Natalie couldn’t have one drink without having every drink. Drunk. Wasn’t it so wonderful to be drunk? Natalie was drunk. Unreasonably so, for her. But for that moment she never wanted to be anything else.
Natalie couldn’t remember if she and Christopher had been sitting at the bar at Doug’s Harbor Reef Restaurant for two hours or three when R.J. and Dennis finally met them there. Or was it even four?
She could somehow still sequence the events of the day: The four of them had docked Natalie and R.J.’s pelican blue-colored yacht—Splendour—on the Two Harbors side of Catalina in late afternoon and had planned to go for dinner and drinks at Doug’s, the only restaurant on that side of the island. But while R.J. and Dennis were both taking naps on the yacht, Natalie and Christopher got bored and decided to take the Valiant, Splendour’s dinghy, to the restaurant early. They left a note for R.J and Dennis telling them where they’d gone. She and R.J. had named Splendour after her most classic film, Splendor in the Grass. The Valiant was named after R.J.’s portrayal of Prince Valiant in the 1959 film of the same title. A dinghy always trails after a yacht.
Natalie and Christopher had been having drinks at the bar when R.J. and Dennis arrived by water taxi. Natalie was wearing a red quilted jacket over a golden yellow turtleneck sweater and a pair of designer blue jeans. It had been chilly and rainy when they came over on the dinghy so Natalie had kept her jacket on at the bar.
She and Christopher were quite chummy when R.J. and Dennis arrived, laughing and drinking, sharing little private jokes. At one point, Natalie was literally hanging onto Christopher so she wouldn’t fall off her stool, she was laughing so hysterically. Even with her back to him, Natalie could feel R.J.’s anger bubbling. Christopher made her laugh. So what? She needed to laugh right now. R.J. could fuck off and she really meant that tonight.
They were all seated in the dining area to eat dinner having finally migrated over from the bar. They had already gone through three wine bottles which now lay empty on the table. A couple nearby who were fans of Natalie’s had sent over a fresh bottle of champagne from which they were now all drinking.
Although Natalie was drunk, she was having a small moment of clarity through the fog of her drunkenness. One of those moments when you come to, awake and alone above the din. She was suddenly drunk enough to realize just how drunk she really was.
“Do you know the rest of your lines, Natalie?” Christopher asked.
“Lines?” she asked, giggling. “Lines of what?” The word could suddenly refer to so many things. Her moment of clarity was over.
“I mean are you off-book? For taping the last scenes of Brainstorm,” Christopher said. Oh God, of course. Brainstorm.
She grabbed her glass of champagne less because she wanted another sip and more to simply steady herself with an action. A prop.
“Natalie has been off-book since before you guys even started filming. She probably knows all of your lines too, Chris. And Louise’s and Cliff’s,” R.J. said to him, clinking his glass with Christopher’s. R.J. smiled but Natalie didn’t trust it. She knew he wasn’t really happy at all.
“I do. I mean, I am,” Natalie agreed. “I’m off-book.”
“It’s such a struggle for me sometimes,” Christopher said.
“Well, you have a lot more lines than I do,” Natalie said. “I forgot a line during a run-through of Anastasia once. It was a dress rehearsal that was open to friends and family, mind you, so it wasn’t like it was an empty theater and I could just call out to the stage manager for the line. The whole thing only lasted all of maybe five seconds, but it really seemed to go on a lot longer. And it was terrifying. That has never happened to me before. Luckily, I finally remembered the line but I was scared and embarrassed by the whole thing. I’m sure people could tell.”
“I wasn’t there,” R.J. said. “Lucky for you that you remembered.”
“Have you always been so lucky, Natalie?” asked Dennis. Dennis was Splendour’s young skipper who had become a good friend of hers and R.J.’s in recent years since they had purchased it. He had basically come with the yacht when they bought it. She loved his straightforwardness and the way he always seemed to want to protect her even if she didn’t feel like she needed to be protected.
“No. Honestly, I don’t really believe in luck. When I was a little girl, even before I did my first movie, my mother—who we would always call Mud, very old-school Russian Mud”—(she delivered as an aside to Christopher)—“Mud used to plant coins for me to find on the sidewalk, always when she thought I wasn’t looking. Then I would have to pretend to find them, and then she would say that it was magic. That I was a magical person,” Natalie said, topping off her champagne. “She seemed to make it her life goal for me to think that about myself. That I was lucky. That I was special. That I was a magical Russian princess.” Natalie paused and took a sip. “I don’t think it ever does anyone any good to rely on thinking they’re special.”
