We opened the door. It was stuffed with piles of dirty laundry and twenty-four used mattresses.
“What are they trying to tell me?” he said. They had given him the wrong room number.
Colin settled, we sought out John Heard. It didn’t take long. His door was open and he was expressing articulately how he missed the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan streets. Nevertheless in no uncertain terms he announced that the traffic outside was more than he could “fucking” stand. So they moved him to a room next to mine. It was either divine justice or John managing, as always, to experience everything to its utmost. The two forces could be the same, of course, so as matters developed, I felt justified in thinking it all probably served him right….
That night was one that will go down in my book antisleep-wise. Part of the construction crew that had preceded us by weeks decided to have a party. And they had it in a private dining room located right under my bed. The floors and walls were not exactly reinforced, so I heard every toast, every joke, and every rowdy, raucous dance number—backed by drums that could have soloed at any first-class Independence Day parade.
It was the one night we had to catch up on sleep, and the production company had warned us to go to bed immediately in the high altitude so that we’d be ready to work early the next day.
I turned my sound machine on full blast. Thank goodness the current was correct. But it made no difference. The sinking of Atlantis couldn’t have been louder.
At about midnight Simo went to the production office and complained. The American secretary who had sent out the memos warning us to get to sleep immediately said, “Oh, she should tell us when she’s sleeping.” Simo marked her name in his little black book and finally called the hotel manager.
An American film company listens to no one but the director and sometimes a temperamental star. Neither was present in our case, so I did the best I could. What I also didn’t know was that Cuzco power sometimes suffers an upsurge in energy which often blows out electrical equipment. So, of course, my sound machine blew. What was interesting was that I didn’t. I sat up in bed and said to myself: It’s all happening for a reason and everything will be fine. At 5:00 A.M. I fell asleep.
At 6:00 A.M. a trumpeter attached to an army barracks near us began to sound reveille, followed by a military band joyously rendering a rousing march, fortissimo, to accompany the soldiers as they went out on maneuvers. First they had to practice marching in the vicinity though, until around 7:00 A.M. So I slept from 7:00 to 11:00.
I got up saying to myself: All of this has already happened. It’s an adventure I’m simply reliving: It all took place in another time.
Simo, however, put in a distress call to Los Angeles for two more sound machines. I couldn’t depend on alternative realities to get me through the movie. And I didn’t want to look like Marjorie Main playing myself.
After all that we went out to look at the Inca city which would be our home for four weeks.
No one really knows how old Cuzco is. As with all pre-Hispanic cultures, the facts are diffused because of the tradition of oral history. But modern archeologists now claim that Cuzco had been inhabited by unrecorded pre-Inca cultures. The word Inca is a Quechua term used to describe just one person—the ruling emperor himself. Quechua is still the language of the Inca. The creation myth of Cuzco goes like this:
In the beginning there were wretched barbarian creatures who lived in a land of darkness. The great Sun lord sent his son to earth to bring enlightenment and culture. His name was Manco Capac. The great Moon goddess sent her daughter to be his bride. Her name was Mama Occlo. They emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca and began a long odyssey together which culminated in the fertile valley of Cuzco. Applying the test of the Sun lord, Manco Capac plunged his golden staff into the ground. When it sank and disappeared, he knew this was “the navel of the earth,” and founded an empire upon the spot. So Cuzco was more than just the capital city of the Inca Empire. It was a holy city, a place of pilgrimage with as much significance to the Quechuas as Mecca has to the Moslems.
The Incas built their city in the shape of a puma. Within that animal form I marveled at the Sun Temple, the Plaza de Armas, the Wailing Square, the cathedrals, and the palace of Pachacutec.
The cobblestone streets of Cuzco wound and beckoned to us with new colors, sights, and sounds. Each junction was ancient history. After many earthquakes, it was the Inca structures that remained. There were craft shops selling rugs, baskets, bags, jewelry, sweaters, gold, and paintings.
Later on, Colin and I met and went to look at some of the locations the production crew had selected. Although my actual experience in Peru had taken place in Huancayo, which had entirely different terrain, it wasn’t possible to base our production company there because of the requirements of accommodations and surrounding locations. I could feel the art department strain for my approval because they knew it was quite different. But they did a superb job in the main in scouting out places which were reminiscent of what I wrote in the book; except for the “hotel” where I actually lived.
The original experience was more primitive than the movie version. I had lived in a mud hut called a “hotel,” with a dirt floor and no windows. That was it. No running water, no heat, no nothing.
Maybe it was difficult for them to believe. I don’t know, but instead of going with what I wrote, they found an actual hotel, rather quaint, almost European, trimmed with red paint and sporting a courtyard abounding with flowers. Zsa Zsa Gabor would have been happy honeymooning there. They had, however, confirmed to the man who ran the hotel that they would muddy up one whole wall and the courtyard. He looked on in disbelief at what was happening to his treasured hotel—which he believed the company had chosen for its charm. Mud was loaded into the courtyard, splattered on the walls, and even dumped in the room interiors. He had suspected Hollywood was insane, but this was proof.
