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"The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty."
"I think you're beautiful."
"I think you're crazy."
We laughed, but she wasn't kidding.
"Is it true," I asked her, "that beautiful women lead
tragic lives?" It was what I had concluded from my Perfect Woman, with her many bodies. Perhaps not quite tragic, but difficult. Unenviable. Painful.
She considered that. "If they think their beauty is them," she said, "they're asking for an empty life. When everything depends on looks, you get lost gazing in mirrors and you never find yourself."
"You seem to have found yourself."
"Whatever I've found, it's not by being beautiful."
"Tell me."
She did, and I listened, startled turning astonished. The Leslie she found hadn't been on film, but in the peace movement, in the speakers' bureau she formed and ran. The real Leslie Parrish made speeches, fought political campaigns, struggled against an American government bent on war in Viet Nam.
While I flew Air Force fighter-planes, she was coordinating West Coast peace-marches.
For daring to oppose the institution of war, she was tear-gassed by the law, attacked by right-wing gangs. She went on afterwards, organizing ever-larger rallies, producing massive fund-raisers.
She had helped elect congresspeople, senators and the new mayor of Los Angeles. She had been a delegate to presidential conventions.
Cofounder of KVST-TV, a Los Angeles television station with special powers built in for the downtrodden minorities of the city, she had taken over as president when the station was in trouble, deep in debt and not a day's patience left among the creditors. Station bills she paid sometimes with money from her film work, and the station survived, it began to prosper. People watched, wrote reviews nationwide
about the noble experiment. With success came the power struggle. She was called a racist rich-person; she was fired by the downtrodden. KVST went off the air the day she left, and it never went on again. To this day, she told me, she couldn't see the blank screen on Channel 68 without pain.
Mary Moviestar paid the way for Leslie Parrish. Devout righter-of-wrongs and changer-of-worlds, Leslie had walked alone into late-night political meetings in parts of the city that I didn't have the courage to fly over at noon. She stood in picket lines for the farm workers, marched for them, raised money for them. She had thrown herself, a nonviolent resister, into some of the most violent battles of modern America.
&nbs
p; Yet she refused to play nude-scenes in motion pictures. "I wouldn't sit around my living room naked with my friends on a Sunday afternoon. Why should I do it with a bunch of strangers on a movie set? For me, doing something so unnatural for pay would have been prostitution."
When every role in films had its nude-scene, she sank her movie career, switched to television.
I listened to her as though the innocent fawn I touched on a meadow had grown up in the firestorms of hell.
"There was a march, one time, in Torrance, a peace march," she said. "The planning was done, we had our permits. A few days before, we were warned that the right-wing crazies were going to shoot one of our leaders if we dared to march there. It was too late to cancel. ..."
"It's not too late to cancel!" I said. "Don't do it!"
"Too many people already coming, too short notice. We couldn't reach them all at the last minute. If just a few showed up alone against crazies, that would be murder, wouldn't it? So we called the newspapers and the television
networks, we said come on out and watch us get killed in Torrance! Then we marched; we linked arms with the man they said they'd shoot; we surrounded him and marched. They'd have had to kill everybody, to get him."
"You ... did they shoot?"
"No. Killing us on-camera wasn't part of their plan, I guess." She sighed, remembering. "Those were the bad old days, weren't they?"
I couldn't think what to say. That moment, standing in the movie-line, I had my arm around a rare person in my life: a human being whom I totally admired.
I the retreater was struck dumb with the contrast between us. If others wish to fight and die in wars or in protesting wars, I had decided, that's their freedom. The only world that matters to me is the world of the individual, the world each of us creates to be our own. Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.
She's so different from me, why this awe-full respect for her?
