You or Someone Like You (22 page)

But, she said, George Eliot—! (Heads were moving back and forth between us.)

George Eliot, I replied, was making an empirical observation anyone not clinically insane recognizes as perfectly obvious. All cultures create social ideals for men and for women—what each should do, feel, value, wear, et cetera—and at the same time to varying degrees these mirror what men and women actually are, how each is evolutionarily programmed to feel and think. But biology is not necessarily
prescriptive
.

And as for literature, literature is not, and George Eliot is not, about politics. Literature, well done, illustrates the reality of human nature.

She glared at me.

Although obviously, I added, ignoring the truths of literature in our laws and customs and politics is silly.

It became a debate, and after they left the debate continued both at an afternoon pitch meeting at Miramax and at what became a quite volatile client conference at Endeavor. I didn't gather this information. It flew at me. This is what they're saying, Anne. And this. With the name of each person saying it. In Los Angeles, gossip comes with an index.

I was right, no, no, I was wrong, I was deluded, I was retrograde, I was “sexist” (of course), no, I was not sexist but realistic. I had guts (said a handsome young defender of mine heatedly; he had a political thriller coming out next month from Paramount), and if she (the one who said I was sexist, she had a three-picture deal with Sony and a vengeful look on her face) would just
read
Dorothea Brooks's character correctly—!

She had
read it
correctly, she said, but he, a male, was incapable of seeing that Eliot was merely reflecting a socially constructed sexist norm of her time and culture, not a biological universal, and no wonder he never dated anything not clawing its way up the Wilhelmina roster.

He: Utterly untrue, not to mention insulting, and frankly it should be obvious to everyone not a prisoner of her time and culture. (He meant liberal Hollywood.) (She: Oh,
please
!) Hadn't she felt, exquisitely delineated in every anguished passage of Eliot's prose, all that complex, conflicted shit women feel when boarding yet another flight to New York or London before the kids have even woken up—

“There was also,” said David to me in the restaurant, “your views on making moral judgments.”

You have done your homework, I said to him, and laughed.

“Mm,” he said, taking a bite of bass.

Well, the moral judgments, that was the Browning. Browning killed certainty. And I believe in this, in closing the book and wondering, “Wait—is our narrator a genius or a fool?” The Modernists say, Your man Browning is simply stating, There's no truth, it's all viewpoint. But I disagree, strongly, I said to David. Browning is say
ing, There
is
truth. And we must find it. We must take what we see, and we must judge it to find truth.

“Oh, but we can't judge!” they argued to me at the chic bistro where we, at a large, prominently placed table, were holding our book club. “Who are we to sit in judgment?” (they argued). “Whose values should we say are better or worse? Everyone has a point of view, and all points of view are equal.”

I said to those of them making this argument, You vote for the Republican or Democratic party, and you have absolutely no problem with imposing your party's view on abortion on everyone else because you think your view on abortion is right. That's Browning. And, if you're even minimally honest, that's you, too. I can't abide these idiots who say “We can't judge!” and spend their lives judging and writing checks to political organizations whose very existences are axiomatically judgments. I reiterated this at a cocktail party the following night in a voice loud enough to carry: These good Hollywood people who “didn't want to judge,” which was not a Modernist perspective but simply the head-in-the-sand vapidity of mindless leftism. And then someone aggressively demanding of me, “Why do we have to judge?” and my retorting rather hotly, “Opposing child prostitution,” and then “Supporting separation of church and state,” adding pointedly, “Those are judgments,” and being rescued by Ilene Chaiken, who saw I needed rescuing.

“It's that political, then,” said David, raising an eyebrow, looking at his pad and writing quickly now.

Well, I said, and put down my teacup. I assumed he was referring to the book club in this case, not literature itself. I smiled, briefly. Yes, I suppose it is. It became overt when we read the Dostoevsky, and it seems to be continuing.

David said, “It does indeed seem”—he was reviewing some previous notes; I wondered who in the world he had been talking to—“that that's what makes them most uncomfortable. Your divisions into right and wrong.”

