Saving Persephone
Short-Story Part I. Pitching a Screenplay
Forgive me, Mother, that I came through night
Not maiden-white, as once I went away,
But laureled with ash and robed in starless light,
With winter set upon my brows forever to stay.
Forgive me that the flowers knew me changed,
That violets darkened where I touched the plain;
Forgive me that your daughter was estranged
In shrouded halls, where grief taught grief its name.
Forgive me that I wear the night so well,
As queens must wear the doom that gives them fame;
Forgive me that I found beneath your hell
A throne of iron and a crown of flame.
Forgive me, Hades, warder of the deep,
That I was never wholly what I seemed;
You thought the dark had lulled my soul to sleep,
Yet in your grasp I watched and dreamed.
Forgive me that I knelt beside you,
And let you deem my silence born of chains;
I took the seed you gave to make me known,
And made it sovereign fire within my veins.
Forgive me, Zeus, high-seated above the clouds,
For showing what Olympian laws conceal:
That gods may name a bargain just and proud
When daughters are the coin beneath the seal.
Forgive me that I lived to bear the tale,
That what was done in darkness came to light;
The thunder strikes for order, stern and pale,
But I returned and gave the wound its greater right.
Forgive me, fields, for what the seed has bound,
For every furrow locked in frost-bound sleep;
Forgive me, hearths, where hunger walks the ground,
And mothers count the grain they meant to keep.
Forgive me, mortals, for the frost I bring,
Though frost was never mine alone to make;
I ate one seed, and sorrow swallowed spring,
And all the waking world was made to ache.
Forgive me, forgive me, when the summer wanes,
When gold lies dim on field and orchard bough;
When hard-hewn earth beneath the ploughshare strains,
And seed lies deadened in the dearth below.
Then still they speak my name as though the curse
Were born from me, and not from Zeus or Hades,
sitting on their thrones: That woman—dark Persephone of earth—
Whose wickedness made the barren fields her own.1
Summer 1979 - Burbank
Mara was driving down the freeway in a 1935 Duesenberg chugging along with the top down. Sleek, fine, a mighty fine brute. The car had belonged to some B-lister; he croaked prematurely in Palm Springs with a grapefruit spoon in his right hand and an unfinished screenplay strewn across the kitchen table, page 47 soaked in grapefruit juice. They blamed the death on the benzedrine-cocaine cocktail, of course, but it was the damn grapefruit that ruined everything and destroyed the ending. Bad show all around. Too much citrus, she thought. We’re injecting acid and plastic, dissolving and preserving ourselves, in alternating fashion until we died too shiny and sour for the worms to tamper with.
Barry Klein, an exec, knew everyone’s business in town. He knew of the unfinished screenplay, he even knew that Mara was of the mind to adapt it for the studio. Finish what the B-lister started, which made her a B-lister-finisher and in the prime spot on the C-list, which was as good a spot as any considering she was living on the streets, peddling pieces of herself for less than prime for men who could get it cheap all over. Hot Stuff by Donna Summer2 was playing on the radio, pulsating through the chrome and the LA heat, picking up frequency through the electrified smog. Summer of 1979 when the palm trees looked especially leggy and indifferent. She arrived at the studio all wound up.
“Barry, can we have a chat?”
“No, no, no. I said no. When are you going to get it through your head? Stick to the commercials, we ain’t got the budget for this film. There is no itch for it. Especially a film written by a cocaine addict, dead, and a woman to boot. They just won’t go for it. Throw some pennies on its eyes and call it finito.” Barry slapped the back of his right hand into his left palm a few times, sealing the matter with sharp little cracks. He also had not looked up once from his desk, his balding head shining under the fluorescent light.
“But Barry, give me two minutes…I won’t waste your time. Give it a chance, you ain’t even got to read it all. Just let me give you a teaser.”
“The teaser.” He looked up then, amused. “Listen to her. The teaser. Since when do you talk like that?”
“Since I started talking to no-brained men, who don’t pay any mind unless it’s shiny.”
“Alright, listen. Come here and sit on my lap if you’re going to give me a little teaser. But be quick. I’ve got lunch with Paramount and they are a prissy bunch.”
