Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  Then he muttered, “The scene doesn’t go anywhere,” and looked at me like he expected a solution. I was in the next scene and was already in the Cheshire mask and costume. Before the second take I said, “I can jazz it.”

  Scott nodded. When he said “Action,” I was moving toward the loading dock. The other thing sissy boys did in high school was gymnastics.

  Late in life, a sudden glimpse of yourself when young can be like a flash of sunlight in a dark wood.

  Before the Caterpillar even spoke, my Cheshire Cat, with his mad grin, grabbed the pipe from the hookah and drew deeply.

  On screen I imitated a cat doing a long, fond inhalation. My eyes crossed and my mad smile seemed to spread all the way to my ears. Later I found out this was called improvisation. On my own inspiration, I crouched down, hissed at something only I could see, and pounced on an invisible mouse.

  My shenanigans ended up in the film. Watching in the Annex I was impressed at how catlike and off script I’d managed to be.

  The Caterpillar stared at me, affronted, and I was pleased to see how pissed off I’d made him. He was just an actor with a couple of off-Broadway credits. I was the director’s boyfriend.

  After shooting at Down the Rabbit Hole stopped that day, Scott turned to me and said, “We should drop by Down the Rabbit Hole. The crowd there is amazing.”

  I smiled and reminded him that he had hired that entire crowd. He seemed startled, but I knew he had a lot of things on his mind.

  * * *

  In the front row of The Film Annex, Gilda sitting beside me says, “Now my big moment is here.”

  On screen the Duchess went into her act. Gilda in the movie wore an enormous, misshapen hat. Flaming ringlets of red hair clashed with a chartreuse lipstick shade never seen before or since. Her dress looked like an orange tablecloth tied around her waist.

  During the filming I’d heard about a tired, old restaurant on the waterfront that had suddenly gone out of business and left everything behind. For a price we shot the Duchess’s house scene in the kitchen.

  On screen a shrill-voiced midget played the cook. She and the Duchess tossed plates and cutlery at each other.

  Then Gilda held “the baby” who actually was the very short actor she’d held in her lap at the Rabbit Hole.

  Gilda smacked his ass while he pretended to sneeze. On the first take Gilda had felt too softhearted to lay into him.

  But when he complained that he wasn’t given enough screen time, she got way more aggressive.

  Scott had paid someone to come up with a raucous tune for the famous song, which she sang far off-key:

  Speak roughly to your little boy,

  And beat him when he sneezes;

  He only does it to annoy,

  Because he knows it teases.

  The cook, the Duchess, even the “little boy” sang it. Then the Duchess’s Frog Footman and the Queen’s Fish Footmen, the White Rabbit and a lizard, a dodo, a lobster, and finally Alice and the Cheshire Cat and a dozen others appeared behind them and we all sang. I think it was the White Rabbit who began doing the Twist. That stupid dance was several years old by then. But we all knew it and did our own versions of it. Lucinda was smiling.

  Scott too was wide-eyed. I never saw such joy on his face before or after. The next day, he had us dancing on a wrecked street in Washington Market. Everyone who saw the movie in its first incarnation agreed this was a great chaotic moment.

  Fifty years later the Annex audience applauds. I turn and watch Lucinda stare up at herself on screen. Gilda whispers something to her and she cracks a tiny smile.

  * * *

  With almost no preliminaries, the Red Queen (a tall, mad-eyed drag) strode on screen. And she and Gilda as the Duchess had a short but vicious croquet game on a patch of dying grass. They glared at each other with genuine hate and used pink lawn-ornament flamingos to whack balls across the lawn.

  * * *

  Then I watch Lucinda in her Alice outfit and ringlets walk down a Washington Market alley that looked like Berlin after the bombing. This was from the period in the shooting when she wanted me on screen with her all the time.

  Unless it involved swimming or somersaults I never was much of a performer. I got reminded of this as I watched myself on screen standing in the shadow of a building. Alice walked by and I was supposed to ask her, “What happened to the Duchess’s baby?” Rather than expose the New Jersey accent I was trying desperately to lose, Scott had an actor overdub my lines.

