by James Morrow
It was actually the first time anyone had ever asked me that, and I was pleased to set him straight. “What do you think?” I said.
“It had to be you in both cases. There’s only one Syms Thorley.”
“Good answer, Mr. Fuentes. Tell the costumers I want plenty of ventilation. When I played the robot in Flesh of Iron, I practically died of heatstroke.”
II
AMONG THE BETTER Edgar Allan Poe stories nobody reads anymore is “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a metaphysical adventure that Roger Corman once considered adding to his famous cycle of Poe adaptations. I know this because Roger approached me about playing the lead. Negotiations broke off for several reasons, including my casual remark, “So why aren’t you using Vincent again? Did a piece of undigested scenery from Pit and the Pendulum give him dyspepsia?” While the title might lead you to expect a story about a mad embalmer who specializes in feminists, “MS. Found in a Bottle” is in fact a morbid and ambiguous nautical tale concerning a shipwrecked flâneur and his gradual realization that heaven and earth hold more things than are dreamt of in his skepticism. Had Corman actually made the picture, I’m sure that his patron corporation, American-International, aghast at the uncommercial title, would have pulled a variation on the bait-and-switch they used when releasing The Conqueror Worm and The Haunted Palace, allegedly based on the corresponding Poe poems but actually derived from non-Poe sources, a Ronald Bassett novel called Witchfinder General in the first instance and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space in the second. I know that Corman and his screenwriters intended to retain most of the key story elements from “MS. Found in a Bottle” — the black ship, its spectral crew, the Polar whirlpool — but the picture would still have been billed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse” or “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Descent into the Maelstrom” or “Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead” or whatever fan-friendly Poe title was still lying around.
The present memoir is not so much a manuscript found in a bottle as one poured from a decanter. Thanks to a few golden ounces of amontillado — “For the love of God, Montresor!” — I’ve managed to scrawl my way through an entire legal pad in only three hours. After I replenish my glass and take a few swallows, I’ll tell you about my big meeting with the whack-jobs who ran the Knickerbocker Project.
Allow me to clarify my earlier remark concerning vampires. While it’s true that Count Dracula and his undead brethren were once supreme among the roles preferred by horror performers, I myself always refused to don the cape and fangs. This gap in my résumé traces to a promise I once made my maternal grandmother, who, upon resigning herself to the fact that I would probably spend the rest of my life portraying movie monsters, told me, “No vampires, Isaac. Our people have spent a hundred generations running away from crosses, and I won’t have you doing the same.” I’m proud to say I’ve remained true to my bubbe, even to the point of turning down the role of the blood-drinking cucumber in Corman’s drive-in classic, Demon from Beyond the Stars.
Shortly after writing about dropping the eye in Agent Jones’s gazpacho, I started fiddling absent-mindedly with the channel changer on my Holiday Inn TV. I soon stumbled upon the big news of the day, a survey suggesting that come November President Reagan — dear old Ronnie, that former friend of the working man, famously sympathetic to the carpenters’ strike that rocked Hollywood back when we were shooting Revenge of Corpuscula — will clobber Walter Mondale at the polls. Next I tuned in the nascent cable channel called American Movie Classics, and you’ll never guess what they were running. No, not a Corpuscula picture, something far more interesting, Trumpet Voluntary, 1936, directed by Lewis Milestone, the absorbing saga of two families, one rich, one poor, anticipating their sons’ return from the trenches of the Great War, screenplay by my cynical, resentful, intermittently lamented father. Although the late Nathan Margolis and I never really got along, I continue to admire the way that, as a contract writer first for Paramount, later for Warners and MGM, he occasionally got himself attached to a serious drama, as opposed to the reliably profitable stuff the studios preferred to make — the musicals, screwball comedies, Shirley Temple vehicles, horror pictures, gangster movies: Hollywood’s elixir for the Great Depression. Besides Trumpet Voluntary, Nathan scripted Mickey O’Neil’s Favorite Planet, that piquant Frank Capra parable, which nobody went to see, about a New York cop who wins the Irish Sweepstakes, then tries in vain to make the world a better place, as well as the equally unprofitable Adventures of Charles Darwin, Mervyn LeRoy at the helm, a well-researched bio-pic about the uneventful life of the unassuming Englishman who undermined — and what kind of assignment was this for a Jewish boy? — the Torah’s account of human origins.
