by Lisa Tucker
“How about if we have lunch tomorrow?” Lucy said, ignoring Janice’s comment about coming to their place in Venice. “There’s a great new Japanese restaurant in Brentwood. I think you’d—”
“So he still won’t let you come over here,” Janice snapped. “That’s just great. Well, give me a call if you ever decide you’re tired of being told what to do. Okay? Now I really do have to go. I have to get to work.”
Before Lucy could say anything else, Janice hung up. And a few weeks later, she shipped the vase to her mom in Wisconsin. When she moved out of the Venice house at the end of the month, she wasn’t worried that Lucy didn’t have her new number. She knew she’d blown her chance; Lucy wouldn’t call anymore. And really, maybe it was inevitable since their lives were going in completely different directions, especially now that Lucy’s movie had been released.
The film came out on the last Wednesday in February. Janice thought it was so ironic. She’d just walked out of what she’d decided would be her last audition—since it was obvious she didn’t get the part; she was blonde and tall but not the big-boob beach type the TV pilot casting director wanted—when she picked up the newspaper and saw the first article about The Brave Horseman of El Dorado.
Over the next few weeks, Janice read everything about the movie. Most of the articles still focused on Charles, but it wasn’t as irritating as in the wedding pieces. He was the director and writer, after all. He was the big ego, the auteur, the whatever the hell they called it.
Nearly all the reviews were positive. What surprised Janice was how happy she was for her friend—most of the time. Even if the world was unfair, which it obviously was, Lucy deserved this luck as much as anyone.
Of course some of the headlines were easier to take than others.
“Charles Keenan’s Latest a Luminous Tale of the ‘New’ Old West,” “Horseman Delivers as Both Adventure and Spiritual Journey,” “Keenan’s Joan: Bold Portrait of the Hero as Heroine.”
Wait a minute here. Keenan’s Joan? Excuse me, but wasn’t that Lucy’s Joan who everyone saw up on the screen saving the poor and bringing justice and slowly walking the gallows to a death that made half the audience break down in audible sobs?
Naturally, Janice had seen the film several times. Actually, her first date with Peter was to The Brave Horseman. She liked him immediately when he said he’d never seen a Charles Keenan picture. “Didn’t he make Star Wars?”
Over drinks at the marina, she told Peter that Lucy had been her roommate. She also told him Lucy was the only good friend she’d ever broken off contact with, though she couldn’t help emphasizing how they met, because she wanted him to know that she’d helped Lucy, that a lot of their relationship was based on Lucy needing help since she was young, poor, new to L.A. She wanted to make sure Peter knew there was nothing pathetic about her own position in this failed friendship. Unfortunately that meant she couldn’t tell him how bad she felt, a few months later, when she had to rely on a newspaper article to find out that her former friend had become a mother.
James Joseph Keenan was born on July 9, 1978, at 11:27 p.m. at an undisclosed Los Angeles–area hospital. He weighed eight pounds, eleven ounces and was twenty-three inches long. In perfect health, and a beautiful baby, the reports said, though there were no pictures, and never would be if Charles had anything to say about it. “I don’t want my son to grow up in the glare of Hollywood,” he said, in an interview about four months after the baby was born. “We’re a normal family who happens to make movies. Lucy and I spend most of our time together, taking care of our little boy. His grandmother helps, so Lucy and I can have some time to ourselves. It’s all very ordinary and quite boring, I’m sure, to an outsider.”
There were no pictures of Lucy, either, in any of these baby stories. Janice wondered if she was still rail thin, and suspected she was. Now that Janice had started her social work classes, she was learning more about the kind of poverty Lucy had grown up with. Lucy had always said she couldn’t gain weight, but Janice had never wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that Lucy had almost starved when she was a kid. A lot of things hadn’t occurred to Janice then: like how attractive it must have been to her friend that Keenan wanted to protect her. Like why Lucy went along with him about having kids so soon, even though she was way too young to be a mother. Lucy’s own mother was dead and she’d never even known her father. Charles’s weird obsession with having a family probably seemed like a relief to Lucy, after all those years of having no family at all.
