Here is what happens in this article: I meet with Michelle Williams on three days in two different cities over a bit more than a week. Much does not go as either of us expects. On the first day, we mainly talk about her youth, and I make her cry. On the second, we mainly talk about her becoming Marilyn Monroe. This is the only dry-eyed meeting. (Unless—quite possible—I was too insensitive to notice.) On the third, we mainly talk about her life with, and without, Heath Ledger. At the end of the third day, we walk around a park in the dark. At the end of the second day, we tidy up the leftovers of her daughter's birthday cupcakes. At the end of the first day, she leaves in tears, her parting words: "That was really awful."
That's about all. There's also a moment at the very end of the article that could be taken as an atmospheric, ambivalent allegory about the chasing of dreams, but is probably just a brief account of a long hike. The rest is taken up with all that kind of stuff that people sometimes say when they're asked enough questions. If any of it breaks your heart, it was probably already a little broken to begin with.
On that first day, we meet at the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles. This extensive residential compound is a legendary staging post for aspiring actors—indeed for anyone trying to get a foothold in the city. It is also where Michelle Williams used to stay in her early teens, long before Dawson's Creek, let alone her subsequent stealthy rise through an interesting mess of movies, whose inevitable misfires never seemed to be hers, until she emerged as one of the great unshowy talents of her generation. Meeting here was my suggestion. No great reason. In everything I'd read about her, this was the only place in Los Angeles that seemed even slightly significant. (She's lived in Brooklyn for many years.) Though she phones me when she's on her way, wondering if we should change the plan because it's raining and she is wearing thin ballet-style shoes, I'm already there and can't think of an easy alternative. When she arrives—it's just after nine in the morning—she leaves her car (she has a driver), climbs into mine, and I slowly drive round the apartment's parking lot while we work out what to do.
"This is crazy," she says. "Why did I agree to this?"
She tells me that she hasn't been back here for fifteen years. When she first decided that she wanted to be an actress, at the age of 11 or 12, her parents would drive her up from their San Diego home to Los Angeles for auditions and, eventually, for jobs. By 15 she would become legally emancipated and have her own apartment in the Valley, but before that she'd stay here off and on, usually with her mother. "Such a strange place to revisit," she says.
I park and we take shelter from the rain in a covered outdoor stairway. Williams can't even quite recall which apartment was once hers, but some memories begin to trickle back. First, the decor. "I remember there was a lot of teal and pink," she says. Then the inhabitants. "I wonder if the people I remember still live here." She pulls a name from her memory. "Devin Oatway. I kind of want to go to the front desk and ask if his parents are still here." She won't, of course. "Oh, I had such a crush on him," she says. "He gave me Thus Spake Zarathustra."
So, even then, she was the kind of girl whose pulse privately quickened for Nietzsche? It's sensible to be wary of such details, and wonder whether they're just a typical affectation of a young actor straining for seriousness, but for Williams it all seems to come from somewhere inside her that was established early and deeply. "My dad gave me Notes from the Underground when I was 12," she explains, and here and now, sitting on a step of the building where she used to read such books, she quietly recites to me the opening of Dostoevsky's nihilistic landmark: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man...."
Clearly, I observe, she was quite drawn toward the dark.
"I was, yeah. Aren't most teenagers?"
No, I say. Lots, but not most. Otherwise there'd be no sports.
She considers this, agrees that it might be true. "Maybe when I was in my early twenties and my late teens, I was more prone to sitting in it or lacerating myself with it," she says. "Now I want to move out of it. I have a daughter. I want a happy life."
She is discussing her education, and how she ended up being home-schooled and doing correspondence courses—a better fit with her acting work, and a way to sidestep the unwanted bother she'd begun to face at school. "There's plenty of opportunities to tease someone who's been in a Lassie movie." Her last formal school was Santa Fe Christian in San Diego; later its principal would denounce Williams after she appeared in Brokeback Mountain. ("Michelle doesn't represent the values of this institution," he said. "She made the kinds of choices of which we wouldn't approve.") "It didn't really bother me," she says, when I allude to this.
No twinge, I ask, when you suddenly found out that you'd been living a sinful, artistic career?
"It wasn't any surprise to me," she says. "I knew. I remember my mother saying to me at one point, 'Just don't make anything your grandmother couldn't see.' And at that point I knew I was living a sinful artistic career, because I had done, and I knew I would do."
