Page 21 of Hollywood, Ending

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Matthew Malone was waiting for me outside the bar, wearing a ball cap and sunglasses. “Oh, Junie,” he said, “congratulations,” and hugged me. As we walked into the bar, I said, “Did you really tell Tom Weisman you’d make another movie with the studio if he cast me?”

“Maybe,” Matthew said. “But only because I was gonna do that movie anyway.” He smiled with half his mouth and I said, “Thank you, Matthew,” and he said, “Our business runs on favors. You’ll pay me back someday by casting me in a movie you’re producing when I’m old and decrepit. You’ve got the drive, Junie. You’re talented, but it’s the ambition that’ll get you where you’re going.”

When Matthew got to the bar, he took off his sunglasses and the bartender did a double take before saying, “Are you…who I think you are?”

“Indeed. Some friends and I are celebrating this afternoon and hoping to rent out your bar.”

“Well, there’s basically no one here.” There were, in fact, two people in a booth, staring mouths agape at Matthew Malone.

“We’d like to have a private event.”

“Sir, I’m, uh, I’m not sure I can just kick people out of here. I’d have to call my manager.”

“Would fifty thousand dollars be sufficient for a private party rental for a couple hours?”

The guy nodded rather furiously. “Yeah. Yeah. That would, uh, yeah, I’ll figure it out.”

“And as apology for the inconvenience, I’ll pay their bar tab,” he said, nodding toward the couple in the booth.

“Sure, of course,” the bartender said. The couple was soon gone.

Kai showed up a few minutes later and enveloped me in a hug. “You’re a proper movie star now,” he said. “Even if our movie sucks—”

“Which it doesn’t,” Matthew interrupted.

“Which of course it doesn’t but even if it does, you’re…I mean…you’re gonna be Matthew Fucking Malone, wearing sunglasses and a hat everywhere you go.”

“Well,” said Matthew, “let’s not get out of hand. There is only one Matthew Fucking Malone.”

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I drank three different mocktails—one with some kind of fake gin that was called Juniper Everlasting, which we all got a kick out of. Matthew drank his standard old-fashioneds, and plenty of them. Kai had a couple beers, and we talked about the shoot so far, and how we only had two weeks left. “Kai will remember this as his first real movie,” Matthew said, “but I wonder how you’ll remember it.”

“As my first really good movie,” I told him.

“I’ll remember it for the two of you,” he said. “Two kids who clearly love their work and each other. You’ve reminded me why I do it. Why I still want it, in spite of everything.”

Kai put his arm around me, and I felt really cared for in that moment. But of course I did. I can’t help but associate success with being loved; I was trained to do it.

13

My favorite part of the script, the part that really made me want to do it, wasn’t dialogue at all but the page describing a scene of Andy at the hospital, preparing for his gallbladder surgery.

The music swells. He hated hospitals. Depicted everything in his work—electric chairs, business executives, shoes, car accidents, wine bottles, drugs and cats and buildings and dollar bills. But only once a hospital bed. 1954. He was just starting out. It was an ink drawing, nearly abstract. Commission, of course. He was not Warhol then, not yet. He was still Andrew Warhola. Whatever we make, what we are really fabricating is the self. The quality of his line suggested promise, but promise is common, even ubiquitous, among twenty-six-year-olds. In the drawing, the hospital bed is in the background. In the foreground, hands. The hands that reached into his father, perhaps. The ones that took out the old man’s gallbladder, the surgery from which Ondrej never recovered. Now the son was in a hospital bed. Same failed organ. Same surgery. Long time since he’d thought of himself as Ondrej’s son, but here he was, a boy in a gown, no say in what happens. Awful to be wigless and dressed like this, more so since the nurses all knew. That’s Warhol. The artist. What a thing to have become, Warhol the artist, forged in the smithy of his soullessness.

A nurse enters the room, the music stops, and Andy hears, “It’s time to go, Mr. Warhol.” He is alone—his longtime partner Jon having died of AIDS a year earlier. Warhol holds a crystal in his hand—he became a Crystal Guy at the end—and goes off into surgery, a surgery he will never recover from.

We never see the corpse; we see us hearing the news, and the world hearing the news. And then all his friends and colleagues gather at the Factory, because even though it no longer really exists it’s the only place to go. Jude and I end up on the roof of his apartment and share our first kiss there, in what the script calls “a stubborn unwillingness to give in to despair.”

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The love scene was at the very end of the shoot, and before it we met with an intimacy coordinator who asked us each for our vision of the scene and what kind of coverage we wanted. I was never out of a bra, but Kai was ostensibly naked, so he had to wear a little patch around his crotch. That day we kissed and it felt like kissing, and I straddled him and it felt like straddling, and the camera raked across his naked torso and down past his hip, and it’s just acting but it is also making out. It’s a both/and drug of the strangest variety, not least because even though it was a closed set, lots of people were watching, including the guy holding the boom mic, who had to hold it above his head while Kathryn got her minutes-long shot, and when Kathryn finally shouted cut, he’d lower the mic and groan like he was also having sex, something Kai and I kept laughing about between shots.

This time around, Kai didn’t struggle to go into the emotional depths. I felt him trusting me. I kissed him, and I kissed his tears. I stroked his hair as he heaved sobs into my shoulder. In between set-ups, he sat on his cast chair with AirPods in, and then he’d go back to crying. It was beautiful and quiet on set, like all of us were sharing in this terrible loss.

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