Crashed

with makeup, Lissa, so why would I stop now?’ ”

She led me along a strip of meticulously mowed grass between beds of roses that stood four and five feet high, most of them in full bloom. The air was thick with scent, and I could hear the lazy drone of bees. “Anyway, during our second season on ‘Family Way,’ Charles died. When Buddy read his will, it turned out that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in a hole and have a rose bush-he specified a damask rose, one of the very old varieties-planted on top of him, so he could supply nitrogen to the flowers. He’d bought a few acres up here but he and Buddy had never built on it. We go right, here.”

I followed her as she turned. The green path we were now taking led to a circle of roses perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a smaller circle of grass in the center. “So Buddy brought Charles’s ashes up here and did what Charles had wanted, and that rose just exploded. You could practically see it grow. This was the time, I’m sure you’ll remember, when men like Buddy and Charles were dying by the dozen every day. And Buddy had brought some of his friends up here when he planted Charles’s rose. The idea sort of took hold in their hearts.”

We entered the circle of roses. At the center was a round bench, and Lissa sat down and indicated a rosebush, not very tall but profusely adorned with blooms of a red so dark it was almost black. There was a small pewter plaque in front of it that said Henry Wellman. “There he is,” she said. “My Henry. He chose the rose, which is called ‘Othello,’ because of its color, thank you, not as a comment on our marriage, which was mostly free of jealousy. By the time Henry passed on, there were almost fifty people buried up here, mostly gay men, but not all of them, and Buddy was fighting tooth and nail with the city, which wanted to close the place down. Anything new, anything beautiful, just brings out the worst in bureaucrats. By that time, I was rich from ‘Once a Witch’ and Henry’s real estate, and I bought all the property on both sides and hired lawyers. It took a bunch of lawsuits and newspaper stories and some stuff on television, but the little gray men eventually went away. The funny thing is that two of the men who fought the hardest to stop Buddy have their own roses here now.”

“How many people are up here?”

“Twelve, thirteen hundred, and more every week. Buddy doesn’t charge fees, but everybody has to bring the rose, naturally, and for the first ten years they’re expected to pay twenty or thirty dollars a month for upkeep. Of course, everybody does. Some people have left the place thousands of dollars. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones continue to bloom? Properly cared for, a rose bush can live fifty or sixty years.”

“You’re a very nice woman,” I said.

“It’s easy to be nice when you’ve been blessed. Isn’t Henry blooming, though? He was never what you would have called a handsome man, although he had his angles, so it’s especially nice that he’s so beautiful now. It’s more like how he was inside.” She folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly, looking at the new incarnation of Henry for several minutes. Then she said, “Thistle’s father is here.”

I said, “Oh.”

“She fought it of course, the mother, I mean. Luella the Cruel. It’s all faggots up there, she said. She wanted to plant him in Forest Lawn, probably under a life-size sculpture of herself, paid for by Thistle, of course, with a stone saying something like, Can you imagine leaving someone like this behind? I’m sorry, I’m being terrible.”

“I’ve met her,” I said.

“Then you know. The poor child, as if she wasn’t having enough trouble by then. Oh, good heavens, you came to see me to talk about Thistle, and all I’ve done is rattle on about everything under the sun.”

“I could listen to you rattle for weeks.”

“Well, that’s sweet of you, but it’s not going to help you find out what’s happened to our girl.” She got up and blew Henry’s rose a kiss and said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Howard.” With Lissa leading the way, we left the circle and followed a path that led around a large gray boulder. On the far side of the stone was a bed of roses planted directly against the rockface, their colors especially intense on the gray background. “He’s the Sterling Silver,” she said, “the sort of lavender one. A very delicate rose, subject to mildew and other problems. In that way, I’m afraid it was an appropriate choice.” The pewter plaque read Howard Downing. “He was a pleasant man, but no match for Luella.”

“Vlad the Impaler would have been no match for Luella.”

“You know, it never ceased to amaze me that she felt no concern for that child. Later, I mean, when things began to go wrong. All the misbehavior, all the acting out and the drugs. It was just an inconvenience to Luella, an irritation. And, of course, it threatened her lifestyle. That little girl was a miracle at the beginning, but then …” She broke off, looking down at Harold Downing’s plaque. “But then,” she said, “it was just heartbreaking.”

33

Slipping away

“It really began in season four,” Lissa said. We were sitting in the front seat of her SUV with the doors wide open to admit the fragrance of the roses. “I’m sorry to date everything in terms of the show, but that’s how I remember those years. And, of course, Thistle was the show. In more ways than one.”

“I never actually saw her until recently,” I said. “I guess what I saw was filmed in the middle nineties, and it looked like it, except for her. She looked like her performance was ninety seconds old.”

“The really good ones don’t date. And the really awful ones don’t, either, they’re just as horrid today as they were fifty years ago. It’s the rest of us who get frozen in a moment, a style, a way of being-in my case, I guess, a woman, what everybody’s idea of a woman was then. The hairstyles don’t help, of course, but that’s not what’s really wrong. What’s really wrong is that tastes change. Nobody eats baked Alaska any more, nobody wants their refrigerator to be avocado green, and no actor overplays on camera, but there was a time when those things were the ne plus ultra. And film, of course, unlike avocado-colored refrigerators, never goes away. On the other hand, some things don’t date at all. A simple white refrigerator, a perfect apple pie, great acting. They appeal as much now as they did fifty years ago.”

“Some child actors are instinctively perfect,” she said. “Thistle was one of those. It’s not so surprising, I guess. Give a boy a towel to tie around his shoulders and he can fly. Give a little girl a doll-I’m aware that my attitudes here are not exactly breaking news-give a little girl a doll and a toy set of cups and saucers, and she’ll have a tea party. But eventually they stop playing, while Thistle could turn it on all day long, ten hours a day, and it went way, way beyond simply believing what she was doing. She was phenomenally inventive. The thing I heard her say most often on the set was, ‘I did it that way before,’ and what that meant was that she was about to come up with a completely different approach to presenting, say, shock or surprise or guilt or incomprehension. She’d ask for a minute, and she’d sit on the couch if we were in the living room or on one of the kitchen chairs if we were shooting in there, and she’d close her eyes. Sometimes she’d laugh while her eyes were still closed. Then she’d get up and say, “Okay,” and nail it in one take. And woe betide the director who was new to the show and who didn’t want to give Thistle one of her little timeouts. Everyone in the studio jumped on him.”

“And so they should have.”

“We were the biggest problem, because we laughed. She’d catch us off guard and we’d just stand there, laughing, and the scene would grind to a stop. How she loved it when that happened. You know how much she looked like an elf? At those moments, she looked like the naughtiest elf in the swarm, if that’s what you call a bunch of elves, like she’d just gotten the idea to put the donkey ears on old Bottom.”

“This was in the early days?”

“Yes.” She put both hands on the steering wheel and looked at her wedding ring, which had caught fire in the sun. “Really the first three years. They were magic, in so many ways. The trouble is that Thistle thought it was magic, too, and believed to the center of her being that it was. And that left her defenseless. Oh, how can I explain this without it sounding crazy? You know, lots of creative people feel like someone else is actually doing the work. Some of the best writers I know say that the words come