A POET FROM HOLLYWOOD
A Memoir
Cantarabooks, 2010
This is the story of the book of poetry that Stephen Gyllenhaal
wrote and I published, and how it served as a
catalyst that changed both our lives.
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RANDOM EXCERPT
Chapter Five:
“I've Got a Few More Changes”
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Note: The sixteen chapters are changed randomly on my blog.
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There was a mad flurry of activity before June 28, the date Housing Works and I agreed on for the reading, and Stephen wasn’t making it any easier. In two months the books had to be ready and on hand—and we hadn’t even gotten his final edits yet.
I quickly regretted agreeing to the clause in his contract that gave him control over the final wording of his poems. Still not quite satisfied with his poetry, Stephen was calling and emailing Michael more often, sometimes as often as twice a day. When his communiqués seemed to be on the verge of interfering with our personal lives I told Michael so, but he assured me that Stephen’s almost constant need for attention was something he could handle.
“The thing is,” said Michael, “all these changes and reconsiderations are making him a better poet. His word choices are improving. He’s stopped trying to be precious with line breaks. His ideas are clearer. It’s time well spent working with him.” Michael’s devotion to Stephen’s poetry made me feel at certain moments that I was dealing with a single two-headed creature who spouted confessional free verse.
There was one day coming up though, that I thought Michael and I would have just to ourselves. Surely Hollywood’s number-one poster family would be taking time off for this very special holiday.
Mother’s Day 2006, the second Sunday in May, was a beautiful spring day, possibly the best day of mooching free food and liquor we ever spent in New York. The Bellevue Literary Review was holding its spring reading, and of all the literary magazines in the city, their readings were the most lavishly catered. The wine was excellent and the platters of cheese and crudités were plentiful enough to make a meal of, which we did. We feasted, bought two copies of the Review, and listened to a few of their authors read from their work.
At the reading we ran into an acquaintance who invited us to an artists’ open house in the East Village. Feeling merry and surrendering to serendipity we went there, drank more wine, and bought whatever was for sale. By seven in the evening we were totally buzzed. We didn’t want to go home to Queens quite yet and decided to have dinner at nearby Virage. We found a table near the bar and, once settled in, phoned our son in San Francisco to wish him a Happy Mother’s Day. Then out of my purse I took out a picture of Stephen, a printout of the .jpg he sent me for his author’s photo. This is the picture I eventually submitted for his entry in Wikipedia; I own this picture and a few others I’ll be mentioning. I taped it to the menu holder on our table and Michael and I saluted it. “Let’s call him up,” said Michael, grinning boozily. “Ask him to join us.” “Here’s not here,” I said. “He’s back in LA. In fact, he and Jake and Naomi just spent the afternoon walking down the beach at Malibu.” Michael asked me how I knew—I told him that the gossip sites had posted paparazzi pictures of the three of them on the beach just that morning. He was shocked to find out how little time it took for even the most low-key of the family’s activities to be broadcast across the internet. Personally, I liked it. Wherever Jake went, the paparazzi were likely to be lurking about, so wherever Jake went with his dad, I was sure to get a glimpse of Stephen. Yes, it was a pleasure seeing pictures of him. But I also needed to know where he’d be at given times. During the months of May and June he was constantly flying back and forth from the Coast at the same time I was trying to line up interviews for him—the only kind of publicity we could afford. Even though he was easy to track through the paparazzi pictures, Stephen continued to play coy with me concerning his whereabouts. He even hinted that he might not even show up for his own reading at Housing Works. But there was one thing I counted on—that celebrating Mother’s Day with his wife and son in Malibu would be occupying all of his attention. We looked forward to a nice, if short, break from him and Claptrap. “To Stephen!” we toasted the photo, eliciting some odd looks from the dinner crowd. When we got home we were well-fed and drunk and I was feeling frisky, but like a fool I turned on the computer to check emails to see what might be in store for us the next day. At the top was a message. “I’ve Got a Few More Changes,” said the subject line. Not to mention that the email address showed that Stephen had sent it from his Blackberry cell phone, the one he always kept in his back pocket. I thought back to all those paparazzi photos that day and wondered: While he and Naomi were being pictured lovey-dovey on the beach, how could he have been thinking about revising “The Nasty Pink of Sunrise” and “The Enron in My Face”? Michael sat down at the desk. “I’ll be just a minute,” he said. Half an hour later, Michael was working on Stephen’s poems and I toddled off to bed alone.
