Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe it didn’t mean anything had to change.
“Of course I can,” I said.
The director ran back to the camera, and Don leaned back, taking his hands off our mics.
“And . . . action!”
Don and I were both nominated for Academy Awards for One More Day. And I think the general consensus was that it didn’t matter how talented we were. People just loved seeing us together.
To this day, I have no idea if either of us is actually any good in it. It is the only movie I’ve ever shot that I cannot bring myself to watch.
A MAN HITS YOU ONCE and apologizes, and you think it will never happen again.
But then you tell him you’re not sure you ever want a family, and he hits you once more. You tell yourself it’s understandable, what he did. You were sort of rude, the way you said it. You do want a family someday. You truly do. You’re just not sure how you’re going to manage it with your movies. But you should have been more clear.
The next morning, he apologizes and brings you flowers. He gets down on his knees.
The third time, it’s a disagreement about whether to go out to Romanoff’s or stay in. Which, you realize when he pushes you into the wall behind you, is actually about the image of your marriage to the public.
The fourth time, it’s after you both lose at the Oscars. You are in a silk, emerald-green, one-shoulder dress. He’s in a tux with tails. He has too much to drink at the after-parties, trying to nurse his wounds. You’re in the front seat of the car in your driveway, about to go inside. He’s upset that he lost.
You tell him it’s OK.
He tells you that you don’t understand.
You remind him that you lost, too.
He says, “Yeah, but your parents are trash from Long Island. No one expects anything from you.”
You know you shouldn’t, but you say, “I’m from Hell’s Kitchen, you asshole.”
He opens the parked car’s door and pushes you out.
When he comes crawling to you in tears the next morning, you don’t actually believe him anymore. But now this is just what you do.
The same way you fix the hole in your dress with a safety pin or tape up the crack in a window.
That’s the part I was stuck in, the part where you accept the apology because it?
?s easier than addressing the root of the problem, when Harry Cameron came to my dressing room and told me the good news. Little Women was getting the green light.
“It’s you as Jo, Ruby Reilly as Meg, Joy Nathan as Amy, and Celia St. James is playing Beth.”
“Celia St. James? From Olympian Studios?”
Harry nodded. “What’s with the frown? I thought you’d be thrilled.”
“Oh,” I said, turning further toward him. “I am. I absolutely am.”
“You don’t like Celia St. James?”
I smiled at him. “That teenage bitch is gonna act me under the table.”
Harry threw his head back and laughed.
Celia St. James had made headlines earlier in the year. At the age of nineteen, she played a young widowed mother in a war-period piece. Everyone said she was sure to be nominated next year. Exactly the sort of person the studio would want playing Beth.
And exactly the sort of person Ruby and I would hate.