I don’t like having to keep the spinning plates spinning on top of all their various and sun-dried poles. From now on they can fall off the poles and break for all I care. I censor myself and where the fuck does it get you? Gussying up your thoughts and putting them to paper.
A woman’s place is in the home
Seated by the telephone
Men sow their wild oats
And women are sown
Here I am again
Making the same mistake
Instead of learning my lesson
I just establish a new record to break.
What’s the riddle?
Me talking so much
And saying so little
She: One of us is boring.
He: Why do you say that?
She: Because . . . well, we’re just sitting here, not talking.
He: What’s wrong with that?
She: Well, I don’t know. Probably nothing—it’s just that we don’t need each other for it.
He: For what?
She: Being quiet.
The itsy bitsy spidered his way up my water spout
He little Jack Hornered his way into my corner
And now I can’t get him out
He ate all my porridge, sat in my chair
Slept in my bed, washed himself into my hair
Hey, all you king’s horses!
Whether you’re horse’s asses or men,
Could you pretty please piece my heart
Back together again?
Love has made me what I am today
But as to what that is I really couldn’t say
One thing’s for certain
I am quite alone
Cause there are none so quiet
As those who will not phone
And there is no one as far past caring
As he who just don’t care
I’ve washed that man right into my hair
He’s sat in my chair and slept in my bed
He’s eaten all my porridge and climbed inside my head
Maybe no man is an island
But some might as well be
The type whose bats
Always seem to get in your belfry
What am I getting myself into that I don’t want out of?
I can’t remember beginning, I can’t conceive of ending. That I am afraid of, that I need, that I find unlike anything I could ever have imagined or anticipated, that I can’t do without, that I don’t know what to do with a cliché.
And what if I said I loved you? What then? To justify some delinquent desire with the confessions of some emotion? You’d know where you stood—right on my feet. It needn’t be anything. But it’s the possibility that leaves us delirious with dull discussions.
This is fairly new. Incurable optimist that I am, I am bravely inclined to think it’s temporary. The hundred-dollar question: “What do we mean to one another?” Afraid the answers won’t support each other. And all this talking around the issue. But what is it? “Let’s define our relationship,” you bastard. I spend my entire epic existence vacillating between extremes and I think possibly this might be changing—but no. What the fuck happened to the in-between? Midway between passive and panicked. I seem to become involved in situations that only allow for tension. I’m beginning to think, “Relaxation is a rumor, a vicious rumor started by a sadistic . . .”
We could come to a full stop now if you think that would help. Because like any other B-movie heroine, I can’t go on like this. Can you understand? I don’t want to hurt you any more than I want you to hurt me. It’s now a question of surviving each other’s company instead of enjoying it.
Trying relentlessly to make you love me, but I don’t want the love—I quite prefer the quest for it. The challenge. I am always disappointed with someone who loves me—how perfect can he be if he can’t see through me?
I can just get so close
Till I begin to suffocate
I must go back to the surface
To breathe
I catch my breath
I manage to breathe
Offhandedly supplying distance
While I seemingly never leave
To compensate
For my lack of honesty
I entertain with distorted truths
My inadequacies and obsessions—
If a personality can be promiscuous
Mine would be quite loose
Try as I might
I can give to you no more
Than I give the next person
Or the last
I set the stage by establishing positions
You are the audience
I—the cast
I try to be somewhat exclusive
Somehow I never quite succeed
We’ll keep in touch
But enough
Is too much
I’ll need new disinterest on which to feed
Of course I’m playing a losing hand
A hand on which I invite you to tread
If only I could love someone
But I’ve chosen to love
Anyone
Instead.
Hey check-coated guy
Blow your smoke into my favorite eye.
Steal your arm around me
Till you’ve finally found me.
All under a moonlit sky.
Oh my
All under a moonlit sky.
Moving side to side
On a dampening lawn
My head falling to his shoulder
He stifling a deep yawn.
The party fast receding
Leaving the dancers with the night
Someone runs some water
Someone turns out a light
Half woman and half bar stool
The room spinning round from rounds of drink
She sits hunched over her wine glass
Returning any time she was given to think
Who am I doing it for,” I asked him. It was a fairly rhetorical question and the only reply it warranted was a shrug, which he supplied. I sat on the floor engrossed in the empty space before me. He lay stretched out on the couch looking sturdy and sure. Maybe no man is an island, but some sure look like one. All safe and dry and looming on your horizon. But the current was against me and who was I kidding? His island was already inhabited and here I was, a teenaged trespasser. All I had to do was make the most of being adrift.
