The Princess Diarist(15)

At some point I realized my head was hurting. Not hurting exactly, it just felt different than it usually did, which I mentioned.

“You need to get some air,” one of the crew said.

“Isn’t there air in here?” I said. “What have I been breathing then?”

“Hey,” a new voice called out as I was being steered toward an available door by a few of the friendlier sparks. The sparks were sparking to me, weren’t they? We were just about to pass through the door when I heard that voice again. An American one, not British. A Yankee voice. “Where are you taking her?”

“Nowhere, man, the lady just wants to get a little air is all.”

“Pardon me, but the lady doesn’t seem to be very aware of what she wants.” Then I knew who it was. Harrison! My costar! What was he saying? I didn’t know what I wanted? That might have been true, but when did he become the expert on what I did or didn’t want?

“Hey, Harrison!” I greeted him as he found his way to my circle. “Where’ve you been?”

I have no idea what these rowdy Brits thought they were going to do with me. I have to believe not much, but they were going to make a lot of noise while they didn’t do it. And Harrison was suddenly making a great show of saving me from what I can only guess at. (But why bother?) The crew pulled, Harrison pushed back, I tried to stay in focus.

But there was also an element of danger. Not with a capital “D” but the word in whatever form applies due to the roughhousing that seemed to rule the day, or the roost, or the world. What began as a kind of pretend stage-fight tug-of-war transformed into a more earnest battle for a woman’s—what is the word?—maidenhood. No! Virtue! A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was under way and I was unclear how it would all turn out. But vaguely interested, and that’s a fact.

Once I could wrap what remained of my mind around who was involved in this tug-of-war, I gradually came to realize who it was that I wanted to win: my costar, the smuggler, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head, and the gun in his belt—not now, just when in character, but still . . . I felt the gun was implied and so must’ve the crew, because after a mad scuffle, which left Harrison limping, Mr. Ford threw my virtue and me into the backseat of his studio car and commanded the driver to “Go! GO!” We went, followed on foot for the briefest but boldest of times by the film set crew—the finest of men.

? ? ?

about halfway to London from Elstree, I heard the honking of a horn. That is, I eventually realized that’s what the persistent noise was. I pushed Harrison’s shoulder back. “What’s that?” I asked, panicked. “Is someone honking?”

“Shit,” mumbled Harrison, squinting out the back car window over my head. “It’s Mark and Peter.”

“Oh my God.” I started to sit up, but he stopped me with his hand and voice.

“Fix your hair.”

My hair, my hair, my hair—it was always my hair with this movie, on-screen or off. I stayed slunk down while I did my unlevel best to straighten my hair and then slowly rose, afraid of who I’d find out the window, and would they be armed? Armed with a camera and shocked face? Or . . . ?

“Just act normal,” Harrison suggested. Realizing that acting normal would take hours and a team of horses, I grinned and waved at the two of them through the window, the closest I could get to normal without assistance, additional encouragement, and a hat. “They were sort of behind us so they couldn’t have seen anything.”

While I watched, a blue car caught up with us on our right. One of the crew, Peter Kohn, was driving the car, with a beautiful girl to the left of him in the passenger seat, the actress Koo Stark. Mark was in the backseat, leaning all the way forward into the front seat between Peter and the girl. He waved happily and smiled. I waved back and showed them my upper teeth.

I watched Harrison roll down his window of the car. This was prehistoric England; windows were lowered manually, phones had to be dialed, and everything was closed on Sunday by eleven o’clock at night. And when I say “everything,” I mean everything. It amazed me.

Plus they didn’t sell corn bread, most breakfast cereals, pancake mix, pinto beans, or regular bacon! That was my staple diet! How did people survive? There were tons of ordinary American products that couldn’t be purchased in the UK. Some of them could be found at Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly. I knew all of this from having already lived in London for the last few years. The Americans who made up our cast (Mark and Harrison) and crew (George and Gary et al.) on Star Wars were just finding it out.

One of those Americans was the previously mentioned Peter Kohn, who usually wore a knit hat and long dark blue or maroon sweaters. Exactly what services he provided to Star Wars I wasn’t exactly sure. He didn’t seem to be there in any sort of normal official capacity, not that I would really know what a normal official capacity looked like, but here we were, Peter, Koo Stark, and the stars of the movie, all on our way to the same restaurant.

? ? ?

the fact that Harrison and I had rolled around in the backseat during our return to London didn’t necessarily mean that it was a prologue for a more elaborate event. An inkling of what was coming, maybe. Sure, there had been some unexpected exploratory kissing: reading another person’s face with your mouth with dedicated eagerness, swimming with your lips between a particular person’s nose and chin, gently digging for jewels using your tongue as a makeshift shovel, jewels buried in the mouth of your beloved—wait! I think I felt a sapphire over here near the back molar on the left. Fishing face-to-face—like grouper, but without the water, the scales, and that awful fishy smell. But otherwise . . .