54

As they sat watching the rushes from the week’s shooting, the director said to the studio executive, “You see what I mean, the camera loves her.”

“Mm,” the executive replied. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Any actor would look like shit in person if they could look like that on the screen. Who’d you say is your editor?”

“Tompkins.”

“I’d tell Tompkins to leave the rest of them on the cutting-room floor. Dump the bodies in New Jersey somewheres. Just get in as much of her as possible.”

“He’ll do the best he can. Funny, isn’t it? The ones the camera hasn’t blessed like this, they want it on them all the time, like Streisand. But this one, she’s always getting out of the way of everyone else—I tell you, she’d defer to the fucking credits. And she sits there, while that asshole Petersen flubs his way through a scene, when we’ve already done ten takes of it, not saying a word, and she was perfect the first time.”

“Well, Petersen is box office.”

“I wouldn’t bother pushing him for an Oscar on this one.”

“We’re not stupid. Obviously we’re going to be campaigning for Simmons. I think she’s ready for it.”

“They may not think so, though. Remember, this is only her third movie.”

The studio executive lit a cigarette and rested his head on the back of his plush chair. “Remember we only need a percentage of what they think,” he told the director, “and we account for a lot of jobs, so a lot of people are going to vote the way we want them to, because they want us to stay healthy so they can keep those jobs. The best performance you see from any actor is him paying his bills.”

“She should be on Carson,” the director said. “And Merv Griffin.”

“We’re trying to get her into People,” said the executive. “She’s not all that easy to promote, though. It’d help if she was fucking somebody.”

“Well, she’s been linked romantically with Beatty, and Rod Stew—”

“I’m not talking about PR bullshit, I mean really fucking somebody.”

“To tell you the truth, Stu, I don’t know what she does. There have been days when she shows up on the set looking a little tired—but I don’t know from what. She lives in a little apartment on Wilshire. Sometimes she makes dinners for people: makeup people, the sound crew. I’ve been to her place. She’ll make a buffet, and put the food on an ironing board with a tablecloth over it. She’s a fantastic cook.”

“She must have recipes. I’ll tell publicity to contact the women’s magazines.”

“That’s an idea—look, would you believe that’s a twenty-eight-year-old actress?”

Stu turned his attention to the screen again. Veronica, round-shouldered and gray, was reaching with effort to hang a coat on a peg.

“She’s supposed to be—what? Eighty at this point?”

“Yeah, we had two days of exactly the same weather, and I wanted these shots of her against the setting sun—one when she was twenty and the other when she was eighty, so the second day she spent the morning in makeup, and I got exactly what I was after.”

“What’s the accent she’s using? It sounds sort of hillbilly.”

“The Shakers did talk like hillbillies. None of us knew that until Veronica came across it in a book. She’s probably read a dozen books on the Shakers since we began this project.”

“Petersen sounds like Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett. That’s the trouble with a performance that’s so fucking authentic, it makes the bread-and-butter slobs you have to have along for the ride look like the no-talent fucks they are.”

“She’s good with him, though. Works with him the way I used to see my mother giving my baby brother Gerber’s strained peaches out of a jar. His performance is a hell of a lot better than it would have been without her.”

“I’ll tell you something, Martin. When I saw Islands in Winter, I cried. Me. She got to me, she really had me going. And you know why? Because she made me remember that I love movies, she made me feel this rush of joy…joy in, I don’t know, life, I guess, art. There’s too few like her. The ones who give us back…our dignity.”

“Maybe she will get an Oscar this time out. The Academy isn’t always ungrateful.”

Stu shook his head, marveling at what he was seeing on the screen. “She really isn’t seeing anybody, huh?” he said.

“Nobody I know of,” Martin replied. He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard absently, concentrating on the film he had just shot.

“Christ, I should call her up myself.”

“You’d get her answering machine,” said Martin.

“I had lunch with David Whitman a couple of weeks ago,” Stu said. “He told me that he fucked her back when they were in college.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Martin said.

Later that evening Stu tried calling Veronica. He got her answering machine.

It was in a closet of her bedroom, where she couldn’t hear it.

Veronica was in her living room, which she had virtually emptied of furniture, save for a simple, rush-seated, ladder-back Shaker chair.

Veronica was moving back and forth across her bare floor, dancing and clapping her hands, and singing a Shaker hymn.

She had been doing this for hours, just as the Shakers themselves had done once upon a time, and she would keep doing it for hours more.