by Ellen Datlow
The unicorn trotted back into the pool and was gone.
This is it, Alice thought. It’s the mercury. I’m as mad as he is.
“The way out’s through there. We can have a better life.”
“I’m scared.”
“The other side’s just a wondrous reflection of what’s here.”
“Daddy, will we know each other there?” There was a strange relief to giving in.
“We’d know each other anywhere, child. The night you were born, I held you in my arms as I stood by the window. You were bathed in moonlight. It was like you were lit from within. I’d know you anywhere. You’re mine and Maria’s love manifest.”
“Daddy, do you promise we’ll recognise one another?”
“Yes. Do you believe in me?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I believe in you. Here.” They were reflected in the silvery white mirror. A mist floated above it. “Hold my hand.”
And they stepped through to the other side.
SOME KIND OF WONDERLAND
Richard Bowes
On a Sunday afternoon Gilda Darnell and I are in her living room, phoning in one last conference call. I tell the host, “We two have been buddies since we were both in Scott Holman’s Alice film Some Kind of Wonderland, back in 1965. She was the Duchess. I was the Cheshire Cat.”
With the show’s 50th anniversary/resurrection scheduled for Monday evening, we’ve chased down every promotional opportunity we could find.
Gilda says, “Some Kind of Wonderland came out early in 1966. The Village Voice had us on the front page. ‘Hippy Alice Hits The Big Apple!’ was how they put it. We got lots of downtown Manhattan attention but so many underground films got released around then. And Scott Holman our producer/ director had passed away. But I never forgot about it. A few years ago I managed to buy the rights from the Holman family and got The Film Annex interested in restoring it.”
She nods to me and I say, “Scott Holman had this off-kilter perspective—like the Alice books themselves. He caught New York at a certain moment. And he created the cast out of people he found. His Alice was a young model he saw on a fashion shoot.”
Gilda says, “I’d been in a couple of off-off-Broadway shows but I came to his attention because I was the mouthiest waitress in all the West Village.”
“And what were you, Justin?” the host asks me.
“A street boy who got very lucky,” I hear myself say as the interview ends.
Gilda gets a call from a publicist she hired. This one actually works on Sunday. “The approach is: ‘It Was Worth the Wait,’” she says.
Things I learned working on Wonderland led to my nice gig as a location scout and fixer for movies and TV shows shooting in New York. But Gilda has managed to learn the ways of Manhattan real estate and politics. She’s my hero.
While she talks strategy, I look down at the world from her twentieth-story windows in Tribeca. Below is the intense green of Washington Market Park. Late afternoon sunlight bounces off the Hudson.
I love the way she doesn’t forget the actual past. Prominent in her living room are framed black-and-white photos from fifty years back and more. They show a stark, corroded highway, a junk-riddled Hudson riverbank, and the wrecked warehouses where this building and other high-rises now stand.
This had been the thriving, sprawling Washington Produce Market. The neighborhood that fed New York until the city abandoned it in the 1960s. Bringing those ruins to Scott’s attention was my proudest contribution to the film.
Gilda has a photo of Scott Holman displayed prominently. The writer/director/producer wears black-rimmed glasses and a Borsalino hat like a European auteur. But underneath that you can see a young guy staring intently at something off camera. I want to believe he’s watching me.
The editor of an online entertainment site calls Gilda. At the same moment Lucinda Gold comes out of her room and floats through the apartment in dark glasses and a lovely green kimono. Gilda is Lucinda’s partner and caregiver. Lucinda was Alice in the film. She’s gone a few rounds with addictions and had a stroke a decade or two back. The glasses hide a dead eye and she speaks a bit haltingly.
We go out on the balcony and watch the sun set. I sit on her good side and catch a hint of the lovely kid for whom I once was a body double.
She’s kind of excited by the revival and tells me, “Gilda tries to appear so cool and professional. Actually, she’s gaga. I hope you invited all the freaks and monsters?”
