It's All In the Playing (33 page)

“Awfulness,” Butler would say. “The awfulness of conditioning.”

Yudi, who was in charge of organizing the production to make the shooting run quickly and smoothly, was faced with extras who wondered why we were pushing them around, difficulty in communicating, and because of the unpredictable weather, rarely knowing which scenes were next.

However, all problems paled when John Heard dunked me in the so-called mineral bath. I swallowed water the grips wouldn’t put their feet in, and of course my hair and makeup were ruined. I was stunned. The crew shrank back into a mudbank, wondering how I’d handle it. I wasn’t sure myself. When I surfaced, John was just standing there smiling at me. I truly do not know what the hell he had in mind but the effect was somehow to put everything else in perspective. It was such a spontaneous act that in many ways I thought it was funny. Outrageous, but funny. And so I shook the dirty water from my hair and face and couldn’t think of anything to say but “I don’t believe you did that.”

The crew knew a long coffee break when they saw one. I retired to my trailer. There was no hot water, so someone got me rainwater in a bucket to wash my hair. All my makeup was streaked with mascara and mud, so I washed it off and Tina applied it again.

Stan walked in.

“We always say we’ll never make another movie
again, don’t we? But somehow when it’s all over we forget the pain and difficulties.”

I nodded, almost chuckling to myself.

“It’s like childbirth, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yep,” answered Stan.

I stared into the makeshift mirror, wondering if John would survive a push into the Urubamba River.

Just as Tom McPherson had predicted, several of the crew members were experiencing serious cardiovascular difficulties with the hard work in such high altitude. Most everyone had intestinal and stomach problems, and was losing weight. Tempers were short over such mistakes as the hotel operators calling the wrong rooms in the middle of the night.

The most serious sickness was that of the leading man on our sound crew. An old soldier from many wars, he refused to put his own health ahead of the production. He was close to cardiac arrest every day. So Stan took charge and told him he
had
to go home. No film was worth dying for.

On the day he left, we stopped the cameras and waved to his plane as it circled overhead. I heard someone say “The lucky cuss.” But another guy shot a look at him and said, “What’s the matter? Is what you’re learning about yourself too much for ya?”

As each of us dealt with the difficulties in our own way, it soon became clear that we each had different lessons to learn and problems of self-esteem to solve. I heard the word
karma
everywhere as relationships were buffeted about in storms of emotional conflict. “What goes around comes around” was on everyone’s lips. A kind of clear karmic harmony began to become evident. If someone was cruel and short-tempered at ten in the morning, it took no longer than till eleven o’clock for that person to experience the same treatment from another.

“It used to take three months for my karma to come
around,” I heard someone say. “Now I’m experiencing it in twenty minutes.”

And so it went. Sometimes the rain would come in flashing torrents, drenching us with such swiftness that there was no time to run for cover. There were many “towing” shots, where John and I had to do scenes in an open jeep with the cameras chained securely to the windshield and on “door platforms” while the camera crew huddled in a truck, hunkered down under yellow rain slickers. Sometimes they sang between gusting flurries of rain; sometimes they shivered in silence. I think John, as a New York actor, must have reassessed his respect for making movies. There was no way to know what the cameras were recording. There was no room in the jeep for Brad, and Butler sat in the back seat unable to see us. The dailies never did arrive, so we were, in effect, shooting blind, with only the crackling long-distance telephone assurance of someone back home in the editing room telling us that what we were getting was okay. They couldn’t possibly understand what it felt like to pull trucks out of the mud every morning while living on peanut butter and crackers. Our feet were wet and frozen inside our combat boots, and our stomachs rumbled with Peruvian dysentery. The Peruvians themselves stood in open sandals in the cold driving rain with such patience, peering at us from under drenched ponchos and wondering if these invaders from North America’s Hollywood were really from another planet.

Every now and then someone would bring lollipops to the location. The huge macho grips would pounce on them, licking away on a grape sucker while pulling a camera out of the mud.

