Page 73 of Playworld

“Thank you,” he said, his voiced lowered too. “Martini, please.”

“Good idea,” Mrs. Potts said.

Before she could walk away, Mr. Potts gently took her elbow, pulled her to him, and, keeping his eyes on the television, kissed her half on the mouth. She half-kissed him back.

Now we have been told—ABC News has been told by a doctor at the hospital—that one lung of the president has partially collapsed.

Over Reynolds speaking, the image crosscut to the shooting, but this time in slow motion. Now that I’d seen it so many times, there were several things I noticed that I hadn’t before. An old man, a bystander, in a red cardigan, leaned into the scrum as they subdued the shooter, helping the Secret Service agents pin him against the hotel’s decorative stone wall. The blood around James Brady’s head was diffused at its edges by the rain. In slow motion you could see the agent who took the bullet raise his eyebrow in the millisecond before impact, the muscle twitching first at the shot’s sound, and who did, upon being struck, something like a scissor kick as he leaped in the air, as if the momentary separation from the planet allowed the bullet’s force to pass through him. The cop in front of him, who, even with bullets flying, pinched the brim of his hat with both hands so that it would not fall off. And there was a roughhouse quality that approximated care as the agents formed a testudo around the shooter and hustled to a nearby police car. Which was to say that every time they showed the event, I realized that in several seconds so many things occurred you could spend a lifetime trying to understand just how everything converges on the now. And I reflected that men like John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman, and this unnamed shooter were entirely committed to the role they’d decided to play. It was the unspoken aspect of what Elliott had observed in Gramercy Park.

I’m going to give you the name of this, uh, man that has been reported to us as the assailant, simply because everyone else has been reporting his name. He is John W. Hinckley Jr. That is the report we have. John W. Hinckley Jr. And it is understood that he is from Evergreen, Colorado…

Without a shred of self-consciousness, with no space between the mask and your face, you enter history.

Take Two

By early April, a warmer sun shone through thin scudding clouds, the wind still stung with some of winter’s lingering sharpness, but opening day at Yankee Stadium touched the low seventies.Eyewitness Newsweatherman Storm Field said the unseasonable temperatures would continue, and when it did rain, dead earthworms appeared in the concrete’s cracks and the flowers planted on the crossing islands bloomed. It was a Friday, and my audition that afternoon was at a movie set, on location, at an East Side town house, on Ninety-Second Street between Fifth and Madison—a reading, Brent had explained, for the director himself, “for Alan Hornbeam,” he said to me over the phone, after Miss Abbasi brought me the note in American government to call my agent. My parents went to see all his movies as soon as they came out. Mom was an especially big fan. “He specifically asked for you,” Brent said. I’d never heard him sound so excited. He explained that Hornbeam had a stable of actors he worked with in movie after movie. “You could grow up with him, Griff. You would bemade.” Apparently, at the very beginning of production, the teen actor in the featured role had a family emergency that forced him to suddenly quit the production. There was a scramble to replace him. It was a tremendous opportunity, Brent said. “It’s a two-week shoot,” he added. “Maybe three. Knock his socks off.” Normally,I’d have given this opportunity little thought, but ever since Oren had mentioned that my best way out of show business was through success, I thought I might bring just a tad more intentionality to this audition than usual. Plus I’d just seen Jodie Foster interviewed at Yale about her relationship with John Hinckley Jr., about the love letters he’d written her, especially the one before going to shoot Reagan: “I am doing all of this for your sake! By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me.” She had no idea who he was, but I was struck that she had a normal life now, that she was a regular college freshman. Ignoring the fact, of course, that her stalker had tried to kill the president to impress her.

There was a pair of trailers outside the town house where they were shooting the film, the windows of which were covered with blue density gels. Pedestrians slowed or joined the onlookers at the shoot’s blocked-off perimeter, straining behind the sawhorses that readPolice Line Do Not Cross. The location crew behind these stood with the indifference of zoo animals, accustomed as they were to being watched. I made my way through the crowd to the gofer, who greeted me and checked my name off a clipboard. People eyed me like I was someone important, and it took all my self-control not to turn to look at them like my father might and nod as I was welcomed into the empyrean. The gofer pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and said, “I’ve got Griffin Hurt here to see Alan.” He got clearance and bid me to follow him. A pair of thick black cables ran up the building’s steps, into the entryway, and through the foyer, whose diamond-checkered black-and-white marble floor was covered with plastic, up the stairs to a second-story living room. As on every movie set, this room was suffused with the same combination of bustle and idleness as an operating theater; a muffled quiet, library-like but hectic; the stuffiness of bodies and equipment and tech crammed into the space: the low hum of power draw and the heat coming off the soundboard and the monitors, and the klieg lights, whose glare was unforgiving, set up for a shot framing the sofa and love seat. The two cables ran toward this tableau and behind a wingback chair, in which Hornbeam was seated, so that by an accidental trick of perspective, and because of his diminutive size, it was as if they were the impossibly long feeding tentacles of a giant squid.

