How to Save Your Own Life (18 page)

“I have to talk to my agent,” I said.

“Talk,” she said.

 

And in the days that followed, I did. But what I didn't understand was that my agent was also Britt's agent. Nor did I know that Britt had already announced to all of Hollywood that she “had” my book—so
hands off.
Britt belonged to that ancient Jewish merchant class whose philosophy seems to be that you don't actually have to
buy
a thing if you can make everybody believe you already own it. Purchase by publicity. And of course she was so intimidating to everyone—not just to me—that no other producers dared make offers on the book. In essence, I was trapped. I tried to negotiate, but the negotiation went nowhere. I was like a Christian trying to negotiate with a hungry lion.

 

Lunch with my agent, Eliza Rushmore. Eliza is a saccharine-voiced, streaky-haired graduate of Skidmore who called me Isadora until the first million copies were sold, “my love” after the second million, “sweet one” after the third million, and “darlingest” after the fourth. You'd pay ten percent of your yearly income not to have to talk to her at all.

“Darlingest,” she said (over a lunch of red snapper flambé at Laurent), “we
tried
to sell your book
everywhere,
but there were just
no
takers
attall.”
(She talked in italics like the Cosmopolitan Girl.) “It really is a very hard book to film. All those flashbacks ...”

“But movies
always
have flashbacks ...” “Yes, my love, but everyone was quite agreed that the literary flair, the
humor,
if you will, makes it all
harder
to deal with. The books that make the
best
movies are always,
invariably,
the
worst
written. It's greatly to your
credit
as a writer that your book is so
unsaleable
as a film.” She bit off a buck-toothed, goyish smile.

“I don't give a shit, Eliza, I absolutely refuse to accept a tiny option for a book that's sold all those copies. It's insulting. I mean when you sell out to Hollywood—you sell
out.
Or else you don't do it at all. They're likely to make a mess of it—so if all I'm ever going to see is that much money, I'd sooner not sell it at all.”

“But the movie will sell more books. And besides Britt is a
can-do
person ...”

“A
what?”

“A can-do person rather than a big talker—like so many of your Hollywood types.”

“If she's the best of them, I'd like to see the others.
God.”

“Besides, sweet one, you'll make money off the percentage.”

“I've heard you
never
make a penny off a percentage of net profits. They have bookkeepers working in cellars to make it appear there
are
no profits.”

“Oh, don't believe that silly sour-grapes stuff. Of
course
you'll see a percentage. It could make you rich.”

“I'm not sure I want to be rich.”

“Darlingest,” she said, forking up some more red snapper, “it never hurts.”

 

Britt summoned me to the Sherry-Netherland the next morning. She sensed my reluctance and realized that stronger measures were needed.

“Let's have breakfast together, okay? I really don't care about the movie at all—but I do want to get to know you better.”

I trotted off to the Sherry-Netherland at 10:00 A.M.

When I got there, Britt was not waiting in the café. I sat for about a half-hour feeling increasingly like an idiot and then got the brainstorm of calling upstairs. The line was busy, busy, busy for another half-hour-and when I finally reached Britt she seemed to have forgotten all about our date.

“Oh God, I've been on the phone with Bob Redford
all
morning, and then my lawyer called from the Coast—can you hold it just another minute and have some coffee?”

I held it another forty minutes at least, and still Britt did not arrive. I had an appointment at noon—so I called Britt's room again. Again she appeared to have forgotten my existence.

“Oh God, I am disorganized this morning. Why don't you come to the room?”

In the room it was apparent that Britt had never even tried to make it downstairs to meet me. She was just blow-drying her hair. She was dressed in nothing but black bikini underpants, and her shapely waxed legs ended in perfectly pedicured feet. She was manically fluffing her orange frizz with a blower, bending forward, bending sideways, almost as if blown by her own hot air. Her body was tiny. Somehow I was always surprised to find Britt so short. At four foot ten and virtually bare-assed, she should not have been so intimidating—but she was. Her breasts were tiny points with wrinkled raisins for nipples.

