Fear of Fifty (27 page)

The nights I lay awake wanting to tear up the contract, to commit the book to a locked desk drawer, to incinerate it on the beach! Sheer defiance made me persevere. I no longer knew whom I was defying. Myself? My husband? My family? The tradition that dooms uppity women to death? I knew yet did not know all I was doing.

Writing blocks came back. I had written the book in a rush to outwit the blocks, but the last fifty pages took as long to write as the preceding four hundred. The outtakes are illustrative. In one, Isadora writes long letters, à la Herzog, to Freud, to Colette, to Simone de Beauvoir, to Doris Lessing, to Emily Dickinson. In another, she dies of a botched abortion. In another, she blows off Bennett and goes to Walden Pond to live alone in the woods. In another, she promises eternal slavery, and he takes her back.

None of these would do. The ending of a book is a magic amulet for its author as much as for its reader. We
know
that books cause things to happen, so we hold back, wanting to unhappen them. I went back to what I knew I must do: make the ending consistent with the character. She was on her way. But she was not there yet. She would not grovel, but she would not yet fly away. She would change her head, but not the desk at which she wrote. Not yet. She wasn't quite ready. She had another mountain pass to cross.

When the book started circulating in its pale-green-covered original galleys, there was a buzz. I didn't understand this. Enthusiasm and denunciation both at once. Galleys were stolen and passed around. They disappeared.

My panic intensified as success beckoned. I knew I wanted success, but did I want it
this
way? The nakedness of the book terrified me. I had written on my skin and stood before the world like a naked tattooed lady. The heat was on.

The first summer at the Cape, I had dreamed of unwriting the book; the second summer at the Cape, it was in galleys. I agonized over the ending, over the copyediting (even reading the dialogue into a tape recorder to hear if it sounded real). I had already
dovened
over the manuscript with a Liquid Paper brush in my hand until I was stoned on the fumes.

Publication day loomed in November like the day they roll the guillotine into the town square. If I could have stuck my head into it and put myself out of my misery, I would have.

A certain skinlessness goes with the ability to observe and describe feelings. This does not make for blithe unconsciousness. Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

So the book went out into the world, making its own way, having its own fate. Its fate was not predictable. No child's fate is, and the parent just stands there, biting her cuticles and praying.

Two years later I found myself famous, with a paperback atop the bestseller list for the better part of a year.

But my fame was hardly the sort a Ph.D. candidate in literature might have lusted after. Talk shows and cover stories, photographers in the dune grass outside my rented shack in Malibu, movie deals gone sour, Hollywood heroics, and the frazzled fallout of drugs. But also requests for my underwear (unwashed if possible), notes in bottles from marooned Crusoes who wanted shipwrecked me to rescue them. Answered prayers are always harder than unanswered ones. I came up against my own compulsion for self-destruction. I had got what I wanted; now I couldn't wait to throw it away.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Julia Phillips was my teacher in self-destruction. She was way ahead of me in that specialty. When I met her—that one-hundred-pound bundle of nerves with hair that gave off sparks like firecrackers—I fell in love. Her energy was manic; she talked nonstop; she had a child, an Oscar, an obedient husband. She was running the world from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In 1974, that wasn't usual for women.

One of Edna O'Brien's heroines says somewhere that movie people are possessed by demons, but a very
low
form of demons.

But a demon was once a daemon—a creative force—and Julia was also that. She gave off energy, ideas, a kind of charisma. I was awed by her before I hated her.

She wooed me for the movie rights to
Fear of Flying
and eventually bought them for a modest option, no reversion clause, and $50,000.

Even in 1974, that was not a good deal. The deal dragged on, magically changing clauses in her lawyer's computer for at least a year. Meanwhile, I was writing my first screenplay, having endless story conferences in the Sherry-Netherland with my role model, and saying good-bye to my marriage one day at a time. And the book was out there getting famous. The first sign of this was truckloads of mail.

