Chapter 36 #2
“You really kill people in your books.” She picked at her Nicoise salad.
Esther explained that she was surprised when the reporter Abby Turnbull got murdered. Most authors didn’t knock off repeat characters, she commented, adding that my style was more like true crime than a mystery.
“Well, that’s because of what I’ve experienced. I know these horrible things happen in real life,” I explained, too nervous to eat my burger.
Esther has an unusual background, working in politics for fifteen years on Capitol Hill. One of the six “Boiler Room Girls” who socialized with Ted Kennedy, she was present at the party on Chappaquiddick Island when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after Kennedy’s car plunged into a pond.
Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes suggested that Esther become a literary agent, and by the time she took me on as a client, she was a legend.
It didn’t take her long to prove her prowess, selling the U.S.
rights for The Body Farm and From Potter’s Field for $4.
5 million. I was speechless, and she was only getting started.
I began a habit of sending Esther a dozen roses for every million.
At one point she had more than thirty dozen arrive at once and couldn’t fit them in her office.
Prior to J. K. Rowling, I was the highest-paid female author in the world, winning every major crime-writing award.
Typical headlines were MURDER SHE WRITES, and MYSTERY WOMAN, and A CAREER TO DIE FOR, and CORNWELL’S LIFE OF CRIME.
The summer of 1992, I heard that actress Demi Moore was interested in playing Scarpetta.
Esther thought it a fantastic idea. A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise was about to hit the theaters, and Demi was making Indecent Proposal with Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford.
I told Esther it was amazing that Demi was interested.
But I needed to have closure with Jodie Foster.
I wanted to hear for myself that she didn’t want to play Scarpetta, and on September 25, I met her in an L.A.
diner. There with an assistant, she was dressed in a rumpled white T-shirt, jeans.
Alone and feeling foolish, I didn’t look nearly as cool as she did.
I remembered our awkward visit in a stairwell the year before.
She remembered it too, saying we’d met before. I was flattered.
I asked again about her playing Scarpetta. I said that she was the top choice among my fans.
“Don’t you know why this is a bad idea?” she leaned forward and asked in a quiet intense voice.
“No,” I replied, disappointment sucking the air out of the room. “I think you’d be amazing.”
She didn’t go into detail about why she shouldn’t play Scarpetta. But I got the drift that my books were too much like The Silence of the Lambs. I didn’t agree, explaining that Scarpetta was nothing like Clarice Starling. But Jodie was unmoved.
“What if you directed the movie and Demi Moore starred in it?” I made another attempt, and Jodie answered with a cryptic smile.
It was one of those meetings that was over before it started.
We were together in the diner no more than a half hour, and I felt stunned as we were leaving.
Jodie wasn’t going to play Scarpetta, and I think she sensed I was crushed.
As we emerged on the sidewalk, she asked if I needed a ride somewhere, and I was even more stunned.
I told her that a media escort was picking me up.
Not to be confused with a limo driver, but I left out that part, hoping my escort wouldn’t roll up that moment in her cluttered compact car, a woven God’s eye dangling from the rearview mirror.
During the early years of my career, I didn’t have professional drivers or a publicist traveling with me.
There were people who volunteered to squire authors around when they were on the road for tour events. It wasn’t ideal.
As nice as these media escorts might be, they also were quite sociable, even fans, asking endless questions.
By the time I’d arrive for an interview, I’d already been through several and was exhausted.
Waiting on the sidewalk for my media escort, I watched Jodie drive away in her Saab convertible.
I headed to the airport, on my way to Australia and New Zealand for a book tour.
While there, I was leaving my hotel in Canberra, headed to my next interviews. I was about to climb into the media escort’s car when the concierge excitedly ran outside hailing me. Demi Moore was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. Dashing back inside, I wondered how she knew where I was.
She asked about my tour in Australia and reminded me that she was serious about playing Scarpetta.
I told her the role was hers if she wanted it, and we agreed to get together as soon as I returned to the U.S.
After that it was a whirlwind. She invited me to watch filming of Indecent Proposal, and I flew to L.A.
, checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel again.
The next day she sent a mile-long stretch limousine, and I was impressed by the dishes of candy, the booze in crystal decanters.
