Shooting Hollywood

by Melodie Johnson Howe

  “Maybe she’s already at the studio,” I offered.

  “I tried her office. Nothing. Nobody has seen her. I thought she might’ve come here to pick up her award.”

  “No.” He followed my gaze to the fireplace mantel.

  “You put her award with Colin’s Oscars?”

  “I thought her sense of irony might like that.”

  “Are you saying my show is beneath the writing of the great Colin?”

  “Yes.” You could be honest with Brendan because he never listened to what you said.

  “I’ve been up all night,” he groaned. “I need a cup of coffee.”

  He followed me into the kitchen and slumped in a chair. “What happened, Diana? Why did she get up and leave like that? The Golden Globes for God’s sake, and just as I’m getting a standing ovation. I mean it was her standing ovation, too. I was gracious in my acceptance speech, wasn’t I?” His big brown spaniel eyes pleaded with me.

  “Mentioning your father was very touching. As usual you were very charming, Brendan.”

  “What do you mean as usual? You’ve never liked me, have you?”

  “I don’t know what Theo sees in you.”

  “Since Colin died you’ve turned into a very bitter woman, Diana Poole. It’s not my fault he left you with no money.”

  “Money never mattered to us. You’re married, Brendan.”

  “So? If that’s your reason for disliking a man you must…” Again he waved his arm dramatically in the air searching for the words to finish his sentence. Letting his arm fall to his side he gave up the search. I handed him a cup of coffee and sat down across from him. He took a sip and stared at the TV.

  “You watch Bewitched?”

  “No. I was channel surfing and saw my…”

  “Who is that?”

  “Who?”

  He leaned forward squinting at the young me on the screen. “The blonde. The voice is familiar.”

  “Are you being funny?”

  “God, she’s gorgeous. Can you imagine what she looks like now?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He dragged his hand through his thick brown hair leaving it askew. This gesture always brought gales of laughter from the TV audience.

  “Do you realize that every one of those stars on Bewitched are dead now?” he said bleakly. “I mean if you think about it they’re just dead people talking.”

  “Sounds like something Theo would say.” I grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. The young me vanished.

  “I said it. Not Theo,” he snapped.

  “All right. You said it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I’m married’? Is that why Theo walked out? She wants me to divorce Alison? Did she tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Then what did you mean by that crack?”

  “It wasn’t a crack. It’s a fact. You are a married man. And it’s taking a toll on Theo. Not to mention your wife.”

  “Oh God, this should be the happiest morning of my life but I have you moralizing at me, and I can’t find Theo. What possessed her, Diana?”

  “When you were in her house did you look in the closet and see if she packed some of her clothes?”

  “How would I know? Theo isn’t the kind of woman that makes you pay attention to what she wears. In fact she has awful taste in clothes. Did you see that purple thing she was wearing last night?”

  “Did she take a suitcase?”

  He shrugged helplessly.

  “I’ll go look. I have a key.”

  “You have a key?”

  “She’s five houses down from me on the beach. I look after her place while she’s gone and she looks after mine.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know you had a key,” he said, in a proprietary voice.

  “When she’s traveling I pick up the newspapers and water the plants. She does the same for me when I’m on location. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I just didn’t know that’s all. I think of it as our little hide-away. Hers and mine.”

  “It’s her home, Brendan. She bought and paid for it.”

  “Why do you resent me?” He rested his chin in his hand.

  “In all honesty? I don’t know. You’re charming. You have a wonderful way of expressing yourself, and an inept way of acting that people respond to. Theo says she loves you. Your wife stays with you. Your fans adore you. By all rights I should like you too, but I don’t.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “Did you talk her into leaving me?”

  “Nobody talks Theo into anything.”

  “That’s true. She must’ve said something, Diana, when she got up and left last night.”

  “She said: ‘TV saps your soul.’”

  “TV saps your soul?”

  “Yes.”

  “TV?”

  “TV.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I think it means that Theo is tired, burnt-out. The last time we had lunch she mentioned she wanted to get away and write her novel.”

  “A novel?”

  “A book.”

  “I know what a novel is. You don’t have to be so condescending.”

  “I’m sorry. You bring it out in me. She probably went away to think.”

  “Either way I lose.”

  “There are other writers, Brendan.”

  “Not like her.”

  “There are even other lovers.”

  “Do you really believe I don’t care for her? That I could just transfer my needs and affection to somebody else? “I don’t think you know what Theo means to me. She gave me the strength to talk about my father last night. She brings things out in me I never thought were significant. She sees the significance in me.”

  All actors feel inferior. So when an actor finds someone, especially a writer, who sees the worth in him that is much more important than mere love. I know. I was an actor married to a writer.

  “Did you two have an argument?” I asked.

  “No. Yes, but not about us, about words.”

  “The show?”

  “It was about the way I say my lines, or her lines. She’s very possessive about her lines.”

  “Writer’s are protective of their words.”

  “It’s just dialogue, Diana. Nothing more. You don’t think she’s had a breakdown, do you?” He buried his face in hands. “Oh, God, I can’t go on without her.”

