A few hours later it was all over for Lonesome Rhodes, at least the corporeal part. A compound fracture of the skull had removed his name from the Nielsen ratings. He had become a living legend even before he lost his balance on that top step and now Tommy de Palma did a beautiful job of rounding out the myth. On all the front pages it said that Lonesome’s death was due to collapsing on the stairs from overwork on his way to deliver a message of tremendous importance to his vast radio-TV audience. “We begged him to slow down, but as long as his great heart kept pumping he had to keep pitching for his fellow-Americans,” Tommy was quoted. Tommy had found the suicide note and without mentioning the window business he had used the sure-fire stuff about grieving and sorrowing for the fine American boys and his fellow countrymen. “I was with him at the end and I will remember his last words as long as I live,” Tommy said. I’ll remember those words too, but not quite the way Tommy reported them. He used that “great country of ours is just Riddle multiplied” line and wound up with the “bless you and keep you, my beloved kinfolk and neighbors” bit.
Tommy announced that the Lonesome Rhodes Foundation would continue as a lasting memorial to this simple American. Immediately thousands of dollars poured in from all over the country to keep up the good works. Plans were drawn up for a monument to Lonesome in Riddle with his famous last words inscribed at the base of a vast likeness in bronze. Well, Tommy can have his last words. They’re a little more fit for public examination than what the man really said when he was chasing me down those steps.
The funeral was the most impressive thing of its kind I have ever seen. Traffic was suspended on Fifth Avenue and the great thoroughfare was jammed for twenty blocks. Half a million people tried to pass the bier. Women grew hysterical and fainted. The Mayor was there, and General MacArthur, and a Marine Honor Guard and Ike sent personal condolences. The entire population of Riddle, Arkansas, was flown in by the publicity department of our TV network. A cowhand from Arkansas sang, “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” A bishop spoke on the spiritual essence in Lonesome Rhodes. “He was a man of the people,” said the bishop, “because he was, in the simplest and deepest and best sense, a man of God.”
It was a shame Lonesome Rhodes couldn’t have been there. He would have loved it. It was his kind of stuff, exactly as if it had been written for him and directed by him. He was an influence, there is no doubt of that. Look at the half-dozen minor imitators already trying to fill his boots. The film companies have started bidding for the movie rights. Already columnists are speculating as to who could play it. John Wayne? Will Rogers, Jr.? Paul Douglas? The Lonesome Rhodes Foundation is to have a considerable share of the profits. As Tommy de Palma would say, “Dat’s how legends are born.”
After the funeral, I walked around the corner to a bar and went in to think it over. While I had never given myself to Lonesome Rhodes, I had belonged to him. I had had a hand in shaping that legend. How could I disown it now without having to answer for myself?
A SHORT DIGEST OF A LONG NOVEL
HER LEGS WERE SHAPELY and firm and when she crossed them and smiled with the self-assurance that always delighted him, he thought she was the only person he knew in the world who was unblemished. Not lifelike but an improvement on life, as a work of art, her delicate features were chiseled from a solid block. The wood-sculpture image came easy to him because her particular shade of blonde always suggested maple polished to a golden grain. As it had been from the moment he stood in awe and amazement in front of the glass window where she was first exhibited, the sight of her made him philosophical. Some of us appear in beautiful colors, too, or with beautiful grains, but we develop imperfections. Inspect us very closely and you find we’re damaged by the elements. Sometimes we’re only nicked with cynicism.
Sometimes we’re cracked with disillusionment. Or we’re split with fear.
When she began to speak, he leaned forward, eager for the words that were like good music, profundity expressed in terms that pleased the ear while challenging the mind.
“Everybody likes me,” she said. “Absolutely everybody.”
