well not really… though I told every grinning green Catholic soul at my school I did that and more
I did smell the wine on her breath and watch her trip into the trailer her gown hitting the floor before she closed the door her body as white as the fake snow spitting onto the set, and as cold perhaps
I was sixteen and she was fifty one this was my one and only, her last, flick, not fling, though I would have cut off an arm for it to have been so not the arm she touched in our one immortal scene together… her electric hand, all the blond hairs on my forearm standing at attention me wondering if the camera caught their helpless vertical veer
it mattered not, most of the scene landed not on the screen, but the cutting room floor, my two lines slashed to one my 48 seconds with her shaved to 22
I did not cry when I heard she died, twenty months later, but my lie seemed soiled once she was in the ground I confessed to Father Ryan he was silent when I asked what to tell the fools who believed the dying star lay with me simply because she said, “Call me Vivien, not Ms Leigh”