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she had long ago lost, a defeat which the making of the movie now seemed to confirm and memorialize for all time. “Carolyn was a woman to me,” Lu Anne pleaded for my sympathy. “What chance did I have? I was sixteen, and she was in her twenties. Carolyn’s making herself look good in this movie. She portrays herself as this beautiful and sophisticated woman, this siren, that two brilliant and experienced men fell madly in love with. That’s not the way it was at all. Carolyn had merely got herself pregnant.”

    She went after Carolyn in a way that I would learn was not characteristic of her. Lu Anne was usually the most forgiving of people. She was also known for being gracious. It may have been her current situation, being sick and helpless in a hospital bed while Carolyn romped with movie stars and ate at glamorous five-star restaurants down in Hollywood. Lu Anne was almost penniless at the time, though I didn’t know it then. It may also have been, as her daughter later pointed out to me, the bad temper that sometimes accompanied Lu Anne’s coming down off her many medications.
    â€œCarolyn and Neal weren’t making it together,” Lu Anne said. “Only a short time after they got married, the sex had stopped. It was that simple. That’s why he was so desperate to get me back.”
    We talked for a while more, until she started to tire. I was trying to get as much information as I could from her, but this wasn’t the sort of full interview I had wanted. She didn’t know when she would be out of the hospital, and I didn’t have the money to stay in San Francisco much longer. I figured whatever I got from her that day was all I was going to get. She told me I’d have to go—she needed her rest.
    â€œWhen you come back, I’ll buy you lunch,” she told me, batting her eyelashes at me. I couldn’t believe it. She was flirting with me—mildly, it’s true, but still flirting. “Then we can sit in the park and hold hands.”
    I was twenty years younger than she, but completely smitten. She was beautiful, she was clearly wounded, and she was unbelievably charming.
    â€œThen we’ll have something to look forward to,” I said. I must have looked like a puppy dog in love.
    She told me she needed some candy and a pack of Winstons, and I set off on the run for the commissary. It’s kind of amazing to look back and remember that in the 1970s you could still buy cigarettes
in a hospital—for all I know, they even had a lounge for patients where Lu Anne could have smoked them. In any case, I returned in a jiffy and handed her the Winstons and the three candy bars she’d requested.
    â€œThanks, honey,” she said. I was rewarded by the warm, glowing smile of a well-loved woman. It was clear she was used to attention from men, and she still liked it. Something about her expression reminded me of a purring cat—the visual equivalent of a cat’s purr.
    I extended my hand to her. Still a Midwesterner, I was ready to part with a handshake. But she grabbed my hand with both her good hand and the bandaged one, and gave me a loving squeeze.
    â€œGet well soon,” I said, trying to convey a little burst of healing energy in her direction. I was no longer thinking of my much-sought interview. I just wanted her to be well, to be happy. The fact is, she had charmed the socks off me—no mean feat for a middle-aged woman with no makeup, a bandaged hand, and dressed in a baggy hospital gown. I left the room with her oodles of charisma trailing after me—feeling as if I had just been granted a meeting with Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner.
    Then, the next day, came yet another surprise. I got a call from Lu Anne. She was out of the hospital and staying with an old friend, Joe DeSanti, in Daly City. She wanted to do the full, taped interview I had talked of with her. A day or two later, when she was rested enough, I