So I ask her what the first thing was that really stepped over that line, and that's when she starts telling me about this New York play. It was called Killer Joe. In it, there was copious violence and rough, raw emotion, within which, each night, she was required to take off all her clothes. She was 18 and on break from Dawson's Creek. That summer she'd had two offers—to make a lot of money in a film about cheerleaders with guns, or to make next to nothing and face the discomforts of Killer Joe. For a girl determined to prove which path she was on, it was an easy decision. "That play, I see it as a direct link from there to where I am now."
And that's when I ask the first question that seems to derail her. When I say it, I have no idea that it'll be a big deal. It's not even really a question—I just mention something she said in one of her early interviews: that after her parents came to see the play, she had to go and find a therapist.
But when I say this, she looks at me in the way you look when you're sort of shocked and hurt and feel invaded; when you're determined to show none of this but know it will be a losing battle.
"Oh God," she says. "Wow. I mean, I must have said that twelve years ago, before I learned to shut my mouth. Wow." Then, less to me than to herself: "All right, I can take it. I'm 31—I can take it."
Hesitantly, she agrees to fill in a few details. "They weren't fans of that play. It was like [an] alien invasion or something in our normal lives where there weren't artists—they hadn't seen anything like it." To make it worse, her parents didn't even tell her they were coming—she didn't know they were there until they surprised her afterward, backstage. "I think I was having a beer. I haven't asked them about that for a long time. We don't bring that one up."
When Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents at 15, she didn't do so because of any family schism, but for the independence and the practical advantages—she says she no longer needed a tutor and could work adult hours. When I suggest that it was pretty ambitious and self-contained to think she could handle it, she agrees. "It was just stupid. I didn't know what I was taking on," she says. "I don't think things through very often—I don't project into the future about how a situation will turn out. Even the simplest things, I'm guilty of making really bad decisions a lot of the time. In my work it's a capacity that's served me well, but in my life it can be a problem."
She describes being "a 15-year-old making a house as best as she could. I had an egg crate for a mattress. It's hard to tuck your sheets under an egg crate." It was, she says, "very, very lonely." She also refers to "just being around not-great people"; there were clearly experiences difficult enough that she would prefer to keep the details to herself.
Do you feel angry about anything that happened then?
"Not as much anymore. There's a lot of distance now. Fifteen years of distance. Since I left this time period, living in Los Angeles, I haven't felt like anybody's prey."
Do you think whatever happened was your fault or other people's fault?
"My opinion of that has changed over the years. I don't know—do kids have culpability?"
When she talks about her life, Williams can make it sound as though, beneath a fragile veneer of confidence, she has spent a long time flailing to catch on to the kind of everyday knowledge that she felt everyone else just seemed to know. When I refer to something she once said about how, living in Wilmington, North Carolina, for Dawson's Creek, she would sometimes just order two pizzas at once—one for dinner and one for breakfast—she nods. "I didn't know how to keep myself warm in the winter or cool in the summer. It felt like somebody was withholding all the secrets—how to take care of yourself and where to get the things that would help you take care of yourself. I just literally didn't know where to go. I was too shy to ask for help or to admit that I was cold or that I was uncomfortable or that I didn't know what I was doing. Look, I didn't know what I was doing at so many points in my life that I felt that if I had stopped and admitted that I didn't know what I was doing then I would be really lost, and the best thing to do was to just keep forging and to act like you were okay." When she was in New York for Killer Joe she would carry a map with her, but when anyone else was around she kept it hidden away. She would rather walk block after block in the wrong direction than be seen consulting the map.
"I didn't want anybody to know," she says, "that I didn't know where I was going."
After an hour or so in the stairwell, we get back into my car. Williams remembers that when she lived here she used to have her own car, a '65 Mustang that she would drive, as she puts it, "not totally legally." She was never caught. "I would take a lot of drives through the hills. I liked grocery shopping at night."
As we pull away from her old home, she says that she never could have come here a few years ago. When she told a friend about this plan last night, her friend told her she was crazy. "She has heard the stories," says Williams. "The ones I didn't tell." Williams is still wondering why she said yes. "I guess I must have been curious about it, too. I guess I really do just feel lucky that I got out. Everybody that was there, we were all trying to do the same thing."
