No, when the Archduchess dies the secret of eternal youth dies too. There will no longer be an immortal one in Ronda or the world. So it’s worth visiting the country - you can buy a ticket at any tourist agency - because, as the tough young Rondese say, you never know. She might break tomorrow, or next week, or next season, and if she does it would be worth watching. And if she never breaks, but just dies, dancing there night after night in the square, then something will have gone from the world that no one, now or in the future, will ever see again. Even today it may be too late . . .
The Menace
Barry Jeans - when his fans did not call him Barry, and wanted a bigger word for him - was known as The Menace. The Menace, in movie language, and especially among women, means a heart-throb, a lover, someone with wide shoulders and no hips. A Menace does not have long lashes or a profile; he is always ugly, generally with a crooked nose and if possible a scar; his voice is deep; and he does not say much. When he does speak, the scriptwriters give him short, terse snaps of dialogue, phrases like ‘Lady, take care!’, or ‘Break it up!’, or even just ‘Maybe’. The expression on the ugly face has to be dead-pan and give nothing away, so that sudden death or a woman’s passion leaves it unmoved. Only the muscle at the side of the lean jaw tautens, and then the fans know that Barry is either going to hit someone, and hit him hard, or stagger in a torn shirt through a jungle carrying on his back a man who hates him, or lie in an open boat after shipwreck with the woman he loves but is far too honourable to touch.
Barry Jeans, the Menace, must have made more money for the movie world than anyone living. He was English by birth; his father was a clergyman, and vicar of Herne Bay for many years. Old people say they remember Barry as a boy singing in the choir, but it is not true. His mother was half-Irish, and that is why they called their son Barry. He went to grammar-school and was just too young to join up for World War I, which puts him in the mid-fifties age-group. Everyone knows this and nobody minds. It’s a good age for Menaces. The fans don’t want to see a youngster stagger through the jungle or lie in an open boat - it would not look right.
Barry’s father was broad-minded and let his son go on the stage. He was in repertory for a while, and then got a job as understudy in a London production. From understudy he graduated to small parts in drawing-room comedies, which were fashionable in those immediate post-war years, but he never did much good. Producers found him too stiff, and he got the name for being, in theatrical jargon, a ‘stick’. Nowadays producers who have long retired, and others still active but in their dotage, say they always foretold a big future for Barry. But in fact the only person who ever believed in him was his wife May, and perhaps because of that belief they have never parted, but are still together after thirty years. Everyone knows May. She is not one of those wives who remain hidden, and then appear shy and rather sweet at Gala Performances. May is there - in the dressing-room, and very often on the set. Barry says he would be lost without her.
It was May who pushed Barry into having an audition for the Lonsdale play that was going into production in New York at the end of the twenties. It was a small part, and the chap the producer and Lonsdale wanted had appendicitis at the last moment, so they were obliged to take Barry. After that he never looked back. It’s a curious thing how actors who fail to make the grade in London go over big in New York. Like ne’er-do-wells in Australia. A fellow slips away below decks, and the next thing you hear is that he has a million sheep on a ranch the size of Cornwall.
It was the women who went for Barry. They adored the way he stood there on the stage, in his English clothes, with his hands clenched. It was strange it had meant so little to the women in England.
When the Lonsdale comedy came off Barry was offered a part in an American play, and although it folded quickly he hit the headlines. He hadn’t a great deal to do, but he had to bring the curtain down in the second act with the words ‘Scram, baby, scram!’, and the way he said it did something to the American women. Barry’s future was assured, and he had an offer from Hollywood the opening night. May told him to accept, and three weeks later they were on the Coast. Barry Jeans the Menace.
