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  Lil listened attentively and then, after a dramatic pause, she told John, “You’re a very good doctor. Have some candy. Bernie, get him some candy.”

  This offer meant that John had performed exceptionally well, and Bernie fetched and opened a large, flat box of fussy candies with elaborate icing and questionable centers. I was horrified when John actually ate one of these treats, because, as I told him later, once we were alone, “Those were ornamental candies. Lil’s had that same box for over fifty years, because everyone knows that they’re just for show, to prove she’s a good hostess. What did it taste like?”

  “Like a very old eraser.”

  “Look, he’s having a candy,” Lil said, as John manfully swallowed the prehistoric goodie. “But you’re a doctor, isn’t candy bad for you?”

  “Everything’s bad for you,” John replied, jovially. “Breathing is bad for you. But we all need some candy.”

  “He’s very smart,” Lil informed me, as if John had left the room. “Why is he so smart?”

  “You mean for a Gentile?” I asked. “I don’t even know why they bother letting them go to school. They can’t learn, and all they do is drink.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Lil scolded, “even if it’s true. So your specialty is head injuries. What is that, like if I hit someone in the head with a hammer?”

  “Arlene, next door, she had a head injury,” said Bernie.

  “Arlene has two fake hips, a neck brace, and she needs a kidney,” said Lil, “but I don’t think she has a head injury. She’s just not very bright.”

  “No,” said Bernie, “before she got her new hips, she fell in the tub and hit her head on the sink. That’s how she got that terrible scar.”

  “That’s not a scar,” said Lil. “She just wears too much lipstick. I told her, I said, ‘Arlene, you look like a streetwalker, except you’re riding around on that little scooter.’”

  Lil’s Jamaican housekeeper provided a lunch of cold cuts and fruit, while Lil spoke about her new marriage: “It’s important to have a relationship. It keeps us both young, and there’s always someone there to call 911. Bernie and I, we have fun, you should stay for a few days and come with us. We get up at six a.m. and Bernie drives us to the mall for the Early Bird Special on breakfast, and then we hit the Stop and Shop—you can find incredible deals, last week we got fifty cans of tuna, ten for a buck fifty.”

  “So maybe some of the cans were a little dented,” Bernie added. “Who cares?”

  Every beat of this narrative terrified me, but I was especially alarmed at the thought of Bernie, who was nearing ninety, behind the wheel of a car.

  “So show me,” Lil asked John, as we got ready to leave. I knew just what she was talking about, because my mother had told her about the tattoo John had gotten a few weeks earlier. On his right shoulder there was now a heart, with a dagger through it, dripping blood, and there was a banner stretched across the heart with my first name on it.

  The tattoo had been entirely John’s idea, and I’d been stunned. We’d gone to the tattoo parlor together, and I had checked out the many tattoo options that were pictured in the sketches lining the walls. My favorites were the Chinese characters for “to vomit,” and a large-scale body mural, suitable only for someone’s entire chest or back, of a bare-breasted native Alaskan hottie, shrugging off her fur-trimmed parka as she rode a cresting ocean wave, balanced on twin dolphins; I tried to imagine the guy who’d say, “Oh, yeah, man, that’s what I want—the Alaska chick with the dolphins! Forever!”

  As we waited, I could hear a twenty-something girl in the back, wailing pitiably as she was marked with only the tiniest navy blue heart on her ankle. I then watched in agony as the tattoo artist began to dig his many needles, each filled with a different color, into John’s flesh, as John sat calmly, without even the mildest groan or wince. “But doesn’t that hurt?” I asked, through clenched teeth.

  “Of course it hurts,” John scoffed. “It’s a needle. Aren’t you going to get one? Maybe a skull, or maybe that topless butterfly woman who looks like she’s having sex with a saber-toothed tiger.”

  “I tell you what,” the tattoo artist told John, as he meticulously outlined the heart on John’s shoulder. “If you want, I’ll throw in some purple on this for free.”

  “Sure,” said John, “why not?”

  “AHHHH!!!” I moaned, as if the needle were piercing my eyeball. I have trouble getting a flu shot, so I wasn’t about to opt for something more sustained and elaborate. “But am I a coward, and a terrible person,” I asked John, “because I’m not getting your name tattooed on my shoulder?”