It was not that she was conceited. It was simply that she was only three. No one had ever taken her with sweet and whispered promises that turned into morning-after lies, ugly and cold as unwashed dishes from last night’s dinner lying in the sink. She had never heard a dictator rock her country to sleep with peaceful lullabies one day and rock it with bombs the next. She was undeceived. Her father ran his hands reverently through her soft yellow hair. She is virgin, he thought, for this is the true virginity, that brief moment in the time of your life before your mind or your body has been defiled by acts of treachery.
It was just before Christmas and she was sitting on her little chair, her lips pressed together in concentration, writing a last-minute letter to Santa Claus. The words were written in some language of her own invention but she obligingly translated as she went along.
Dear Santa, I am a very good girl and everybody likes me. So please don’t forget to bring me a set of dishes, a doll that goes to sleep and wakes up again, and a washing machine. I need the washing machine because Raggedy Ann’s dress is so dirty.
After she had finished her letter, folded it, and asked him to address it, he tossed her up in the air, caught her and tossed her again, to hear her giggle. “Higher, Daddy, higher,” she instructed. His mind embraced her sentimentally: She is a virgin island in a lewd world. She is a winged seed of innocence blown through the wasteland.
If only she could root somewhere. If only she could grow like this.
“Let me down, Daddy,” she said when she decided that she had indulged him long enough, “I have to mail my letter to Santa.”
“But didn’t you see him this afternoon?” he asked. “Didn’t you ask for everything you wanted? Mommy said she took you up to meet him and you sat on his lap.”
“I just wanted to remind him,” she said. “There were so many other children.”
He fought down the impulse to laugh, because she was not something to laugh at. And he was obsessed with the idea that to hurt her feelings with laughter was to nick her, to blemish the perfection.
“Daddy can’t catch me-ee,” she sang out, and the old chase was on, following the pattern that had become so familiar to them, the same wild shrieks and the same scream of pretended anguish at the inevitable result. Two laps around the dining-room table was the established course before he caught her in the kitchen. He swung her up from the floor and set her down on the kitchen table. She stood on the edge, poised confidently for another of their games. But this was no panting, giggling game like tag or hide-and-seek. This game was ceremonial. The table was several feet higher than she was. “Jump, jump, and Daddy will catch you,” he would challenge. They would count together, one, two and on three she would leap out into the air. He would not even hold out his arms to her until the last possible moment. But he would always catch her. They had played the game for more than a year and the experience never failed to exhilarate them. You see, I am always here to catch you when you are falling, it said to them, and each time she jumped, her confidence increased and their bond deepened.
They were going through the ceremony when the woman next door came in with her five-year-old son, Billy. “Hello, Mr. Steevers,” she said. “Would you mind if I left Bill with you for an hour while I go do my marketing?”
“No, of course not, glad to have him,” he said and he mussed Billy’s hair playfully. “How’s the boy, Billy?”
But his heart wasn’t in it. This was his only afternoon of the week with her and he resented the intrusion. And then too, he was convinced that Billy was going to grow up into the type of man for whom he had a particular resentment. A sturdy, good-looking boy, big for his age, aggressively unchildlike, a malicious, arrogant, insensitive extrovert. I can just see him drunk and red-faced and pulling up girls’ dresses at Legion Conventions, Mr. Steevers would think. And the worst of it was, his daughter seemed blind to Billy’
s faults. The moment she saw him she forgot about their game.
“Hello, Billy-Boy,” she called and ran over to hug him.
“I want a cookie,” said Billy.
“Oh, yes, a cookie; some animal crackers, Daddy.”
She had her hostess face on and as he went into the pantry, he could hear the treble of her musical laughter against the premature baritone of Billy’s guffaws.
He swung open the pantry door with the animal crackers in his hand just in time to see it. She was poised on the edge of the table. Billy was standing below her, as he had seen her father do. “Jump and I’ll catch you,” he was saying.
Smiling, confident and unblemished, she jumped. But no hands reached out to break her flight. With a cynical grin on his face, Billy stepped back and watched her fall.
