Had Angela Doubleday continued to play a spaced-out hippie she
would have finished in a one-bedroom apartment far from the studios
and not on a two-acre estate in Malibu. The defining moment in
her career came when the director Sidney Lumet cast her in the
role of Anna, the voracious young wife in Eugene O’Neill’s
Desire Under the Elms. Doubleday played Anna like a cornered lioness.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences likes nothing
more than a surprise turn by one of its stars and gave her the
nod for the first of four Academy Award nominations, the last
for a low budget independent production in which she portrayed
an aging Las Vegas showgirl battling drug and alchohol addiction.
The stalker attacked on the night she celebrated her nomination
with members of the film’s cast and crew. He broke through
a security barrier outside Spago in Beverly Hills and slashed
a guard with his pen knife. The stalker had been following her
for two months. Something glinted in his raised hand as he charged
forward. Everybody swore it was the knife. An off-duty cop shot
him. The stalker grabbed the bodice of Doubleday’s dress
as he fell. He weighed no more than 130 pounds and was mortally
wounded but gripped her so fiercely they sprawled together to
the ground. The bullet had clipped his aorta. He bled to death
in seconds. When the guards peeled him away they found a doll
in the hand where the knife should have been. The doll was dressed
and painted to look like Angela Doubleday. In the note pinned
to the doll’s dress he wrote that he intended to give it
to her.
I put my eye to the viewfinder again and panned from the house
to the sea, where the stiff offshore breeze whipped a flotilla
of catamarans and windsurfers beyond the wave break. For a moment
the real world vanished. Only the image existed, bright and beautifully
distant, the four corners of the viewfinder framing the world
into a coherency I found lacking to the naked eye. A crack and
splinter of brush behind me pulled my face from the camera. A
man crashed through the chaparral on the opposite side of the
rock, charging down the hill at such speed that when he glimpsed
me in passing and tried to stop he skidded ten yards into a clump
of sage. I yanked the 500 and inserted a 50 millimeter lens, not
thinking much about him at the moment except that he was too close
for the telephoto. The man had a wild and winded look, one hand
grabbing the sage for balance and the other hidden behind his
back as he stared at me, wide-eyed and panting. I didn’t
confuse him for a day hiker, not after glancing at his corduroy
pants and slick-soled loafers. I lifted the viewfinder and focused
on his face. He didn’t look too happy about the camera.
A four-day growth stubbled his jaw, which was the style of the
moment, combined with black hair gelled back in thick grooves.
His eyes were a bright, psychopathic blue. I figured him for a
bodyguard, someone hired to keep creeps like me away from Angela
Doubleday.
I took the shot.
He released his hold on the sage to climb up to me but the soles
of his loafers wouldn’t hold on the hardpan and he slipped
to one knee.
I took that shot, too.
He pushed off the ground, jerked a pistol from behind his belt
and told me to give him the camera. He didn’t bother to
point the pistol at me, as though I’d drop dead at the mere
sight of one. I lowered the Nikon, let him see my face. I have
a nice face. Some men find me attractive, particularly ones who
don’t expect a woman to look like a Barbie doll, unless
it’s one who dresses in black, wears a nose stud and can
do a hundred push-ups in less than three minutes. I’ve done
time, and when someone tells me to do something I don’t
want to do, I’ve learned how to make my face a hard place
to look at. I moved my lips carefully, in case he was slow to
understand things. I said, “No.”
He took two nervous steps uphill, afraid of falling. “Look,
I don’t have time to fuck around.”
“Then leave,” I said.
He inched up the hill again, dug the heel of his downhill foot
into the dirt and pointed the pistol at me street punk style,
one handed, the grip parallel to the ground. Instinctively, I
raised the viewfinder to my eye, as though the magic prism of
the lens would shield me from a bullet. Aggressive bodyguards
are one of the hazards of my job. I asked, “What are you
going to do, shoot me?”
I watched his finger tighten around the trigger, a movement
simultaneous to my own finger pressing against the shutter release.
A thought rimmed my mind as we waited for each other to shoot.
If he actually did pull the trigger and I caught the flash of
the muzzle as the bullet fired I’d rate a Pulitzer Prize
in photography, if a posthumous one.
I took the shot.
Fired up slope, the bullet struck the camera at the join between
lens and body. The viewfinder slammed into my eye like a good
left cross.
I don’t remember going down.
* * *
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