Williams and I next go to the kind of place where the lucky few who check out in triumph from the Oakwood apartments end up, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and sit in the dining room for a quick final few minutes while she eats some tortilla soup to fortify herself before she appears on Ellen. Figuring that there's no time to get into some of the more difficult and involved subjects I hope we'll discuss, I inquire about her early days growing up in Montana. Her father has clearly lived a colorful life—at various times an investment guru, an explorer (he claimed to have found the true site of Mount Sinai), and a failed Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Montana. He and Williams's mother divorced when Michelle was 24. With her mother she remains close. With her father, less so. "We're not in contact at the moment," she'll tell me, "but maybe that will change." When she was young, it was different. "He taught me how to fish. He taught me how to shoot clay pigeons. He bought me the lightest running shoes. He is certainly where I inherited my independent streak from. He put books in my hands."
Somehow, in the last few minutes, as she prepares to leave, all the awkwardnesses she has been feeling seem to coalesce. It seems partly to be a discomfort in talking about her parents, and partly that she feels ambushed by being reminded of things she said years ago and which otherwise seem to have been forgotten about, and partly the lingering effects of our earlier expedition to a reminder of a difficult adolescence. Whatever the exact cause, I first notice that she is chewing the tulip-motif scarf round her neck, and then I realize that she is crying. "Boy, I get to do Ellen now..." she mutters. "I can't wait...I'm in a fantastic mood...oh, what did I get myself into?..." She talks through her tears: "I wasn't expecting this. I thought I'd gotten so good at this recently. I'm like, 'Ah, I can do this.' Goddammit, I thought I'd gotten better at it. I'm not leaving because I'm crying...there are people waiting. But it feels like a terrible ending." That's when she says, "That was really awful," and she is sort of laughing, too, though less the way you laugh at something you find funny and more the way you laugh at something whose awkwardness is so huge as to seem absurd. It would be a bad way for any interview to end. This one perhaps more so, because I'm pretty sure we're both thinking about how much remains that hasn't yet even been mentioned.
On Ellen she talks about her daughter Matilda's new dog, Lucky, and bashfully accepts compliments about what a wonderful actress she is. We meet again the following week in a suburb of Detroit. Williams has been based here for months, filming Disney's Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi (a movie that will not be released until 2013). She says she took the part "to make a movie for Matilda, to make something she could see." She plays Glinda the Good Witch and for now Matilda truly believes that her mother can fly. Matilda turned 6 yesterday, and Williams arrives bearing leftover cupcakes from the party. (I bite into the whole cupcake; she cuts hers into quarters first. "That's what you do when you have a kid. That's a mommy move.") We sit in the corner of an empty hotel dining area, just us and the Muzak. (About half an hour after it's played, we discover that the song we've both noticed was a version of Patrick Swayze's "She's Like the Wind," which may betray something odd about both of us. "I wasn't going to say anything," she says.)
Cupcakes...Patrick Swayze...flying witches...it feels like, without acknowledging it, we're both trying to make sure that this conversation doesn't pick up where the last one ended. It seems a wise time to talk about My Week with Marilyn.
What is so impressive about Williams's performance as Marilyn Monroe is everything that it is not. Every legendary aspect of Monroe's that you'd expect is in there somewhere—the vulnerability, the flirtatiousness, the slapstick, the desperation, the oozing sexuality, the wounded fragility, the chronic insecurity—but rather than being overtly played, these are hidden away where they should be, inside a character who Williams manages the near impossible feat of convincing us might once have been an actual human being. The best advice she got before filming began, advice clearly taken, came after she had approached Philip Seymour Hoffmann (whom she had appeared with in Synecdoche, New York) and told him, "I've committed to this awful thing of playing Marilyn Monroe." "His advice," she says, "was: 'If there's even a whiff of the icon, things get much less interesting.'"
Still, anyone who has followed Michelle Williams's career could have sensibly raised a quizzical eyebrow at the news that she had taken this role in the first place. In her first TV appearance, on Baywatch, Williams was a bikini-clad teen jogging along the beach, an object of desire for the son of David Hasselhoff's character. It suggested a path that her subsequent career didn't follow. Inasmuch as the role that first made her famous—the Dawson's Creek bad girl Jen—still somewhat played into regular sexy-girl stereotypes, that only made her swerve in the opposite direction with all the more resolve.
"I wouldn't say that that would be one of my first qualities as a human being—being sexy," Williams reasons. "And I think because my character on Dawson's Creek was sexy...sexualized...sexual...I saw all the negative attention and connotations that can come along with that. And that those things can keep people from seeing you clearly."