By the time I got to California in the fall, with my first-draft screenplay under my arm, Julia had gone to another level of drug use. But knowing nothing about cocaine, I thought she was merely rude and abusive.

I'd wait in a hotel room—the Beverly Hills—and she'd call to say, “There's a wreck on the San Diego Freeway. I'll be an hour late.”

An hour later her secretary would call with a report of another wreck, an emergency meeting, or a child-care disaster. As the hours went from one to two to six, I'd start feeling victimized and enraged. She alienated directors and actresses the same way, and she dismissed her own behavior with a kind of brass and bravado that was alternately inspiring and depressing.

Shit disturbers can be thrilling. We all hate the hypocrisy of the world and want to call the world on it, but when the shit disturber becomes a hypocrite, it is a more distressing betrayal than any other. As W. H. Auden says, “It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a travelling salesman than a bishop.” Julia was no bishop, but I had made her my high priestess of shit-disturbing; the rebel's rebel. When she proved to be just a front for the embezzling David Begelman, I was confused.
Who then was the potter and who was the pot?

Between meetings that never happened and a deluge of book publicity, I was busy meeting and falling in love with Jonathan Fast, whose parents had become my friends through the Untermeyers' dinner parties. Julia meanwhile was busy alienating everybody in the movie business with her bad habits.

When directors like Hal Ashby and John Schlesinger and actresses like Goldie Hawn and Barbra Streisand had all been driven away by Julia's craziness, Julia decided to direct the movie herself.

That was when I crashed. Notwithstanding her brief course in directing at the American Film Institute, Julia was a novice—and a grandiose novice at that. (So, of course, was I, but I wasn't planning to direct the movie.)

By then, Jonathan and I were living together in Malibu and I was trying to extricate myself from my marriage to Dr. Jong.

Our house in Malibu had a waterbed overlooking the Pacific, a hot tub overlooking the Pacific, and a central jungle atrium open to the elements. Garter snakes and lizards played in it. I once came home to find a snake in the living room—and not the usual kind you find in Malibu living rooms.

The house was one of those slapped-together-by-a-studio-carpenter playhouses for midweek, midafternoon producer-starlet sex.

We were happy. We were in love. But we were also traumatized.
Newsweek
was doing a cover story on me and planting photographers in the ice plant and bougainvillea. Jonathan was trying to launch his career as a screenwriter and suffering the usual torments of rejection. I was trying to shut out the world and write a second novel—though writer friends assured me there was no point since
anything
I did after
Fear of Flying
was likely to be damned, and there were no second acts (or second chances) in American lives.

“Write screenplays,” Mario Puzo said. “There's more money in it.”

Little graduate school snot that I was, I looked around Malibu— with its sullen multimillionaire hyphenates running on the beach, growing ever richer and more grizzled, and thought only of
Literature
with a capital L.

“If I don't write the second, how can I write the third?” I asked Mario. “If I don't write the third, how can I write the fourth, if I don't write the fourth, how can I write the fifth ... ” Et cetera.

I wanted to be Ivy Compton-Burnett or Simone de Beauvoir, not Robert Towne.

“Fools die,” muttered Mario Puzo.

Or maybe he only said, “Schmuck.”

Was I in Hollywood? Well, then, I would be Isherwood, Huxley, or Thomas Mann—certainly not the Marx brothers. My elevated notions of Literature have always done me in.

Or maybe it's my father's show biz entrepreneurism gone wrong.

Somewhere around the time Julia put her hand on a rock and declared herself
director
and I anointed myself the Mistress of Literature, I met a certain man. Someone brought him to a party at our beach house. It could have been anyone. A number of unsavory characters flocked to our house in Malibu the year I was
really
famous.

“Meet my close personal friend,” the matchmaker said, using that adjectival expression that denotes an utter obliviousness to the meaning of the word “friendship.” The close personal friend's means of livelihood was not clear. How
could
he be a business manager, a personal manager, a producer, and a lion tamer all at the same time?

