Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

But, I console myself; it’s only thirty seconds or so of screen time, no real sweat. She still looks elegant as hell.

Dash reads the rewritten pages, while Lillian paces on the beach, tries to smoke a cigarette, tries not to watch. He finally walks over to her, an agonizingly slow walk.

DASH

It’s the best play anyone’s written in a long time.

(Ah, a play, she’s been writing a play. .)

LILLIAN

Are you sure?

DASH

I’m positive.

LILLIAN

(A beat.)

But are you sure ?

Cut to: Success, acclaim, opening night at Sardi’s, where Lillian is overwhelmed by Brava s and applause. “They think I’m wonderful,” she babbles on the phone to Dash, “I’m the toast of the town!” Later, back at the beach house, she tells Dash that she likes being famous and fantasizes about what to do with the royalties pouring in — a sable coat? Or should she give it all to Roosevelt? — and Dash reminds her:

DASH

It’s only fame, Lily. It’s just a paint job. If you want a sable coat, go buy one. Just remember: It doesn’t have anything to do with writing. It’s only a sable coat and doesn’t have anything to do with writing.

Who cares? She goes off on a fancy tour of Europe, bejeweled and lipsticked, wearing her sable coat and hanging out with Hemingway and Dorothy Parker and Cocteau. She dances, she’s feted, she’s now staying at the Ritz. But a friend of Julia’s mysteriously appears (Maximilian Schell, soft-voiced and gentle), with a request from Julia that Lillian carry money into Berlin — they need cash to smuggle out Jews and political prisoners. Even I feel the sudden shame of that sable coat; Lillian feels obligated and guilty, and I don’t blame her. One play! Written in mere seconds of screen time, and now look at all that jewelry — doesn’t she owe the world more than that?

Work hard. Take chances. Be very bold.

What a failure she is, I think. What a fraud. How will she ever face Julia again?

But Lillian agrees to do it; she gets on a train to Berlin, wearing thousands of dollars stashed in a fetching fur hat (I didn’t really want the sable coat, but I wanted that hat), and passes the time in reverie about Julia. Passing through Customs at the German border, Lillian is questioned by a Border Guard, a Central Casting Aryan, who raises an eyebrow at the Jewish-sounding “Hellman” and asks:

BORDER GUARD

What is your occupation?

LILLIAN

I’m a writer.

BORDER GUARD

A writer ?

LILLIAN

Yes.

BORDER GUARD

So. . (menacing pause) you would write of Berlin?

LILLIAN

Oh, no, I wouldn’t.

BORDER GUARD

Perhaps your impressions, you would write?

LILLIAN

My impressions? Yes, I would, write my impressions. .

She’s just a playwright , for heaven’s sake, I think — what’s all the fuss? What in the world is so threatening? I’m surprised and confused that this is what causes the stumble, rather than her Jewishness. I don’t understand the threat — it’s the money in the hat that’s dangerous, isn’t it? Why does her being a writer disconcert?

But I’m thirteen; I’m too busy being thrilled by the answer to Occupation and how seriously that’s taken. For the first time I imagine some stranger asking me that, my filling it out on a form, the public declaration of that identity. I feel the same thrill I felt at six, the same rich whiff of paper and pencil and ink.

And this is the end of the Writing. Lillian makes it safely to Berlin and, in a clandestine café meeting over caviar, delivers the money to Julia. It is their farewell scene; Julia is murdered soon after, and Lillian spends many scenes trying to find out how and why and in despair at the loss of her friend, her beloved mentor and muse.

But Lillian gets to have it all, do it all — the beach house, the bathrobe and the sable coat, and saving a little bit of the world, too. And if we never heard a word of her writing, or even what she was writing about ( did she write her impressions of Berlin?), it doesn’t matter. I’m even more profoundly, delusionally in love with the Writer, not the Writing, with the beach house, with Paris, with the bread and cheese, with walks on the beach, with the sound of that typewriter, with being loved and feted by glamorous, brilliant, vivid-eyed friends, with the identity.

This is what I decide I like: The paint job. This is what I decide to work for.

I graduated high school, I went off to college, I kept very busytrying to become a Writer without doing any Writing. This wasn’t too hard — I could still pass as a writer, mostly thanks to other people’s assumptions; I was terrible at math, and if you’re terrible at math but possess a basic verbal competence, it can get balanced out by appearing that you’re gifted at words; I turned in good reports because my father, in the guise of helping me with homework, rewrote my school papers word for word, and then he’d get the As; I loved to act in school plays, thus receiving a cross-genre benefit (somehow, liking to be in plays helps people assume you must like writing them); and because I genuinely loved to read, and if you carry a book everywhere, you easily get labeled as a writer as well as a reader. At college I declared myself an English lit major, because all the reading involved in being an English lit major would be good preparation for when I magically became a Writer. I even started writing my own papers, without my father’s help; I still got As, but that wasn’t real writing, that was just fulfilling assignments, rote, formulaic, Discuss the Symbolism of the White Whale assignments, and I didn’t flake out on assignments.

A friend and I went to see Reds . 99I’d been looking for other images of writers in movies since Julia , the way I stayed alert for glimpses of sex. The Shining had a novelist, who holes up for the winter in an abandoned hotel with his wife and kid. 100He writes, literally, like mad; lots of shots of Jack typing, in a growing frenzy, wildly productive, until it’s revealed his accumulated pages are the output of a diseased mind; we/his wife discover the thick sheaf of paper contains only one sentence over and over, in varying layouts: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. Lots of fun, but Jack wasn’t a real writer, and the lesson here is clear: When someone works too hard at writing, that someone will go insane and run after loved ones with an axe. (i.e.: Writing is unhealthy.)

Better when writing is all play. Rich and Famous had two writers, a Serious Writer and a Trashy Writer, neither of whom we ever see either write a word or evince any desire to Save the World — all I remember is Jacqueline Bisset, as the Serious Writer, flying to New York to see her editor and having sex on the plane with a handsome guy, which seemed like a pretty cool lark; Jacqueline meeting her editor at the Algonquin for drinks, which seemed like the most sophisticated thing a person could ever do; and Candice Bergen, the Trashy Writer, living in yet another house on the beach. 101Paint job, paint job, paint job.

But Reds offered a three-and-a-half-hour beehive of writers, journalists, poets, and playwrights, arguing politics in cafés, wearing fabulous late-Edwardian clothes — and also, again, frolicking in a clapboard beach house. They drink a lot. Their explicit aim is, like Julia, to Save the World, but also, in the midst of an epistolary rant about Socialist politics and liberating the oppressed American worker, John Reed interrupts himself to explain to his girlfriend, Louise Bryant, that he’s unhappy with the rhyme scheme of his in-progress poem about lilies, that he must change it as soon as he can. Flower poems and revolutionary action are placed on a par. What does one have to do with the other? I wonder. How can you liberate an oppressed worker with a lily poem? That’s hardly the stuff of sneaking money across Nazi-thick Europe.