American Girls(58)
“Anna,” Jeremy said. “You’re not okay. Should I just take you back to the set?”
I nodded my head because it was the only place left to go.
16
My last full week in LA, Roger shot the final scenes of his film in front of what used to be 10050 Cielo Drive, but was now 10066 Cielo. The drive to the site was long and winding, with spider-vein-like cracks in the asphalt of the road ahead. As we wound our way higher above the city, the sound of the traffic below became increasingly muffled. A “No Trespassing” sign hung close to the entrance, with a redbrick wall in front of the sign announcing the new address in large brass numbers. From the outside, it could have been some tacky Atlanta minimansion. The estate seemed proud of its new identity, like it was daring you to try to figure out what it used to be. Nothing remained from the original home except for the telephone pole, to the right of the gate, which Tex Watson had scaled in order to cut the phone lines. It loomed like a forgotten remnant of the murders, of the 1960s even, a stake in the ground marking a gruesome past, an arbitrary last witness.
Barely any of the research that I did made it into Roger’s film. Since Charles Manson treated “knocking up ladies” the way other people did “taking out the recycling,” Roger decided that referencing it directly would be too much. Dex had warned me about this when he had told me about the movie business. He said that anytime you worked on a movie, whether you were writing it or researching it or shooting it, you could never forget that the end product was out of your hands. If you wrote a screenplay about Charles Manson, you shouldn’t be shocked if it wound up being about Willy Wonka. It still felt like a lot of wasted energy. But Roger paid me $600 more, which, with the money from my Chips appearance, was enough to pay my debts and even go home slightly ahead at the end of the summer.
The movie wound up being about a married couple. The wife was supposed to be my sister after her face got messed up, which you don’t learn until the end is something that the husband did to her. You don’t really see the husband much; he’s mostly a voice that whispers in the air, which you think must be a ghost or a serial killer, but it’s not, instead it’s this actor who didn’t show up until the last weeks of shooting.
“It will be like Cassavetes,” Roger said. “A Woman Under the Influence. You think the whole time that she is crazy, wandering around like this, but she is being crushed, ground down by this man.”
There were three parts to the film, these haunted scenes where the ghost version of my sister visits murder sites in Los Angeles, scenes where the broken-nose version of my sister tries to live a kind of regular life but can’t quite hold it together, and then scenes with the new actor, the husband, where you see that the marriage, or whatever it is, is the real horror.
The final scene of the film takes place in a car, outside the old 10050 Cielo Drive, and the husband is whaling on my sister, really letting her have it. He’s berating her for the way she cooks pasta, for how she keeps her mouth open when she breathes, stuff you shouldn’t even notice or care about. Then he starts in on how she looks, that she’s getting older, that the only thing anyone will ever love about her is her face, and that her face is starting to wrinkle and fade. And while he’s giving her this part of the speech, my sister, who’s a good actress, but not that good, starts to shake, really shake. And then, I don’t know how it happened, but her nose started to bleed. I think she was trying so hard not to cry that it must have unloosed something, and the blood came down her face and looked so sad and horrible that I forgot that it was a movie, I couldn’t look anymore. I waited for Roger to say, “Cut,” to make it stop, but he was transfixed. The cameras moved in closer. My sister closed her eyes, and her movie-husband whispered, with perfect cruelty, “I don’t feel sorry for you, bitch.” It was the last thing that Susan Atkins had allegedly said to Sharon Tate, word for word, as she was pleading for her life.
Had it been anyone other than Roger, I probably would have thought it was a cool idea. Before the scene began, he explained to the actors that people walked around locking their doors and looking over their shoulders, mindful of the too-close footstep in the parking garage, the abandoned house with broken windows, the stranger in the shadows. But he had an epiphany part of the way through filming: he had been wrong in his original concept. The real danger wasn’t violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting—the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn’t been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors.
“Which is not to say that you have not helped me,” he said, nodding to me at the end of his speech. “You and these Manson girls, you are my inspiration. This is the incarnation.”
The final scene was the first one that my sister had filmed since the splint had come off her nose. Where her nose had been perfect before, it had the slightest tilt toward the top now. She’d fix it later, I was sure of that, but for the moment it made her face more beautiful, it had the openness of a butterfly asking the world to be gentle to its first unfolding wings. She didn’t know that I was watching her while she got ready to shoot, the extra time she spent looking at herself in the mirror. I could feel the tears, the ones that didn’t come until the cameras rolled, mixed with blood. They weren’t pretend.