The llamas and alpacas would periodically look up from grazing the rain-soaked knolls, blink those incredibly long eyelashes, observe our madness with judicially pursed lips, and go back to the sanity of being one with nature.

Whenever I could, I returned to the peace of my trailer, a gutted-out bus, wide and very comfortable. I wanted to invite every crew member in with me, but where would I start?

I carefully hoarded and slowly consumed each bowl of custard I had found in a bakeshop in the Cuzco Plaza. Sometimes the electric power in the trailer worked, sometimes not. The Peruvians said the gods at Machu Picchu were responsible for whether the power worked anywhere in the country.

Returning to my hotel at the end of every day, I looked forward to a hot bath to remove the mud. There was no stopper in the bathtub, so I used the heel of my foot to prevent the water from leaking out. Instead of a sheet, I slept with a blanket next to my skin for warmth, and when I wondered how I could ever communicate what we were going through, I huddled over my notebooks and jotted down my feelings. Day passed day, yet time seemed to be standing still.

Chapter 21

   T
he second assault on Machu Picchu was rapidly approaching. And the ire of the cultural representative was rapidly reaching a boiling point. He had taken to calling me a neo-Nazi in public again. He had telephoned not only members of the local press but the foreign press as well, in order to call attention to the problem. He claimed he was going to shut down shooting of our picture unless I rewrote the scene in Machu Picchu.

I, in the meantime, had met a good friend of his. She was a woman who knew him and his family quite well. She told me that his son was a mystic, deeply involved in researching esoteric subjects. She said the man himself had seen spacecraft on a number of occasions. (“It would be difficult to avoid them, living in Cuzco,” she added.) He had even speculated that the Inca ruins could not simply have been built by people from “here.”

In any case, there had been an archeological and anthropological seminar held in Cuzco the previous year. Several factions were represented, attempting to explain the splendor of the Inca civilization, not only in Machu
Picchu but throughout Peru. One faction strongly contended there must have been extraterrestrial help of some kind, since so many craft had been sighted over the centuries and the technology required to build such monuments was beyond present-day explanation. Another faction objected vehemently to that. This was the political faction that claimed that recognition of extraterrestrial help was a neo-Nazi plot engineered to undermine belief in the intelligence of the Third World. This faction garnered a great deal of publicity. For whatever reasons of his own, the cultural representative had decided to embrace that position and was continuing to make it as public as possible. Several wire services had picked up this story, saying that shooting on our show had actually been shut down. All of it was engineered to pressure me into cutting the extraterrestrial speculation from the script. Frankly, I was more interested in whether we’d have sunshine, because the scene the man appeared to be worried about had already been shot in Los Angeles. But he didn’t know that.

   Esther Ventura was an Argentinian woman working for the production outfit that hired our crew in Peru. She was a cultured and sensitive woman with dark eyes and naturally curl-tossed hair who understood my script because she was on the path of her own spiritual quest. She knew of my concern about the one-shot chance we had to shoot Machu Picchu in good weather.

“I suggest you let me bring a broujo to you,” she said in her husky voice. “They can be very effective in helping you control the weather.”

I had never met a broujo. I had heard about them in my metaphysical readings and I was attracted to the notion of asking one for help with the weather, particularly in view of the fact that there seemed to be so much negative energy building up over the Machu Picchu shoot.

“Benito” was accepted as the Inca high priest of the
Andean area including Cuzco and Machu Picchu. His blessing would be needed in any case, according to Inca law. So the ceremony that was arranged was not a mere occult adventure; it would have taken place on some level, whether one had been aware of its implications or not.

Esther brought Benito to my trailer during a night shoot. It was particularly dark and cold. I expected an elderly man garbed in a traditional poncho and cap, but to my surprise Benito, dressed in a tweed suit with a vest, stepped out of a Toyota. He wore a brown felt slouch hat and was accompanied by his wife, who was dressed in a long skirt and a shawl.