* * *On the last morning in May I was at waiting for Stephen at the General Society Library—which also houses the Small Press Center—on West 44th Street. Once again he was late. As I sat on the lecture platform waiting, making sure I’d be the first thing he saw walking in, I found myself trying to arrange my legs in a sexy pose at the same time thinking, “Why am I doing this? The man is an idiot.” About quarter to ten he came in and spotted me. He was flustered and apologetic as he came over, saying he’d just been in a meeting at CBS trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to get them interested in one of his projects, a TV series. We still had over a half-hour until Michael was to join us. I’d wanted the extra time to show Stephen this historical library and to show Stephen off to the library staff. The library staff, all the way up to the director, seemed to be mighty impressed with him, and we ended up getting a tour of their collection of antique locks and the usually-closed meeting room with its staid portraits of library officers through the years. Stephen, in turn, seemed to be just as impressed. Said one of the portraits reminded him of his grandfather. I’d never heard him speak about his family in Bryn Athyn outside of his poetry. It was probably the closest Stephen and I ever had to a date, although it was more like taking a precocious kid on an outing. At ten-thirty Michael arrived and we all went across the street to a coffee shop called The Flame, where we ordered a late breakfast. I got the bacon and eggs, Michael got toast, and Stephen ordered a bowl of oatmeal to go with his daily fistful of vitamins. We were all feeling free and lighthearted at that meeting, which we all considered to be sort of a wrap party. Stephen at last had let go of the book only a week earlier and without any further hesitation I’d sent it to the printers. With the book now positively “going through”, he was filled with all sorts of new plans. Although he’d stopped bringing up the possibility of touring with Jake and Maggie, he talked now, for example, about doing joint readings with Ethan Hawke. “I thought you said you didn’t like him,” I reminded Stephen, to which he answered with a nervous laugh, “I don’t. But we’re still friends.” As a wrap gift, I presented Stephen with a bagful of goodies we’d gotten from the national book business convention, the American Book Expo, that past weekend. There were badges, clips, squeaky toys, and one special find, a giant and very lifelike gummy rat—a reference to one of his poems in Claptrap. Gleefully he took it out of the cellophane and dangled it high by the tail, scaring the waitresses. “He’s a big kid, just a big kid,” I remarked to Michael later when Stephen went to pay the bill. “And you’re his mother,” said Michael. “No I’m not,” I protested. * * *The books arrived three Thursdays later and they were beautiful. I called Stephen the minute they came in; he told me to send a few directly to the family home on Mulholland Drive and charge the shipment to him. “I know this isn’t in the contract,” he said, “but how about you send me ten copies, for friendship’s sake.” It’s true, our contract only required us to send one free copy per publication to the author. But at that point, I figured that building a friendship with Stephen was worth the cost-per-unit price of ten copies and agreed to it. (Oh, who am I kidding? I was smitten with the guy and he knew it. Of course I’d send him a lousy ten copies.) Two days later was Father’s Day, a beautiful summer Sunday in New York. A warm summer day in Manhattan meant only one thing to us—draft beer. We took the subway from our place in Queens to the Upper West Side and went to our favorite Irish saloon on Amsterdam Avenue. On this afternoon their doors had all been flung wide open and the place was especially airy and inviting. About fifteen minutes into Michael’s and my first round at our usual table, Stephen’s special ring emanated from my cell phone. I was sure that he was calling to thank me for sending the books. Assuring Michael that I’d take the call outside just for a moment, I left him with our two pints and my fried zucchini. Patrons of Kiely’s: If any of you were unduly bothered on Father’s Day afternoon, 2006, by the sight of a short middle-aged Asian-American woman pacing maniacally up and down the sidewalk swearing into her cell, let me belatedly apologize. When I returned to Michael twenty minutes later I couldn’t hide it from him that I was upset. He asked me what was wrong. I spat it out in acid little bullets: “Jake. Doesn’t. Like. The. Cover.” Michael, not quite understanding, asked me to repeat what I’d just said, which I did: According to his father, 25-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal, Oscar nominee, star of major films and therefore someone eminently qualified to offer his opinion on book aesthetics, had informed Stephen of his displeasure at the cover of Claptrap. I recounted more of our conversation. “First of all, I reminded the idiot that he was the one who gave me the photo to use in the first place. In fact he insisted we use it. He told me to trust him because, being a movie director, he had a great eye for these things.” “You mean that fuzzy picture of the back of that guy’s head,” said Michael. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s Peter Sarsgaard on the red carpet at the LA premiere of Jarhead.” “How do you know this?” “Because way back when Stephen told me over the phone he was sending me the .jpg, he said it was Peter Sarsgaard on the red carpet at the LA premiere of Jarhead.” “And now he’s telling you that the picture he not only sent you, but the picture he insisted you use for the cover of the book, is a picture that Jake doesn’t like.” “Oh, it’s worse than that,” I said. “He’s now denying that it’s Peter. You know what he just said? He said that he’ll ‘never reveal the true identity’. He said, ‘My lips are sealed forever’.” Michael asked me what else was discussed. I told him that Stephen reminded me that he had been in the movie business for twenty-seven years and that his wife was the recipient of the PEN/West Award for Best Screenplay of 1988. “What the hell has this got to do with the book cover!?” he exclaimed. “How the fuck should I know?” I said. I remembered the insanity Stephen had put me through with that damn book cover back in May, all the times I had to convey to Joe, our mechanicals man, “The author wants it fuzzier. The author wants more negative space on the left. No, more on the right.” That photo passed back and forth between Joe and me so many times he threatened to charge me double if I sent it back to him once more. So I told Stephen that this was it. This was the book and he was going to have to live with it and if he had a problem with it he could come back to New York and slug it out with me. I reported to Michael, “He said, ‘Don’t be too sure. I’m bigger than you are.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but you’re fatter.’” I didn’t mean his physique. He may have been fifty-six but he was still built like a quarterback. I meant his head. Michael was not amused. “What are you, his sister now?” The feelings that sprang up were not sisterly. “I—I just want to strangle him!” As I blurted out that very unprofessional statement two simultaneous and startling desires came over me. One was to strangle Stephen Roark Gyllenhaal. The other was to drag him to bed and jump him. “I think you need dinner,” said Michael consolingly. I protested that it was my turn to buy him dinner, but after finishing his beer he led me out of Kiely’s down the street to an inviting seafood eatery. There we called our son to wish him Happy Father’s Day, and Michael fed me more shrimp and lobster than we could afford until the urge to commit rape and poeticide left me.
