“Well, there’s some question, in my mind at least, as to whether she disappeared on her own this time, or whether it was someone else’s idea.”
Lissa Wellman let out a sigh. “I hate to hear that, but I haven’t seen her.”
“I didn’t think you had. I’m just hoping for information. Something that might tell me where to look.”
She glanced in her rear-view mirror. “Move your car so I can get out, and come with me,” she said. “I’m on my way to see Henry.” She put the car back into reverse and said, “But we can talk in front of Henry with no problem. Henry’s dead.”
“My husband,” Lissa Wellman said, carefully negotiating a curve. She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day. “Nicest man I ever knew. Not necessarily the most exciting or the most amusing-actually, Paul Lynde was probably the most amusing-but Henry was nice all the way to his bone marrow. Niceness goes a long way.”
“It’s got staying power, too,” I said.
“You know something about it, don’t you? I’m afraid that puts you in the minority. It seems to me to be getting rarer and rarer. We value other things now. Intelligence, I guess, or wit, or the ability to stay half an hour ahead of what everyone else is thinking or doing. Or even wearing. But I’ll take niceness. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. In a small town, it’s important to be nice because you see the same people every day. In LA, you can be all kinds of awful because people generally only go by once. I read somewhere that the act that tells you most about someone is how they look at themselves in a mirror, but I’d say it’s how nice they are to someone they know they’ll never see again.”
“How long were you and Henry married?”
“We’re still married. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we’re not married. But we were married in the flesh, so to speak, for thirty-three years.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing much. Oh, he worked when I was getting started. Sold real estate. But then I began to make some money, and he decided to take care of me. He took what I made and invested it in property and built it all into a very tidy little empire, which he called LissaLand. Apartment houses and regular houses and acreage up north, some kind of shopping mall, and, oh, I don’t know, all sorts of places I never even saw. But they all brought in money every month. And a week after he died, I sold all of it, every square foot. I didn’t want to be a landlord, have all those people’s lives in my hands.” She turned on the indicator for a left. “So here I am, old, previously famous, and rich.”
“Not all that old,” I said.
“Keep it up, dear,” she said. “You’re doing very well for someone who’s not in show business.” The left led us up a gentle hill, and then under an archway, heavy with climbing roses, that said ROSEHAVEN on a large metal plaque.
“By genetic standards,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’m very old. And the women in my family have always gone on just forever, I mean we continually live almost a century. But even if I disregard your flattery, there was no reason to expect I’d ever be famous, much less rich. The nicest thing anyone ever wrote about me was that I had a ‘modest but congenial talent.’ ” She shook her head, and the orange hair grabbed at the sunlight. “And he meant it as a compliment. But an angel took a hand and made me rich and semi-famous, and you know who she was.”
“I do. And I know that she thinks your talent was something special.”
“Really. How do you know that?”
“This is embarrassing to admit, but I had to read her journals to figure out where she might be. She said you had a light in your center, and that’s what the camera saw. She was just reflective, she said, but you were a lighthouse.”
“That poor child. If I was a lighthouse, I did a rotten job of keeping her from hitting the rocks.”
Lissa guided the car along a narrow road that took us between banks of roses, not so much a formal garden as an almost impromptu arrangement of beds, all different sizes and shapes, with lawn stretching like green aisles between them. Here and there a stone bench sprouted, a double bench, actually, with seats facing in both directions and sharing a single backrest between them. Then a high wall appeared in front of us, nothing fancy, just rough, weathered redwood, grayed by exposure to the elements and absolutely perfect for the site. Lissa pulled around it, and I saw half a dozen parking spaces.
“This is beautiful,” I said.
