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The Big Sleep: 1945
From the beginning, when Hollywood needed someone to write like a man, Brackett was the woman they called. It started with Howard Hawks when the Big War was still running. He had ol’ Bill Faulkner scribbling away on a script for The Big Sleep, and all Bill could do was talk about the stains of sin and the crimes of history. So Howard phoned Leigh’s agent, balked when he found that Leigh was a woman’s name, but sent for her anyway.
She showed up with her brown curls bouncing under a beret. So young then. She looked nice. She looked very nice indeed. The soft wool of her dress was gathered and bloused, so that her full sharp curves were hinted at rather than seen, and the way the whole thing was cut made her look taller and slimmer. Howard took one glance and said, “Jesus, what are you? I was expecting a truck driver of a broad. You look like a God damn Howard Chandler Christie painting.”
Maybe Brackett was a tangle of nerves inside, but she’d be damned if that came out. “Mister,” she said, eyes locked on Hawks’. “We both know you didn’t hire me to play tennis.”
Howard smiled. “Well, at least you can spar.” He ushered her down to Faulkner’s bungalow. Bill was a contract writer. A 9:30 to 5:30 guy. The most important writing he did every day was his name on the time card coming and going.
Howard barged in without knocking. Bill’s secretary, a wavy-haired beauty in wide-legged trousers and monochrome flats, popped out of her chair. Loose papers scattered about her feet. She held out her hand to greet Howard and Leigh. The ink stain on her right middle finger glistened in the Hollywood light pouring in from the doorway.
“Meta Carpenter,” Howard said, with a nod to the secretary. “Used to work for me. Now I can’t pull her out of Bill’s bungalow.”
Leigh shook Meta’s ink-stained hand.
Meta said, “Charmed.”
Bill remained seated on a Baltimore fancy side chair. He wore a tweed coat pockmarked with cigarette burns, ashy slacks, and a bow tie tilted to tickle the left side of his chin waddle. He played something intricate on a banjolele. It sounded gothic and classical, but also somehow contemporary and new. Leigh felt yanked out of her body and into the universe of Faulkner’s song. It was all off. She’d built enough worlds to know. The composition may be brilliant, but the tempo wavered out of time signatures and the floating bridge had floated upwards, sabotaging the little instrument’s intonation.
Meta rescued Leigh from her trance. “The little banjo is on loan from Ray Chandler.”
“It’s lovely,” Brackett said, less about the instrument than about the way the secretary’s aristocratic twang breezed into the song.
Hawks had no time for any of this. He snapped, “Bill!”
Faulkner struggled to lift his gaze from the weight of his heavy eyelids. He seemed to live behind a wall eight feet thick. “Howard,” he said, slow and soft, as if the name had too few syllables so he’d necessarily drag each one through its own airburst.
“Put down that God damn little toy and meet your new co-writer, Leigh Brackett.”
Leigh stepped forward to greet Faulkner. Bill leaned the banjolele against a tin trash can. He grabbed a copy of Chandler’s The Big Sleep and flipped to the middle page. “Should you be agreeable to a simplified collaboration of this endeavor, I propose we divide our labors equally. I’ll bay the front half of this bear while you come around and assault from the rear.”
Leigh turned to Hawks for a translation. “He’ll write the first half; I’ll take care of the second?”
Faulkner blocked Hawks’ reply by grabbing both halves of the cheap paperback and struggling to tear it down the spine. The glue held strong and the pages, while fluttering like butterflies gathered in a net, refused to rip. Faulkner grunted and pulled, but proved no match for the pulp. Leigh wondered if everyone was embarrassed, or just her.
Howard barked, “Enough of this nonsense. Meta, tell Leigh what she’ll write. Let’s get this show on the road.”
It took eight days to write the script. Bill went on a bender for three of them. Meta signed his time cards for him. Leigh worked in the adjacent bungalow, on contract from Howard and not from the studio. As long as pages were typed, Howard didn’t bother with hours. Late mornings and long lunches flew just fine. Leigh’s only restriction was the ten o’clock curfew her mother insisted on. Brackett could’ve written it all at home, and faster, but for her aunt constantly interrupting, asking time and again why Leigh didn’t write something nice, something Ladies Home Journal would buy. It was worse than the screams from Bill and Meta in the bungalow next door. At least Meta could stand on her own, give Bill as bad as she got, happy to scream, “Your wife,” whenever something needed breaking.
On the eighth day, Bill stopped by Brackett’s bungalow for tea. Meta stayed behind to type up pages from an opening scene between Philip Marlowe and General Sternwood. Faulkner brought his banjolele along. Leigh took it from him with all the gentleness of an Army doctor extracting a Mauser slug from a GI’s thigh. She strummed a tune, simple and sweet and with enough empty spaces between notes for her to slide the floating bridge into place and tighten the slack skin. When the sound was right, she handed it back to Bill, knowing his ear would never know the difference.
Star Wars II: 1978
Lucas peered up at the screen. The light from a gunfight in an intergalactic saloon splattered across his face. Something about his fascination with his own film was totally inhuman. His bright, intent eyes showed a curious mixture of intelligence and what could be madness.
Leigh sat next to him and finger-picked the icy ukulele. She played along to the score of the film. This was her favorite part. The intergalactic saloon band knew only one song. The repetition of it left light years of space for her to improvise in. Brackett had sat in this screening room with this film so many times that the score had taken residence inside the twisted channels of her ear. Her ukulele improvisations had become the newest and freshest part of the film.
And here it was, Leigh would think when she wasn’t thinking about the sequel. Here was her art in a nutshell. The form was rigid, intractable, beyond her control. But what she could do in those tiny pockets of silence between notes, it was Big. Even if only she heard it.
George would tap his foot along with her ukulele. He’d never address it directly. She’d doctored enough scripts, done enough contract writing to know how to be invisible, how to contribute things that seemed to grow in place rather than be created by someone else. So when George heard the ukulele, Leigh was sure he heard it as something that he’d thought of first, that had been there all along.
And George was a sweet kid. At the beginning of the movie, when the whiny hero was still in his desert home, George had asked, “Recognize this place?”
“Sure,” Leigh said. She’d been to Arizona, driven over from Lancaster. Her and Ed passed through this very patch of dunes on the way to Tucson for one of those Hawks movies. Rio Bravo maybe. Or, no. El Dorado.
“It’s your Mars,” George said. “Exactly how I pictured it when I read your stuff in Planet Stories as a kid.”
George’s hand gripped tightly around the arm of the theater chair. Leigh patted his wrist, felt the tendons tighten under her fingers. “It’s perfect,” she said.
But it was not perfect. None of it was perfect. She could feel the sickness thicker in her blood with every day in the screening room. Most times, when the ukulele got too cold and the film seemed to stretch across eons, she could up and leave. Get back to writing, which was what she was being paid to do, anyway. Lucas kept insisting she watch the movie. She couldn’t make it through. Even with George right next to her in this cozy screening room.
Silent as cats except for the gentle rattle and whisper of tiny pills in a plastic bottle, Leigh took some of the medicine the doctor prescribed to her. The pills wouldn’t