Little Known Facts: A Novel (21 page)

Lucy, the mother of my two children, hated the fact that I started to consult an astrologer not long after our son was born. A director I was working with at the time, one who helped me get my first Oscar nomination, put me in touch with a woman named Isis Durand who lived way out in Upland. For years, apparently, she had helped him make decisions about which projects to take on, which people to trust, which days he should try not to travel, at least not by air. “She’s unbelievable,” he told me. “I can talk to her for five minutes on the phone, and for days afterward, I feel like everything is exactly as it should be. Nothing else works for me like that. Not pills or pussy or money.”

To be clear, I was very skeptical, because before meeting Isis, I didn’t bother to read my horoscope, let alone pay some expensive psychic to tell me my future. No one could tell the future; in lucid moments, I did not doubt this. And how could it be that the constellations had anything to do with whether I would encounter unforeseen obstacles on a certain day or meet an important stranger who would make me think twice about a career goal? To make matters worse, I was married to a doctor, someone who put her faith in science and facts, little else, a quality I had initially admired in her very much.

The reason I ended up contacting Isis is that my agent received two phenomenal screenplays, and I wanted to do them both, but the director and producers for each project weren’t going to wait around for me to film one and then the other. The directors were rivals, and I knew that whoever’s I made my second choice would likely never ask me to work with him again. They were both extremely successful, and egomaniacal, and I was still in the early years of my career, and how I handled this would matter a lot. These things still matter a lot, but I’m no longer as vulnerable to the whims of the powerful because, to be frank, I have some of that power now too.

Isis already knew about my dilemma when I called her. It’s obvious to me now that my director friend had probably tipped her off, but at the time I was too awestruck and naive to figure that out. I’ve known her now for twenty-five years, and aside from her advice about signing on to do that humiliating flop,
The Writing on the Wall,
she’s more or less always been on the money. She’s old now and often sick, but I’ve done my share to keep her alive. When she told me a few years ago that she had breast cancer but no insurance, I gave her most of the money for her treatments. During that time, she wouldn’t meet with me in person, but she did take my calls. Her treatments have cost me almost a million dollars, but spread out over a couple of years, that’s not so much money. I’d probably have paid ten times as much if I’d had to. A number of the checks that I gave her for her treatments were written out to a Dr. Selzer, but about half of them I wrote out directly to her. It could be that she’s the biggest con artist out there—I have thought of this, but I really don’t think she is. We’ve known each other too long, and I’ve paid her too well for her to have any complaints in that respect.

Even so, if she was conning me, it doesn’t matter that much. Who knows what my career would have become if she hadn’t been advising me these past two and a half decades?

Based in part on the reading she did for me not long before we wrapped on
Bourbon at Dusk,
I decided to submit it to the Cannes Film Festival’s screening committee, nearly killing my relationship with Elise to make the mid-February deadline. It had been five years since I’d last been to the festival, and that year the film was one that I’d only acted in, not directed and co-written, not invested more than two years of my life in—finding the right producers, casting it, writing the screenplay with my friend Scott Jost, who unlike me is a screenwriter by profession, but mostly he edited what I’d written, though he would say that he wrote as much original material as I did.

Bourbon
was a runner-up for the Palme d’Or, and so it earned a “Grand Prix,” which is fine, but the French-Israeli filmmakers who won the Palme for their “gritty, neo-realist drama about child prostitution in an age of urban anomie” were possibly the most ungracious bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune of spending an evening with. The director said to me point-blank two hours before the winner was named, “I liked your film, Mr. Ivins, but I do not think it is good enough. I do not think that mine is good enough either, so this is not meant as an insult.”

Well, let me put it this way—if it sounds like an insult, it most likely is an insult. In fairness to this guy, I think he was drunk, but five minutes later, his producer stoked the fire by saying, “I agree with Henri.
Bourbon
is a good film but not a great one. Our film is maybe very good but not great either.”

It could be that they were jealous of the fact I was with Elise, who they might not have known was my girlfriend before meeting us at the festival. These two balding gnomes couldn’t keep their eyes off of her, and when she was polite but not flirtatious with them, I suppose they decided to take out their sexual jealousy on me by insulting
Bourbon.
I could see these guys calling her when we were back in L.A., begging her to star in their next film. It made me sick to my stomach to think about this, especially because I would tell her not to do it and she would probably get angry. In my experience, no one I know in Hollywood has ever spoken frankly about jealousy, an emotion as natural and certainly as painful as any others that we feel. Because of this tacit code of silence, it is very hard to truly be friends with many of the people who work in film. We are a jealous, neurotic group, both disdainful of and avid to be in the public eye; always comparing ourselves to other people, and so worried about losing what we have that half of us have been hollowed out by ulcers and fear, not to mention unchecked ego, by the time we turn forty.

Later that night, Elise went on to win the award for best leading actress, and when they called her name, I felt this unsettling mix of paternal pride and amorous longing. She had never looked better than she did at that ceremony, and she is a woman who looks good every single minute of the day. Her skin, which is a honey color that I would guess a lot of people, both men and women, would run down a pedestrian for, was glowing in a way that I had never seen before, such was her extreme pleasure in being the object of so much admiration and respect. She had chosen a Dior dress for the occasion—a pure, poetic statement in mauve silk, one that hugged her tall, slender body. All night, even after we didn’t win the Palme d’Or, I kept thinking about unzipping that dress, pressing my lips to her warm and fragrant neck, saying and doing the things that make her blush, things that she loves but would never admit to unless the lights were off.

