The Princess Diarist(12)

So when I was contemplating having an affair on this movie, I wasn’t going to include married guys. (Not that I even thought about not including them.) One of the things I knew when Harrison and I met was that nothing of a romantic nature would happen. It wasn’t even an issue. There were plenty of guys out there who were single whom I could date without needing to dip into the married guy pool. He was also far too old for me—almost fifteen years older! I would be twenty in a matter of months, but Harrison was in his midthirties—old! Well into adulthood, anyway.

Also, he was a man. I was a girl—a male human like him would have to be with a woman. If Harrison and I went to the prom together, no one would believe it. “What’s he doing with her? Captain of the football team and president of the cool literary club? What’s he doing with Cutie-Pie Sweetcheeks, with the troll doll collection and Cary Grant obsession? Must be a glitch in the machine . . .”

On top of that, there was something intimidating about Harrison. His face in repose looked to me like it was closer to a scowl than to any other expression. It was immediately clear that he was no people pleaser; this was more of a people unsettler. He looked like he didn’t care whether or not you looked at him, so you watched him not caring, hungrily. Anyone with him was irrelevant, and I was definitely an “anyone.”

When I’d first seen him sitting on the cantina set, I remember thinking, This guy’s going to be a star. Not just a celebrity, a movie star. He looked like one of those iconic Movie Star types, like Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy. Some sort of epic energy hung around him like an invisible throng.

I mean, let’s say that you’re walking along in the twilight, minding your own business (your own show business), and there’s fog all around you—a mysterious sort of cinematic fog. And as you continue walking, you find that you’re moving slower and slower, because you can barely see a few feet in front of you. And then all of a sudden the smoke clears. It clears enough for you to imagine that you’re beginning to ever so slowly make out the outline of the face. And not just a face. This is the face of someone that painters would want to paint or poets would wax poetic about. An Irish balladeer would feel compelled to write a song to be sung drunkenly in pubs all over the United Kingdom. A sculptor would sob openly while carving the scar on his chin.

A face for the ages. And seeing him sitting there in the set that would introduce him to the world as Han Solo, the most famous of all the famous characters that he would come to play—well, he was just so far out of my league. Compared to him I didn’t even have an actual verifiable league. We were destined for different places.

Having grown up around show business, I knew that there were stars and there were stars. There were celebrities, talk show hosts, product spokespeople, and then there were movie stars—people with agents and managers and publicists and assistants and bodyguards, who got tons of fan mail and could get a movie financed, and who consistently graced the covers of magazines. Their grinning familiar faces stared proudly out at you, encouraging you to catch up on their personal lives, their projects, and how close they were to being the most down-to-earth of those famous-to-earthlings.

Harrison was one of that epic superstar variety, and I wasn’t. Was I bitter about this? Well . . . not so you’d notice.

? ? ?

i was in the last year of my teens, only weeks free from my drama college romance and in my first starring movie role. I was extremely insecure. I felt as though I didn’t know what I was doing, and for good reason. In most areas, I didn’t.

Oh, I could be witty as the deuce, but I had no idea how I should best apply that cleverness, for I was clever, not intellectual. I had very little learned knowledge, having dropped out of high school to be a chorus girl in my mother’s Broadway show, and I was very insecure about my lack of education. I was a voracious reader, but part of what that taught me was that I was nowhere near as scholarly as I wanted to be. I was precocious, but how many years beyond your teens can you be called that with sincerity?

I was good with words and had an ability to analyze people and things, but only enough for a party trick—at least that’s what I told myself at the time. I would tell you I wasn’t as smart as you thought I was, but obviously not without first establishing that you thought I was bright. Still, knowing that I was insecure, I couldn’t imagine being with someone who seemed to be overconfident. But then, was Harrison overconfident if it transpired that his high opinion of himself was based on a clear-eyed assessment?

It was all so confusing. But one thing I knew was that Harrison made me feel very nervous. I got tongue-tied in his company, and clumsy. It was uncomfortable in the extreme, and not in any way I could overcome with a few well-chosen witticisms. We met, hit a wall, and stayed there. It didn’t seem like a challenge, it seemed like something to avoid whenever possible. I was with him when we worked in scenes together and I tried to avoid him otherwise so as not to annoy him—not to, as it felt like to me, waste his better-spent time. It was more comfortable to hang out with the cast and crew who were more fun and less immune to my charms.

But when I look back with squinting eyes, I figure Harrison was scoping out the set in those early days. Not to have an affair necessarily, but then again, not not to either. We were on location, after all, and to have a little quiet jaunt on the side wasn’t the worst thing he could do. It was almost expected. On location—far from home . . .