  “It turned into a pig,” Alice said, and shrugged.

  “I thought it would,” the actor’s voice replied. But his dubbed voice and my lips didn’t coordinate. The Annex audience notices and titters.

  Then a Jackstone shot silenced them. Scott had him catch me in evening light and the camera made me fade until only the mask and my phony smile were there: a nice effect.

  “Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” Alice said. This was said in the voice of an Alice who had seen quite a bit. “But a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing.”

  Just after I’d read the book, Scott told me, “Alice, behind her nice upper-class manners, is kind of a remote survivor.” I’d never met people like Alice or like him. I took in what he said but didn’t much understand.

  Only later did I realize how a kid who never quite fit into his well-to-do family could worship Alice’s independent spirit. In Lucinda he created an Alice with the beauty and confidence he could only dream about.

  Back then I mostly managed not to think of home. And I tried not to notice how Lucinda at times acted secretively like my mother did when she got hold of a new painkiller prescription.

  The morning we were about to shoot the Mad Tea Party scene it was obvious to me. I asked Lucinda what she was on. She just gave me her coldest Alice look ever, turned her back, and walked away.

  I wasn’t in the tea party scene, probably at the request of Johnny Breen.

  On the Annex screen, the March Hare and Mad Hatter are at a long table on a cobblestone street. They were played by Breen and Ted Libber, a duo who billed themselves as a “Neo-Vaudeville act.”

  Libber, as I recall, was OK. But Breen had spotted Scott, new to the city and just down from Yale. He’d attached himself to Scott as if they were an item. Johnny Breen was there the night Scott found me at the Village Gate.

  On screen the duo start crying, “No room. No room,” as soon as Alice appears. They run through their routine and yank the dormouse out of the teapot with eye rolls and shtick that was older than Alice in Wonderland itself.

  They could carry a tune. The Annex audience, in a friendly mood, applauds their singing:

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

  How I wonder what you’re at!

  Up above the world you fly,

  Like a tea tray in the sky.”

  I rise and walk to the back of the house. Breen was full of resentment the moment he saw me on the set with Scott. Fifty years after I’d forgotten him, I discovered he hated me still.

  One of my tasks for the revival of Some Kind of Wonderland had been contacting as many surviving veterans of the film as possible. Gilda had lists of everyone who appeared on or off camera. Certain names were crossed off because of death. Libber was deceased. There were question marks next to those whose status and/or location was unknown.

  Johnny Breen was one of the potentially missing and I’ll admit, even after all these years, to not having put a lot of effort into finding him.

  So encountering him in the evening dusk a few days before the Wonderland showing was uncanny and unpleasant. Breen came around a corner near my place as I walked by. Like he’d planned an ambush, he stood in front of me on the sidewalk as ethereal as a puff of smoke and smiling a tight smile. Two old men stared at each other.

  “No room, no room,” he said in a hoarse whisper. Then he said, “I introduced Scott Holman to avant-garde theater in New York. I guided him when he babbled about doing Alice in dirty old New Yo
rk. Next thing I knew a certain gutter rat was sleeping with him, appearing in Scott’s movie even though he had never acted.

  “Libber and I got a few days’ work out of that film, and nothing more. We’d hoped for a sequel. But the movie flopped. Then Scott was dead. Everyone knew you’d given him an overdose but somehow you didn’t get touched. We wondered who you bribed, how much you stole.”

  I made myself smile and said, “No one killed Scott. He still lives. Come to his show and see for yourself.” I stepped around him. Breen tried to block me and it seemed like I walked right through him.

  Standing at the back of the theater, I’m still not sure if that meeting was real or a dream. Breen couldn’t imagine any motives on my part but theft and murder. That was his stupidity. But I think about Scott and how lost and innocent he was. I could have saved him if I hadn’t been so young and in awe.

  * * *

  When I turn my attention back to the film, Alice with a fixed smile wanders with the Cheshire Cat under a corroded highway and down to a junk-filled beach. A tugboat pulls a bunch of barges up the Hudson and sunlight comes through layers of good, old-fashioned New York smog.

