Chapter 47
WHILE THE PANDEMIC RAGED, I WONDERED WHAT SCARPETTA MIGHT have to say about the world we were living in. I started imagining where she was. I didn’t know, and suddenly it seemed urgent that I find her.
So, I meditated, just like I used to when starting a book about her.
Where are you? What are you doing this very moment?
Show me. She always would (and still does).
I focus on her, and sometimes what materializes in my imagination isn’t an actual scene in the next book.
It’s her state of mind during a private moment.
After I wrote Postmortem, I tried to envision Scarpetta, looking for what might be the hook for a second story.
I kept seeing the same thing. She was in a lawn chair in her mother’s Miami backyard, baking in the sun.
Scarpetta’s eyes were closed, her mother inside the house rattling around. And that was as far as I’d get.
Scarpetta wouldn’t open her eyes or lift a finger, and I was doing my best to fashion a story out of that. Scene after scene I attempted and deleted. Weeks went by as I tried to figure out what she was doing in that damn lawn chair.
Finally, she muttered, “I’m tired.”
After the serial murders in Postmortem, I guess she should have been. Who could blame her?
“Leave me alone,” she added nicely.
So, I did. I gave up on the lawn chair scene and accepted that she would return to the page when she felt like it.
Next thing I knew, I imagined her downstairs inside the morgue cooler, unzipping the body bag of murder victim Beryl Madison.
Then Scarpetta was walking outside as a Ford LTD cruised up, Pete Marino behind the wheel.
Suddenly, I was writing Body of Evidence.
In 2020 while Staci and I were sheltering in place, I tried to envision Scarpetta rather much like CIA operatives engage in remote viewing, a form of ESP. She appeared to me like a scene in a movie. I saw her sitting at an old wrought iron table in a sumptuous garden in Old Town Alexandria.
She was in dirty work clothes, her pocket pruner on her hip, the sun gentle on her face, the metal chair across from her scraping as I pulled it out to sit. I said we hadn’t talked in a while, and the world certainly “has gone to hell in a handbasket.” She had her eyes closed, listening.
“I’m wondering if you’d like to work a case together again,” I ventured.
“Depends on what it is,” she answered, implying that it had better be a good one.
Then she was gone, no doubt busy pruning or planting. Or maybe she was on her way to the next crime scene with Marino at the wheel, the two of them crime-busting without me. I started writing a new Scarpetta story for the first time in five years, and it seemed she was showing up again.
I asked Esther if she thought it possible that I could relaunch the series.
She said yes. But don’t expect miracles.
Publishing houses were merging. There were fewer places to go and more people watching TV and not reading.
The situation wasn’t helped by yet one more failed attempt at making a movie.
After three decades, I was no closer to a dramatic adaptation of my series.
I began Autopsy in 2020, moving Scarpetta back to Virginia, this time outside Washington, D.C.
, in the historic district of Alexandria where she, Benton, and Lucy live on an eighteenth-century estate.
After years of space research at NASA and elsewhere, I had a new bag of scientific tricks, a new fuel load.
Quantum mechanics. Electromagnetic energy.
Artificial intelligence. High-energy weapons. Robots. Drones.
My space thrillers may not have been popular, but the research was life-changing.
I’d fallen in love with rockets, and it’s on my bucket list to go up in one.
What I wouldn’t give for a ride in a spaceplane like the Dream Chaser I piloted in a simulator.
Prior to this I’d not given any thought to life beyond our planet.
I became insatiably curious about alien intelligence, the origin of humans, and began alluding to such things in my most recent novels.
Possibly, humans are descended from Martians who knew their planet was doomed.
A backup plan was necessary for survival of the species.
When SpaceX finally lands people on the Red Planet, I hope I’m still around to see what they find.
If I were that young girl in Montreat again, I’d want to grow up to be an astro-archaeologist and learn to pilot a spaceship.
I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe.
I find that a reassuring thought, hoping that if we’re being visited, we’re respectful and welcoming to our cosmic neighbors.
While Staci and I were on Cape Cod a few years ago, we saw UAPs, as UFOs are called today, these inexplicable translucent orbs dancing in moonlight.