“Well, you are and you know it,” said R.J. “You can be a little bitch and you know that too.”
“Screw you, R.J.,” she said.
“Oh, but would you screw me, dear?” R.J. said. “It’s been such a long time.”
“R.J., come on,” said Christopher.
“You can call me Robert, Chris. Only close friends call me R.J. You’re Natalie’s co-star. You’re not a friend,” he said.
“R.J.!” said Natalie.
“I don’t want to get in the way of your process, dear. Either of your processes,” R.J. said, adding a very sibilant “s.”
However drunk Natalie thought she was, R.J. was drunker. And he was seething. R.J. thought that Natalie and Christopher were having an affair.
Natalie and Christopher were playing estranged spouses in Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, a science fiction thriller about a device capable of recording the emotions and sensations from one person’s brain and transmitting them into another person to experience. R.J. had practically begged Natalie to take the part, yet he had done nothing but complain about it throughout the entire length of filming which was thankfully now almost complete.
Brainstorm would be Natalie’s first feature film since the poorly received The Last Married Couple in America a year earlier. She didn’t know what had gone wrong with that picture but she didn’t think it had anything to do with her. The script was middling and her chemistry with George Segal had felt very strained at times.
R.J. and Natalie often invited their co-stars onto Splendour like they had done with Christopher that weekend. During the filming of Last Married Couple, George, while spending the weekend on their yacht, had made a racist joke that involved Sidney Poitier leaving watermelon seeds between the cushions of the sofa in the main cabin of Splendour during his own visit a previous weekend. It had bothered Natalie so much, she could just feel the tension during their interactions for the rest of filming. So maybe the movie flopping really was her fault. She found casual racism and homophobia so ugly, and she always had. She had wanted to punish George for it.
There was no room for any such mistakes on Brainstorm. Natalie had to do well in Brainstorm. She wanted to continue to bond with Christopher because she felt like it was adding a certain pizzazz to their scenes together. She wasn’t an idiot; she’d been in Hollywood since she was four years old. She could see what was happening to her in that town, and it was not good. She was missing out on roles that she should have gotten. Roles for an actress of her age were already scarce.
A perfect example was the Robert Redford situation. Natalie had always considered Bob to be a good friend. Years ago, she had personally chosen him to play the role of her closeted gay husband in Inside Daisy Clover which turned out to be his breakthrough performance. However, just last year he had passed on her as the mother in the adaptation of Ordinary People he was directing. That was a role that could finally have won her an Oscar.
“I forgot a line in a musical I did once with Liza Minnelli. I just made something up on the spot and the audience went fucking wild for it. Whatshisface even wrote the line I ad-libbed into the book,” Christopher said.
“I would have a hard time doing that. Jimmy Dean did that on the set of Rebel and I was always so impressed by it.” Natalie smiled at Christopher.
“You know, Chris, Natalie decorated Splendour from stem to stern. It never looked that good before the Wagners bought it,” Dennis said, beaming at her.
“Thank you, Dennis,” she said.
“Natalie is really good at staging things,” R.J. said taking a swig from the cognac he had ordered.
Natalie’s friend Mart was supposed to have joined them that weekend but he had canceled at the last minute because of a sick friend. She knew that Mart would have defused the tension at the table. He was always so good with R.J.
“Does your friend have that new disease that gay men are getting?” she had asked Mart.
“I think maybe he does. But no one really knows for sure. You know, there’s no test yet.” There was a long pause on the phone. “Nat, even I could have it.”
“Mart, don’t even say that,” Natalie said. “I wouldn’t make it without you.”
It was true too, and they both knew it. But Mart wouldn’t last long without Natalie either. She had staged an intervention once several years ago to address his excessive drinking and it had worked for some time. Without her there, he would be a mess again in no time. She was sure of that.
“I hope your friend gets better,” she said to Mart.
“Yeah. Hope. ‘Hope!’” Mart said. “It’s like the title of a bad TV movie I’ve written. What a mess, you know?”
Mart had started out as Natalie’s personal assistant but through the years he had transitioned into a confidant and a close friend. Mart knew everything about Natalie, and Mart was a vault. For instance, he was the only one who knew that R.J. had hit her once and she’d had to run to a neighbor’s house for help—to a mother and her fifteen-year-old boy.
