I DIGRESS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

By the time I was twenty-one I was married with three children (my husbands) and under contract to Universal Studios. I was also going to UCLA at night to take creative writing courses. Oh, and did I add it was the sixties! Well, for some anyway. Backstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, while Jimi Hendrix and the Who were smashing their guitars on the stage and Janis Joplin, feathers limp on her head, swigged from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, mothers were smoking pot and nursing their babies as their toddlers ran around naked in the cold mud. My husband, ever the sage, looked at the naked wild children and said, “They’re all going to grow up and vote Republican.” And they did. Reagan. But I digress.

Going to UCLA Extension was certainly a help. The first critique I got from a classmate was, “How can you write with a body like that?!” I cleverly retorted, “I don’t write with my body.” Say what? But I was devastated. I could see my life unfolding before me — a constant struggle between being a sexy beauty and a creative writer. In all honesty it was much easier being a beauty. Again I digress.

I learned my craft in these classes by writing short stories. But it was acting that taught me how to connect to the “interior monologue” that we all have going inside of us. It also taught me some very important lessons about timing, pacing, and dialogue that pushed my work ahead of the others in those classes. Acting also taught me some other things that I won’t get into here.

I learned about pacing doing a segment of Run For Your Life TV series. Ben Gazzara was escaping to one of those islands again where corrupt police or soldiers were giving him a hard time. I’m being kind when I say the dialogue was flat. The words had fallen out of my mouth like rocks. The director had yelled “Pace we need more pace!” He clapped his hands and pounded on the table. And so we threw this awful dialogue at each other as if we had a plane to catch. And it worked much better. It didn’t change the words but the pacing did give them an edge and an urgency. It did seem to me, however, that Ben got to linger over each word. But I digress.

I remember a meeting I had with Howard Hawks before I had ever been in front of a movie camera. I had seen all his films and knew what an important figure I was sitting across the desk from. His office was decorated with real zebra skin rugs, and wild snarling animal heads glared down at me from the walls. Hawks was a tall, robust man with a giant bald head shaped like an egg. Intense eyes stared out at me from under pale lashes. He wore a safari-like jacket. This was a not a Ralph Lauren statement. This was for real. Hawks was man’s man. He was impressed that this young woman knew all his old films. I am paraphrasing here because memory has a way of revising itself. He said in reference to pacing, “You can have an actor say anything as long as they say it quickly, not letting long gaps elapse between each actors lines. That’s not how people have a conversation. Everybody wants to put their two cents in and quickly. Half the time they don’t give a damn what the other person is saying.”

Not only did he shoot all the animals on the walls, and the zebras on the floor, but he also shot some of the great movies: “The Big Sleep”, “My Girl Friday”, “Bringing Up Baby” and many others. Hawks also told me how he got Bacall to lower her voice. Something about pebbles in her mouth and yelling into the wind. I think she denies this story. He did not like women with high pitched whiny voices. I think he would be greatly irritated by many of the actresses today. I think of him often in that office. I miss the man’s man. And the animal heads. He knew how to get men and women to talk to each other on film. Like equals.

I was sitting in his office because he had seen me in the titles of one of his last movie: “Man’s Favorite Sport.” The titles were made up of photos of young women each playing a different sport. I was golfing in an orange sherbet-colored bikini. Doesn’t everyone? He was at the end of his career then, and just checking a pretty girl out. But I digress.

Throughout my acting years I developed an ear for dialogue and pacing the way a musician develops an ear for music. And when I began to write seriously (meaning to get published) I would read my dialogue out loud. I could hear it fall flat and I could here it soar. I had no trouble taking out words and knowing when to cut that last line of dialogue because it broke the rhythm. I could hear it. I could also hear a director yelling at me, “Pace, Melodie, pace.” And see Howard Hawks sitting behind his desk explaining to a young girl how to keep dialogue moving. A writer (Elizabeth Bishop?) said, “Dialogue is what people do to each other.” That is true in acting and in writing. Ever seen “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”?