Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  The film is made.

  The consensus of those who worked on the film is that it is the unhappiest film production they have experienced.

  Some movies turn out the way you, as script writer, conceived them. Some turn out entirely differently as a pleasant surprise. Some turn out entirely differently and as a surprise without pleasure. This film was a surprise without pleasure for me. But many people liked the film. Some of my friends like the film and some do not. I do not know which are my ‘true friends’. While I am living in Oxford (UK) in 1986 the film is screened three times to appreciative audiences of Oxford students.

  I say in an interview that Makavejev was in turn a playful child, an inquiring intellectual, and sometimes, when threatened, a high-school-level Marxist ideologue. I say in an interview that he came to Australia and took emblems and icons from the culture and from my stories to tell his story. I describe it as ‘stealing the props and costumes from our grandmother’s attic’. But I accept that it is legitimate for a director to do this.

  In an interview in Italy which a friend translates for me Makavejev says, ‘Australia is Switzerland pretending to be Texas.’ He found Australia too low-key and minimalist. ‘I am from a Mediterranean culture where you say things to provoke people and raise the energy level.’ He says other unflattering things about the country which had been his creative host.

  Greta Scacchi, interviewed in London, says that ‘not only was the original part of Terri in the The Coca-Cola Kid a good one, and an original script, but I liked what it was saying as well’. She says that by the time filming began the script had drastically changed. ‘Makavejev is a sweet and charming man,’ she says, but she wouldn’t be in a hurry to work with him again.

  The film is chosen as Australia’s official entry in the Cannes Film Festival.

  At the Cannes Film Festival, Makavejev says, ‘… if politics is for those whose orgasm is incomplete … the fact that I’m not dealing with politics any more says something good about me.’

  In 1986 The Coca-Cola Kid is in the top five highest grossing foreign films in the US and in the top ten US video sales. While in London I have a meal with Greta. She thinks that the reason video sales are so high is that people are taking it out to look at her nude scenes.

  In 1986 I am in Belgrade for the launching of the book of my selected short stories, in Serbian translation entitled The Coca-Cola Kid – not the book of the film. Its publication there has nothing to do with Makavejev and I had not intended to contact him. When he sees that I am in Belgrade he contacts me and organises a party in my honour.

  I arrive at the party, we hug each other, tears come to our eyes.

  I ask him about some of the harsh things he said about Australia in his interviews.

  ‘I sell movie,’ he said, ‘it is just show business. You write great script, Moorhouse.’

  ‘You made a great movie, Dusan.’

  ‘We make another movie, eh?’

  ‘Do not push the river, Dusan.’

  But what happened to the original story of the Coca-Cola kid? A footnote.

  In the original story, Becker, the jazz-playing Coca-Cola executive at the ‘Yacht Club’ in a small Australian town, quotes from Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’, ‘I must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life … a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’ … and he plays jazz piano, drunkenly, wanting to be a pianist rather than a merchant, although proud of his merchandising prowess.

  In the first draft of the script, Becker is making himself. a decent Bloody Mary at the Country Club in an Australian town and at the same time teaching the club steward how to make it correctly, watched by Kim, the Marxist schoolteacher, in a denim suit. ‘One of America’s gifts to civilisation,’ Becker says. Kim says that he doesn’t accept America’s gifts to civilisation. Later Becker tells Kim that the plastic sandwich wrap is used by kids as a condom replacing the Coca-Cola douche as a contraceptive and this has affected sales as well as the birth rate. [This piece of information about the plastic sandwich wrap had fascinated Makavejev and he had wanted it in the script.]

  In the next draft of the script Becker describes the Bloody Mary as ‘perhaps America’s single most important gift to gastronomy’. Adding a drop of Tabasco sauce, he says to the club steward, ‘Now that, sir, is a Bloody Mary.’ Becker plays jazz piano still and asks Kim if he knows anything about jazz. Kim says something about ‘decadent white jazz – the negro struggle – jazz is the music of black defeatism’.

  In the next draft, Becker asks Kim what a communist is doing at a country club in a small town. Kim says that in a small town everyone goes to everything ‘except the proletariat’ which allows Becker to recite some lines from Dorothy Parker: ‘You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat, to come across for the proletariat.’

  In the next version, Becker is still making the Bloody Mary and teaching its secrets to the club steward, reciting Masefield and Parker. He talks of the sandwich wrap replacing the Coca-Cola douche, ‘a French letter,’ he says, ‘in every school bag.’ Kim volunteers the information that in Australia the major brand of sandwich wrap is called Gladwrap. [This fact had also tickled Makavejev when he heard it and he wanted it in the script.] In this draft, Kim also gives Becker a lecture on commodity fetishism.

  In the next to final version we learn that Becker is in town to put the town’s old soft drink manufacturer, T. George McDowell, out of business, and he sings, ‘Shot an old horse and feeling blue/If you shot an old horse, so would you.’

  In the final 1984 version heavily revised by Makavejev, this meeting between Becker and Kim disappears altogether from the script. Twenty years after that night in the Wagga Wagga Country Club when I met the original Coca-Cola Kid, the incident which inspired the story and the film is gone.