It's notable that in the movie roles Williams took in the Dawson's Creek era, she monopolized the dumpy-sister and dumpy-friend roles. "I really wanted to do that," she says. "When you play sexy you're kind of playing just for men. That is something you have to police and turn it on its head." A path, it seemed, was set. "I mean, sexuality has been a part of my work, obviously...Blue Valentine...but it's never been sexy, it hasn't been beautiful."
Recently she realized that her evasive maneuvers might have been too successful. "It's funny spending your twenties running away from it, and then you hit your thirties...wait a second! Come back! I want that time back when I didn't appreciate what I had! That kind of ripe sexuality, when you hit your thirties you feel more in possession of it, you feel it's not something that can be sort of taken away from you and reassembled."
That is one reason why she threw herself into the challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe. It was only after she read the script for My Week with Marilyn that she remembered the poster. In her teenage bedroom in San Diego she had an Edward Hopper print, and a collage of people's eyes cut out from magazines, and a board on which she'd pin up pages ripped from books and treasured quotations like Walt Whitman's "I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines." Her friends may have had pictures of the latest teen heartthrobs: "For me it was Montgomery Clift. Him and James Dean." But one day when she was about 12, shopping with her mother at the mall, Williams saw a photo in the poster shop. It wasn't the beginning of some kind of fixation: "In the years that passed, I didn't develop into a rabid Marilyn Monroe fan, I didn't see all her movies, I didn't read about her." But she had to have that picture.
"Something about it reminded me of Montana," she says, "spinning in the grass barefoot. Maybe because it made her feel so relatable. And made Marilyn seem like she was just a girl or something. She's spinning, and she's wearing a white dress and barefoot and her arms are out and she is spinning with her head back and she's smiling. And she looks so happy." Williams hung it next to her bed where she could see it as she lay there. "Maybe this felt like the real her or something," wonders Williams. "Because those ones where she is backed into a corner with a dress falling off, those ones feel like they're for men."
This has been a much calmer conversation. Today is Halloween, and she must leave to prepare Matilda and herself. Michelle is to be an owl—just some feathers stuck onto some round glasses and a construction-paper beak. Matilda will be Shirley Temple. "She really likes all that stuff. She likes Fred and Ginger, and Larry, Curly, and Moe." Michelle explains that when she sees her daughter interacting comfortably with other children and adults, she feels everything is okay. That she's done something right. "When she skips," says Michelle, "she leaves the earth."
In her earliest memory, Michelle Williams is on a preschool field trip to the local park in Montana. She is wearing a brand-new yellow dress made by her grandmother, with a purple unicorn on its pocket. One moment she is feeding the ducks in the pond, the next she has gotten too close and has fallen in. She's not in danger—she is standing there in the shallow water—and so she just stays where she is, shocked at this unexpected turn of events. Shocked that at one moment you could be feeding ducks, the next you could be wet. Shocked that something so benign could change so quickly. And she is also thinking something like: I wonder if I just stand here nobody will notice. Maybe I could be a duck.
She has another memory, just a little later. She is at her great-grandparents' house, also the location of her earliest memory of delirious happiness (riding bareback, galloping through a field). But today there is a big storm, and she is outside playing in a puffy jacket, and when she tries to get back to the house the wind blows her around and she runs into the barbed-wire fence. And she realizes she is stuck. The harder she tries to escape, the more the barbs go into her jacket.
She told me these two stories—I'd asked her to think back as early as she could recall—in Los Angeles while waiting for her tortilla soup. And then she wondered aloud: "So why does my mind choose those two memories that can be used as metaphors for the rest of my life? Was I always who I am now?"
When Williams sits down for our third and final meeting, I ask her about Brokeback Mountain. I do want to know about her memories of making the film, but we both also know where this is going. She tells me about being Ang Lee's first auditionee for the role, at eight o'clock in the morning, and how she tried to sell him on the notion that landscapes are inherent in your character and so her Montana upbringing made her the right choice. Maybe that's even what swayed him. Either way, he chose wisely. There are plenty of fine Michelle Williams performances from before then—her 2003 cameo in The Station Agent, for instance—but this was something more. The stillness and broken love of her despair seemed to anchor the grander melodrama that surrounded. I ask whether it was a difficult role to play. She pauses for a moment, then answers, "Not compared to what everybody else had to do." When she and Heath Ledger saw the finished film together, they complimented each other, but beyond that they weren't sure. "I didn't know what to make of it," she says. "Maybe when you see something different for the first time, you don't know how to categorize it. It doesn't really fit with anything else. Like the first time you listen to Björk. The first time you eat sashimi."
