Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

33. hollywood, hollywouldn’t

I’d been in Shelley Duvall’s kitchen merely seconds before I noticed the ants. Not that the room was crawling with them, the ants were concentrated in one place — along the windowsill above the sink — but they teemed there in numbers that might have inspired the Vatican to consider the historical context of that ominous biblical directive to “go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth.”

What was I doing in Shelley Duvall’s kitchen? I’d gone in there to fetch a beer from the refrigerator, and mission accomplished, returned to the living room, where I gave Shelley the bad news that a plague of ants was descending upon her kitchen. I advised her to call an exterminator. “Oh, no,” the actress said cheerfully. “They’re just having lunch.”

Before I could take a sip of beer she led me back into the kitchen, showed me a squeeze bottle of honey, and demonstrated how around noon every day she would squeeze a line of honey onto the sill, opening the window just a crack so that the ants on her property might come in and dine.

Well, that was Shelley for you, in real life as so often on-screen: completely loopy in a big-eyed, long-lashed, childlike, and endearing sort of way. She gave a more traditional performance in The Shining, but while others around me in the theater were transfixed by Kubrick’s creepy masterpiece, by Jack Nicholson’s escalating homicidal madness, I could not look at Shelley, even in the more terrifying scenes, without smiling and thinking, That woman feeds ants in her kitchen.

I’d gone to Shelley’s home to take a meeting with a couple of young screenwriters. There had been Hollywood interest in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues throughout the late seventies; the book had been optioned several times, and two adaptations had been written, both by experienced screenwriters, but the scripts hadn’t worked. The writers just hadn’t gotten it. Now Shelley Duvall was wanting to produce and star in Cowgirls, and to that end was interviewing writers. I was encouraged that the pair she’d invited to her house that Sunday were young, less crimped by tradition, but we hadn’t conversed very long before it became apparent to me that they weren’t going to get it either.

What was it none of these guys were getting? Why, the tendency for the serious and the comic to commingle, sometimes almost seamlessly, in life generally and in my novel particularly. Oh they were aware, surely, that comedy, especially slapstick comedy, has an underlying element of desperation, but finding and acknowledging the comedic that can infiltrate everyday sober circumstance was foreign to them, as was the broader notion that human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny. I, on the other hand, have always looked at life that way, and reading Hesse, Nietzsche, and Alfred Jarry (not to mention forays into Eastern philosophic systems and psychedelics) had reinforced my sense that this is just the way our world is ordered. Convincing a screenwriter that such a perspective should be or could be the secret spice that flavored any successful adaptation of Cowgirls was proving futile, however. The writers were frankly incapable of thinking that way. Humorous in one scene, serious in the next: that they could manage, but both in the same scene…? Not happening.

Did Shelley Duvall get it? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, she didn’t hire the two writers we interviewed at her free-form ant farm. And a month or so later she phoned (I’d finally gone telephonic) to say that she had written a script herself. Really? Yes, and she wanted me to come back to L.A. and meet with a director to whom she was going to pitch her screenplay. I hadn’t heard of Alan Rudolph at that time, but the fact that he’d come recommended by Robert Altman was good enough for me.

We met at a German restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I’d glanced over Shelley’s “script” right before Rudolph arrived — and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Only twenty-three pages in length (the average script is a hundred pages longer), single-spaced, no paragraphs, no separated passages of dialogue, it gave the impression of having been written by a delusional senior in a North Dakota nursing home, someone who’d not only never seen a film script in her entire life, but had neglected to consult an instruction manual. Rudolph, I was certain, would take one look at this debacle, shake his head in disbelief, and flee the restaurant before we could order a schnitzel.

Astonishingly, the director who, I was to learn, had made invaluable and largely uncredited contributions to Altman classics such as Nashville and the sadly underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, skimmed through Shelley’s nonscript (it didn’t take long), nodded, and said matter-of-factly, “Sure. Good. I can make this.”

And he meant it. He wasn’t being facetious. What’s more, he really could have made it. As he was to demonstrate repeatedly in ensuing years, if ever there was an American director capable of extracting diamond dust from Shelley’s lumpy little sack of charcoal, who could have successfully straddled that Cowgirly borderline between the edgy and the sweet, it would have been Alan Rudolph. His smoky, neon-bathed romances have seldom shied from directing our eyes to the poignant goofiness that can infect the most sophisticated of modern relationships. His lens charts the wobble in the orbit of the heart, his absurdist wit lends existential wisdom to film noir scenes that from another director might be only violent and banal.

For the knowing and confident way in which he agreed to take on that dopey script, I developed a kind of instant man crush on Rudolph, but Shelley was unable to get the project funded and eight years would pass before another actress would hook me up with him again. In 1987, my friend Debra Winger talked Rudolph into casting me as a toymaker in Made in Heaven, a studio movie being shot in Charleston and Atlanta, and during the shoot Alan and I developed a lasting friendship, despite the fact that he cut the single best line I’d written for my character: “Toys are made in heaven — but the batteries come from hell.”

One of the perks of associating with celebrities is that you get to experience firsthand the state of invisibility. Step out in public with any rock star or Hollywood actress and poof! — you disappear. People look right through you. It’s a kind of enchantment, more effective than the graduate program at Hogwarts. Once during the filming of Made in Heaven, however, the tables turned and the cloak of invisibility unexpectedly fell about unaccustomed shoulders.

There had been a small but lively dinner party at the house in Charleston provided to Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton for the duration of the shoot. The house was in an upscale neighborhood a good distance from the downtown hotel where most of the cast and crew were lodged. At the end of the evening, I caught a ride back to the hotel with Neil Young and his manager. In the conversation that ensued, Neil learned for the first time that the guy in the backseat was a novelist. He’d never heard of me or my books, assuming all evening that I was an assistant producer or some other functionary connected to Lorimar Studios. He was mildly surprised, I suppose, but didn’t seem particularly impressed.

It was well past midnight and the hotel lobby was deserted. To retrieve our room keys, Neil and I approached the front desk more or less in tandem. When we got closer to the desk, the night clerk — a pretty woman in her early twenties — suddenly lit up like a ballpark, clutched her chest, and made an audible sound that resembled a mixture of a sigh, a squeal, and a purr. Naturally, Neil thought the excitement was for him.

“You’re Tom Robbins, aren’t you?!” the girl gushed. “I heard you were staying with us.” She went on to tell me how wonderful my books were, how much they meant to her, while the great Neil Young (and he truly is great) waited impatiently — invisibly — for his key. The human ego is a treacherous apparatus, best kept at a safe distance from the self, but I confess I took a small measure of pleasure in making a star play the transparent ghost for a change.