Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (5 page)

Jill picked up the next folder from the stack and flipped it open without reading the tab. What was inside was structured as a letter to the studio on Cass's letterhead, but it was clearly a multi-page contract. Jill started to read. It was an option contract. On May 24, 1959, Cass had taken out an option on the rights to remake
Weary Hearts.

Jill stared at the contract. Cass had never been involved in the remake of a movie. He had always had plenty of ideas, plenty of new material. But this contract suggested that he had wanted to film another version of
Weary Hearts.
Jill was astonished; she had had no idea.

She pulled open the conference room door, calling for Ken and Lynette. She held out the contract. "Did you know anything about this?"

Ken took the contract, glancing at it quickly. Lynette moved close to him so that she could see too.

"No," she said, "but we wouldn't have. This was all production office business."

"Do I understand it right?" Jill asked, although she was reasonably confident of her ability to understand a contract. "Cass was thinking about remaking
Weary Hearts?"

Ken nodded, then moved over to the conference table and looked through the rest of the papers in the open folder. "And he kept renewing it, fifteen, sixteen years, it looks like. He didn't let it lapse until the mid-seventies."

"That wasn't like him," Lynette said flatly. "He didn't tie up money in things he didn't have definite plans for. I do know that much."

"But why did he option it in the first place?" Jill wondered. This was really surprising, Cass thinking about remaking
Weary Hearts.
The mid-seventies... John Travolta as Phillip? It didn't bear thinking about. "Can you see remaking that movie?"

"No," Ken answered. "But don't trust me. I was a hundred percent sure that
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
was the one book that could never be made into a movie. That's why I worked for Casler Properties, not Casler Productions."

Generally there were two good reasons to remake a movie, neither of which Jill could see applying to
Weary Hearts.
Sometimes there was something new to be said about the movie's plot or setting; one reason that A
Star Is Born
kept getting remade was that people kept having new things to say about Hollywood. But if Cass had had something new to say about the Civil War, he had never told Jill about it or mentioned it in any of the interviews he had given—and she had read every one of those.

The other reason for remaking a movie was to improve on the original casting. But just as no one would want a different Rhett Butler, a different Citizen Kane, or a different Rick and Ilsa, so too were the parts of Phillip, Booth, and Mary Deas fixed in people's imaginations. Bix and Alicia had been killed before the movie's release, and Charles, in his grief, had never acted again. With none of the three actors ever appearing on the screen after this movie, they had become the roles, the parts defining them, they defining the parts. Jill would not be the only one who found the idea of recasting a sacrilege.

She was shaking her head, feeling her hair sweep around her shoulders. "I just don't get it."

"Maybe it was that he knew how crazy you were about the movie," Ken suggested. "And he wanted to keep anyone else from remaking it."

"That's a nice idea." And it really was. "But when he first took out this option, I hadn't been born yet. He hadn't even met Mother. Technically he was still married to Ellen, even though they were separated and she was living in Virginia. Maybe that's it. Do you think he did this because it was his only movie set in the Valley?"

"No," Lynette said bluntly. "Cass was sentimental about a lot of things, but not money. He threw away an awful lot of money on this option over the years. He must have been planning on remaking it. I don't know anything about what prompts a person to remake a movie, but I'd swear that Cass had it in mind."

Jill was more puzzled than ever. She knew her father; his behavior had always seemed consistent, explicable. This was odd. "I'm going to call some of the people who used to work in the production office."

She sat down with Lynette's massive Rolodex and gathered the numbers of former Casler Productions employees. Over the next two days she spoke to all of them, and if any had ever known about Cass's option on these rights, no one remembered. Certainly there had been no significant discussions or plans.

The last person she spoke to was Walt Schneider, a story editor. He confirmed everything the others had said.

"You know the movie," Jill then said to him. "Can you think of any reason to remake it?" This was someone whose narrative imagination her father had trusted.

"Not offhand," Walt confessed. "I don't see how you could update it. You couldn't set it during World War II. It's about staying home with the war on your doorstep. You could go backwards to the War of 1812, which isn't something anyone is the least interested in. Or you could see it in a Vietnamese village. Booth-the-Cong bravely sets out to waste Charlie Company. That would be a real box-office smash, wouldn't it?"

Jill agreed that
Weary Hearts
told from the point of view of the North Vietnamese was not anything she'd wait in line to see.

Of course, if Doug Ringling was to be believed, that was the problem with the movie's first rough cut. Not enough people would have waited in line to see it.

And, in fact, his story did provide the one plausible explanation for Cass's secret interest in remaking the movie.

Cass would have seen every foot of film printed from the April shoot. He would have read every version of every script. If what Bix had written was a masterpiece, Cass would have known.

His option would have included the rights to all the preliminary material. Perhaps it wasn't the "Script as Shot" that Cass would have remade. Perhaps it was some other script altogether, a script with the same settings, the same characters, a similar plot, but different enough to be thought a masterpiece.

Jill was now determined. She was going to find out if there was any truth to Doug's story.

She would not have persisted had it remained a question about his family, whether or not his uncle Bix had written a masterpiece. As much as she had once idolized the character Bix had played, the question of how good a writer the man himself had been did not feel very urgent to her.

But she cared terribly about what kind of man her father had been. That did feel urgent. Perhaps with time she could have learned to forget Doug's innuendos about Cass's character. But what was going to explain why, year after year, her father had quietly renewed the option to make the movie? And why, after fifteen years of renewals, he had stopped?

She wanted answers.

"So did you meet her? Did you actually lay eyes on her? Does she really exist?"

Doug dropped his suitcase down on the worn linoleum floor. He knew that Randy's first question would be about Jill. "I met her. I laid eyes on her. She really does exist."

