The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

 

Tilly: Excerpt A

I first met Angus Mann in Africa when I was twenty-nine years old.  When I think back to our beginning, when I open up all of the little boxes in my head and examine those memories, I re-experience Angus more than simply remember him. 

My career was on its way up.  His, almost an afterthought, although, to be fair, the decision of Bright Leaf Films to option The Lion Tree was an unexpected shot in the arm.  The Lion Tree, as a motion picture, gave Angus more public recognition in the eleventh hour of his career than did all of his preceding works combined; just as I told him it would.  This was a victory I lorded over him mercilessly, until the very end.

Angus would undoubtedly object to the term “career” as a characterization of his life’s work, connoting as it does a prolonged exchange of effort and personal sacrifice for financial return. 

And, of course, he would be right about that. 

Angus never wrote for money, and for most of his life he never had much of it.  He wrote words in exchange for oxygen.  He wrote to live.  He wrote because emotionally, constitutionally, he had little choice.  Angus Mann wrote in his own blood.  To call it a “career” misses the point.

But back then, I was all about “career” – the prolonged exchange of personal sacrifice for financial return. I was then a comely sprig of single-minded ambition tempered by emotional immaturity, disgustingly poor judgment, low standards, delusions of grandeur and a tragic blind spot for irony.  In short, perfect for Hollywood. 

And while I had little grasp of just why I was perfect for Hollywood, I knew in the pink of my marrow that I was perfect.  I either sensed that I had all of the runaway narcissism and other tragic self-delusions required of the Hollywood perfection standard, or I believed that I had no self-delusions at all and that Hollywood would reward me for my unique artistic talent as an actress; which, of course, is seriously delusional and narcissistic.  So, either way, I was perfect for Hollywood. 

I met Angus on location filming The Lion Tree, about two or three weeks into the shooting.  We were in Tunisia and then Kenya working on what would be the first of three efforts to get the safari wildlife shots just right. Blair Gaines directed and co-produced the picture; a first rate movie maker and, not by coincidence, a first rate hot-headed prick.  I vowed in the middle of that film that I would never work with Blair again. I have broken that promise twice. 

I never actually had a role in any of the safari shots, but Blair was pushed for time.  He wanted to work with me on my part of the script, which was in constant evolution.  Angus had written Colonel Ivanova as a multidimensional character; subdued perhaps, but multi-faceted.  The screenwriters, I cannot remember their names—Frick and Frack—could not settle on just how to boil Ivanova down, to congeal all of her richness into a flat, marketable attitude that they could slap onto a poster.  They kept tweaking and rewriting and my part kept changing.  Ivanova the siren.  Ivanova the bitch.  Ivanova the victim. Ivanova the scrupulous interrogator.  Blair finally lost his patience and the arguments were daily and epic. 

The rapid deterioration in that relationship is ultimately what led to all of the mid-production industry gossip about Blair firing the screenwriters and reworking the script himself.  Not exactly true.  What Blair actually did was hire Angus, already a consultant for the project. Then Frick and Frack quit in a huff and stomped off to see their lawyers.  What is true is that Blair always seemed to be in danger of shooting a scene that had not yet been fully scripted.

So I spent a couple of weeks in Tunisia and Kenya working on my part.  I flew out with the crew and met Blair who had gone over early with the advance team and the gaffers to scout the shoot. I spent most of my time sweating beneath a white tarp the crew stretched over the tops of two of the larger trucks Blair had rented.  Tough as I was in every other respect, I was still a girl from Ohio who had barely managed to acclimate to Los Angeles.  I was certainly not prepared for the Kenyan climate. 

I spent my days staving off heatstroke, swatting at flies, preparing for my evening sessions with Blair and staring out into the savannah watching them try to shoot this single scene – an enactment of the allegory that Ivanova offers to Lieutenant Miller as a way of summing him up, before imposing his sentence—which was in many ways a centerpiece of the film. 

On each day, our window of opportunity was only about three or four hours.  Lighting was crucial and Blair wanted the sun to be in a particular slice of the sky. He wanted these shots to have an under-exposed, sepia flavor, like an old memory burned at the edges.  He wanted the savannah scenes to have some visual resonance, albeit in contrast, with the scenes set under the enormous synthetic dome on Rhuton-Baker, the planet where Elena Ivanova interrogates her lover.  The Rhuton-Baker scenes were deliberately washed-out and over-exposed, to suggest sterility rather than age. Truth rather than memory. 

