“No talent, then?”
“She had talent, yes; but not enough to match her ambition,” Maggie said. “She had brains though, and not a lot of scruples. We both started off with bit parts, but she wanted more. Well, we both wanted more, but I wasn’t unscrupulous enough to sleep with the scriptwriter to get it. Or maybe I’d already figured out exactly how little power the scriptwriter had. She learned fast, though; dumped the poor wordsmith for the director, and she got her extra lines—in one of the worst movies ever filmed, but you have to start somewhere.”
“What was the movie?”
“God, what was the name of that stinker? Where’d Nate go, anyway? He’d remember, of course; but if I asked him he’d pretend he didn’t. He doesn’t like to be reminded of his early screenplays.”
“Nate wrote it?” I exclaimed, glancing over at the table that Nate had apparently vacated. “He was the scriptwriter she…um…”
“You bet,” she said, shaking her glass and smiling. “That’s how they met, working on that movie. And probably how she met that comic book writer, too.”
“Ichabod Dilley?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He was an artist, actually. Nate dug a kid up somewhere to do the psychedelic paintings they used in the film.”
So Nate had known Ichabod Dilley, too. Curious that he hadn’t mentioned it just now.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Dilley? I didn’t really know him,” she said, shrugging. “He was this total recluse who never came to the set, though perhaps Nate was just trying to be mysterious about his discovery. I think I only ever saw Dilley once: tall; skeletally thin; long, greasy brown hair. Had one of those unfortunate, mangy beards, the kind you see on a kid who’s really too young to grow one but insists on trying anyway. And big, round wire-rimmed sunglasses, and an oversized pea coat. Unprepossessing.”
“You didn’t like him?” I said.
“I didn’t dislike him,” she said. “I didn’t really know him. Tammy was the one who hung around with him. God knows why. From what little I’d seen, I couldn’t figure out what she saw in him but, then, if Tammy thought she could use a guy to get something she needed…”
Maggie shrugged, and took a sip from her iced tea.
“I always thought the poor kid based those comics on her, if you really want to know,” she said.
“The Porfiria comics?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You ever read them? In the comics, Porfiria is pure Tammy. As she was then. No wonder she wanted so badly to play the part. It was perfect for her. Too bad the chance finally came about twenty-five years too late.”
She sat back, clinking the ice in her drink, and smiling again. I waited, because I could tell the scene hadn’t ended. Maybe a melodramatic way of thinking, but I suspected that was how Maggie saw life: as a series of scenes that often hung together badly, like a movie made by an incompetent director from a wretched script. And there wasn’t anything Maggie could do about that, but at least she could control her own performance. Make any scene in which she appeared as good as she knew how. I’d seen Michael trying to teach his acting students about pacing. I’d heard his lecture to the Drama 101 class on the structure of a well-made play. Even I could tell that this scene still needed a proper ending.
Maggie took a swallow, and then reached down into her tapestry bag, rummaged around for a bit, and came out with something.
“This was us,” she said. “Taken on the set.”
She handed over a plastic sleeve containing a 4×6 color photo that had obviously been around a while before someone decided it was worth protecting with the sleeve. In the shot, a group of about twenty beautiful young people smiled into the camera. They were wearing costumes from the early seventies. Okay, the photo was taken in 1971, but they were still costumes—Hollywood’s idea of what flower children looked like. Flower children, and a couple of Hell’s Angels who looked as young and innocent as the pseudohippies. All of them a lot cleaner than their real-life counterparts probably managed to be, and with hair so perfect you knew a stylist with a brush and a big can of hairspray lurked just out of the frame. The women, all sporting long, pre-Raphaelite hair, wore granny gowns, Indian-print dresses, fringed or beaded halter tops over artfully frayed jeans. The men’s tresses were almost as long—some less obviously wigs than others—and most wore beards or mustaches and flowered shirts or tie-dyed T-shirts in rainbow colors.
I could see the younger Maggie, near the back of the group. The QB—Tammy, as she was then—near the center, draped artfully on the shoulder of one of the most attractive young men. All the men seemed to be standing closer to her than they had to. I could see why. She had a glow—that’s the only way to describe her.