Yes, I said.

I turned my teacup one way, and then I turned it the other. David simply waited. He didn't move a muscle. Some people walked past his chair. I was finding this extremely odd. Actors and directors have told me, but I was now discovering it personally: The most out-of-body experience one can have is being interviewed. I was anxious, but I tried not to show it.

I told David: I said to my son, Samuel, You
will
judge. You
will
say This Is Right, and you
will
say This Is Wrong.

“And?” asked David.

Oh, I said, Sam understands.

David wrote this down. He put away his pen, picked up the menu. “Dessert?”

At some point, David made reference to my world being “the Hollywood elites.” I almost responded with something quite sharp, but I didn't. I simply said, These are the people we know. The quote was dutifully reproduced in the article. It was my impression that it set straight David's implication that I had somehow “sought out” names you saw in the coming attractions. As we waited for the valet to bring his rental car, David asked about their new passion for literature. What did I think of it all? I juggled a few variables and thought, Oh what the hell, say it. I replied that Oscar Wilde once described the basis of literary friendship as “mixing the poisoned bowl”; naturally, I said, Hollywood has taken to it like cats to cream. (I figured the ones who knew me would get a kick out of that.)

David shifted his car keys to his left hand, got his pen out again, and wrote this down.

The piece was not, as I fully assumed it would not be, a cover. It was, at the same time, longer, with larger and more numerous photos, than either of us had expected. “Good God,” said Howard, holding the brand-new copy of
Vanity Fair
at arm's length. Then he said, “Stop scowling at me.” Then, “You think I had something to do with this?”

I said nothing. I was peering at a photo of myself, Alan Levine, and Peter Mehlman.

“
No
. Anne. I didn't.” Then he said, “Fine, call Margolick and ask him. Call Sarkin. Call Si if you want!”

Haven't you been talking to Annie Leibovitz about directing something?

Gritted teeth: “Anne…”

We both looked at the magazine. Turned it this way, then that.

It is pretty, I admitted.

“What does it say, anyway?” asked Howard.

Oh. That.

All right, so there I am, swimming in an ocean of my own creation. I'm all these Things, and I didn't even know it. The trick of journalism, I now understand, and it is a trick played on the reader, is to create the illusion of a coherent whole where none actually exists. It is to take the complex, unkempt pieces of a real life and stitch them together and generate a neat sum with neatly interlocking movable parts that exists for the reader but not, actually, for the person written about. There was a quote from Nancy Meyers: “She's one of the smartest, toughest people in town. Anne has the trick of knowing everyone while remaining, herself, unknown, which in Hollywood is an interesting choice.” (So. I have a trick, too.) Any idea why that choice? asks Margolick. “I think it's her personality,” Nancy says. “Anne doesn't need anyone except Howard.” There are comments from Sid Ganis on my marriage to Howard; apparently we're a “rock solid” couple. “There's a lot of trust there,” Margolick quotes Sid as saying.

I could not tear my eyes from the photographs. I stared at the pages. It hadn't started out well. I'd been planning to cut back my vibernum that afternoon; I didn't want José doing it, because while he was an inspired gardener—well,
I
wanted to do it. They had put me in a gown by some designer or other and had led me into the living room, where Annie Leibovitz assessed me. I was awkwardly try
ing to look at myself in a wall mirror. Annie, I said to her, I do have my own clothes. “Listen,” she said, smiling and adjusting the tripod, “it's just dress-up.” The makeup person came at me again, and I held up a hand—I felt so uncomfortable, I explained, in that ridiculously expensive dress I was sure should be covering someone much younger and sexier than I. Some starlet, say. The makeup woman cooed and shushed me and I felt the pancake going on my skin. I stood there, looking skyward as she'd ordered, very unhappy. Annie was questioning Howard, who was walking in and out annoyingly, about the room. Was the furniture normally like this? (“Look down, please,” said the makeup woman.) Annie mesmerized me, her movements, which she noticed. “You're so attentive,” she said mildly, bent down, squinting into her camera. I'm trying, I said, to understand why an Annie Leibovitz photo is different. She asked, “How many photographers have shot you?” I laughed. Only you, I said. Oh, and a few paparazzi. She made a vague noise of assent, focusing. Something was bothering her. And I was uncomfortable and nervous, and so to hide it I said in my strong voice, I'm sorry, but how long will this take because I
really
need to cut back my vibernum.

