Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. One evening at the interval of a play at the Royal Court I saw a girl — she was so lovely and gamine that I could not think of that creature as anything but a girl — who was speaking American English to a female friend she had come with. I noticed that she was wearing Capezios. Catching her alone for a moment, I made my move. My predations at that time often had a theatrical background.
"You're a dancer," I told her.
She was in fact a dancer. I asked her if she cared for dinner or coffee or a drink after the play, but she didn't want to leave her friend alone. Today I would have given her my phone number, but not then, so I asked for hers and she gave it to me. On our first date we went to an Italian place in Hampstead. Jennifer had spent two years with the Frankfurt Ballet, and when we met she was in England pondering options. European cities were losing their state art subsidies, and there was no shortage of young dancers from Britain and the States. I took her home, not pressing it. Our second meeting was on Highgate Hill, and as we walked to Ken Wood we told each other the story of our lives. This was the wonder-of-me stage of our courtship and it was genuinely sweet.
It turned out that Jennifer, notwithstanding her adorable long-toothed smile and freckled nose, had been around the block, a runaway child and an exotic dancer — a teenage stripper — in New Orleans. Her nice parents in Oak Lawn had reclaimed her and sent her back to ballet school, first in Dallas, finally in New York. As a student she had gotten into cocaine and danced a Nutcracker in Princeton, where the falling-snow effects, she said, made her sneeze. We were so easy with each other, at the same time so intoxicated. It was lovely.
In London, although there was plenty of blow about, she abstained, and in that hard-drinking city she stayed sober. She put up with my boozing, but sweetly let me know she did not want to see the other. I thought often about moving her into the place in St. John's Wood. Since the Pritchards showed no sign of returning, I had stayed in it after the script was done and kept it on my own for months afterward, working on originals. For some reason we never got to the point of moving in together that year. Then I got a call — like all your Hollywood Calling calls, it came in the middle of the night — asking me if I would come out and talk about another deathless number. I decided to go, and when I told Jennifer, she cried.
"I thought we were long-term."
It just about broke my heart. "We are long-term," I hastened to say. I wondered if she would ask to come with me. I probably would have taken her. At the same time, I wanted to see Lucy.
Back in L.A., it was a dry, sunny winter inland with a mellow marine layer at the beach each morning. The place I liked that I could have was a condo in Laguna. Laguna was prettier then, but for some reason I had not known about the traffic and had not realized what was happening to Orange County. The apartment overlooked the sea and had sunsets.
I had batted out three original scripts in London. Mysteriously, the first two drew from my then agent — Mike? Marty? — more apparent sympathy than admiration. Out in the movie world, two of the three were promptly skunked. I was still used to being the boy wonder, and a midlife bout of rejection was unappealing. I didn't much like rejection. Maybe I had tried too hard, attempting to scale the new peaks of serious and adult, naively imagining for myself an autonomy that neither I nor anyone in the industry possessed. The third one, anyway, was optioned, went into turnaround and years later actually got made. But my deathless number expired.
Frustrated and depressed, I postponed calling Lucy. During my third week back I finally invited her down for another walk on the beach.
Climbing out of her dusty Jag, she looked nothing but fine. She wore turquoise and a deerskin jacket, my Fresno Indian. With her smooth tan, her skin was the color of coffee ice cream and her eyes were bright. Ever since watching her perform in the soap I had begun to think of her as beautiful.
As we set out down the beach, beside the Pacific again, she put on a baseball cap that said "Hussong's Cantina," promoting the joint in Ensenada. It was a sunny day even at the shore, and you might have called the sea sparkling. A pod of dolphins patrolled outside the point break, gliding on air, making everything in life look easy. Lucy told me she had tested for a part in our friend John's next movie, a horror picture. She was still worried about whether he had spotted the two of us walking out of Grauman's. The horror flick sounded like another bomb at best. This time Lucy had read the shooting script and knew what there was to know of the plot.
"She's a best friend. Supposed to be cute and funny. She dies."
I said that in my opinion she, Lucy, was ready for comedy.
"Tom, everyone pretty much dies horribly except the leads. It's a horror flick."
We had a nice day and night.
A week later I went up to Silver Lake, where Lucy had moved after selling her trailer in Malibu. Her bungalow had some plants out front with an orangy spotlight playing on them, and in its beam I saw that the glass panels on her front door were smashed and the shards scattered across her doorway. Among them were pieces of what looked like a dun-colored Mexican pot. This was all alarming, since her door would now admit all that lived, crawled and trawled in greater L.A. Moreover, there was blood. When she let me in I asked her about it but got no answer. She brought us drinks and I lit a joint I had brought and she began to cry. Suddenly she gave me a sly smile that in the half darkness of the patio reminded me of the weeping Indian maid I had rescued on the next seat at Grauman's.
"I'm in difficulty," she said.
I said I could see that. It turned out to be all about bloody Heathcliff, Brion Pritchard, still on the scene and newly cast in the horror movie. Third-rate art was staggering toward real life again: Brion was the man who got to stab her repeatedly in the forthcoming vehicle.
"How can they do that?" I asked her. "Another of John's movies and Pritchard gets to kill you again. Isn't that like stupid?"
"He's relentless," she said. "Tommy, don't ask! What do I know?"
I suppose it was I who should have known. Brion was in serious decline, succumbing to occupational ailments in a tradition that went back to the time of nickelodeons. He drank. A man of robust appetites, he also smoked and snorted and stuffed and swallowed. On top of it all, he had started lifting weights and pioneering steroids. He boozed all day and through the night, drove drunk, punched some of the wrong people. Along the Rialto, all this was being noted and remarked upon. He was a violent working-class guy, one of A. E. Houseman's beautiful doomed ploughboys, who but for talent and fortune would have drunk himself into Penrhyndeudraeth churchyard long before. Predictably, he had identified Lucy as the font of his troubles.
Shortly after dawn on the morning before my visit, Brion had come banging on Lucy's door, haranguing her in elegant English and low Welsh. Impatient to enter and mess with her, he had taken her ornamental pot and shoved in the door, cutting himself in the process, badly enough to sober him slightly and slow him down. This bought time for Lucy to call 911. She told me that when the cops came Brion gave them the old Royal Shakespeare, which by then in Hollywoodland impressed no on e. They all but begged her to press charges, although he had succeeded in hitting her only once, hard. Naturally she denied it heroically — I could well picture her playing that one — and sent them away. At least she hadn't raced to his side at the hospital.
That evening it was plain we were not going to have much of a party. I asked Lucy to come down to Laguna with me. She dawdled and I hung around until she turned me out. I was angry; moreover, I was feeling too much like what you might call a confidant. In the end I made her swear to get the door fixed or replaced, and I said I'd do it if she wouldn't. I told her to call the cops and me if the loutish Welshman accosted her again. I have to admit that if it came to action, I wanted the cops on my side.