  Urban Legend – another footnote.

  In The Choking Doberman, Jan Harold Brunvand dismisses the plastic sandwich wrap contraceptive as an urban legend: ‘… in England, where the same legend is known, the product is called “cling film” and it doesn’t work any better there than it does in the US …’

  The Coca-Cola Kid

  ‘I DON’T know why we’re here,’ she said.

  They slammed the Citroen doors in unison.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ he said.

  They walked across the lawn to the door of the Yacht Club. She didn’t answer so he answered for her ‘… to meet the enemy,’ he said, as they went from the chirping country darkness into the rattle.

  The Young Liberals were not yet drunk. A few couples had begun to dance but were not yet loose. All the poker machines were in use. The band was playing – staring out, in a trance, to the private world of dance musicians. The stewards swayed with trays of drinks, rushing with a professional slowness. The dance music and intermit tent slugging of the poker machines filled the crevices between conversations.

  They left their coats at the door.

  ‘Perhaps I should’ve worn a dinner suit,’ he said, not meaning it. Trying to fill the dull emptiness between him and his wife.

  ‘Only a few’re in dinner suits,’ she said.

  He knew why they were there. They were there because they were bored and lonely in a town where they hardly knew anyone – let alone enough people to pick and choose politically. The town didn’t even have a Communist Party.

  He looked for a drink, to ease himself into the ill-fitting situation. A shoehorn drink.

  He stopped a steward with one hand and turning to his wife said, ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘Beer,’ she said.

  He wanted to throw a few down fast.

  ‘There’s Kevin and Gwen,’ she said, pointing her beer across the dance floor.

  ‘The revolutionaries made it,’ Kevin said, greeting them.

  ‘We’re waiting to be thrown out,’ he said.

  ‘Please – no politics tonight,’ Kevin said laughing. ‘Remember I arranged the invitation.’

  Kevin intr
oduced them to another couple. They talked. Then he danced with Sylvia. ‘Now you’ve brought us here, at least be agreeable,’ she said to him. He felt as soon as she said it that the party was a mistake.

  After the dance he drifted off and lost four dollars on the poker machines and resented it.

  ‘I warned you to limit yourself to two dollars,’ his wife said when he drifted back to where Kevin, Gwen and she were seated around a jug of beer.

  He wasn’t looking for chastisement. He glanced at her but didn’t retort.

  He began an aggressive talk with Percival, who was on the executive of the group – one of the political ones.

  ‘I agree,’ said Percival. ‘Take the farms away from those who mismanage them.’

  His aggression was seeped away by the agreement.

  ‘I’m pleased you agree,’ he said, not meaning it, with it sounding so agreeable that it disgusted him. He was caught in polite conversation. He wanted to be disagree able. He wanted to demonstrate where he stood, who he was. He wasn’t one of them.

  He caught his wife’s expression which said, ‘Must you talk politics?’ and looked away.

  He stood up and left the table. He was alone again. He resisted the temptation to go back to the poker machines. But he didn’t want the small talk of the table. He didn’t want the bitchiness of his wife. He stood alone, a hand in his pocket, drinking too fast.

  He went to the balcony of the club. It was then that he met the American.

  He was standing alone leaning against a wall, drink in his hand, bow-tied, looking across the water. He turned and acknowledged him with his eyes and raised his glass in salute, saying in a slightly slurred American accent:

  ‘I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky.

  All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’

  A smile squeezed out of him involuntarily as he heard the American’s recitation – it disarmed him.

  ‘And furthermore, buddy, I know the last stanza too,’ the American said.

  ‘Must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy … da da dah da dah … and all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover.’ The American seemed to falter, paused, and then continued, ‘and a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’

  The American’s face then sagged, sadly. He drank from his glass, his hand wrapped around it in a tight grip.

  He said to the American, ‘I thought only Australian and British kids learned Masefield.’

  ‘I learned Masefield, buddy, I learned Masefield.’ His face tightened up again for performance,

  ‘I’m going to be a pirate with a bright brass pivot gun,

  And an island in the Spanish Main beyond the setting sun.’

  ‘I don’t know that one.’

  ‘The Tarry Buccaneer,’ he said, ‘The Tarry Buccaneer.’

  He lapsed again.

  ‘Do you sail?’ he asked the American, again writhing against the compulsion to be ‘sociable’.

  ‘I fly,’ the American said, and then in a formal voice, ‘So you’d like to be a pirate with a big brass pivot gun – come in, sit down – do you smoke? – no, have one of mine – I think we can find you a suitable position – provided of course that you have the requisite qualifications – have you a brass pivot gun?’ It was a meandering performance for the American’s private amusement.

  Then the American turned to him as though he had remembered his presence and became genial. ‘My name’s Becker – Atlanta – the Coca-Cola Kid from Coca-Cola City.’

  They shook hands heavily and overlong like two drunks. ‘How do you mean Coca-Cola Kid?’

  ‘I’m the Coca-Cola Kid – Coca-Cola – work for Coca-Cola – here from the parent company.’

  His resistance to Becker grouped instantly, his sociability strong-armed out of the way. An enemy.

