Kathleen Moore

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• The face on the idolOn the night of the earthquake, burst water mains flood the studio's back lot. She and a neighbour drift past on the head of a prop idol that has come loose from a set of Burma. Stahr, standing four feet away when she slides down off it, sees the face of his dead wife. The two women explain that they followed a truck in through a gate, and a policeman puts them off the lot.
• Hard to findShe has no telephone. The policeman remembers nothing; the technician who fished the women out remembers a name, Smith, which turns out to be wrong. Stahr has his office ring every Smith who took a new telephone in Los Angeles that month. What he finally reaches is the other woman, who lives up the same road.
• How she talks to himShe is direct in a way nobody at the studio is, and it is what he cannot get past. 'When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right,' she says in the middle of a dance, and then leaves the ball. A week later, when he tries on the telephone to sound wounded, she laughs at him until he gives it up.
• Her father's book'My father was shot by the Black-and-Tans in twenty-two when I was a child.' He had written a book called Last Blessing, which still brings her ten shillings a year, and she asks Stahr to buy it for the movies. He tells her he does not read.
• The years she was hungryOn the day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling between them to eat on, sixpence each, and the stepmother watched her eat it. Friends in Ireland sent butter. There was a soup kitchen, and an uncle who made advances and then paid her fifty pounds for not telling his wife. Work was almost impossible for a woman in her position to get: 'I sold cars. Once I sold a car.'
• She lived with a king'You see, I ran away from a king.' Not the King of England — a king without a job, of whom she says there were several in London. He was married, learned and a heavy drinker. He set her schedules, sent her to courses at the Sorbonne and round museums so that she would eventually be able to read Spengler, and she left before they got to Spengler. 'It was just in place of babies.'
• The SundayHe drives her up the coast to the house he is building on a point past Malibu, which has no roof on it yet. 'Perhaps it's for me,' she says, when he tells her he does not know why he is building it. A telephone rings in the tool shed and it is Hollywood, calling about an orang-utan that can say hello. They eat at a drug-store counter because she asks to, and that night they walk barefoot through the grunion, the little fish that come in with the tide on a schedule printed in the newspaper.
• The letter she tries to take backShe had written to him before that afternoon, meaning to hand it over when they said goodbye. Instead it falls out of the car, and she goes through the seat cushions in the dark without telling him what she has lost. His butler finds it and brings it in. Stahr, rather proud of not opening it, leaves it beside a pile of scripts until three in the morning.