Chapter 1 #3
persisted despite grasshopper plagues and drought even when other settlers gave up and returned back east. Impoverished but
ever resourceful, Sadie sold off cherished family quilts and took in sewing from her more successful neighbors to make ends
meet, running the farm by day and stitching her neighbors’ quilts late into the night. Sadie’s quilting kept her family alive
until at last, years later, the farm flourished.
After she finished the final page, Julia had held the script to her chest, lost in the details of Sadie’s hardship and triumph.
If only she could meet Sadie and learn her secrets for persevering when all hope was lost. That was impossible, sadly, but Maury had introduced her to Ellen, Sadie’s great-granddaughter, a promising young director and screenwriter.
Julia was thrilled to learn that Sadie Henderson was not just a fictional character, and that Ellen’s wonderfully immersive script had been inspired by her diaries.
When Ellen confessed that there was no one in the world she would rather have portray her great-grandmother than Julia, Ellen’s sincere admiration and remarkable familiarity with Julia’s repertoire had compelled her to accept the role on the spot.
After that lovely beginning, they couldn’t have imagined that A Patchwork Life, the movie, would crash and burn less than a year later. Julia and Ellen had bailed out before then, increasingly disillusioned
with the film’s jarring departure from their original vision. First, the studio had replaced Ellen as director, dismissing
her as too young and inexperienced to helm a major feature film even though she had written it, even though her previous movie
had won an honorable mention at Sundance. Next, Stephen Deneford had cast as Augustus the up-and-coming action star Rick Rowan,
lead in the blockbuster movie Jungle Vengeance, despite his limited range and the fact that he was more than twenty-five years younger than Julia, and thus rather implausible
in the role of her husband. Then Rick’s agent persuaded Deneford not to kill off Augustus but to keep him around in the role
of heroic provider and protector. Otherwise, Rick warned, Augustus’s absence would “turn it into a chick movie.”
“Chick movie?” Ellen had bristled at the script meeting. “This is a movie about women—strong, intelligent women going about
the difficult business of life in nearly impossible circumstances.”
Rick had shrugged, puzzled. “Right. A chick movie.” He had flipped through the script, shaking his head. “It should be Augustus,
not Sadie, who keeps the farm from going up in flames. He should be the one to scare off the claim jumpers. I mean, come on,
who’s going to believe a woman did all that?”
Ellen had fixed him with a blistering look. “That’s how it really happened.”
“How it really happened doesn’t matter,” Deneford had said, rubbing his forehead as if warding off a headache. “What matters
is that it’s believable.”
“I fail to see what’s so unbelievable about a woman performing heroic acts, especially to protect her children,” Julia had said. “Women were widowed all the time on the frontier. They could hardly afford to wait around for a man to rescue them.”
Ellen had thrown her a look of sheer gratitude. Julia had given her a small nod in return, but her conscience had pricked
her annoyingly. She had spoken up to protect her role, not the integrity of Ellen’s script. The scene where Sadie faced down
the unscrupulous cattle ranchers with nothing more than an unloaded rifle and a pitchfork contained one of the film’s best
monologues. Julia wasn’t about to graciously hand over such an Oscar-worthy scene to a pompous, over-muscled Rambo wannabe.
But Julia and Ellen had lost that battle, and soon thereafter, the men had conspired to entirely reimagine the film, now retitled
Prairie Vengeance, as a vehicle for Rick. Dismayed, Ellen had nonetheless revised the script as ordered rather than lose what little creative
input she still possessed. Julia too had persevered as her most compelling scenes were rewritten and turned over to the beautiful
ingenue cast as Young Sadie. But when Deneford had decided to remove all of the quilting from the picture and to have Sadie
save her farm not by taking in sewing but by taking on shifts at the local bordello, Ellen had resigned, unable to bear the insult to her great-grandmother’s memory. Julia had
followed her out the door, certain she was extinguishing the embers of her career by doing so.
She had never been so happy to be so wrong. As filming continued without her, Prairie Vengeance went so far over budget that Deneford had been obliged to forgo his salary in exchange for back-end compensation, so he would
be paid only if the movie made a profit. He had boasted in the trades that he was certain to benefit from the deal, but his
confidence had been wildly unwarranted. When a final cut was ready, screening audiences panned it so vehemently that the studio
sent the movie straight to video, where it quietly slipped into obscurity.
