It took old Birgit about a solid red-hot minute of staring and disbelieving and remembering to realize who she was listening to. When she did, she almost went into meltdown. Richard Randall had been a little nerd in the class no one ever noticed. Now Richard had become Rochelle and looked like a Las Vegas sex goddess. Our girl was trying to regain her balance and gravity in a world that had suddenly gone weightless, while Rochelle rattled on, wanting only to reminisce about the time they were in Oklahoma together. Wouldn’t you have loved to be there, watching the whole thing?
Some people have to be struck by lightning; others cut up their bodies to make change happen. I was much luckier. I only had to look at my life to see I loved no one, had no passion for anything, didn’t care what happened today or tomorrow or next week. You asked why I left all that and came here. Now that I’ve thought about it like this, I think the answer’s kind of easy. Life has to have some geography. Color, mountains, variety… If not, you’re just living on the moon or out in the desert. When you watch those nature documentaries, you learn that only the weirdest, most sturdy lizards and bugs can survive where it’s either hot or cold and never anything else. That’s not me. Perhaps what I realized most of all was that I was losing my geography, whatever richness I had inside. No, wait a minute: maybe what I realized was I was becoming one of those nasty little desert bugs who spend days digging endless tunnels into the sand.
Enough of this.
Ciao, Main—
Arlen
Dear Rose,
Here it is, the end of May and I haven’t written you in too long. Please forgive. The truth of the matter is, I’ve been in a funk for weeks, and no matter how many Sacher tortes or glasses of new white wine I drink, I can’t seem to get over my self-inflicted bruise. Part of it resulted from a big mistake I made after writing to you.
When I retired and moved here, I swore I would not “be” Arlen Ford anymore, not the Arlen that people knew me as. Oh, sure, once in a while someone stops me on the street to ask for an autograph, and that’s nice, but otherwise I don’t want it. I recently rented an old Tony Curtis film, The Great Imposter, and watched it with the greatest longing. The character fakes his way through many different lives and professions and gets away with almost every one because he’s so good at what he does. People don’t question his authority. I know it’s naïve of me to ask, but why can’t we stop living a certain way and simply change direction without being brought to task by others? I know it sounds bratty, but I do not want to be an actress anymore; it left me empty and hugely unhappy, and the time came when I realized I wasn’t a person as much as a personality. Acting is a wonderful profession, especially when you’re successful, but is it ungrateful to say I’ve had enough of it and want to do something else now? What? What do I want to do? Unfortunately, I don’t know yet, but it took me half my life to decide I wanted to be an actress. Maybe it’ll take the other half to decide what’s next. In the meantime, the past sticks like something ugly on the bottom of my shoe.
What am I talking about? An Italian journalist appeared on the doorstep recently and asked if he could do an interview. I was surprised at his chutzpah for just showing up without being invited, but I like people with nerve as long as they aren’t obnoxious. I invited him in for a cup of tea.
At first he seemed an interesting guy. He knew a lot about my films and was a good talker. A pleasant chat on a Wednesday morning. Attractive too, in a skinny way, and as I told you before, I’ve been celibate a long time. The fact that he was good-looking didn’t hurt. I wasn’t going to go to bed with him, but it’s nice being in a room with a pretty boy. We talked, had a few giggles, and I thought, Oh what the hell, let’s do the interview. Maybe it’ll be interesting.
It started out innocently enough. Stock questions: Why did you retire? Why did you choose to live in Austria? What was your favorite role? I tried to be clever, sprightly, and amusing. But about halfway through, an ugly look came into his eye that said he wasn’t having any of it. Finally, I stopped being darling Arlen and asked what he really wanted. He smiled like a barracuda with a million teeth and said he had enough material for the interview; could we now talk off the record? What do you mean, Mr. Interview Man? Well, the word’s going around that the real reason Arlen Ford so gracefully stepped down from the silver screen is that she has AIDS: she’s dying of the media’s favorite disease but naturally doesn’t want anyone to know. As if I were going to pull a Freddy Mercury and tell the world a day before I died.
Instead of getting riled, I said I’d be happy to show him the results of a blood test I’d taken three weeks before, when I’d had a full medical examination for my Austrian health insurance application. He said he’d like to see that. Still calm, I went to my study and got the papers. See, no AIDS. Next question? The son of a bitch had more!
The most disturbing thing was that I’ve never spoken with a journalist who had done his homework better. He seemed to know more about me than was possible. When I asked where he’d found all this information, he said he had spent a month and a half on special assignment researching my background. I suddenly knew what it must have felt like for people to go in front of Joseph McCarthy’s committee in the 1950s and be questioned about meetings they had attended or people they’d talked to twenty years before. It was frightening, but more than that it was terribly, terribly depressing. Once I got used to them, his questions were really no more than annoying; but what was awful, Rose, was that I started feeling like a drowning person whose life was flashing in front of her before she went under for the last time. And what I saw, I hated.
What have we done to deserve grace or forgiveness? I gave up a career because it left me empty at the end of the day, which scared me. But have your life spread in front of you like a map, or flash in front of you as if you’re a dying man, and you cringe at the mistakes, the gluttony, the waste. I desperately wanted a computer printout like that AIDS test, a simple piece of paper that said in black and white that I was all right, clean. Only this paper would testify in crisp scientific numbers and reassuring medical terms that I’d lived okay. There’d be a range from zero to ten, and if you fell anywhere in there, you were following an essentially valid path and needn’t be concerned. But I didn’t have a paper to shove in his face. This nasty little nematode threw details and facts at me: comments from old lovers and acquaintances (he even had a statement from our beloved eleventh-grade English teacher), reviews of my work going all the way back to the first film, ticket sale numbers on the flops… and it all added up to a big so what.
When I was a little girl, my parents were lent a summer bungalow with a big back yard. Mom invited a friend over for coffee one afternoon. While the two of them were talking, I was up in my favorite tree, practicing Indian war cries and having fun. Mom told me a few times to calm down but I wouldn’t. Finally her friend got ticked off and said, loud enough for me to hear, “What that girl needs is a good inferiority complex.” Well, thirty years later it’s happened.
I didn’t tell you about this, but I’ve been doing volunteer work at the children’s hospital in Vienna. I said I’d do anything they wanted, so they assigned me to a special ward of terminally ill kids who speak only English. I go every day and read to them or play games—basically, whatever they’re in the mood to do. I got the idea from Weber after he told me about working with cancer patients in New York.