A woman named Eileen Rader was brought into the conflict. Rader was the head of the studio’s script department. She’d been with the department thirty-five years, having begun in her early twenties. She’d become particularly adept at dealing with what the studios called their literary prima donnas, writers who had detoured through the studios on their way to careers as poets or playwrights or novelists. Only after these writers realized how far they’d detoured and how unlikely they were ever to return to the main thoroughfare did they become reasonable. Rader was successful with this kind of writer because she affected empathy with them; she was admired by the studio for her soft touch. While some complained that she coddled them, the evidence was the writers came around. She demonstrated to them, in ways they found irrefutable, how they could live with the studio’s position and still consider themselves artists. Invariably Eileen reduced the problem to a single question. “Listen to me,” she would say, “we both know these guys are bastards. We both know their taste is what they sit on. But ask yourself this. Will anyone be better off if this picture doesn’t get released? Do you really want to punish the public, who’d be better off with ninety percent of a Lee Edward movie than none at all, in order to try and punish the studio, which you can’t hurt anyway because it’s too callous and bloated to feel pain? I’m not on either your side or the studio’s in this,” Eileen would say, “I’m on the side of this picture which, even slightly compromised, is too good to lose in a world of bad movies. I think that’s the side you’re really on too.” Implicit in all this was the inescapable reality that the studio was going to win and the writer was going to lose. Once the writer accepted this, even subconsciously, it was a matter of time before he relented.
In the case of Toward Caliente the time was long and uneasy. Toward Caliente was Llewellyn’s attempt to turn back the clock and win the battle over White Liars, where his name had changed and he had lost control of those things to which he had once given passion. One night he went home, to the house that reminded him he badly needed another success, and tried to convince himself there was something he needed more and that it was still within his reach. He tried to convince himself there was a way back to the main thoroughfare. Had he convinced himself of this that night, he honestly believed he would have summoned the will for it: he’d have gone into his bedroom and said to his sleeping wife, I’m going to be a poet again, and if it means losing this house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, then so be it. So he tried to be a poet again that night; he sat himself in the study and went to work. All night he worked at writing a single poem, there in the dark of the study with a single light burning over the desk. At four in the morning, after sitting at the desk seven hours, he had written the following:
My love is like a red red pose
He looked at this “poem” and heavily, slowly, picked up the telephone and made a call. “Eileen,” he said, and to his horror felt a sob bubbling up from his throat. To cut it off he croaked, “Give them what they want,” and quickly got the phone back in its cradle before it was too late.
At dawn a few hours later Llewellyn staggered into his kitchen where Maddy was feeding Jane. She looked up and was dismayed at the sight of him. “I gave them what they wanted,” he said in an abysmal voice.
“You couldn’t help it,” she said, “it’s like that in this business.”
“That’s a lie,” he answered. “That’s what everyone says and it’s a lie. Anyone can help it. It’s not something they do to someone, it’s a choice they give you and you take it or you leave it.” He swallowed; the same sob had been bubbling up all morning. “I tried to be a poet last night,” he explained. “I spent all night trying to write a poem and this is what I came up with.” He handed it to her. “All night and what I came up with was, My love is like a red red rose.”
He turned and left. She looked at the poem. “You wrote pose,” she said to the kitchen door. She heard the front door close.
Toward Caliente was an impressive success in Los Angeles and New York and Toronto and Boston and did surprisingly well in such cities as Dallas and Santa Fe and Seattle. It got good reviews and, some months later, three Academy Award nominations for the performance of the lead actress, editing and screenplay. That his only Academy Award nomination should