My father lost no opportunity to tutor me in his philosophy of screenwriting. His words of wisdom still ring in my ears. “There are only three rules, Isaac. Never let a dog die on screen. Never advance the plot by having somebody say, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And never have a character commit suicide. Beyond that, it’s deuces wild.” I’m proud to say that I obeyed my father’s commandments not only when composing my Lycanthropus script but also in conducting my personal affairs. Of course, The Syms Thorley Story is not yet completely written, but I see no defunct canines on the horizon, and the same goes for conveniently curious characters.
We’d just wrapped the first of the three big orangutan scenes in Revenge of Corpuscula when Trixie the stenographer came trotting across stage three with the news that “a vitally urgent phone call, but that’s what they all say” was waiting for me in Mr. Katzman’s office.
The morning’s shoot had not gone well. On paper the scene looked simple enough. Corpuscula breaks into Dr. Werdistratus’s lab intending to steal his journal, but then he notices the mad scientist’s pet orangutan, Bongowi, caged in the corner, so he decides to steal the animal instead. Sam had insisted we use a live ape, on the dubious theory that it would be cheaper than renting a suit and paying some bit player scale to wear it, but the people at Celluloid Critters had failed to train the wretched beast properly.
“Werdistratus is not the only surgeon in Europe,” I tell the kidnapped Bongowi. “Somehow I shall persuade Dr. Niemuller to implant carnivorous impulses in your brain, then send you off to kill your master.”
After delivering the line, I merely had to open the cage and lead Bongowi away by the handy collar Werdistratus had placed around his neck. Unfortunately the damn orangutan was suffering from some kind of primate depression, because he slouched in the back of the cage and wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I tugged on the chain. His handler was apologetic, and a lot of good that did us. Eventually Beaudine resorted to giving an apprehensive gaffer five dollars to jab a fork into Bongowi’s rump, with Stengler framing the shot so tightly the audience would never know.
Beaudine decided to accompany me to the front office, since he wanted to have a word or two with Katzman concerning the orangutan fiasco. Trixie handed me the phone. While I spoke in my most patriotic whisper to a reedy-voiced woman who identified herself as Joy Groelish, daughter of the Project Director and a biologist in her own right, Katzman and Beaudine exchanged heated words about the melancholic Bongowi.
“Do you still live at 1901 Marguerita Avenue, Santa Monica?” Joy asked me.
“Indeed.”
“That hairy cocksucker’s a loser, Sam,” Beaudine said. “He just sits there and stares into space.”
“I’m your official liaison to the Knickerbocker Project,” Joy said.
“I’ve had liaisons before,” I told her, “but never an official one.”
“We have to replace him,” Beaudine said. “Impossible,” Katzman said. “Celluloid Critters is fresh out of primates.”
“I mean replace him with an actor in a suit,” Beaudine said.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 7:00 A.M. sharp,” Joy said. “Sure thing,” I said.
“Dress for hot weather. Destination Mojave. Don’t forget your ID badge. Toodle-oo.�
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“Good-bye,” I said.
“Orangutan suits are expensive,” Katzman said.
“So are movie directors,” Beaudine said. “I’ve had it, Sam. It’s hard enough trying to keep Thorley and Dagover in line, and now this ape shit. If you have to hire Ollie Drake to finish Revenge, he’ll end up working overtime getting ready to shoot Lonesome Trail. The union’ll come after you.”
“Gentlemen, I have a suggestion,” I said, setting the receiver back in its cradle. “Why don’t we all take tomorrow off and spend the day making an orangutan suit?”
“Are you crazy?” Beaudine said.
“Fuck that,” Katzman said.
“I’ll give it to you straight,” I said. “I just learned that, first thing in the morning, I’m off to a secret U.S. Navy installation in the desert.”
“Like hell you are,” Beaudine said. “You’re taking that goddamn ape to Dr. Niemuller so he can turn it into a carnivore.”