“Watch it, Barry. I’ve got a switchblade. I mean it. You give me five minutes, and I’ll give you the pitch or you get nothing. No more commercials. You can find another broad to do it for you.”
“Whatcha doin’ with a switchblade, for?” Barry looked nervous, but chuckled to lighten the mood. He found the “edge of a woman” and recoiled, but Mara stood defiant.
“Alright, alright.” Barry held up both hands. “Don’t go fussing around and threatening people. It’s not a good look, alright? Sit down your majesty. Your time starts now.”
“The story of Persephone and Hades,3” Mara started.
“Yeah, what’s that about?” Barry frowned.
“You’re going to shut up and let me talk through this without any more interruptions, got it?”
“I’m all ears, milady.” Barry reclined in his leather chair, threw his feet up on the desk, and lit a cigarette.
“It’s an old story. Like old-old. Persephone is a Faye Dunaway type, very pretty and innocent out in the field picking flowers.”
“Sure, sure, but are we talking actual field or backlot field? Because actual field means bugs, weather, all that. I’m already seeing dollar signs and absolutely no Faye Dunaway.”
“Fine whatever. She’s in a field, but not a pretty field. It should feel almost obscene how alive everything is. I don’t want to see this in Stage 12 with fake flowers and that poor bastard from effects standing by. Real flowers, heat, bees a-buzzing, girls a-hollering, she is sweating a little, all that ripe business. She then bends down to pick a Narcissus.”
“You want us to get the bees in a specific location? Do they get their own trailer?,” Barry snickered.
“Concentrate, will ya!”
“Hold it.” Barry lifted one hand. “Narcissus…like the guy who loved himself? I’ve got a no-name nobody, a theatre buck, a guy named Richard Gere who I want to put in front of the camera…” Barry stopped mid-sentence, having caught sight of himself in the mirror to his left. For a moment, business paused while he restored order to three thin strands left on his head, smoothing it back with heavily ringed fingers.
“Narcissus like the flower.”
“Can we make it simpler? A rose maybe. Audiences know roses…worked for Sergio Leone.”
“The flower matters, Barry, it can’t be changed.”
“Fine, just fine.” He continued to take languid puffs on his cigarette.
“Then the ground opens.”
“Can we do the ground opening cheap?”
“Don’t know, Barry.”
“Can we shoot around the ground opening?”
“No. Say, Barry, you coked up or something?”
“No.”
“Then cool it. Let me finish, this is important. Now, I want you to shut your eyes and imagine it. Just really imagine it.”
Barry shut his eyes deeply and smiled. “Go on.” Mara drew herself up, as if the fluorescent-lit room had become a stage; her only stage, in fact.
“So she reaches for it, that’s all, she reaches, one hand, one bare little hand, and it’s nothing, Barry, it’s your daughter reaching for a balloon at the fair.” Barry opened one eye and grumbled something under his breath.
“It’s some girl on Sunset reaching for the radio knob because the right song came on and suddenly the whole of everything feels arranged in her favor, that’s a woman reaching for anything bright because life has been so lousy and so hot and so crowded with men and their opinions and their little offices and their big ideas, and for one second she thinks beauty has appeared, that the flower is only a flower, that the world has set something lovely before her and does not mean to do anything else for it.”
Mara took a deep breath, “And then the earth opens as if she were sitting on the San Andreas fault. The whole earth, Barry. Split clean open. How could they not save Persephone? Anyway, this is pretty much a Julie Andrew’s number.
“Yep, yep, clean open. Julie Andrews…”
Mara saw Barry dozing. “Jesus Christ! Keep your eyes open then.” Barry snapped to.
“Hades is waiting. Hades, who has already talked to Zeus, because they are brothers colluding. And Zeus, high up there with his thunder and his beard and his big executive cloud, says yes, take the child, what is she to me?”
Mara’s voice began to gather speed.
“And out comes Hades with his deathless horses, up from beneath the chasm. He comes up in his chariot, very grand, very dark and he seizes her. That is the word. Seizes. Takes. Carries off.” Mara throws her hands up in the air. “The meadow was all along a mouth with these large jagged teeth.”
“She cries out. She calls for her father, which is nearly more than I can bear, because she still believes her father will save her, but he does not. Imagine being that young, Barry. Imagine supposing someone has your interest at heart and then doesn’t save you. And only Hecate hears her from her cave, and also could do nothing. She is powerless.”