In the end we just couldn’t make it look primitive enough. So the company paid the man, restored his place to normal, and went searching on the other side of the tracks for a better way to purvey our celluloid dreams. I hoped the hotel owner’s feelings were not too badly hurt. No doubt he took the whole Hollywood madness in good stride.
Since we had shot the interior mineral bath sequences on a Hollywood sound stage, we needed to get the exterior shots in Peru. That meant digging a huge hole and duplicating a natural phenomenon that did not occur in Cuzco. The water also needed to bubble and emit steam.
The hole was no problem. There happened to be a giant one deep beside the Urubamba River. But where to get the water to fill it with?
Someone said the mayor of Coija had a heated swimming pool with freshly chlorinated water in it. Chlorination was essential, they felt, because John and I would be in it for days.
The art director went to the mayor and asked him if I could use the water in his swimming pool for my movie. When he said yes, they moved the shooting date up on the schedule because things were going so smoothly.
However, when the company backed up the fire truck to drain the mayor’s pool, they found that he had already drained it to make room for cool, fresh, un-chlorinated water for me. The art director tried to explain I hadn’t wanted to use his pool—I wanted to use his water. The local fire department, which consisted of one truck, was brought in. The guys lost count of the trips that truck made to fill our hole with 80,000 gallons of water which then needed to be heated and fitted with artistically primitive surrounding rocks so that the whole thing didn’t look like a manicured rock-garden special from the San Fernando Valley.
But once the local fire department’s water was in the pool, the pool sprang a leak. Fifty thousand gallons of water leaked into the Urubamba before it was stopped.
They then put a liquid rubber sealer on the bottom, filled the pool again, and brought in the heaters. The heaters melted the sealer, which appeared on the top of the water as floating rubber scum.
Someone suggested throwing dry ice into
the water so the steam would camouflage the rubber.
It worked. John and I would just have to say our dialogue fast so our mouths wouldn’t stay open long. Obviously the mineral-bath shoot was scheduled for later.
The art department did a superhuman job in the wilds of Peru. So superhuman that the art director had to be sent home with altitude sickness precipitated by movie pressure.
A word about what 11,000 feet feels like. First your head aches, constantly and relentlessly. The food you eat is difficult to digest. The oxygen in the blood is obviously thin, causing dizziness and heart pounding which can be extremely disconcerting. Those are some of the physical effects. The mental, psychological, and psychic effects are even more profound.
I had been there only a day and a half when my dreams and mental associations began to be unlike any I had ever experienced.
I think it was a combination of the altitude and the Andean energy. Later on I was to hear stories from nearly every member of the crew relating to what was going on in their heads.
Our dreams were more vivid, more definitive, more real than usual. They made me more aware than ever of the possibility that we might very well be living two or three levels of reality at the same time.
Colin and Simo and I shopped in the marketplaces the day before we started shooting. The Peruvian handicrafts were exquisite: hand-woven shoulder bags of multicolors, and soft baby-alpaca sweaters woven in fairy-tale colorful designs. The alpaca fur rugs were perfect thrown across a bed. I did all my Christmas shopping in Cuzco and never looked back.
Our stomachs were beginning to rumble with the food, even though we had had only soup and bread. Later we would find that we should have stuck to that.
I had brought a quart of chunky peanut butter with me along with a case of crackers. If things got really rough I could live on those.
The company was settled in and ready to work. Then we found out that already someone had stolen my combat boots (boots that I needed to match those in scenes we had already shot). And maybe worse than that, all the booze stored in the production office was stolen.
Joie, our costume supervisor, had thought to bring doubles of my combat boots, but our company manager had no solution for the missing liquor.
We began shooting in the Plaza of Cuzco. Crowds gathered and gawked. The crew was organized, professional, and fast, and even though the rarefied high-altitude light stung my blue eyes (Andean eyes all seem to be brown), Brad was able to rig an overhead tarp to reduce the glare.
Stan had wanted to shoot one of the most dramatic scenes in the script on the first day of shooting because it was much better for the production schedule. I felt that John and I had not had enough time to adjust to the altitude and that we would have a hard time with the screaming dramatic dialogue. John was in a good mood. He had been learning Spanish and was interacting with the local people. When I asked him how he felt about tackling the big Plaza scene he wanted to take the chance. He seemed to relish overcoming the adversity. After that we were scheduled to move out to the airport to do the arrival scene, because that was the only day they would give us permission to shoot out there. And in the afternoon we were to head for Machu Picchu.
We got through the morning, although the airport scene took far too long, headed back and had lunch, and then rounded up the crew, baggage, John, assorted paraphernalia, and technical equipment, and somehow got it all to the station and onto the train going up to Machu Picchu.
We were on a train that was supposed to take three hours to get there. As it turned out we arrived seven hours later.
The terrain we traversed made it worthwhile. The Urubamba River tumbled from its Andean paradise above, running alongside the train, actually spraying our hands as we stretched them out the windows. Jungle undergrowth, ever-changing trees of storybook varieties, and huge boulders raced past with the speed of the river—which was traveling much faster than our train. Handcrafted bridges of hemp and mountain vines were the only indication that humans lived in the wild countryside we were passing through.