In a matter of months his face was more familiar to women all over the world than that of their own husbands. And the husbands did not mind. In a sense, it was a sort of compliment if a girl married a chap at all. It must mean that the chap they married was a super-Barry. His hat - a trilby with a dent in it - his cigarette, never hanging from his lips but always held between his fingers, the little scar on the side of the temple that suggested a brush with a rhino or a knife thrown in a Shanghai joint (in fact he had slipped on the breakwater at Herne Bay when he was not looking) - it all exercised a subtle and indefinable magic which left every other movie star standing at the post. But above all it was the mouth, firm and decisive above that square jaw with the cleft in the chin, which maddened millions. It never relaxed, it never smiled, it never, in fact, did anything. That was what got them.Women were weary of close-ups of their favourite stars lip-to-lip in a passionate embrace, and Barry did not give them that. Instead, he turned away. Or stared over the girl’s shoulder. Or just murmured the word ‘You!’ and nothing else. Then there would be a fade-out into the next scene, and the fans would be left writhing.
Barry Jeans the Menace really started the fashion that became so prevalent between the two wars on both sides of the Atlantic of men and women not making love at all. What was vulgarly called ‘making a pass’ was no longer done. If a fellow took a girl home in his car, and drew up in front of her house, there was no question of parking and staying put for half-an-hour. Barry Jeans never did that. He pulled the trilby hat still further over his eyes, his mouth became more stern, and he said something like ‘Quit . . .’ The next thing you saw was the girl on the front door-step, fitting a key in the lock and crying, and Barry Jeans banking the corner in his Cadillac. It was the same on mountains or in the desert. If Barry Jeans got himself on the edge of a crevasse in the Andes or the Alps, or lay beside a mud-pool oasis with three palm-trees, five hundred miles from the nearest Legion outpost, the woman of course by his side, he never touched her. He did not even have a rope to help her out of the crevasse, or a tin mug to scoop up the dirty water from the pool. He just said ‘This is it’, and either walked away or died.
It was his manner that made the Menace popular with men as well as with women. You did not have to take trouble any more. You did not have to kiss your girl. You did not have to make love. And all that tedious business of booking a table at a restaurant, and seeing the head waiter, and ordering the wine, became completely vieux jeu. Barry Jeans never did it. He walked into any place with his woman, and he just held up one finger, and everyone seemed to know what he meant. Waiters fell over themselves, guests already seated were told there wasn’t a table, and the Menace sat down with his woman watching him, waved the menu aside, and uttered the one word ‘Clams’.
Barry Jeans began the vogue of eating your steaks so rare that it was hard to tell whether they had been cooked at all, of wearing no topcoat in a blizzard, of sleeping nude (this the fans supposed, because no one in any movie saw him put on pyjamas), of having a tenderness for objects rather than human beings. Thus, in his most famous movies, the ones that went over the biggest, the last shot would be of the Menace stroking his old Ford car, or holding the tiller of a sail-boat, or even looking up at a giant oak tree with an axe in his hand and saying ‘You’ve got to go’. People came out with a lump in the throat. It made ordinary romance seem so trivial. The only bad picture Barry Jeans ever made was when he took the part of Adam in the great Biblical version of Genesis, and they had a shot of him patting a dinosaur on the back and saying, ‘I’ve lost my rib’. It did not ring true. But that was the fault of the scriptwriter.
When World War II came along the Menace wanted to join up, but the Pentagon rated his entertainment value so high, in helping to keep up the morale of the troops, that they wouldn’t let him, and he went right on makin
g films. But he compensated for the lack of active service by sending more food parcels to Europe than all the rest of the British contingent in the United States put together. Barry’s spam kept many homes going, and thousands of housewives would have fallen for Goebbels’ propaganda about starving Britain if they had not been able to use Barry’s cooking fat.
When the war was over, and the Menace paid his first visit to Europe for ten years, with the idea of looking up his father - who had retired by now but was still living in Herne Bay - the crowds were so thick at Waterloo that they stretched right away to the river. Mounted police had to be called in, and people who did not know thought it was a Communist revolution at last.