I start to run down the list of invitees. Then I recall a recent confrontation that I’m not sure wasn’t a nightmare and blurt out, “I got asked about Bonibo and how I killed Scott.” Right about the time the movie was made, an anonymous chemist achieved the dark marriage of junk and speed. Bonibo was the street name.
“Oh, Justin, I’m sorry.” She looks like she’s ready to cry. “Everyone who matters knows how much you loved him.” I feel bad about having stupidly upset her and try to lighten things.
“He may have loved me but he wanted to be you!” I say, and somehow we laugh. With an early spring night falling on the city, I kiss her and wave goodbye to Gilda.
At ground level, the gathering darkness and the absence of pedestrians could give a minor chill. But this is Tribeca, now the safest of Manhattan neighborhoods, not the bombed-out wreckage where we filmed much of Some Kind of Wonderland.
On a cobblestoned side street leading away from the river I pass the eighteenth-century two-story townhouse we once used as the White Rabbit’s home.
Fifty years back it was on a different street, with faded tradesman signs over the door and shingles falling off. Now it’s been moved and refurbished. A light is on in a second-floor window and a figure stands talking on a cell phone. He turns slightly and reveals rabbit’s ears.
Someone walking her dog stops and stares. A male couple snaps cell phone shots. The light goes out, and I wonder if this is something Gilda’s created as publicity for the revival.
I also remember Scott telling me, “It’s a kind of leakage. A story spreads out into the world around it. Even someone who’s never read the Alice books remembers a song or once saw a drawing.”
As I walk uptown through SoHo and into the Village, I remember thumbing my way to Manhattan from South Jersey when I was seventeen. People back home said I talked and walked funny. Everyone knew my mother drank and did drugs and that my father was nowhere to be found.
On my way to the city, I dumped that prior life.
When the last lonely driver let me out of his car on Bleecker Street, I took one look around and knew this was my place. I wasn’t the hottest boy but I wasn’t stupid. I used whatever charms I had. And I learned to talk to everyone, forget nothing, and smile a lot. I could be trusted to run errands, keep my eyes open, and be discreet.
One night, I was filling in for the busboy at the Village Gate and caught the eye of a young man in glasses sitting with some other guys. When I paid an unnecessary visit to their table, he said, “You’ve got a smile like the Cheshire Cat.”
Because I’d gotten a really lousy education, I had no idea what he was talking about. The night after that he came alone and met me at closing time.
We went out drinking. Scott was his name. He’d just graduated from Yale and moved into the city. Scott took me to his apartment on the first floor of an old brownstone on a quiet old street.
My trip from Gilda and Lucinda’s leads me down that street and into the apartment where I’ve lived ever since.
Yes, I’m lucky and, yes, it’s haunted. There’s a mirror over the unusable fireplace. When I flick on the light it catches my favorite Scott photo on the opposite wall. My lover sits twirling his horn-rimmed glasses, smiling at me. I walk closer, kiss his reflection on its lips, then wipe it clean.
* * *
On Monday evening at The Film Annex we’ve turned out a crowd. The theater seats about two hundred, and there are standees. A curator tells the audience how editors managed to reconstruc
t our nearly lost Manhattan Alice film. She describes the mid-sixties explosion of New York’s underground cinema, cites stuff like Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Chafed Elbows by Robert Downey Jr.’s father, and the rise of Warhol’s publicity machine. “It seems Some Kind of Wonderland got lost in the melee,” she says.
Then it’s my turn to stand before the screen in my best suit and talk about Scott Holman. The world has changed for certain when an aged former rent boy is called on to explain a director’s work.
The first thing I say is, “When we first met, Scott called me ‘the Cheshire Cat.’ All I knew was that he was magic.
“For me it was magic that he was able to devote every minute to what obsessed him. And his obsession was a movie about Wonderland, but with New York grit.
“He was shocked that I’d never heard of Alice. He read the first part of Alice in Wonderland aloud to me. I read the rest—first book I ever finished. Within a few weeks I found myself immersed in that story.
“Not my first lover or my last,” I say, “but the only one who woke me in the middle of the night to wonder how gay the Frog Footman was.”
I don’t describe Scott’s telling me how trust funds worked and my awe at such things’ existence.
At the Annex I don’t dwell on his downfall. “Maybe Scott Holman wasn’t meant for the long haul. He gave everything he had to one dream and you’ll see it wasn’t in vain.”
There is some applause as the lights go down and I step aside. Just before the opening credits, the curators have inserted a tiny clip from the film. The Cheshire Cat (me in mask and costume), all lunatic smiles, pounces upon an invisible mouse.
This gets laughs but I hear a woman murmur in the dark, “The cat must have been on Bonibo.” And I freeze.
* * *
Scott Holman interspersed the opening credits between shots of Alice waking from a nap on a wicker couch in the living room of our apartment.
He told me early on what caught him about Lucinda. “She was at the center of this chaos of models, photographers, art directors on a fashion shoot. She wasn’t twenty but had this expression of amused disbelief. Just the way a modern Alice should react.
Scott came from a well-to-do family that didn’t know what to make of a boy who read and reread Wonderland and Looking-Glass. In his heart of hearts, this thin guy with thick glasses wanted to be Alice. Instead he tried to live through Lucinda.
At moments early in the shooting, with her long blond hair and wide-open eyes, Lucinda combined Tenniel’s drawings of a self-assured Alice with her persona as a bright young woman in New York almost one hundred years later.
On screen, Alice arose and parted the curtains. The first thing that caught her eye was a human-size rabbit played by an elegant kid in a waiter’s outfit with a white rabbit’s tail on the seat of his pants. He murmured to himself about being late.
Alice took one look and slipped on her sandals. She wore a dancer’s cream-colored leotard and a long, flowing embroidered blouse over it. Lucinda had designed what would be her costume throughout the film.
The audience saw Alice go out the door, then saw her on the street. She followed the rabbit along that old block, hurried to keep up with him.
Watching this on screen, I remember being across the street with Scott and Jackstone, his cameraman. They caught some good footage of the Rabbit and Alice. But gawkers and passersby did double takes and ruined a lot of shots. This was street photography without red tape or licenses.
What the viewer saw next was the rabbit running down a flight of stairs and through a door with Down the Rabbit Hole painted above it.
Jackstone rarely spoke and never smiled. But he caught Alice following the rabbit through the door really nicely.
Scott had been told about a legendary bar in the Village called Down the Rabbit Hole. Rich kids are used to getting what they want, but nobody could find him such a place.
Over my last couple of years in the city I had learned more than he could imagine about how the Village worked. I knew, for instance, of a beat-to-hell bar located in a cellar on a back street. The owner was always broke.
When I told Scott what I was going to do, he didn’t have total confidence in me. But I did get the hundred dollars I said it would take. With that I bribed the owner into painting Down the Rabbit Hole over his door. Scott was impressed.
A bit later he said, “The Cheshire Cat’s a small part. Alex quit today and I’m giving it to you.” I was terrified. “All you need is that wild smile. I’ll coach you.”
He then rented the place, which was a dark semi-hellhole with low lights and old, scarred furniture, for a shoot. Much of the newly assembled cast and extras of Some Kind of Wonderland were there in costume. Human-size birds and turtles, Mad Hatters and Dodos leaned on the bar. Men dressed as playing cards and women in crowns sat at tables. There’s no scene like it in the book. The camera caught me in my Cheshire Cat suit. Gilda as the Duchess had a small guy in bonnet and gown who played her child, sitting on her knee.
On screen the rabbit passed through the room and out a rear door with Alice following. Next we saw them go down a long, dimly lit corridor where she found a small table with a bottle and the note. “Drink me.” After debating the idea for a moment, she popped the cork and took a belt.
Back when I stood next to Scott watching her do this, I found it amusing. The bottle was full of tea.
