The Chrysanthemum Palace

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LATE MONDAY MORNING I LEARNED Thad awakened around 2:00 A.M. with another migraine. Clea took him to Cedars. Again, production boards were juggled so that his services weren’t needed until the following day, when the duel between Morloch and the ensign was to be staged.

At this point in ‘Prodigal’s’ scenario, the starship ensemble felt the full, bipolarizing tug of the Dome, causing that debilitating condition known as Stanislavski syndrome. Nick Sultan spread his auteur wings — he thought of himself as a kind of boob-tube Sam Mendes — but sadly, such happiness would not be sustained through production’s end. Vorbalidian prosecutors wore absurdly powdered wigs as the Demeter crew, in stylish captives’ robes and chains, stood trial for their very sanity. Emissaries of the king, high-minded twits, malevolent magistrates, and venomous palace prosecutors skedaddled like extras in Mr. Sultan’s long-forgotten RSC production of Marat/Sade. The normally laconic android grew hysterically loquacious; the captain whined, whinnied, and brooded in aforementioned junior college Hamlet mode; X-Ray was placed on suicide watch after pronouncing he was “more fit to work in a slaughterhouse than a temple of healing”; whilst I, ruggedly reliable, peripatetically priapic Karp, found myself literally and metaphorically impotent, a pilot whose pilot light had gone out, a flyboy castrati whistling in the Domed dark.

Such was the cheap stuff Emmy dreams were made of.

The next morning, I drove to the Margaret Herrick Library over on La Cienega.

I’d been there before to poke around, chasing story ideas that never panned out. It was a clean, well-funded place, somehow connected to the Academy. The cool, classical hush of its interiors reminded me of the Huntington in Pasadena. I filled out the form and a few minutes later an officious clerk returned with a folder of clippings, production notes, stills, and related ephemera.

Son of Author Michelet Drowns

(Italy) The 12-year-old son of Pulitzer Prize — winning novelist Jack Michelet drowned Monday during the shooting of a film off the coast of Capri. Jeremy Michelet was missing for several hours from his father’s yacht, The Soft Sea Horse, which was being used as a location for a movie based on one of his books. The body was found later that day by a fisherman. The production of The Death of a Translator, starring Alain Delon and Sophia Loren, has been suspended for a week. Mr. Michelet wrote the screenplay.

There were photos from the press kit — Jack with the director, Jack with Sophia, Jack with Alain — but nothing of the boys.

I closed my eyes and set the stage, remembering what Thad once told me: reflexively supplanting Jeremy’s face with that of Leif Farragon’s, I imagined the twins in the water… saw the boy sinking, and Thad saying nothing for the longest time. It must have been dreamlike, as if nothing had happened… yet everything had, everything and nothing all at once! Life and death, past and future, each canceling out the other — precisely how I’d felt (in far lesser degrees) upon learning Roosevelt Chandler was no longer of this world. Suddenly, lugubrious manila file in hand, I felt like a coward for being able to walk away from the scene of the crime (his monologue about the killer from Chrysanthemum came back to mind) and stay away so many years. But Thad was left to simmer and boil, forever connected by tissue and bone to his overthrown, ambivalent beloved. And the worst was yet to come: soon to be ruled against by that monstrous Neptune, and sentenced by Mom, in absentia, before eternal banishment to the suppurative Hades of Migraine…