  On the shore the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, in full costume, dance a pavane and sing “Beautiful Soup,” while Alice and the Cat watch.

  As that scene ends, a voice that’s somehow familiar whispers in my ear, “Remember when we were shooting on that stinking beach infested with truck tires and rats. The only way to get there was by walking under that expressway, hoping all the time it didn’t collapse as you did.”

  I turn and recognize the face. Carson is the name. She was the Gryphon. Her girlfriend, Shep, was the Mock Turtle.

  Today they wear modified versions of their movie costumes. I recognize Gilda’s hand in this. Carson says, “For that four-minute scene, I had to stand under the sun flapping my wings and wearing a bird mask. Shep had it worse. I think her shell started out as a bathtub.

  “Scott began OK as a director—a sweet guy. But when he did our scene he was less than half present. By the time he and that Golem cameraman found a take they liked we were dying for a drink.

  “There was nothing open in that hellhole. But you led us out of the neighborhood and trekked across Canal Street. There was actual life there, including a little deli that sold beer and wine.

  “I’m wearing this bird head and wings and Shep’s got the turtle shell on her back and they don’t let us in. But you’re a smiling pussycat and they welcome you, tickle your phony ears and sell you six packs and cold bottles of cheap wine. I love you for that still!”

  The two of them are headed out the Annex doors when Shep looks my way and finally speaks. “Watch us on the news!”

  * * *

  The grand finale is the Knave of Hearts’ trial. It was shot amid the mirrors and red velvet of an old-fashioned strip club that I’d found for Scott. Wonderland lizards, rabbits, lobsters, pigs sit in the jury box. The Red Queen and the Duchess glare at each other before a backdrop of a couple of dozen extras dressed as playing cards.

  On screen Jackstone made it look like the human playing cards are being shuffled, riffled, and fanned. Viewing it I saw how, when the film got released, Jackstone was on his way to Hollywood.

  Scott assembled this whole scene, acquired the costumes, supervised the lighting, assigned lines to the performers, and arranged them around the location. When the last take was shot, Scott slumped against me and whispered, “It’s over.”

  What I remember about the end of shooting is getting Scott home after the wrap party. On his desk (the one I still use) I noticed a bill for costumes. It involved the kinds of numbers I’d never even thought about. Scott grabbed it. “This is an investment,” he said.

  * * *

  In the Annex, the credits roll and my name pops up on the screen as Alice walks up the stairs of Down the Rabbit Hole with a slight smile that says she knows whatever is worth knowing about this town.

  There’s nice applause and the lights come up. A woman in a devastating suit whispers in my ear that she’s from the Tribeca Film Festival, a prestigious event run by Robert De Niro.

  * * *

  That evening, Gilda gives what she calls “A Survivors Party” for those connected with the movie who have made it to old age.

  She lets me announce that the Tribeca Film Festival is very interested in showing Some Kind of Wonderland. It’s ironic that it was filmed in Tribeca before that’s what this neighborhood was called.

  Gilda knows how to garner publicity. We watch social media display photos of actors she dressed as playing cards standing at attention in front of The Film Annex.

  New York One interviews Carson and Shep in their personae as the Gryphon and Mock Turtle as they sing while strolling down the Hudson River Park.

  Someone on radio calls the film “As surrealistic as Alice in Wonderland has always been.” It’s getting more and better attention than almost anything got fifty years ago.

  Gilda says, “We’re here to celebrate a young man who came to New York with a dream and died bringing it to life. Holman went for something dark—Carroll’s characters in a ruined city and an Alice who gets tough in ways he couldn’t.

  “That young man’s gone but his better half lives on.” She points to me and my eyes tear. The party is running down when I kiss everyone and go out the door. As the elevator opens Lucinda slips in beside me.

  “I’d like to visit Scott” is all she says, and we walk through the lobby and onto the side street. The upstairs light goes off in the rabbit’s house as we approach. “Gilda’s doing?” I ask.