I arrived on set at the Paramount Pictures lot, and she couldn’t have been warmer or more unassuming, introducing me to Robert Redford.
I shook his hand as images from some of my favorite films flashed in my head.
The Sting
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Way We Were
I’d always thought he was one of the most handsome and classiest men on the planet and here I was chatting with him.
“I’m sure everybody says this to you, but you’re such an intelligent actor on top of being a fabulous one.” I said something gushy like that.
“No, actually, everybody doesn’t say that to me,” he replied with a touch of bemusement.
After filming, Demi invited me to visit her dressing room, and I climbed into her black Mercedes sedan, startled that it was exactly like what Scarpetta drives in my early books.
It impressed me that Demi drove herself, no assistants hovering.
I was fascinated by the inside of her trailer with its makeup station, and a vast wardrobe hanging from racks.
Afterward, we went to the Hotel Bel-Air for tea, where I met one of her production assistants.
Soon after this Demi invited me to her home in Malibu where we watched A Few Good Men.
Or better said, I did. Demi fell asleep on the sofa with one of her young daughters.
The next time I visited, I met Bruce Willis for the first time.
I had no idea what to say to him as I thought of Look Who’s Talking and Die Hard.
“What made you want to be an actor?” I asked yet one more lamebrain question.
He talked about his early years as a bartender and how much he loved to make people smile and laugh. I visited him and Demi at their house in Sun Valley, Idaho. Working out with her and her trainer, I bravely tried to keep up with them, Demi as fit as a professional athlete.
We were jogging along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu one day when actor Jack Klugman walked by on the sidewalk.
“The old Quincy just passed the new one,” I said to Demi, alluding to the first TV show about a medical examiner.
It seemed prophetic, and we continued discussing how to adapt Cruel and Unusual into a film.
I’d rented a house in Malibu while writing the screenplay, having no idea what I was doing.
At the same time, I was working on a possible TV series with Faye Dunaway and writing the treatment.
Again, not knowing much about such things.
In early November 1992, Demi flew to Richmond and spent a day with me at the OCME. She put on a surgical gown like the rest of us, and that morning was an especially bad one. I always knew when heinous cases were coming in. I could feel it in the air like a storm about to hit.
A high school student had gunned down his parents and brother, the three bodies arriving with paper bags over their destroyed heads. There was a sexual abuse homicide of a child. I remember at least five awful cases that morning, and Demi witnessed all of it without flinching.
After the autopsies were done, we cleaned up and walked to Shockoe Slip for lunch at the Tobacco Company. As we were shown to a table, heads were turning, a lot of whispering and nudging.
“Are you who I think you are?” the waitress asked Demi.
“Who do you think I am?” she replied solemnly.
At least three members of the wait staff began hovering and constantly topping off our water glasses.
The waitress was so nervous she forgot the day’s specials.
Demi was staying at my house and the next day we visited the FBI Academy together.
We hung out with female agents and got some training on the firing range.
On November 11, I attended her birthday party in Las Vegas with Bruce Willis, Woody Harrelson, Mike Myers, and other megastars.
They engaged in high-stakes gambling in a casino while I worked a slot machine, unhappy that I lost $60.
We attended the Cirque du Soleil, and I was impressed by Demi’s ability to whistle through her fingers.
I flew back to L.A. with everyone on a Columbia Studios Gulfstream jet and must admit I didn’t feel I belonged with all these luminaries. I picked a seat in the front cabin where there was no one else except a bearded man who said hello.
“And what do you do?” I asked Rob Reiner.
I had no idea who he was, and he diplomatically mentioned starting out in TV as a character named Meathead in All in the Family. He was the director of A Few Good Men.
“Well, now I feel really stupid,” I told him.
We’d laugh about that in years to come, and I’d remind him of how gracious he was on that occasion. He could have made me feel even smaller than I did. I forever will be stunned and crushed by the murders of Rob and Michele on the first day of Hanukkah in 2025.
After Demi’s birthday bash, she sent me a handwritten letter.
“It was a wonderful birthday and having you there was a treat… I want to express my deep appreciation for the educational trip to the morgue as well as the FBI Academy. You shared your life and friends, and I will never forget your kindness. Anyway, enough mushy stuff. All my love, Demi.”