The Princess Diarist(14)

Meanwhile, two members of the crew—the second assistant directors Terry and Roy—began making sport with me. “Look who we have here, boys! It’s our little princess without her buns!”

I think part of their motive was that I was essentially the only girl at this party, and it would be more entertaining to have the only girl at a party completely off-her-ass drunk than not. If it was the last thing they did, they were going to get me to drink some of that hard liquor everyone was guzzling. It became one of the main focuses of the night—let’s get Leia legless—and if I played along, it would be the most idiotic choice I could make, considering that this shindig would no doubt include everyone I knew on the film, including my bosses, the producers, and the birthday boy himself, the director.

A kind of bawdy Victorian interaction ensued, much in the vernacular. Any people who use language the way the British do—with colloquialisms like “twat” (rhymes with “fat”) and “cunt” (rhymes with everything) at their core—how could you ever tire of listening to and/or interacting with such a gang?

Well, perhaps you can, but I never have. I fell in love with London while I was at school there and have never fallen out. I love their being as bound up in their history as they are, preserving their buildings instead of razing them to the ground to make way for another big beige building with lots of windows to throw yourself screaming from. I love its accents, its exchange rates, its idiosyncratic friendly behavior, its museums, its parks you need keys for, and its colas without ice. If I can forgive a place for not making ice a priority as part of their lifestyle, that’s true love.

We all banded together and sang a hideous version of “Happy Birthday,” after which Harrison began a conversation with George. I was once again surrounded by a musty, sweat-scented, denim–and–T-shirt–clad crowd of heterosexual men. Whether it was muscle or fat that filled out their unremarkable T-shirts, they all looked various degrees of attractive to me, in part because a lot of them actually were attractive and in part because of how undeniably attractive I looked to them, just shy of being an underage girl. But come on, me, give me some credit! I wasn’t merely all that was available on the menu—I was nineteen and cute as the deuce. I can see that now, though if you asked me then, I would have said I was fat faced with a chunky body.

They kept pushing for me to have a drink, and finally the people pleaser in me took over and I agreed to let one of the crew get me one. I asked for an amaretto, the only thing I drank. It tastes like awful cough syrup—which is redundant—but at least it would be a familiar taste. I didn’t have a cough or sore throat, I rationalized, but maybe I could prevent one from coming on. One of the special effects crew cheered at my acquiescence.

“I don’t know how anyone can drink alcohol, just based on the taste,” I said. “It’s like rust. I’ve seen people swirl wine in their mouths with delight and it baffles me.”

“Me, too, luv,” one of the crew replied. “I’m in it for the effect is all—screw the taste.”

“Yeah, but when I was young, it looked so great to me—people standing around in clusters, drinks in hand, heads thrown back in wild laughter—and I just couldn’t wait for that to happen to me. I couldn’t wait to learn the secret of alcohol that unleashes all that gaiety from deep within. But it was a lie, a horrible, horrible lie, and someone is someday going to have to pay for it.”

“Look here, my darling,” said the crew member who’d returned from the bar. “No one is going to have to pay for this—it’s courtesy of George Lucas.”

I looked at the glass he handed me, but instead of finding amaretto, I discovered a glass of what I assumed was wine. I frowned.

“Sorry, luvvie, they didn’t have your fancy sweet drink,” the crew member said. “But this should do what amaretto does and one better.”

Why did I drink it? Maybe to show them how bad an idea alcohol was for me. But whatever the reason, the bottom line is that I drank. My face went into a tight-fisted grimace after my first swig of the foul stuff. And another swig, and another after that. I couldn’t focus on the taste for very long, because there I was laughing, laughing like those adults I watched at my mother’s parties when I was a kid.

“Remember that first week when we did the swing across?” I said.

“What’s a swing across, mate?”

“I’m telling you! I’m trying to tell you! It was when Mark and I swung on a rope from that platform thing to the other side! You know! You know what I mean!”

They did. Not that the crew cared about my story, they only cared that I continued to drink, which I did. They laughed at whatever I said, and I appreciated their laughter, and so continued down that same path until the lines of that path became increasingly blurry and whether it was or wasn’t a path at all mattered less. Everything mattered less. What mattered most was that we continued laughing and had a good time.

? ? ?

i don’t know when I became aware that quite a few members of the crew were organizing a kind of joke abduction of me. I don’t know this because quite a lot of time has transpired between George’s surprise party forty years ago and now.

It was a jovial sort of a plan. To get me out of the party and take me away to wherever movie crews take young actresses when they want to establish that the actress belongs to them, at least for the moment, and not to any cast members or production folk. Certainly it wasn’t a serious thing. What made it look serious was how big the men tended to be in some of the various factions.