Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“Isn’t that the cliché about movies, Vikar,” her head still against the upholstery, as she peers at him from beneath half shut eyelids, “that they’re dreams?”

“I have this dream. I mean the same dream, all the time. Every time I go to the movies, that night I dream and it’s the same. There’s a rock, it’s night and the moon is full, someone lies on top of the rock waiting for something terrible.”

“Is it you?” Perhaps there’s a slight slur to her words.

“No. At the top of the rock is ancient white writing. The rock is open, like a …” Vikar stops and after a moment says, “I cheated on Elizabeth Taylor.”

“There’s no such thing,” Dotty says, “as cheating when you go to the movies. Don’t you know that? Just like there’s no such thing as cheating in dreams. In the movies you get to fall in love with who you want, sleep with who you want, live happily ever after as often as you want. Liz,” she says, “understands. If anyone understands, it’s Liz.”

“When you work on a movie like that, do you know what it’s going to be?”

She turns in her seat. “Can we have two more? Excuse me?” The bartender in the shadows on the other side of the room looks up. “Two more?”

Vikar hasn’t started his first one yet. “When you’re making a movie like A Place in the Sun ?”

“You mean do you know it’s going to be great?” She shrugs, “Of course not. You understand you’ve got a first-rate director, a first-rate cinematographer, a fairly blazing cast … ironically, at the time the gamble was Liz, she hadn’t done anything grown-up, and Shelley was cast completely against type — but Monty, Monty was the hot young actor in Hollywood, he already had done Red River, The Search with Fred Zinnemann, and, uh …” she stops to think, shaking her head groggily, “… oh God …”

“Are you all right?”

“The other one. First picture I ever worked on.” The drinks come. “Monty and Olivia de Havilland.”

“ The Heiress .”

“ The Heiress . I wasn’t supposed to be on that at all because I wasn’t union, always suspected it might have been Monty himself who got me in — he was sweet that way. Up till then I was a messenger girl on the lot running notes back and forth among Billy Wilder and Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich, who were making a picture and couldn’t abide each other. Cutting was easier than a lot of things for a woman to get into, because in their quaint way Mayer and Warner and Zanuck and Zukor all had this idea that editing was like sewing. Brando was just coming along, shooting Streetcar when we were doing Sun , still an unknown quantity as far as pictures were concerned — so Monty was it and everyone knew except maybe sometimes Monty himself, who always had that thing great artists have, tortured doubt half the time and arrogance the other half … or maybe he knew he was It and couldn’t stand it. I worked on another picture with him years later, Suddenly, Last Summer , after his accident, and it was even more obvious then when you could see what he lost, not just his face but his spirit. At his peak he seemed somehow both modern and classic at the same time … so we knew we had the stuff for a good picture. But when you’re actually shooting the thing? You don’t know the iris of Monty’s eye is going to turn into a distant boat on a lake. At the moment you’re shooting it, Monty’s just another flesh-and-blood entity, right there, right then, before he gets turned into something else. Before he gets translated .” She says, “I suppose I’m one of the first people who has an idea a picture might be special, because in the editing room that’s when it really gets made into what it is.”

“Yes.”

Dotty lets out a sigh so heavy it startles him. “Young man, most pictures, they stay in the time they’re made. A really good picture — say, Casablanca —lives beyond the time it’s made, and then there are a few perfect pictures, a few sublime pictures— The Third Man, The Shop Around the Corner , that silent Joan of Arc picture of yours — that exist before they’re made …”

“The movie is in all times,” says Vikar, “and all times are in the movie.”

“… but the making of any movie, it’s in the here-and-now, it’s in the here-and-now no matter how much you want to be some place else,” the bourbon beginning to take over, “any place else. Sometimes you throw yourself into the work just to get out of the here-and-now. When I was working on the Stevens picture, the here-and-now,” she blinks heavily, “was the hell-and-gone. I was,” she takes another drink, “in love, of course. Ever been in love, of course?”

“No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”

She blinks at him. “What?”

“It’s from My Darling Clementine .”

“This isn’t a joke,” she says quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck it.”

“I’m sorry.”

She lapses into a deep silence. “Fuck it.”

105.

She says, “I was twenty-nine, about to turn thirty, which in those days was like being, well, practically like being the age I am now, ha. He was thirty-nine, an actor — a married actor … you knew that was coming, didn’t you? … big actor of the day though I don’t know how many remember him now … couple of Oscar nominations, even some loose talk about him for the Monty role in Sun , but Monty was in the middle of his hot streak and this other actor, his hot streak was ending. Boxing picture, Lana Turner picture, crazy Joan Crawford picture where he played, uh … a violinist? Or … and this big prestige picture about anti-Semitism everyone was talking about … So the world saw this guy who seemed on a hot streak when, really, everything was coming apart. A few years before, he and his wife lost their little girl, to a sore throat , if you can believe it — so his marriage was falling apart and he and I were sleeping together and it was all very hot hot hot going cold cold cold, dead cold, cadaver cold, and if the public didn’t know, well he knew and I knew and Hollywood knew and the House Un-American Activities Committee, they sure well knew. Someone’s been drinking my drink,” she says suspiciously, holding the bourbon glass up to the dim Nickodell light, then dropping her head back again on the red upholstery behind her and Vikar can’t tell if the bourbon is making her memories hazier or bringing them into focus, “… all falling apart … ran Ingrid out of the country for having a baby by a husband that didn’t happen to be hers — well at least he was a husband, hey, Vikar? somebody’s husband — ran out Orson for having been a loose cannon ever since they wheeled him on deck, ran out Chaplin for his politics or for not paying his taxes or liking his girls too young or take your pick or take the whole lot. The courts made the studios sell off their theater chains, people were hauled in front of Congress for being stupid enough to attend some meeting fifteen years before, then there was television which as far as the studios were concerned was worst of all. Night Jules died, not long after I finished Sun , he was in New York and called me here in L.A. and I could tell he was in trouble. I got the next plane out. Never belonged to anything in his life let alone anything political, it wasn’t his style — didn’t know any names to name but wouldn’t have named any if he had, of course, and they knew that, of course, and while the Committee’s about to charge him with perjury he’s also getting it from the other side, the lefties who’re pissed at him for testifying at all, including his wife, she’s busting his balls too. Got to the city about one in the morning, let myself in the flat there in Gramercy Park that a friend kept for us in her name, I could smell the liquor and cigarette smoke and I could hear him sleeping and I curled up and went to sleep next to him and sometime in the night I woke and he hadn’t moved and I knew he wasn’t sleeping anymore. So-called ‘confession’ on the desk, though nothing was confessed. Paramount got some of the other studios, UA, Zanuck over at Fox, to circulate this story he’d died in bed with, I don’t know, a stripper or something, in order to protect me, and in some state of stupefaction — and I do mean stupe, Vik — I let them do it and that’s my cross to bear. So when all that’s going on, you’re not thinking too much about whether Place in the Sun is going to make it to Movie Valhalla, and the last thing you’re thinking is twenty years later you’re going to run into some guy with a scene of it on top of his head.”