When Mart didn’t have the funding to mount his play, The Boys in the Band, Natalie put it up herself. She hosted a big party for Mart and the cast on opening night.
“People must see this, Mart. No one dies at the end—it’s revolutionary!” she told him when the play had opened.
Natalie had never encountered a film or a play where the gay character was allowed to live at the end. Perhaps not happily (all the characters in Mart’s play seemed to be deeply depressed as well as insecure alcoholics), but at least they were alive and breathing when the curtain came down. It had simply never been done.
She remembered Sal Mineo’s character in Rebel Without a Cause—Plato. It had been so obvious while they were filming that his character was supposed to be gay. And Natalie was pretty sure that both Sal and Jimmy had been playing it that way. Then, of course, Plato was shot dead at the end of the film with Jimmy crying over him. Gays were never allowed to just live.
Natalie and Sal had both received their first Oscar nominations for Rebel, but they hadn’t spoken in many years. Then she saw him at a film premiere sometime in the mid-seventies. He was with a young man, a blond, almost a Jimmy Dean type. She kissed Sal on the cheek. Then Sal got stabbed to death in West Hollywood a couple weeks later and Natalie was so shaken by it. With Jimmy dead in a car accident in his Spider before Rebel even came out and Sal gone now too, she was the only principal from the film left alive. Sometimes it made her feel like she would die in some horrible way too. Finally succumb to her mother’s premonition that Natalie would drown in dark water. There was nothing magical about that.
Mart was also the one who had told Natalie a rumor he’d heard about Christopher. Mart said that Christopher had had an affair with the actor who played the “Cowboy” in Mart’s play.
“You know, I can almost believe that,” Natalie had said. “I bet he was researching a role. He’s very method.”
But how stupid it was of her to say that. It was the exact same excuse that R.J. had given her years before when she had walked in on him and another man when the two of them were married the first time around. It was one lame excuse of several he had offered, none of which she believed. She ended up being the one to take the blame in the press for the end of their marriage in order to save R.J.’s career, but she knew there were still whisperings about it around town. R.J.’s agent back then, Henry Willson, was known to represent closeted gay actors including Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. She had once overheard at a party that he kept a “stable of faggots.” R.J. also had that effeminate butler in the small bachelor pad in Beverly Hills they had moved into back when they were first married. Natalie’s mother always found it suspicious that the butler was a live-in in a two-bedroom condo. “Is not normal, Natasha,” Mud would say to her. “Makes no sense.”
A man with an accordion came over to their table and began playing “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. It made Natalie think fondly of her Russian parents—her mother’s obsession with the Romanov family, her heavy accent, her father’s drinking, his handsomeness. Everything that had seemed loud and angry before seemed to pause briefly and she felt drunk enough to let her eyes rest a bit in peace.
“Let’s have a toast!” Christopher suggested as the accordion player moved into the center of the restaurant, continuing with the song.
“To what?” asked Dennis.
“To Natalie. To magical Natalie,” Christopher said.
“To Natalie,” R.J. slurred.
She looked at R.J. and saw him squinting at her. It was the same look he had given her when she had walked in on him with that man. As if she was the one who should watch her step and not the other way around. As if she was the one capable of betrayal.
Maybe R.J. was actually jealous of her because of her friendship with Christopher and not the other way around. They had never really discussed his sexuality but now she thought they probably should have at some point.
It was funny after all, this dumb sci-fi movie she and Christopher were in. She wished she could use the device from Brainstorm on R.J. She wanted to feel what he really felt about her. About Christopher. About their lives. Record his emotions and feelings onto the device and then press play so she could feel them for herself. There was something so frightening about never really being able to know another person. There was something so frightening about Natalie having married R.J. twice and still not knowing him at all.
But what if she put on the device and there was just a big nothing? A total vacuum. The empty depths of R.J. transformed into the soundtrack of their lives. Like the interminable silence she had experienced when she’d dropped that line in the play. The sound of being alone.
“To splendor in the grass. To glory in the flower,” Natalie said. She remembered a toast her father used to say. “Droozyia! Boodem zdarovy!” She downed her champagne. Then she stood up and threw the flute against the wall where it smashed against two wooden rowing paddles crisscrossed and covered in fishing net.
“Natalie, what the hell is wrong with you?” R.J. yelled.
“I’m Russian, R.J. This is what Russians do,” said Natalie.
***