Rubicon Beach (20 page)

At the Pasadena festival he also met Madeline Weiss, a girl of nineteen who had grown up very much on the right side of Pasadena’s tracks. It was indicative of Maddy’s station and status that working for the museum archives was directed not so much at making an income as accumulating some “life experience,” as her father called it: he considered it part of the business of maturation, somewhere between piano lessons and debutante nocturnes. Of course it had to be the right sort of life experience; she wasn’t slinging hamburgers. Her family, of the upper crust, regarded writing for the movies in the same way as did Llewellyn’s family of the lower crust; contempt for the profession was utterly democratic, crossing all boundaries of class and money. To Maddy’s credit, she didn’t wait for Lew’s success to fall in love with him; she didn’t even wait for his peak before she married him, though by then, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three, he was on a definite ascent. Maddy had a cynicism that seemingly came from nowhere, an errant gene that might have been un attractive in someone else but was enough to keep her from appearing as superficial as most Pasadena girls; it also kept her at odds with her family’s exalted plans, in the way Llewellyn’s romanticism kept him at odds with his family’s practical plans. It did not, however, prevent her from wanting the house in Hancock Park.

The house in Hancock Park was too big for two people, bigger for that matter than was necessary for two people planning on being three, as was to be the case several years after their marriage. It was also beyond the means of even a successful screenwriter. It was barely within the means of a successful screenwriter whose Pasadena father-in-law contributed half the down payment. For Maddy this fact under cut her reasons for wanting the house: Hancock Park was not only not Hollywood, despite the residence of one or two aberrational rock stars, it was the only thing about Los Angeles that old established Pasadena respected and envied. Thus Maddy aspired to the house in Hancock Park to prove something to her father, only to have her father bail out the couple on the finances. By the time she realized that none of this made any sense, by the time she realized that her father had proven something to her rather than the other way around, they’d gotten the house.

Llewellyn didn’t want to live in Hancock Park. Its history denied the ever-transitory truth of the city. He didn’t want the burden of the expense either, meaning he didn’t want the burden of Hollywood success. In his own way Hollywood success was something he wanted to live down, in his own mind it only ascertained his corruption. It proved he was who he really was, he was not who he was really not. He capitulated in the end because Maddy was adamant and because of the house itself: red brick with white edgings, smaller than most of the houses in the park, with a door right in the middle and two large windows upstairs; and though he wasn’t a child, it reminded him of Christmas when he was and the family—Lew and his sister and his mother and father—got in the car at night to drive through the upper-class neighborhoods of the heartland, looking at the lights and decorations. A very similar house of red brick and white edgings, with a center door and two upstairs windows, was bedecked with a string of nothing but white lights that flickered on and off. Llewellyn and Maddy drove up to the house in Hancock Park twenty years later, and he sighed heavily knowing he’d regret whatever he chose to do. Perhaps he believed that his mother and father might relive some memory of their own; he imagined a reconciliation at the airport, and driving them up to the house and sitting there in the front seat of the car watching them, recognizing on their faces dreams the dreamers could not name.

Ten years after
White Liars
Llewellyn had his greatest success with a picture called
Toward Caliente
. The picture had been conceived and written by Llewellyn, and in the early stages of the project he had made a bid to direct. This plan was aborted by what he saw as his own lack of temperament conducive to direction and also by the birth of his daughter, Jane. By the time
Toward Caliente
was released, Jane was two years old; Lew and Maddy had been in the Hancock Park house five years.
Toward Caliente
provided an experience for Llewellyn similar to that of
White Liars
, with the writer and director at odds over a crucial resolution. Since Llewellyn believed this to be his movie, with the director merely the pilot of a vehicle the writer had constructed, he warred heatedly for the resolution he favored. The fundamental difference between
Toward Caliente
and
White Liars
was that this time the studio sided with the director in the conflict. In a high-level meeting with the studio executives Llewellyn was gently admonished for what were now considered his “arcane” instincts; the director’s position was praised as providing the audience with a “stronger emotional identification.” Llewellyn said, “If I hear another word about ‘strong emotional identification’ from another idiot who’s never written a sentence or directed a foot of film, I’m going to slug him.” It said much about the talent of Hollywood executives for self-abasement that those to whom Llewellyn directed this outburst took it sanguinely; there was, after all, a good deal of money involved in
Toward Caliente
. “We’ve made our decision,” the production chief explained. “We realize, Lee, you have your artistic conscience to live with in this matter. If you wish, we’d be willing to remove your name from the picture.” Lew was aghast. “This is
my
picture,” he said.

A woman named Eileen Rader was brought into the conflict. Rader was the head of the studio’s script department. She’d been with the department thirty-five years, having begun in her early twenties. She’d become particularly adept at dealing with what the studios called their literary prima donnas, writers who had detoured through the studios on their way to careers as poets or playwrights or novelists. Only after these writers realized how far they’d detoured and how unlikely they were ever to return to the main thoroughfare did they become reasonable. Rader was successful with this kind of writer because she affected empathy with them; she was admired by the studio for her soft touch. While some complained that she coddled them, the evidence was the writers came around. She demonstrated to them, in ways they found irrefutable, how they could live with the studio’s position and still consider themselves artists. Invariably Eileen reduced the problem to a single question. “Listen to me,” she would say, “we both know these guys are bastards. We both know their taste is what they sit on. But ask yourself this. Will anyone be better off if this picture doesn’t get released? Do you really want to punish the public, who’d be better off with ninety percent of a Lee Edward movie than none at all, in order to try and punish the studio, which you can’t hurt anyway because it’s too callous and bloated to feel pain? I’m not on either your side or the studio’s in this,” Eileen would say, “I’m on the side of this picture which, even slightly compromised, is too good to lose in a world of bad movies. I think that’s the side you’re really on too.” Implicit in all this was the inescapable reality that the studio was going to win and the writer was going to lose. Once the writer accepted this, even subconsciously, it was a matter of time before he relented.