  “Yes,” said John, and then he faked torture by chanting, “Ow ow ow ow!”

  I was, of course, thrilled beyond belief by John’s tattoo, because I somehow imagined that it made me tougher, as if I were now a Hells Angel or an especially unrepentant serial killer on death row. I loved John even more because he never expected me to return the favor; he was being permanently inked with the name of a real wuss. There was only one problem: at the beach, people tended to look at John’s tattoo, ask, “Is that real?” and then they’d spit on their fingers and rub the tattoo, to check whether it was temporary.

  “Yes, it’s real,” John would tell these people, “and why are you spitting on me?”

  “Look at that,” said Bernie, in West Palm, as John rolled up the sleeve of his T-shirt, “a doctor with a tattoo.”

  “So, Aunt Lil,” I asked, “what do you think?”

  Lil considered the situation. “I like it,” she decided. “And do you know why? Because it’s a gesture. And so it means something. And, most of all, it’s permanent. Which is important,” she concluded, right to me, “because you can take a ring off.”

  5.

  A year later, Lil died. John and I went to her funeral, and the service was held at a white marble temple in Queens. My mother, Hilda, other relatives, and Lil’s many friends had gathered; but because Lil had been living in Florida for so long, the rabbi hadn’t known her. He spoke in generalities, which was a shame, because Lil was such an impressive and full-voltage woman. “Life is like a sandwich,” the rabbi intoned, in his plummy, pleased-with-himself rabbi voice, “the two slices of bread don’t matter, it’s what’s in the middle that counts.”

  The mourners were puzzled by this, because none of us could follow the metaphor—if you don’t have the two pieces of bread, then it’s not a sandwich, it’s just loose meat. And if the rabbi was referring to birth and death, well, those do seem rather necessary events, even in the life of a BLT.

  After the service, everyone piled into their cars and drove out to one of those vast roadside cemeteries on Long Island. I always find these places incredibly depressing, not because they’re filled with dead people, but because the stone markers and careful landscaping have so little to do with those dead people’s lives or personalities. These cemeteries seem like filing systems, like some bland, hellish vision of a peculiarly American eternity, a Levittown for the deceased.

  Lil’s coffin was lowered into the ground, and her sisters and her daughter each tossed a shovelful of dirt into the grave. Usually, the mourners leave after this, and the cemetery staff fills in the rest of the grave, but Lil had left very specific, alternative instructions. Lil had felt that, under the usual procedure, after the mourners depart, the grounds crew gets sloppy, and often toss empty soda cans and cigarette butts into the graves along with the soil. Lil stipulated that at her funeral, her friends and relatives should wait until the grave was completely filled in, just to keep the gravediggers honest.

  This took a while. It was even a little annoying, but it was very Aunt Lil, and it certainly gave her the last word. I looked at my mother and Hilda, who were dissolved in tears. Lil had sometimes terrorized them, but the three sisters had always been a team. Now there was no one to advise them or bully them or praise them for bringing back such thoughtful gifts from London or Montreal or Albuquerque.

  Bern
ie looked lost; he knew that he’d been very lucky to have found two such appealingly forceful wives. Lil’s daughter, Martha, a vital woman, with a loving, what-the-hell attitude—she’s Lil without the Uzi—was surrounded by her four kids, Lil’s adored grandchildren. I sometimes wondered if Martha had been sure to have lots of children, to give Lil the maximum number to shop for.

  John hadn’t known Lil for long, but he seemed very moved. I saw how much John had respected Lil, as a kindred spirit. They were both exceedingly tough cookies. John, as I was discovering, was a very no-bullshit guy, who, when asked, would offer very specific, stop-whining advice. He was a fallen Catholic from Spokane, Washington, and Lil was a Depression baby from Queens, but they had more than understood each other. They were both passionate travelers who didn’t need particularly luxurious accommodations. Lil had once taken a package tour of Israel which had promised that the participants would get to serve in the Israeli army. She had been bitterly disappointed, because, “They didn’t really let us do anything. We just dusted off little bits of pottery at an archaeological dig.” I could tell that she’d wanted at least a skirmish.

