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She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.
“Well, I don’t think the studio would see that as appropriate,” she said.
“Do you know who June Lincoln was?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“David Gambol? Jacob Klein?”
She shook her head once more, a little impatiently. Then she gave me a typed list of things she felt needed fixing, which amounted to pretty much everything. The list was TO: me and a number of other people, whose names I
didn’t recognize, and it was FROM: Donna Leary.
I said, Thank you, Donna, and went back to the hotel.
I was gloomy for a day. And then I thought of a way to redo the treatment that would, I thought, deal with all of Donna’s list of complaints.
Another day’s thinking, a few days’ writing, and I faxed the third treatment off to the studio.
Pious Dundas brought his scrapbook over for me to look at, once he felt certain that I was genuinely interested in June Lincoln—named, I discovered, after the month and the president, born Ruth Baumgarten in 1903. It was a leatherbound old scrapbook, the size and weight of a family Bible.
She was twenty-four when she died.
“I wish you could’ve seen her,” said Pious Dundas. “I wish some of her films had survived. She was so big. She was the greatest star of all of them.”
“Was she a good actress?”
He shook his head decisively. “Nope.”
“Was she a great beauty? If she was, I just don’t see it.”
He shook his head again. “The camera liked her, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t it. Back row of the chorus had a dozen girls prettier’n her.”
“Then what was it?”
“She was a star.” He shrugged. “That’s what it means to be a star.”
I turned the pages: cuttings, reviewing films I’d never heard of—films for which the only negatives and prints had long ago been lost, mislaid, or destroyed by the fire department, nitrate negatives being a notorious fire hazard; other cuttings from film magazines: June Lincoln at play, June Lincoln at rest, June Lincoln on the set of The Pawnbroker’s Shirt, June Lincoln wearing a huge fur coat—which somehow dated the photograph more than the strange bobbed hair or the ubiquitous cigarettes.
“Did you love her?”
He shook his head. “Not like you would love a woman…” he said.
There was a pause. He reached down and turned the pages.
“And my wife would have killed me if she’d heard me say this…”
Another pause.
“But yeah. Skinny dead white woman. I suppose I loved her.” He closed the book.
“But she’s not dead to you, is she?”
He shook his head. Then he went away. But he left me the book to look at.
The secret of the illusion of “The Artist’s Dream” was this: It was done by carrying the girl in, holding tight on to the back of the canvas. The canvas was supported by hidden wires, so, while the artist casually, easily, carried in the canvas and placed it on the easel, he was also carrying in the girl. The painting of the girl on the easel was arranged like a roller blind, and it rolled up or down.
“The Enchanted Casement,” on the other hand, was, literally, done with mirrors: an angled mirror which reflected the faces of people standing out of sight in the wings.
