“How many people are up here?”
“Twelve, thirteen hundred, and more every week. Buddy doesn’t charge fees, but everybody has to bring the rose, naturally, and for the first ten years they’re expected to pay twenty or thirty dollars a month for upkeep. Of course, everybody does. Some people have left the place thousands of dollars. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones continue to bloom? Properly cared for, a rose bush can live fifty or sixty years.”
“You’re a very nice woman,” I said.
“It’s easy to be nice when you’ve been blessed. Isn’t Henry blooming, though? He was never what you would have called a handsome man, although he had his angles, so it’s especially nice that he’s so beautiful now. It’s more like how he was inside.” She folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly, looking at the new incarnation of Henry for several minutes. Then she said, “Thistle’s father is here.”
I said, “Oh.”
“She fought it of course, the mother, I mean. Luella the Cruel. It’s all faggots up there, she said. She wanted to plant him in Forest Lawn, probably under a life-size sculpture of herself, paid for by Thistle, of course, with a stone saying something like, Can you imagine leaving someone like this behind? I’m sorry, I’m being terrible.”
“I’ve met her,” I said.
“Then you know. The poor child, as if she wasn’t having enough trouble by then. Oh, good heavens, you came to see me to talk about Thistle, and all I’ve done is rattle on about everything under the sun.”
“I could listen to you rattle for weeks.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you, but it’s not going to help you find out what’s happened to our girl.” She got up and blew Henry’s rose a kiss and said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Howard.” With Lissa leading the way, we left the circle and followed a path that led around a large gray boulder. On the far side of the stone was a bed of roses planted directly against the rockface, their colors especially intense on the gray background. “He’s the Sterling Silver,” she said, “the sort of lavender one. A very delicate rose, subject to mildew and other problems. In that way, I’m afraid it was an appropriate choice.” The pewter plaque read Howard Downing. “He was a pleasant man, but no match for Luella.”
“Vlad the Impaler would have been no match for Luella.”
“You know, it never ceased to amaze me that she felt no concern for that child. Later, I mean, when things began to go wrong. All the misbehavior, all the acting out and the drugs. It was just an inconvenience to Luella, an irritation. And, of course, it threatened her lifestyle. That little girl was a miracle at the beginning, but then …” She broke off, looking down at Harold Downing’s plaque. “But then,” she said, “it was just heartbreaking.”
33
“It really began in season four,” Lissa said. We were sitting in the front seat of her SUV with the doors wide open to admit the fragrance of the roses. “I’m sorry to date everything in terms of the show, but that’s how I remember those years. And, of course, Thistle was the show. In more ways than one.”
“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.”