Travels (15 page)

I felt amazed. Just as amazed as if he had shown me that I had a third arm coming out of my chest, an arm I had never noticed before. How could I not have noticed this before? But I never thought I was insecure. If anything, I saw myself as astoundingly confident.

Could I really have held such an incorrect view of myself?

Dr. Norton tried to soften the blow, and explained that many things about ourselves were difficult to see without outside help. That was the whole point of a therapist. He was an objective outsider.

This was a new idea to me, that there might be some things about myself that I couldn’t see without outside help. But it obviously was true.

I never kept track of how much I was spending again.

It became clear that my marriage was finished and that I was going to remain single in Los Angeles. I was in my late twenties, I had a reputation
as a writer, I had a psychiatrist, and I had a Porsche Targa. In short, I was ready for whatever life had to offer.

But my academic past had left me rather sheltered, and I was unrealistic, particularly where women were concerned. I kept imagining that I could do things that I couldn’t.

At one point I was going out with a girl who worked in a literary agent’s office. Pretty soon I decided I liked another girl in the same office. I wanted to go out with this second girl, but I didn’t want the first one to find out.

“Do you think I can keep it secret?” I asked Dr. Norton.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I think two girls in the same office will talk, and they’ll discover they’re both going out with you.”

“Even so,” I said, “is that so bad?”

“Well, I think they may both decide not to see you.”

That seemed an unpleasant outcome. I didn’t like the idea of going from two girls to none. “Oh, I don’t think that would happen,” I said.

Dr. Norton shrugged. “Time will tell.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happened. The girls found out, and they were both indignant that I would try such a low trick.

Later I began to get interested in my secretary, a cute blonde with large breasts. I’d never been involved with a large-breasted girl before.

“I think I’m falling for my secretary,” I told Dr. Norton.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Why not?” I said. I couldn’t see why it would be a problem.

“It tends to complicate not only your work but your private relationships as well. That seems to be what usually happens. At least, it happens often enough to lead to the rule that it’s unwise to get romantically involved with your secretary.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe that’s the rule for most people. But I think I can handle it.”

“Time will tell,” Dr. Norton said.

Within two weeks, my life was living hell. I quickly learned this cute, large-breasted girl was not for me. I knew it, and she knew it, too. Suddenly nothing worked right in the office: things didn’t get done; callers were insulted; appointments were missed; details overlooked. And my cheerful, sunny California secretary now filled the office with glowering rainclouds. Her every word and comment to me was sour and accusing.

I couldn’t believe it. Not only had our affair not worked out; now I was going to have to fire her.

“What a mess,” I said to Dr. Norton.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Dr. Norton said.

By now I saw the point of these homilies. Dr. Norton was trying to get me to understand that certain rules of life had been around for a long time and that life probably wasn’t going to make an exception for me. I was having trouble understanding precisely that. I kept thinking that things would be the way I wanted them to be. And I kept learning I was wrong.

I had been going out for several months with a girl I liked when I met a famous movie star. Suddenly I wanted to go out with this movie star, but I figured it would be a short-lived thing that would quickly end, and I didn’t want my regular girlfriend to find out.

“If you date a famous movie star, your girlfriend’s going to find out,” Dr. Norton said.

“How?” I said. “I’m just going to dinner in an out-of-the-way restaurant.”

It turned out my out-of-the-way dinner was reported the same night by a television gossip columnist. Not only my girlfriend but all her family and friends found out what I had done. My girlfriend broke up with me. I was considered a rat.

I felt pretty bad, too. I couldn’t seem to manage my social life. I blamed my sex drive. “I can’t help it,” I said to Dr. Norton. “I’m going out with some girl, and then I see another girl, and I want her. And then I see another girl, and I want her, too.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, noncommittal.

“When is it going to stop?” I said to Dr. Norton. “Maybe when I get older. Maybe, in a couple more years, I’ll calm down sexually. It’ll stop then.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m almost sixty …” He shrugged.

“It never stops?” I said.