Through it all Ellen had retained the rights to her great-grandmother’s diaries, and with Prairie Vengeance gone and mostly forgotten, she had rewritten her original screenplay as a television series. When Ellen offered Julia the
role, she explained that in this new version, Sadie Henderson would be Augustus’s mother, not his wife, summoned to Kansas
to keep house and raise her grandsons after their mother’s death. Augustus would still perish, right on schedule, leaving
Sadie in charge of the homestead.
Julia appreciated that Ellen had tactfully refrained from pointing out that the changes were a pragmatic concession to Julia’s
age. “But this isn’t how it really happened,” Julia felt obliged to remind her. “I know how important it is to you to be faithful
to your great-grandmother’s diaries.”
“It’s more important that the role is a perfect fit for you,” Ellen had replied. “As I’ve said from the beginning, there’s
no one in the world I’d rather have portray my great-grandmother than you.”
Her heart full, Julia had accepted the role gladly, gratefully. PBS had immediately green-lit the pilot, and almost before
she could catch her breath, Julia was once again donning Sadie’s corset and calico dresses. Coming to work every day on a
much friendlier, motivated, competent set was a pleasure, and every risk she and Ellen had taken was validated when the show
premiered to excellent ratings and glowing reviews. Though it lacked the vast budget and reach of programs on the Big Four
networks, by the end of the second season, A Patchwork Life had become a cultural phenomenon, first in the US and then, after the BBC picked it up, abroad. Season after season it became,
indisputably, one of the few shows considered appointment television. Millions of viewers gathered around their TVs every
week at the appointed hour—setting their VCRs and DVRs if they had inescapable conflicts—and obsessively discussed every plot
point and character revelation around watercoolers and in blog posts the next day. Three different Kansas towns hosted annual
Patchwork Life festivals, earning millions of dollars in tourist revenue, and one small city near the ranch where most of the exteriors were filmed transformed a long-shuttered storefront into a Patchwork Life museum, revitalizing their downtown.
As for the cast, the relative unknowns were catapulted into fame and success, while
Julia found her career rejuvenated beyond her most ambitious hopes.
To her astonishment, one of the first fan letters she received—on elegant stationery in impeccable penmanship—was from Deneford’s
mother, Lillian, who declared A Patchwork Life her favorite program and praised Julia’s performance in particular. Julia promptly wrote back to thank her for her kind words,
and a cordial, intermittent correspondence blossomed. Occasionally their paths crossed at awards programs and charitable events,
where they always enjoyed a pleasant chat. They were mutually delighted to discover they were both members of the same women’s
fraternity, Pi Beta Phi, making a sincere friendship inevitable. They never spoke about Stephen or Prairie Vengeance, which probably helped them remain on such cordial terms.
The first two seasons of A Patchwork Life covered nearly everything in Sadie Henderson’s diaries, so after that, the show departed from the original source material.
Ellen seamlessly introduced new plotlines inspired by actual historical events, as well as new, entirely fictional characters.
Nigel had joined the cast in the middle of season two to play Benjamin Atherton, a ruggedly handsome cattleman and will-they-or-won’t-they
love interest for Sadie. Julia and Nigel had made the most of their sparkling on-screen chemistry, delighting viewers with
scenes of heated conflict, smoldering anger, grudging respect, secret longing, and steadfast but wistful friendship. Mutually
admiring but competitive, Julia and Nigel pushed each other to perform ever more brilliantly, which inspired the rest of the
cast to rise to meet them. No wonder the show had garnered numerous awards through the years, although Nigel’s much-wished-for
second BAFTA still eluded him.
An expectant hush settled over the theater as the recap sequence played, punctuated by quick smatterings of applause as various actors made their first appearance on-screen for a line or a reaction shot.
When Julia appeared as Sadie, eyes flashing as she delivered a withering rebuke to Nigel as Ben, Noah reached over the back of her seat to clasp her shoulder. “You tell him, Sadie,” he murmured.
Smothering a laugh, Julia patted his hand and threw him a quick smile before returning her gaze to the screen.
Soon she found herself riveted, even though she had seen the episode a dozen times before in the studio cutting room. The