  During the years following Lil’s death, I’ve noticed that when my mom and Hilda get together, or talk on the phone, they take turns becoming Lil. They tell each other what to do, in no uncertain terms, and they both get irate when the other one won’t listen; this heartfelt battling keeps Lil alive. I don’t particularly believe in heaven, but I like the concept; I especially like the picture of Lil chatting with God, because she has some ideas.

  Lordy

  1.

  Just about all writers share one titanic, all-consuming, and eternal source of inspiration: the rent. Enter Hollywood, which is UNICEF for playwrights.

  I was lying on my couch, trying to come up with an idea for a screenplay, and I began thinking about drag, and wondering why a guy in a gown is so often funnier than a woman in, say, a dapper three-piece suit. I tried to imagine a disguise or transformation that might be more fun, for a female star. And so I started thinking about nuns. Nuns can seem dictatorial, sexually repressed, and scary, and therefore entertaining. I pictured a lower-rung showgirl who witnesses a gangland hit. To protect her, the feds stash our doll in a convent, and, because it’s a comedy, she’s forced to wear a habit. I was obviously sparked by such gender-swaps as Some Like It Hot, and by Barbara Stanwyck as a burlesque queen invading a college campus in Ball Of Fire. But I wanted nuns, so I called my notion Sister Act.

  I brought Sister Act to the producer Scott Rudin, and we agreed that the leading role was a natural fit for Bette Midler, then, in the late 1980s, the delicious, dependably rowdy star of such hits as Ruthless People and Outrageous Fortune. Bette’s production company was based at Disney, so Scott set up a meeting in New York with a studio chieftain. I pitched Sister Act and a deal was struck. I was stunned at how rapidly the project came together, but then, the Lord works in mysterious ways. He may even work for Disney.

  I wrote a treatment, which is a studio term for “summarize the story in under two pages, so that an executive’s assistant can boil it down to one paragraph on a Post-it, and please refer to all characters by the names of the stars who should play them but never will.” The treatment, like any activity in the studio sector, is designed to make the project appear not merely attractive, but surefire. It’s an ironclad guarantee, assuring every staff member that his or her job, home, second home, spouse and vehicle upgrades are in the bag.

  I was still new to this process, so my treatment was probably worrisome. I wanted Sister Act to be a satire of sugary family perennials like The Sound of Music, The Singing Nun, The Flying Nun, and such parochial school romps as The Trouble with Angels and its sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows. These mainstream nun flicks were filled with sage, older nuns who, after offering their wisdom, would die serenely off-screen; with younger, guitar-strumming “rebel” nuns, sometimes riding Vespas; and with feisty novices, who either had to be broken, via missionary work, or farmed out to the Von Trapp compound.

  My favorite nun saga is The Song of Bernadette, a biopic that follows a humble French peasant girl who experiences a vision of the Virgin, as portrayed by an immaculately brunette Linda Darnell. A bubbling, healing spring bursts forth at the site of Bernadette’s epiphany, and ultimately becomes the millions-served holy shrine of Lourdes.

  I planned for Sister Act to subvert all of this prissy uplift. I wanted our heroine, Terri Van Cartier, to embody raunch, sex, and the unstoppable gospel of cheap showbiz. It would be pop versus pope, and pop, in a barrage of sequins, wisecracks, and Marlboro Lights, would win. That’s how addled or innocent or crazy I was, because I actually believed that Disney would make a movie that tried to defeat the Catholic Church.

  Treatment in hand, I was flown to Los Angeles for an early meeting blitz. Such meetings are what most people would consider gossip with a buffet interrupted by phone calls, but what Hollywood calls work. Since I couldn’t drive, I arranged for a cab to the Disney lot in Burbank. I love taking cabs in L.A., because it’s like heading out on an extended cross-country family vacation. In New York, a cab passes buildings, buses, and other cabs, but in L.A. you can see used car lots, redrock canyons, and mesquite. From a Beverly Hills mansion, I once saw a seven-year-old girl emerge, dressed in the short black satin skirt, fishnet stockings, and frilly starched apron of a naughty French maid, and I was outraged: Where were the child labor laws? Then I remembered that it was Halloween.

