The View from the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

got myself a temporary license.
    When I wended my way into the Rockies, I was the proud possessor of a Colorado temporary driver’s license. It was my only piece of identification. Certainly my bank account was not the sort that rendered you eligible for credit cards. If anything happened to me, some place in Denver was where they would look. What could possibly happen?
    All the way across the country, I made unsuccessful attempts to reach the agent who has been foisted on me by IFA, following the defection (if that is the right word) of Janet Roberts. This fellow had had no use for me and kept ducking my calls. Finally, quite by accident, he picked up his own phone and found me at the other end, haranguing him from a phone booth near the freeway outside Sacramento. The conversation was brief and unpleasant and when I hung up, I was in tears, doubly angry because not only was I getting nowhere in my chosen profession, but I would now be driving into San Francisco, a city about which I’ve heard all my life, too angry and upset to enjoy it.
    Or so I thought. The wonder of San Francisco (when I laid eyes on it two hours later) was so overpowering that by the time I got off the Bay Bridge I’d forgotten the guy’s name. I forgot everything except one of the most beautiful cities I’d ever seen.
    I spent the latter part of July and the first two weeks of August exploring this enchanting place. After lingering almost a month, I didn’t want to leave San Francisco (a) because it was so wonderful and (b) because I was scared to death of where I was heading.
    Nevertheless it was time to face the music, and so I turned south along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. I visited San Simeon, and at the local lun cheonette encountered a fellow traveler, a lady of about forty, who struck up a conversation. She was friendly and intelligent—until I told her I was on my way to Los Angeles to make films—at which point she smiled and said, “Oh, my husband is a film producer. You must look us up when you arrive.”
    Aside from the delusion that her husband was in the movie business (a delusion that, I confess, I expected everyone to harbor, such was my fantasy about Angelenos), Fran Laurence seemed tolerably sane on all other subjects, so I took her address. Who knew? In the end, her husband did turn out to be a genuine film producer (he’d worked with everyone from Judy Garland to Elvis), and the whole family sponsored me with a generosity unparalleled in my experience, greatly changing my perception of Los Angeles, when I reached it. Walter Mirisch was right.
    Meantime I motored uneasily south, only half-registering the fabled wonders of Highway One as my anxiety increased. In Santa Barbara, I checked into a cheap motel. I was now a mere ninety miles from my goal, the dreaded Big Orange, where I didn’t know anyone nor had I any particular prospects. (Unless you counted Fran Laurence’s husband, and I wasn’t.)
    I turned on the motel TV. I watched Tyrone Power and Dean Jagger in Brigham Young . Vincent Price plays John Smith. The Mormons have always interested me, courtesy of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. (I had made it a point, going cross-country, of visiting Salt Lake City.)
    But I was restless. The film exerted an almost nightmarish fascination, the Mormon odyssey mirroring my own uncertain transcontinental meanderings. The movie was making me more uptight, not less.
    Then an odd idea struck me. All the way west I had been reading paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels. On the back of each book it was unaccountably explained that “Ross Macdonald” is the nom de plume of one Kenneth Millar, who lived in—wait for it—Santa Barbara!
    What is the point of having a nom de plume if you’re going to tell everyone your true name and town of residence? The logic, I confess, is beyond me. But just for the hell of it, in my restless humor, I