Nothing cooperated.  The insects got in the way.  In Kenya the wind came in unpredictable gusts.  We had generator problems.  The lions were difficult.  The wild lions were, ironically, far too diffident for the mood Blair was trying to capture.  Zoom lenses brought them in close, but did nothing to agitate them into ferociousness.  The captive lions, on the other hand, were so agitated at all the heightened attention, that their handlers – I should say, their near slave-labor meat-slingers—could not give them any workable direction. The zoo shots were, without exception, disasters. We kept having to leave civilization to find these cats in their natural habitat, where they were simply too content to seem wild. 

But Blair got his shot.  He always does.

We did most of our script work at night out in hotel courtyards, first in Tozeur, then in Mombassa, after Blair had worked through the dailies and lined the cast and crew out for the next day’s shoot. 

It has been so many years, now.  I have never been back to Africa and it is certainly out of the question now.  But I do remember it vividly. I remember that the night air was sweet and still and heavy and so hot, boiling up from the ground, it was hard to concentrate.  It was as though the sun, baking the people having lunch in a park on the other side of the planet, was burning directly through miles of darkened earth to reach the soles of our feet. 

I remember that Angus was always nearby, always underfoot, with his tea and his cigarettes.  He carried around a ragged copy of his story, either stuffed in a back pocket or rolled up like a paper scepter. 

He was quiet and distant much of the time, as though he were politely laboring the pain of some internal wound.  Often, Angus was silent for hours on end, standing and watching or sitting and watching as people and equipment streamed around him; as though he were a rock jutting obstinately out of a river.  My first impression was that he was just naturally deferential to what goes on in someone else’s home.  I know better now.  What I saw as deference was simply a well-mannered hopelessness, a begrudging, excruciating surrender to something he loathed. 

When Angus did contribute, it was sudden and unpredictable, in the nature of involuntary outburst; a violent squall in the desert.  Out of nowhere he became a torrent of vituperative opinion and strenuous objection, with no hint of deference; as though we were in his home.  As though we were deigning to instruct him on composition.  He spoke like a writer.  His tirades had a beginning, a middle, and an end, full of metaphor and nuance and symbolism, and always rich with understated derision.  We even joked to ourselves that Angus spent his hours of pained silence mentally composing his next harangue.

And yet, while I call them outbursts and tirades and violent squalls and the like, the remarkable thing about such interjections was that Angus’ intensity came less from his manner than from his words and the implacable ferocity in his eyes when he spoke them. Flailing and shouting were beneath him and often, even when he chose to sacrifice all economy of verbal expression, speaking great rivers of words in service to some depth of feeling, he almost always adhered to a preternatural economy of emotional expression. One had to watch, and listen, to understand Angus. It took me a long time to realize that his many harsh opinions were merely steam vents miles away from the molten core.

In retrospect, I have to say that Blair showed remarkable tolerance and even concern for Angus’ opinions; an uncharacteristic solicitude that increasingly upset the screenwriters.  Although, knowing Blair, angering the screenwriters may have been the whole point. 

I remember how strangely territorial I was; how protective of the art of making movies.  How I resented the incursions from this force of literature, this man, the author, who had made no bones about his disdain for the industry, my industry, at whose doorstep he laid nothing less than the downfall of all western civilization.  I took my cue from the crew and the screenwriters, who, by the end of the shoot, truly hated Angus; probably because they could not tell from one moment to the next whether the burning sensation at their backs was the Tunisian sun or his scathing judgment.  Blair, on the other hand, treated Angus like a father.  Angus, in return, treated Blair like a wayward son who had chosen to bring home a hooker as his bride.

Tilly: Excerpt B

The message had come with my breakfast, sealed in a green-bordered envelope with a circle of plum wax, slipped decorously beneath my plate of mango. The flourish was entirely that of the hotel, but the message was all Blair, typically Spartan in its efficiency and authoritarian in the way it marshaled both letter and meaning into lock step obedience.
 
Tilly:  John’s a mess.  No shooting.  Ivanova today. My place - 11:00.  BG.

I took the message to mean that Jack Wellington (only Blair called him John) had gotten worse; had progressed from feverish fatigue and green-tinted wooziness to actual incapacitation.  I assumed constant vomiting and diarrhea and turned out to be correct. 

Jack at that time was a fifty-something London stage actor who desperately wanted to make a foray into American film.  I think Blair cast him in our movie because he needed an older, attractive looking Brit to play the part of the man who unwittingly delivers his family, and himself, unto a pride of hungry lions. It was brilliant casting. Jack delivered every word and act with a compelling subtext of desperation. He had the look and sound and feel of someone for whom time was running out, a condition which, on screen, was believably inspired by the breath of a 200 pound lion and not simply poor theater reviews in the London Times.

