It’s strange what stays in the mental files
and what gets shredded. I happened to
read today that Steve Martin had signed up to appear in the Ang Lee movie of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk based on the novel by Ben Fountain. "The Catch-22 of the
Iraq War" according to at least one source.
It’s not a walking novel per se but as I understand
it the hero and the surviving members of his Bravo Squad who’ve seen a few
minutes of spectacular victory in Iraq, are sent on a publicity tour, which
among other things requires them to walk out onto the filed at Texas Stadium,
home of the Dallas Cowboys.
I don’t know what part Steve Martin plays in
the movie, but by free association I remembered a paragraph in his memoir Born Standing Up, about the time he was dating
Mitzi Trumbo, the daughter of Dalton, the great screenwriter, and one of the
Hollywood Ten who was blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
Martin writes, “My first
glimpse of Dalton Trumbo revealed an engrossed intellect--not finessing his
latest screenplay but sorting the seeds and stems from a brick of pot. ‘Pop
smokes marijuana,’ Mitzi explained, ‘with the wishful thought of cutting down
on his drinking.’ Sometimes, from their
balcony, I would see Trumbo walking laps around the perimeter of the pool. He
held a small counter in one hand and clicked it every time he passed the diving
board. These health walks were compromised by the cigarette he constantly held
in his other hand.”
It’s not easy to find a picture of Trumbo
walking, and certainly not one of him walking circuits of his pool. In fact an awful lot of pictures show him in
his bath, working.
And then I remembered the introduction to Steve
Martin’s 1977 Cruel Shoes, his collection
of “short stories.”
It runs like
this: “You are walking down a country
road. It is a quiet afternoon. You look up and far, far down the road you see
someone walking toward you. You are surprised to have noticed someone so far
away. But you keep walking, expecting nothing more than a friendly nod as you
pass. He gets closer. You see he has bright orange hair. He is closer- a white
satin suit spotted with colored dots. Closer - a painted white face and red
lips. You and he are fifty yards apart. You, and a full-fledged clown holding a
bicycle horn are twenty yards apart. You approach on the lonely country road.
You nod. He honks and passes.”
And then I remembered this photograph of
Steve Martin walking, ad you know I don't think this is digitally enhanced. I think some assistant had to put those banana skins there, and then had to clear them up afterwards:
And then finally this:
