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couple of Oscars. But not best picture, like Gorman said.

3 PARTS GIN
    1 PART ROSE’S LIME JUICE
    1 LIME SLICE
    C hill the gin and lime juice with ice, and serve in a cocktail glass; garnish with a slice of lime while listening to Wayne Newton’s rendition of “Call Me Irresponsible.”
    Surgeon and Admiral Sir Thomas Desmond Gimlette (1857–1943) first served the drink that bears his name during the First World War. The Royal Navy officer had access to gin, and it occurred to him to mix it with lime juice.
    An icon of Prohibition-era speakeasies, the gimlet is simple and elegant like its cousin the martini, but it has a more feminine flavor. Gimlette was the inventor, but it was Raymond Chandler’s character Terry Lennox, in the novel
The Long Goodbye
, who made it a legend, declaring, “A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.”
    __________________
    I’d never read or seen the play the movie was based on. But it was nothing like the stories I preferred. It centered on an alcoholic reverend, Burton’s character, as a sexually obsessed loser and bum. Not so different from the actor himself, actually.
    The good reverend, on a trip with a group of old women to a beach in Mexico, sexually harasses the granddaughter of one of his traveling companions, our infamous Lolita. In order to avoid the trouble coming his way, he hijacks the school bus they’re traveling in, finally taking refuge in the hotel of a former lover. Residing there are a sketch artist, Deborah Kerr’s character, and her father, the self-appointed oldest living poet. All of these characters suffer and yell a lot. That’s basically the story. Pretty standard Tennessee Williams from what I can tell.
    I couldn’t see what an old famous guy like the poet was doing on a beach in the middle of nowhere. If I were him, I’d buy a Jaguar, like the one Scott Cherries owned, and hire a couple of amicable girls. That way I’d die with a dumb grin on my face.
    But that’s me, not the movie plot, which I found dull. Lots of dialogue and no car chases. When I finally met Tennessee Williams, it all made sense. You can’t expect much from a writer who dressed in pale pink and was accompanied by a lapdog wearing red ribbons.
    My work on the set pretty much consisted of doing nothing. The bartender kept the drinks coming, and I obligingly tossed them down. Every day of the week was the same. Regular people think a movie set must be so glamorous andexciting, but anyone lucky enough to actually have the experience usually becomes very frustrated once they discover how tedious the whole thing really is. Three months of boring, repetitive, hard reality in order to produce two hours of frivolous fantasy. Giving birth is less painful and more fun for those involved.
    Blondie appeared once in a while on the set, trailing behind her friend and charge, Lolita. Gorman revealed that my princess charming was Eva Martinei, Sue Lyon’s teacher. The actress was still hitting the books when she wasn’t fooling around with her boyfriend, listening to music, or playing at acting. Blondie also ran interference for her pupil. So her mother wouldn’t find out that Hampton Fancher, the boyfriend, hadn’t only sampled sex with her daughter in the kitchen but on the motorboat, in the sound room, in the editing room, in the car, in the school bus they were using for the shoot, on the beach, in the jungle, behind the bar, and, every now and then, in an actual bed.
    Blondie passed by one afternoon as I was downing my fifth drink. She shouted a greeting, flashing that roguish smile. I growled my reply like a rabid dog. But by then I was so drunk, it sounded more like an anesthetized dog about to get spayed.
    Nevertheless, she came over and we chatted awhile, volleying picaresque puns. She was a well-read woman of the world, knew everything, had lived a lot, and traveled even more. She was the type of college girl who didn’t mess around with lowlifes like