing around in clusters, drinks in hand, heads thrown back in wild laughter—and I just couldn’t wait for that to happen to me. I couldn’t wait to learn the secret of alcohol that unleashes all that gaiety from deep within. But it was a lie, a horrible, horrible lie, and someone is someday going to have to pay for it.”
“Look here, my darling,” said the crew member who’d returned from the bar. “No one is going to have to pay for this—it’s courtesy of George Lucas.”
I looked at the glass he handed me, but instead of finding amaretto, I discovered a glass of what I assumed was wine. I frowned.
“Sorry, luvvie, they didn’t have your fancy sweet drink,” the crew member said. “But this should do what amaretto does and one better.”
Why did I drink it? Maybe to show them how bad an idea alcohol was for me. But whatever the reason, the bottom line is that I drank. My face went into a tight-fisted grimace after my first swig of the foul stuff. And another swig, and another after that. I couldn’t focus on the taste for very long, because there I was laughing, laughing like those adults I watched at my mother’s parties when I was a kid.
“Remember that first week when we did the swing across?” I said.
“What’s a swing across, mate?”
“I’m telling you! I’m trying to tell you! It was when Mark and I swung on a rope from that platform thing to the other side! You know! You know what I mean!”
They did. Not that the crew cared about my story, they only cared that I continued to drink, which I did. They laughed at whatever I said, and I appreciated their laughter, and so continued down that same path until the lines of that path became increasingly blurry and whether it was or wasn’t a path at all mattered less. Everything mattered less. What mattered most was that we continued laughing and had a good time.
• • •
i don’t know when I became aware that quite a few members of the crew were organizing a kind of joke abduction of me. I don’t know this because quite a lot of time has transpired between George’s surprise party forty years ago and now.
It was a jovial sort of a pla
n. To get me out of the party and take me away to wherever movie crews take young actresses when they want to establish that the actress belongs to them, at least for the moment, and not to any cast members or production folk. Certainly it wasn’t a serious thing. What made it look serious was how big the men tended to be in some of the various factions.
At some point I realized my head was hurting. Not hurting exactly, it just felt different than it usually did, which I mentioned.
“You need to get some air,” one of the crew said.
“Isn’t there air in here?” I said. “What have I been breathing then?”
“Hey,” a new voice called out as I was being steered toward an available door by a few of the friendlier sparks. The sparks were sparking to me, weren’t they? We were just about to pass through the door when I heard that voice again. An American one, not British. A Yankee voice. “Where are you taking her?”
“Nowhere, man, the lady just wants to get a little air is all.”
“Pardon me, but the lady doesn’t seem to be very aware of what she wants.” Then I knew who it was. Harrison! My costar! What was he saying? I didn’t know what I wanted? That might have been true, but when did he become the expert on what I did or didn’t want?
“Hey, Harrison!” I greeted him as he found his way to my circle. “Where’ve you been?”
I have no idea what these rowdy Brits thought they were going to do with me. I have to believe not much, but they were going to make a lot of noise while they didn’t do it. And Harrison was suddenly making a great show of saving me from what I can only guess at. (But why bother?) The crew pulled, Harrison pushed back, I tried to stay in focus.
But there was also an element of danger. Not with a capital “D” but the word in whatever form applies due to the roughhousing that seemed to rule the day, or the roost, or the world. What began as a kind of pretend stage-fight tug-of-war transformed into a more earnest battle for a woman’s—what is the word?—maidenhood. No! Virtue! A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was under way and I was unclear how it would all turn out. But vaguely interested, and that’s a fact.
Once I could wrap what remained of my mind around who was involved in this tug-of-war, I gradually came to realize who it was that I wanted to win: my costar, the smuggler, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head, and the gun in his belt—not now, just when in character, but still . . . I felt the gun was implied and so must’ve the crew, because after a mad scuffle, which left Harrison limping, Mr. Ford threw my virtue and me into the backseat of his studio car and commanded the driver to “Go! GO!” We went, followed on foot for the briefest but boldest of times by the film set crew—the finest of men.
• • •
about halfway to London from Elstree, I heard the honking of a horn. That is, I eventually realized that’s what the persistent noise was. I pushed Harrison’s shoulder back. “What’s that?” I asked, panicked. “Is someone honking?”
“Shit,” mumbled Harrison, squinting out the back car window over my head. “It’s Mark and Peter.”
“Oh my God.” I started to sit up, but he stopped me with his hand and voice.
“Fix your hair.”
My hair, my hair, my hair—it was always my hair with this movie, on-screen or off. I stayed slunk down while I did my unlevel best to straighten my hair and then slowly rose, afraid of who I’d find out the window, and would they be armed? Armed with a camera and shocked face? Or . . . ?
“Just act normal,” Harrison suggested. Realizing that acting normal would take hours and a team of horses, I grinned and waved at the two of them through the window, the closest I could get to normal without assistance, additional encouragement, and a hat. “They were sort of behind us so they couldn’t have seen anything.”
While I watched, a blue car caught up with us on our right. One of the crew, Peter Kohn, was driving the car, with a beautiful girl to the left of him in the passenger seat, the actress Koo Stark. Mark was in the backseat, leaning all the way forward into the front seat between Peter and the girl. He waved happily and smiled. I waved back and showed them my upper teeth.
