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George was now perched at the front of his seat, his arms wrapped around the seatback in front of him, his knees nearly touching the carpeted floor. As flashes of a laser battle flickered across his face, she pictured him as an ancient, a trainer of old screenwriters and young Jedi knights alike. She’d call him Minch. Luke could carry all of her frustrations with Minch’s Force. Artoo could be her cancer, beeping and whirring as a constant reminder that he wasn’t happy with any of this.
From another room, Lucas’s secretary called the boss away. George, legs asleep, wobbled out of the screening room.
Brackett settled back into her chair. Her last thought before drifting off to sleep was her first rule of writing: the guy who signs the final check has the final say.
El Dorado: 1965
Howard and Leigh were back in Tucson. The wintertime desert felt worlds away from the Ohio ranch where Leigh and Ed did their writing in adjoining studies, Mars to the Venus of her marital home. The distance apart was mitigated by the script she’d written for El Dorado. It was her finest work yet. It wasn’t tragic, but it was one of those things where John Wayne dies at the end. Hawks said he loved it. The studio loved it. Wayne loved it. “All it needs,” Howard said, “is a little polish on it.”
He flew Leigh and Ed out to Los Angeles for this polish. Ed took up residency in their home in Lancaster. Leigh followed Howard from LA to southern Utah to Tucson. “A little polish on it,” Leigh knew, could mean anything from rewriting damn near the whole thing to just rewording dialogue enough to make a man out of a Mitchum or Wayne. She brought along her traveling typewriter. Lightweight, speedy keys, always at the ready.
Good thing, too, because “a little polish on it” this time meant taking the finest thing she’d written and turning it into a remake of Rio Bravo, which she’d written already.
The waning sun streaked the mesas a blood orange on the outskirts of Tucson. Gaffers and grips rolled cords and folded screens. Camera men packed their lenses and stored the dailies. Robert Mitchum headed off for the nearest bar, looking like nothing more than a tin badge pinned to a drunk. John Wayne loitered around the director and the writer, waiting to petition for an extra line or an extra one after that. Howard said, “I need some new lines.”
Leigh felt it coming like a sap to the back of the neck. “I wrote you new lines,” she said. “What you want is some old ones.”
Howard swatted Leigh’s words away like so much desert dust gathered into the fibers of his slacks. “It’s where the girl comes into town…”
“Which girl?” Leigh asked. “Angie Dickinson?”
“Sure. Angie. Whatever the hell her name is,” Howard said.
Duke interjected. “Angie’s not in this movie. The girl has to be Charlene or Michele.”
“Charlene. Michele. Angie. What’s the difference? The girl comes in on a stage and blah blah blah. You get it Leigh?”
“I get it.” The desert seemed to have drifted into Brackett’s mouth. Grains of sand ground into her back molars. “I wrote the damn scene eight years ago.”
Duke looked down at Leigh from a perch that felt about eight feet above her. “That’s right,” he said. “If it was good once, it’ll be just as good again.”
Leigh stomped off to her trailer, lines for Angie or Charlene or Michele racing through her head. She typed with a view of the sunset spectacular out her window. She wrote until the dark shut down.
Star Wars II: 1978
Leigh dropped off the first draft of the sequel with Lucas. George wore no mask between himself and his excitement. If he’d had a tail, he would’ve wagged it. “I can’t wait,” he said, short of breath like even the words took him away from the reading he wanted to do. “I’m going to read this right now.” His eyes didn’t rise from the page to address Brackett. She watched his glance dart across the words. This must have been what a young George looked like when his new issue of Super Science Stories arrived in his Modesto mailbox, when he raced inside and tucked himself into his father’s oversized armchair and read “The Citadel of Lost Ships.” Leigh gave herself a few moments to indulge in this fantasy, to think of all the boys and men so excited to swallow the pulp that she and Ed had been grinding out for most of the middle of this century. When the moments passed, she remembered the most important thing.
“Um, George, honey,” she said. “There is the matter of my check.”
Brackett’s words ripped Lucas from his ice planet and back to this dark mahogany office. He gulped air against the bends. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, extracting his ukulele. A paycheck was woven into the strings. “I know you played it to help yourself write,” he said. “Take it. Take it and the money. It was always too cold for me, anyway.”
Leigh stuffed the check into her purse. The check itself was the size of all checks. The number on it was large enough to take care of her for the rest of her life, a span of time she knew couldn’t be more than a few weeks. She cradled the ukulele in her arms. It was preternaturally cold as it had always been. George’s mind jumped into hyperspace. He landed on the ice planet before Leigh could say goodbye.
She headed down the hallway. Lights had been extinguished. Night awaited outside.
Leigh knew she’d written her final work. It was better than the Star Wars that had come before it. Brackett—whose heroines had never simpered or fainted, melted or whimpered—had taken a lot of the princess out of Leia. She’d given the character some of the old verve Brackett had given Bacall back in the war years. Maybe that dancer’s daughter could do something with those lines. She’d given Han Solo a father who could teach him how to be a man. She made Luke, the whiny little blond kid, into a real hero, one who could best Darth Vader in hand-to-hand combat at the end. And the scenes with Minch were the best. Leigh was certain George would love them.
Of course, she also knew that some younger version of a Brackett would come along and put a polish on her screenplay. There was no telling how much of a polish, what would get shined up and what would get shined off. She only knew polishing would occur.
Brackett held the cold ukulele close to her breast, chilling the metastasized blood inside. “I’ll be there soon, Ed,” she said, pushing the studio door open.
She stepped into the starlight.
Mad Nights of Springtime
In the lettuce fields of postwar America with a cold Pacific fog drifting over the Santa Clara River valley just north of Los Angeles, a young Jack Kerouac wandered into the campsite of itinerant Filipino farmhands. He was not even thirty; not yet on the verge of a fame that would come to destroy him. The farmhands strummed their Catholic hymns on a ukulele. Little Jack, Ti Jean as his blesséd old French Canadian mother called him, felt the air vibrated by song and strings and experienced the satori to carry him into the great nothing. It was beginning and end.
As with any great religious observance, the farmhands kept wine nearby. An old, thin man waved Jack in. The old man’s giant hands were all out of proportion for the bony arms they dangled at the end of. Those hands—too big for picking strawberries or blueberries or any berries but just the right size to cradle a cabbage in his palm—welcomed Jack and pointed to a seat where Jack sat and accepted the circling bottle of wine and sang along. Could they be singing in English? Yes, Jack. It’s “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” with thick pidgin accent. This song so much like the songs of Lowell in that tender childhood, father still alive, brother still alive, everyone alive and in love with this beautiful world that postwar America could now only see as prewar America. Prewar America couldn’t have known they were pre-anything. Nor could the young rootless Jack, wandering on the road that would become On the Road, know he was pre-Kerouac.
So Jack