“Isn’t it.” She undid her seat belt and got out of the car. “Like a lot of the good things in my life, it came from ‘Once a Witch.’ ” We were walking by now, heading back around the wall toward the roses. “Years ago, back in the 1980s, I had a part in another sitcom, ‘In the Family Way.’ You don’t have to pretend to remember me. I played the next-door neighbor, and I had brown hair and nothing but straight lines. We had this darling makeup man, Buddy Mendoza, who’d been forever with his friend Charles. Charles was an agent who’d done very well, and he and Buddy were just rolling in money. I once asked Buddy why he continued to work, and he said, ‘All my life I’ve been playing with makeup, Lissa, so why would I stop now?’ ”
She led me along a strip of meticulously mowed grass between beds of roses that stood four and five feet high, most of them in full bloom. The air was thick with scent, and I could hear the lazy drone of bees. “Anyway, during our second season on ‘Family Way,’ Charles died. When Buddy read his will, it turned out that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in a hole and have a rose bush-he specified a damask rose, one of the very old varieties-planted on top of him, so he could supply nitrogen to the flowers. He’d bought a few acres up here but he and Buddy had never built on it. We go right, here.”
I followed her as she turned. The green path we were now taking led to a circle of roses perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a smaller circle of grass in the center. “So Buddy brought Charles’s ashes up here and did what Charles had wanted, and that rose just exploded. You could practically see it grow. This was the time, I’m sure you’ll remember, when men like Buddy and Charles were dying by the dozen every day. And Buddy had brought some of his friends up here when he planted Charles’s rose. The idea sort of took hold in their hearts.”
We entered the circle of roses. At the center was a round bench, and Lissa sat down and indicated a rosebush, not very tall but profusely adorned with blooms of a red so dark it was almost black. There was a small pewter plaque in front of it that said Henry Wellman. “There he is,” she said. “My Henry. He chose the rose, which is called ‘Othello,’ because of its color, thank you, not as a comment on our marriage, which was mostly free of jealousy. By the time Henry passed on, there were almost fifty people buried up here, mostly gay men, but not all of them, and Buddy was fighting tooth and nail with the city, which wanted to close the place down. Anything new, anything beautiful, just brings out the worst in bureaucrats. By that time, I was rich from ‘Once a Witch’ and Henry’s real estate, and I bought all the property on both sides and hired lawyers. It took a bunch of lawsuits and newspaper stories and some stuff on television, but the little gray men eventually went away. The funny thing is that two of the men who fought the hardest to stop Buddy have their own roses here now.”
“How many people are up here?”
“Twelve, thirteen hundred, and more every week. Buddy doesn’t charge fees, but everybody has to bring the rose, naturally, and for the first ten years they’re expected to pay twenty or thirty dollars a month for upkeep. Of course, everybody does. Some people have left the place thousands of dollars. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones continue to bloom? Properly cared for, a rose bush can live fifty or sixty years.”
“You’re a very nice woman,” I said.
“It’s easy to be nice when you’ve been blessed. Isn’t Henry blooming, though? He was never what you would have called a handsome man, although he had his angles, so it’s especially nice that he’s so beautiful now. It’s more like how he was inside.” She folded her h
ands in her lap and sat quietly, looking at the new incarnation of Henry for several minutes. Then she said, “Thistle’s father is here.”
I said, “Oh.”
“She fought it of course, the mother, I mean. Luella the Cruel. It’s all faggots up there, she said. She wanted to plant him in Forest Lawn, probably under a life-size sculpture of herself, paid for by Thistle, of course, with a stone saying something like, Can you imagine leaving someone like this behind? I’m sorry, I’m being terrible.”
“I’ve met her,” I said.
“Then you know. The poor child, as if she wasn’t having enough trouble by then. Oh, good heavens, you came to see me to talk about Thistle, and all I’ve done is rattle on about everything under the sun.”
“I could listen to you rattle for weeks.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you, but it’s not going to help you find out what’s happened to our girl.” She got up and blew Henry’s rose a kiss and said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Howard.” With Lissa leading the way, we left the circle and followed a path that led around a large gray boulder. On the far side of the stone was a bed of roses planted directly against the rockface, their colors especially intense on the gray background. “He’s the Sterling Silver,” she said, “the sort of lavender one. A very delicate rose, subject to mildew and other problems. In that way, I’m afraid it was an appropriate choice.” The pewter plaque read Howard Downing. “He was a pleasant man, but no match for Luella.”
