by Owen Thomas
“With David. I think something might be wrong.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Drugs maybe. Woman problems maybe.”
“He’s getting his period?”
“Problems with women, Hollis. With Mae.”
“He’s fine.”
“How would you know? You have no idea.”
“Mmm Hmm. I know more than you think I do, Susan. Always have.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I’d like to eat my waffle now.”
“Fine. Eat your waffle. If David doesn’t come by, just call him. Invite him over. See how he is.”
“He’s fine, Susan. You don’t need to get everyone stirred up.”
“It’ll be good for him to see you. He can check in on Ben.”
“Is that what this is all about?”
“What is what all about?”
“Ben is fine, Susan. Ben is great.”
“I’m sure he is fine. I wasn’t…”
“Can I get another cup? Great. No, leave that. I’m going to eat it. It’s a stone cold waffle now, but I’m going to eat it anyway.”
“Listen, don’t you blame me Mister Man. It was hot when I brought it.”
“Hollis…”
“I’m not blaming you, I’m blaming my wife.”
“Hollis… tell her you’re on the phone.”
“Uh-huh. Bet you do that a lot.”
“Well I’m sure as hell not to blame.”
“Hollis!”
“Mmm hmm… But the Bible says that there ain’t no lies to be found in the mouths of the blameless. Book of Revelation, chapter 14, verse 5. Doesn’t really fit you, now does it fella? Any lies in that mouth of yours?”
“No lies and no waffles.”
“Hollis!”
CHAPTER 32 – Tilly
Pryce Point, the highly combustible action orgy directed by Raymond Lang, written by Cecil Abrams, and starring the who’s-who of my acting generation, was for me an experience not unlike my first real sexual encounter. That is to say: a painful inevitability that seemed like a good idea in the moment but failed miserably to live up to my expectations.
Calvin “Cal” Kleinspar, my randomly selected tenth grade Natural Sciences lab partner, had been more than just a little attractive. The wrestling – or was it football – gave him physical presence. He was easy to pick out of a crowd. He had muscle and nice skin and large white teeth. There was something vaguely collegiate about him. The girls liked to call Cal “California Kleinspar” or “Calvin Klein” or just “Clydesdale” to evoke a rather graphic comparison, purely imagined, with the equine anatomy.
In the hallways of Wilson High, Cal was a model of confidence, the kind exuded into the atmosphere like a fragrance by those whose personal assets are readily apparent and self-executing. He was cool. He was suave. He wore sunglasses inside. Someone called him Calvin Coolidge. Helping matters greatly, and perhaps this goes without mention, Cal had all the right friends securely in his orbit. People courted his attention, and many of those people, whose attention I courted, earnestly recommended my affections. We were made for each other, I was told. Possible homecoming material. At the very least, I was assured that passing up an opportunity to date California Kleinspar – or to decline a ride on the Clydesdale, as one of my friends had so delicately put it – would have been a waste of immeasurable good fortune.
So I did not resist, as I should have, a friend of a friend’s invitation to the party at Rounder Lake. He would be there. He knew I would be there. Stars were aligning. The party at Rounder Lake. There was my first lesson in false advertising, for it turned out that Calvin’s trailer was but an egregious misrepresentation of the feature film. For all of his schoolyard suave, in the back of his brother’s station wagon, Cal had the sensitivity and finesse of a starving junkyard Rottweiler presented with a warm slab of meat.
He kept the sunglasses on; I suppose that much of him was true.
To belabor that memory serves little point except this: after so many decades of reflection, it occurs to me that my experience in filming Pryce Point was not altogether different than my twenty-six minute relationship with California Kleinspar. Indeed, I am reminded powerfully of Orin Twill’s likening of Hollywood to a beast laying low in tall grasses and knowing far more about its prey than its prey knows about itself.
Pryce Point, I was told, was a match made in heaven. Milton Chenowith was convinced it was exactly the mainstream launch I needed to show that I had not been “born again” as an art-house literary movie darling – or at least not a committed one – saved from the anti-intellectual, apolitical, comically orgiastic leanings that had marked my early Einemann films. Pryce Point was to ground my professional reputation and pull me out of the dispiriting misstep that was The Lion Tree.
