Ali couldn't make it very clear. Jenny is a poor girl of Italian extraction, on scholarship at Radcliffe. She plays the harpsichord and is pretty much uninterested in everything else, Winthrop House jocks in particular. Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye Columbus was rich and cool about it, but here Oliver is the rich one-only not cool. Poor Oliver is absolutely taken with Jenny, and, eventually, she with him. The love story is happy this time (after the requisite trials and tribulations). You know this from the very beginning, because the body of the film is a flashback in husband Oliver's mind relating how they fell in love and lived happily married... But you also know that it's going to end sadly because these memories are provoked when a doctor tells him that his wife is going to die of leukemia.
"But are you sure you don't want to borrow some pants?" Ali asked. "You look so cold, y'know." I'd been sitting there getting colder, so this time I said yes.
We went out to her dressing room, a little cubbyhole in a trailer parked outside the building. The curtain over the tiny window had a note safety-pinned to it: "Liza Minelli-Junie Moon." Ali found me a pair of bellbottoms. (They were a size 8.)
As the rummaged in the drawer she talked about Arthur Hiller. "I don't really know what he's like as a director: all we've done is rehearsals. But he's about the funniest man I know. He's always joking. He's more easy-going than Larry Peerce [who directed Goodbye Columbus]. Not that-it's just that Arthur never gets flustered. I honestly don't know what the film will be like, though."
I Am Fed
It was lunchtime, and I went off to eat with the other extras. We had box lunches-two hot knockwursts wrapped in silver foil the first day, pius potato salad and a dessert and so forth (they were quite inedible). We complained so much that the next day they gave us fairly decent sandwiches. We had to eat their food because there was no time to go anywhere else.
The three days that I was there-and each one lasted longer as the crew tried to keep to its daily schedule-I felt cut off from the rest of the world. There was nothing to do expect read, talk to other people, or go to the bath-rooms to warm up.
The coffee machines ran all day, and in the afternoons two of them were converted to a strange sort of tomato bullion which, however, didn't give you the jumpy feeling that you go after eight cups of coffee. Drinking these wonderful hot liquids was the only way to stay alive.
On Saturday, then, the third evening, when they finally let us out at ten o'clock, I felt aimless knowing I wasn't coming back-and also that if I did, the rink would be empty.