Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (41 page)

But war forced out of him acts of unimagined courage, both physical and moral. His choices were hard ones, requiring him to send men, some of them faceless, some of them loved, to nearly certain death. Agony came when he had to lead a retreating army to safety knowing that he was leaving a wounded Pompey to die alone on the battlefield. Leadership demanded a constant return to some inner well, drawing from it again and again, until the ice from this underground river froze the rest of his soul. The physical vibrancy that had been his bridge to others chilled into solitary grandeur as the coiled vigilance that his command required engulfed his being.

The screenplay told a dark story, haunting and poetic. Echoing though the screenplay were the words of the half-surviving Confederates whom Marie Ringling remembered from her girlhood in Richmond, and its message was that, in the end, heroism ruins a man for normal life.

But Phillip and Mary Deas were not judged harshly for their betrayal of Booth. They were ordinary people, and ordinary people needed to love. Booth had become a hero and in so doing had lost his capacity to love.

The Booth of this version did not ask Phillip his question about Mary Deas's baby, "It wasn't some Yankee, was it?" That was not something this Booth needed to know.

It was not that he wished her to have been mistreated, he was not hard-hearted or unfeeling, but what Booth needed to know about someone was not what had happened to him; everyone had suffered, and only the details of their stories were different. Booth cared whether or not a person was surviving. Mary Deas loved her baby tenderly, fiercely. That was survival. What path had led her feet to that road did not matter.

He could see that Phillip and Mary Deas loved each other, and he could see that she was still lovely, that her eyes were still dark and warm, that her daughter was lovely, too, the first violet flowering in a Valley stripped of its blossoms. But he saw all that from a distance, through a veil of hard rain and dried blood. He could not love. The war had done that to him.

He accepted his limits as other men had accepted their physical losses—the hands, the legs, the arms gone with no getting them back. He bore his suffering with dignity, but endurance was not enough; he had to act. One morning Phillip came into the sagging chicken coop where he had stabled the last two horses to find Booth saddling his.

In this version, Booth left. It was Booth who took up the blue coat, going west to fight the Indians. He was a good cavalryman, that was all he was, and Virginia had no need for cavalrymen anymore.

Mary Deas came out of the house, crossing the weed-choked lawn. Her heavy, limp skirts were tied up, her eyes were puzzled by the saddled horse. Booth swung into the saddle, and, in a sad sketch of a cavalryman's jaunty salute, waved his battered hat to her and bid his horse into a gallop. Phillip caught her, his arm around her shoulders, stifling her questions. Together they watched Booth ride off, a man and a horse growing smaller and smaller, fainter, until they were only a cloud of dust, and then not even that.

The script fell shut in Jill's lap.

In the final version Phillip's decision to go west had been noble, a man's decision to step aside, but there was no such bittersweet consolation about Booth's action. He made no choice; this was inevitable. What did a hero do when his world no longer needed heroes?

She could have sat for hours, thinking about what Bix had written, about all that it said about men and what war did to them, about all the things that they did not tell women, but Doug was waiting for her inside. She made herself get up. At the first sound of her footsteps crossing the porch, he was at the door, pushing it open.

"What's it like?" he was asking. "Is it garbage?"

Garbage? Had he been worried about that, worried that they would find, when all was said and done, that Bix was a fraud, a smooth talker, a con artist?

Jill didn't doubt for an instant that Bix was a smooth talker and a con artist, but he was no fraud.

"No, Doug, it's magnificent, better than we ever dreamed."

Doug reached for the script, a light flooding his face. "Will you help me read it?"

"Yes."

They sat side by side on the porch swing. At first Jill talked through the story, setting each scene for him, letting him read the dialogue for himself, and then soon he was able to do it on his own.

She glanced at the pages as he turned them. Already the words of the script were burned into her memory, as vivid and enveloping as if she had actually seen it filmed.