Mara had a crazed look in her eyes now. “And Demeter knows, they always know. She takes up torches then, the great grain-mother, she who gives wheat to kings and crusts to beggars and bread to every man who has ever buttered it with absolutely no respect, and she goes across the world crying for her child. Through valleys, through cities, by wells, by roads, over the wide mortal lands she goes, asking all what became of Persephone. And the gods, Barry, the gods lower their eyes and they wait…for nothing. Those all-knowing all-powerful gods, choose to do nothing! The audacity!”
“Demeter stops the whole damn thing. No wheat, no barley, now cut to the fields, Barry. Dead and flat, just awful. Think out in the desert. Men wandering around looking tragic because suddenly there’s no bread and they’re hungry.”
“And now Olympus cares. Of course now they care. The girl screaming was one thing, but no smoke from the altars? No offerings? No roasted bits going up to the gods on Mt. Olympus? Catastrophe! So Zeus sends Iris, then everybody else, all of them coming down with honors and gifts and big speeches, and Demeter won’t have it. Just not having it, she is a mother scorned and all that. She’s sitting there like, no, bring me my daughter or enjoy the dirt you filthy scums.”
Mara paced, then stopped, seeing the scene.
“That’s good, actually. We stage her very still. Everyone else is pleading, fluttering about, and Demeter barely moves. The lighting, hrmm….”
Barry murmured, “Mmm.”
“Then Hermes goes down. Messenger boy, we don’t cheap out here. He goes to the underworld.”
She leaned over the desk.
“And there she is. Persephone sitting beside Hades. She ain’t dead, but she don’t seem all right either. That’s important. Yes, yes. She’s changed, but she’s watching. Don’t have her weeping all over….sets up the drama right, you know that thing that actress what’s her name with the eyes?”
Barry gave a soft murmur.
“Hades knows he has to let her go, so he gives her the pomegranate. One seed, maybe a few, depends who’s telling it, but visually we only need one. Yesssss, that’s the shot, we zoom in on it.”
Mara swallowed. unsure of herself all of a sudden. “And then they make the bargain. She can go back, but not all the way. Some of the year above, some below. Very reasonable. Men love a compromise after they’ve ruined your life. So when she comes up, Demeter lets the fields live. When she goes down, everything dims again. That’s how they explain winter. That’s how the world goes dark for part of the year, it was all her fault.”
“And I think,” Mara said, softer now, realizing she was going to say something against custom, “I think maybe that is what the picture is. Maybe we give her another ending. Not a very happy one, audiences like a little tension now and then, Barry, nobody believes happy endings anyway. But an ending where she knows what has happened to her and then she returns to take her vengeance and rise, never to return to Hades…like an escape.”
She laughed once, but her eyes had gone wet. “I’m not asking we undo the story. But give the girl the last shot and then it’s summer forever. Smog-gold, hot, hot summer.”
Mara was breathing hard, almost embarrassed by going on so long. She looked over. Barry was asleep at his desk with his mouth open.“Barry, wake up! You’re going to miss your lunch.” She lurched forward and shook his shoulders.
“Yeah, alright! I’ve listened to you for five minutes, now scram. I’ll deal with you later.”
“Forgive me for wasting your time.” Mara grabbed the screenplay and her purse with some urgency and fled the building. She wanted to cry. No one took her seriously here.
Next Up: Saving Persephone, Part II. The Hollywood Roosevelt
Previous Posts:
The hold that you have on me Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hot Stuff by Donna Summer. Mom, to the baddest LA IT girl, this one’s for you.
This story draws chiefly on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, especially the version in which Persephone gathers flowers, reaches for the narcissus, is carried off by Hades with Zeus’s sanction, Demeter searches for her with torches, Hermes is sent below (although I made some small adjustments with Iris), and the pomegranate seed binds Persephone to a divided return. Mara’s retelling (hopefully) matches that version as much as possible.
That "no name" Richard Gere would get his big break in American Gigolo. Highly recommended.
Great piece, Joanna. ✨
Benzedrine-cocaine cocktail with grapefruit 😀. Grapefruit amplifiies drug effects by blocking drug metabolism so it adds up. I like how the poem is the preface to the short story.