  “Actors always go on.”

  He peered over his fingertips at me. “Did you just make that up? I mean just now, off the top of your head?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was very funny,” he said, not laughing. “But do you think it’s true?”

  “That actors always go on? Yes.”

  “I hope you’re right. ‘TV saps your soul.’ How could Theo say that? It’s given me mine.”

  “TV has given you steady work, money and fame, Brendan. But not your soul. I’m not so sure you have one.”

  He smiled his charming lop-sided grin. “Sometimes I think you know me best, Diana.”

  I smiled back. You couldn’t help it with Brendan. He took another sip of his coffee then spoke with a dark finality, “That was an omen.”

  “What was?”

  “You watching the rerun of Bewitched. Dead people talking.” He got slowly to his feet and wandered out of my house.

  Later I walked down the beach to Theo’s and let myself in with her key. In the living room her sparse expensive stiff-backed furniture looked stoic and prim like lonely women who have waited too long to say ‘yes’. The house was heavy with silence. But her house was always quiet. I, who must have the TV or music on all the time, once asked her how she could stand the silence. Theo pointed to her head and said, “It’s not quiet in here. I’m a writer. I love it.” I had laughed, remembering my husband sitting in the stillness of his office; a room I hardly go into anymore. And now there was no Theo, with her eyes turned inward, moving gracefully through her silence toward her office.

 
I quickly went into her bedroom and searched through her closet. Her suitcase was gone and so were some of her clothes. I heard the front door open and close; then hurried footsteps in the hall. I waited listening. Drawers were being opened and slammed shut in her office. I crept down the hallway and peered in.

  Brendan Kincaid was taking papers from her filing cabinet and placing them into a large plastic trash bag.

  “Hello, Brendan.” I leaned against the door jam.

  “God, Diana, you scared the hell out of me. I didn’t see your car.”

  “I walked down the beach. I told you I was going to check to see if she took a suitcase with her.”

  “Did she?” He dumped some folders into the bag.

  “Yes. What are you doing?”

  “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing taking her papers?”

  “I’ve written her love letters. I don’t think that’s anybody’s business but mine. I want to find Theo. Not cause my wife embarrassment.”

  “You wrote a trash bag full of love letters?”

  “And the scripts are mine, just as much as they are hers.” He stuffed more papers into the bag. A card fluttered to the ground.

  “You’re acting like she’s not coming back, Brendan.”

  “I don’t think she can forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “Stealing… her love.” Throwing the trash bag over his shoulder he lurched down the hallway and out the front door.

  “You have no right to take any of this, Brendan,” I foolishly yelled after him, but he wasn’t listening.

  In Hollywood everybody has a right. It’s all about rights: the rights of the stars, the rights of the director, the rights of the producer. Even the rights of the lover. It’s all about how many rights you can accumulate in your contract or how many you can steal.

  I picked up the card he had dropped. It was a warm and fuzzy drugstore card declaring eternal love and was signed by Brendan. Where love letters were concerned he was certainly no Browning. I checked the back of the card to see if he had sent her a Hallmark and discovered the words: ‘Dead people talking’. They were written in Theo’s hand. And they were the exact words Brendan had used this morning when watching Bewitched. I placed the card on her desk.

  It was a Hallmark.

  That night something jarred me out of my sleep. My heart pounding, I sat up feeling another’s presence in my room. I quickly turned on the light. It was only W.C Fields in the movie David Copperfield falling downstairs and announcing that he had arrived. As usual I had fallen asleep with the TV on. I felt comforted by Fields until I remembered he was one of the dead people talking. I got out of bed, threw on a robe, went into the living room, and opened the sliding glass door. On the deck I breathed in the heavy salty air and watched the dark waves turn white as they splattered on the shore in the moonlight. I gazed down the beach toward Theo’s house. A light shone in the window. Had she come back?

  I slipped into some shoes, threw on a coat, got her key, ran down the beach and let myself in. In the dark I made my way through to her office. Alison Kincaid was going through Theo’s computer discs.

  “Hello, Diana,” she greeted. Her face was strained and pale. “Thought you’d be asleep. Brendan is not computer literate. Didn’t think to get her discs.” She looked through them with a clerical precision.

  “What’s all this about, Alison?”

  “Theo’s not coming back. At least not to Brendan.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He received a post card from her. It was placed in the mailbox, not sent. It has a picture of the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on it. Do they still call it Graumans?”

  “I think it’s a Lowes now. Who knows what they call things anymore.”

  “Here, read it.” She whipped it out of her pocket and thrust it at me. It read: ‘Brendan, you tried standing in mine now you’re going to have to find another pair. Here’s a graveyard full of them.’ I turned it over. It was a post card of all the old movie star’s footprints.

  “He’s frantic, Diana.” Alison opened her tote bag and dumped the computer discs into it.

  “What possible use can her personal writings be to you?” I grabbed a yellow legal tablet out of her hand. “You just can’t take anything you want.”