In those early years when I was friendly with Tom Clancy, he often spoke of his work in Hollywood. Based on my experiences with him, I imagine he was collaborative. Perhaps that’s one reason his movies have been so successful.
I’d think about that as Scarpetta continued falling in and out of film options, nothing ever happening.
It reminded me of the Israelites stuck in the desert forty years while trying to reach the Promised Land.
I’d been in the wilderness almost as long when the eventual Scarpetta TV show would begin filming in the fall of 2024.
Not all previous failed attempts have been my fault.
But some of them were. As I look back, I don’t think I was aware of how rigid I could be.
In 1997, I’d spent several days with Helen Mirren, and she stayed with me in my New York apartment.
I wanted her to play the director of ATF in a TV show I was writing for ABC.
Soon enough the conversation shifted to Scarpetta.
We talked about the possibility of Helen in that role.
I worried that her starring in Britain’s huge hit Prime Suspect might be too much like Scarpetta.
How stupid was I? Studio executives wanted an actress in her twenties, and that was even stupider.
I adore Helen Mirren and admire her brilliance.
She would have made a fabulous Scarpetta. She’d make a fabulous anything.
While I was writing the screenplay of From Potter’s Field for Peter Guber at Mandalay Studios, Susan Sarandon became the favored possibility.
I met with her several times in New York and L.A.
One day at lunch she launched in about why Scarpetta shouldn’t kill the psychopath Temple Gault at the end of my novel.
Susan didn’t want that and said she wouldn’t play Scarpetta if it entailed her killing someone.
This was at the time the movie Dead Man Walking had been released, Susan playing a prison ministry nun, both the character and the actress opposed to capital punishment in any form.
Susan suggested that in the screenplay I should have the serial killer Temple Gault commit suicide.
Then Scarpetta wouldn’t have to plunge that knife into his thigh, transecting his femoral artery and causing him to hemorrhage to death.
Didn’t matter that it was self-defense or to save her young niece Lucy’s life.
Scarpetta was to turn the other cheek, and Temple Gault should kill himself. Problem solved.
“Violent psychopaths rarely commit suicide,” I informed Susan.
“I know all about psychopaths.” She dismissed my argument while picking at a salad.
Movies aren’t the same as working in a morgue or spending time with those who investigate violent crimes.
But I didn’t say that to Susan Sarandon.
I was polite even as I thought, No way you’re playing Scarpetta.
That project imploded as had all the others while I wrote draft after draft of scripts nobody wanted.
In 2009, Angelina Jolie was interested in playing the part, and I met her on the set of her movie Salt. We had lunch in her trailer and talked about the eventual script. She said something to me I’ll never forget.
“Just don’t make Scarpetta too earnest.”
I think she was talking about me and not the character.
I was too earnest. My years of research and absorbing tragedies had made me too serious and inflexible.
Because of what happened with Demi Moore, I had a reputation in Hollywood that was unfortunate but earned.
I was considered mercurial and noncollaborative.
This followed me from one option to the next.
I’d sit in on a big meeting with studio executives like Amy Pascal, and someone at the table would allude to how difficult I was.
No matter what, the reputation stuck. But that’s not why a movie never got made.
It always fell apart in the writing stage no matter who the screenwriter was, including me.
During the option with Sony Pictures, Oscar winner Robert Rodat was hired to write a screenplay based on Postmortem.
That attempt went nowhere. In 2004, director Joel Schumacher and I met in New York.
He wanted to make a movie about Scarpetta starring Nicole Kidman.
I was excited and felt hopeful. I’d always been a big fan and she would be perfect.
Early summer I gave Joel and his screenwriter a tour of the Richmond medical examiner’s office, and they showed up in flip-flops.
Not the best thing to wear in the morgue.
The resulting script was another nonstarter, and in 2005 Sony released me early from the option.
I remember producer Casey Silver calling and telling me that.
“Are you saying they don’t want to make this particular picture, or they don’t want Scarpetta at all?” I asked.
“They don’t want Scarpetta at all,” he said as I felt my mood chill, the Promised Land forever out of reach. “Amy Pascal says she doesn’t want to make a big-screen CSI.”