Janice thought about sending a baby gift, but she couldn’t imagine what Lucy didn’t already have. One of the articles had talked about (but not shown) the elaborate furnishings in the nursery wing of the house. “When you have a wing,” Janice told Peter, “a rattle or blanket just won’t cut it.”
Peter loved her sarcastic sense of humor. She loved the way he laughed: a big hearty sound that filled her apartment and made her feel like the whole place was smiling with them.
The closer the two of them became, the more she trusted him with everything about herself, including her strange continuing interest in Lucy. She thought it was really sweet when he came to the door one evening holding a stack of papers announcing what she already knew: The Brave Horseman had been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Picture, and, yes, Best Actress.
It was the first of Keenan’s movies to get any nominations, and it helped make a box office smash out of what had already been called a surprise hit. Now, Janice thought, surely she would see her friend—ex-friend—at the awards show. Walking down the red carpet outside, arm and arm with ole Charlie.
How old was he now anyway? Her own boyfriend Peter was her age, twenty-six. Lucy was only twenty-one. But Charles had to be what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? That old fart, thought Janice.
Her attitude about Sir Charles was apparently never going to change. Especially since she didn’t see her friend at the awards show, and she figured it had to be his doing. At least he wasn’t there either. She didn’t have to see his big eye leering at some model while poor Lucy sat at home with a squalling kid.
Why didn’t they go to the Academy Awards though? Did this mean there was trouble in paradise? No, Janice finally discovered, according to the only interviewer that got through to a “representative for the couple”:
“Charles and Lucy are very grateful to the Academy for recognizing The Brave Horseman of El Dorado. They regret that they were unable to attend due to an illness of their son.” (Oh shit, thought Janice, the poor little guy. But no.) “Thankfully, the baby has recovered completely now. The couple sends a hearty congratulation to all the award winners and their families.”
Maybe they didn’t expect to win anything themselves. Certainly the oddsmakers hadn’t expected them to win or even be nominated.
“Brave Horseman Takes Oscar for Best Director: Longtime Producer and Friend Walter Urig Accepts Award for Keenan.”
The only award the movie received was the big prize for him. Figures, thought Janice, although the truth was she would have been shocked if Charles had lost. Like Peter said, it really was a brilliant movie: probably too odd for best picture, but a shoo-in for director. Lucy did a wonderful job, but Charles had created the entire world. Plus, according to Peter, it was a great example of a truly feminist Western. “He’s no feminist,” Janice snapped, but when Peter asked what made her so sure, she really didn’t have a good answer. Even her insistence that he wouldn’t let Lucy work wasn’t something she could prove.
Still, wasn’t it a little bit strange that all the press in the months after the awards focused on his next project? Not to mention how strange that project was.
For reasons that were never made clear (at least in any of the papers Janice read), Charles, having just won an award for a Western, had decided to turn away from them for good. He was casting for his new movie, The View from Main Street USA, described as “an ode to fifties family life.” The fifties? In 1979? J
esus, Janice thought, leave it to that guy to make an ode to a decade every normal person knew was as empty of real meaning as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The fifties was the time of McCarthyism and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and miserable women stuck out in the suburbs with a passel of snot-nosed kids. And all those commercials for laundry detergents and floor wax and dust spray. The birth of TV soap operas.