Unfortunately, Jack showed up in Mombassa with a nasty flu and a case of viral meningitis. While his condition certainly added to his natural air of desperation, it also took him out of commission. He soldiered on for a couple of days and, in fact, Blair found a way to turn the situation to his advantage by shooting the death-by-lion scenes before the safari camping scenes because Jack just looked so awful.  But, eventually, the virus took Jack beyond even cinematic death and we had to wait for him to recover.  Blair took the disruption personally, of course, and never again used Jack Wellington, whose last acting role before retiring – his Swan Song, as it were—was as the high school principal in a London stage production of Grease.

But for as much as it vexed Blair, Jack’s illness ended up playing to my advantage.  The delay allowed for some additional days in Kenya, which I was growing to like very much, with its colors and tradition and its song, in spite of the heat. Among many other things – like browsing the open air markets of Kongowea for spices and a beautiful yellow sari that is still in my closet after seventy years, or touring the teeming North Shore and its purlieus in a rickety boda-boda with my very excellent guide Kahil who taught me how to chaffer with vendors and introduced me to authentic Taarab music and proposed marriage when I tried to pay him for the day—I owe to Jack Wellington’s incapacity an oneiric hot air balloon ride that I have never forgotten. As the sun set over the acacia-dotted plains of the Maasai Mara, loping clusters of giraffe and herds of antelope and blue wildebeest and elephant and vast, flaming formations of African cranes, all slipping in and out of our quiet, bulbous shadow. It might have been the shadow of a head, peering down into the cradle of humanity. It was like floating over an ancient dream that all of us recognize in the marrow of our unconscious.

But Jack’s illness also meant that I finally had Blair’s attention on substantive script work.  The hiatus produced the better part of two full days for us to get to the bottom of Colonel Elena Ivanova, which was a vast improvement over the scraps of attention she and I had been receiving in the evenings after a day of shooting and compulsive fretting over the dailies.
 
Tilly:  John’s a mess.  No shooting.  Ivanova today. My place - 11:00.  BG.

The message beneath my breakfast fruit had offered no directions to “my place.” I found Blair Gaines that morning like I had all the others before him.  It was like falling, really, or slipping on ice hidden beneath a whisper-thin sheet of snow.  It is the nature of a body to succumb to gravity.  And so it was with me and my directors.  It was a sound that they made, or a light that they shed, or a vibration that they hummed in their bones without even knowing.  Or, at least, knowing without really knowing.  They must have known something.  How can a resonance so true, so perfectly tuned, go unnoticed? 

Like so many directors, Blair had a singularity of presence that gleamed and flickered in the dark like a beacon to lost and desperate sailors.  Strange that it is the lost and desperate who are most likely to mistake warning for invitation.  It is an irony so sick as to make one believe in a psychopathic God.  But then, the notion that God has issues in abusing our trust has always been one close to my heart. In the words of Angus Mann, “Trust breeds its own betrayal, even in the heart of God.”

For a man with a reputation as a gritty, down-to-earth, working man’s director, Blair Gaines knew how to luxuriate.  I found him on a saffron lounge at the foot of an immaculately maintained, lily-strewn pond.  The lounge had been backed up against the trunk of an enormous Waterberry tree, its lush canopy dappled with dense clumps of cream-colored flowers, its southern branches ballooning like a rich, green cumulous raining petals out over the pond. The sky was a deep clot of cobalt and the sun roared, shaking its fiery mane along its midday arc. 

There was something so striking, so indefinably emblematic, in the sight of this man, caught in such languid repose beneath such a magnificent tree, that I had an impulse to paint him.  I wanted to drop everything where I stood and to tell my escort to find me an easel and a canvas and some vibrant oils.

In my days at Wesleyan, back when I believed myself a literary academic, I took up painting as a hobby. There was a period of artistic grace – between appreciating that I had a modicum of talent and understanding that I was not channeling the Renaissance, in which I painted every day for the better part of a semester. Not coincidentally, this was also the same period in which I took up the flute, but that is another story. The flute was a terrible humbling mistake, born mostly of a budding intellectual conceit and the foolish notion that there was something irresistibly erotic in baroque fellation. 

But painting was different.  Painting was an act of more visceral compulsion. My intellect was, at best, a passive tag-along when it came to painting, reduced to a ministerial functionary that held the palette and straightened the easel.  I tended to paint by emotional impulse, whenever I was moved by unseen, incomprehensible forces; the wind upon my sail of canvas.

The pond at Blair’s feet was on a corner of acreage that surrounded the two-story villa he had rented for the duration of our stay in Kenya.  The villa was owned and operated by the hotel in which the rest of us were staying, but safely ensconced on its own atoll floating in indigo waters about an eighth of a mile off shore. It was one of maybe a dozen such islands, strung together in a tiny corporate archipelago that unwound gracefully into the Indian Ocean.  Each island had a private dock and a motorboat that waved the company flag of red, green and gold interlinked rings – a colorful, Olympic-inspired chain—on a field of white.  On the ocean-side of each island, safe from the prying eyes of the mainlanders, were deep crescents of soft white sand. 

