I’m sure it’s the high point of your week: weddings, babies, anniversaries. ‘Penny and Randy Rollins of Amagansett’s famed Wee Tippee Inne celebrated their nineteenth an-niversary with a gala extravaganza—featuring Penny’s world-famous fish chowder!’ And I write copy for mail-order catalogs. Stuff like ‘White swirls of rayon chiffon set aglow by luminescent faux-pearl buttons.’”
“You didn’t resent Sy, that you had to give up MAGIC HOUR / 63
screenwriting, give up all that high living for something…less exciting?”
“Resent? A woman tends to resent a man who says, ‘I don’t desire you anymore.’” She looked away, embarrassed.
Then she went on: “But that’s on a personal level. Professionally, how could I resent him just because other people weren’t hiring me as a screenwriter? That wasn’t Sy’s fault. Eight studios and fifty thousand independent producers rejected my scripts. They said they were sweet. Sweet is movie speak for insignificant. But in all those years I never doubted that Sy wished me well.”
“Did you ever talk about anything beyond this new project?”
“Sure. Look, I know his friends, his family.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“No. Just Sy. Both his parents died since the divorce. But he had aunts, uncles, lots of cousins. I knew them all; we went way back. When I met him, he was still publishing his poetry magazine and trying to get his first movie produced, and his office was still in the Spiegel Crown Kosher Provisions building.”
“Spiegel?”
“Spiegel was his name originally: Seymour Spiegel.” She shook her head. “He changed it the summer before he went to Dartmouth. I never understood why. I mean, what did he think he would say at graduation? ‘These are my parents, Helen and Morton Spiegel. Their name used to be Spencer, but they Judaicized it.’ Or if he was going to change his name, why not go the whole route and call himself Bucky?
I mean, Sy is not a quantum leap from Seymour.”
Just then, Bonnie got stopped by some memory of Sy. Her eyes opened too wide, the expression people use when they’re trying not to cry. She stood up and got busy sponging off what looked like a clean stove.
64 / SUSAN ISAACS
And then it happened again: the imposition of self-control, followed by the conscious shifting of the gears of her personality. When she turned around, she was composed—but with just the appropriate degree of concern. “Do you have any ideas about who killed him?” she asked. Sincere. Saddened.
Full of sympathy. Full of crap.
“Do you?”
“No,” she said. For a woman her age, she looked like she had a great body. I tried to figure out where I’d seen her before. Maybe running. She had the slim, muscular legs of a runner.
“Think back over the last few weeks. Was Sy angry at anybody?”
She leaned against the kitchen counter and smiled.
“Everybody. When he was making a movie, anyone who gave him a hard time was an enemy. It was funny, because for all his charm he was aloof, and always in control. When we were married, we’d have fights where I’d yell, kick the refrigerator, and Sy would watch, like he was watching an actress doing an improvisation: Wife Losing Her Temper.
“But when he was producing—God, that was another story! Goodbye charm. And forget aloof. His money and his reputation were on the line. He never yelled—that wasn’t his way—but he’d lace into people in this icy voice. It could really get scary—all that fury expressed in this absolutely cold manner. Let me tell you: he got his way.”
“Was he angry at anyone the last time you talked?”
“Lindsay, I guess.”
“But they were living together. They were supposed to be in love.”
“Well, I’ve got to tell you: the love part is debatable. But even if they had been, this is the movie business. An executive producer doesn’t love an actress who’s jeopardizing a twenty-million-dollar proj-
MAGIC HOUR / 65
ect. Sy told me the dailies were awful, which really surprised me because her success isn’t just based on blatant beauty; she’s a talented actress.”
“But you think Sy got disillusioned with her?”
“Sy had a gift for falling in and out of love pretty easily.”
“Let’s put love aside. Was he annoyed with her? Angry?”
“Furious. He said she was just coasting—not putting any thought or energy into the role because it wasn’t an ‘important film.’ That really ticked Sy off, because it was an article of faith with him that any movie that’s true, that moves audiences—even a screwball comedy—is an important film.
He believed in Starry Night. And Lindsay didn’t. What made the problem even worse was that she has such a monumental ego she couldn’t see how flawed her performance was. And naturally, she wouldn’t try to fix what she’d decided wasn’t broken. Let me tell you, if he hadn’t gotten killed, he would have made her life a living hell.”
“So he was ready to steamroll Lindsay?”
“Yup. And the director too.”
“What’s his name?”
“Victor Santana.”
“Why was he mad at him?”
“Because Santana had gone gaga over Lindsay and couldn’t or wouldn’t get her to change.”
“Anyone else?”
“Oh, his usual hate list. The director of photography they’d hired—a French boy genius—was shooting too pastelly. The line producer was bellying up to NABET—the film technicians’ union—too much. Sy was angry at everyone.”
“Okay, then who of the movie people was seriously angry at Sy?”
66 / SUSAN ISAACS
“I don’t know. I’m not part of the Starry Night company.”
“How about Lindsay Keefe?”
“My guess is if you tell a critically acclaimed actress—a movie star—that her performance is putrid and then, no matter how many little adjustments she makes, that the dailies are still awful…well, you figure it out. But even I wouldn’t believe she’d shoot him because he criticized her work.”
“Who else?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked her straight in the eye. “He was your ex-husband.
He could talk to you.”
“We didn’t talk all that much.”
“You talked enough. What else was on his mind?”
“He never really