At least Lucy didn’t have to clean, Janice thought. And the view from Malibu USA was nothing short of amazing, as she discovered when she picked up a local magazine and saw a feature on Eric Giles, the decorator who had done the Keenans’ house. The rooms were painted a muted yellow; the front French windows opened to a view of the ocean that seemed to stretch for miles, while the back looked out on the mountains and the most colorful garden Janice had ever seen. The furnishings themselves were magnificent—and the point of the article—but Janice was so caught up in the views that she didn’t pay much attention to the chairs and tables, lamps and rugs. She wondered what it would be like to wake up every morning and see such a lovely world. For a moment, she even considered that Lucy might be really happy there, but then she noticed that Giles never mentioned even one thing Lucy said when he was talking about working with the Keenan family. “Mr. Keenan wanted the decor of the front room to harmonize with the flood of natural light.” “Mr. Keenan asked that the screening room wet bar be taken out and replaced with a play area for his son.” “Mr. Keenan said his wife’s dressing area should have an intimate feeling, and suggested a violet, rose and white color scheme since ‘Lucy loves violets.’” Eric Giles said he was “impressed” by the director’s “obvious feeling for his wife.”
Had Lucy’s tongue been removed? Did Charles have her locked in a closet somewhere (a tastefully decorated closet of course)? When she looked at those French windows, did she think of the view, or only of escape? And the most important question of all, put to Janice by Peter: why didn’t she just call Lucy and find out if she was okay?
“Because I don’t have her number,” Janice said irritably. “And it’s not like her people will just give it to me if I say I used to be her friend.”
“But can’t you leave a message for her to call you?”
“What’s the point? I still don’t like him. Nothing has changed.”
It all seemed to fit in a creepy way: Charles and his fabulous fifties family movie, Charles and his fabulous house. Lucy had nothing to do with either, Janice was sure. She told Peter if Keenan offered Lucy a part in his next movie, if he ever let Lucy be in anyone’s movie, she’d never say another bad word about the man.
Luckily, Peter didn’t hold her to that.
Not only did Charles let Lucy be in a movie, he also encouraged her to do so, according to an interview in Variety. The director was a friend of Charles’s, Derrick Mabe, and the role was perfect. Lucy would be playing a German violinist who saves dozens of her Jewish pupils from the Nazis. The title of the movie was The Passion of Helena Lott.
“When Derrick sent us the script,” Charles told the interviewer, “I read it immediately. I thought it was a brilliant exploration of maintaining personal morality in a time of national evil. I also thought my wife would be a natural for the title role because Lucy is such a principled person and an artist, like Helena.”
Dammit, Janice thought, why didn’t she do any interviews herself? Wasn’t this just a little bit strange for an actress whose career depended on getting herself in front of the public? And what the hell did he even mean when he said Lucy was a “principled person”? The Lucy who Janice knew had smoked an occasional joint and cursed and even tried to steal that spoon just because she liked it. Was he turning her into his clone?
In the last paragraph of the interview, Charles mentioned that Anthony Mills was “eager to work with Lucy again.” This time Anthony was playing Lucy’s lover rather than her torturer. Wow, thought Janice, what a hunk that guy is. She remembered when he asked Lucy to dinner when they were working together on Horseman. Charles knew about that, didn’t he? Would he really let his wife pretend to have sex with this guy, and in Germany, no less, because at least part of the film was supposedly being shot on location? And if he did, Peter asked, a little exasperatedly, because he really didn’t understand why Janice continued to be so hostile to Charles, would it change Janice’s opinion of him?
No, she said, frowning. She was training to be a social worker; she had to trust her instincts, and she just didn’t trust Charles Keenan. Never had, never would.
“I’m glad I made it past this infallible instinct radar of yours,” Peter said archly, but he smiled. “What if I hadn’t?”
“It’s completely different,” she said, but she smiled back. He’d just asked her to marry him on the flight home from visiting her parents in Milwaukee. Her parents had loved him too. Of course she’d said yes. She’d finally found her own luck.
She was planning the ceremony, looking for a good tailor to make alterations so she could wear her mother’s wedding dress, when she found out Lucy’s daughter was born. She hadn’t even heard Lucy was pregnant, but then she saw the birth announcement in one of the local Beverly Hills papers. The filming of Helena Lott must have finished just in time, before Lucy started showing. Janice figured this out by counting backwards from May 7, 1980. She loved the name they gave the little girl. Dorothea Elizabeth Keenan. A tiny thing at just five pounds, but otherwise healthy.