And, best of all, success was guaranteed. A sure-thing. For reassurance, I needed to look no further than the roster of all of the right people – the A List – involved in the project. Darnell Lewis behind the camera. Raymond Lang, Cecil Abrams, and a production team with a golden résumé. Sharing a co-lead role with Zack West – the Golden Boy himself. Good fortune did not stare more directly into one’s eyes.
Simon Hunter, Milton’s well-tailored London-born acolyte at Chenowith, Taylor & Reid – the agent to whom the legwork in the advancement of my career had been so deftly delegated – liked to refer to Pryce Point as “the project.”
It’s the hottest project on the map, Tills, Simon liked to say.
Damn good news, Tills, Fulton McKenzie has just signed on. His breathless dispatches from the back rooms and the top floors of the Hollywood machine were of Californian syntax wrapped in a high-rent British accent.
Everyone is like totally buzzing about the project, Tills. Cecil tells me people are ringing him up from all over the world.
An hour with Simon over lattes and one could easily begin to think Pryce Point was the name of some colossal humanitarian undertaking in the jungles of the third world, or some record breaking marvel of civil engineering; an improbable bridge or sky-scraping tower of glass.
But Pryce Point was, in the end, just a movie, and not an especially good or successful one. It delivered action without suspense; conflict without drama. Characters lacking, of all things, character.
Certainly, nothing of the beautiful and brilliant Sienna Pryce required much digestion. I recall how quickly I came to loath the cartoon that was my alter ego. She offered no surprises; or rather, her surprises were all shallowly and predictably manufactured. A leggy neurosurgeon, only thirty-five years old. She was skilled at Tai Kwan Do and a crackerjack amateur pilot; an aptitude put to exceedingly good use when it came to taking control of a jet aircraft on a fiery collision course for the White House. Sienna was inexplicably but respectably proficient with knives and semi-automatic weapons. She knew a little Farsi. For all of her beauty, she was gritty and determined in a fashion-model, neurosurgeon sort of way.
Of course, Pryce Point was not nearly so much about the lovely and competent Sienna as it was about her husband, Jack Pryce, the disaffected spy whom the trailers showed saving the free world in a ball of fire. Milton had grossly over-sold me on Sienna as a co-leading role. For all of the tricks up her sleeve, she was but sexy, uxorial window-dressing for at least half the film. The plot has her abducted at a medical conference in Bahrain, wearing the blouse, skirt and heels she wears through the unrelenting action of the rest of the film, accessorized only by the ropes and electrical tape of her abduction. It was clear from the script that the bondage fetishists were to be, if not the target demographic, then at least the most satisfied demographic.
The ballyhooed writers and director were keen on having it both ways with Sienna. From the time of her abduction until roughly mid-film, with only the fabric of her skirt and an idealistic young terrorist to protect her from the more plentiful, loathsome and strangely lustful variety, Sienna was the helpless, blindfolded damsel in distress, slung from jeep to c
ellar to desert munitions tent like a sexy sack of potatoes. Husband Jack, meanwhile, moved heaven and earth to defeat evil and rescue his wife. That Jack Pryce actually does neither of these things, and that his wife ultimately takes matters into her own hands, were contrivances that only served to simultaneously cheapen the cause of feminism and annihilate Pryce Point’s credibility as a non-animated film.
Once Sienna and her perfectly unshaven, unconscious spouse are loaded into a luxury jet destined for Washington, she undergoes a transformation far less credible than those transformations in the tradition of Peter Parker, David Banner and Clark Kent. Without warning, she becomes a stony killing machine, gutting libidinous gun-wielding Arabs, breaking the necks of a pilot and co-pilot with graceful, single twist screw-top precision, pulling the screaming jet out of a dive into the White House Rotunda and parachuting to safety, limp husband in her arms, as the United States Air Force blows the plane out of the sky, sending it down into the sleepy Potomac.
I was not at that time in my life in much of a position to stick my nose in the air over shallow or ridiculous characters. I had played my share; probably more of those than any other. In fact, before landing the role of Katie Finn in Peppermint Grove, I had played characters that made Dr. Sienna Pryce look horribly complicated by comparison.