I remember marveling to myself—as I had stepped precariously from the water taxi up onto the dock, grabbing the strong, reedy black hand of the man who was there to greet me and show me the way—that Blair spent so much of his time on shore, meeting with us into the late evenings in the common courtyards and restaurants of the hotel, returning to his island only once everyone else had patted their pockets for a room key and shuffled off to bed.  I think, had it been me, I would never have left the island.  I would have made everyone come to me.  I would have made a point of holding court, even under a pretense of business, so that every evening after shooting was a generously spread, richly catered affair under the African moon with music and good wine.  It was that lovely. 

Of course, in those years I would have thought nothing of that sort of attention; that all-too-welcome intrusion into my personal existence; that shameless, self-aggrandizing display of the differences between myself and the beneficiaries of my hospitality. 

Blair, dressed only in faded blue trunks and an Outback Safari hat, was busy hacking up the script with multi-colored pens.  If he was aware of our approach across the lawn, his demeanor betrayed nothing.  My escort, dressed in a starched, ocher uniform, his skin so black as to seem almost midnight blue as we stepped into the shade of the Waterberry, announced my arrival with a slight genuflection as though he were addressing a king.

“Miss Tillijohn, sir.” 

“Thank you, Sunjata.”  Blair made an angry, slashing circle around eight lines of dialogue.  He gave me a darting glance without really looking up.  “Sunjata, bring us another chair if you would, mate.”

“Yes sir.”

“And, oh, another one of these.”  His hand dropped behind the lounge and brought up a large empty glass wrapped in white cloth.

“Yes, Mr. Gaines.  And may I bring one for Miss Tillijohn?”

“Yes.  Right.”  Blair answered for me before I could respond.  With another slash across the page, he shook his head and smiled a little, apparently liking the sound of my new name.  “By all means, bring one for Miss Tillijohn.”

“Yes sir,” and Sunjata was gone, striding across the lawn, back up towards the villa.

“It’s got as certain charm, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“Tillijohn.  Maybe you should keep it.” 

He looked up at me for the first time.  He was smiling, but I knew him well enough in just a few weeks to know that this was just a façade; that he was not really in a smiling mood.  This was a pleasantry quickly melting in the heat of his agitation over his work and the derailment caused by illness and British frailty.

“Maybe I will keep it,” I said.  Then, giving an obvious glance at the script on his lap, “Are you going to keep any of this script or are we starting from scratch?”

“Ahhh . . . Bloody thing.  I should start over.  I should start from page one and write the Goddamned thing myself.”  He capped his pen and stood up abruptly, dropping the notebook on the lounge.  “Have a seat, Tillijohn. Back in a tick.” 

He dropped his hat on top of the notebook and, with one forward step, he dove cleanly into the pond, submerging beneath the lilies and the fallen Waterberry blossoms and did not resurface until he had reached the far bank.

Tilly: Excerpt C

I paced the perimeter of the white stone walls that framed Griffith observatory, panting and clutching my heaving sides.  The day had grown warmer with the afternoon and the climb had more than taken the edge off my restless energy.  I half-staggered off the trail and out into the parking lot, gleaming hot in the sun.

A couple loading children and teenagers out of an SUV paused their commotion and looked at me with open concern.  It took a moment for them to recognize plucky Katie Finn, or perhaps it was it the tabloid queen that held their attention, but it came as it always does with a finger point and whispered exclamation.  Cameras were extracted. Lens caps pocketed.  Zoom lenses silently magnified the pixels on the surface of the beads of sweat streaking my face.  I turned back and headed around a bush to the far side of the walkway, slipping out of sight like the wildlife that I had become. They did not give chase, opting instead to scamper off to see James Dean’s head on a pedestal.

When my breath had finally returned, I sat hugging my knees upon the farthest edge of the brown and green mottled escarpment that fanned out like an earthen dress from beneath the observatory, staring out over Los Angeles.  From the safety of that plateau, the city looked so harmless; gleaming in its smoggy blue mist, its steel corners and cliffs of glass fracturing the aging sun into brilliant shards of burnt-orange light. 

I thought of the two meetings – the conversations – that had, to that point, bracketed my career.  The first, years earlier with Orin, in his modest study, surrounded by his books, regarded from below by little dewy-eyed Rosalie Twill; and the last, only hours ago, in the slick, over-stuffed office of Milton Chenowith, surrounded by glossy black and white photographs, regarded from above by hard-bitten Marion “the Duke” Morrison.  The first, a conversation that warned of an impending, traitorous mediocrity.  The second, a conversation that seemed to revel in ripening that warning into a promise, nudging mediocrity into its full, inglorious bloom.  In the middle of those two conversations, lay the city at my feet, a world unto itself and lifetimes apart from the person I never thought I would become.

