Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“I think she was just tired. She’d worked nonstop for three years, with all of us riding on her shoulders, but she didn’t think that was the reason. She told me she could feel it. Thistle was leaving. This child was literally growing up on television, doing what she did in front of seventy or eighty million people every day, and she felt like she was failing. She felt the talent, the spark, whatever it was that Thistle represented to her, slipping away. Going out, like a candle. And there she was, under those lights, under all those eyes, surrounded by people whose paychecks depended on her, her father just dead and her mother glaring at her whenever things weren’t perfect, and she was failing . We all fail, all actors, we all have bad takes and sometimes whole bad days, but she’d never had a bad minute, and suddenly here they were, one after another after another. And she was just a kid. So what she believed was that she’d never had talent, really, it had all been Thistle, and Thistle was leaving.”

“I heard her say it a couple of times. She said, That wasn’t me, it was Thistle .”

“Exactly,” Lissa said. “And it just got worse and worse. Because, of course, who she was, when Thistle was gone, was a failure. She was a phony, someone who was pretending to do things she couldn’t really do, and everyone was beginning to see that she couldn’t do it. I’ll never in my life, not if I live to be a hundred, forget the morning in season five after the TV Guide review came out that panned her. I remember every word of it. It said, ‘The problem with the show is that Thistle Downing seems to have lost what used to be the surest touch in television. Before, she dominated the scripts, but now she’s just trying to live up to them. And the scripts aren’t much to live up to.’ And then the press piled on. The child was twelve or thirteen years old.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Everyone on the set was so kind to her that day,” Lissa said. “I think it would have been better if we’d all made jokes about it, or just surrounded her and hugged her, even though I think Californians overestimate the healing power of a hug. But that would have been better than what she got. Everyone was just so, please sit here Thistle; lovely take, Thistle; that was wonderful, Thistle; let’s do it one more time, Thistle . It was enough to make you sick. About four o’clock, she disappeared. The call went out for her, we were all in place on the set, and she just wasn’t there. We looked absolutely everywhere for her-I honestly think some of us were afraid she’d done herself harm-but it turned out she’d gone out to the street, gotten into a cab, and just taken off. A week later, she told me she’d come up here, up where her father was.” She fell silent for a moment. “She had nowhere to run, so she ran to a rose bush.”

Lissa Wellman took off the big glasses and touched the sides of her index fingers to her lower eyelids, a blotting motion. She put both hands on the wheel and sat there, chewing on her upper lip, her sunglasses forgotten in her lap, and looked at the featureless weathered redwood wall in front of us as though something were written there. “I could have helped more than I did,” she said. “I always told her I loved her. And she believed me, God help her. She didn’t know how little it meant. Everybody in show business loves everybody else so much, it’s darling this and darling that, people fall in love and drink together and swear eternal friendship and then the shoot ends and we all lose each other’s phone numbers. I loved Thistle, but it was something like that, sort of talk-show love, not the kind of all-out, no-holds-barred, no-questions-asked, I’ll-love-you-forever-no-matter-what love she needed. Probably still needs. And, of course, no one was giving her that except the millions of fans who never got anywhere near her and who were beginning to wonder what was wrong with her anyway. Who were beginning to change the station. Abandoning her by the tens of thousands every week. So the problems started. The tantrums, the lines she didn’t learn because she didn’t believe she could do the scene, the days she was late because she couldn’t sleep at night and then couldn’t get out of bed because she was terrified of failing again.” She sighed. “And the drugs.”

“The drugs could kill her,” I said.

“If they haven’t already. Killed whatever was inside her, I mean. Doing something creative is tough, but it comes from a fragile place. I can name lots of people who killed their talent with less cause than Thistle. I think Hollywood’s continuing fascination with zombies comes from the fact that there are so many of them among us. They look the same, they sound the same, but they’ve been unplugged. The thing that made us want to look at them, listen to them: it’s gone. They’re still here, but they’re just waiting to be embalmed. I’d do anything, I’d give years off my life, to turn the clock back for that girl.”

“She’s still in there,” I said. “She doesn’t believe anything good about herself, but she’s still in there.”

Lissa Wellman put a hand on my wrist. “Listen. In your life, there must have been one horrible, unforgettable, humiliating moment, maybe when you were ten or eleven, at the most sensitive time in your life, there must have been one moment when you wished you could disappear forever. More than that, not only wanting to disappear, but wishing you’d never existed at all. A moment that can still make you cringe, twenty or twenty-five years later.”

“There was,” I said.

“Well, multiply that moment by a million, imagine it happening to you on national television, and make it last for four years .” She put the sunglasses back on and looked away from me, toward the life and color of the roses, rooted in people’s dead loved ones. “That’s what happened to Thistle Downing.”

By the time I was back in my own car, making the long climb out of Hidden Valley, the sun was close to the day’s finish line. The expensive homes in the basin beneath me were being swallowed up in the mountains’ shadows, the rooftops just darker rectangles against the darkness of the earth, but the sky was still a thinly scattered blue, and high above me the tops of the Santa Monica mountains gleamed in the last of the sunlight. I had the windows down, feeling a new cooling in the air. Sometimes, in the middle of the hottest summer, the Los Angeles nights will suddenly turn cold, as though to remind us that this place was the next thing to a desert before the old men stole all that water and piped it down here to the thirsty city.

6:10 by my watch. Almost six hours since anyone had seen Thistle. And I still had no idea where she was.

Something Lissa Wellman had said to me was picking at a corner of my mind, something about the relationship between Thistle and Edith, but try as I would, I couldn’t focus on it. There was an answer there somewhere, if I could get a clear view of it. And I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my own position. No matter how ridiculous they were at times, Hacker and Wattles were not comic figures, and Rabbits Stennet was undiluted murder. And yet I was finding it difficult to see myself actually doing anything that would put Thistle Downing in front of the cameras with those five gym rats.

With nothing else to do, I decided to head back to the Camelot Arms. It was possible she’d finally made it home, that she was there alone now, bewildered by the destruction of the few things she’d called her own. She’d need someone with her. She’d probably need someone to hide her, at least for the time being.