So I resolved, mostly in hindsight, that my antipathy for Sienna Pryce was evidence of my own personal growth and maturation as an actor. More than once in the making of that film, as I posed and grimaced and heaved Sienna through the sand and the sweat and the plot points of her predicament, I found myself asking a question I never would have asked even six months earlier: What ever will Angus think of all this?
The Pryce Point project was remarkable for more than its over-indulgence in banality. On the fifth take of the parachute scene, strapped to the Golden Boy’s limp, flawless body and harnessed to safety wires that were supposed to suspend us from a crane, I leapt from a Gimble set made to look like Gulfstream jet and fractured two of my ribs. The harness, defective I later learned, had simply had enough strain and it gave way with an awful tearing sound, sending Zack and I eight feet to the floor, screaming.
From the Pryce Point executives, there came a flurry of concern and handwringing that quickly metamorphosed into a tidy sum of dollars. Since Darnell Lewis was shooting scenes out of order, the accident had occurred relatively early in the production. Determined to stay on schedule, he shot around the inconvenience, working on the bulk of the Jack Pryce storyline while I recuperated.
Milton Chenowith sent me flowers. Blair Gaines sent flowers twice and called incessantly for a week.
My mother threatened to fly out to Los Angeles and even went as far as to compare airfares and weigh options for the care of my younger brother since, in her opinion, my father could not be counted on. My doctor marveled over my exceptional recuperative powers. But I owed far more on that score to my mother and her professional co-dependency than I did to my good health or a compassionate God.
Simon Hunter launched himself rather overzealously into the role of outraged protector, which I found sweet but unconvincing. Simon would sooner have gnawed off his own arm than bite the hand of Cecil Abrams. His indignant tantrums were in the privacy of my company and for my exclusive benefit. But there was no question that Simon desperately wanted to be the kind of person who would draw blood in a rage over my best interests and this sincerity I found was almost as touching as it was pathetic.
Strangely, it was the Golden Boy, Zack West – formerly Zel Wippo – who, apart from my mother, seemed the most genuinely appalled at the failed double-body harness. I suspect this was because it had been the weight of his own body that had snapped the bones protecting my heart and he felt a misplaced sense of responsibility. It was Zack who rode with me to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, and Zack who raised hell with one associate producer after another, and Zack who took it upon himself to keep me apprised of the progress of the film in my absence. He called me almost daily from Nevada, where they had decided to build the terrorist training camps, and sent me text messages during those times when there is nothing for an actor to do on a movie set except watch the crew reposition with lights and equipment. When I returned to the set some weeks after the accident, Zack was attentive in ways that he had not been previously, even strapped to my nearly naked, blood streaked body in a defective harness.
The tabloid press, which in the interests of cheap publicity had been given periodic free access to the set, took a keen interest in Zack’s uncharacteristic solicitude. Stories and photos began to surface. The Bachelor and the Siren was the first thematic angle, which evolved into a Hollywood Future Power Couple in the Making theme, followed by, ironically, a tale of Cynical Sex to Manipulate Publicity and Boost Box Office Receipts. From what I could tell, no one on the set seemed to take the media spin with much surprise, which meant either that they believed the stories entirely, or that they disbelieved them entirely, or, just so the irony might feed upon itself, that they did not much care one way or the other about the veracity of the gossip as long as the publicity prolonged the media buzz and boosted box office receipts.
Similar disinterestedness could not be said of Simon Hunter, whose mood began to cycle between various shades of brooding and an almost manic representational zeal, causing him to recommend every half-baked movie project on the horizon just as an excuse to “take a meeting” over lunch. He ran interference with the press whenever he could and privately found creative ways to disparage Zack West as a wolf.
“Yes, well, I’ll tell you something, dear Tills, according to my sources at Paramount, Zacky-ol-chap, may just have a little paternity problem brewing. Poor girl; an intern to a production assistant on the Juggernaut picture last year. Never know if these things are true. But still. A girl should be careful with that one.”
