The Princess Diarist(19)

Suffice it to say, we survived and then some. Difficult from this distance to know how close our close was, and whether this brand of close had as much to do with the proximity of someone who looked so very much like my space date—he who smirked at me while jumping to light speed (while I required no assistance whatsoever).

Our affable ordeal behind us, Harrison fell asleep and I tried to. God, he really was handsome. I forgave him for not loving me in the way one usually expects—and almost forgave myself for not expecting it. I tried to follow him into slumber land, and when I couldn’t, I breathed with him there in the dark—wondering what he was dreaming and hoping that if I actually managed to fall asleep, in the morning, I would wake up before he did. Maybe I’d be better at talking with him now—less daunted, in character and out.

There are some things that I still consider private. Amazing, isn’t it? You would think, without concentrating too hard, that I consider whatever I said and did up for grabs. Way up where the grabs are groped the most. But sex is private. That might be one reason we do it—for the most part—in the nude. Clothes falling away signals a situation that I’ll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don’t dress it up, don’t expect talk to, either.

So it is with uncharacteristic reservation and scruples that I quash any details, put the kibosh on sharing anything but the most general information or description hereinafter when relating what occurred between Mr. Ford and me on that fateful Friday night in May 1976. This applies also to whatever it was that occurred between Harrison and me on subsequent Fridays at ungodly hours. For that is when we spent our time together, when we had our sleepovers, like good youngsters do. Oh, we spent time together during daylight hours following our time together at night. Such as it was. I think I recall his reading the paper while I . . . while I pretended to do something else.

Privacy questions aside, I can barely recall our time together during our first weekend. I didn’t know how I would live through the five whole days of filming following that first weekend. Those five days on set together went unbearably slowly, with our having to behave toward each other as though the weekend before hadn’t even occurred. Weekdays were off-limits, intimacy-wise. Not that this had ever been expressly stated by either one of us. We simply intuited we would spend our weekdays treating one another as though not only had that first weekend not happened, but all of the ensuing ones hadn’t happened either.

Despite the common use of the phrase “going out with” to describe two people spending time together, Harrison and I didn’t spend a lot of time going out, or wouldn’t.

Instead, we went into each other’s apartments. I remember spending most of our weekends together at my rented domain in Esmond Court, but that could just be where my memory goes when I send it back to the seventies. I know I wanted to spend our time together there and not at his place.

I preferred Harrison staying over at my apartment because—as the borrowed flat of a friend of mine—it was nicer than his. Sorry, but it was. We all received scale for the first film, which amounted to about $500 a week. And while I came from a wealthy family (though of recently reduced circumstances) and could have afforded rent for nice accommodations even if I hadn’t been able to borrow Riggs’s flat, Harrison had a wife and two children at home, so in order to maintain their support, he lived in the most modest housing that the studio could get away with providing him. So when it came down to where we would stay, the choice became fairly obvious soon enough.

Once, on one of the rare occasions when we did have a sleepover at Harrison’s apartment, Mark and his fairly ubiquitous friend Peter dropped by unannounced. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it might have looked odd that I was there. Clearly I hadn’t just dropped by for brunch, as no scones or eggs were in evidence, and we didn’t appear to be running lines. Harrison, after letting Mark in, returned to the table we’d been sitting at, sat down across from me, took my hand, and pronounced solemnly, “We’re engaged.” It was hiding in plain sight, mocking the suggestion that there was anything going on; therefore, it couldn’t be true—a technique I like to use to this day.

? ? ?

but I also know that I wasn’t good at being clear about anything that I wanted with Harrison. I could charm the birds out of everyone’s trees but his. That’s something I wrote in the diaries that I kept during the filming of Star Wars. The first one, Episode IV. The diaries I found recently while expanding my bedroom at home. I was going through the many boxes that were stored romantically beneath the floorboards and came across three written notebooks I had kept during that epic time—and then promptly forgot I’d kept. Or that they kept me, in some ways, sane. When I read them, I was struck by how unusual they were, which is when I first considered publishing them. (I still might. What do you think?)

There were two reasons that I wrote the diaries, the first one being that I’d always written, since I was about twelve. It seemed to calm me, getting anything that might be chaotic behind the eyes onto the page in front of me where it could do me less harm. Along the lines of the saying, “Better out than in,” though that refers to vomit. Maybe more like, “Better an empty house than an unhappy tenant.” Not that writing on my notepads managed to actually empty my mind—though some would argue—but I was grateful to relieve the overflow.

The second reason I wrote them was that I couldn’t talk to Harrison. Basically about anything, but especially about the entity that was “us”—not that there actually was such a thing. Not only couldn’t I converse with Harrison, but given that my weekends with Harrison were a secret, it became something that was better left unsaid, to discuss, only with my pen in hand, with the journal in front of me. I felt that I couldn’t confide in anyone else what was happening with Harrison, because Harrison was married. And not to me.