The Jane Austen Society(18)
He had listened, patiently for him, to all of this, all the while wondering if Jane Austen was somehow the key to getting Mimi Harrison into bed. But between dinners out and cocktail receptions and red-carpet walks, Jack Leonard was starting to feel that migraine coming on again, as he walked Mimi to her front door night after night. For one thing, she was no spring chicken anymore, as her latest box-office receipts were finally starting to reflect, so all the games made less sense to him and—worse still—would have less of a physical payoff. For another, he could tell she was interested in him, too.
That Mimi might have been fighting against a strong physical attraction to him, in deference to her usual better judgment, would never have crossed his mind.
One thing he had learned in Hollywood was that there was no better way to sleep with a leading lady than to make her one. He hadn’t paid much attention to the recent Laurence Olivier–Greer Garson adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but now that that was out of the running, he turned to Mimi’s own interest in Sense and Sensibility. He liked the idea of three young sisters under twenty (casting was already going on in his head on that one) and had a genuine appreciation for Willoughby’s willingness to seduce young women out of wedlock. He thought there was a backstory in there that could be alluded to in defiance of the Code. The more he learned about Austen from Mimi, the more he was impressed by how she mostly wrote about bad behaviour. As far as Jack could tell, there weren’t too many pure heroes in the books. Everyone was making mistakes, and falling for cads, and giving the wrong people the benefit of the doubt. He loved it.
Of course, he wasn’t reading any of it—but he had one of the screenwriters, a famous debauched novelist living in bungalow seventeen on the back lot, working on a treatment of it. So far Jack liked what he saw.
Mimi, on the other hand, was not so thrilled.
“The scene in the script, where Willoughby shows up, because he’s heard Marianne is near death—I never bought that. Of all of Jane Austen, that is the one scene that rang hollow for me. Willoughby doesn’t care about anyone but himself—if he’s visiting Marianne, it’s totally out of guilt. But he doesn’t care about guilt either. Why on earth would he ride there all night and demand that Elinor see things from his point of view? Why on earth would he care?”
They were sitting in two facing armchairs in Jack’s spacious office, which was in bungalow number five, at the perimeter of the main studio lot. Outside the front bay window were huge pink hydrangea bushes and a white picket fence leading to the Main Street fa?ade that featured in every “Let’s put on a show” musical that the studio was currently cranking out. As Mimi continued speaking at length about Willoughby, Jack was getting the feeling that she was projecting that character onto him, and it bothered him greatly that she could underestimate him in this way. He didn’t mind being a cad, but he was the hero of his own life, and he would always get the girl in the end.
The scene as she described it was bothering him, too, but for different reasons. From what he understood from both Mimi and the script, Willoughby was acting here like a loser, yet had gotten everything that he’d wanted in the end. He’d impregnated an underage girl, seduced one of the heroines into visiting an empty house unchaperoned, and married an heiress.
If Jack Leonard could get even half as far with Mimi Harrison, he would be a happy man.
“Isn’t the point of the scene to show that Marianne was not wrong for thinking Willoughby loved her, just wrong in thinking he would do anything about it? Isn’t it really about redeeming her?” Jack was parroting the words of the scriptwriter, who had explained exactly this in a recent meeting, after one of the co-producers had voiced the same concern as Mimi.
Mimi shook her head. “The reader knows all that already. I really think Austen slipped up here—I think she actually responded to Willoughby. I think she liked Henry Crawford, too.” Jack stared at her blankly. “Henry Crawford, from Mansfield Park, remember? Anyway, I think part of her wanted us to forgive them, or at least feel sorry for them. I think this is where her religious sincerity sometimes got in the way—goodness knows Fanny Price was the poster girl for that. But if Willoughby is genuinely seeking expiation for his sins—”
“Seeking what?”
Mimi stared back at Jack just as blankly. He had claimed to have gone to an Ivy League business school, but this was one of those times when she wondered if he really had.
“Expiation. Seeking atonement; forgiveness.”
Jack downed the Scotch he had been cradling in his hands. “Yeah, yeah, I know. So,” he said in a relaxed tone, “I’ve been thinking. Angela Cummings. For Marianne. Monte tells me you two make quite a team.”
Mimi was not surprised to hear the name of her latest co-star, who was taking Hollywood by storm following a brief modelling career out East. But it was hard to begrudge Angela anything. For one thing, she was a most supportive castmate, having stood up for Mimi many times to Terry Tremont, the director on the Western they had just filmed in the Nevada desert in the scorching heat of summer. Mimi was secretly impressed with the way the girl went after anything and everything that she wanted, the bigger the better. Mimi was also one of the only people in Hollywood who knew that Angela was juggling a torrid affair with Terry alongside a new relationship with her married co-star on an upcoming film. Next to the twenty-year-old and her lovers, Mimi’s relationship with the equally notorious Jack Leonard seemed positively chaste.