The Chrysanthemum Palace

~ ~ ~

A WEEK AFTER RETURNING TO L.A. I was in my trailer working on Holmby Hills. We still hadn’t heard from HBO but Dan said I should just start writing, to calm my nerves.

So there I was, trying to pound out a first scene — one already delineated in the “bible”—yet hopelessly stuck.

I lit a cigarette, drifting back to Anaheim.

“Where would you most likely find a denouement?” asked the unctuous host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Idly, I typed:

1. In the bathroom

2. In a story

3. Under the hood

4. In Death Valley

It occurred to me to write a movie about our ménage à trois but nothing coalesced — not that I’d spent much time mulling it over. It was way too soon. How to begin? (There wasn’t even a bible!) I couldn’t, in all fairness, favor Clea over Thad, though of course that was my bias. Anyway, all was moot because the biggest part of me wouldn’t dare defile her memory by commodifying it, or worse, memorializing by screenplay, then failing — I was an old hand in the Failed Script Department. I decided it was only a daydream. The time had come to refocus my energy and discipline on Holmby Hills. I set upon the opening scene with renewed fervor.

While pondering my destiny — and developing a serious urge for Mexican takeout — Dad called. Nick Sultan was no longer involved in the Chrysanthemum project. Perry said that while he liked the final version of “Prodigal Son (Episode 21-417A),” “Mr. Sultan” had scored a studio tent pole that would keep him busy for the next two and a half years. Good for him. “Recent events” had convinced my father “to get off the dime” and develop Black Jack’s novel himself. He wanted me to begin work on the script ASAP. He’d spoken to Dan Fauci and while things looked optimistic re Holmby Hills he said it was always good to have a few irons in the fire. Dad’s production company would negotiate a fee with the lawyer of my choice. “I can tell you right now it’ll probably be something in the seventy-five-thousand-dollar range,” he said firmly, as if expecting me to bitch. He couldn’t have been more wrong. As the studio gods said, Let there be nepotism. I got that puffed-up, mini-mogul feeling again; that’s how much I needed a shot of self-esteem.

This one, I’d truly earned.

I put Clea’s things in storage.

Her landlord quickly leased the Venice house — I knew, because I’d become a bit of a Peeper. I watched a hip couple move in, barely in their thirties. I actually drove by for a few months, hoping to bump into Clea’s unquiet ghost. Sometimes I’d pull up to the curb and sit there in darkness. I wondered if the new tenants were in the business.

For a while I dreamed about her. I guess Clea’s last “visitation” came when I finished reading Chrysanthemum. I was startled by the power of Michelet’s novel — and its vengefulness. How strange that until recently I hadn’t known the scandal behind it, a cause célèbre at the time of publication. My father never spoke of it; he presumed I already knew.

The book’s protagonist is “Jack Michelet” (this, prepostmodern). “Michelet” has been short-listed for every literary prize known to man — winning most. He’s married to a dilettante who takes artsy photographs of animals in zoo-cages, worldwide. Their son (“Tad”!), an unsuccessful writer of advertisement copy, and his fiancée, a onetime hooker turned day-care center operator, arrive at the house in the Hamptons for a weekend visit. “Michelet” seduces the bride-to-be in the nursery, where he gardens during writing breaks.

Tad and Melanctha could be overheard arguing about something in the kitchen, a friendly dispute over a recipe his mother was preparing for dinner. (They knew Michelet was giving Cly [short for Clytemnestra! — BK] a tour of the greenhouse.) The minute he said, “Show me,” the girl’s neck blotched and her chest began to heave. He watched a vein pound the way fishermen read the swells of a coming storm. He squatted down as she held herself open. It was musty and he leaned in to take a draught as mother and son bantered — good as having her. The cunt looked like a chrysanthemum. He knew from folklore that the flower’s boiled roots could be used as a headache remedy, its violet petals brewed as potion. He would make it his official crest and seal. Michelet knew the mum needed darkness as well as light and that Tad did not have a taste for its cultivation, nor for autumnal colors, unaware even that such a thing blooms in the fall, as the days grow shorter. No, his son would never tap the balmy unskirted elixir for the migraines that had always plagued him, nor have the patience to read up on basics, chapter-and-verse: “As with all gardening efforts, it is not luck or the so-called green thumb that achieves results, but rather hard work and dirty fingernails.” It was then that Michelet resolved to make the thing his corsage, and a cortege for her husband-to-be — and her mother-in-law too — but for now this floral, florid arrangement would be their secretum. Mum was the word, indeed. He stared at the petals with great keenness while kitchen voices grew mock-contentious and Cly’s carotid beat furiously until without being touched, she came.