She hasn't seen it since. But she does know what she thinks of it now. "I think it's a great film. And...it's probably obvious but..." She pauses for a long time, and when she picks up the thought her voice is quieter and higher: "...well, he's really quite astounding in it. Heath."
I ask her why she thinks they were so drawn to each other. (A long pause follows. All the pauses will be long from now on.)
"There's an answer that I know," she says, "but I don't want to say." She talks around this not-saying for a while, then says, "Our initial meeting, the circumstances of how we first met, were cosmic or something." They were together through the shoot, and soon she was pregnant. "Yeah, a lot of things happened at once," she says. "It's a bit like: We had a lot of things to do, because we didn't have a lot of time, or something."
The waiter brings her a chamomile tea—we are at the same hotel table as yesterday—and lights a candle. Michelle breaks off her flow and watches. "It feels like lighting a candle for somebody," she says. "I feel like..." She trails off. "Where was I?"
I begin to ask her how she heard what had happened to Ledger—she was in Sweden at the time, making a sad film called Mammoth—but she quickly, firmly shakes her head. After it happened, she had to do a final week's shooting in New York. "It was horrible." Following that, she was also committed to appearing in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. "I don't remember most of it," she says. "I've got a lot of holes." Once the film was completed, she wondered whether she would ever want to work again. Or whether she would just stop.
"That seemed like a really smart idea," she says. "You just want to be able to walk out of your house and turn your face to the sun and stumble down a corner where you have some memory, and you're not really allowed any of that." The paparazzi compounded her torments in a way that was unbearable. She acknowledges that death is something that may intrude at any time into anyone's life. "But the other stuff, there's no handbook on that," she says. "It was making me crazy. I felt like I was going crazy. It was too much—trying to deal with what had happened and trying to deal with what was at our doorstep. I just felt trapped. And it's not just me—there's somebody else who I'm trying to protect, and I can't. I can't make it stop, I can't make it go away. Trying to find ways to explain it or shield her from it. It's like you're trying to go about your life, and make dinner...but the roof is off of your house, and the walls are falling down."
The things that would eventually help, just a little, would be very small things. "Moments that were strung like beads on a thread...and they were very far apart from each other. I mean, it sounds so silly, but a just-right cup of tea. I spent a lot of time taking baths. A lot of tea and baths—double warm."
And still no work. Before, she had always relied on work and loved the way that it would help her get through difficult times, but she knew it wouldn't help here. "That didn't apply anymore. There was no working through this. This is something that had to be gotten through on its own terms. On its own terms." In fact, the moment when she missed acting never came. Instead, her hand was deftly forced. She had read the script for Blue Valentine many years before, when she was 21, and committed to make it once the director, Derek Cianfrance, had the money. Now he came to her. The money was in place. They were ready to begin.
At first she stuck firm. Told him no. The film was set, and was to be shot, in California. She wouldn't travel. Not now. She wouldn't further disrupt Matilda's life for a film.
Cianfrance returned with a new proposition. They would reset the film on the East Coast, and he promised that she would never be more than an hour away from either her Brooklyn or upstate New York homes. She was both grateful and infuriated. How could she say no? Her yearlong sabbatical was over. "I went back internally kicking and screaming," she says. "I am now very grateful."
Blue Valentine's back-and-forth montage of a relationship in golden blossoming and toxic unwinding is a great modern portrait of how love in all its purity and might is sometimes simply not up to the job required of it. When Williams gave interviews about the film, she would talk about how she drew upon the difficult unacknowledged atmosphere in her family's home growing up. I'm sure this was important, but it seemed impossible to me that this memory was all she was thinking about. It felt as though there was something obvious that everyone was considerately tiptoeing around. A young couple, a very young daughter, a deep love, a parting of ways; she and Ledger had been apart for some time when he died. But today, when I nudge toward this, and how she must have drawn on other circumstances close to her, she quickly says, "Only the magic of falling in love" and firmly diverts the conversation to her parents. Maybe it's that she won't talk about it, but maybe it is that she couldn't even allow herself to consider the slightest parallels at the time she was filming, and so what she is saying is absolutely true.