Barry was embarrassed by the demonstration, but May enjoyed it. She had picked up an American accent during her years in the States, which Barry had not, and used a lot of phrases like ‘gotten’ and ‘I know it’ and ‘you’re welcome’. She did most of the talking into the microphone when they arrived, and told Barry to sit low in the car with his hat over his eyes. It made him more inaccessible than ever, and the crowd loved it. The publicity was so tremendous that they gave up the idea of getting to Herne Bay, and sent for Barry’s father to join them in their hide-out at Cape Wrath, where pictures were taken of Barry and his father looking out to sea, and Barry saying, ‘It’s good to be home’. Rumour had it that they were invited to Balmoral, but this was never proved.
New names, pop singers, and the teenage craze made no difference to the Menace. His fame was too deeply graven into the hearts of all men and women over thirty-five.They had been born and bred in the faith of Barry Jeans, and they would die in the faith of Barry Jeans. Besides, the kids liked him too. The greying hair - only at the temples, mind - and the slightest suspicion of a bag under the eye, and that line on the jaw, it did the same thing to the daughters that it had done to the mothers twenty years before; it made them dream. Who wanted to be kissed by the boy next door or the young man round the block when you could sit alone in perfect darkness and have Barry Jeans say ‘Some day’ out of a wide screen, and turn his back on you, and go? The inflection of his voice, the meaning he put into it, and never a glint in the eye, never a smile. Just the two words ‘Some day’. Phew!
The Menace never touched Shakespeare. May said it would be a mistake. Anyone can put on a beard and mouth a lot of words, she told him. God gave you a personality and you ought to keep to it. Barry was disappointed. He would have liked to have a shot at Lear. Hamlet and Richard the Third had been pinched already. ‘May’s right,’ said the entourage. ‘You don’t want to touch that stuff. And it doesn’t go over in Tokyo. No, you stick to the parts that made you big, and you’ll stay big.’
The entourage, otherwise ‘the boys’, consisted of Barry’s personal manager, his agent, his press-agent, his secretary, his make-up man and his stand-in. May would not have a woman secretary because if she was of a certain age she would try to boss Barry, and if she was young she would try something else. ‘The boys’ were safe.They were all hand-picked, with wives who did not matter.
Barry did not move without the boys and May, and even at home in Beverly Hills, in the lovely old reproduction of a Kent oast-house which had been built for him, the boys stayed around at week-ends just in case. A new script might come along, or a millionaire with money to burn, or an accountant with a new tax dodge, and if this should happen May wanted the boys to handle it. Barry himself must not be worried.
The Menace had no family. Only May. In early days this had been a disappointment. Publicity could have used photographs of Barry holding a youngster on his shoulder, or teaching a kid to swim in the pool or fly a kite. But as the years went by May and the boys agreed it was just as well as things were. A lanky son or a great gaggling daughter would have spoilt the Menace legend. Barry Jeans could remain the unknown, the untouchable, the guy who was every woman’s lover and no girl’s father. When a star begins to play fathers it is the thin edge of the wedge, and a grandfather, of course, is his finish.
‘Sweetie-pie,’ May would say, ‘the world wants you just the way you are.Your hands in your pockets, your hat over your eyes. Don’t alter a thing. And stay that way when you come off the set.’
Barry did. He hardly ever spoke, even at home. The people who knew him, all of them in Hollywood or elsewhere in the movie world, would gaze at the long spare figure drinking orange juice through a straw - he never touched hard liquor - and wonder how the devil he did it. His contemporaries had most of them got thick necks and paunches. Not Barry Jeans. Not the Menace. May had him up at six every morning, when he was not in the studio, doing Swedish exercises. And if there was not a party he was in bed by nine.