I would like to say that Orin Twill had been wrong about me.  In the months that followed our meeting, I thought often of his prediction and just as often dismissed it as ludicrous.  But in less than eighteen months time, I found myself chewing gum and swishing mouthwash on television. It was a fast and steep descent that started with the sudden loss of my position with The L.A.Q., the budget for which was, apparently, not able to accommodate assistants with their own ego-challenging, editorial opinions. 

I set out to look for similar work, but had no success, and as my already paltry financial reserves dropped lower, so did my standards.  My mother, presumably with my father’s knowledge and blessing, repeatedly offered me a stipend, which I repeatedly refused.  I knew that several years earlier my father had arranged the loan for my brother’s home, paying the bulk of the down payment, and I remember him saying from within his cloud of self-conceit, that there should be some benefit to having a banker in the family.  I remember, too, having an ugly mixture of contempt and envy for David, who was able to accept the help without any apparent reservation.  For better or worse, it was not a debt I could bear to incur.

Months of poverty and depression and self-pity followed.  Mine is not a rags to riches story of drugs and prostitution and the violence of urban circumstance.  I never lived shoeless on the street nor took up with junkies and thieves.  But I was lost just the same and those alternative lifestyles of desperation no longer felt like the possibilities of another world, but the possibilities of my world.  As though all of that was but a few misfortunes away and the veil of separation was utterly transparent.  It was a self-indulgently piteous season of my life, and as silly and unnecessary as I now know that it was, I also know how real those feelings were then.  Every sense of who I was and what I was worth began to waste and decay. 

I kept up appearances for my mother, receiving her calls and enduring her unbroken stream of complaints about my father – his drinking, his aloofness, his cold and exclusive superiority – as though I had energy to burn.  To the end of her days, she had no idea the state of my life during those years.

As for the relationship with my father, it all but completely stopped for lack of attention; the geographic separation like a silver stake through the heart of whatever was left of the father-daughter bond.  At least he made the pretense of being busy when I called; as though he was in the middle of something so urgent or compelling that he needed to hand the phone to my mother before he had uttered ten words of greeting. 

At least he bothered with the pretense.  Pathetic as it is, I still love him for that.  It was something.  A pulse.  Something.

I was certainly no better.  Determined to be both financially independent and cruelly forsaken of all support, I could not talk to my father without sounding either indifferent or angry at his existence.  To make matters worse, all of my mother’s marital complaints roiled beneath the surface of my being.  Quite inexplicably at the time, her grievances filled me with an irrational contempt for my father that was wholly at odds with my equally strong irritation at my mother for choosing to be such a willing and devoted victim.  In truth, my father could not win with me, even if he had bothered to try. There was far too much unspoken and far too little forgiven.

After a series of disastrous jobs, I finally went to work as a cashier for a California health food chain.  That employment led to an acquaintance that produced a night job waiting tables at a restaurant in West Hollywood called Gomp’s.  It was one of those places where the signature plating effort lay in the elaborate, precariously vertical arrangements of a very little bit of food beneath drizzles of improbable color set upon large, white platters.  Gomp’s towers of culinary pretension were a very long ways away from the finger-licking, flesh-staining simplicity of the nyma chama and the ugali awaiting me, years later, on a private island in the Indian Ocean off the Kenyan coast of Africa. If there is a comparison more emblematic of the differences between Los Angeles and Mombassa, I cannot think of one.

It was at Gomp’s that I fell in with a group of people that set me on the path. They no longer have names, these people.  It has been far too long for names.  I remember them like the little ghosts of memory that inhabit the playgrounds of my childhood. 

But I do remember that their primary ambition in the world was to act.  Not to star in movies – no one ever used the word movie—but to act … in film. They spoke of their calling to the craft.  They all spoke lovingly of the screenplays – the treatments – on which they were working. They spoke incessantly of the industry that surrounded us as if they were discussing their own families.  Martin Scorcese was simply Uncle Marty, just as Robert DeNiro was Bobby D, and Anthony Hopkins was Sir Tony.  And, of course, there was always Mother Meryl.  They all loved Mother Meryl. The list went on forever.