No wonder Bix had gone to such lengths to make this movie. There must have been a compulsion, as urgent as any craving that Jill's mother had ever felt. And no wonder the young veterans he had picked for the crew had cooperated, no wonder they had all been willing to risk their careers. Although it was set during a different war, this was to be their movie, their statement of what it was like to come back home. Amid all the clamor that the boys were back home, here was one voice, saying, "Wait a minute, we've changed.
The Best Years of Our Lives
was fine, but it didn't go far enough."

But this voice had been stilled, and no one spoke these words again until after Vietnam.

Doug was nearing the end of the script, and Jill watched him read the final scene, his face growing bleaker. At last he closed the script with a shiver.

He was silent for a minute and then—"What was it that Alicia said, about aching for him? I feel that."

Jill understood. If she felt isolated, if she felt like she was standing at the edge of the lake, watching everyone else, how much more withdrawn was Booth? There was no hope for him, and he had once been one of the swimmers, he had once known their joy. And this character, his knowledge and his pain, had come out of Bix's soul.

Doug turned back to the title page, looking at the intricate drawing Bix had penned around his sister-in-law's name. "At least he fell in love."

Yes, that was a comfort. Bix wasn't Booth. Surely there were times during the writing when he must have felt as if he was, when he must have felt that what the Germans had done to him had left him—as Yeats had written in Cass's favorite poem—"changed, changed utterly."

But he had recovered enough to love again. It was not a happy love, but it was love. He had died, but he had been in love when it happened. His soul had recovered.

"Would it really have been such a flop?" Doug asked. "Would they have lost that much money?"

"I don't know," Jill answered. "There's nothing for the blood-and-guts fans and there's certainly not much love interest."

Phillip and Mary Deas's romance really was a tiny part of the script, and Booth's story had nothing to do with loving a woman. His choice was never between the Confederate cause and the woman he loved. Women were beside the point.

But women had been beside the point in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
and people had gone to see that.

"It might not have been a big success," Jill guessed. "But how much money could it have lost? It couldn't have cost that much to make."

Bix had written the movie carefully. Part of the growing sense of the inevitability of Booth's fate came from almost documentary detachment of the camera. There were few close-ups, shot/reverse shots, and glance-object cutting, a narrative technique that required fewer of the time-eating camera setups. Bix had saved tight, intense camera work for the battles. There were no big panoramic spectacles with thousands of men and horses. Battles were shot in intimate detail—sweating faces, campfires, and trenches. He had clearly learned from the horror movies he had worked on how to evoke a great deal of atmosphere without spending much money. The alternation between the two styles would have been powerful... and enormously cost-efficient.

Jill was perplexed. "This makes less sense than ever, Doug.
Circean Nights
was draining cash out of the studio, cash and people. It was derailing the schedule of every other production. So why add more complications by refilming this movie?"

"Maybe they just did it as a sop to your dad and Bix, trying to keep them happy until things calmed down." Doug looked down at the script. "Except I can't see how making any changes to this would have made anyone happy. I'm no critic, but what were you saying a while ago, about that guy who blew up his building?"

"Howard Roark in
The Fountainhead."

Back in May, she had thought it all right that Bix had not been Howard Roark. Cooperating with the studio had been realistic, practical, and Jill was, above all else, realistic and practical.

But now that she had read the script, she felt differently. Bix should have refused. There was a time to stop being practical. This script had grandeur to it; it was worth every risk he had taken for it. Why had he let them turn it into a love story? Why had. he helped?

Doug was turning the pages of the script. "Maybe Charles will have some idea."

"Charles?" Jill could hear how thin her voice sounded. She didn't know what the truth was, but she did know that Charles wasn't telling it. He had said that there had been endless rewriting during the spring filming, but if that had been so, this script would have been a rainbow of colored pages, each color indicating a different draft. There were no insertions, no major deletions in this script. Jill wasn't surprised. Bix had been too organized, too controlling, to have let a director near anything that hadn't been thought through completely.