* * *I mentioned Grassroots in the East Village to Stephen as a place to meet a week later because it was the one bar in New York that made Michael and me feel totally grounded—our turf, as Michael put it. It’s a garden-level bar that smells of old wood and dusty sunlight, a perfect place to drink and people watch. When the big power outage of 2004 killed all the cell phone signals and brought the city to a standstill while we were both stuck in Manhattan at our separate jobs, we both just knew that if we each made our way down to Grassroots we’d find each other, and we did. I met Stephen who was already waiting at the steps, talking on his Blackberry. We stood there punching each other’s arms until he his finished his conversation, and went in together. It was four o’clock and the place was just opening up, the bartender had already started work. I sidled up with Stephen to the bar. “This is great,” he remarked brightly, looking around. “Jake would love this.” “No one cares about Jake here,” I muttered embarrassedly, catching the bartender’s eye. “What’ll you have?” he asked. Stephen ordered a Perrier. This is a saloon, you Hollywood moron, I felt like yelling at him. The bartender told him they didn’t serve Perrier, so he ordered a club soda. I got my usual draft pint. We went over to the little table near the only window. “You know,” said Stephen, “I was thinking about it in the shower this morning. It’s really not a bad cover.” I glared at him; he seemed totally oblivious to the fact that for over a week I’d been steeling myself for a major battle.
Finally I asked as evenly as I could, “Are you always this much trouble?”
“Well, that's what my family says,” he answered sheepishly.
“So, how about now?” I went on. “Are you happy now? You know the reading’s in two days, it’s really going to happen.” He laughed nervously. “Are you ready?” I asked. He said now that it was inevitable, he couldn’t wait. His nervousness was so palpable I started to soften toward him. “I just spoke to Anders, he said he’ll be there. And Max,” said Stephen. I recognized the names of his two brothers from our previous conversations. When I asked him about his three sisters though, he was noncommittal. “I don’t know anything about that.” Instead he spent the better part of our meeting telling me stories about himself and his two brothers, some of the scrapes they all got into as boys. “And now he’s been managing the newspaper in Minneapolis,” he said of Anders. “I forgot the name.” I told him, the Star-Tribune. Of course I knew the name. I reminded Stephen I was from Minneapolis.
“Well, Anders and his family are coming,” he said. This led to a last bit of business, a question I’d been putting off. Chaya had said to me a week or two earlier, “Listen. My volunteers are going to be overworked with Mary Gordon’s fans and students showing up, so if there’s going to be a big media circus the night Stephen reads, I have to prepare them for that as well. So ask him if you-know-who is coming.” As nonchalantly as I could I asked, “By the way, is Jake going to be at the reading?” Stephen pressed his lips together and smoothly answered, “No. He has to stay in Los Angeles to do pickup shots for his new movie, Zodiac.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Good,” I said quietly but still audibly enough, I’m afraid, that he heard. I regretted this immediately as I was turning over that pickup shots excuse in my mind. And while I was looking and looking at Stephen, searching, I guess, for some expression on his face that would tell me positively whether or not it was the truth, it hit me: Jake was planning to stay away for his father’s sake. And Stephen knew it. It was then my heart went out to him completely and unreservedly and I thought, Anywhere you want, I’ll go, anything you want, I’ll get you. The meeting took a little over an hour and the after-work customers were starting to fill up the place. After a short exchange of “So Wednesday at seven, don’t be late” and “I guess we’ll see you there” he and I got up together, went out and walked up the steps to the sidewalk. When I was a step higher and we were eye-to-eye I turned around and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. His breath smelled of fettucine alfredo.
Next Random Chapter—Nine: “And What About...Naomi?”
