I took the number of Junior Mansons down to five from twelve and made it clearer from the start that one of them, who was now male, wasn’t a bad guy and the other four most definitely were.
They sent over a copy of a film magazine. It had the smell of old pulp paper about it, and was stamped in purple with the studio name and with the word ARCHIVES underneath. The cover showed John Barrymore, on a boat.
The article inside was about June Lincoln’s death. I found it hard to read and harder still to understand: it hinted at the forbidden vices that led to her death, that much I could tell, but it was as if it were hinting in a cipher to which modern readers lacked any key. Or perhaps, on reflection, the writer of her obituary knew nothing and was hinting into the void.
More interesting—at any rate, more comprehensible—were the photos. A full-page, black-edged photo of a woman with huge eyes and a gentle smile, smoking a cigarette (the smoke was airbrushed in, to my way of thinking very clumsily: had people ever been taken in by such clumsy fakes?); another photo of her in a staged clinch with Douglas Fairbanks; a small photograph of her standing on the running board of a car, holding a couple of tiny
dogs.
She was, from the photographs, not a contemporary beauty. She lacked the transcendence of a Louise Brooks, the sex appeal of a Marilyn Monroe, the sluttish elegance of a Rita Hayworth. She was a twenties starlet as dull as any other twenties starlet. I saw no mystery in her huge eyes, her bobbed hair. She had perfectly made-up cupid’s-bow lips. I had no idea what she would have looked like if she had been alive and around today.
Still, she was real; she had lived. She had been worshipped and adored by the people in the movie palaces. She had kissed the fish, and walked in the grounds of my hotel seventy years before: no time in England, but an eternity in Hollywood.
I went in to talk about the treatment. None of the people I had spoken to before were there. Instead, I was shown in to see a very young man in a small office, who never smiled and who told me how much he loved the treatment and how pleased he was that the studio owned the property.
He said he thought the character of Charles Manson was particularly cool, and that maybe—“once he was fully dimensionalized”—Manson could be the next Hannibal Lecter.
“But. Um. Manson. He’s real. He’s in prison now. His people killed Sharon Tate.”
“Sharon Tate?”
“She was an actress. A film star. She was pregnant and they killed her. She was married to Polanski.”
“Roman Polanski?”
“The director. Yes.”
He frowned. “But we’re putting together a deal with Polanski.”
“That’s good. He’s a good director.”
“Does he know about this?”
“About what? The book? Our film? Sharon Tate’s death?”
He shook his head: none of the above. “It’s a three-picture deal. Julia Roberts is semiattached to it. You say Polanski doesn’t know about this treatment?”
“No, what I said was—”
He checked his watch.
“Where are you staying?” he asked. “Are we putting you up somewhere good?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m a couple of chalets away from the room in which Belushi died.”
I expected another confidential couple of stars: to be told that John Belushi had kicked the bucket in company with Julie Andrews and Miss Piggy the Muppet. I was wrong.
“Belushi’s dead?” he said, his young brow furrowing. “Belushi’s not dead. We’re doing a picture with Belushi.”
“This was the brother,” I told him. “The brother died, years ago.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like a shithole,” he said. “Next time you come out, tell them you want to stay in the Bel Air. You want us to move you out there now?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m used to it where I am.” “What about the treatment?” I asked.
“Leave it with us.”
I found myself becoming fascinated by two old theatrical illusions I found in my books: “The Artist’s Dream” and “The Enchanted Casement.” They were metaphors for something, of that I was certain; but the story that ought to have accompanied them was not yet there. I’d write first sentences that did not make it to first paragraphs, first paragraphs that never made it to first pages. I’d write them on the computer, then exit without saving anything.