You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr Read Free Book Online

blockbuster,” he would announce. He explained to them why it was a perfect vehicle for this or that client, a career maker, and so he started getting to know the actors. CAA was doing surprisingly well, and Howard was flying more frequently to L.A. “He’s gone a lot,” observed my mother but left it at that. Through Mike, the studios noticed him. The idea of this hybrid literary-to-film job he was doing was no longer so strange. Howard came home and looked at mesideways and said, “So. What would you think?” One of the studios had made an offer. Executive in charge of new properties. He was elated. They had said, in essence: Be our book eyes.
    Howard would say in the future that his job descended directly from Samuel Goldwyn because it was Goldwyn who first tried to marry literature and movies. The semiliterate Eastern European immigrant, desiring the elevation of his art through literary good taste, hired as a screenwriter the dignified Belgian Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck spoke no English, and Goldwyn, as he would have been first to acknowledge, spoke no Belgian. Hollywood legend has it that Maeterlinck’s first effort for his new employer was an adaptation of his own novel, Life of the Bee , and Goldwyn ran from his bungalow screaming “My God, the hero is a bee !” Still, Goldwyn liked having the author around the lot. He proudly pointed him out to everyone who stopped by as “the greatest writer on earth! He’s the guy who wrote The Birds and the Bees .”
    I started packing up the brownstone.
    In my driveway, the light was becoming golden with evening as they listened to me. I frowned. I asked the three of them, who’ve worked with Howard for years: Howard never told you any of this?
    No, they said, with some amusement because obviously I didn’t have the faintest idea how Howard behaved with them. “You know, Anne, Howard doesn’t really talk much about himself.” And after a moment one of them added, not at all unkindly, “He’s like you that way, yes?”
    I hadn’t known this about him. I suppose he is, I said. They realized that I had always taken Howard’s easy friendliness with them, his colleagues, as friendship. They realized that I had not known that he was rather circumspect with them. They watched me learning these things about my husband.
    Very warmly they kissed me good-bye on the cheek. Their car keys were tinkling cheerfully. They called, “See you in a few weeks!”
    I went inside and thought about our next meeting. Well! Next time, I decided, I’d cut some fresh flowers from the garden.
    Â 
    THEN THERE IS WHAT I did not say.
    When Howard and I arrived in Los Angeles in 1979, I was, I realize in retrospect, in shock. The sun was pouring down like the rain in London. Unlike London, there was no context for anything. Stuart called from Brooklyn. “So! Anne. L.A.”
    I replied, with an eye on Howard, who was emptying boxes, that L.A. was “the ninth circle of hell.” Stuart misunderstood me to say that Los Angeles was “the nicest suburb of hell.” He repeated this to Howard, who readily acceded to the description.
    Almost immediately I said to Howard that they were all ridiculous. I actually said (I’m embarrassed to admit it now) “all.” They certainly all seemed ridiculous; I have learned over the years that this is not the point. First, Hollywood people are ridiculous and they are not. More important, even the dullest and crassest of them have a certain startling animal perceptiveness. Who would imagine that pathological narcissism could foster such external awareness? Howard took David Geffen to lunch one day, and David, his eyes taking in the entire restaurant, snorted, “These are people who talk on the phone all day.” But perhaps because of this, they are deceptively febrile with words. Counterintuitive, to my mind. Utter disdain for