She is not, however, a woman simply coasting by on her beauty until it runs out. She is sharp and very talented, her presence in front of the camera so natural that none of the seams show, which they do with lesser actors. The first time I saw her, which was in this asinine picture a friend of mine directed about two nitwits driving their dead uncle cross-country, I almost fell out of my chair. At the time, Scott and I were arguing daily over the fourth draft of
Bourbon at Dusk,
Isis was taking two or three days to return my calls, and a number of things were in flux with both the story line and the project’s funding, but even without Isis’s input, I knew that Elise would be the perfect woman to play Lily, the female lead. When I called her agent and had the script sent over after Scott and I had finally finished it, the agent called back the very next afternoon to say that Elise wanted the role more than anything she had wanted in her entire life. This was probably only agent-speak, but regardless of how much he was exaggerating about her response, it was clear that she was interested. The producers liked her too, which I was almost certain they would. After a quick screen test, we agreed on a salary, figured out the shoot schedule, and signed a contract. Then she was mine. For about nine weeks, anyway.

I realize that the age difference makes some people pause. But it’s not my tendency to imagine failure. At the same time, I’m not a simpleton; I know that it’s possible that Elise and I will not stay together until death do us part, but there seems no point in assuming that our relationship is only a temporary diversion, something to amuse ourselves with until we each find someone better. She is generous, kind, easygoing. I have never met anyone like her, and to state the obvious, I have met a lot of people. Her appetite for the world is one of the things that I like most about her. Before we went to Cannes, she hired a tutor to help tune up her college French, and once there, her sudden facility with the language surprised me and a number of other people. I’ve never known anyone who could speak a foreign language so well without having studied for at least a few months in the country of origin. “You must have had a good teacher when you were in college,” I told her, and she gave me sort of a strange look and said, “Well, yes, I guess I did.”

“I bet there’s more to that story,” I said.

But she only shook her head and said that she guessed she just had a good ear for languages. There probably is more to it than this, but it’s not my habit to pressure girlfriends for detailed histories of their past relationships or flings. Elise would likely have told me if I’d probed a bit, but the last thing I need to do is act the jealous boyfriend who also happens to be old enough to be her father. In fact, I think I might even be a couple of years older than both of her parents. But really, so what. My body is still in very good working order. I see no reason not to be with her if she wants to be with me too.

In Cannes to celebrate her leading-actress win, I bought her a three-carat emerald ring. It was too soon to buy her a diamond, in part because everyone would have cried “Engagement!” as eager as the media is to marry its stars off, often with the tacit hope that things will soon devolve into a spectacularly acrimonious divorce. Although I’m not eager to get married again, the thought has crossed my mind a few times. I know that at some point she does want to get married, though maybe not to me, and I haven’t dared to ask if she wants kids, nor has she told me. I’d really prefer not to have another child; raising kids is one of the things that I probably am too old for, or else I just don’t want to devote the energy to it again. Still, if having a baby turned out to be one of her fondest wishes, I’d probably have to give in.

I keep two journals—one of them, J1, to be published after my death if the executor of my estate (who is my attorney, not one of my kids) thinks enough people will want to read it. The other journal, J2, I don’t and won’t share with anyone. To protect the people I leave behind (and myself, sure), I start a new notebook each year and destroy the one that precedes it. This is where I write down the things that I have done or the thoughts I have had that sometimes make it hard to sleep at night. I can’t talk to my psychiatrist about these things because I don’t want him to think badly of me (not any more than he probably already does). Despite the risks, I need to keep this second journal because it’s like a pressure valve—if it weren’t there, my life would blow up.

There are entries about my relationship with Isis in J2, entries about my ex-wives and other women and my children and friends and brother. I’ve also written about shady things that I have witnessed and done nothing about, things I have done myself and later regretted, or, sometimes, regretted while I was doing them. I almost never read through the book before I burn it each year, always on January first—I think of this as a cleansing, a way to start over, and I always hope that each year there will be fewer entries, or shorter ones, or ones that could go in my other journal, the one for public consumption.

Lucy, I think, has seen one or two of the J2s, which is why, probably, she never believed me when I lied to her about a few things that happened while I was on location (or, once in a while, at home in L.A.). She would never admit to reading my journal, but I’m almost certain that she did—the specificity of her complaints and accusations made me realize that she had to have read some part of that year’s J2. I have always tried to keep it locked up in the glove compartment of my car when I’m not at home. If I am, I keep it in a desk drawer, one in which I eventually had a special lock installed (too late, unfortunately, to keep the diary from Lucy) because desk locks, my brother Phil and I discovered while we were growing up and snooping in our father’s study, can be picked with bobby pins or the kind of tiny screwdriver used to repair eyeglasses.

Each year’s J2 always starts off slow—only a few entries for the first several months, but then, around June or July, for some reason, things start to shift—Isis says that for some people, myself included, the summer months are known for creating full-moon conditions for weeks on end. The full moon seems to stir up the crazy elements that ricochet through a person’s life. Even the police blotters attest to this—full moon fever is real. It’s a little unfortunate that I live with it for almost half the year—things don’t start to calm down until November or early December for me. Last year, that was also the case, and there was no little whimper either. Things ended with a big bang—the debacle with Billy in New Orleans. Not long before I asked him to work for me on the Bourbon set, Isis told me that some rogue element was coming right at me, but I didn’t suspect that it would be my own son.

It took Elise and me about a week or so to come down from Cannes, during which time she was sometimes weepy and very tired. Her moroseness made me a little sullen too, or maybe it was just the jet lag. We argued more than we ever had before, more than we did during the month over the holidays that I did my kamikaze editing job on
Bourbon
with Fred Banes, who edited
Javier’s Sons.
I knew he’d be the right guy if he had time in his schedule to work with me for about five intense weeks. He didn’t, not really, mostly because his wife wanted him at home over Christmas and New Year’s, but he’s not divorced yet, so I think it worked out.