I felt like a courtier at the king's levee. Tyrants always establish their dominance by making one watch them dress, eat, or shit. As I waited I felt increasingly drained of any ability to rebel, to plead my case, to establish my position.

“I have an appointment at noon,” I said feebly.

“With whom?”

“What business is it of yours?” I should have said, but I felt obligated to
tell.
Sometimes I spill the story of my life out of nervousness, and sometimes out of a wish to ingratiate and disarm.

“Actually, it's with this psychiatrist I've been having an intermittent affair with. You see, my husband recently told me that all during the early years of our marriage—when he was really brutal to me—he was madly in love with this woman—this army officer's wife named Penny, and ...”

The phone rang. I was caught with my life history down around my ankles.

“Hello?” That nasal voice. The voice of a telephone solicitor selling ballroom-dancing lessons, or a street-corner vendor selling hot watches.

“No, I will not give him even his goddamned agent's commission—that son of a bitch ... Why? ... I hear you, Melvin, but he's a creep who couldn't get arrested ... No, we don't need him ... What? ... Tell him I'll put it on the auction block. Tell him I have another studio to indemnify me ... Why the fuck should I? ... I don't need him, I'm telling you ... Don't you dare call me back till you've gotten rid of him. I mean it. Or I'll find another goddamned fucking lawyer, do you hear me? I mean it.” And she slammed down the phone.

To me, sweetly: “Why don't you cancel that appointment and have lunch with me instead. Girl-talk, okay? No deal stuff.”

And I did, and she spent the next hour screaming on the phone or blowing her hair—while I waited, feeling dumber and dumber. And with that, I lost it all: my dignity, my resistance, my integrity. I had known her only one day and already I was waiting three hours at a time in hotels. The pattern was set.

 

At lunch, she tried to convince me we were sisters under the skin. It was true that a lot of people had responded to
Candida Confesses
—but what I didn't yet realize was that the book was a litmus paper for everybody's special craziness. It had the common touch—whatever that is. Scholars responded to it and so did totally uneducated people. It later became clear to me that just because people came up to me and said “I am you,” that didn't necessarily make it true. Most critics are so misguided about the nature of literature that they lead even writers, who should know better, astray. Even autobiography is not interesting if it is only about its subject. Unless that subject becomes everywoman, unless that story becomes myth, it is of no interest to anyone but the subject—and perhaps her mother. And once it becomes myth—it is no longer merely autobiography. Or merely fiction.

So of course Britt identified. How could she not? She was a Jewish girl from Flatbush. She felt she had been victimized by the male sex, by the whole world. This was especially interesting, because if any victimizing was being done, you could be sure Britt was, as the N.Y. police say, the perpetrator. As for being victimized by the male sex, it was hard to imagine any man fucking Britt and coming away with his genitals intact. Just as her laugh was metallic, one could presume her inner organs to be made of the same unyielding stuff.

“The whole point,” she said at lunch, “is how women are fucked over by men.” She said this looking very self-satisfied, as if she had just translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What was I to say? That I didn't think that the point of my work at all? That I thought she was smug and not very intelligent? That I thought she was making a mockery of the very real sufferings of some women in order to grab more profit for herself? We were in the Sherry-Netherland café and Britt, of course, had taken the banquette while she left me the outside chair. Trout meunière was about to be brought. The white wine had been poured and was cupping the light in long-stemmed glasses. We sipped. “To the year of the woman,” Britt toasted. Just then, a roach crawled over the banquette behind Britt's bony shoulder. He made his way slowly toward her Hermès handbag, up one side, across the top, and then descended into its caramel-colored leathery depths in search of tobacco crumbs, half-smoked joints, one bent cocaine spoon, an assortment of French cosmetics, a handful of tarnished pennies, half a month's supply of birth control pills, an old Valium vial filled with the purest, whitest coke, a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill to snort it with (she'd forgotten she had the spoon), and a wallet full of charge plates, traveler's checks, and cards of people she'd never remember to call.