  Lucinda shakes her head. “She was upset because the Rabbit Guy tried to follow her home. Remember Scott saying a great story had a kind of leakage. Bits of it get out and lodge in peoples’ heads? There’s plenty of that hanging around right now.”

  The townhouse door opens. The White Rabbit, in a jacket and slacks that display a white tail, steps out and walks away briskly. Lucinda and I look at each other, nod our heads, and follow him uptown along dark Hudson Street. People on a corner smoking outside a club do double takes as the rabbit passes.

  “It’s not just us: ordinary people can see him,” Lucinda says.

  Unable to stop thinking about Scott, I talk to her compulsively, saying stuff she already knows. “After he’d shot the film, when it was being edited, then shown to distributers, he kept spending money on booze and grass. But I thought it was from his magic Trust Fund. As a kid, I’d learned not to notice things I didn’t want to see.

  “Then I discovered checks were bouncing. The rent was way overdue and his family didn’t want to know him. He mainly just lay there smashed out of his mind. Even I knew he was doing narcotics, but I somehow couldn’t talk to him about it.”

  The White Rabbit has led us into the West Village. He turns a corner, and facing us is Down the Rabbit Hole. “Oh, my,” Lucinda says. Without the slightest hesitation, we follow him down the stairs. The bar has, like everything in the Village, been gentrified almost beyond recognition. The rabbit walks past the yuppie clientele, opens the door he opened in the movie, and disappears.

  On occasion nostalgia has led me here over the decades. I know the door leads, not to a tunnel and a pool of tears, but to a closet full of cleaning equipment. Still, I open it to make sure. The bartender says, “Guy, the restroom’s the other way.”

  Lucinda takes my arm as we exit. Suddenly, on one wall of the bar, we see the whole crew: life-size playing cards, birds, beasts, Duchess and Queens. She and I, Alice and the Cheshire Cat, are there. It’s not a photo but a kind of living mosaic all alive and nodding to us. We do a double take and they’re gone. The bartender and a couple of patrons who were looking our way are blinking and rubbing their eyes.

  “Talk about leakage,” Lucinda says when we get outside.

  “Scott created all that,” I say. “I feel like he created me. I even learned to talk like him. To support us when he was down, I ran dirty errands, worked late shifts at c
lubs, anything short of peddling my ass.

  “Around then, Jackstone came by. He was showing New York producers this reel of his camera sequences from our film. This was just before the studios brought him out to Hollywood. He saw Scott and just shook his head. But he connected me with a couple of guys about to film a cop TV movie, told them what I could do.

  “I gave them a tour of the waterfront; they gave me a few hundred bucks. Not a lot, but it would pay the rent. So, I gave the money to this guy who’d changed my life. The clients wanted me the next day too. So I compounded my stupidity and left him alone in the apartment. When I came home and found him on the floor, I called for help but it was too late.”

  Because it was drugs, cops were called. Because I was a gay kid I got arrested.

  Lucinda knows this story but we need to tell it again no matter how it hurts. Tears come out of her good eye. “I’ll never forgive my addiction,” she says. “After Wonderland, the Warhol crowd and a couple of shock fashion photographers got interested in me. Bonibo was speed to keep you going and then junk to knock you out. I looked like the goddess of death, as you must remember.

  “Scott was doing Bonibo,” she says. “He told me he needed more, said he had to travel. So I furnished his suicide.”

  We reach my place and she’s patting my back and I’m patting hers as we go inside. She calls Uber on her phone. I turn on the light and there’s Scott watching us from the photo.

  “Justin, you knew I’d dealt him the drugs. You could have told them and you didn’t. I still owe you.”

  “I used my one call to phone Gilda,” I said. “Even back then she was connected. Knew a crusading lawyer who got me released. He even found out Scott had put my name on the lease. Made it possible for me to survive.”

  A horn beeps. I see Lucinda’s car in front of the house. She goes to the glass and says, “Oh, Scottso, with you, there was never a regular day. Thank you.” She kisses the reflection and me before leaving.

  Then I kiss him as always and tell him, “Some Kind of Wonderland had a great day. I know you can feel it.”

  ALIS