In all the years that the Menace had held the world, his name had never been connected with any scandal. He had broken up no homes. The beautiful women who had played opposite him could not even get a still of him sitting near them in the studio to take home. May did not allow it. The still might get publicized and printed in the papers, and then everyone would begin to talk. Passionate Italians, languorous French vedettes, belles from the deep South, dusky Puerto Ricans, whatever star of the moment was signed on to play opposite the Menace, they never got a word alone with him off the set. May or the boys were always there. And if a reporter, more enterprising than his fellows, caught Barry off guard in the break for lunch when the boys were in the washroom and May was powdering her nose, and asked him, ‘What do you think of Mitsi Sulva?’, or whatever the name was of the beautiful girl billed beneath him, he only answered just the one word ‘Great’. It was non-committal and absolutely safe. It could not give offence to the lady, and it could not offend May. Not even the most treacherous reporter could twist the word into anything else. A headline saying ‘Barry Jeans thinks Mitsi Sulva’s great’ did not mean a thing. And by the time the reporter was bringing up another question the boys were out of the washroom.
It was during the making of the first ‘feelie’ that the boys began to wonder whether the methods they had used to date would work any longer. As everybody knows, the ‘feelies’ came in during the late fall of ’59, and revolutionized the film business. The result was chaos until the technicians got the thing under control and the big combines had all their houses wired for ‘feel’, but the real panic was in the studios. How would the stars get by? How would the big names, and the biggest name of all - Barry Jeans the Menace - hold their own in the new medium? The point being that it was not just the wiring of the houses that fixed the ‘feelie’; the star had to be wired during the shooting - the gadget was concealed in his clothing - and the power was transmitted back to the ‘barker’, the name of the mechanism that in its turn fed the power machine which was hired out to the movie houses. Unless the current was Force A the barker could not do its stuff. And the terrible thing was that a star’s motivation, or Force, was an unknown quantity until it was put to the test.
It was not until Barry Jeans was on the floor rehearsing with Vanda Gray that the technicians signalled to the director that Barry’s Force was only ticking over at G. It was the lowest number on the dial, and not strong enough to feed the barker.The director ordered a break and went into a consultation with the team.
It was a delicate situation. Not even the director, who knew Barry well, had the courage to tell him he was only sending out Force G. The expert in charge of the mechanism was tough, though. He was in a strong position, because nobody else on the floor knew how it worked.
‘Let’s be realistic,’ he said. ‘This guy’s no damn good. I know he’s a star, I know he’s world-famous. So what? We’ve entered a new era. The “feelies” are going to put Jeans out of business.’
The production manager swallowed two tranquillizers.
‘This is serious,’ he said. ‘Not a word of all this must leave these four walls. If gossip got around the studios that Barry Jeans couldn’t make a higher grade than Force G, there would be such a scandal that Gigantic Enterprises Ltd would never recover. Speaking personally, I could nev
er hold up my head again, and I’m not joking when I warn you that it would strike a serious blow at the entire film industry.’
The ‘feelie’ expert chewed gum and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Your move,’ he said. ‘I’ve done all I can. I’ve stepped up the kicking rate until the feeder’s darn near busted, but nothing happens. If I play about with the mechanism it may pack up altogether, and that’ll cost Gigantic Enterprises a million dollars.’
The director was saying something about getting in a psychiatrist to talk to Barry, and the production manager nodded thoughtfully.
‘There’s a Swede over at International,’ he said. ‘I believe he did wonders for Leila Montana when her voice went bass.’
‘That’s right,’ said the director. ‘Leila got back her confidence fine, but they still had to dub the voice in Golden Girl. Wait a minute . . .’ He turned to the expert, and asked if there was not some method similar to dubbing that could be worked with the feelie gadget. ‘Can’t we fake it?’ he said. ‘Try somebody else’s Force, and feed it to the barker?’
The expert shook his head. ‘No go,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to have direct transmission,’ and he launched into technical details far above any of their heads. The director listened carefully. It was vital for him and the team to understand the jargon. Unless a director knew exactly what happened on the floor he was no use. He was out of date. The feelies were here to stay.
‘We ought to have tested,’ he said. ‘We were crazy not to test. I had a hunch at the time that we were slipping somewhere.’
The Breaking Point: Short Stories Page 23