Each of them seemed to have an area of specialty or emphasis. Each drew from wells of arcane knowledge that, judging from the frequency of the trips to those wells, had surprisingly common application.  One believed himself an expert on Felini; another on Film Noir; yet another on the occult and the vampiric cinema.  In the back kitchen there was a predictable doubling up of expertise on both science fiction and modern crime sagas.  Not just crime, but bank heist films, with a subordinate fascination with prison escapes.  I remember that one of the bussers had committed to memory everything Don Vito Corleone ever said, complete with mannerisms and cotton-cheeked expressions, never quite grasping the impact of his own Asian heritage on the overall impression.

Even one of the owners, not Mr. Gomp himself but the other one, was an Alfred Hitchcock devotee and treated us to weekly diatribes against the scourge of stylistic purloiners.  Theft is not an homage, he liked to say, looking at all of us severely, usually with a bubble of spittle on his lip.  Theft is always a crime; as if we were all secretly plotting a remake of The Birds; although I suspect he was speaking as much in defense of Gomp’s stock of fine wines as he was the sanctity of Mr. Hitchcock’s cinematic signature.  He was a squat, round little man with small, dark eyes and small, fleshy lips and a perfectly bald head.  He was British and wore vests with his suits.  The urge to see him in silhouette was irrepressible and we made fun of him mercilessly behind his back.

The enthusiasm of these people, their certainty of purpose, seemed to come to me by a kind of osmosis.  I think I envied them until I gradually became them.  They spoke so constantly of their auditions and of their agents and their opportunities, it was lost on me that they were all spending most of their waking hours working in the restaurant business, and that none of them had anything even remotely approaching a career in film.  Their vision of themselves was infectious and, without a compelling vision of my own, I simply succumbed.  What ultimately lowered my inhibitions against this seduction was their seemingly unanimous certainty that their path was also my path; that I was one of them; and that if I felt lost to the world, it was only because I had never given in to what they knew was my, and everyone’s, true calling:  Acting. The craft.  The industry.  The beast.

Still, I mightily resisted Hollywood’s gravitational pull, overplaying a shyness I did not have and feigning rapturous devotion to a literary-minded career that did not exist.  After many months of less than subtle pressure, I finally allowed myself to be coerced into auditioning for a national brand toothpaste commercial.  I was assured that while they required mostly modeling, not acting, commercials were good gateway opportunities.  Screen presence, demographic appeal, self-confidence; dramatic versatility; humor; sexuality; delivery—I was assured that all of these things came through in what I was encouraged to think of as a kind of nationally distributed audition tape that only incidentally helped to sell somebody’s product. Great way to get noticed, they told me.  Great way to get in the door.  Problem is, most people don’t have the looks.  But you, Tilly . . .

So, at the recommendation of my friends, I signed up an agent – Magdeline Sumner of The Bartholomew Group, a ridiculous orange-haired woman in very high heels and a severe, theatrically made up face, recommended by one of the bussers.  Maggie, as she liked to be called, drank too much coffee and tried much too hard to seem relaxed.  She told me not to worry so many times, and with such urgency, that shortly into our first and only meeting, I was terrified about the very idea of auditioning for anything.  I changed my mind about the whole idea half a dozen times and would have told her so had I been able to penetrate her rapid, over-caffeinated monologue, about “the process” and “the business” and “the rules” and “the dangers” and the need for guidance and protection against exploitation. 

But I could not break into Maggie’s monologue and did not tell her I had changed my mind.  I was there.  I filled out the paperwork giving The Bartholomew Group a percentage of what she assured me would be a lucrative career in commercial acting. 

Two days later I found myself standing in a Santa Monica parking lot, baking in a two hour line with an assortment of bronze-skinned, white-toothed Amazons that made me feel like a fish among mermaids.  My forward line-mate, Kimmi Fontaine – a name manufactured so as to never be forgotten – had long since earned her stripes in a couple of Tic-Tac adds, had just wrapped a shoot for Band-Aid, and was working hard on breaking into the cosmetic cabal. Loreal and Maybelline were looking promising, she said, gleaming in the sun. Lancomb needed to get over itself. 

I told Kimmi that I was looking for a product with an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor.  She smiled at me quizzically, as though I had burped at her, and then stopped talking. 

The audition, consisting mostly of a series of grotesque facial contortions in a room full of over-lit mirrors, cameras and well-dressed, overly serious men, lasted only fifteen minutes.  I was ejected unceremoniously back out into the sunlight, feeling numb and disoriented, awash in the anti-climactic residue of an experience that had simultaneously taken too much and too little of my time and effort. 

I retuned to my regular shift at Gomp’s to face an uncomfortable level of curiosity and demand for details.  I did my best to suffocate the interest of my co-workers by explaining, quite sincerely, that it had not gone well and that I was embarrassed to have tried.  They were not persuaded and I was made to endure well-meaning lectures on the virtues of positive thinking and perseverance, all of which only helped to convince me that I had completely wasted my time. 