“The desert?” said Katzman. “The last I heard, the Navy was a seagoing operation.”
“I’m perfectly serious,” I said, flourishing my New Amsterdam Project ID badge. “On Friday I signed a government contract.” I went on to explain that, for reasons not yet clear to me, the war effort required my acting skills. I told them I was obligated to attend tomorrow’s briefing, then a rehearsal the following week, but the show itself would be closing after one Sunday matinee, so there was every reason to believe we could still bring Revenge in on time.
“What the hell is the New Amsterdam Project?” Beaudine asked.
“The code name for the Daffy Duck Project,” I said.
“You signed a fucking contract without telling me?” Katzman said, seething.
“It’s all very hush-hush,” I said. “You’ll have to shoot around me. I hate to dick with the schedule, but Uncle Sam needs me, and there’s really no choice.”
“Syms may actually have a decent idea there,” Beaudine told Katzman. “I’ll get Dudley to shuffle the call sheets, and tomorrow we’ll shoot Werdistratus strangling Klorg and maybe also the madhouse scene, and meanwhile Trixie can hunt up a cheap orangutan suit. My brother-in-law will play the part. He owes me a big favor, so he’ll do it for nothing. Can the budget handle nothing at this point, Sam?”
“I want to see this government contract of yours,” Katzman informed me.
“I’ll have Darlene bring it around tomorrow,” I said.
“When you get back to the set, tell that Celluloid Critters bozo to come in here, dragging his Bongowi behind him,” Katzman instructed Beaudine. “I want the pleasure of firing that fucking monkey in person.”
If you’re a connoisseur of post-war science fiction films, with their mutant insects, outsized octopi, defrosted dinosaurs, and piscine horrors rising from opaque lagoons, you know that the writers repeatedly employed a conceit that, in retrospect, seems to strike a blow for feminism. Because the audience presumably expected a love interest — though I don’t think the children who actually went to see these pictures were ever consulted in the matter — the male protagonist’s quest to outwit the monster often found him collaborating with a beautiful lady scientist, sometimes the daughter of the dotty old entomologist or paleontologist charged with identifying the menace in question, sometimes simply a career girl with a PH.D., her urge to decipher nature’s secrets having brought her on board whatever research project had inadvertently spawned, unearthed, thawed, annoyed, or lured the beast. As any film historian will tell you, there are more sharp and savvy females per capita in 1950’s sci-fi cinema than in all other genres combined.
Ivan Groelish’s daughter was not beautiful, but she radiated a kind of cerebral sensuality — the ineffable eroticism of intellect — that rendered her knobby chin, droopy eyes, and equivocal lips moot. The farther we got out of the city, Joy driving her ‘39 Chevy convertible at a treacherous seventy-five MPH along a crumbling stretch of two-lane blacktop that would one day transmute into the Antelope Freeway, the more smitten I became. As my high-browed, ovum-domed companion spoke of how Mendelian genetics had revolutionized the field of selective breeding, a subject about which I knew nothing and still do, my heart became crammed to bursting with lascivious sentiments, and I winced internally when she mentioned her engagement to a chemistry professor at the University of San Diego. Owing to Joy’s knowledge of organic molecules and other carnal entities, my emotional infidelity to Darlene persisted throughout the day and many more days to come, a betrayal that I now confess only in light of Poe’s epigraph to “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a quotation from Phillip Quinault. “Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre n’a plus rien a dissimuler.” He who has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.
We followed Route 14 north through the simmering sands, past the crimson cliffs of Red Rock Canyon, chatting all the while about the trundling mummies and hobbling zombies that had brought my talents to the attention of the Knickerbocker Project. Reaching Route 78, my liaison hooked a right and headed west, racing the Mojave wind to a negligible settlement called Inyokern, where we ordered lunch at the solitary café. We swilled our black coffee, gobbled our wieners, returned to the convertible, and, zooming to the far side of town, encountered a barrage of signs instructing lost travelers to go get lost somewhere else.