In the case of
Toward Caliente
the time was long and uneasy.
Toward Caliente
was Llewellyn’s attempt to turn back the clock and win the battle over
White Liars
, where his name had changed and he had lost control of those things to which he had once given passion. One night he went home, to the house that reminded him he badly needed another success, and tried to convince himself there was something he needed more and that it was still within his reach. He tried to convince himself there was a way back to the main thoroughfare. Had he convinced himself of this that night, he honestly believed he would have summoned the will for it: he’d have gone into his bedroom and said to his sleeping wife, I’m going to be a poet again, and if it means losing this house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, then so be it. So he tried to be a poet again that night; he sat himself in the study and went to work. All night he worked at writing a single poem, there in the dark of the study with a single light burning over the desk. At four in the morning, after sitting at the desk seven hours, he had written the following:

My love is like a red red pose

He looked at this “poem” and heavily, slowly, picked up the telephone and made a call. “Eileen,” he said, and to his horror felt a sob bubbling up from his throat. To cut it off he croaked, “Give them what they want,” and quickly got the phone back in its cradle before it was too late.

At dawn a few hours later Llewellyn staggered into his kitchen where Maddy was feeding Jane. She looked up and was dismayed at the sight of him. “I gave them what they wanted,” he said in an abysmal voice.

“You couldn’t help it,” she said, “it’s like that in this business. “That’s a lie,” he answered. “That’s what everyone says and it’s a lie. Anyone can help it. It’s not something they do to someone, it’s a choice they give you and you take it or you leave it.” He swallowed; the same sob had been bubbling up all morning. “I tried to be a poet last night,” he explained. “I spent all night trying to write a poem and this is what I came up with.” He handed it to her. “All night and what I came up with was, My love is like a red red rose.”

He turned and left. She looked at the poem. “You wrote
pose
,” she said to the kitchen door. She heard the front door close.

Toward Caliente
was an impressive success in Los Angeles and New York and Toronto and Boston and did surprisingly well in such cities as Dallas and Santa Fe and Seattle. It got good reviews and, some months later, three Academy Award nominations for the performance of the lead actress, editing and screenplay. That his only Academy Award nomination should feel like such a stab in the back was beyond the understanding of those around Llewellyn, including his close friends and family. As with
White Liars
, Llewellyn found himself on the losing side of a creative conflict only to see the judgment of the winning side vindicated. The studio was not so heavy-handed as to call this to his attention. They thought it ungracious, though, that he didn’t thank them for making his movie a hit. Part of him genuinely hoped he would lose the award, as though that would somehow prove something to the studio and justify himself; part of him wanted to win so that he might lambaste them from the podium, though in such a triumphant context this action wouldn’t carry much logic, let alone appear particularly at tractive. In fact the worst thing that could happen did:
Toward Caliente
won the Writers Guild award but lost the Oscar, thus giving Lew’s compromised script the esteem of his peers while denying it the somewhat more tarnished sanction of the industry as a whole. “Don’t you understand they fucked with my script?” he railed at the members the night of his honor, weaving drunkenly behind the microphone. The writers burst into laughter. Since Guild winners usually went on to win the big prize, it could later be assumed the rest of Hollywood didn’t find the spectacle amusing. After that there was nothing like a palpable blackout of his career, it was just that the phone didn’t ring so much. The city assumed that with
Toward Caliente
something of Llewellyn’s career was dying by his own hand, and they were right.

In the two years after his Guild award and Academy Award nomination he wrote and delivered one complete script, a quite mediocre television movie, for which he’d been commissioned. After that he wrote nothing at all. The mortgage on the house was salvaged by Maddy’s father, who was less interested in the property investment than in the contemplation of his daughter’s unseemly pending reemployment with the Pasadena museum. Your father’s absolutely prehistoric, Llewellyn snarled at his wife, to which she answered, God, are you so beyond gratitude? Gratitude! he cried.

Then he got a call one day from Eileen Rader, who offered him a job. He would be writing the sequel of a very successful picture of the previous summer, with a cowriter; this meant he’d do a treatment and first draft which someone else would then rewrite. It was the studio’s way of protecting itself from any possible idiosyncrasies on Llewellyn’s part. “Listen to me,” Eileen said, “this assignment isn’t art, Lee, we both know that, this is you getting back into action, this is you becoming a working writer again,” and he read between all the lines right there on the phone: Eileen had pulled strings to get him this gig, she had swung weight. Accept it with good humor and a sigh of relief. So he did, with no enthusiasm. Among those around him there was enthusiasm enough: Maddy, his father-in-law, and his friends, including Richard, who was out from New York for the third time in five years, living at the Ambassador, a fifty-something-year old actor who couldn’t get so much as a commercial. “Write me a part,” Richard said when he heard, and didn’t even have the pride to laugh as though he were joking.

Now, in the last years of his fourth decade, Llewellyn had found himself thinking about his life and everything it meant in the manner of a man who’s at the end of that life. When I was a young man, he told himself one day, I fell in love with women who made my heart stop. When I became older, I fell in love with women who made my heart melt. That pivotal transition came with Maddy, whom he’d known at least a year before he loved, and it came one lunch when she pushed her caustic cynicism too far in his direction (now he couldn’t even remember what it was she said) and he withered her with a look. The blood ran from her face. She was like a child, stricken by the way his gaze turned cold; and in that moment, having hurt her, his heart melted for her and he loved her.