I watched Harrison roll down his window of the car. This was prehistoric England; windows were lowered manually, phones had to be dialed, and everything was closed on Sunday by eleven o’clock at night. And when I say “everything,” I mean everything. It amazed me.
Plus they didn’t sell corn bread, most breakfast cereals, pancake mix, pinto beans, or regular bacon! That was my staple diet! How did people survive? There were tons of ordinary American products that couldn’t be purchased in the UK. Some of them could be found at Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly. I knew all of this from having already lived in London for the last few years. The Americans who made up our cast (Mark and Harrison) and crew (George and Gary et al.) on Star Wars were just finding it out.
One of those Americans was the previously mentioned Peter Kohn, who usually wore a knit hat and long dark blue or maroon sweaters. Exactly what services he provided to Star Wars I wasn’t exactly sure. He didn’t seem to be there in any sort of normal official capacity, not that I would really know what a normal official capacity looked like, but here we were, Peter, Koo Stark, and the stars of the movie, all on our way to the same restaurant.
• • •
the fact that Harrison and I had rolled around in the backseat during our return to London didn’t necessarily mean that it was a prologue for a more elaborate event. An inkling of what was coming, maybe. Sure, there had been some unexpected exploratory kissing: reading another person’s face with your mouth with dedicated eagerness, swimming with your lips between a particular person’s nose and chin, gently digging for jewels using your tongue as a makeshift shovel, jewels buried in the mouth of your beloved—wait! I think I felt a sapphire over here near the back molar on the left. Fishing face-to-face—like grouper, but without the water, the scales, and that awful fishy smell. But otherwise . . .
Kissing that way doesn’t necessarily sound like something I’d have been eager to do on a regular basis. Once a month maybe, under the right circumstances, which might include the drive from the studio to the city. It might have been the purr of the motor that got us there.
But get there we did somehow, having dinner with Mark, Peter, and Koo Stark—whose work in Star Wars tragically ended up on the cutting room floor—and who should avoid leaving things (e.g., purses) at people’s houses so they don’t have to hold the thing aloft and wonder aloud, “Does anyone know who this belongs to?” and ignite a chorus of the reply, “I think that’s Koo’s.” No matter how pretty she was (and undoubtedly continues to be), no one escapes a splash of the ridiculous when referred to in the possessive as “Koo’s.”
So I’m at a restaurant in London, with most of my thoughts centered on how much prettier Koo is than me, how confident she seems to be—obviously in part due to her beauty. I wonder if she’s having an affair with Peter and assume that she more than likely is, because Peter is attractive also. Not as attractive as Koo, but he doesn’t have to be because as you no doubt are aware, if you have a penis and a job, being handsome is a fantastic bonus but hardly a necessity.
So Koo was with Peter in all likelihood. Mark was alone, and Harrison was . . . Harrison was on his lickety-split way to being pretty much everything to me. He would all too soon become the center of my off-center, kilter-free world. Which, I agree absolutely, is pathetic in the extreme—but keep in mind that this whole thing was not my weirdly inexperienced idea. It was Harrison’s. I was just some innocent bystander doing her not-exactly-levelheaded best to burn off the alcohol she had ingested earlier that evening. Maybe then I could make some sense of what had happened in the car with Harrison—not what had happened so much as would it ever happen again? And if so, would that be on the soon side? Now that the offer was essentially on the table, would it stay on the table or continue onto the bed?
> I don’t recall much about that dinner except how incredibly self-conscious I was, how awkward and fuzzy I felt from having consumed two and a half glasses of an alcoholic beverage. And not even hard liquor—the sort that’s as dense and inscrutable as cement. This was the softer variety of alcohol, floaty, giggly, and vague. I attempted to counter these inconvenient blur-encouraging effects by combating them with large quantities of my all-purpose sugary, caffeinated, carbonated healing elixir—Coca-Cola. I hoped I would feel its rallying effects very soon.
I drank a few restorative rounds of Coke and tried very hard to not look at Harrison. How could I? What would he think if he caught me looking at him? That I liked him? Ugh, in that awful embarrassing way that’s impossible to hide? And, this was totally his fault. He was the one who started making out in the back of the car. I would never have considered liking him, left to my own devices. What devices? How many did I have? Had I had them long? What if what I assumed were devices were, in fact, delusions? So, more accurate to ask, “Left to my own delusions, would I have been able to convince myself that I wasn’t suddenly infatuated with Harrison?”
Fresh Coke in hand notwithstanding, I was still a little drunk—an altered state that I was inordinately unaccustomed to. Stoned, I knew. Cheerfully bleary-eyed from the effects of pot—yes, that I was not only used to but got increasingly used to as time went on. Used to in a great way. Under the shade of its effects, subjects I had formerly considered barely worth noticing could now both catch my eye and keep it.
Alcohol was another matter. A dark, regrettable experience that I always promised myself (and/or whoever else might be listening) I would never go near again if whoever had the most pull in the area of intoxication would let me off easy. Yet, here I was again.
Seated at our table, I figured it would be all right to look at Harrison when and if he said something, but my hair could grow if I waited for that unlikely event, right?
The Princess Diarist Page 5