Conversations in the Raw by Rex Reed

Author:Rex Reed [Reed, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780988232273
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Jean Seberg

Baker, Ore.

This summer they’ll pour into Paris again, eager tourists and American college boys with slickum on their hair, and the first thing they’ll do is head straight for the Rue Scribe, hoping to see Jean Seberg selling the Herald Tribune in front of the American Express. But all they’ll see is Norwegian beatniks with dirty feet. The real Jean Seberg is alive and well and living with a handful of Chinese poker players, 300 extras, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, a 250-man crew, Alan Jay Lerner, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, a man who bought Laguna Beach for $2.80 and is now being sued for $13 million by the state of California, 250 head of horses from Nevada, 30 water oxen from New England, a bear from Honolulu, an ex-member of the Green Berets, 150 hippies, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “I’m back,” she smiles, “and I don’t find America very different. Only decadent. When you start bottling peanut butter and jelly in the same jar, that’s decadence.”

The golden sunflower girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, who was a star at 18 and an unemployable has-been at 20, is very much back indeed. She’s living in the wilderness of Oregon as the star (Winning out over 18,000 girls— how’s that for a has-been) of Paint Your Wagon, a Technicolor super-extravaganza $14-million musical directed by Joshua Logan. The location is unbelievable. A sleepy little town near the Powder River (population 9,986) was the stagecoach center during the Oregon early Gold Rush. It is surrounded by ghost towns and porcupines and in the morning hours on her way to the helicopter which flies her to work Jean sees real cowboys get thrown out of real saloons for drinking too much beer for breakfast. There are few diversions and no restaurants. “La Grenouille” the actors tell the Teamsters who drive their cars to dinner; then they all meet at the A & W Root Beer Stand. Roughing it is what it’s called. But somehow, they survive. Alan Jay Lerner jumps elegantly into a private Lear jet and heads down to Hollywood to score new songs for the film with Andre Previn and confer with Katharine Hepburn on Coco. Clint Eastwood rides over the hills on a motorcycle to a ranch where he rises each morning at six to slop the hogs. Joshua Logan takes off his mud boots at night and watches old movies flown in from Los Angeles. And Jean survives because . . . well, because she’s Jean Seberg, for whom the experience is just one more sugary question mark in a career full of unpunctuated sentences.

Elegant and golden as a buttery iceberg, she puts on a Ray Charles record and moves into the kitchen of her little rented green clapboard house to bake a pumpkin pie. “I tried to bake one in Paris once, but I couldn’t find any pumpkin.” She glides through the room like a swan, dressed in pink, munching corn chips, with skin white as winter and blue-gray eyes the color of Park Avenue at dawn.

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