Germy stopped short.
“What are you thinking about? Even if it seems totally ir-relevant.”
“Well, Sy wasn’t definable. He struck me as something of a chameleon. Man-about-town with men-about-town. Lover boy with women. Tough negotiator with the unions—a real dirty street fighter. And full of Jewish show-biz warmth with a couple of the old-time reporters, dropping Yiddish all over the place. The few times he and I talked, he was very profess-orial—as if the only thing he lived for were discussions of Fritz Lang’s deterministic universe. It made me laugh because I knew he had to have gotten me confused with another critic: I never gave a flying fuck about Fritz Lang.”
“Which one of his personalities came closest to being the real Sy Spencer?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
“What do you think drove him, Germy? Money? Sex?
Power?”
“Well, he certainly seemed to have enjoyed all of those.
But he didn’t seem driven, even though he must have been.
He could be pleasant—even charming. But some integral part of his circuitry—the part that reaches out and makes human connections—seemed…disconnected.”
“What do you know about his ex-wife Bonnie Spencer?”
Germy shook his head: never heard of her. “She wrote the screenplay for a movie called Cowgirl.”
92 / SUSAN ISAACS
“I remember that one. It was a nice movie.”
“What was it about?”
“A widow of a small-time rancher literally puts on her husband’s boots. It deals with her relationships with the ranch hands, the neighboring wives. Some moving dialogue about her passion for the land. Beautifully photographed.”
“A major motion picture?”
“No. But a really decent minor one.” He took off his glasses again and did some more gnawing. “Her name wasn’t Spencer when she wrote it. Something else.”
“Sy married her after it came out. But then none of her other screenplays ever got made.” I had this vivid image of Bonnie in her bicycle shorts and too-big T-shirt leaning against the sink in her kitchen. It was not an image of a person who could in any way be in the movie business. “Ever hear anything about her?”
“No,” he said.
“It sounds like he cut her loose when he realized she wasn’t the hot property he thought she was.”
“That sounds fairly typical. Of the industry and of Sy.”
“What about Lindsay Keefe? I’ve been hearing her acting wasn’t very good this time around.”
“Well, now we move on to gossip. I’ve heard the same thing, and I don’t doubt it. She’s a very cerebral actress. Her characters tend to be focused women, intelligent, passionately devoted to whatever they’re doing, sometimes capable of deep emotion: abused women who write poetry, missionaries who join obscure revolutionary movements. That sort of thing. The character in Starry Night, though…she’s different.
Soft, endearing, the poor little rich girl. My guess is, Lindsay may be enough of an actress to project endearingness. But she’s mostly head, no heart. The role would be one hell of a stretch.”
MAGIC HOUR / 93
“Will they stop making the movie now that Sy’s dead?”
“Are you joking? Making movies is a business. For an actor, a director, they’d have to stop for a few days until they could get a replacement. For an executive producer…they won’t even stop for a cup of coffee.”
“Did you hear anything else about what was happening on the set?”
“The usual malicious innuendos.”
“Good. What are they?”
“That Sy was dissatisfied, and he and Lindsay may have actually fought over her performance. Or, even if there was no confrontation, she sensed she was in trouble with him.
In either case, she took a deep breath…and pointed her major artillery at the director, Victor Santana. Made him an ally.”
“How did she get him on her side?”
“Her side? Her side was the least of it.”
“No shit! Lindsay was making it with Santana?”
“Steve, when the executive producer leaves the set for the day and the director and the leading lady then proceed to hold a script conference in the director’s trailer for forty-five minutes with the blinds drawn and they don’t ask a production assistant for coffee and the trailer is observed rocking back and forth, what do you think?”
“Fuck City.”
The real question was, what did Sy think? What did he know? And what had he been planning to do about Lindsay Keefe?
We sat in his kitchen eating ice cream out of pint containers, the way we used to. Halfway through, we switched; I got Germy’s cookies ’n’ cream and he got my coffee Heath bar crunch. Neither of those flavors had been invented when we were kids.
94 / SUSAN ISAACS
He told me how his mother’s cancer had metastasized and how excruciating her pain had been and how she’d finally ended it by OD’ing on the Seconal she’d accumulated over a month. I told him I always thought she’d go on forever with that funny old bonnet and the pruning shears and how truly sorry I was she wasn’t around anymore to call me cutie-pie.
He put down his spoon. “Steve, when we were kids, I never had the courage to ask you…Your father just walked?
Your mother supported the family?”
“Yeah. After he sold the farm, he had a few different jobs, but he’d always get canned for coming to work drunk. I’m not talking a little slurring; I’m talking pissed out of his mind.
When you’re working over at Agway, it isn’t a plus to puke all over the biggest farmer in Bridgehampton. Anyway, he took a hike when I was eight.”
“You never heard from him again?”
“No. For all I know, he could still be alive somewhere, although I wouldn’t make book on it.”
My father was a lazy, disgusting, dirty drunk. He was also, in rare, semi-sober moments, a sweet man, talking sports to me, buying a buck’s worth of bubble gum so I could have the baseball cards. And he’d sit beside Easton as he built his model ships and say “Good work,” although he couldn’t help, because his hands shook with perpetual D.T.s. And once in a while he’d come up to my mother and say, “‘Ah,
