Perkins got a taste of Franklin’s smooth touch right away. He asked abruptly, “How did you get on with McDougall?”
Franklin smiled. “I never minded him. Charlie was unhappy with him, but I never had any trouble. McDougall’s a difficult man—wasa difficult man—in many ways, but I think very talented. Whenever we discussed scene changes, he seemed to be well attuned to what I wanted.”
In a rough translation, that meant that the writer did what the director asked for, and so the director liked him.
“How did you get on with him personally?”
“Well, that’s a strange area,” Franklin said. “Any film is first a writer’s project. Then suddenly it’s taken away from him, and it becomes a director’s project. There’s a changing of the guard, a transfer of power. Many writers resent it. And McDougall did too. At least somewhat. But I am quite comfortable with the idea that at a certain point, the film is mine, not his. So I had no trouble with him.”
“Did you like him?”
“I respected his talent.”
Perkins blinked. It was as much of a reaction as I’d ever seen from him. “That wasn’t exactly what I asked.”
“I feel,” Franklin said, “that creative people ought to be permitted their idiosyncrasies.” He smiled. “I certainly feel I should be permitted mine.”
You see what I mean? Franklin is really smooth.
Perkins said, “Did you ever argue?”
“Rarely. On occasion, I argue with members of a production company, but I find arguments are usually not useful.”
“How do you suppose he came to be murdered?” Perkins asked.
Franklin, still cool, said, “I wasn’t aware he was murdered.”
“You still think it was an accident?”
“I think,” Franklin said, “that he was both consciously and unconsciously self-destructive.”
Perkins moved further into the room and got that concentrating look on his face. I was pleased. I could tell he’d finally met his match. “In what ways was he self-destructive?”
“Art McDougall was an oral-dependent, passive-aggressive narcissistic type. He wanted desperately to be liked. He also felt inadequate, which is why he affected the tweed jackets and the pipes and the other writer’s props. He wasn’t really that sort of person at all.”
“Go on.”
“Well, whenever somebody seemed to like him, he would test that affection by doing outrageous things. Many people mistook this behavior for something else—like hostility. He was continuously seeking friendship and continuously mistrusting it when he found it. So he would do something unpleasant, just to see if his friends would stick by him through it. You follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Franklin continued, “that personality type runs the risk of engendering considerable ill will in the course of getting reassurance. And McDougall had plenty of ill will.”
“You said consciously and unconsciously self-destructive...”
“Well,” Franklin said, “that personality type directs the same impulses to himself. He is testing because, on the most profound level, he feels unworthy of affection. On the deepest level, he hates himself and wants to get rid of himself. Art was always doing mildly self-destructive things. He drank too much. He took too many drugs. He alienated people. He told lots of self-destructive stories, like the time he fell asleep while working and a cigarette caught his pages on fire and ruined a month of work.”
“Here?”
“No, this was in Los Angeles, where he lived, as I recall.”
“So you think his death was unconscious suicide?”
“I assume,” Franklin said, “unless there’s evidence to the contrary.”
“Did you know the room was wiped of fingerprints?”
Franklin laughed. “That sounds so melodramatic, it belongs in a movie. Who told you that?”
