Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [79]
“Oh,” she said, kissing my cheek. “It’s so exciting about Maximilian Schell! John told us all about it at Thanksgiving dinner. He seemed to be making fun, but you just knew he was so jealous.” The thing was, until that moment, I hadn’t known. I smiled, grateful she’d let the secret slip. That he was jealous seemed in some way to delight her. She wanted to know more. After all, though she was his mother, she was also a woman who knew and appreciated power in men and, without question, valued her effect on them.
Not long after that, I had a second meeting in the suite at the Warwick. This time I was more confident, buoyed in part by Mrs. Onassis’s enthusiasm, and before I was out the door, he offered me the part. I did end up playing Dorothy Norman, but it was years later and with a different actor, in a different time altogether. Due to a writers’ strike, Maximilian Schell was no longer attached to the project.
When I saw Max again, it was at an opera opening in Los Angeles in 2005. By then, I’d long abandoned the thought that a role might change my life—the sanguine belief that all actors hold close. He was seventy-five. His eyes were still bright, and tossed around his neck was what appeared to be the same black scarf. When we spoke, his face lit up, and I knew he remembered everything.
On that night years before, as we’d walked past his hotel to John’s apartment, he’d turned to me with an abrupt tenderness and said, “Whatever happens with the film, whether we work together or not, when you pass by the Warwick, I hope you will think of me and this night.” Strange thing is, I do.
The waves licked the sides of the kayak as we set out from Great Pedro Bay on the remote southern coast of Jamaica. We pushed past the barefoot children on the shore and the brightly colored fishing boats to have our adventure. It was why we had come.
The day before, we’d left the more predictable resort scene in Negril and headed southeast, not knowing where we would land. We traveled well together from day one. John was the spontaneous pied piper, the one who’d swerve the car over, saying, Let’s go—let’s get out and do this. I was the navigator, riding shotgun with a variety of guidebooks, reading aloud historical and cultural tidbits as he drove. He loved that, being a team. He called me Chief, and I called him King.
After we were no longer together, he’d send a postcard now and then from his travels. A riverboat in Asia. A midsummer bonfire in Finland. And from Costa Rica, a card covered with golden toads that said, “It’s a beautiful country, but I must confess to feeling ignorant about the place without you.”
At this point in our lives, we were like a puzzle and our different pieces fit; I held him back a bit, and he pushed me to go further. And we both relished the idea of taking off without a plan and seeing where the day would take us. We loved the possibility that something could happen, something we could tell a story about later on. Stories were the golden treasure, shiny bits that brought us closer.
In February, a few months back, I’d broken my foot horseback riding in Virginia. The jump was low; it was a fluke, really. But the break was serious. I’d be on crutches for four months, and the doctors wouldn’t know until then if the bone had died and would need to be fused to my heel, the result being a permanent limp.
John’s cousin Anthony was with me when I fell. After I underwent a six-hour operation, he spent the night beside my bed at Fauquier hospital. As I went in and out of a morphine daze, he read aloud to keep me company. Anthony had a habit of teasing everyone he liked. Otherwise, he could appear quite formal. He goaded me once at a gym, saying his aunt Jackie could lift heavier weights than I could. In a baby voice, he loved to imitate the pet names John had for me—Christmas Mouse, Puppy, Sweet Frog. But that night, he showed his true and tender colors by keeping vigil, not wanting me to wake up and find myself alone hooked up to an IV.
The next morning, when I opened my eyes,