Deleted Scenes and Bonus Content

Most DVDs include a special-features section, deleted scenes, and glimpses into the making of the movie. I wanted to share a couple of deleted sections and behind-the-scenes notes from A Beautiful Fall. This paragraph below was written in longhand in a yellow legal notebook I carry with me. It outlined my first thoughts on the character of 1960s movie starlet, Janette Kerr. After the premise was written, these were the first words I wrote for the novel:

Marjorie Kerr lived a simple life, or least she had for the past twenty years. Ever since she’d left Hollywood, California, in a powder blue Cadillac convertible in 1972 following a brief, tumultuous career as B-movie starlet. Marjorie had seen the studio system up close as a working contract actress to MGM, been cast in many B-movie player roles as night-club cigarette girls, passengers on trains, and chorus line dancers. She’d even played opposite Clark Gable in Some Go East, collecting his coins at an onstage newspaper stand and delivering her one line on cue: “Twenty-five cents.” He’d replied: “Here you go, kid.” But she left Hollywood. Left it and didn’t ever care to go back …

o o o

This section below is an unedited swatch, a first-draft glimpse at A Beautiful Fall as it was being written. The barn-dance scene was written out of sequence with the rest of the novel. When this was written, none of the other scenes with Christina and Bo had been set to paper yet.

(Hayride Scene)

“Bo, thanks for coming on this hayride with me. Don’t know why the others didn’t want to come.”

“Some people aren’t as adventurous as you are.”

Christina snuggled closer, tighter to Bo. The faces of the other couples were in shadows cast by the darkness of the orchard. There was no wind, but the night air was chilled.

“I’m glad you are.”

The rumbling chug of Farmer Whitfield’s tractor up ahead of them made all talk private. Just two people in a group sitting on a blanket on the trailer’s floor, edged with bales of hay.

“You seem especially happy tonight. Having a good time?” Bo said.

“I’m having a wonderful time. I love being outdoors, even at night. I love being with all of our friends, and I love being here with you.”

“Sounds like you’ve got everything you need.”

“Yeah, Bo. I do. I just want the piece that’s missing. Knowing it’s always going to be this way.”

Bo joked. “You want me to hold back the changing of time? Try and keep things just the way they are?”

“No,” Christina let out in her soft voice of confidence and resolve. “I just want to wake up every morning with you sleeping next to me. That’s all.”

Christina lived by the confidence that if ideas could be put into words and expressed, then they could be understood. Bo was the kind of man who liked things he could put his hands on, not ideas that he couldn’t wrap his mind around. Still, he felt guilty when he heard the words that sprang out from her heart. He knew where they came from. He knew Christina was honest and could only say what she felt on the inside. Sometimes he thought he would just ask her. Just surprise her one day with a ring and get the whole thing over with. Bo knew he would be marrying up. Christina was a jewel. His own dad had told him that at Thanksgiving the year before. She was smarter, she was better looking, and she had to be making more money than he. No, just give it another spring, another summer. They were having a great time. Why rush it?

“As long as I’m the last man you kiss before you go to bed, we’re good. You aren’t seeing someone else after I drop you off, are you?”

“Yes, Bo. I keep him in my laundry room.”

Christina pinched Bo on his arm. The hayride turned the back loop of the dark trail and Christina watched the tractor’s headlights pass over the apple-less trees. The clouds above them moved south, heading for warmer weather. The bark on the trees seemed to hold close for warmth. Could it be cooler than forty?

“Hey, after the ride why don’t we invite everyone back to my house for hot chocolate or cider, or anything warm? Does that sound like a good idea?”

“Yeah, if everybody wants to. You’re just cold now.”

“Bo, I love these times when we’re alone.”

Christina sat in front of Bo on the blanket. She turned her head to face him.

“You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You know so. I couldn’t make anything more clear.”

Bo kept silent. Christina was in high spirits. This was everything she loved in one special night. He hoped she wasn’t going to use this moment to scratch the marriage itch. He didn’t think this was the time or place.

Christina reached her open hand up behind Bo’s neck and pulled him down for a kiss. “Maybe just you should come to my place for cocoa.”

Bo found the deep pool of Christina’s eyes among the shadows of the night. She sat still as a statue before him, unblinking. He wondered just what went on inside her, and if he would possibly drown if he fell off the edge. He kissed her again, a long kiss, and knew how deep was her love. Just like the song that played on her stereo when he’d picked her up that night. Just like the question she was asking him. How deep?

The tractor rounded the last bend and pulled in under the bright naked exterior lights mounted high in the corners of the barn. They were again in the company of friends, greeters in the night happy to see the couples return to the party.

“Anyone in the mood for a late-night hangout session at my place? We can make it the first official lighting of the fireplace.”

“Oh, it’s so late, hon,” Emma said, because she wanted to be alone with Michael.

“Yeah, it’s getting kind of late,” Samantha echoed Emma’s thoughts, only for entirely different reasons. She was tired, tired enough to want to get home and go to sleep. It had been a wonderful night, but it was time to go to bed.

Jim fished the keys to the van out of his pocket and opened the driver door, turning on the dome light.

o o o

This last section is a deleted scene from chapter 1. Originally, I wanted to show a more complex relationship between Emma and Robert Adler. This became problematic fairly quickly, so I abandoned the idea. Here’s a sketch of Robert Adler’s thinking as he watched Emma in the courtroom in chapter 1.

Robert Adler, the firm’s senior partner, sat in the fifth row of the courtroom watching the woman he’d hired eight years earlier. He’d then mentored, apprenticed, and groomed her to the full extent of legal and business maturity.

Had he been twenty years younger, maybe. Maybe he would have acted not as senior partner, or as senior anything, but as someone else in her life. Robert Adler observed Emma presenting a case before the judge and jury that was as solid as stainless steel, yet as warm as a woman’s touch.

Hollywood calls that something extra the “it” that defines a person. Intelligence, humor, vulnerability, self-reliance—Adler saw those qualities in Emma the minute she’d taken her seat for the first of two interviews. When she’d told him the story of where she was from, down south, the Carolinas. And how far she’d come to Harvard law school, passing the Massachusetts state bar exam. Yet she’d retained so much of wherever it was she’d come from. That day he wondered if McCormick & Adler was a brilliant opportunity for Emma. Today in the courtroom he wondered if the firm was merely a stepping-stone on her inevitable journey into the stratosphere of practicing law.