Then came the most singular experience of all. The casting session.
“We think we’ve found our leading lady,” Riordan told me. (Or maybe it was Borgward.) “She’s made a batch of films, and we think she’s really good. So we’d like to know what you think.”
“What I think?”
“There’s going to be a private screening of a rough cut of her latest movie. It hasn’t been released yet, but you can go to the screening. And you’ll meet her, and you’ll see her work, and we’d like to know what you think.”
They showed the film at a small midtown screening room, and of course I attended, along with maybe two dozen other people. I sat on one side of a young woman named Andrea True, who was in fact the film’s star, and on her other side was a friend of hers, a guy in the business in one capacity or another.
The word surreal gets bandied about a good deal, but I’d be hard put to find a better use for it. I was sitting next to this attractive young woman while we both watched her perform sexually on a huge screen with every imaginable partner short of barnyard animals. And throughout it all she supplied a running commentary, delivered to the friend on her other side: “Oh, that came out better than I thought it would... I never thought he’d wind up using that shot... it’s awful the way the camera shows every blemish...”
Afterward the three of us went out for a bite. I seem to remember that we went to Wienerwald, but that seems too good to be true. I remember that she drank apple juice, and talked about Stanislavski and the Method.
The next day one of them called me, Borgward or Riordan. Well? What did I think? Very personable young lady, I allowed. Attractive, pleasant. Yeah, yeah, but what did I think of her as an actress?
“Well, that’s hard to say,” I said. “It depends on elements I have no way of knowing.”
Huh?
“Let me put it this way,” I said. “If she doesn’t enjoy performing fellatio, then she’s the best actress since Sarah Bernhardt.”
Somewhere along the line, everything seemed to stall out.
I don’t know what went wrong, and didn’t spend enough time with Borgward or Riordan to watch the wheels coming off, but it became evident after a while that nothing much was happening, and Jim Fenton smelled a rat. It was time to turn over the escrow account to Riordan, and he didn’t think this was a good idea; instead, he returned everybody’s investment in full.
This was fairly remarkable. Nobody I knew, and certainly none of the folks at Dell, had broken open the kid’s piggy bank in order to buy a share in Different Strokes, nor had they expected much of a return, if any, on their investment. While they’d hoped to attend a premiere and know that they’d played a small part in everything they saw up there on the screen, the fact that they got their money back was more than enough to make them happy.
I remember sitting in Bill Grose’s office. He’d just received his refund, and agreed that we all owed thanks to Jim Fenton, for his watchdog role. But he’d rather looked forward to the movie.
“No more than I,” I said. “And what really hurts is that it scuttles our book deal.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d so looked forward to publishing that book.”
And our eyes met, and I wouldn’t be surprised if little light bulbs formed in the air above our heads.
“You know,” one of us said, “just because there’s not going to be a movie—”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean there can’t be a book,” said the other.
“Of course we’ll have to forget about the stills. If there’s no movie, there won’t be stills.”
“No.”
“Or photos of the actors.”
“Or that. Of course that makes the book less expensive to produce.”
“There’s that. And the production diary doesn’t have to be limited by what really happened. It can be a much better story if it isn’t tied down by facts.”
And so I finished the book. Did I make any changes in the screenplay? I have no idea, but my guess is that I used it exactly as I’d written it. Then, of course, I had to write the production diary, but that was easy enough. It was fiction, and I’d been writing fiction for years. I liked fiction. You weren’t tied down by facts.
By the time the book came out, sometime in 1974, I had separated from my wife and moved to another apartment in New York, on West 58th Street. I don’t recall the book’s having any impact on my life or anybody else’s. It didn’t sell enough copies to go into a second printing, and by then I had less interest in John Warren Wells. I’d decided to stop writing books under that name, and pretty much forgot about that whole aspect of my career. And probably hoped the rest of the world would be equally forgetful.
Late last year I had occasion to remember Andrea True when her obituary appeared in the New York Times. Sometime in 1975, a curious set of circumstances led her into a singing career, and she had several hit records under the same name she’s used as a porn star. (Her birth name was Andrea Marie Truden.) Her story’s interesting enough to commend to your attention, but too long to recount here; the Wikipedia article is well worth a look.
She was 68 and living in New York when she died of heart failure in November of 2011.
Lawrence Block
New York City, 2012