Her Detroit home is a few minutes from here by foot, and I walk her back through the cold, misty night. When we reach the large park near the house she's renting, we slowly circle its pathways and keep talking. About reading, about writing. It turns out that Williams is also the kind of person who signs up for an e-mail service offered by the Oxford English Dictionary where they send you a new, interesting word and its definition each day. When she particularly likes them, she writes them down in her little notebook. (Today's word: arpeggio.) For books, she is currently, she says, "going to the James Franco school." (Her Oz co-star's most successful tip: the stories of Grace Paley. "He said, 'She is going to be your favorite—I can tell,' and she is, she absolutely is.") We also talk about a book that was important to her in the aftermath of Ledger's death, Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Williams once quoted a line on Nightline that helped her: " 'When you have truly lost everything then at least you can become rich in loss.' " The strange thing is that Williams misquoted, and for this purpose improved, Solnit's actual words: "And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."
"I didn't know I had done that," she says, and explains why the thought was so useful to her. "The 'rich in loss' made me laugh. I would just think, 'Filthy stinking rich! Filthy stinking rich!' in a perverse-gallows-humor kind of way. It made me laugh, it made me feel drunk, it made me feel high with loss, in that tightrope kind of way of sadness and hysteria. And when you don't have ideas like that, it feels too messy to bear. It gave me great comfort. It was something I would repeat to myself, like a mantra. Because for some time it felt like we had lost everything. And those words, that idea, calmed me down."
We continue in circles—occasionally she points out where the swings are, somewhere in the dark foggy distance—and then walk the last few yards to her house. Out front is her sister Paige with the new dog, Lucky; somewhere safe inside, Matilda. That's where I leave her.
When I asked which recent daily word she had liked the best, the one she chose seemed to say plenty about what she now cherishes.
"Fastness," she said. " 'A protected place in between two rocks.' "
Before, when we are still at the hotel table, chamomile tea and flickering candle in front of her, she tells me this: "Nothing has turned out like I expected to. Some things have been better, and some things have been much, much, much worse."
I ask her whether everything she's been through has changed how she thinks about love.
"Like I said, there's not an area of my...there's not a cell, not a molecule. No corner is untouched. You know, it's like a reorganization of everything. Everything is different."
She explains that a year or two ago, she was putting herself under a lot of pressure to find someone new to spend her life with, for a particular reason. "Because I really wanted, and I really expected or imagined, that Matilda would have siblings that were close to her age. I wanted that for her. But I couldn't make that happen. And now that she's 6 that isn't even a possibility anymore. So something that was making me feel impatient, that's been removed. For whatever reason, that's not our luck, or our path."
A further thought. "You know, as hard as certain things have been for me, it's been harder thinking about how things will be for her. I have a lot of things that she doesn't, and some of what I have I can give to her—the memories that I have, the objects that I have, the physical reminders that I have, the stories. But she won't really have any that are solely..." And that is where that sentence ends.
There is a question I have been wanting to understand the answer to, but have been feeling that I simply can't ask. Eventually I just ask it anyway:
Do you think there was a part of you that imagined the two of you would somehow end up together?
Immediately, I wish that I hadn't. The look on her face—a kind of juddering visceral alarm at what has been said...I don't wish to see that look many more times in my life. "That would make me way too sad to answer," she says quickly, and I hurriedly begin another question, about something completely different, hoping that if I say it fast enough these new words will chase the old words away from where they are hanging in the air between us, and maybe she will let me pretend that it was something I never said.
"No, no," she says, and I can see the tears forming, and I think she means that she doesn't want to answer any more questions about anything. I mutter some kind of apology under my breath.
But, even now, I'm wrong about everything. Mostly she is just trying to stop my new question. She has something to tell me.
"No," she says. "I said it would make me too sad to answer but it's also..."—and she nods even as her voice breaks once more with tears—"...one of my favorite things to imagine." And through the tears, a beaming, almost beatific smile stretches room-wide across her face. "It's actually one of my favorite places to visit."
That morning at the Oakwood apartments, Michelle Williams looked up at the desolate scrubby hill rising to our right, and it reminded her of the time when she and two young male actors broke through the fence that was supposed to keep the coyotes out and the young actors in, and headed upward. She remembered that their hike was a lot farther than anticipated, and she remembered that they didn't take enough water, and she remembered that at times she was a little scared, but that eventually they reached their destination. The HOLLYWOOD sign. She remembered the ladders behind the letters. She remembered how there was underwear on each step. And she remembered how she climbed up anyway to the middle of the first "O" in "Hollywood," and sat there for a while.
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