Simo ushered them into my trailer and offered them cookies, liquor, coffee, and See’s chocolates. Though Benito had very few front teeth, he polished off most of the chocolates in the first half hour while we chatted by the light of a candle. From the moment I looked into his sweet, wise face I liked him, which made it very difficult for me when I realized he was suffering badly from emphysema and could hardly manipulate his arthritic fingers as he pulled out his bag of coca leaves.

The bag of leaves seemed to be his prized possession. Through the leaves and the way they fell when he tossed them, he could see the past, future, and present. The coca leaves were somehow empowered to hold the secrets of the universe.

Immediately I thought of a drug arrest I had read about in New York City. Some man had gotten a long sentence for bringing through Customs a souvenir from Peru of a bag of coca leaves. I wondered what they’d do with old Benito.

With slow and attentive tenderness (and labored breathing) Benito placed a small felt packet, held together with string, on one of the orange crates I had set before him. For a moment he almost seemed to gaze through the fabric of the packet, his eyes a soft watery
brown. Then with arthritic difficulty he untied the packet and extracted about a dozen tiny silver objects. As I looked closely, I saw they were representations of a star, a llama, numbers, a goat, zodiac symbols, and so on. He held the tiny silver cutouts securely in his hand. Suddenly one of them fell through his fingers. He looked at me and gasped. I didn’t understand what had happened.

“Very unusual,” he said to Esther in Quechua. “Never happen to me—don’t understand.”

I looked at the silver object that had fallen. It was a tiny silver star.

“What does it mean then?” I asked.

Esther translated and asked Benito.

“We will know in the days to come,” he answered in his labored breathless way. Then he looked deeply into my eyes. It was almost as though the falling star represented a disaster of some kind
(dis-astrado
meaning torn, or separated, from the stars). But I couldn’t imagine what it was. Could it be that the weather in Machu Picchu would be really bad and we wouldn’t get the shot?

Then for some reason I felt that someone had died. I didn’t know why.

Benito held the little star for a few minutes in the palm of his hand as though tuning in to its message. Then he looked up at me again with a sad smile on his face and waved the thought away.

Apparently having ascertained what he wanted from the rest of the silver objects, he bagged them again and put them away in the pocket of his suit jacket. He then gestured toward his wife, who was swaying on her feet where she stood above him, beside Simo. She handed him a package wrapped in newspaper. Placing the package on his lap, he opened it and slowly began to extract what was contained inside.

With crippled determination he placed the following objects on the daybed beside us: an ear of corn, a wad of
animal fat, some seeds, a crystal, a coin of silver and gold, a small book made of silver and gold paper, some seashells, a sponge, several marzipan candies, a piece of a llama fetus (as I later learned), and a condor feather. He then sprinkled sugar over everything, on top of which he splashed some anisette liqueur.

I thought the daybed was going to enjoy some interesting aftereffects, but this was clearly the beginning of some kind of ceremony.

Just then there was a knock on the door of my trailer.

“They’re ready for you,” said one of the second assistants.

I got up and explained that I would return after we got the shot. Esther translated and Benito nodded.

When I stepped out into the cold wet night, the second assistant said, “What kind of voodoo ceremony is going on in there?” I laughed and said I’d do anything for good weather in Machu Picchu tomorrow.

I trekked to the set, which was the interior of the jeep lit for a small scene between John and me. John was sitting behind the wheel in a somber mood and didn’t say much. I was glad—I could get the shot and return to my trailer.

Benito was waiting for me. As I sat down he made the sign of the cross and held his head in silent meditation for a long time. When he finished he said, “I talk to the high priests of Inca at Machu Picchu. They govern the weather. You have seven titular spiritual guides who guide you. They talk together. You are sincere in your search, but you must make ceremony to high priest of Inca.”

“All right,” I said. “What should I do?”

Benito waved my words away as, one by one, he lifted each of his displayed objects and meditated on them separately.

Esther whispered to me: “He told me they each
represent an element of life at Machu Picchu which must be respected and recognized.”