And I nodded. There was a time before Manson was the charisma king, then. I thought of a benediction, something given, that was taken away.
I watched the rest of the documentary obsessively. Then, over a black-and-white still, the narrator said something. I rewound, and he said it again.
I had an idea. I had a book that wrote itself.
The thing the narrator had said was this: that the infant children Manson had fathered on the women of The Family were sent to a variety of children’s homes for adoption, with court-given surnames that were certainly not Manson.
And I thought of a dozen twenty-five-year-old Mansons. Thought of the charisma-thing descending on all of them at the same time. Twelve young Mansons, in their glory, gradually being pulled toward L.A. from all over the world. And a Manson daughter trying desperately to stop them from coming together and, as the back cover blurb told us, “realizing their terrifying destiny.”
I wrote Sons of Man at white heat: it was finished in a month, and I sent it to my agent, who was surprised by it (“Well, it’s not like your other stuff, dear,” she said helpfully), and she sold it after an auction—my first—for more money than I had thought possible. (My other books, three collections of elegant, allusive and elusive ghost stories, had scarcely paid for the computer on which they were written.)
And then it was bought—prepublication—by Hollywood, again after an auction. There were three or four studios interested: I went with the studio who wanted me to write the script. I knew it would never happen, knew they’d never come through. But then the faxes began to spew out of my machine, late at night—most of them enthusiastically signed by one Dave Gambol; one morning I signed five copies of a contract thick as a brick; a few weeks later my agent reported the first check had cleared and tickets to Hollywood had arrived, for “preliminary talks.” It seemed like a dream.
The tickets were business class. It was the moment I saw the tickets were business class that I knew the dream was real.
I went to Hollywood in the bubble bit at the top of the jumbo jet, nibbling smoked salmon and holding a hot-off-the-presses hardback of Sons of Man.
So. Breakfast.
They told me how much they loved the book. I didn’t quite catch anybody’s name. The men had beards or baseball caps or both; the women were astoundingly attractive, in a sanitary sort of way.
Jacob ordered our breakfast, and paid for it. He explained that the meeting coming up was a formality.
“It’s your book we love,” he said. “Why would we have bought your book if we didn’t want to make it? Why would we have hired you to write it if we didn’t want the specialness you’d bring to the project. The you-ness.”
I nodded, very seriously, as if literary me-ness was something I had spent many hours pondering.
“An idea like this. A book like this. You’re pretty unique.”
“One of the uniquest,” said a woman named Dina or Tina or possibly Deanna.
I raised an eyebrow. “So what am I meant to do at the meeting?”
“Be receptive,” said Jacob. “Be positive.”
The drive to the studio took about half an hour in Jacob’s little red car. We drove up to the security gate, where Jacob had an argument with the guard. I gathered that he was new at the studio and had not yet been issued a permanent studio pass.
Nor, it appeared, once we got inside, did he have a permanent parking place. I still do not understand the ramifications of this: from what he said, parking places had as much to do with status at the studio as gifts from the emperor determined one’s status in the court of ancient China.
We drove through the streets of an oddly flat New York and parked in front of a huge old bank.
Ten minutes’ walk, and I was in a conference room, with Jacob and all the people from breakfast, waiting for someone to come in. In the flurry I’d rather missed who the someone was and what he or she did. I took out my copy of my book and put it in front of me, a talisman of sorts.
Someone came in. He was tall, with a pointy nose and a pointy chin, and his hair was too long—he looked like he’d kidnapped someone much younger and stolen their hair. He was an Australian, which surprised me.
He sat down.
He looked at me.
“Shoot,” he said.
I looked at the people from the breakfast, but none of them were looking at me—I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye. So I began to talk: about the book, about the plot, about the end, the showdown in the L.A. nightclub, where the good Manson girl blows the rest of them up. Or thinks she does. About my idea for having one actor play all the Manson boys.
“Do you believe this stuff?” It was the first question from the Someone. That one was easy. It was one I’d already answered for at least two dozen British journalists.
“Do I believe that a supernatural power possessed Charles Manson for a while and is even now possessing his many children? No. Do I believe that something strange was happening? I suppose I must. Perhaps it was simply that, for a brief while, his madness was in step with the madness of the world outside. I don’t know.”
“Mm. This Manson kid. He could be Keanu Reaves?”