  “I have to fill a void!” She snapped, pointing a bony manicured finger at me. Her gray eyes were desperate. “Fifteen years ago I married the most beautiful actor in the world. A handsome void. I thought I could fill him with love. I couldn’t. When Theo came to him with this idea for a show he slowly began to change. Then he started to have an affair with her. That’s when he became a different man. The man that I had always wanted. Witty and sharp. Why do you think I put up with the affair? I don’t want to lose that witty and wise man, Diana. I have to help him.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “Fill the void.” She snapped her bag shut and walked briskly out of Theo’s house.

  I sighed and leafed through the yellow legal size tablet; it was a writer’s sketchbook. There was a brief description of a woman having coffee. Ideas for different books. Observations. Overheard conversations that Theo had jotted down. From her desk I took the greeting card Brendan had given her and turned it over. ‘Dead people talking.’ Why had she written that phrase on Brendan’s card? Did she think he was one of the dead people? Or did she just use the card to make her writer’s note? I replaced it and took the yellow legal pad home with me. I fell asleep looking through it while David Copperfield found that his first true love was not all that she was cracked up to be.

  The next morning I was standing in my kitchen watching the local news when the image of Brendan Kincaid appeared in a room filled with microphones and reporters. He announced that the he was asking the police for their help in finding Theodora Woods. He looked exhausted and scared. Why was he so frightened? At the end of the news conference he peered into the camera and said, “I know this may sound odd coming from me, but I think it’s important to say. TV CAN SAP YOUR SOUL. It’s such hard work, you don’t get to see your loved ones, and there is always the pressure of the next show. I think, I hope, that Theo is somewhere getting in touch with her soul again and that she will soon return to us and those who love her. Come back to us, Theo. With your soul intact.”

  A few hours later Brendan called me. “Have you heard anything?”

  “No.”

  “She’s not coming back. I have to adjust. Prepare.”

  “For what?”

  “My wife said she ran into you last night.”

  “You mean while she was ransacking Theo’s office?”

  “We don’t want you to mention that to the police when they talk to you. Remember, Diana, you need to work in this town.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed the appropriate thing to say.”

  “Appropriate? Brendan can you hear yourself?”

  “Oh, God, I’m so lost without her.”

  “Are you aware that you used Theo’s words as your own in the press conference?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “’TV saps your soul.’”

  “How can you be so petty at a time like this?” He hung up on me.

  I poured myself another cup of coffee, put on a CD of Willie Nelson croaking about love, sat down in the living room, and went page by page through Theo’s note pad. I was looking for a clue, a hint of why she had walked out. Under the title A Life I read: My father was a drunk. He loved the sauce more than he loved me. But when he was half sober and feeling melancholy he would take me out in the backyard and we would sit on the damp grass while he taught me how to talk to the moon.

  Had she written down a vignette from Brendan’s life or from her own? I stared at the Golden Globe sitting on the mantle. It looked like it had been moved. Did Brendan pick it up when he was here? I couldn’t remember. At one o’clock I had an interview for
an anteacid commercial. So I went and changed into what I call my good-wife clothes: slacks, pastel colored print blouse, and Keds. In the script my dopey husband didn’t know when to stop eating.

  It was six o’clock when I returned to the house. After the interview I had run errands and gone to the market. I didn’t get the commercial. I guess I wasn’t that good of a wife.

  Late that night sipping a glass of wine I walked out onto the deck and again looked toward Theo’s house; it was dark. I wondered just what Theo was doing by putting that post card in Brendan’s mailbox? Was she playing some kind of cruel psychological game with him? If so, she didn’t have to leave town for that. Now that Brendan and his wife had ransacked her files the last place anyone would look for her very late at night would be her own home. I got her key and my flashlight.

  “Theo?” I called, entering her house. My light bounced around her living room. “Theo?” I moved down the hallway to her bedroom. “Theo?” I turned the overhead light on. Brendan Kincaid lay on her bed surrounded by more of Theo’s papers. His arms flayed out in one of his helpless gestures. Blood ran from a dark hole in his temple down his neck and into his shirt collar. On the floor by the bed was a gun. I leaned against the wall for support. The poor guy looked like he had been sitting on the bed studying her writings as if they were cliff notes, as if he had a test he knew he wasn’t going to pass. I stumbled back down the hall and to the phone in the kitchen.

  Three hours later wearing my husband’s bathrobe I sat alone in my living room. I had told the police everything I knew. Alison was called. She had recognized the gun as belonging to Brendan. The two detectives were talking suicide. I offered to go home with Alison but she refused.

  “You were Theo’s friend not Brendan’s,” she had told me. “Theo caused his suicide. She wanted it to happen.”

  But why? And where was Theo? Staring at her award on the mantelpiece I realized I had been sitting in complete silence. I had forgotten to turn on the TV or my CD player. Folding my arms across my chest I stood in front of the fireplace. The Two Oscars were sleek in their art deco streamline gold-plated nudity. The Golden Globe looked bold in its artlessness. A chill ran through me. The award had been moved. Even Theo couldn’t resist touching it.