He could. This was Hollywood.

It is no news to anybody (except snobbish, literary me in 1974) that Hollywood is and was crawling with characters who have laundered their pasts to resemble character actors' resumes.

Financial skulduggery was omitted. Failures were erased and successes were claimed, no matter how remote the association. Dropped famous names littered the floor like autumn leaves.

Mr. “Manager” had twinkly green eyes and shaggy gray hair. I seem to remember him wearing Zuñi jewelry and linen tunics that resembled Roman togas—but surely this must be wrong. He claimed to have been a boy preacher in Christian carny shows in his youth. He claimed to have been a sinner turned penitent and have seen the light, hallelujah. He reminded me of an ancient Christian orating before being thrown to the lions. I reminded him, apparently, of the same.

This gentleman and I started talking out near the hot tub before the flaming backdrop of the Pacific sunset (which we both congratulated ourselves for having wound up silhouetted against). He had been following the trials of
Fear of Flying
in the gossip columns. He was outraged on my behalf.

“She says she's a director now and she can't even get along with an actor for more than one meeting. I know it's none of my business, but if you ever want to do something about that deal, I can get the rights back for you. You were screwed. You were offered a
rock-
bottom deal. And the agents conspired to make you take it.”

The hook was set. My brain was ticking like a bomb. My shit disturber was up and prowling like a lion. My shit detector had broken down.

In a few days, Jonathan and I were invited to meet our new friend's lions.

Kept in a secret canyon in the desert, they roamed an environment tarted up to look like the African veldt.

Jon and I were invited to cuddle them, sprawl around them, on them, between their paws. We posed for Polaroids to take home to Howard and Bette Fast in Beverly Hills, knowing that they would make appropriately Jewish parental clucking noises.

Our tamer leapt among the lions, roaring at them to prove he could roar at anyone. He lofted stools, chairs, whips. His wife, a beautiful actress who now seldom worked, seemed equally passionate about them. So did his exquisite teenage stepdaughter, a child star.

“You'd better get out of the cage,” he said ominously. “This could be hairy.”

We stood outside to watch as our tamer put his hand inside the
bocca di leone,
then smiled. How could I know he was demonstrating my role in this whole affair?

From lions' dens, we drifted into lawyers' offices. Mr. “Manager” explained to me why suing Julia, Columbia Pictures, and ICM was utterly safe and riskless. I thought he was talking about me; he was, of course, talking about himself. He provided his own lawyer, offered himself as producer, and lion-tamed me into the nightmare of my life (complete with agents testifying, holding up telephone logs with enormous holes like Swiss cheese). He promised, of course, to take all costs upon himself, but his promises were a carny preacher's promises.

If someone ever promises you a “free” lawsuit or that you'll never have to pay taxes again, run for cover. The tax trick was done to me too, at about the same time in my life, and I have been paying ever since. These two disastrous errors of judgment became a way to destroy myself and my fame in one convenient package.

Raised on movies in which the little guy wins against the system, I had no more idea about court than a mouse does about a cheese-judging contest.

Any fool could have known that suing a movie company in the town of Burbank was about as smart as walking into a lions' den in a canyon in the desert. My new advisor expected a quick capitulation and instant victory. He proved to be even more out of touch with reality than I was.

The suit was announced in the press, garnered the sort of hideous publicity these things garner, and dragged on endlessly. It was hard enough to write a second novel, after all that hoopla.
(Fear of Flying
had seemed an apprentice work to me when I wrote it, and now it was to be my tombstone, or at least “Zipless Fuck” was to be my epitaph.) But writing a second novel while waging a lawsuit was just the obstacle course I needed to make me feel as rotten as I needed to feel after all that success. Everyone advised me against it. Instead I got into the spirit of it, decided that I, not my then father-in-law, was Thomas Paine and Spartacus rolled into one.