“Vlad the Impaler would have been no match for Luella.”
“You know, it never ceased to amaze me that she felt no concern for that child. Later, I mean, when things began to go wrong. All the misbehavior, all the acting out and the drugs. It was just an inconvenience to Luella, an irritation. And, of course, it threatened her lifestyle. That little girl was a miracle at the beginning, but then …” She broke off, looking down at Harold Downing’s plaque. “But then,” she said, “it was just heartbreaking.”
33
Slipping away
“It really began in season four,” Lissa said. We were sitting in the front seat of her SUV with the doors wide open to admit the fragrance of the roses. “I’m sorry to date everything in terms of the show, but that’s how I remember those years. And, of course, Thistle was the show. In more ways than one.”
“I never actually saw her until recently,” I said. “I guess what I saw was filmed in the middle nineties, and it looked like it, except for her. She looked like her performance was ninety seconds old.”
“The really good ones don’t date. And the really awful ones don’t, either, they’re just as horrid today as they were fifty years ago. It’s the rest of us who get frozen in a moment, a style, a way of being-in my case, I guess, a woman, what everybody’s idea of a woman was then. The hairstyles don’t help, of course, but that’s not what’s really wrong. What’s really wrong is that tastes change. Nobody eats baked Alaska any more, nobody wants their refrigerator to be avocado green, and no actor overplays on camera, but there was a time when those things were the ne plus ultra. And film, of course, unlike avocado-colored refrigerators, never goes away. On the other hand, some things don’t date at all. A simple white refrigerator, a perfect apple pie, great acting. They appeal as much now as they did fifty years ago.”
“Some child actors are instinctively perfect,” she said. “Thistle was one of those. It’s not so surprising, I guess. Give a boy a towel to tie around his shoulders and he can fly. Give a little girl a doll-I’m aware that my attitudes here are not exactly breaking news-give a little girl a doll and a toy set of cups and saucers, and she’ll have a tea party. But eventually they stop playing, while Thistle could turn it on all day long, ten hours a day, and it went way, way beyond simply believing what she was doing. She was phenomenally inventive. The thing I heard her say most often on the set was, ‘I did it that way before,’ and what that meant was that she was about to come up with a completely different approach to presenting, say, shock or surprise or guilt or incomprehension. She’d ask for a minute, and she’d sit on the couch if we were in the living room or on one of the kitchen chairs if we were shooting in there, and she’d close her eyes. Sometimes she’d laugh while her eyes were still closed. Then she’d get up and say, “Okay,” and nail it in one take. And woe betide the director who was new to the show and who didn’t want to give Thistle one of her little timeouts. Everyone in the studio jumped on him.”
“And so they should have.”
“We were the biggest problem, because we laughed. She’d catch us off guard and we’d just stand there, laughing, and the scene would grind to a stop. How she loved it when that happened. You know how much she looked like an elf? At those moments, she looked like the naughtiest elf in the swarm, if that’s what you call a bunch of elves, like she’d just gotten the idea to put the donkey ears on old Bottom.”
“This was in the early days?”
“Yes.” She put both hands on the steering wheel and looked at her wedding ring, which had caught fire in the sun. “Really the first three years. They were magic, in so many ways. The trouble is that Thistle thought it was magic, too, and believed to the center of her being that it was. And that left her defenseless. Oh, how can I explain this without it sounding crazy? You know, lots of creative people feel like someone else is actually doing the work. Some of the best writers I know say that the words come through them, from somewhere else, that the characters talk and all the writer does is try to get it down before it fades. It’s not like they’re making things up. It’s like someone is telling them the story, and they’re just, I don’t know, taking dictation.”
“I’ve read pieces where writers say things like that.”