Hornbeam stood to greet me, although when he did, he was still shorter than I was. There were people all around us, camera crew and soundmen, the gaffer and the boom operator, and while they were not entirely unaware of our presence, they were at the same time quietly busy and preoccupied. They spoke in low tones, and their inattention conferred upon Hornbeam and me a sort of invisibility that helped tamp down any self-consciousness I might feel or nerves I might have otherwise suffered. Only the makeup gave away the fact that Hornbeam was in costume: he wore a pair of worn-out sneakers, khaki pants, and a patterned button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His tortoiseshell glasses were so large they seemed more prop than corrective. He bid me sit, and when he sat, he placed his elbows on the armrests and folded his hands together. Hornbeam’s nose was steeply humped at its bridge, his thinning hair was hippieish in length but wisped at the temples and had mostly fallen out up top. His wrists and forearms were slight; his palm, when I shook it, was slightly damp. He was an actor too, known for his antic persona; he starred in most of his pictures, but in what seemed to me an intentional contrast to this—as if Hornbeam the comedian were impersonating Hornbeam the director. He spoke so softly and seriously, even after we moved past formalities, that I had to lean forward to hear him.

“I very much liked your work inThe Talon Effect,” Hornbeam said. “Especially that scene at the dinner table, with the entire family, where your father is telling you and your older sister how the Senate will be in session through most of the spring and he’ll be stuck up in Washington for a long time. Do you remember this?”

I said I did.

“And your sister just blows up at him,” Hornbeam continued. “She lays into him about how he never comes to anything of hers—not her performances or sports, that he’s never around. And your mother tries to referee. To explain to your sister how busy he is. And to your father how much you both miss him. Though it’s clear when she’s saying all this that she misses him and resents him too. And you watch all of this just”—Hornbeam raised his hand and made a C with his fingers—“clutching your glass of milk. It’s making you that upset. And then your sister storms off, and you and your mother and father watch her go. And whenyour parents’ eyes are on you, you’re framed in close-up and you take this big drink of milk. You chug the whole thing and then put down your glass. And your line is something throwaway, like ‘May I be excused?’ But the milk’s left this thick mustache on your lips. Because you’re still just a boy. You don’t understand all this pain. Youlovethese people. And I was wondering: Were you given direction to do that?”

I had never analyzed the scene so carefully, had never thought about it this way, though I did recall attending the premiere with my family and how Dad leaned toward me after the scene concluded to whisper, “Now that, my son, isacting.” In response to Hornbeam’s question, I told the truth. “It felt right to give myself the mustache on the first take. After that, Mr. Schatzberg told me to do it every time.”

A smile flickered across Hornbeam’s mouth, and then he indicated the several pages we’d be reading on the coffee table. “I’ll give you some background for this scene,” he said. “The film’s about an actor-director named Konig. Your father. Me. You’re Bernie, his only child. Your mother has recently divorced Konig after discovering he had an affair with the star of his previous picture. We’re talking big New York scandal here, Page Six, the works. Meanwhile, you and your father have never really gotten to know each other. He does a film almost every year and as often as not only sees you on a set like this. In fact, this scene you’re about to read takes place in this living room, which isn’t your family’s living room but a living room on one of Konig’s movie sets. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

After I scanned the pages a couple of times, Hornbeam asked, “Ready?” I nodded, and speaking his lines from memory, he became his famous, high-strung self.

Konig

It’s not that I feel like I should apologize to you about how I treated your mother. Although she’s the only woman in human history who after asking me to—I don’t know—pass her the salt, made me want to say I was sorry for withholding affection.

Bernie

Dad—

Konig

Even the night I impregnated her with you I apologized. Which if you’re wondering how I know the date of your conception, it’s because that was the only time we’d made whoopee all year. Which is another thing I probably shouldn’t be sharing.

Bernie

Mom doesn’t—

Konig

You know my therapist says that if I shared less with the people I loved, my relationships with them would be healthier. Which is a paradox, when you think about it.

Bernie

She doesn’t blame you for what you did. She says you’re a serial monogamist who suffers from a Madonna-whore complex and the signs were in your films even before you met. She just ignored them because she loved you.