“It’s okay. I know what I did wrong. I want to try it again while I’ve still got in my head what I didn’t do.”
“Your nose is bleeding again. You better go and get it stopped,” Tommy said.
“You fuss worse than Lucia,” Mario said irritably. “Go ahead, I need to try it just once more. Not the triple again, okay—just the pirouette return.”
He actually did it three more times before he managed to correct for the spin, and when he finally managed it, he was frowning. “It still doesn’t look right. Just doing it isn’t enough—I have to get it looking right,” he said. He sat on the edge of the net, then noticed Angelo in the doorway.
“I thought it was Bart that came in,” he said to Tommy.
“Yeah, me too. The kids are in the change room, getting dressed,” Tommy told him.
Mario wrinkled his nose, then put a hand to it with a grimace. “Ouch. I forgot I still have a lesson to give. Stel, will you bring me some ice so I won’t be bleeding all through the damn lesson?”
“No shoes on the floor, Clay,” Tommy called, watching the youngster walk across the polished floor.
Clay made a face. “You’re worse than Lucia. What is this, a parlor?”
The four boys came to the foot of the rigging. Watching Mario put ice on his face, they were full of concerned questions.
“It’s all in the day’s work,” Mario said, shrugging it off. “You get used to it. Phil and Clay, let’s have you up first.”
Tommy went toward the catch trap to coach Phil from below. Angelo, standing at one end of the practice room, smoking a cigarette, watched all through the lesson. Tommy wondered what Angelo was up to. Was he simply trying to let them know he had his eye on them? Later, while the two sets of boys were changing places, he said to Mario in an undertone, “What the hell, does he think he’ll catch us giving the kids a feel, or something?”
Mario started to laugh, but it didn’t quite come off. “As far as I’m concerned, he can watch till he’s cross-eyed,” he said. “Hell, he taught me himself to keep my personal life off the rig.”
As Tommy went back to his coaching, he wondered if it was possible for Angelo to really believe that, after knowing them for so many years. He had said that short of having them arrested, there was nothing Angelo could do. Now Angelo was trying, it seemed, to show them how difficult he could make it for them if he chose; and if this began to get on Mario’s nerves . . . .
Damn it, Tommy thought between rage and despair, he was just beginning to get back in shape, and Angelo has to pull this! He realized that he would take distinct pleasure in breaking Angelo’s neck.
The day before the flight to Dallas, Bart Reeder telephoned. Mario had gone to the dentist to have the permanent filling put into his tooth, so it was Tommy who spoke with him.
“Hello, Bart, what’s happening?”
“Shooting starts this week on the Parrish movie—I wish they’d release a title for it!—and I may be a bit tied up. When they’re actually filming, it’s early and alone to bed, and up at five for makeup at the studio.” His voice took on the exaggerated effeminacy which Tommy now knew was a private joke between them, a parody of something Bart was not and would never be. “I just didn’t want you to think I didn’t love you anymore, darling.”
Tommy chuckled, but did not respond in kind. Bart had all the privacy he needed, but the Santelli telephone was centrally located in the hall. “Don’t worry about that, pal. But we’ve had some trouble here. Family trouble.”
“Hell,” Bart said, “what happened?”
“I can’t very well talk about it over the phone.”
“Somebody listening?”
“No. But somebody could walk in at any minute.”
The older man’s voice was kindly, sympathetic. “Want to come over and talk about it?”
“I don’t think I can. We’re flying to Dallas about noon tomorrow, with Johnny and Stella, for a television show there.”
“Your trouble wasn’t with them, was it?”
“No.” It was such a temptation to tell Bart all about it, knowing he would understand. “No, they’re okay. What happened—well, Angelo saw something, or thought he did. I could have talked him into thinking it wasn’t anything, only I was fed up with lying to him. So I told him to think what he wanted to, and in the end I—I more or less admitted it to him.”
Bart gave a low whistle of dismay. “Was that why Matt was wearing a black eye when I came over for my lesson?”
“Good God, no,” Tommy said. “He did that on the bar.”