The proud father was quoted in several articles giving his usual spiel about the importance of keeping his family’s private life private. No pictures again, not even those caught-on-Rodeo-Drive-type photos the tabloids thrived on.
Janice did send a present this time: an adorable little hat that she found at a funky thrift store on Venice Beach where she and Lucy used to shop. She shipped it in care of Charles’s office. But she didn’t put her name and phone number on the card. She was afraid Lucy would call again, but even more afraid she wouldn’t.
By the fall of 1981, Janice was married and in her senior year of college. She was distracted with her own life, but she still managed to note with some irritation that there were probably five times as many articles about Charles’s movie The View from Main Street USA as Lucy’s The Passion of Helena Lott. Apparently, the controversy that erupted over some remarks Charles made at the UCLA film school hadn’t hurt his movie at all:
“War of the Directors? Keenan Calls Lucas’s American Graffiti ‘Shallow and Pointless.’”
Peter brought this article to Janice. When she saw that headline, she thought, oh boy, is Charles in hot water now! But then she read the piece and she couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for him.
“‘It’s all technique, no depth,’ Charles Keenan told a group of film students. ‘Someone tell me: where is the meaning in this movie? That life is a style? That nostalgia is a substitute for a serious attempt to come to terms with the past?’ When asked by phone later if he was only talking about American Graffiti because his own movie about roughly the same period was set to debut next month, Keenan barked out, ‘Of course. If you’d done your homework, you would know I was answering one of the student’s questions about whether I thought another movie about the late fifties and early sixties was necessary, given the success of American Graffiti. Because it was a student, I gave the question a fuller answer than it deserved. Obviously I think another movie is necessary. I made one.’”
Say what you will, Janice thought, the man has balls. He was not only making an enemy of George Lucas, but also of the hundreds of industry people who were his supporters, including his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola. But Keenan had never relied on the industry to make his movies work, and even though he was implicitly criticizing the reviewers and the public that had heartily embraced American Graffiti, they either didn’t know or didn’t care because they embraced The View from Main Street USA too. Nearly all the reviews were positive and Janice didn’t bother reading more than a handful. Lucy was the one she cared about. Charles was only in
teresting to her up to a point, and she was really getting sick of hearing how wonderful he was. Even Peter had to go on and on about the fabulous View from Main Street: how it redefined the period, giving stature to the fifties family, but not ignoring its flaws; how it brilliantly showed the commitment so many people made to giving their children a life they themselves had never even imagined.
The Passion of Helena Lott had a more mixed reception. Most everyone seemed to love Lucy’s performance, but the film itself was criticized for being “slow,” “quiet,” “ponderous” and even “boring.” Janice wanted to blame Charles for this (wasn’t he the one who said the script was brilliant?), but as Peter ever so helpfully pointed out, a lot of the problem was the lighting (too dark), the soundtrack (too melancholy) and very few jump cuts, which made the story seem slower than it was. Janice told him he was becoming quite the amateur film critic, but then she decided she was glad he took it as a compliment.
For the rest of 1981 and a good part of 1982, there was a flurry of articles about what films Charles and Lucy would do next. They had more freedom than ever to pick their projects after the five Academy Award nominations for Main Street (it only garnered one Oscar, this time for Best Original Screenplay, but that was Charles too, of course), and the nearly universal praise for Lucy in Helena, which every commentator agreed was amazing for a newcomer, even though she didn’t win any awards. Janice read all the articles she ran across, though she was wondering if she was finally losing interest, maybe even getting ready to stop this weird tracking of Lucy for good. She was out of college now, working as a social worker; Peter had just passed the bar and started his first job. The truth was the whole movie business had started to seem more than a little trivial.