Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“I never actually saw her until recently,” I said. “I guess what I saw was filmed in the middle nineties, and it looked like it, except for her. She looked like her performance was ninety seconds old.”

“The really good ones don’t date. And the really awful ones don’t, either, they’re just as horrid today as they were fifty years ago. It’s the rest of us who get frozen in a moment, a style, a way of being-in my case, I guess, a woman, what everybody’s idea of a woman was then. The hairstyles don’t help, of course, but that’s not what’s really wrong. What’s really wrong is that tastes change. Nobody eats baked Alaska any more, nobody wants their refrigerator to be avocado green, and no actor overplays on camera, but there was a time when those things were the ne plus ultra . And film, of course, unlike avocado-colored refrigerators, never goes away. On the other hand, some things don’t date at all. A simple white refrigerator, a perfect apple pie, great acting. They appeal as much now as they did fifty years ago.”

“Some child actors are instinctively perfect,” she said. “Thistle was one of those. It’s not so surprising, I guess. Give a boy a towel to tie around his shoulders and he can fly. Give a little girl a doll-I’m aware that my attitudes here are not exactly breaking news-give a little girl a doll and a toy set of cups and saucers, and she’ll have a tea party. But eventually they stop playing, while Thistle could turn it on all day long, ten hours a day, and it went way, way beyond simply believing what she was doing. She was phenomenally inventive. The thing I heard her say most often on the set was, ‘I did it that way before,’ and what that meant was that she was about to come up with a completely different approach to presenting, say, shock or surprise or guilt or incomprehension. She’d ask for a minute, and she’d sit on the couch if we were in the living room or on one of the kitchen chairs if we were shooting in there, and she’d close her eyes. Sometimes she’d laugh while her eyes were still closed. Then she’d get up and say, “Okay,” and nail it in one take. And woe betide the director who was new to the show and who didn’t want to give Thistle one of her little timeouts. Everyone in the studio jumped on him.”

“And so they should have.”

“We were the biggest problem, because we laughed. She’d catch us off guard and we’d just stand there, laughing, and the scene would grind to a stop. How she loved it when that happened. You know how much she looked like an elf? At those moments, she looked like the naughtiest elf in the swarm, if that’s what you call a bunch of elves, like she’d just gotten the idea to put the donkey ears on old Bottom.”

“This was in the early days?”

“Yes.” She put both hands on the steering wheel and looked at her wedding ring, which had caught fire in the sun. “Really the first three years. They were magic, in so many ways. The trouble is that Thistle thought it was magic, too, and believed to the center of her being that it was. And that left her defenseless. Oh, how can I explain this without it sounding crazy? You know, lots of creative people feel like someone else is actually doing the work. Some of the best writers I know say that the words come through them, from somewhere else, that the characters talk and all the writer does is try to get it down before it fades. It’s not like they’re making things up. It’s like someone is telling them the story, and they’re just, I don’t know, taking dictation.”

“I’ve read pieces where writers say things like that.”

“Well, Thistle believed that there actually was someone named Thistle , someone talented who lived inside her and did all the good work. Her real name was Edith, did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“After we got to know each other-after we realized we had a hit and we were going to be working together for a while instead of being broken up after three or four months of filming-she told me what had happened. She said that Thistle just appeared, just came out of nowhere, at her first reading for the show. Even told her what her name was, and that was the name Edith gave the casting director. And, look: she got the part. All she had to do was relax and let Thistle do whatever she wanted. So she did, just read the lines the way Thistle wanted them read and added some physical business Thistle thought of. The casting director left the room and came back with the three executive producers, guys who don’t laugh at anything, and asked to see the scene again, and this time Thistle did something completely different, something even better. Even the producers were laughing, but the casting director quieted them down and said, ‘Once more. Differently this time.’ And she got what she asked for, the best one yet. And of course, she got the part. They made an offer that evening.”

“And Thistle-I mean, Edith-didn’t believe she was the one who had done it.”

“She never did. She, Edith I mean, would take the script home and learn the lines, and when she got to the set in the morning, all she had to do was open up and let Thistle in, and Thistle would move Edith around like a hand puppet.”

A hand puppet , she’d said to Hacker.

“That’s what she was doing when she sat with her eyes closed. She believed she was opening up to Thistle. And that’s what she did, scene after scene, show after show.”

“What did you think about it?”

She shook her head, a gesture packed with regret. “I didn’t give it the thought it deserved. Like everybody else, I was just happy to be part of the show, happy that Thistle could keep it up, keep the people tuning in, keep the damn ratings up. Keep the money coming in. And, of course, everyone was afraid of screwing up Thistle’s process. Afraid for our own sakes, not hers. We were like an army that was being led from victory to victory by someone who believed he was Napoleon. The cities are falling one after another, all this booty is landing in our laps, and who’s going to go into his tent and tell him he’s really Harold Mednick? Who’s going to tell him he’s suffering a delusion? So we all went along with it, with the Thistle idea, even though we knew perfectly well that she was simply the most talented child-oh, hell, one of the most talented actresses -we’d ever worked with. We listened to her talk about Thistle and never said a word.

“I remember telling myself-guess I was actually comforting myself-that the whole thing was just a phase she was going through, like an imaginary friend, and that she’d grow out of it, and realize that the talent was hers, that she was really the one doing all the work.”

“But,” I said.

“But I didn’t tell her that, and there was no one else who could, no one who mattered to her. God knows her mother didn’t. I really think the reason Edith made Thistle up in the first place was that her mother had always told her how ordinary she was, how unattractive she was. So if the child was suddenly capable of all that , getting laughs, getting applause, becoming a star , there had to be a reason. Thistle was the reason. And then her father died, just as Thistle started slipping away.”

“Slipping away?”

“That’s how she described it. She’d been having harder and harder weeks, weeks when the sitting sessions got longer, and the work wasn’t as fresh. You could see her grabbing for inspiration, thrashing around like someone who’s afraid she’s drowning. And she came up with things, eventually, but not on the same plane. Before, she’d been startling, and now she was just good. She was relying more and more on technique.”

“I saw that,” I said. “In the shows I watched.”