But excited phone calls from Maggie Sumner sent me back to Santa Monica twice that week.  The parking lot lines for the call-backs were progressively shorter and, once I was back in the room of mirrors and lights, the well-dressed men allowed me to speak words and walk and move my arms in addition to making faces.  Just the same, I found it all an alien and thoroughly demeaning exercise which I endured like one endures a bad film only because the price of admission has already been paid and there is really nothing better to do with the evening.  If success must give perseverance its due, then perseverance must tip its hat to the momentum of sacrifice and the power of optimistic delusion.  It is natural for us to believe that the movie cannot possibly get any worse.

I am still amazed to say that somehow, over scores of other women far better suited to the task, Kimmi Fontaine among them, I was selected to brush my teeth for America. 

The filming was done in two short afternoons.  I was stupefied, both with the process and the result.  I felt I was awful in every respect.  For the first few weeks after the commercial was released, I tried my best to avoid television entirely.  But the advertisement always seemed to find me when I could least defend myself: walking through a hotel lobby or waiting in line at the pharmacy.  It started like a bad pick-up line, with the slow moan of that baritone sax and the insinuating voice-over –  Going to bed?  Be a good girl.  Don’t forget to brush. But remember, once it’s in your mouth, there’s no turning back.  And each time I heard those words, I wanted to close my eyes and leave the room, the lobby, the pharmacy. 

But I was helpless to keep from looking, and suddenly, inevitably, there I was, bent over a sink in a skimpy open kimono making auto-erotic expressions in the mirror and rapidly developing a sexual relationship with my toothbrush, unable to contain the flow of frothy white paste.  Convincingly unable.  That was the acting part. I was ghastly.

But I was the only one who felt so.  Maggie Sumner spoke at me through my telephone in high-pitched gushes, promising to line up more work. The reviews from the crew at Gomp’s were over-the-top, but no less genuine for their enthusiasm.

I was not at all prepared for the pointed attention to my existence.  My mouth, teeth, cheek bone structure, eyes and my body generally were suddenly the subject of a fanfare I had great difficulty taking seriously. The backs of my legs.  My ankles.  The arch of my foot as I leaned into the mirror and licked foam off of lips that I had always accepted as slightly misshapen and doughy, but that were suddenly luscious and full and classic.  The breasts that I had always bemoaned as wrongly apportioned for my frame, were suddenly exquisite and quintessential and heavenly.

I told my family nothing of the commercial, telling myself that I wanted to see if they noticed on their own and wouldn’t that be fun when, one day flipping mindlessly through the channels, or before turning off the Columbus Nightly News, suddenly there was little Tilly brushing her teeth.

But, as entertaining as that thought might have been, the real reason for the secrecy was a deeper ambivalence for what I had done and for the jarring quality of the spectacle my parents might witness in the very living room in which, as an eight year old, I was scolded for watching James Bond on television—a character my father insisted was not intended for young children.  Fourteen years later I was no longer little Tilly, and brushing my teeth was the very least of what I would be doing on their television.  I did not yet know what to think of it all and it was the possibility that my family would never even recognize me that I hoped for the most.

But they did recognize me.  My mother called one night in a froth.  I can’t believe it Tilly, she kept saying, more to herself than to me. I can’t believe it.  She had that over-saturated tone that works equally well at both ends of the emotional spectrum and I could not tell at first whether she was euphoric or distraught.

“Ben and I were folding laundry and I looked up at the television . . . I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I thought it was you at first, and then I just thought I was seeing things but then Ben started to point and do his dance and so I knew it was you, but … Tilly why didn’t you tell us?” 

“Mom . . .”

“I’m no prude.  It’s a sexy commercial. There’s more to that commercial than just brushing teeth, that’s for certain. You knew that when you were making it, didn’t you?  That it has a sexual sort of theme to it?”

“Mom . . .”

“That’s not a bad thing, it’s just so … well, I don’t know, so revealing. For television, I mean. I wonder what people are thinking? Maybe they won’t even recognize you. Have you told any of our friends?  I wonder if I should call people.  Oh, I should call David.  Has David seen it? Your father hasn’t seen it yet.  God only knows what he’ll think about it.”

It was my mother’s way of saying that she knew exactly what my father would think about it.  It was two weeks later before I got the call breaking the news that, after all the rumors, he had finally seen the spectacle for himself. 

“Well, he was upset.  He had plenty of things to say about it.  Got up and walked right out of the room.  He’s downstairs locked in that study.  He’s just from a different age, Tilly.  He doesn’t accept change like we do.  He has issues with sex, with sexual things, you know what I mean?  Sexual sorts of things.”