She lifted her head. “You garden?” she said.

It was a lovely shot, I am on my knees in the dirt. We'd stripped off the ridiculous gown, the pearls, most of the makeup, I had put on my usual things and gotten an enormous amount of work done, entirely finished the vibernum and almost completely pruned and repaired the spaliéd bouganvillea by the time she announced she had it. She said I was “a natural.” I replied I was surely the most unnatural in the world: I had had to drown myself in something that made me utterly forget the camera, clicking away. She said being able to forget it was what made me a natural.

My favorite photo, however, turned out to be the one with Sam. You barely see him, in the living room, slightly out of focus and from the side and back, heading toward the kitchen door. The Volvo's keys dangle like dull platinum from his index finger. Yet some
how she had managed to make him the focal point of the portrait. Everything comes through, the teenage slouch, the sneakers. Howard, his arm around my shoulders about to be photographed, twists backward on the sofa to shoot Sam an order over his shoulder, and you can tell Sam is laughing as he talks back. A flash of white teeth. She had caught Howard in the act of preparing a pose but disrupted by the act of fathering. I am sitting, gazing at the camera's lens but clearly not concentrating on it, since it was the instant before my eyebrows went up and I said, Oh, Howard, he's been driving for six months, leave him alone!

It's quite brilliant, actually. I love this family portrait.

Poor Justin. He didn't put the phone down for four days.

The Browning anecdote David distilled nicely, following it with one dark anonymous quote (“Her political views are seductive; I think she's actually a crypto reactionary”) and then Jeffrey Katzenberg: “Anne's politics are kind of a cipher,” he said (“with a grin”).

It was a revelation to me. I was a bitch (anonymous), I was one of Hitchcock's icy, thin, elegant, perfect blondes. (This from a pathologically insecure talent manager, who I had to admit did give a good physical description.) They were in awe of me, they loved me, they were frightened of me. I was a snob. No, I was sweet and caring “to those who really know her.” (This from someone who didn't.) I found myself stunned by it, and fascinated. Howard has been written about hundreds of times, though never in anything close to this depth, and I startled him when he put his arm around me gently and asked, somewhat warily, was I OK? Reading what people said? People said anything, Anne, people were jealous and small.

I wiped at my eyes, and he moved to hold me, but I said, No, no, and he moved back just a bit and was surprised to see that I was wearing an elated expression as I struggled to express what I felt. I was trying to figure out what this was exactly. I said it was such a strange pleasure.

“How is this a pleasure?”

We'd read, “The thing you've got to know about Anne is she's married to Howard Rosenbaum, and Rosenbaum's an exec with fearsome connections. His New York bookworld contacts make him a real exotic, yet no one plays the home game better. Without him, she's nothing.” And someone else, who said, “I wouldn't say she's an opportunist, necessarily.” I was brilliant, and I was cold. Something (undefined) had made me frightened of intimacy, I kept people at a distance, everyone except Howard, whom I needed like air. I believed passionately in things, I was constantly thinking about “esoteric subjects”—they cited public school education policy. (I said to Howard, The education crisis is “esoteric”?)—you can't spend a minute with Anne without sensing the wheels turning. And the books! She's so goddamn well-read it's like, you know, she's lived a hundred lives in other places, and so sometimes you kind of think she's not really in this one. And she can say things in ways that people read as unfeeling or cold. Though that (many of the anonymous quoters were identified as intimates of mine; I didn't know I had so many intimates), that was just my surface, you know, and if you really
knew
me like they did, you understood that I
wasn't
cold or unfeeling. In fact, they explained, it made me very unhappy to be perceived that way. But I didn't know how to be otherwise. (This was in fact true.)