I saw the roach descend into Britt's handbag but said nothing. Britt and I would meet again.

The Rolls-Royce love affair ...

If I do it once, I'm a philosopher. If I do it twice, I'm a pervert.
(WITH APOLOGIES TO VOLTAIRE)

My life was pushing me westward and away from Seventy-seventh Street—although I didn't know it at the time. Couriers appeared to bring the news that it was time to leave the old block, time to pull up roots, time to move on. Britt was one such courier—a female Mephistopheles in bikini underwear. Rosanna Howard was another. The day her Rolls-Royce Corniche pulled up on Seventy-seventh Street, it was clear to somebody—if not yet to me—that everything was bound to change.

Rosanna was a student of mine who had been pursuing a friendship with me for months. You couldn't fail to take special notice of her because she appeared at the writing seminar (which met in my apartment) in that chauffeured Rolls-Royce Corniche, satin jeans, and rhinestone-studded T-shirts suitable for a rock star. She also wore black lipstick, platform sandals with six-inch spikes, and a heavy musk body-oil that suggested the very rich
were
different from you and me. Just
how
they were different, I was not to know until much later. She wrote poems about decaying family mansions and kinky sex. I found her moderately interesting but I was too busy for a new friend (I barely had time to see my old ones that year), and besides I had known lots of rich girls before and was not fascinated by them. The very rich like to collect writers and I do not like to be collected. It makes me nervous. But one morning, after a particularly bad scene with Bennett, Rosanna happened to telephone.

“This is Rosanna Howard.” The voice was crisp, midwestern, boarding-schoolish. I must have been disappointed to hear from her because she immediately went on to ask: “Isn't this a good time to call?”

“No,” I lied, “it's fine.” But I can never conceal my feelings. My voice gives them away on the phone. My face gives them away in person.

“You sound upset,” she said matter of factly. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. It's kind of you to ask, but really, I don't ...” Only with Rosanna would I have used the word
kind.

“Are you free for lunch? I'd love to take you to lunch.”

What the hell, I thought, I won't get any work done today anyway.

Her car pulled up twenty minutes later. My ass-kissing door-man, an unctuous Eastern European named Valerian, genuflected before the chromium hood ornament. “Nize car,” he said, “nize peeples.” Valerian had no bleeding-heart liberal hang-ups. Money was good, poverty bad. Rich folks were “nizer” than poor folks. Teach a kid communism from a young age, and when he grows up, he becomes a raging capitalist. Simple.

Rosanna and I had lunch at the Carlyle, and I made a point of paying, knowing that nothing endears one to the rich more than that.

Rosanna had grown up in Chicago, inherited a “tiny railroad” (which just happened to surround the stockyards), gone to Bryn Mawr (and then graduated from Sarah Lawrence), married an uptight, boring lawyer who loved her money, had one son with him, and then left him for a swinging lawyer (who also loved her money, it turned out, but in a way that was less obvious to her). His name was Robert Czerny (and I later came to call him the “bouncing Czech”). To a society girl from Chicago he represented rebellion, freedom, Stanley Kowalski, sex, self-destruction, excitement. He wore a gold cock-ring and twenty-five-dollar ties—and he went down on her when she had her period (which no WASP would do). The way to a woman's heart.

They maintained an apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago (where the son and the nanny were ensconced), but Rosanna and Robert traveled. When Rosanna decided “to Write,” she took a studio apartment in the East Fifties, hired a chauffeur for the Corniche, and set herself up in New York (like any struggling poet) to make her literary fortune. Robert commuted between Chicago, New York, and Washington (where he lobbied for mysterious causes and fucked around a lot). The Czernys had an ultraliberated marriage; they never saw each other. But Rosanna was fiercely defensive of “Rob.” He was her rebellion, but he was also her respectability—because, you see, she really liked women. And every reluctant lesbian needs an absent husband to cover her. I never heard
anyone
use the phrase
my husband
as often as Rosanna.