We agreed to meet at four, at a café in Sherman Oaks named Le Fleur. I took a run, showered, logged onto a SubUrban video, filed Beal’s face mentally, and joined the onset of the rush-hour crawl up the Glen.
On the show, Beal had been in his late thirties, slim, with cropped dark hair and a pencil beard, prone to lisping, mincing, and bursting into show tunes.
The man waiting for me at a corner table was twenty pounds heavier, clean-shaven with longish graying hair, dressed in an oatmeal-colored suit, a chocolate T-shirt, tan Gucci loafers.
“Doctor? Hey, Steve Beal.” Both his hands remained wrapped around a coffee mug. He called the waitress over and asked what I’d be drinking.
I said, “The same.”
Beal said, “Also a couple of croissants, Tara — make mine with almonds.”
“Sure, Steve.”
“You’re not what I expected, Doc.”
“You figured Viennese with a cigar?”
He laughed. “Want me to be brutal? The shrinks I’ve known — and I’ve known a few — came across like people who didn’t get a lot of play in high school. Yeah, it’s pigeonholing, blame it on my former profession. Acting’s all about shortcuts but often they’re just as good as taking the long road.”
“Actors learn to make quick judgments?”
“TV actors do, we’re always under time pressure. Ever read a teleplay? Abbreviations, suggestions, the content is arranged around commercial breaks, it’s so the network can sell ad time. Anyway, you’re here to talk about Zelda. What you told me has totally bummed me out. What a messed-up waste.”
“She was talented?”
“She was as good as most — better. I’m not saying she was a Streep but she did have that thing with the camera you have to be born with. Transforming herself in a snap. People who can do that sometimes make the transition to the big screen but after her arrest I figured Zelda wouldn’t. Though being screwy hasn’t stopped others from making it big. You do know about the arrest.”
“I do.”
The croissants and my coffee arrived. Steve Beal raised his cup. “To Zelda and every other tortured soul trashed by the industry. Do I sound bitter? I kind of do, Doc. Thinking about her has flashed me back to my own servitude. I was six months old when I got my first job — soap commercial — then proceeded to sacrifice my childhood and my adolescence and a whole lot more because Mommy suffered from metastatic stage-door-itis. I barely got any education, so when Sub got canned and my agent stopped taking my calls, I was as marketable as a crippled quarterback. But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He flicked a lapel. “Learned a real skill, now I get to actually accomplish something. Ever watch Sub?”
“A bit of video.”
“You catch me doing my thing?”
I nodded.
“So you’re probably surprised I’m not queer.” He pounded his chest. “Acting! Brrrilliance!”
I laughed.
“I dig that spontaneous reaction, Doc, apparently Steve-o’s still got it going on. So what do you want to know about Zelda?”
I said, “Tell me about her mental problems.”
“Okay... well, obviously, she was moody, everyone in the industry’s moody. But with Zelda it was more intense. She could sink real low real fast, then spring out of it and get hyper so fast you wondered if she’d been putting you on when she was down.”
“Did that cause problems on the set?”
“No, that’s the thing. If she had a scene to shoot, she was ready. It’s like she was... a machine.”
“How’d you know she wasn’t putting it on?”
He put his coffee down. “You’re saying she was a faker?”
I shook my head. “Just trying to educate myself.”
“How do I know? For one thing, I spotted her doing it when she thought no one was looking. More than once.”
“Doing what?”
“Going ultra-down, then ultra-up. Down would be sobbing in her dressing room and rocking like an autistic kid. Skulking off the set, face like a zombie. Up would be racing back and forth through a hallway, bouncing like a yo-yo, tearing at her hair while she talked to herself like a tweaking monkey.”
I said, “Could she have been tweaking?”
“Hmm, good question, Doc. I’ve known plenty of dopers in my day including tweakers, and I have to say this seemed different. But you’re the expert. I sure didn’t see any signs of her being a meth-head — her weight was stable, her skin was gorgeous — she was gorgeous. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded getting with her but there just wasn’t that vibe between us, you know?”
I nodded. “Did anyone else notice her swings?”
Beal’s eyes slitted. “You need backup for what I’m telling you?”
“Just wondering how obvious it was.”
“It wasn’t obvious at all. Everything I saw was in passing, it’s not like I was stalking her, it was my work ethic. I was always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Ask anyone if I ever needed more than three takes.”
“Got it,” I said. “Did Zelda ever show signs of mental confusion — hallucinating, talking about unusual theories or ideas?”
“If she saw flying elephants I never heard about it. Who knows what goes on in people’s heads, right, Doc? In terms of nutty ideas, hell, yeah. She’d wander in late to the set, claim her plane got held up. But she’d never left town, we’d been taping continually. Then there was the religious shit, lots of that.”
“Born again?”
“More like reborn constantly,” said Beal. “One week she’s a Buddhist, the next she’s into Sufism. Then it’s kabbalah, she’s running her hand over a book to soak up secrets. Then it’s boom, back to Jesus, she’s wearing a humongous crucifix. It became a joke on the set, who’s Zelda’s God for the day. Once I asked her about whatever she was into, I forget, and she said she was being guided by an unseen spirit. I said like a guardian angel and she smiled and kissed my cheek and walked away. Like she’d seen the light but I could never hope to understand.”
He leaned forward. “I just remembered the weirdest thing she did. She told me she’d just learned she was God. We were sitting around between takes and she drops that on me. I figure she’s kidding, so I made a crack like, ‘How bout giving me some stock-market tips, Jehovah?’ She just stared at me and turned away and started doing some kind of crazy humming chant. But maybe all she meant was one of those new-agey things — God lives in all of us.”
“Did she ever talk about delusions that weren’t religious?”
Beal slapped his forehead. “You know, now that you’ve got me flashing back, stuff’s coming to me. Maybe that wasn’t the insanest thing she said, maybe another thing was.”
Picking an almond sliver off a croissant, he chewed, swallowed. “I’m not sure I even want to tell you, you might think I’m nuts.”
I smiled. “Promise: no diagnosis.”
“All right, ready for this? She thought she was her own mother.”
“That is a new one.”
“Even for you, huh? Well, that’s reassuring because it totally threw me.”
“What exactly did she—”
“That her mother was a movie star who’d disappeared when she was a kid and she’d just reappeared by inserting herself into Zelda. After Zelda had her baby. What made it even bizarrer was how calm she was when she said it. Like ordering an omelet. Then she starts poking different parts of her stomach and telling me ‘Mommy’s hugging and warming me here, here and here and here.’ ”