He yawned. I looked at him with a minimal amount of expectancy. He looked over at me, and I had to look away. I didn’t want him to see that I “belonged to him”—it was bad enough that I knew it. I didn’t want him to know it, too. I kept it from myself for almost 2 months now, calling it everything from “physical” to a big mistake. Not that it wasn’t those things, it was, but when I “gave myself to him”—Merry Christmas, baby—I gave myself for a while, not just for a good time.
But whatever kind of time it was, it was running out. He was leaving Sunday. So there we were, Tuesday night sitting in the lurch that he would leave me in. Nothing personal, of course. He finished filming and had to go home to his wife and kids. Aye, there’s the rub. That’s when Cinderella’s pre-shattered post-ball shoe was scheduled to drop.
With him love was easier done than said
Instead of taking you to heart he would take you to bed
And you take what he has to offer lying down
You’re getting more involved while he’s still getting around
It’s all a matter of touch and go
Cause he’s one for all and all for show
But after all was said and almost done
I was
playing for keeps and he was playing for fun
I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in. Because sometimes I don’t think it’s such a bright idea. Is it worth the trouble it takes trying to live life so that someday you get something worthwhile out of it, instead of it almost always taking worthwhile things out of you?
I wish I could go away somewhere but the only problem with that is that I’d have to go, too.
forty years on
How I’ve portrayed Harrison is how Harrison was with me forty years ago. I’ve gotten to know him a bit better over time, and as such somewhat differently. He’s an extremely witty man and someone who seems more comfortable with others than he is, or ever was, with me. Maybe I make him nervous. Maybe I talk so much he can’t get a word in edgewise. Maybe it’s our mutual gestalt. Maybe I exasperate him. Probably a bit of all four.
But perhaps the most important reason, maybe, just maybe, we didn’t speak much was because the subject of our relationship was off-limits. And that was the elephant herd in the room to tiptoe around. So we sat amongst the elephants and ignored them together. It was our biggest activity, the biggest thing that we shared other than Star Wars dialogue and the painfully obvious undiscussed.
My affair with Harrison was a very long one-night stand. I was relieved when it ended. I didn’t approve of myself.
If Harrison was unable to see that I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven) then he wasn’t as smart as I thought he was—as I knew he was. So I loved him and he allowed it. That’s as close a reckoning as I can muster four decades later.
I’m frequently still awkward in his presence, still struggle with what I’m going to say. I always imagine that he’s thinking that I’ve just said something asinine, which may or may not be true.
And whatever was the state of his marriage, which ended soon after the filming of Star Wars for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with me, I don’t think of Harrison in any way as a “womanizer.” I think he was lonely in England. We were all lonely in an upbeat beginning-of-our-public-lives way. I think. At least I was, and I’m making an educated guess about the others. None of us had ever starred in a movie before, and Harrison was the only one of an age where he could muster some perspective. We were on the Island of Location, and Location is the land of permission, where you can behave in ways that you would never behave in the real world.
There was Harrison and there was me. Both three months away from home. On location where you were free to do what neither of you would do when surrounded by your all-too-loving family and all-too-observant friends. Where everything and everyone around you was interesting and new. Where you have all sorts of new people now focused on you and how you are feeling. But not in the usual quasi-claustrophobic way. These were people who didn’t want anything from you except that you have your lines memorized, your costume on, and your hair and makeup smooth and neat—especially your hair. Mine anyway, which tended to get unpinned and stray out of the confines it needed to stay in. Even though you were running around and shooting guns, your hair absolutely could not be in disarray. One had to look all neat and tidy while involved in the aerobic activity of saving the galaxy.
For most of us, home is an environment that discourages you from fooling around of any kind. Not that any of us were necessarily inclined to act out on adulterous impulses. I look back and see us all being playfully physical with one another, enjoying that familial comfort that developed amongst us. Us being me and Mark, though my focus on what happened between Mark and myself diminished once things began with Mr. Ford. On some days I would self-consciously draw back from contact with him, while on others I would have fun frolicking through brightly lit hallways, touching an arm, ducking down my bun-encased head, or grazing a powdered forehead to his smuggler’s jacket, leaning over to look at some allegedly unremembered lines, falling into him, my smaller self to his larger one in a fit of suppressed laughter between takes. What’s that saying I’ve said before? And I’ll keep saying it until things can finally get unsaid? “Location, location, location.”
Kissing me in the car was the last time that Harrison would be able to labor under the relaxing assumption that I was your average, everyday sexually experienced would-be actress. Someone accustomed to drunkenly jumping into the backs of cars and later falling into bed. A brief and amazingly casual encounter with said would-be actress, looking to add to her currently very short, but, like many other humans, over the ensuing years increasingly longer, line of exciting unclothed experiences with attractive men.
