I had just finished the part in Eric Haney’s memoir, “Inside Delta Force,” where Haney comes in to his rendezvous point, off of an eighteen hour, fifty-five mile hike, over rugged, dangerous, uncharted terrain, with seventy pounds of kit on his back, carrying a heavy sub-machine gun with no sling, half dead, as a part of the killing selection process into the world’s most secret and elite squadron of anti-terrorist crack troops, which came to be known as “Delta Force.” I came into the kitchen to find Margot and my daughter poring over the computer, agonizing over whether the bridesmaids at Margot’s wedding should wear bronze or gold sandals.
“Gosh!” I thought, “It’s not just that we’re different sexes. It’s not even that we are different species. We are different worlds.”
Our six year old, a unique character, informed us, “That the world exists at all is a miracle. But we are too used to it to notice.”
(There is some thought in spiritual circles that the children of today are more enlightened than in previous generations. I hope that’s true. We need some more enlightenment on our planet.)
We got to know Eric when my husband, after reading “Delta Force,” invited him to come and consult on his picture “Spartan”, about an operator in an elite and secret army force, battling against the powers of evil, which were closer to home than one could have wished.
You could never hope to meet a nicer man than Eric. Or even, for that matter, a more deadly one.
Once my husband and I were in Martha’s Vineyard on a romantic vacation. Unfortunately Dave had to have a meeting right in the middle of it, with some important producers and a director of note, about a film script they wanted him to write for them. The subject was a deadly killer.
Dave was sorry to have to break up our party, but said, “Give me a couple of hours to talk business with them, and then come and join us! It’ll be fun!”
I hemmed and hawed, not anxious to be in that high-powered group, but in the end he persuaded me.
I showed up at the appointed time, to find a very intensely serious “we’re talking about a very big budget” kind of scene. As I approached them, Dave, spying me across the room, leapt up, rushed over to me and said, “I’m so sorry honey, they’ve only just showed up. They kept me waiting. Just come sit down anyway.”
By this time we were at the table, and I sat down to some rather chilly glances.
Their problem of the moment it seemed was how to make a deadly killer sympathetic to the audience. He was their lead guy, and there was a problem with his likeability in that he kept killing and eating people. It was a tough one.
“I mean, what hero of a movie is loved by the audience, and is also an assassin?”
It was at this point that I uttered my first (and probably only) words of the evening.
“James Bond” I said.
There was an uncomfortable pause.
I believe these were the same people who had asked Dave the previous year, if he would write Moby Dick – “from the point of view of the whale.”
Nowadays, when he is not protecting the world, Eric lives with his lovely wife, Diana, who has also become a friend of ours. She is a wonderful writer. One of the subjects she loves is fashion. I suppose she might be interested in gold versus bronze.
They are two different worlds, orbiting each other lovingly.
Thinking about them made me wonder.
I get uncomfortable when my partner goes to Encino. How must an army wife feel when her husband is off on a dangerous mission in ‘God knows where”?
How must Lois Lane deal with Superman? Does she ever get a touch shirty about him going off to save the world all the time, and leaving their nice warm bed?
I wrote a song called “Tough On Crime.” It became the title song of the record I was making at the time, which is to be released in October of this year. We thought it was a good title because it had the hard-ass, take no prisoners, macho feel that was present nowhere else on the record.
Larry Klein produced it. Larry also played bass, Wurlitzer piano, wah guitar, Scott Amondola played drums, Billy Preston played Hammond organ, Walter Becker played guitar, Albert Wing played tenor and alto sax.
It is a tongue in cheek song about a superhero -- from the point of view of the wife.