WITH THE POWER he gained from the success of Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?, Peter had the ability—rare and usually short-lived—to make pretty much anything he wanted to make. At first he chose films that would elevate Cybill to stardom: Daisy Miller (from the well-known—one can almost say “signature”—Henry James story, Daisy Miller). The English novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael was hired to do the script.
I was in and out of Hollywood then, sometimes getting jobs and sometimes not. Peter brought up the fact that there was an eleven-year-old boy in the story, Randolph, Daisy’s brother. My own son, James, was eleven at the time; he was immediately, indeed whimsically, cast as Randolph. James acquitted himself well in the role: well enough that Martin Scorsese wanted him for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; but James declined. He liked acting well enough and Europe well enough too, but the ten-day wait he had to put up with in Switzerland, where the fog on Lake Geneva stubbornly would not lift even long enough for the one shot needed.
While they were doing the Roman sequences of the story I had little to do and wandered to my heart’s content through the Eternal City, which I came to love and still love.
I was working on Terms of Endearment then. I wrote in the mornings and wandered in the afternoon.
When the production moved to Vevey, Switzerland, I stayed in the hotel where the little story may have been conceived and walked less and read more; I also bought a small tourist rental library and shipped it home. I saw little of Peter and nothing at all of Cybill.
To assuage my son’s long boredom I bought him fishing equipment and turned him loose on the quays of Lake Geneva, out of which he pulled up many minute perch. What he enjoyed more, I think, was watching the finicky old Swiss fishermen arguing over their catches.
For my entertainment I could walk the short distance down to the French border and stare at the vast Montreux Palace, where Vladimir Nabokov and his devoted wife, Vera, were living at the time. It looked to be a comfortable place, comfortable enough that the Nabokovs stayed inside. I never glimpsed either one.
In Rome we had dined once, ceremonially, more or less, with Bernardo Bertolucci, at a chilly, snooty, high-end restaurant called El Toula. Nothing was said by either young director—at least nothing I could understand.
Later that evening, though, I did glimpse Andy Warhol, wandering through the Piazza Navona. He wandered through the crowd like a frail ghost, licking his gelato.
My biggest thrill in Rome happened quite by accident. One day I wandered down in the vast caverns and banquet halls of the Rome Hilton. The hall I wandered in had to have been taken over by a movie crew—the cables were the giveaway.
To my shock and surprise the movie being filmed starred Elizabeth Taylor, who went quietly about doing her job and making no difficulties for anybody, that I could see.
I was not to see her again until I happened to sit behind her at a rehearsal for some big special in the Kennedy Center.
She was married at the time of the special to Senator John Warner of Virginia, a union that didn’t last. She had, as I have said elsewhere, extremely beautiful eyes. (Out of loyalty to Irving Lazar as he was dying, she came to his last Oscar party; during the Oscar ceremony Taylor had made a very fine speech about the need for more money for AIDS research. The writer Harold Brodkey, who was at the time dying of the disease, was at our table when she spoke and was visibly moved. She came over to our table and I thanked her, frankly dazzled by those remarkable eyes.)
Daisy Miller did not exactly rock the box offices of the world, but it did respectably, and was, in my opinion, respectable as a film. Since Peter had just made three big hits the studios were ready enough to allow him this star-making effort.
My son whiled away the long Swiss evenings by playing foosball with the future producer Frank Marshall and other members of the crew.
Once the movie wrapped there was a sad note. The young actor Barry Brown, who played Daisy’s none too active suitor, was found dead in his car on a New York street. I didn’t know him well, but I did see in him a kind of self-disappointment—perfect for that role but not so perfect for life. It was a look compounded of fear and emptiness—many actors have it when they are not playing a part.