Hollywood Ending
This is how the story was supposed to go: In my guise as film critic of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I would fly to the press junket in New York and playfully accuse Woody Allen of stealing the title of the novel I'd been trying to finish for over a decade. I'd threaten to change the name of my book from "Hollywood Ending" to "Untitled Woody Allen Project." And I'd finish the interview by handing him the rights to the Internet address I'd been saving for myself: hollywoodending.net.
But the story changed while I was packing for my trip. That's when I learned that my wife had died.
Ashley Goerisch was my wife only in the strictest legal sense of the word. She was a fun-loving friend from St. Louis whose path had followed mine to California, where she and her pal-of-mine boyfriend moved into my house in Hollywood. In 1988, while attending an Elvis-is-alive convention in Las Vegas, Ashley and I dropped acid, snuck off to the wedding chapel from "Lost in America" and exchanged mood rings. We vowed to keep our sham marriage a secret until we died. But my pledge of secrecy didn't last very long, and soon all hell broke loose inside my little house.
We went our separate ways, but the marriage was still on the books several years later when I let Ashley forge my signature on divorce papers so she could marry a man whom she actually loved. In a rare moment of self-denial, I skipped the wedding to avoid inserting myself into somebody else's story; but Ashley and I remained friends, and every couple years we would find an excuse to rendezvous in some corner of the country and howl at the moon together. In the meantime, she maintained a presence in my life as a character in a novel I called "Hollywood Ending."
In Woody Allen's movie of the same name, the hero is a director. In my novel, he's a screenwriter. In the movie the hero suffers from psychosomatic blindness. In the novel, he suffers from psychosomatic paralysis. In the movie, the hero loses his wife to a schmuck in L.A. In the novel, he loses his wife to a nice guy in Michigan.
I hadn't quite figured how my book was supposed to end until two weeks ago, when I received a message to call Ashley's sister, Kristin, at a phone number in Michigan. Kristin lives in Tennessee, not Michigan, so instantly I surmised what had happened: Ashley had died, and it was probably a car accident. For two hours, I paced the floor and rehearsed my reactions, until finally I made the phone call and learned that my intuition had been correct.
Ashley was 37, roughly as young and equally as worthy of posthumous idolatry as Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana.
I cancelled the flight to New York, tossed my suitcase into the back of the Valiant, and headed north. As I made the drive to Michigan, I thought a lot about Woody Allen, and about the difference between Hollywood endings and real life
There's a scene in Allen's "Stardust Memories" where some studio executives re-edit the ending of the protagonist's movie so that a trainload of lost souls ends up in "jazz heaven."
"It's upbeat, it's commercial," they tell him.
But Woody is horrified. "The whole point of the movie is that nobody is saved."
The ashes of mortality enrich Allen's best movies, from "Love and Death," to "Crimes and Misdemeanors." In the comedies he frets about the eventual collapse of the solar system. In the dramas he bemoans the insufficiency of art to compensate for the inevitability of death.
Yet one secret of Allen's popularity is that his on-screen persona changes so little. In a recent documentary, he says that the consistency of actors like Humphrey Bogart and Bob Hope gives them a kind of mythic immortality. Cinematic repetition, he says, is "calming and reassuring." The same principle applies to Allen as much as any actor or director in contemporary film. For a quarter century, his movies have featured the same jazz, the same eyeglasses, the same typeface for the credits, the same perennial loser struggling to find true love while confronting an indifferent universe.
It was a persona with which I identified from the day in junior high school when I first saw "Play It Again Sam." Like Woody I had bushy red hair, a scrawny physique and a talent for making myself the butt of my best jokes. In college, he was my patron saint. His movies were reliable for first dates, where I could measure a girl's interest by her reaction to my cinematic alter-ego.
I never saw and never needed to see a Woody Allen movie with Ashley, who befriended this Pinocchio with no strings attached. Eventually I returned the favor by silently wishing her a happy life without me.
Nine years ago, Ashley was diagnosed with cancer, and that's when I first turned her into a character in my book. I figured if I wrote a sufficiently damning confession of the things I had done in my vain attempt to make her my girlfriend, she would be saved. For good measure, I sent her the velvet Elvis painting that was my most prized possession.
When she went back to the hospital for an operation, there was no sign of cancer. (As it turns out, the original diagnosis had been wrong, but I'd still like to claim some of the credit.)
This time, I didn't have a chance to invoke any magic words on her behalf. Ashley died while I was visiting Hollywood on business, and I calculated that the accident happened at the same moment when I was telling some guys in a bar that I had married a woman who was so movie-star beautiful that teen actress Christina Applegate once borrowed her I.D. to get into a nightclub. I wish now that I hadn't marginalized Ashley that way. I could have described her instead as a talented painter or a fearless explorer; but the first word that everyone always used to describe Ashley was "beautiful." Now that beauty was interred like a fairy tale princess.
I arrived in the lakeside village of Frankfort too late for the funeral, but I found the cemetery and identified her grave by the freshly shoveled dirt and the crumpled tissues. Then Ashley's real husband, Tom, arrived. As we stared down at the plot, he put his hand on my shoulder as if my own grief were worthy to stand beside his.
Later I met up with Ashley's family at their vacation house and weakly urged them to do something celebratory. Her parents, who had flown in from Sedona, offered me a slice of the lasagna that a family friend had donated. Ashley's sister was too dazed to embrace my suggestion that we get hammered, so I traded shots of Jack Daniel's with Ashley's brother, Scott, and her brother-in-law, Bill. I've known Bill since '88, when he was sharing a house in North Hollywood with a neophyte actor from Missouri named Brad Pitt; but at some point in the forced festivities, I felt that I was intruding on a closed circle, and I adjourned to the back seat of my car, where I could neither sleep not cry.
The next day Bill and I toured the house on the outskirts of town that Ashley and Tom had turned into a home. Her upstairs studio was strewn with the touchstones of a life interrupted: the unopened mail, the day-at-a-glance calendar that hadn't been turned since the accident, the kid-sized chairs she was painting with pictures of bears roasting marshmallows.
I wanted some piece of her, some artifact to ritualize my feelings. In her backyard I found a broken figurine of Grumpy from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." I had always sympathized with that little monster, and in college I wrote a short story proposing that Grumpy loved Snow White more than all the other dwarves or that cherry-picking prince.
I gathered the shattered fragments of Grumpy, set them in the front seat of my car and headed back to St. Louis.
My favorite ending of any movie is in "Manhattan." Woody has realized that his young lover makes life worth living, and he rushes to stop her from moving away. As he argues his case, she tells him that it's too late, the arrangements are set. But she promises to return soon and resume their relationship. "Have a little faith in people," she says
In a final shot that is borrowed from Chaplin's "City Lights," Woody stares into the camera, trying to wring hope from a bittersweet goodbye. I imagine that was the same look that lingered on my face as I drove home, waiting for that stupid bell that would tell me an angel had gotten her wings.