Jane had gone to a café in Los Feliz to see a friend play music. The friend, Eli, was the drummer in a band that played songs for children, and there were mainly children in the narrow back room. The point of the show was to get the kids to dance and sing, and Jane sat close to the stage, facing, not the band, but the children in the audience, the bright attentive eyes and the small bodies hopping to the music. When the concert ended she walked with Eli to the backyard patio, which was filling up with mothers and a few fathers, and children running around a tree. The kids were all different sizes, and Jane noticed a little girl in a white dress, smaller than the others, not quite part of the group but wanting to join the group, and Jane thought to herself that the past is the past and the world does what it wants to do, and that’s when I walked into the patio. I was supposed to be there at three, so I was late, and when I saw her I walked to her. “How’s it going?” I said, and instead of kissing, she introduced me to Eli, who had curly hair.
A man was standing behind a grill making hamburgers and hot dogs, and I asked her if she wanted a hamburger. There was a salad bowl with plastic knives and forks and Jane said she’d have a salad, so we sat at a table in the shade, Jane eating her salad and Eli eating a veggie burger and I had a hamburger. We talked about the lyrics of the songs, which I hadn’t heard, but Jane liked them, and she said, “The one about the ring falling into the ocean should be in a book.”
Eli made a self-effacing joke about what he would look like trying to get the ring back, and Jane laughed, and when she turned to me I could tell she expected me to say something equally funny. But I wasn’t feeling funny. I was watching the two of them across the picnic table, and I knew, if I wanted to be Steve, I could have said something humorous to make her laugh, and maybe make Eli laugh, but I didn’t want to be a trained animal doing a trick, so I didn’t speak.
“It would be like diving into shark-infested waters,” Eli said, and he began describing himself under the water, flailing around, fending off sharks. And because I wasn’t saying anything, Eli, who was enjoying the attention, continued, describing himself talking to the shark and trying to reason with the shark, and what he was saying was funny. He was acting more like Steve than I was, and Jane was smiling at him when she turned to me.
“What about you?” she said. “What would you do?”
“To get back the ring?” I wasn’t completely sure what they were talking about anymore.
“What would you do?” she said, and what I did was sit there, remembering the shark cage I’d been in, and how that seemed like ages ago, and how Eli wasn’t in a cage and I was. And now Jane was frowning at me. Not only was I not speaking, apparently I’d been chewing my hamburger with an open mouth, something she didn’t care for. She waited until I closed my mouth and then she turned back to Eli. It was clear that she was in some kind of mood, and people have moods, I realized that, and she seemed interested in Eli, and he probably felt something about her, and I imagined the mood she was having had something to do with that.
Bonnie got me a job on a television show called Crime Story. It wasn’t a Steve Martin look-alike job, but it was something that would pay. I was hired to play a small-time thief called “The Leader,” who was trying to unload some of his stolen goods at a pawnshop. Luca, played by the star of the show, was a big-time thief who wanted to control the city’s racket, and in this one particular scene I’d left my gang and gone alone into the pawnshop. Luca’s henchmen had knocked down the pawnbroker and Luca was standing behind the counter. When I walked in I could tell something was wrong.
“Who are you?” I say to Luca.
“We’re who you do business with,” he says.
His sidekick, Pauly, comes up from the side, sticks a gun into my ribs and shoves me up against the display case.
Luca, with his slick black hair, wants me to sell my stuff to him, at his price. But I have to make a profit, that’s my motivation, and I tell him, “I can get a better price.”
“Then you don’t do business in Chicago,” he says, and he steps around the counter in a threatening way.
The director yelled “Cut.” He walked up to Luca and me and he said to both of us, “That’s fine, that’s really great, but. . you know. .”
And I thought I did know.
He didn’t want two actors acting a situation, he wanted the characters in the script to be real people, engaged in a real struggle. I’d read somewhere that a director is like a lover, and it was true, I wanted to make him happy. My character, as written in the script, was a certain kind of person, and what I think the director wanted was someone to take the character in a new direction. And I was willing to do that.
The next shot was Luca’s reaction shot. They moved the camera behind my back and I positioned myself against the counter. Pauly must’ve been a method actor because, with some force, he jammed his gun into my ribs. And then the cameras started rolling.
“I can get a better price,” I say.
Luca comes around the counter. “Then you don’t do business in Chicago,” he says, and he reaches up and slaps my cheek, lightly. He’s improvising. He’s the star so he’s allowed to improvise. “You got a problem with that?” he says. He’s taunting me. “Huh, big shot? You got a problem with that?”
I heard “Cut,” and then the director got out of his chair and he was holding his hands together, as if praying. “Yes,” he said, nodding, and I couldn’t tell if he was nodding at me or at the star. Either way, I knew I hadn’t completely become my character, that I’d been thinking too much about the script or too much about the cameras or too much about what I was supposed to do. The director, with his nodding, was offering me the freedom to do what I wanted, and my spirit was willing, and my flesh. . that was willing too.
In Rosemary’s Baby, John Cassavetes played a man who was doing the work of the devil. That, or he was the devil, and had taken the form of this man, the husband of Mia Farrow and the father of her unborn child. Either way, the devil wanted the child to be his, and in the beginning, the Cassavetes character tried to fight the devil, tried to protest the usurpation. But the devil was wily. I forget the actual deal he made. Whether it was about wealth or power or fame doesn’t matter because what the devil had promised was freedom, the alleviation of the pain of being human. So naturally Cassavetes fell, not in love, but in thrall, with the devil. His choice was between the paradise he imagined (with the devil) and the paradise he knew (with his wife), and although he was probably torn, what was his choice?
I say “What was his choice?” because by the time he knew what was happening, it was already too late. By the time he was ready to choose, he’d already turned, not only against the woman he loved, but against the man he’d been. Without quite knowing it, he’d become the devil’s apprentice. He’d started wearing the mask of devil, and now the mask had become his face, and he couldn’t take it off. It wasn’t a case of “I like it” or “I don’t particularly like it.” It wasn’t a question of the script he’d been given because the devil had given him a new script. And that was who he was.