They kept pushing for me to have a drink, and finally the people pleaser in me took over and I agreed to let one of the crew get me one. I asked for an amaretto, the only thing I drank. It tastes like awful cough syrup—which is redundant—but at least it would be a familiar taste. I didn’t have a cough or sore throat, I rationalized, but maybe I could prevent one from coming on. One of the special effects crew cheered at my acquiescence.
“I don’t know how anyone can drink alcohol, just based on the taste,” I said. “It’s like rust. I’ve seen people swirl wine in their mouths with delight and it baffles me.”
“Me, too, luv,” one of the crew replied. “I’m in it for the effect is all—screw the taste.”
“Yeah, but when I was young, it looked so great to me—people standing around in clusters, drinks in hand, heads thrown back in wild laughter—and I just couldn’t wait for that to happen to me. I couldn’t wait to learn the secret of alcohol that unleashes all that gaiety from deep within. But it was a lie, a horrible, horrible lie, and someone is someday going to have to pay for it.”
“Look here, my darling,” said the crew member who’d returned from the bar. “No one is going to have to pay for this—it’s courtesy of George Lucas.”
I looked at the glass he handed me, but instead of finding amaretto, I discovered a glass of what I assumed was wine. I frowned.
“Sorry, luvvie, they didn’t have your fancy sweet drink,” the crew member said. “But this should do what amaretto does and one better.”
Why did I drink it? Maybe to show them how bad an idea alcohol was for me. But whatever the reason, the bottom line is that I drank. My face went into a tight-fisted grimace after my first swig of the foul stuff. And another swig, and another after that. I couldn’t focus on the taste for very long, because there I was laughing, laughing like those adults I watched at my mother’s parties when I was a kid.
“Remember that first week when we did the swing across?” I said.
“What’s a swing across, mate?”
“I’m telling you! I’m trying to tell you! It was when Mark and I swung on a rope from that platform thing to the other side! You know! You know what I mean!”
They did. Not that the crew cared about my story, they only cared that I continued to drink, which I did. They laughed at whatever I said, and I appreciated their laughter, and so continued down that same path until the lines of that path became increasingly blurry and whether it was or wasn’t a path at all mattered less. Everything mattered less. What mattered most was that we continued laughing and had a good time.
? ? ?
i don’t know when I became aware that quite a few members of the crew were organizing a kind of joke abduction of me. I don’t know this because quite a lot of time has transpired between George’s surprise party forty years ago and now.
It was a jovial sort of a plan. To get me out of the party and take me away to wherever movie crews take young actresses when they want to establish that the actress belongs to them, at least for the moment, and not to any cast members or production folk. Certainly it wasn’t a serious thing. What made it look serious was how big the men tended to be in some of the various factions.
At some point I realized my head was hurting. Not hurting exactly, it just felt different than it usually did, which I mentioned.
“You need to get some air,” one of the crew said.
“Isn’t there air in here?” I said. “What have I been breathing then?”
“Hey,” a new voice called out as I was being steered toward an available door by a few of the friendlier sparks. The sparks were sparking to me, weren’t they? We were just about to pass through the door when I heard that voice again. An American one, not British. A Yankee voice. “Where are you taking her?”
“Nowhere, man, the lady just wants to get a little air is all.”
“Pardon me, but the lady doesn’t seem to be very aware of what she wants.” Then I knew who it was. Harrison! My costar! What was he saying? I didn’t know what I wanted? That might have been true, but when did he become the expert on what I did or didn’t want?
“Hey, Harrison!” I greeted him as he found his way to my circle. “Where’ve you been?”
I have no idea what these rowdy Brits thought they were going to do with me. I have to believe not much, but they were going to make a lot of noise while they didn’t do it. And Harrison was suddenly making a great show of saving me from what I can only guess at. (But why bother?) The crew pulled, Harrison pushed back, I tried to stay in focus.
But there was also an element of danger. Not with a capital “D” but the word in whatever form applies due to the roughhousing that seemed to rule the day, or the roost, or the world. What began as a kind of pretend stage-fight tug-of-war transformed into a more earnest battle for a woman’s—what is the word?—maidenhood. No! Virtue! A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was under way and I was unclear how it would all turn out. But vaguely interested, and that’s a fact.
Once I could wrap what remained of my mind around who was involved in this tug-of-war, I gradually came to realize who it was that I wanted to win: my costar, the smuggler, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head, and the gun in his belt—not now, just when in character, but still . . . I felt the gun was implied and so must’ve the crew, because after a mad scuffle, which left Harrison limping, Mr. Ford threw my virtue and me into the backseat of his studio car and commanded the driver to “Go! GO!” We went, followed on foot for the briefest but boldest of times by the film set crew—the finest of men.
? ? ?
about halfway to London from Elstree, I heard the honking of a horn. That is, I eventually realized that’s what the persistent noise was. I pushed Harrison’s shoulder back. “What’s that?” I asked, panicked. “Is someone honking?”
“Shit,” mumbled Harrison, squinting out the back car window over my head. “It’s Mark and Peter.”
“Oh my God.” I started to sit up, but he stopped me with his hand and voice.
“Fix your hair.”
My hair, my hair, my hair—it was always my hair with this movie, on-screen or off. I stayed slunk down while I did my unlevel best to straighten my hair and then slowly rose, afraid of who I’d find out the window, and would they be armed? Armed with a camera and shocked face? Or . . . ?
“Just act normal,” Harrison suggested. Realizing that acting normal would take hours and a team of horses, I grinned and waved at the two of them through the window, the closest I could get to normal without assistance, additional encouragement, and a hat. “They were sort of behind us so they couldn’t have seen anything.”
While I watched, a blue car caught up with us on our right. One of the crew, Peter Kohn, was driving the car, with a beautiful girl to the left of him in the passenger seat, the actress Koo Stark. Mark was in the backseat, leaning all the way forward into the front seat between Peter and the girl. He waved happily and smiled. I waved back and showed them my upper teeth.
I watched Harrison roll down his window of the car. This was prehistoric England; windows were lowered manually, phones had to be dialed, and everything was closed on Sunday by eleven o’clock at night. And when I say “everything,” I mean everything. It amazed me.
Plus they didn’t sell corn bread, most breakfast cereals, pancake mix, pinto beans, or regular bacon! That was my staple diet! How did people survive? There were tons of ordinary American products that couldn’t be purchased in the UK. Some of them could be found at Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly. I knew all of this from having already lived in London for the last few years. The Americans who made up our cast (Mark and Harrison) and crew (George and Gary et al.) on Star Wars were just finding it out.
One of those Americans was the previously mentioned Peter Kohn, who usually wore a knit hat and long dark blue or maroon sweaters. Exactly what services he provided to Star Wars I wasn’t exactly sure. He didn’t seem to be there in any sort of normal official capacity, not that I would really know what a normal official capacity looked like, but here we were, Peter, Koo Stark, and the stars of the movie, all on our way to the same restaurant.