For the first time he realized it could have been worse. In the Army, Tommy had met a couple of morally self-righteous types who believed the very existence of a physically intact homosexual to be a challenge to their own manhood. Angelo had boasted that a homosexual who had once made advances to him had been beaten. Tommy couldn’t understand that, either; was a man Angelo’s size afraid of physical force? At least Angelo had not felt compelled to demonstrate his moral distaste by beating them.
“He said that was what happened,” Bart said, “only I have to admit I didn’t believe him. I thought probably you and he had gotten into some kind of donnybrook again.”
“No. We won’t do that again. But look, Bart, I’d rather tell you all this stuff when I don’t have to worry about somebody walking in and hearing my end—you mind?”
“Right you are,” said Bart, all business again. “I called up to ask if you and Matt would have dinner with me tonight. Wally Mason—the director—wants to see you both in his office tonight, to sign for the doubling on the movie. He wants to get a look at you both, see how much of a problem it’s going to be to make you up as the Parrish brothers, and all that. He’ll probably call you this afternoon. Will that be all right with you?”
“Sure. Matt should be back from the dentist soon.”
“We’re shooting at the studio tomorrow. Next week the second crew goes on location at Starr’s winter quarters. They want to get as much circus footage as they can before the show opens in Madison Square Garden. And they’ll probably want a lot of flying footage. So you people have to sign contracts, join the union and Actor’s Equity and all that stuff—you are union men, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been in AGVA since I was a kid,” Tommy said, “and Angelo had me join the stuntmen’s union when I started working this winter. I don’t know about Matt—you’ll have to ask him.”
“Well, you can settle all that with Mason, and he can answer all your questions, and I’d like to take you both to dinner afterward.” Tommy could imagine Bart’s grin when he added, “Safety in numbers, and all that. And they can take my picture for the newspapers and be damned to them—I mean, hell, it can get into all the papers, and we have a good, solid business reason for it. STAR OF CIRCUS FILM DINES WITH REAL CIRCUS STARS—that kind of thing. So I can take you out on the town, right under their goddamn noses!”
“Fine. We’ll be there.”
~o0o~
Wally Mason was a fat, unimpressive little man with a thick Brooklyn accent. It was hard for Tommy to believe that he was a director of international renown. Bart Reeder was there, too, and Jim Fortunati, who was the technical adviser for the aerial scenes of the movie.
“The contract is for the Flying Santellis,” Jim told them. “How many people is that, Matt?”
“Three right now, Jim. Tommy and me, and Stella.”
“Good. Parrish always worked with three—him, his brother, and Eileen Leeds. After Eileen got killed, it was him and Reggie and Cleo. Stella will make up all right as either Eileen or Cleo in long shots—they both had red hair.”
“Stella will be tickled pink, playing Cleo,” Tommy said, remembering Stella’s childish admiration of the woman.
Jim laughed. “Cleo will be tickled, too; she thinks Stella is marvelous.”
Mario said, “I’ll have to remember to tell her that. Who’s playing Cleo in the movie?”
“Jessica Anderson,” Mason said. “We wan
ted Louise Lanart, but she’s too tall.”
Jim smiled in a friendly way at Bart and said, “Too bad. But even when Cleo was a young girl, there was no romantic interest between her and Barney, and she had to make that clear to the script writer before she’d sign the rights to use her name. I know you’d like to have your wife for your leading lady, Bart, but I guess it just didn’t work out. Of course Miss Lanart is too young to play Eileen Leeds—she was ten years older than Barney.”
“Well, of course, in the movie we play that way, way down,” said Mason. “It’s hard to make that kind of thing look romantic. How did Parrish come to marry a broad forty years old when he was thirty, anyhow? Was it just because she was a circus star, too?”
“No,” Fortunati said, “he was crazy about her. He never got over it, after she was killed. It may sound funny, but it was a real love match.”
Bart said courteously, “That’s all right. Louise is a professional. She understands how the breaks run in this business.” But his smile was gently ironic, and he met Tommy’s eyes for a moment.