CHINA LAKE NAVAL ORDNANCE TEST STATION:
RESTRICTED AREA
INYOKERN BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
DEVELOPMENT FACILITY:
U.S. PERSONNEL ONLY
ARGUS RANGE RESEARCH CENTER:
KEEP OUT
For a horror actor with the proper security clearance, however, these admonitions meant nothing, and by flashing our ID badges Joy and I successfully negotiated the subsequent succession of checkpoints, sentry boxes, crossing gates, perimeter fences, and German shepherds.
While the China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station was ostensibly a military installation, under the impetus of the Knickerbocker Project a civilian community had bloomed within its bounds. In deference to the pedestrians, Joy slowed down, cruising along Main Street at a mere forty MPH. Clusters of slapdash bungalows and prefabricated cottages rolled by, their back yards filled with flotillas of laundry drying in the desert air, the rows of monotonous dwellings interspersed with playgrounds, tennis courts, and sandlot baseball fields. Passing the limits of this ad hoc town, Joy once again hit the accelerator, and we flew at full throttle down a sinuous dirt road, a plume of dust and gravel billowing behind us like the wake of a speedboat.
At last my liaison pulled up before a squat structure of poured concrete buttressed with steel, bleak and featureless, like a sepulcher for people who didn’t believe in an afterlife. The briefing bunker, Joy explained. Navy jeeps and staff cars jammed the parking lot. Spreading eastward from the gargantuan building was a vast stretch of water the color of a bruise. These days, of course, China Lake is dry as a mirage, but back then it was wet and deep. Clusters of bubbles bobbed and seethed just below the surface, as if the relentless sun were bringing the water to a boil.
Joy guided me through a reverberant vestibule and into an elevator car. Throughout our long and rapid descent my stomach issued frantic distress calls, while my throat constricted as if being squeezed by the clutching hand in Monogram’s Terror in the Green Room, script by Darlene Wasserman. The next time this tidy little thriller comes on TV, take note of the bearded psychiatrist who shows up in the last scene, spouting the immortal line, “The human mind is deeper than the Mariana Trench.” That’s Sam Katzman himself, demonstrating to the world that he had every right to make a lot of cruddy B-movies, because he sure as hell couldn’t act.
Although Joy had driven like a lunatic to get us to the meeting on time, we were still the last to arrive. Blue-uniformed Naval officers, white-coated biologists, and gray-faced eminences in charcoal suits filled the subterranean briefing room, everyone seated at a circular table that might have last seen service in some Paramount epic about King Arthur. Armed guards stood watch at all four corners.
A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Joy introduced me as “the man of the hour,” then systematically presented my two dozen Knickerbocker colleagues, all of whose names I instantly forgot, with three exceptions: Rear Admiral George Yordan, my immediate sponsor, a spindly man with a black eye-patch, Vice Admiral Alexander Strickland, the blowzy Chief of Teratoid Operations, his face as flush and pliant as a hot-water bottle, and Joy’s gnomish, dithery father, Dr. Ivan Groelish. The first time I met Lionel Atwill — at one of Siggy Dagover’s famous parties, back before we’d learned to avoid each other everywhere except movie sets — I thought to myself, “Yes, this man is entirely capable of building an army of psychotic robots and setting them loose on the world,” whereas Ivan Groelish looked barely capable of creating an unruly can opener.
The next ten minutes passed in stupefying small talk, during which interval a deferential sailor served us our choice of iced tea or hot coffee. A scowling commander whose name badge read Barzak informed me that his eleven-year-old son belonged to the Syms Thorley Fan Club, employing the same tone he might have used to confess that the boy smoked reefers. A sallow young biologist, Lance Pellegrino, complimented me on my performance in Beyond the Veil. Though a rationalist at heart, he could “not dismiss the possibility of life after death,” and he thought I’d done a terrific job of “communicating what it’s like to be a ghost.” I told him that, though a romantic at heart, I did not believe in ghosts, “but, of course, if not for life after death, I’d be out of a job.”
At last Admiral Strickland lit a Lucky Strike and, fixing me with the ineluctable stare of a professional basilisk, announced the start of the briefing. “For the sake of getting the best possible performance out of you, Mr. Thorley, we are about to disclose certain highly classified facts. Should you dare to reveal them to another soul, including your paramour back in Santa Monica — well, there’s a word for that.”