  The Disney headquarters, like everything else Disney, was enchanted and disturbing. Everything was themed. There were topiaries clipped into eerily threatening boxwood Mickeys and Minnies, and street signs pointed bicycle messengers along Goofy Avenue and Dopey Drive. Some of the buildings were modestly scaled and retro, but carved above the entrance to a more recent office tower was a monumental, ten-foot-high, limestone grouping of the Seven Dwarves, with their arms raised, as if they were holding up the many upper floors. This effect was adorable and grotesque, because if the figures are that tall then they’re not dwarves anymore, plus they were enslaved and suffering, as if after they’d built the pyramids Doc and Grumpy had been shipped to L.A. in chains. I should mention that during this period, Disney’s obsessively hands-on micromanagement style had justified the nickname Mousechwitz.

  I entered the sleek, impersonal office of an ebullient vice-president. All of the Disney execs at this time wore exclusively black or navy blue, costly but unconstructed Armani or Comme des Garçons suits, for a Rodeo Drive ninja feeling. The studio was about to release what would become its blockbuster animated musical The Little Mermaid, and the VP was holding what looked like a brightly colored cardboard purse. “Paul, look!” he exclaimed, tilting his purse this way and that, “it’s the Little Mermaid Happy Meal!” He was friendly and welcoming, and I noticed a framed photo of a softball team on the ledge behind him. “That’s from our company picnic,” he explained. “It was so much fun!” I asked about the other grinning, sunburned people in the picture, all wearing Team Disney sweatshirts and Mouseketeer ears, and the VP, thinking about it, realized that they’d all since been fired.

  Another, equally gung-ho, executive appeared, carrying, in his palm, a four-inch-high collectible plastic figurine of the Little Mermaid herself, with her chunky cascade of red hair and her skimpy seashell bra. “Look at her!” this exec crowed. “Isn’t she hot? I’d do her!” Other staffers approached, all agreeing that the figurine was indeed hot and doable, and I tried not to ask, “Do you want to do the action figure, the cartoon, or the mermaid herself? How exactly do you do a mermaid, anyway? Wouldn’t you drown?”

  As in all decent studio meetings, everyone was “totally stoked” about Sister Act and eager to “fast-track” the property. The execs tended to sound like skateboarders, and their primary notes were about shaping the material for Bette and about how much we all loved nuns. “Nuns!” I declared, “I’d do ’em!” and everyone cheered.

  I returned to New York and complet
ed a first draft. I handed it in, and there were questions. With Bette considering the role, the movie could now become an all-out musical, so what should she sing? Original material or Motown standards? As Terri chafes at convent life, could she smuggle some of the other nuns, with a few stashed in the trunk, into a drive-in? A whorehouse? A McDonald’s, for product placement? Could the nuns get high? What about sex? I felt that enforced chastity should be a logical source of comedy—wouldn’t Terri get itchy? What if there was a guy who felt turned on, and terrified, by his yen for a nun? And where should the convent be located—on an isolated prairie, or somewhere more urban?

  I flew out for more meetings. Bette and her staff were now present, and Bette was indecisive. She was, and is, a fabled performer, having kicked off her career before gay audiences at a bathhouse in New York. She was also extremely well-read, and was conflicted about her image. Did she dare play a nun? Everyone, for many months to come, continually explained to Bette that she wasn’t risking blasphemy by portraying an actual nun, yet she remained uneasy.

  A word about stars. Many are appealing, but the greatest exhibit a transformative gift. In a meeting, Bette, with a cold, could seem bedraggled or distracted, and thoroughly human. But she could also, as a sheer act of talent and will, become something more, and something that doesn’t necessarily require a squadron of tireless hair and makeup people. Bette could suddenly, and to startling and enthralling effect, become the real deal, the most interesting person in the room—or the galaxy. I’d watch and realize, Oh, of course, that’s what stardom is. That’s how she earns her salary and the fascination, and patience, of the world.

  I’ve learned to be shy about meeting actors, or writers, or just about anyone I admire. Sometimes a star is subdued or not particularly verbal, or as dumb as a post. I once asked Scott Rudin, who’s worked with everyone from Tom Cruise to Meryl Streep, which stars, in his experience, delivered off-camera, which personalities continued to impress. One of the first names he offered was Bette.