At the Pasadena festival he also met Madeline Weiss, a girl of nineteen who had grown up very much on the right side of Pasadena’s tracks. It was indicative of Maddy’s station and status that working for the museum archives was directed not so much at making an income as accumulating some “life experience,” as her father called it: he considered it part of the business of maturation, somewhere between piano lessons and debutante nocturnes. Of course it had to be the right sort of life experience; she wasn’t slinging hamburgers. Her family, of the upper crust, regarded writing for the movies in the same way as did Llewellyn’s family of the lower crust; contempt for the profession was utterly democratic, crossing all boundaries of class and money. To Maddy’s credit, she didn’t wait for Lew’s success to fall in love with him; she didn’t even wait for his peak before she married him, though by then, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three, he was on a definite ascent. Maddy had a cynicism that seemingly came from nowhere, an errant gene that might have been un attractive in someone else but was enough to keep her from appearing as superficial as most Pasadena girls; it also kept her at odds with her family’s exalted plans, in the way Llewellyn’s romanticism kept him at odds with his family’s practical plans. It did not, however, prevent her from wanting the house in Hancock Park.
The house in Hancock Park was too big for two people, bigger for that matter than was necessary for two people planning on being three, as was to be the case several years after their marriage. It was also beyond the means of even a successful screenwriter. It was barely within the means of a successful screenwriter whose Pasadena father-in-law contributed half the down payment. For Maddy this fact under cut her reasons for wanting the house: Hancock Park was not only not Hollywood, despite the residence of one or two aberrational rock stars, it was the only thing about Los Angeles that old established Pasadena respected and envied. Thus Maddy aspired to the house in Hancock Park to prove something to her father, only to have her father bail out the couple on the finances. By the time she realized that none of this made any sense, by the time she realized that her father had proven something to her rather than the other way around, they’d gotten the house.
Llewellyn didn’t want to live in Hancock Park. Its history denied the ever-transitory truth of the city. He didn’t want the burden of the expense either, meaning he didn’t want the burden of Hollywood success. In his own way Hollywood success was something he wanted to live down, in his own mind it only ascertained his corruption. It proved he was who he really was, he was not who he was really not. He capitulated in the end because Maddy was adamant and because of the house itself: red brick with white edgings, smaller than most of the houses in the park, with a door right in the middle and two large windows upstairs; and though he wasn’t a child, it reminded him of Christmas when he was and the family—Lew and his sister and his mother and father—got in the car at night to drive through the upper-class neighborhoods of the heartland, looking at the lights and decorations. A very similar house of red brick and white edgings, with a center door and two upstairs windows, was bedecked with a string of nothing but white lights that flickered on and off. Llewellyn and Maddy drove up to the house in Hancock Park twenty years later, and he sighed heavily knowing he’d regret whatever he chose to do. Perhaps he believed that his mother and father might relive some memory of their own; he imagined a reconciliation at the airport, and driving them up to the house and sitting there in the front seat of the car watching them, recognizing on their faces dreams the dreamers could not name.
Ten years after White Liars Llewellyn had his greatest success with a picture called Toward Caliente. The picture had been conceived and written by Llewellyn, and in the early stages of the project he had made a bid to direct. This plan was aborted by what he saw as his own lack of temperament conducive to direction and also by the birth of his daughter, Jane. By the time Toward Caliente was released, Jane was two years old; Lew and Maddy had been in the Hancock Park house five years. Toward Caliente provided an experience for Llewellyn similar to that of White Liars, with the writer and director at odds over a crucial resolution. Since Llewellyn believed this to be his movie, with the director merely the pilot of a vehicle the writer had constructed, he warred heatedly for the resolution he favored. The
