by Steve Tesich
Brad, a perfect combination of hustler and hostess, took it upon himself to talk enough for both of us. He told me things about myself, he told me things about himself. Being an underling, he conveyed the impression while he talked that I was under no obligation to listen. Every once in a while, he laughed out loud at something. The gurgle in his voice while he laughed, like someone drowning in his own blood, had a cheerful, energetic quality.
“Shall we?” Brad finally asked and jumped off the corner of Cromwell’s desk, where he had been sitting.
“Let’s,” I replied.
I had been here many times before, in the service of Cromwell and others, and I knew where the screening room reserved for me was located, but Brad insisted on taking me there himself.
We had to leave the building and walk across the vast Burbank lot. It was close to three P.M. Close to the heat of the day. Through the heat ribbons, the sand-colored buildings on the studio lot shimmered like the mirages that were manufactured inside them. Brad kept talking.
We walked past astonishingly beautiful girls, young starlets or starlets in the making, as beautiful as apparitions. They were or seemed to be all in between auditions or interviews with casting agents on the lot. In between jobs. In between all kinds of things. They all seemed to have been created by biogeneticists for certain body parts currently in demand.
Young. So young. All of them.
Even now, in my condition, they eyed me and not the young, rather attractive Brad at my side. I fit the type of man they thought had the influence and the power. All Brad had was youth and good looks. He was no better off than they were, and they knew it. But I was fat, sweaty, middle-aged. I was the very image of some wealthy industrialist turned studio head and therefore, in their young, street-wise eyes, the man to know.
The screening room was cool, very plush, intimate, the seats wide and comfortable. The configuration of the seats and the type of seats were reminiscent of the first-class section on a Boeing 747.
Brad, having urged me to enjoy, left. I took out my cigarettes. I came prepared. Two packs.
I lit one while the projectionist dimmed the lights slowly to black. I felt goose bumps all over my body, as I always did at these times. Although I wasn’t there to fix anything really, merely going through the formality of seeing the excised footage, habit was habit, and from years of habit the fixer in me surfaced and fixed his eyes on the screen. Sitting in a dark screening room and waiting for the reels of film to roll was like being in a darkness like no other. Anything could happen when the projector began turning. It was like sitting in darkness and waiting to be born, or waiting to die, or waiting for something less definite but more terrifying and exhilarating than either.
2
The wheels of the projector kept turning. The reels of film rolled on.
I sat alone in the screening room, watching scene after scene and take after take of scenes that had been deleted from the film.
Normally in these situations there was an editor or an editor’s assistant in the projection booth who made sure that the cut footage I was seeing had been arranged in its proper chronological order. This time, there was nobody in the projection booth except the union projectionist. The editor of the film and his assistants, I later discovered, had all resigned, out of respect for Mr. Houseman. As a result, the projectionist, having no idea which scene followed which, kept slapping on reels of film in no particular order. We began somewhere in the middle and skipped around from there, backward and forward.
Fortunately I had seen the completed film so many times in my apartment in New York that I had it almost memorized, shot by shot and line by line, so that I could make intelligent guesses where in the film the various scenes were supposed to have been before Mr. Houseman deleted them from the completed work.
Leila’s scenes were not the only ones that had been cut. Everybody in the film lost something in the editing room, but nobody lost as much as she did.
In the original scheme of things, as the vanished scenes clearly revealed, hers was one of the pivotal parts of the movie. In that conception, she was to have been the town observer and commentator on the unfolding dream of the two lovers and their story. Originally, the whole film was to have been a flashback of Leila’s character, allowing her to comment intermittently upon the action we were seeing.
It was as if, in that original conception, Mr. Houseman, who was the sole screenwriter as well as the director, had lacked confidence in the central love story or had failed to predict, until he began putting the film together, the power that the little love story would assume. The device of the waitress storyteller, a kind of lovable busybody narrator, was there to allow him at crucial points in the film to leave its seriousness and pain by cutting back to her and giving the audience a little respite and a laugh or two before returning to the tragedy of the love story.
But as he worked on the film in the editing room and observed, as he could not fail to have observed, the power that the little love story began to assume, he mercilessly deleted everything that stood in its way. He no longer wanted relief, comic or otherwise, to detract from the love story itself. He no longer needed, nor would tolerate, an observer or a commentator. Therefore he had no more use for the waitress or for the actress who played her.
Her one tiny moment in the film, the scene in the restaurant, was left in place because Mr. Houseman had shot the scene of the two lovers in such a way that he could not cut her out of the scene and thereby out of the film altogether. Had he shot an alternate take from another angle, there would have been no Leila at all in the film. And, needless to say, no Leila at all in my life.
Leila’s acting (as the wheels of the projector kept turning and the reels of deleted scenes rolled on) was not what I had thought it would be. She was not a potentially great and as yet undiscovered actress. In truth, she was in the wrong field, because she was essentially not an actress at all.