“You’ll notice, Mr. Gardner,” Wally Mason said, “that this contract gives the studio exclusive right to your services, and first call on your time, till the show opens May first in Madison Square Garden, with a provision for extra time at the Garden after the circus is actually running. Do you know that’s where Parrish had his accident?”
Mario shook his head. “I was just a little kid then. Every place was the same to me.”
“Anyhow, we can arrange it so there’s no conflict,” Fortunati said. “Notice, you’ll get a screen credit.”
Tommy looked over Mario’s shoulder at the line Jim pointed to: “Screen credit to read, Flying sequences performed by the Flying Santellis.”
“Jim got that for you,” Mason said good-naturedly. “I thought it was enough to say, Circus scenes performed with the cooperation of the Starr Circus.”
Mario said, “Thanks, Jim. You advise me to sign this one the way it is, then?”
Mason’s good-natured voice was suddenly stiff. “You are perfectly free to have your own legal advisor, or a contract lawyer, go over it before you sign, Mr. Gardner. It is our standard contract for all stunt doubles not paid by the day.”
“Look, I’m not arguing. It’s just that Papa told me never to sign anything without reading it,” Mario said with a diffident grin, scanning the lines. “You put in this list of tricks, Jim?”
“That’s right,” Mason said. “I don’t know a flying trapeze from a flying saucer. That’s what I need a technical advisor for. I just told him to be sure he got somebody who could do that special Parrish trick, the triple whatever-it-was.”
Fortunati met Mario’s eyes in a grin. “Triple back somersault, double pirouette return,” he said, “and if you can’t do them back to back we’ll fake them.”
“I can do that okay,” Mario said, and quickly scanned the rest of the contract, reading it aloud for a moment.
“‘A repertory of performance as specified by the technical advisor, to include the triple back somersault with double pirouette return, the back and forward double somersault, the flying pass in midair, and such other exhibitions as shall be mutually agreed upon’ . . . okay, okay . . . .” He glanced at the top of the contract. “‘Matthew Gardner, also known as Mario Santelli, and the individual and several members of his troupe, including but not limited to, Thomas LeRoy Zane, also known as Tommy Santelli, performing respectively as aerial leaper and catcher in the aerial trapeze flying-return act known as the Flying Santellis’ . . . . Okay, Jim, I’ll sign. Give me a pen. Tom, you have to sign this, too,” he added, scribbling Matthew Gardner and under it, Mario Santelli, Tommy took the pen and carefully wrote Thomas LeRoy Zane and Tommy Santelli in the indicated spaces. The last time he had signed a contract he had been young enough to need his father’s countersignature, and to write Jr. after his own name.
“And now,” Bart said, “we’ll go out and celebrate.”
It was Tommy’s first taste of elaborate nightlife. He knew it gave Bart a certain amount of pleasure to go with them to one or two of the best-known Hollywood nightclubs, and he knew it would please Lucia to see their photographs later in the papers. Tipped off by the studio, newspaper reporters clustered around to photograph them, celebrating the making of what was later to be called the greatest circus film of the century. Tommy wondered if all the glamorous movie-star stories in newspapers and fan magazines were as contrived and truthless as this one. He decided, when a well-known starlet was photographed sitting on his lap, that they probably were.
Later, driving back in Bart’s car, Bart said, “And yet, you know, I can’t really figure out how the world got in this kind of shape. Where we have to fake everything that way.” He spoke with such vehemence that Tommy wondered if he was drunk, though Bart had, as always, drunk very sparingly.
Mario said, “I suppose the kind of people who spend a lot of time and money at the movies need a certain amount of romantic slush. Tommy, you don’t mind being photographed with what’s-her-name, Karen Andrews, in your lap, do you?”
“Heck, if Karen doesn’t mind, why should I mind?”