Watching from the doorway, her father felt the horror that possessed him the time he saw a parachutist smashed like a bug on a windshield when his chute failed to open. She was lying there, crying, not so much in pain as in disillusionment. He ran forward to pick her up and he would never forget the expression on her face, the new expression, unchildlike, unvirginal, embittered.
“I hate you, I hate you,” she was screaming at Billy through hysterical sobs.
Well, now she knows, thought her father, the facts of life. Now she’s one of us. Now she knows treachery and fear. Now she must learn to replace innocence with courage.
She was still bawling. He knew these tears were as natural and as necessary as those she shed at birth, but that could not overcome entirely the heavy sadness that enveloped him. Finally, when he spoke, he said, a little more harshly than he had intended, “Now, now, stop crying. Stand up and act like a big girl. A little fall like that can’t hurt you.”
A TABLE AT CIRO’S
AT HALF-PAST FIVE Ciro’s looks like a woman sitting before her dressing table just beginning to make up for the evening. The waiters are setting up the tables for the dinner trade, the cigarette and hat-check girls are changing from slacks to the abbreviated can-can costumes which are their work clothes, and an undiscovered Rosemary Clooney making her debut tonight is rehearsing. Don’t let the stars get in your eyes …
A telephone rings and the operator, who is suffering from delusions of looking like Ava Gardner, answers, “Ciro’s. A table for Mr. Nathan? For six. His usual table?” This was not what she had come to Hollywood for, to take reservations over the telephone, but even the small part she played in A. D. Nathan’s plans for the evening brought her a little closer to the Hollywood that was like a mirage, always in sight but never within reach. For, like everyone else in Hollywood, the telephone operator at Ciro’s had a dream. Once upon a time, ran this one, there was a Famous Movie Producer (called Goldwyn, Zanuck or A. D. Nathan) and one evening this FMP was in Ciro’s placing a million-dollar telephone call when he happened to catch a glimpse of her at the switchboard. “Young lady,” he would say, “you are wasting your time at that switchboard. You may not realize it, but you are Naomi in my forthcoming farm epic, Sow the Wild Oat!”
Reluctantly the operator plugged out her dream and sent word of Nathan’s reservation to André. André belonged to that great International Race, head waiters, whose flag is an unreadable menu and whose language is French with an accent. Head waiters are diplomats who happened to be born with silver spoons in their hands instead of their mouths. André would have been a typical head waiter. But he had been in Hollywood too long. Which meant that no matter how good a head waiter he was, he was no longer satisfied to be one. André wanted to be a screen writer. In fact, after working only three years, André had managed to finish a screenplay, entitled, surprisingly enough, Confessions of a Hollywood Waiter. He had written it all by himself, in English.
With casual deliberateness (hadn’t Jimmy Starr called him the poor man’s Adolphe Menjou?) André picked out a table one row removed from the dance floor for Mr. Nathan. The waiter, whose ringside table was A. D. Nathan’s “usual,” raised a protest not entirely motivated by sentiment. In Waiter’s Local 67, A. D. Nathan’s fame was based not so much on his pictures as on his tips. “Mr. Nathan will have to be satisfied with this table,” André explained. “All the ringside tables are already reserved.”
André had to smile at his own cleverness. A. D. Nathan did not know it yet, but from the beginning André had had him in mind as the producer of his scenario. A. D. seemed the logical contact because he remembered André as an ordinary waiter in Henry’s back in the days before pictures could talk. But André knew he needed something stronger than nostalgia to bring himself to A.D.’s attention. Every Saturday night Nathan presided at the same table overlooking the floor. Tonight André would make him take a back seat. Nathan would threaten and grumble and André would flash his suave head-waiter smile and be so sorry M’sieur Nathan, if there were only something I could do … Then, at the opportune moment, just as the floor show was about to begin, André would discover that something could be done. And when Nathan would try to thank André with a crisp green bill for giving him the table André had been saving for him all evening, Andre’s voice would take on an injured tone. Merci beaucoup, M’sieur Nathan, thank you just the same, but André is glad to do a favor for an old friend.