But it was all too easy for me to understand how any director, how all her previous directors, could be smitten by Leila in real life. Her inner life in real life was so rich and textured and so overwhelmingly true to the moment at hand, that any director would assume that such naked truth would play beautifully on the screen.
It didn’t.
What was so right and powerful and at times heartbreaking in the three-dimensional realm of real life was all wrong and over the top on the screen. Leila’s tragedy as an actress was that she was only real and right in real life.
Acting is not, despite persistence of talk to the contrary, being true to yourself. Acting is the art of assuming the burden of truth and the limitations of being somebody else, and Leila had no capacity for being true to anyone but herself.
Every scene in which she appeared meant too much to her. It should not have meant that much to the character she played to go home and pick up her little daughter in her arms and tell her about the things she had seen and heard during the day. But Leila was not playing that character. She was not playing any character. She was not acting. Having that little girl in her arms meant too much to her, far too much, and on the screen it showed as something embarrassingly exaggerated. In real life, the same scene would have been very touching and moving. On screen, it wasn’t. The same was true for every other scene in which she appeared. Observing the gradually deteriorating love story of our two lovers in the movie seemed to pain her more than it did them. Her heart seemed to be breaking for people whose hearts were not breaking at all.
It must have been a shock to Mr. Houseman to see how much she lost in translation to the screen.
Some of her moments were comic, but not comic on purpose, not funny in a good way. If she had a future in films, it was in roles in which she would be properly misused. In films that were entertaining and demeaning distortions of the human experience (the kinds of films I rewrote), her depth of feeling, if exploited properly, could be turned into belly laughs. Few things are funnier, if the context is right, than somebody on the screen to
whom everything in life means so much.
The reels of film rolled on. I saw several scenes with several very good actors that had been totally cut out. A policeman. A priest. A wonderful scene with a wonderful actor playing the part of a Little League coach. Gone. All three. I saw many variations of scenes that had been cut and many variations of those that had been kept.
The Old Man’s reputation was that he shot a lot of film, filmed many takes, and this deleted footage bore out the truth of his reputation. As much as I loved the film the first time I saw it in my living room in New York, I found myself loving it even more when I realized (as the wheels of the projector kept turning) what he had gone through in order to create his masterpiece. Considering his age and his illness, I could only marvel at his capacity for completely reconceiving his film in the editing room and finding a way to create a great work of art despite the fact that he had written and shot a relatively pedestrian movie. Such relentless pursuit of perfection was incomprehensible to me.
The lights finally came on. There was no more film to see.
It was dark outside, almost as dark as it had been inside the screening room. The studio lot was deserted. In the distance, I saw my rented car.
CHAPTER SIX
1
THERE WERE TWO restaurants in Beverly Hills that I considered for my dinner with Leila. Both were appropriately pretentious and suitably overpriced, but I had eaten at Spago’s too many times before, so I chose Nestor’s. The chances of running into movie people were not as high at Nestor’s, another reason for my selection. I made a reservation for two at eight o’clock.
Since she neither drove nor had a car, I offered to come and pick her up, but Nestor’s was located in the heart of Beverly Hills and she thought it would be silly for me to drive all the way to Venice to pick her up and then all the way back to Beverly Hills.
“The more you drive,” she told me, “the more likely you are to have an accident and the last thing I want on my conscience is to have somebody killed or maimed in a car wreck while coming to pick me up for dinner. I’ll take a cab.”
You had to wear a jacket and tie to Nestor’s and so I did. On my way there that evening, I tried to delete from my memory all those deleted scenes of hers I had seen in the screening room the day before, but it sometimes happens that the very effort to forget something enhances its presence in your mind.
I arrived at Nestor’s, as was my way, ten minutes too early but, approaching the canopied entrance of the restaurant, I was stunned to see Leila standing outside. She was chatting with a tall young man in charge of valet parking.
Never, not once in my entire life, had a woman with whom I had a date arrived before me.
I stopped the car just to savor the sight of her standing there.
She was dressed for an evening out in a fancy restaurant, but the way she stood there, chatting with that tall young man, the way she held her purse by the straps so that it hung down to her ankles, the way she kicked the purse playfully while she chatted, now with her foot, now with her knees, made her seem like a schoolgirl kicking her school bag.
2
Our table in the smoking section, like all the other tables at Nestor’s, had a candle burning in the center, and although it was there more as decoration than as a source of light, in the mood I was in, it was by candlelight that I saw Leila that evening.
We started drinking. Since it no longer made any difference to me what I drank, I joined her by drinking Scotch. After several stumpy glasses of Scotch, we decided to move on to taller, more graceful glasses of champagne. Her posture, her whole appearance, changed and lengthened with a champagne glass in her hand. We had two bottles before dinner. She got higher and higher and I did my best to appear likewise.