“But I mind,” Bart said savagely. “I’d like to see a world where I could have my picture taken, say, with Tommy on my lap if I want to. For every woman who got upset because I wasn’t, shall we say, available for her romantic daydreams, there’d be some young kid reading the papers and going to movies, and he’d be able to stop hating himself and say, ‘Okay, Bart Reeder is queer, and he’s happy and successful, and he’s getting along okay, so maybe I don’t have to go out and hang myself after all.’ And the suicide rate would go down, and everybody would be happy. Why should I have to make out like I have a big romantic interest in some dumb broad like Louise Lanart?” He spoke the name with loathing. “Now, don’t get me wrong. Judy’s a good kid. I like her a lot, and she doesn’t want to sleep with me any more than I want to sleep with her. I’ve got nothing, nothing at all, against Judy Cohen. It’s Louise Lanart I can’t stand. But why should she have to act like we have a big romantic thing going? Why can’t she live alone and admit she never found a man—or, for that matter, a woman—who could turn her on? I happen to know she’s tried that, too, when she found out she couldn’t get wound up even in a big romantic idol like me!” His voice was bitter beyond tears. “For that matter, why in hell should she have to be Louise Lanart instead of Judith Cohen? We fought a whole goddamn war to make a world where Judith Cohen could call herself Judith Cohen, and still the studio didn’t want her to sound Jewish. When will we get rid of all that crap?”
Mario smiled bitterly. “About the same time we get one of those interplanetary empires in one of my science fiction magazines. Johnny thinks we’ll have a man on the Moon before the end of the century. I don’t, but I bet when they do, they don’t hire any goddamn queers to go out in their spaceships.”
Later, when they had picked up Tommy’s car and were driving, alone, back to the Santelli house, Mario said, in a low almost as bitter as Bart’s, “Now do you see why some of the boys like to go to those bars you hate so much? At least there you don’t get your picture taken with a starlet in your lap.”
Tommy said, “Hell, it’s just show business.” The smell of the girl’s face powder was still on his skin, and it roused another unpleasant memory. But he had become a realist. “Well, anyway, when Angelo sees that in the papers, he’s going to get it through his thick head that at least we’re not going to go around wearing labels pasted on our foreheads saying I AM A QUEER, KICK ME.”
“Oh, Christ, Tom, you’re as bad as Angelo is, sometimes! Can’t you see what a filthy fake it is?”
Tommy reached for his hand. He said, “Sure I can, fella. But what do you want me to do about it? I didn’t make the world the way it is. Hell, I’m not the one believes in a God who’s going to send me to hell because I like sleeping with men. But we tried it their way, splitting up, and that didn’t work so good, either. So what
are we going to do? I don’t mind doing a little lying, if”—for the first time his voice faltered—“if it lets us stay together without all kinds of trouble.”
Mario’s fingers squeezed tight on his hand. “Anyway, we’ve got that,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
The plane that took them to Dallas was a four-engine Boeing Constellation. Tommy’s only previous experience of flying had been an Army transport, herded into narrow metal seats with a thousand other servicemen to Germany and back again, crowded, uncomfortable, and airsick. He found the contrast welcome and pleasant. Mario had never been on a plane before, and though he tried to conceal it, he was almost as excited as Suzy. Tommy good-naturedly yielded him the window seat—there was nothing to see anyhow—and tried to fall asleep.
After a long time, Suzy, in the seat behind them, grew tired of Stella’s lap and began to fret and complain. Mario turned his head and asked, “Want me to take her for a while, Stel? How about it, Suzy, want to sit on Babbo’s lap for a while?”
“Oh, would you, Matt? She’s so heavy, and my legs are going to sleep,” Stella said. “I think what she really wants is a nap.”
The stewardess came and said, “You can lay her in an empty seat, if you want to, Mrs. Gardner.”
They put Suzy down, covered with a blanket, and Mario said, “Why don’t we change seats? I’ll sit back here with Johnny—he wanted to talk about the contract.”
“Yeah, I’d really like to know how you wangled a screen credit out of Wally Mason. From what I know of the guy, that takes some doing,” Johnny said.
Stella slid into the seat beside Tommy. “You’ve been on an airplane before?”
“Only in the Army. And that wasn’t what you’d call going first-class. No stewardesses running around with free drinks and good meals and waiting on you hand and foot. Just a couple of sergeants handing out box lunches, and a medical orderly making with seasick pills. This is great, though. How do you like it?”
The Catch Trap Page 75