I couldn’t decide whether to be pleased or appalled by this prospect.

Dr. Norton had a different idea about the nature of my problem. He seemed to think I kept getting into trouble because I wasn’t telling women the truth. He thought I should tell them all that this was a time in my life when I was seeing a number of women, and leave it at that. “That way you don’t have to be secretive,” he said.

But I couldn’t do that, because I was afraid none of the women would like me if they knew I was seeing other women.

* * *

A year later I got divorced. I bought a house in Hollywood. My life settled down a little. I managed to write some screenplays, and I tried to set up a movie to direct. I liked my life pretty well, but I was moving further and further from the academic existence I had known for so many years. Many things about movies perplexed me. For example, all the people in the movie business lied. They lied all the time. They said they liked your screenplay when they didn’t; they said they were going to hire you when they had no intention of hiring you. I couldn’t understand why movie people didn’t just say what they meant. It was so confusing. Why did everybody lie?

And there seemed to be a different style in movies from the academic style I was used to. In talking over a movie, the studio head said, “What about casting Joe Mason?”

“I don’t really think so,” I said.

Then, the next week, we had another casting meeting, and the studio head said, “What about Joe Mason?”

“He’s not really right,” I said. “And I never liked him myself.”

Then, at the next meeting, the studio head said, “What about Joe Mason?”

By now I was frustrated, because the movie wasn’t getting cast. I stood up and leaned over his desk and shouted, “I
can’t stand
Joe Mason! He makes me
vomit
whenever I see him! I
hate
Joe Mason!”

“Hey,” the studio head said, raising his hands, “all you have to do is say so.”

So I began to learn that the ordinary, everyday style of communication in Hollywood required what was, in academic terms, wretched excess. You were expected to shout and scream and carry on in a way that would never have been acceptable at Harvard. But apparently in Hollywood they didn’t listen to you unless you shouted and screamed.

And the Hollywood environment was exotic. There were homosexual and theatrical people, and people who were into drugs and orgies and odd things of all sorts. This had its own fascination, but I often felt uneasy.

Eventually I was going out with a girl who was a famous sex symbol. I was quite pleased that I was going out with a famous sex symbol, although we never really had sex. She wasn’t interested in sex, and she bathed infrequently, so she had strong odors, which deflected my enthusiasm. But she was a lively, friendly person, and I enjoyed spending time with her.

One day she called to say she’d be late, because she was going to see a psychic. This didn’t surprise me. Hollywood people were into all this loony stuff, psychics and astrology and peculiar diets. Everybody was interested in what your sign was. What’s your sign? I used to answer, “Neon.” It was a lot of foolishness.

When she showed up, she was very excited. “Michael, you have to see this woman!”

Why? I asked. I didn’t believe in psychics.

“Listen,” she said, “this woman told me stuff nobody could possibly know!”

Sure, sure, I thought. That’s what they always say.

“No,” she said. “Listen. I ran out of money and I had to get a job, so I made a low-budget movie in the Philippines. I never told anybody.”

I certainly didn’t know about this film she had made.

“And while I was there, I met this pilot in the air force, and he used to take me for rides in his jet fighter.”

I didn’t know about that, either.

“Well, this psychic told me all about it. And there’s no way she could have known!”

I wasn’t impressed.

“Go and see for yourself.”

I didn’t want to go. It was a waste of time and money.

Later on in the evening, I was talking about a movie called
Westworld
I wanted to make. The studio, MGM, was behaving in a discouraging fashion. One day they said they were going to make it. The next day they said it was off. I was worried about what would finally happen.

“Go and ask her, Michael.”

And she made the appointment for me to see my first psychic.

The psychic was a British woman, about fifty, wearing a quilted housecoat in the middle of the afternoon. She lived in a small frame house in the San Fernando Valley. She kept all the shades drawn, so it was dark and gloomy. She led me into a back room with barbells on the floor and an exercise bicycle to one side. The room smelled of talcum powder. And it was dark with the shades drawn. And she sat me down on a bed and then she sat next to me. She took my hand.