She wore her hair up in a style I associated with classical ballerinas. It made her long white neck seem longer and very fragile, as if it could be broken with terrifying ease. Two shiny black earrings dangled from her earlobes. She kept worrying them with her fingers, as if checking to make sure they were still there.
Her fancy black dress was cut low, revealing two-thirds of her breasts. As she inhaled and exhaled, her breasts rose and fell like white-plumed, sleeping seabirds nestled down for the night inside her bodice.
But it was her long white arms that tempted me more than anything else. Her black dress had long sleeves gathered at the wrist, but the sleeves were made of transparent gauze which created the illusion (by candlelight) that each arm was a body of a young, ravishing girl encased in a negligee. Whenever she moved one of her arms, my center of gravity shifted to the pit of my stomach and blood disgorged into my groin.
The drunker she got, the more her eyes narrowed, until they became almost Asian in appearance. She kept them focused on me the whole night, peering into my soul or letting me peer into hers.
When I talked, her lips moved ever so slightly, as if she were taking the words from my mouth into hers to see what they tasted like.
It thrilled me that she was, or appeared to be by candlelight, so beautiful.
And it thrilled me, of course, that this beautiful woman with those ravishing arms (like two young daughters, one on either side of her) could be attracted to me. Her attraction for me, which I could not but notice and which grew as the night went on, was not based on any physical allure I possessed. What she was attracted to, I concluded, was something else. Something spiritual within me. The real me. Since I had no idea who that person was, feeling, as I had always felt, that I could be anybody, the possibility that somewhere deep within me the genuine article existed, the real me, and that perhaps Leila saw it, made me hope that in time I too would get to know it.
In time, I told myself. In time, I will not only tell her everything but share with her things I have not shared with anyone else.
Rebirth. Renewal. It seemed not only possible but imminent, by candlelight.
3
Over dinner, I told her about my apartment in Manhattan. How big it was. How it was too big for just one person. I described the view I had of Riverside Drive and Riverside Park and the Hudson River.
I was a fount of information. Since the essentials between us could not be discussed (her child, her movie), I described the inessentials in great detail.
I told her that I had six large windows facing the Hudson and that if I opened one of them and looked right, I could see the George Washington Bridge to the north, and, if I looked left, the Seventy-ninth Street marina to the south, and further south, the piers where the big liners docked. Circle Line boats, I told her, went past my windows, loaded with sightseers. Barges. Oil tankers. Tugboats. Foreign vessels with foreign flags. I told her how I had seen Long Island ducks flying south for the winter and how, when I opened my windows, I heard the sound of their ghostly cries. I described the intense but short-lived cold spell that hit New York right after Christmas and how, when it was over, I saw huge flotillas of ice moving down the Hudson from upstate New York, as if the Adirondacks were some arctic continent breaking up and drifting in pieces into the Atlantic.
“I’ve never been to New York.”
“You’d like it there,” I told her.
“Really?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it.”
In this way, in my own way, I was inviting her, and in her own way she was considering the invitation.
I told her about my marriage and about my separation from Dianah.
How long had I been married, she wanted to know.
“Over twenty years.”
“Only once?”
“Yes, only once.”
“Any children?”
“He’s not a child anymore, but yes. A son.”
(It occurred to me that between the three of us we only had one child.)
I told her all about Billy, or all that I could tell her. How handsome he was. How tall. How self-conscious of his height. How bashful he could be and how eloquent. How much I loved him.
Smiling softly, her quarter-moon eyes glisten
ing by candlelight, she listened to me. It was my impression that she could have listened to me talking about Billy and my love for him for hours and hours.
A man who loves his son.
I could see the impression I was making.
The more details I divulged of my love for him, the more she seemed to be handing herself over to me, falling in love with me, with the father within me who loved his child.
My bill arrived.
When we stood up to go, Leila had to grip the back of her chair in order to steady herself. And then, although drunk, she let go of the chair and, performing a half-curtsy, leaned her rigid torso forward at some precise angle known only to her and blew out the candle on our table. She did it with such dignity and grace, complying, as it were, with laws of some higher etiquette known only to the drunken few, that even the haughty waiters were impressed by what she had just done. It seemed right. As soon as she had done it, it simply seemed right that the candle should be blown out before we left.
4
She gave the tall young valet in livery two smacking kisses, one on each cheek, when he brought my car.
“Take good care of yourself,” she told him.
Inside the car, while I drove, she told me about him.
“I got here early. I was going to go inside and wait for you, but I started talking to him. He’s so sweet. He really is. From Iowa. Wants to be an actor. What else? He kept calling me ma’am. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Boys like that—” she sighed “—I don’t know. You just want to … I don’t know. But you just want to … something, when you see boys like that. Like a sweet ear of corn, that’s how sweet he was. And I kept giving him advice about the movie business.” She laughed. “Me!”