Nor had Alicia taken all the scripts on the plane so that she could make a clean copy, as Charles had said; there would have been no reason to. All the copies would have been clean. Whatever the history of this particular script was—Jill imagined it had been among the things Alicia's friends had shipped back from California—Jill was sure Charles had known all summer exactly where it was.

There was no point in talking to Charles. He would only lie more.

"He's on his way to Gettysburg," Jill said. "We'll never find him. Let's read what Alicia's written on the script. That might tell us something."

The notes were interesting and bewildering. Alicia had done her work on the script in two stages. The first was in the spring, when she was preparing her part—although surprisingly many of her comments were about Booth's character. Perhaps Charles was able to be such an intuitive actor, Jill thought nastily, because his wife did the analysis for him. Her understanding of his complex, tragic character was rich indeed.

Alicia's other comments were written during the summer, during the preparation of the new script. Certainly most of the rewriting had been done on fresh paper, but there were a number of notes such as "Cut this" and "Don't forget Pompey's still alive." Bix's comments ranged from, "That's the ugliest dress I've ever seen," which was probably a comment written about her calico costume during the spring filming, to quick "big love scene here" remarks. There were a few doodles, but no intimate dialogue. Bix and Alicia had not conducted their romance on the pages of her shooting script.

Cass had written little, only an occasional note here and there—things that he had started and then crossed out as if he had suddenly realized that he was writing on the wrong piece of paper.

But right in the middle of the script, upside down on the back of one of the sheets, he had written a list:

The Living Stream, Too Long a Sacrifice, A Stone of a Heart, A Terrible Beauty, Wherever Grey Is Worn.

Jill recognized them instantly; they were all from Yeats's "Easter, 1916," Cass's favorite poem, another work about the cost of heroism... although, of course, in that poem about Irish rebels, the phrase had been "wherever
green
is worn."

He must have been playing around with them as titles to the movie... although these titles fit this script better than the final version. Maybe he too had liked the first script better than the one he was helping to write.

She explained all this to Doug. "I really like 'Wherever Grey is Worn.' It just fits in millions of ways, since even though Booth will be wearing—"

She stopped. All this time everyone had been searching for film labeled
Weary Hearts
and found nothing, not a trace of anything.

But suppose there had been a cover-up, suppose that for some reason the studio executives had been determined to destroy every trace of this script and the footage filmed from it, and suppose that her father was determined to save the footage, what could he have done?

He could have stolen it, keeping it in his private files. No, other people could have stolen it. Cass couldn't have. He would have found some other way, some legal, honorable way, to preserve it.

Like filing it under another name.

CHAPTER 18

Jill called her brother. Doug urged her to. Brad's your family, he had said, not just yours, but Randy's, too. What's family for?

Jill had no idea what family was for, but she wanted to learn. So she called.

She and Doug needed to go to California, she told Brad, tonight if possible, but she had committed herself to take care of the chickens through Sunday.

Brad was thrilled. He didn't ask what wild impulse was sending her flying across the continent; he didn't care. For the first time in her life, she needed his help; that's what mattered to him.

He'd be delighted to take care of things, he assured her. He had done it for Randy before. It was no problem. Really his pleasure. Any time. Did she need a ride to the airport? Help in making her reservations? Anything at all?

No, no, she told him. This was enough.

Was she sure?

Yes, she was. "And, Brad... thank you. It's good to know you're there."

"Jill, I will always be here for you. You're my sister."

This was the first time he had used that word. She thanked him again, then hung up and hurried upstairs. Doug was already in the bedroom, packing. She pulled out the parachute-silk duffle that she had brought with her, laying it on the bed next to his American Tourister carry-on.

It took them ten minutes to pack, then two hours to get to the airport. They had to wait another two hours for the last plane to the coast. Jill spent most of that time on the phone. She asked Cathy Cromartie to get them into the studio vaults; she called the hotel to tell them she was coming. As she talked, she noticed the odd looks Doug was getting.