“Just relax, love,” she said.

She was silent for a moment. Holding my hand.

I decided that, as long as I was going to a psychic, I’d try to help the process along by making my mind a complete blank. Sitting with her, I tried not to think about anything but just to be blank.

“What are you doing?” she said, after a few moments. “I can’t read you, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make my mind blank.”

“Well, just relax. Don’t try to do anything.”

“Okay,” I said. So I just stared at the barbells and the exercise bicycle. And then she began to talk.

“I see you surrounded by books,” she said. “Lots and lots of books.”

She said I had a project that was up in the air, but that I shouldn’t worry, it was just a little premature. The project would begin in late February.

I found it quite agreeable to be with her, and not at all weird, the way I imagined it would be. She was just a lady who seemed to get things out of the air, and talk about them. I felt as if I was listening to her daydreams about me. That sort of feeling.

But I knew what she was telling me was wrong. This was now November. MGM had set its final decision for December 15. No matter what the studio said at that time, there was no way to begin the picture, either at MGM or elsewhere, by February. So she was definitely wrong.

And she said that I was drawn to psychic and spiritual things. That was wrong, too. I was a scientist. I had no interest in this stuff.

And she said I was psychic myself, which proved to me—if proof were necessary—that neither of us was psychic. Because I knew I wasn’t.

She made some other comments about my past and my family, but nothing unambiguous. Sitting there with her, I began to imagine how I would recount this experience for the amusement of my friends. Psychic? Some woman in her bathrobe sitting in a room with barbells? Give me a break!

A few weeks later, on December 15, MGM canceled
Westworld
. As far as I was concerned, that was the final nail in the psychic coffin.

Then, two days later, MGM changed its mind. The studio would make the movie after all, if the producer and I would agree to an absurdly tight production schedule. We didn’t like the schedule, but we wanted to make the movie, so we agreed.

The movie began shooting on February 23 of the following year, so I had to admit that she had gotten one thing right. But by then I had lots of other things on my mind. I was finally shooting a movie!

In August of 1973 I was flying back from Chicago, where I had screened
Westworld
. It appeared the picture would be successful. The producer and
I had survived an impossible budget and an impossible schedule: to shoot and release a picture in six months. Many people had predicted we couldn’t do it; some had even bet their jobs we couldn’t. Heads would soon roll at the studio—but not ours! Now, with the intense pressure abruptly ended, the producer and I shared in a mood of almost hysterical self-congratulation. We had done it: not only had we made our dates, but the little low-budget picture actually seemed to work! Sitting on that airplane, we literally felt on top of the world.

Suddenly I broke out in a drenching sweat. My clothes were soaked through within seconds. I was panic-stricken, in the grip of a powerful anxiety attack. But why at this instant of airborne elation? It took a while to figure it out.

All my life I had pursued clear goals: in high school, to get into a good college; in college, to get into medical school; in medical school, to become a writer; as a writer, to make a movie.

I was thirty years old. I had graduated from Harvard, taught at Cambridge University, climbed the Great Pyramid, earned a medical degree, married and divorced, been a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, published two bestselling novels, and now had made a movie. And I had abruptly run out of goals for myself.

I was stranded within my own life. That was why I broke into a sweat:
what was I going to do now?

I had no idea.

In the following weeks, I fell into a lethargy, then a full-blown depression. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Needless to say, sympathy for my condition was in short supply. To be depressed by success was not attractive, or even understandable. My friends didn’t realize that they might be next in line.

I took to haunting bookstores, buying five hundred dollars’ worth of books at a time, carrying them off in cartons. Books on every conceivable subject: dinosaurs, hot-air ballooning, Charles II, saturation diving, Islamic art, weather forecasting, computer graphics, Indonesian cooking, criminology, Benjamin Franklin, the Himalaya, Victorian cities, high-energy physics, tigers, Leonardo da Vinci, the British Raj, witchcraft, vegetarian cooking, the Inca Empire, Winslow Homer. Since nothing interested me, everything was equally uninteresting.