I just stood there and waited for her to tell me to read somebody.
“You’re impossible, standing there waiting.” She thought a second. “All right. Try Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
“Hugo,” I said. “Hunchback. Thank you,” and I turned, ready to begin my sprint to the library. I heard her words sighed behind me as I moved.
“This can’t last. It just can’t last.”
But it did.
And it has. I am as devoted to adventure now as then, and that’s never going to stop. That first book of mine I mentioned, The Temple of Gold—do you know where the title comes from? From the movie Gunga Din, which I’ve seen sixteen times and I still think is the greatest adventure movie ever ever ever made. (True story about Gunga Din: when I got discharged from the Army, I made a vow never to go back on an Army post. No big deal, just a simple lifelong vow. Okay, now I’m home the day after I get out and I’ve got a buddy at Fort Sheridan nearby and I call to check in and he says, “Hey, guess what’s on post tonight? Gunga Din.” “We’ll go,” I said. “It’s tricky,” he said; “you’re a civilian.” Upshot: I got back into uniform the first night I was out and snuck onto an Army post to see that movie. Snuck back. A thief in the night. Heart pounding, the sweats, everything.) I’m addicted to action/adventure/call-it-what-you-will, in any way, shape, etc. I never missed an Alan Ladd picture, an Errol Flynn picture. I still don’t miss John Wayne pictures.
My whole life really began with my father reading me the Morgenstern when I was ten. Fact: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, no question, the most popular thing I’ve ever been connected with. When I die, if the Times gives me an obit, it’s going to be because of Butch. Okay, now what’s the scene everybody talks about, the single moment that stays fresh for you and me and the masses? Answer: the jump off the cliff. Well, when I wrote that, I remember thinking that those cliffs they were jumping off, those were the Cliffs of Insanity that everybody tries to climb in The Princess Bride. In my mind, when I wrote Butch, I was thinking back further into my mind, remembering my father reading the rope climb up the Cliffs of Insanity and the death that was lurking right behind.
That book was the single best thing that happened to me (sorry about that, Helen; Helen is my wife, the hot-shot child psychiatrist), and long before I was even married, I knew I was going to share it with my son. I knew I was going to have a son too. So when Jason was born (if he’d been a girl, he would have been Pamby; can you believe that, a woman child psychiatrist who would give her kids such names?)—anyway, when Jason was born, I made a mental note to buy him a copy of The Princess Bride for his tenth birthday.
After which I promptly forgot all about it.
Flash forward: the Beverly Hills Hotel last December. I am going mad having meetings on Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, which I am adapting for the Silver Screen. I call my wife in New York at dinnertime, which I always do—it makes her feel wanted—and we’re talking and at the close she says, “Oh. We’re giving Jason a ten-speed bike. I bought it today. I thought that was fitting, don’t you?”
“Why fitting?”
“Oh come on, Willy, ten years, ten speeds.”
“Is he ten tomorrow? It went clean outta my head.”
“Call us at suppertime tomorrow and you can wish him a happy.”
“Helen?” I said then. “Listen, do me something. Buzz the Nine-nine-nine bookshop and have them send over The Princess Bride.”
“Lemme get a pencil,” and she’s gone a while. “Okay. Shoot. The what bride?”