For me? A brief thrilling liaison I would eventually calmly walk away from, smiling and sophisticated. Anticipating the look on my friends’ faces when I could safely and cavalierly recount that amusing tryst I’d had on this cool little sci-fi film I’d done in England. I would laugh ironically as I told my fascinated, impressed pals about this man whom I’d been attracted to—how could I not be, he was so handsome. I was barely old enough to vote but I could easily enlist in the army, and I enlisted into the army of him. But we’d both known from the start this wouldn’t be a love affair, just two adult humans who hadn’t fallen in love with each other but appreciated each other. We were both adults, why shouldn’t we have had fun together! It never occurred to me to feel hurt because he hadn’t fallen in love with me. It was better this way! Friendly feelings and wonderful sex—what a nice change it had been from my relationship with Simon in drama school—so emotional, so innocent and new. No mess, no fuss. There was him and there was me; none of your needy “couple” shit, right? And I was now five foot six inches tall, had green eyes, was slender, lithe, and free of self-pity all the time. Right. Sure.
But you’ve got to feel bad for Harrison (well, you don’t have to, but if you can, for my sake, try). Not bad as in actually feeling a pang of anything emotional, gimme a break—no, just the sort of bad you might feel when someone is telling you a longish story about how they were talking about this surprise gift they bought for someone and then that someone overheard the conversation and the surprise was ruined. Oh no! How awful! What did you do? A ruined-surprise kind of awful, as opposed to, “Is that guy J.D. still living with you? Huh, because I was just at a drugstore and saw him picking up some medication and I overheard him tell the pharmacist it was for his leprosy.” I mean there’s bummer bad and then there’s the “Oh my fucking shit! No way, you’re kidding, right?” sort of bad. Blithely sympathetic bad or end-of-the-world bad. There, see? And all I was trying to do was say that I feel a little bad for Harrison at this point in my life (which he would loathe, so I take it back).
But when it was happening, I didn’t feel bad for him; I only felt bad, and more than a little, for myself. Time shifts and your pity enables you to turn what was once, decades ago, an ordinary sort of pain or hurt, complicated by embarrassing self-pity, into what is now only a humiliating tale that you can share with others because, after almost four decades, it’s all in the past and who gives a shit?
• • •
as I mentioned, a few times already, perhaps, en route between Elstree Studios and London, between Borehamwood and London, between surprise party and the next thing, Harrison and I spent quite a lot of time kissing. Later, Harrison informed me what a bad kisser I actually was then. Not that he knows (or anyone knows) what kind of a kisser I am—it’s a secret. The remark would probably sting a bit even six thousand years after the event. But I wonder about it now. I wish I could return to Harrison—maybe while he was recuperating from some airplane accident or being crushed by a flying piece of film set. He would be lying in bed, a leg or two elevated, his brow smooth with forced serenity.
“Why did you think I was such a bad kisser?” I would ask casually.
He would look out the window at the failing lights, chewing the inside o
f his cheek quietly. Not that you can do that loudly without help.
“Maybe,” I’d suddenly offer, “it was because I was so shocked to find myself on the receiving end of an offscreen kiss from some person I’d have an on-screen kiss with in a movie or two that my mouth just sort of hung open in amazement.”
“Oh, shut up,” he’d growl without looking at me. I always have him shut me up in our imagined interactions, probably because he always looks like he wants me to lose my grip on the English language.
Anyway, I suppose in part I’m telling this story now because I want all of you—and I do mean all—to know that I wasn’t always a somewhat-overweight woman without an upper lip to her name who can occasionally be found sleeping behind her face and always thinking in her mouth. I was once a relevant piece of ass who barely knew she existed while much of the rest of the moviegoing world saw me romping through the air in a metal bikini, awake as I needed to be in order to slay space slugs, being whoever I needed to be in the face of affective disorders and otherwise.
I can now share this with others because the story is part of history. It’s so long ago, it winds up being a real workout for my memory. This is an episode that’s only potentially interesting because its players became famous for the roles they were playing when they met.
Harrison is a decent—albeit complicated and frequently silent—guy. He’s always been decent to me, and as far as I know the only time he cheated on any one of his three wives was with me. And maybe he didn’t think that counted all that much because of how short I am.
So while there’s still time for Carrison to grow old together, that gateway is steadily closing. If we’re going to get back together we’re going to have to do it soon. And getting back together with someone you were never truly with is, to say the least, complicated. But absolutely worth the effort. Or not. I’ll probably regret writing this, but if you have the impulse to yell at me, please don’t. Periodically, I feel guilty enough on my own.
The Princess Diarist Page 10