André thought of the scene in terms of a scenario. That was the dialogue, just roughed in, of course. Then the business of Nathan insisting on rewarding André for his efforts. And a close-up of André, shyly dropping his eyes as he tells M’sieur Nathan that if he really wants to reward André he could read Confessions of a Hollywood Waiter by André de Selco.
So that was André’s dream and he dreamt it all the while he was fussing over last-minute details like a nervous hostess getting ready for a big party.
By the time Nathan’s party arrived, the big room with the cyclamen drapes and pale-green walls of tufted satin was full of laughter, music, shop talk and an inner-circle intimacy that hung over the place like the smoke that rose from lipsticked cigarettes and expensive cigars. Everyone turned to stare at the newcomers, for Hollywood celebrities have a way of gaping at each other with the same wide-eyed curiosity as their supposedly less sophisticated brothers waiting for autographs outside.
Nathan entered with assurance, conscious of the way “There’s A. D.” was breathed through the room. His figure was slight but imposing, for he carried himself with the air of a man who was used to commanding authority. There was something ghostly about him, with his white hair and pale, clean, faintly pink skin, but his eyes were intensely alive, dark eyes that never softened, even when he smiled. As he followed André toward the dance floor, actors, agents, directors and fellow-producers were anxious to catch his eye. It was “Hello, A. D. How are you tonight, A. D.?,” and he would acknowledge them with a word or a nod, knowing how to strike just the right balance between dignity and cordiality.
At his side was his wife, a tall brunette with sculpture-perfect features, hardened by a willful disposition. Some still remembered her as Lita Lawlor, who seemed on the verge of stardom not so many years ago. But she had sacrificed her screen career for love, or so the fan magazines had put it, though gossippers would have you believe that Lita was just swapping one career for another that promised somewhat more permanent security.
Accompanying the Nathans were a plain, middle-aged couple whom no one in Ciro’s could identify, an undiscovered girl of seventeen who was beautiful in an undistinguished way, and Bruce Spencer, a young man whom Nathan was grooming as the next Robert Taylor. And grooming was just the word, for this male ingénue pranced and tossed his curly black mane like a horse on exhibition.
André led the party to the inferior table he had picked out for them.
“Wait a minute. André, this isn’t my table,” Nathan protested.
He frowned at André’s silky explanations. He was in no mood to be crossed this evening. It seemed as if everything was out of sync today. First his three-thousand-dollar-a-week writer had turned in a dime-a-dozen script.
Then he
had decided that what he needed was an evening alone with something young and new like this Jenny Robbins, and instead here he was with his wife, that young ham of hers, and those Carterets he’d been ducking for months. And to top everything, there was that business in New York.
Impatiently Nathan beckoned the waiter. “A magnum of Cordon Rouge, 1935.”
1935, Nathan thought. That was the year he almost lost his job. It was a funny thing. All these people hoping to be tossed a bone never thought of A. D. Nathan as a man with a job to hold. But that year, when the panic struck and the banks moved in, he had had to think fast to hold onto that big office and that long title. He wondered what would have become of him if he had lost out. He thought of some of the magic names of the past, like Colonel Selig and J. C. Blackburn, who could walk into Ciro’s now without causing a head to turn. And he thought how frightening it would be to enter Ciro’s without the salaaming reception he always complained about but would have felt lost without.
But he mustn’t worry. His psychiatrist had told him not to worry. He looked across at Jenny with that incredibly young face, so pretty and soft, like a marmalade kitten, he thought. A little wearily, he raised his glass to her. He wondered what she was like, what she was thinking, whether she would. Then he looked at Mimi Carteret. How old she and Lew had become. He could remember when they were the regulars at the Embassy Club and the Coconut Grove. Now their eyes were shining like tourists’ because it had been such a long time since their last evening in Ciro’s.
“Is the wine all right, Lew?” Nathan asked.
Some Faces in the Crowd Page 5