If Pryce Point had become my “project” in that year of my life, then I had become Simon Hunter’s project. Although he rarely overtly untethered himself from the professional purpose that justified his time, Simon quickly took on the devotional qualities of a Labrador Retriever, threatening to blur the line that separates professional agent from sycophantic groupie. Simon’s was a tenacious infatuation, and so sincere I had not the heart to disabuse him. Perhaps instinctively, I charted a fool’s course between the Scylla of rejection and the Charybdis of false encouragement. In the end, Simon was truest to his gender, hearing only what he wanted to hear and understanding only what he wanted to understand. However cold and heartless it might have felt, I would have been well advised to set him straight in the beginning.
I know now, after all of this time, that I should have set them both straight, for I was no more honest with Zack West than I was with Simon Hunter. The difference, as if it matters, is that the engine of my unconscious deceit of Zack West was not compassion, but vanity. The unforgivable truth is that while I felt no greater emotion for the Golden Boy than I did for Simon, his affection for me brought out a strange and ugly satisfaction. To be sought by Zack West, while provoking no return ardor on my part, gave some credence to my own misguided sense of arrival. Everyone seemed to understand that the Golden Boy was mine, if only I would have him, and this alone – far more than my acting or even my role in a project like Pryce Point – considerably improved my stature in the entertainment world. To revel in reflection is common narcissism. To revel in the reflection of rumor is celebrity. Whatever my remarkable recuperative powers when it came to broken ribs, I had no immunity to Hollywood’s peculiar plague.
Zel Wippo was born a Long Island Jew to a mother who worked as professional fundraiser and to a father who owned both a successful accounting practice and a less successful sandwich franchise. The sandwich franchise, renown for its Philly Cheese Steak, was unfairly maligned by the New York Board of Health for a single case of botulism that, in all truth, may or may not have been due to a faulty refrigeration unit in an establishment Mordecai Wippo had purchased from a predecessor.
Zel’s mother’s notorious affair with a museum director precipitated a divorce that ultimately spun young Zel, then only ten, out of the Long Island silver spoon orbit westward to the beaches of Santa Monica where he lived with his maternal aunt. Aunt Lucy made her fortune as a real estate broker. Aunt Lucy’s live-in eye candy, Vance Cassidy, was a surfing instructor and freelance model of some local repute. A short decade later, under Vance’s close tutelage, Zel Wippo became Zack West, the Golden Boy, striding out of the Pacific Ocean blond and built and dripping with a laid-back hippie charm wholly alien to his Long Island progenitors.
My courtship with Zack – for misguided or not, it was a courtship – certainly had its moments in which I believed that I had found, at last, a normal romance. But that is surely the wrong way to put it, for there are no “normal romances” in Hollywood, and there was nothing in fact normal about any relationship between the Golden Boy and anyone else, including me. Judged against the Midwestern values of my father, there was nothing normal about ceding authority over my love life to the dictatorship of public opinion, which itself is governed by a fetish for the abnormal, if not the outright perverse. It is the fireworks of romantic immolation that they all come to see and, ultimately, Zack and I were but another pair of Hollywood roman candles.
There were moments in which my relationship with Zack felt, if not normal, then, for lack of a better word, appropriate. Significantly, we were contemporaries by birth, sharing the emotional resonance of a common generation, and he respected me as his equal. If anything, I was Zack’s intellectual superior, but we did not have a relationship that did much to test those kinds of differences. Had it occurred in any environment other than Hollywood, documented in letters and private photos rather than the tabloid press, it was a relationship of which I think my parents would have approved.
For all of his attention, and for a man of his general exuberance, Zack’s declarations of affection for me were infrequent and understated. I tended to dismiss them as aberrational feelings brought on by those drugs beyond his trusted stash of Grade A cannabis. Zack was known to experiment and I never quite knew who he would become when he did. In any event, I assumed, wrongly I now believe, that he always saw me as a convenient co-star dalliance, or a figment of the imaginary world in which he lived. Actors are so often unable to separate the life acted from the life lived. I believed that in his mind we were Jack and Sienna Pryce and that eventually he would simply replace the Pryce Point movie poster in his head with something else.