“Yeah, well, look mom…”

“It was his mother.  God, it was all of them. But she raised him that way.  We don’t have sex at all anymore. There’s not much physical affection of any kind, really, but certainly no sex.  I’d like to think I can still satisfy him.  I’m no prude with sexual things, Tilly. I don’t know if you know that.  He’s much more reserved than I am.  It’s just been awhile.  The last time we had sexual…”

“Mom, please…”

“What?”

“The commercial.  Mom.  The…commercial.”

“Well, he just thinks he can control everything, but he can’t.  He thinks he can control me and you and David and the rest of the world, but he can’t and he can’t accept that he can’t.  I think that’s why he drinks so much.  It’s gotten pretty bad, Tilly.  This is a difficult place to live sometimes.  He’s never violent or rough or anything like that, he’s just very…cold.  He can be very withdrawn and cold.  And then at times like tonight, when he saw your commercial, he’s just so angry.  He was raving mad. Like waving-his-arms-around-and-shouting angry.”

“Let me guess,” I interrupted, suddenly thinking of Orin Twill and little Roslie and of his prediction, “he felt betrayed.  He feels like I’ve betrayed him.”

“Yes!  How did you know that?  That’s exactly what he said.  That he felt betrayed!”

“Lucky guess.”

“He just thinks it’s the wrong path for you, honey. He doesn’t see this, like we do, as a stepping stone to greater things, like acting on television or in the movies.  He likes to think of himself as better than television and the movies.  He’s not really above it, he just likes… that’s how he sees himself.  You know what I mean?  He thinks you’re selling yourself short.  He really does believe in you, Tilly.  He really does.”

“Christ…”

“Don’t let it bother you.  The anger is for me, not you.”

“You?  What’d you ever do to make him angry?”

“I know him too well. Maybe we all do. He hates that.”

It’s not as though my father and I had much of a relationship before I started selling orgasmic dental hygiene. It was a rare occasion that we ever spoke to each other and even then it was because he sometimes had the bad judgment to answer the telephone when I called.  Our discussions on those occasions were usually stilted and awkward, although every so often we stumbled upon a genuine exchange that felt like sunlight punching its way through the clouds.

But after the commercial was released and after it became common knowledge in my family that I was seriously considering some sort of career in show business or commercial acting, my father made a point of dropping all pretense of a relationship with me.  Oh…Hi, Tilly.  Let me get your mother, was the most I recall him saying to me during those years. 

Many years later, after I was nominated for my role as Katie Finn in Peppermint Grove, and before I had started on The Lion Tree, my mother threw a party in my honor, inviting a number of their oldest friends to the house for dinner.  I participated briefly by telephone, not because I couldn’t actually be there, but because the very thought of exchanging sentences with my father—of dealing with his disapproval and my own unresolved feelings about him—was so difficult and unsettling that I made up an excuse and stayed in Los Angeles. 

The party is a surreal memory for me, even now at this considerable distance, both because I was not actually present for the celebration and because my father and I exchanged more words that evening than we had in all the five years preceding it put together.  He tried mightily that night to show his friends how proud he was of me, and how supportive he was of my choices in life.  He should have gotten the award I did not. 

There were moments that night when even I believed him.  Moments like when he sang out my name and asked his friends to raise their glasses in my honor.  Brief and fleeting moments, when I wished I had made the trip home; when homesickness wrenched my heart and I wished I had attended that perfectly ridiculous party in person.  I listened to his voice and imagined that he was happy.  Not just happy, but happy specifically for me, his only daughter.  And for those scattered moments I could feel the sun on my face, probably due as much to my own sublimated desire to believe in an undying paternal love as to any sincerity on his part.

And yet, the moments were there just the same, gleaming like little islands in the dark sea between us.

That dark and quiet sea stretched from a time well before my inauspicious open-kimonoed introduction to the public eye, to well beyond my Sundance nomination.  It was as though a part of him had died.  Or, at least, as though the part of him that was my father had developed an immunity to my presence in the world.  As though he no longer cared to hear my voice over the distance, leaving me no choice but to scream and to boil that black expanse with my offensiveness. His convulsive disapprobation was the only sign of life I could identify; the only ripple in the dark that connected us.

Perhaps that, as much as anything else, explains why I so willingly parlayed the debasement of my media debut into a string of like-toned commercials for chewing gum and mouthwash.  I imagined that the sight of my magnified, over-made face on the television—chewing and swishing and spitting for all the boys—would irritate my father to the point of disgust, giving new life to the disapproval that had so characterized my adolescence. 

We all come with an innate understanding that it is impossible to maintain an indifference to that which we hate and that to judge, even harshly, is to care.  And as I chewed and swished and spit and bent at the waist in my underthings, I imagined that he cared.