"Does she look as good as her pictures?" Randy asked, even though he had been in the midst of a phone call when Doug had come into the kitchen of the old farmhouse the two of them shared.

"Much better."

"Is she as rich as they say?"

"Now, how on earth could I know that?"

Jill, although only a few weeks older than Randy, was his aunt, his father's half-sister. Randy had never met her; Randy's father was the only one in the family who had. Nonetheless, the Casler family were all enormously interested in her. She had gone to the Academy Awards with the actor Payne Bartlett this year and had had a total of four seconds of camera time. A video tape of the hours-long ceremony had been passed up and down the Shenandoah Valley so that everyone could watch those four seconds in slow motion. It was fun to be related to a person who went to the Academy Awards.

But Doug had always suspected that the Caslers were perfectly happy to be related to Jill without bearing the burden of actually knowing her. She was rich; everyone she knew was famous. Who didn't assume, in some secret corner of the heart, that the rich and famous would not be very interested in one's own little self? Even Doug, who had had his own share of fame—although notoriety was probably the more apt term—had put off visiting the wealthy Aunt Jill until the end of his stay in California.

"Tell me everything," Randy went on. "You might as well practice on me. You know your sisters will hang you by your heels until they get it all out of you."

"Why don't you finish your phone call first?"

"Oh." Randy looked down at the open receiver in his hand. "It's just my mother." He put it back to his ear. "Sorry, Ma, I got to go. Doug's back." He listened for a moment, then held out the receiver. "She wants to talk to you."

Obediently Doug crossed over to the phone, forcing himself to keep a blank expression. He found Randy's mother very hard to take. Her speciality in life was putting other people in the wrong.

"Douglas." Louise Casler's voice was cool. "How was your trip?"

"Very pleasant, ma'am."

"I heard Randy ask you about his father's sister. I suppose she was quite curious about the family."

"No, not a bit," Doug was pleased to report. As far as he could tell, she was oblivious to them. He had told her that he was from the Valley; it had not occurred to her to ask if he knew any of her relations. They might think about her all the time, but she did not seem to ever think about them.

"Well," sniffed Louise. "What kind of manners is that? Not to ask after your own family? I hope my children would acquit themselves better than that."

"I'm sure they would." A conversation with Louise was never over until she was clearly in the right, so Doug always aimed to put her in the right just as quickly as possible.

"I suppose you spent all the time talking about the movie," she said, as if that were some grave lapse on Doug's part instead of the actual purpose of his trip.

"Yes, but she didn't know anything."

"I don't know why you thought she would."

"I don't either, ma'am," Doug answered. "I don't either."

"I don't imagine that her father was a very communicative parent."

"I suppose not," Doug agreed.

How Louise could have known one thing about Cass Casler's parenting, Doug didn't have a clue, but he had seen Jill's face when she had spoken about her father. Cass might not have been a communicative parent, but he certainly had been loved.

Actually, Doug was disappointed by how little Jill had known about the movie... how little everyone had known about it. He had gone out to California with the notion that a rough cut was like a draft of a manuscript, something that could be preserved intact. But apparently there was a single "work print" that the editor cut and slashed; it changed every day. Parts of the version of
Weary Hearts
that the studio executives had rejected would have been incorporated into the final film.

So what happened to the parts that they didn't use? he had asked.

No one seemed to know for sure.

The movie had been made only forty years ago. Forty years wasn't all that long in Virginia. His grandmother probably had stuff in her deep-freeze that was older than that. But it turned out that forty years was a lot longer in California than it was in Virginia.

So he had gone to Jill.

But she wasn't going to help. And there was no reason why she should, why anyone should. His own family had lived with Grandfather's story for years; none of them had ever thought to investigate. Doug hadn't either, until this spring. It had never upset him that Bix's talent had gone unacknowledged, that he was known only as an actor, not a writer. Sure, it had seemed a shame, but not nearly so much a shame as was his death, and there wasn't a thing to do about that.

Then, this spring, Doug's own reputation had crashed, splattering itself across every sports page in the nation. He had come to the Valley with nothing to do. He started helping Randy with his poultry business. It wasn't bad work. He liked physical labor, he enjoyed learning about Randy's high-tech equipment, but he was used to coaching college basketball, a job that consumed every breath, every hour. He needed more of a goal.

The old family stories about
Weary Hearts
kept flitting through his mind as he watched the little conveyor belts chug by with their string of warm, smooth white eggs. With his own reputation lost, it seemed a real crime that Bix hadn't had more of a chance to establish his own. Suddenly this came to seem like something Doug could do for him, this uncle whom he had never known, this uncle whom he so resembled. Doug could reclaim Bix's achievement, he could insist that the truth be told. He could do for Bix what he was unable to do for himself.

Outside the master bedroom of Jill's bungalow was a small flagstone patio set off from the hotel grounds by a low white railing and a screen of lush plantings. Jill always preferred being outdoors, so on the morning after she had talked to her father's story editor, she carried the bedroom phone out to the patio, clipped it into the outside jack, and sat down at the glass-topped cafe table. She was going to spend the day on the phone.

She was not indulging in idle gossip. Although Jill did not have to support herself, she led a busy, productive life. She had considerable abilities. Although not blessed with her father's narrative gifts or his visual imagination, she did have his sense of structure. She could instantly discern how something was organized and, almost as quickly, identify what in that particular system was not working properly. She was systematic, thorough, and efficient. Had she not inherited three high-rise office buildings and the land under two shopping malls, she could have earned her living as the office manager of a big, expensive law firm full of tense lawyers and cantankerous clients. She would have done a splendid job.

As talents went, it was not a magnificent one, but it was hers, and, driven by her British nanny's stern precepts against idleness, she put it to good use.