—The Hollywood Reporter, April 14, 1960
It was a weird out-of-body feeling and a wildly inappropriate reaction to the fact that she had just seen two men killed in the space of thirty seconds and at any moment might herself be ripped apart by one of those weapons built to stop a charging rhino in its tracks. But this was the thought, and it didn’t merely pass through her mind, it lodged there like a tremendous rock in a river: I am Margot Macomber, and I am thoroughly despicable. She wasn’t thinking of Joan Bennett in the movie: she’d seen the trailer, but never the actual film. She was recalling very precisely the Hemingway short story about a woman on safari who sees her husband, Francis, behave like a coward when he runs from a lion, and then punishes him by cuckolding him and sleeping with their hired hunter. Their hired gun. Later, after her husband grows a backbone, she shoots him. Had she thought of Hemingway because she’d been discussing the writer with Muema just the other day? Perhaps. Didn’t matter. He was in her head now.
Carmen had no desire to shoot Felix, but she couldn’t believe that her husband was crying. She was shocked that he had thrown up into the dirt beside him. Beside her. This was a part of him she’d never seen, probably because she’d never before seen him in a situation where his death was possibly imminent. But so was hers and so was Reggie Stout’s, and neither of them was sniveling in the dust and vomiting up breakfast. And she was a woman. And she knew what the gossips （and Felix） whispered about Reggie. Sure, he was a war hero. But still.
How was it possible, Carmen thought, and what did it say about her that right now—right now, facedown on the ground—she was thinking about how pathetic her husband was, and how glad she was that （thank God） she hadn’t taken his name, since she was likely to divorce him when they returned to California?
Assuming, of course, that he or she or both of them didn’t die here in East Africa on her best friend’s honeymoon. Was it irony or destiny that she and Katie had met on the set of a movie called Hanging Rock?
* * *
.?.?.
Hanging Rock would have been a pretty good name for a movie if it had had anything at all to do with the former volcano in Australia that carried that moniker. It didn’t. It was a Western, which left Carmen flummoxed: You could drop a rope from a branch and create a hanging tree, but who hung a noose from a rock? Or, for that matter, if you interpreted the two words a little differently, why would you dangle a rock from a rope at the end of a tree limb? Carmen had wanted to ask these questions from the moment she’d been cast, but she had the common sense to keep her disdain to herself. The film was about a corrupt sheriff in a corrupt cow town sometime in the late nineteenth century, and the decent, courageous cattleman who wants to avenge the unfair prairie justice—a hanging—that was meted out upon his older brother: Porter Rock. It came out in 1958, which was a good year for movies. Most of the film was terrible, and it never had a chance for any best-picture awards. But some people thought Katie should have gotten a Best Actress nomination over Anna Magnani for her work in Wild Is the Wind and Deborah Kerr for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She was never going to beat Joanne Woodward for her performance that year in The Three Faces of Eve, but a lot of critics had what seemed a genuine love for Katie’s portrayal of Porter Rock’s kid sister.
Carmen had two scenes with Katie in that film and they were her only moments in the movie. （They’d filmed a third scene of her confronting the sheriff that she was proud of, but she discovered at the premiere that it had been cut.） Both of the remaining scenes were on an outdoor set in the backlot and involved horses, and so she and Katie had a lot of time to bond while the lighting was set and the animals were wrangled onto their marks. She hadn’t realized until they’d started to chat that she’d seen Katie onstage when they’d both been teenagers, because back then Katie was using her family name: she was still Katie Stepanov. Carmen was never the type who went gaga over anyone or anything, but she’d nonetheless found herself, at first, uncharacteristically awed.
“It helped that my parents produced a lot of shows,” Katie said. “I had a leg up on everyone else my age.”
“But you also had—also have—a lot more talent than everyone else your age.”
Katie shrugged. “Again: I was getting lessons and coaching from the time I was, I don’t know, three years old.”
They discovered they were the same age and both came from the East Coast, though Carmen had grown up in the Westchester suburbs of New York City and her father was an adman and her mother a homemaker. There was no Stepanov or Broadway glamor to her childhood: she was the kid in a balcony seat at the Nederlander, and Katie was the kid on the stage. But that was, in its way, the template for their friendship. Carmen was a lady in waiting to the first daughter from a family of East Coast entertainment royalty that now, thanks to Katie, had a beachhead on the West Coast. But Katie looked after Carmen, too, making sure that Reggie’s PR firm took her on and advocating on Carmen’s behalf when there was the right sort of role for her friend: a role that had a great line or a great moment. A scene that demanded a little nuance.