Oh, but why be coy or discreet? We had a sleepover—you know, like we made a fort with pillows after we had a really big pillow fight, then we called his mom and got permission for him to stay overnight, but we couldn’t stay up too late, because we had school on Monday, and besides which we were in the school play. All I can remember after he followed me into the apartment and turned on the hallway light was that I meant to show him around my little flat, only now our fumbling was not in a moving vehicle, driven by a knowing spectator. We were once again practicing for our cinematic snog.
The bedroom couldn’t get dark enough; even with the lights off I still wanted to turn the lights out. I didn’t want him to recognize me from the movies. “Hey! Weren’t you in . . . that scene we shot today? Don’t I know you from . . . Cloud City?”
Okay, so now we’d spoken together with our words, we’d bantered together using George’s words—now we were exploring the outer reaches of no speak, of memorizing the bottom of each other’s faces with our mouths. If you’d told me that morning when my bed was being used for other purposes that—well, if I didn’t know Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit, how could I have predicted that the stars of Star Wars would find themselves in bed together?
I don’t believe people are across-the-board confident. If they are . . . well, they’ve misjudged the situation where there’s an arrogant result. Mostly people have those few things they do well and hope those things make up for the other shit.
Why am I telling you this? Partly because with my combination of insecurity and inexperience I was paralyzed. Scared to say anything that might make Harrison leave me in the lurch that had all too recently been Riggs’s apartment. A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. Our skin agreed. We pressed our luck—first his, then mine, then ours—until we had smoothed our way into the thick of it, until nothing else was possible except to get through to each other, in and on through each other, until we eased into the other side.
I looked over at Harrison. He was . . . God, he was just so handsome. No. No, more than that. He looked like he could lead the charge into battle, take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the gluten-free world, all without breaking a sweat. A hero’s face—a few strands of hair fell over his noble, slightly furrowed brow—watching the horizon for danger in the form of incoming indigenous armies, reflective, concerned eyes so deep in thought you could get lost down there and it would take days to fight your way out. But why run? It couldn’t really be a hardship to find yourself lost in such a place with all that wit and ideas safely stored there. Hey, man! Wait a second! Share the wealth here. Give the face to one man and save the mind for another and both would have plenty. But no! This was the ultimate living example of overkill. So how could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? No! Don’t tell me! The fact is that he was! Even if it was for a short while. That was way more than enough. It would eventually get to be exhausting trying to measure up, or keep up. I was a lucky girl—without the self-esteem to feel it, or the wherewithal to enjoy what there was to enjoy of it and then let go. Only to look back on it forty years on with amused, grateful, and all-but-puffy eyes.
Suffice it to say, we survived and then some. Difficult from this distance to know how close our close was, and whether this brand of close had as much to do with the proximity of someone who looked so very much like my space date—he who smirked at me while jumping to light speed (while I required no assistance whatsoever).
Our affable ordeal behind us, Harrison fell asleep and I tried to. God, he really was handsome. I forgave him for not loving me in the way one usually expects—and almost forgave myself for not expecting it. I tried to follow him into slumber land, and when I couldn’t, I breathed with him there in the dark—wondering what he was dreaming and hoping that if I actually managed to fall asleep, in the morning, I would wake up before he did. Maybe I’d be better at talking with him now—less daunted, in character and out.
There are some things that I still consider private. Amazing, isn’t it? You would think, without concentrating too hard, that I consider whatever I said and did up for grabs. Way up where the grabs are groped the most. But sex is private. That might be one reason we do it—for the most part—in the nude. Clothes falling away signals a situation that I’ll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don’t dress it up, don’t expect talk to, either.
So it is with uncharacteristic reservation and scruples that I quash any details, put the kibosh on sharing anything but the most general information or description hereinafter when relating what occurred between Mr. Ford and me on that fateful Friday night in May 1976. This applies also to whatever it was that occurred between Harrison and me on subsequent Fridays at ungodly hours. For that is when we spent our time together, when we had our sleepovers, like good youngsters do. Oh, we spent time together during daylight hours following our time together at night. Such as it was. I think I recall his reading the paper while I . . . while I pretended to do something else.
Privacy questions aside, I can barely recall our time together during our first weekend. I didn’t know how I would live through the five whole days of filming following that first weekend. Those five days on set together went unbearably slowly, with our having to behave toward each other as though the weekend before hadn’t even occurred. Weekdays were off-limits, intimacy-wise. Not that this had ever been expressly stated by either one of us. We simply intuited we would spend our weekdays treating one another as though not only had that first weekend not happened, but all of the ensuing ones hadn’t happened either.
Despite the common use of the phrase “going out with” to describe two people spending time together, Harrison and I didn’t spend a lot of time going out, or wouldn’t.
Instead, we went into each other’s apartments. I remember spending most of our weekends together at my rented domain in Esmond Court, but that could just be where my memory goes when I send it back to the seventies. I know I wanted to spend our time together there and not at his place.
I preferred Harrison staying over at my apartment because—as the borrowed flat of a friend of mine—it was nicer than his. Sorry, but it was. We all received scale for the first film, which amounted to about $500 a week. And while I came from a wealthy family (though of recently reduced circumstances) and could have afforded rent for nice accommodations even if I hadn’t been able to borrow Riggs’s flat, Harrison had a wife and two children at home, so in order to maintain their support, he lived in the most modest housing that the studio could get away with providing him. So when it came down to where we would stay, the choice became fairly obvious soon enough.
Once, on one of the rare occasions when we did have a sleepover at Harrison’s apartment, Mark and his fairly ubiquitous friend Peter dropped by unannounced. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it might have looked odd that I was there. Clearly I hadn’t just dropped by for brunch, as no scones or eggs were in evidence, and we didn’t appear to be running lines. Harrison, after letting Mark in, returned to the table we’d been sitting at, sat down across from me, took my hand, and pronounced solemnly, “We’re engaged.” It was hiding in plain sight, mocking the suggestion that there was anything going on; therefore, it couldn’t be true—a technique I like to use to this day.
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