The next scene was shot from the floor up. Alice didn’t get giraffe-necked or anything. But Scott had Jackstone somehow make it seem that her head was floating on the ceiling like a helium balloon.
Further down the hall she found a cake on another table. “Eat Me” was written in frosting. Alice was a sensible but daring girl: so she did. Watching her on screen in The Film Annex fifty years later, knowing how fond of strange potions she became, I shivered.
On screen, Alice started to cry. Mice and rats and birds, all human-size, watched a puddle of tears form.
The next moment the audience saw a pool of tears with Alice swimming in it. This was shot a few nights later without too much light in the swimming pool at an old health club. To get us in after hours I’d bribed the night watchman.
That night Scott was drinking and smoking weed. This evoked my mother and my home and showed me a part of him I didn’t want to see.
Scott told Lucinda a couple of times: “Alice swam fully dressed in the pool of her tears.” Like this somehow meant she should be able to do that. Scott wanted to film her in semi-darkness swimming in tears. Lucinda couldn’t do much more than hang on to the pool’s ledge and kick her feet.
I saw him having trouble distinguishing the imaginary Alice from Lucinda in the real world.
Jackstone was uninterested in anything not involving lenses. So I was the only one who actually worried about her drowning in the dark. One way sissy boys fulfilled their high-school gym requirement was the swim team. I stripped to my briefs and played lifeguard. When Lucinda had trouble staying afloat, I jumped in and helped her out of the water.
Scott wasn’t pleased. But she and I weren’t that different in height and my hair in those days was long and blondish. I wore the Alice outfit and the scene was dimly lighted enough that the viewer saw what could well be Alice swimming in tears with her clothes plastered to her.
That night I saw Scott divide people into those who could help fulfill his fantasies and those who couldn’t. He relied on me and I was in awe of him. But I remembered that night.
As I thought about it, the audience in the Annex watched the White Rabbit scamper by, talking to himself about his impending execution by the queen. He threw open a door and outside there was sunshine.
Then he noticed Alice all dry and dressed somehow and said, “Mary Ann, quick now fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan,” before he stepped into the light.
* * *
On screen, Alice in her leotard and blouse, but looking a bit wary followed the Rabbit out the door and onto a street paved with broken cobblestones.
&nbs
p; Scott and Jackstone had complained about their trouble shooting in noisy, crowded Greenwich Village. So I’d taken them on a tour of the lost Washington Market neighborhood that I knew about. He was fascinated, and from then on much of the film was set in a world stranger than anything in the book.
Empty brick hulks with faded wooden signs like: Collin Brothers: Egg Brokers and Josephson: Grain Wholesaler lined the streets. The windows were full of jagged glass and seemed to stare down on Alice or any trespasser, with expressions of shock and horror. At the end of the street was a rusty elevated highway and beyond that the murky Hudson River.
In this neighborhood nothing moved and there was little noise. Most of the abandoned buildings had rusted loading docks.
On screen, Alice and the audience saw something blue move on one of those docks. It was a large caterpillar smoking a hookah. He stared at her and asked disdainfully, “WHO ARE YOU?”
And she answered, “I hardly know, sir, just at present,” and told him she had been several different people since that morning.
Watching her on screen, I felt exactly as I had when I saw her perform this scene on that wrecked street fifty years before. She had her lines down and delivered them. But her Alice seemed a bit remote and withdrawn—changed by the world into which she’d wandered.
When Scott whispered to me, “The city’s making our Alice tough,” I got that when he talked about Alice he was talking about himself.
“EXPLAIN YOURSELF,” said the Caterpillar, and took another hit from the hookah.
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see.” When Lucinda delivered that line, it sounded like the truth.
But the contemptuous insect again spoke with disdain, “I DON’T SEE.”
All this was in the script and the Caterpillar is a satiric creation. But I’d heard the actor playing the part express his contempt for people like Lucinda and me, because he was a professional and we weren’t.
Scott let the scene play out. The viewer saw Alice appear to break off and eat a piece of the mushroom on which the caterpillar sat.