There was no food other than picnic boxes packed from the hotel restaurant. And at each mountain stop the crew gave away more boxes. Peasant women in bright-colored serapes, their hair dressed in twisted thick black braids, accepted the boxes with dignity for their children. They lined the railroad tracks when the train rolled in. Many tried to sell us handcrafted necklaces and bags.
Tina and Julie, our body makeup girl, cried for the poverty in which they saw people living. John went to a window. He saw the outstretched hands and turned away, unable to cope with it. Then he reached in his pocket and threw all the money he had out of the window without looking at where it landed.
No one else saw him do it. It is one of the strongest memories I have of the trip to Peru.
The bright day turned to darkness as our milk-run trek proceeded. The crew had brought along cases of beer and by now they and John were feeling no pain. He enjoyed drinking with the crew. We swapped movie stories about people we had worked with. Nothing is sacred when a crew gets going.
We hung out of the windows together, with the rain and the Urubamba spray dashing against our faces.
Finally at 2:00 the next morning we pulled into the train station of Machu Picchu. And as we suspected, it was raining.
We loaded ourselves into a bus which would take us up the winding road to the ruins. If the weather broke we would have to shoot in three hours at daybreak.
“Listen,” said Brad. “It’s war. We all know that. We’ll just pull together and make it work.”
And so I returned to the haunting ruin of Machu Picchu which had so captured my heart ten years before.
Machu Picchu was known as the Lost City of the Incas and was not discovered until 1911 by an American named Hiram Bingham, who was to become governor of and senator from Connecticut and a professor of South American studies at Harvard. The Indians themselves had not known it was there. The ruin is situated at the top of the mountain with no access for vehicles or construction. How it was built, even why, still remains a mystery.
I stepped from the bus into the rain and mist. The old hotel was still there. I looked up and saw the shrouded outline of the ancient stones, and at that moment, out of the wispy clouds stepped a giant alpaca. He stood outlined in the rain—almost as though he were guarding the place until we could be there in the morning.
I climbed the stairs of the hotel veranda. A million tourists had been there since I had first been so moved by the place. So much had happened to me. So much I had learned, so much to understand.
We had to bunk in together because there was a shortage of rooms. So Colin and I stayed together. Even though the rain was soothing, I pulled out my sound machine and turned it on.
“So this is what you sleep by,” said Colin.
“Yep,” I answered. “And you’ll be off to sleep before you have time to wonder what Peru is going to come up with tomorrow.”
Chapter 19
When we woke it was Colin who came up with something I didn’t expect. Because it was still raining and our shooting call was on hold, Colin felt it was the right time and place to tell me about something about which I knew nothing. It had to do with the dialogue at Machu Picchu.
“I had a meeting with a cultural man dealing with Machu Picchu,” he began.
“Oh?” I said. “What’s he like?”
Colin made a face. “Right out of a bad Costa Gavras movie.”
This was not a good sign. “Well, what happened?” I asked anxiously.
“He says if we don’t take out the references to extraterrestrials in our script, he won’t let us shoot here.”
I looked at Colin, trying to understand. I had been used to ridicule where my views on extraterrestrial life were concerned, but this sounded serious.
“Why?” I asked. “What does he object to?”
“Well,” answered Colin, “he feels there is a neo-Nazi conspiracy in the world spreading rumors that Third World cultures
such as Peru are too backward and unintelligent to have built monuments as splendid as Machu Picchu without extraterrestrial help.”
I had never heard of such a concept.
“You’re telling me that this guy thinks that to speculate that extraterrestrials might have helped build Machu Picchu is a neo-Nazi idea?”
Colin nodded his head.
“According to this character, yes. So we can’t have David speculating that it might be true.”
I thought a moment.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have Shirley ask him if ETs could have helped, and John could do one of his seductive ‘could-be’ shrugs and not answer. We’d get the same point across but on paper it’ll just say David didn’t answer.”
Colin smiled that Harold smile. The smile that crossed Harold’s face in the movie just before he strung himself up on a rope to bug his mother.
“Good,” he said. “It’s settled. Shirley will ask and David will shrug.”
“Right,” I agreed. “Then I’ll give a press conference and say that the ETs probably helped because the Incas were the only culture smart enough to understand them.”
“You should go into politics,” said Colin.
“Thanks,” I said. “But the politics of the spirit is enough for me.”
It seemed so simple sitting in a wet hotel room in Machu Picchu. We would change one line, period. But as it turned out, the man called a press conference that day for Peruvian and international reporters. He accused me of being a neo-Nazi and gave them his conspiracy thesis. The reporters were aghast and amused. The Peruvians knew he was a media groper, and the international foreign press knew it was a good story. Because I had refused to give any interviews until after the shooting was complete, I couldn’t, nor did I want to, say anything.
So once again in the papers around the world it looked as if I had gotten myself into yet another controversial, colorful situation. At least they were becoming more and more cosmically oriented.
It's All In the Playing Page 23