“Well, Thistle believed that there actually was someone named Thistle, someone talented who lived inside her and did all the good work. Her real name was Edith, did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“After we got to know each other-after we realized we had a hit and we were going to be working together for a while instead of being broken up after three or four months of filming-she told me what had happened. She said that Thistle just appeared, just came out of nowhere, at her first reading for the show. Even told her what her name was, and that was the name Edith gave the casting director. And, look: she got the part. All she had to do was relax and let Thistle do whatever she wanted. So she did, just read the lines the way Thistle wanted them read and added some physical business Thistle thought of. The casting director left the room and came back with the three executive producers, guys who don’t laugh at anything, and asked to see the scene again, and this time Thistle did something completely different, something even better. Even the producers were laughing, but the casting director quieted them down and said, ‘Once more. Differently this time.’ And she got what she asked for, the best one yet. And of course, she got the part. They made an offer that evening.”
“And Thistle-I mean, Edith-didn’t believe she was the one who had done it.”
“She never did. She, Edith I mean, would take the script home and learn the lines, and when she got to the set in the morning, all she had to do was open up and let Thistle in, and Thistle would move Edith around like a hand puppet.”
A hand puppet, she’d said to Hacker.
“That’s what she was doing when she sat with her eyes closed. She believed she was opening up to Thistle. And that’s what she did, scene after scene, show after show.”
“What did you think about it?”
She shook her head, a gesture packed with regret. “I didn’t give it the thought it deserved. Like everybody else, I was just happy to be part of the show, happy that Thistle could keep it up, keep the people tuning in, keep the damn ratings up. Keep the money coming in. And, of course, everyone was afraid of screwing up Thistle’s process. Afraid for our own sakes, not hers. We were like an army that was being led from victory to victory by someone who believed he was Napoleon. The cities are falling one after another, all this booty
is landing in our laps, and who’s going to go into his tent and tell him he’s really Harold Mednick? Who’s going to tell him he’s suffering a delusion? So we all went along with it, with the Thistle idea, even though we knew perfectly well that she was simply the most talented child-oh, hell, one of the most talented actresses-we’d ever worked with. We listened to her talk about Thistle and never said a word.
“I remember telling myself-guess I was actually comforting myself-that the whole thing was just a phase she was going through, like an imaginary friend, and that she’d grow out of it, and realize that the talent was hers, that she was really the one doing all the work.”
“But,” I said.
“But I didn’t tell her that, and there was no one else who could, no one who mattered to her. God knows her mother didn’t. I really think the reason Edith made Thistle up in the first place was that her mother had always told her how ordinary she was, how unattractive she was. So if the child was suddenly capable of all that, getting laughs, getting applause, becoming a star, there had to be a reason. Thistle was the reason. And then her father died, just as Thistle started slipping away.”
“Slipping away?”
“That’s how she described it. She’d been having harder and harder weeks, weeks when the sitting sessions got longer, and the work wasn’t as fresh. You could see her grabbing for inspiration, thrashing around like someone who’s afraid she’s drowning. And she came up with things, eventually, but not on the same plane. Before, she’d been startling, and now she was just good. She was relying more and more on technique.”
“I saw that,” I said. “In the shows I watched.”
“I think she was just tired. She’d worked nonstop for three years, with all of us riding on her shoulders, but she didn’t think that was the reason. She told me she could feel it. Thistle was leaving. This child was literally growing up on television, doing what she did in front of seventy or eighty million people every day, and she felt like she was failing. She felt the talent, the spark, whatever it was that Thistle represented to her, slipping away. Going out, like a candle. And there she was, under those lights, under all those eyes, surrounded by people whose paychecks depended on her, her father just dead and her mother glaring at her whenever things weren’t perfect, and she was failing. We all fail, all actors, we all have bad takes and sometimes whole bad days, but she’d never had a bad minute, and suddenly here they were, one after another after another. And she was just a kid. So what she believed was that she’d never had talent, really, it had all been Thistle, and Thistle was leaving.”
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