  ‘Out here to rot some teeth,’ he said, softening it only mildly with a quarter smile, glad at last to be critical, although aware of the effort it took to be unpleasant against the mood.

  Becker smiled, puzzled, and seemed to fumble to make out the true nature of the remark, as though only hazily aware that it was not just facetious.

  He wished he’d been able to say something that let Becker know he’d met the unexpected – that he was face to face with a radical.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Becker said, coming to a realisation, almost singing, ‘what have we here – an enemy of Coca-Cola?’

  ‘I guess I am,’ he said, trying to be firm – it wasn’t exactly how he’d seen himself – ‘among other things.’

  Becker shook his head with disbelief. ‘Could not be – could not be – the enemies of Coca-Cola have all been liquidated – Atlanta had them all liquidated.’

  He didn’t smile at the humour.

  ‘How could you talk about the Holy Water like that?’ Becker said. ‘Why, we made a profit of eighty-nine mil lion dollars last year – why, baby, the whole world drinks Coca-Cola.’

  ‘A few million people can’t be wrong,’ he said, coldly.

  ‘A few million? Baby, ninety-five million people drink Coke every single day – you saying people don’t know what they like?’

  Becker saw a steward. ‘Steward, my good man –’ he turned to him and asked what he was drinking and then ordered.

  ‘Why, Coca-Cola,’ Becker went on, ‘is an everyday word in every language – it’s in the dictionaries.’

  ‘Truck drivers wash their engine parts in it to eat away the grease,’ he replied, ‘and stomach linings and teeth …’ He wanted to say something about economic priorities.

  ‘Their parts? – I wash my parts in it too. Don’t tell me the one about the tooth dissolving overnight in a glass of Coke – I don’t want to hear that one.’ He shook his head. The steward came back with the drinks.

  ‘What do you do for the good of the world, Kim boy?’ Becker drank deeply.

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ he said, feeling a certain virtue.

  ‘Yes,’ Becker said, looking out to sea, ‘you teach good habits, I teach the bad.’

  ‘If that’s the way you feel,’ he said, seizing the point, ‘why don’t you get out?’

  Becker turned back with a grin. ‘Hell, I’m not serious – I like Coke – hell!’

  He blushed at having failed to see Becker’s flippancy.

  ‘Now look –’ Becker said, with a loud selling voice, ‘you might give kids a lot of good ideas but you give them a lot of God-almighty crap too – I just push a good soft drink – the best, as it so happens – nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘But the waste of it all.’ He moved on to the line he wanted to argue. ‘The waste of resources when they could be used for food. Socially desirable ends.’

  ‘I notice you spending a few damn dollars on social undesirables,’ Becker said, clinking their glasses to make his point.

  ‘Personal charity is no answer.’

  ‘Stop.’ Becker held up his hand in a halt sign. ‘Stop – the game’s over. I’m here to get drunk, not to sell Coca-Cola or debate the world.’

  He wondered if he’d scored against Becker. It was typical of people like Becker that they could switch off matters of conscience.

  Becker had gone for more drinks.

  He came back. ‘I’m going to be a pirate with a bright brass pivot gun.’ Gracefully Becker presented the drink. ‘I want to tell you a secret.’ Becker sounded drunk. ‘I don’t want to be the Coca-Cola Kid,’ he shook his head, ‘I want to be a jazz pirate.’

  ‘Jazz pirate?’

  ‘Jazz pianist – jazz penis,’ Becker said.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ he asked without interest. Becker was obviously not going to talk seriously.

  ‘They don’t have jazz penises any more – not any more.’ He waved his drink around. ‘I practised every day – I wrote for lessons – filled in a coupon back of a comic book.’

  At first he thought Becker was rambling on with nonsense but realised he wasn’t altogethe
r joking. He looked at him with slightly more sympathy, although jazz pianists weren’t actually in the vanguard of social reform. Decadent white jazz.

  He stood there to finish the drink with Becker, who didn’t say any more. He seemed to be conversing with his own thoughts.

  He found himself with nothing to say either and stood for a second rebelliously uncomfortable – stymied – unable to engage Becker. Then he wandered off, with a glance at Becker, who wasn’t looking and appeared not to notice.

  He saw his wife dancing with Kevin. They weren’t aware he was watching. He felt as if he were spying. He was spying – but his wife was innocently serious and there was a quite proper distance between them. They were talking more than dancing. He joined them when the dance finished.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ his wife queried.

  ‘Talking to an American – the Coca-Cola Kid.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Reciting Masefield.’

  Her face expressed irritation and she turned to Kevin, obviously with no intention of forcing her way through his enigmatic answers. He didn’t care to help.

  Most people were on the way to being drunk. The poker machines were rattling faster. The dancing was full of sex.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ he heard his wife say politely to him as though she felt it necessary to say something to link herself with him, perhaps as a conciliatory offer. He recognised it as a move to end the bad day they’d been having together.

  ‘What can you expect from the sons and daughters of graziers and Coca-Cola executives?’ he said, matching the effort of her wifely question with a husbandly tone. But it really didn’t dissolve the bad feeling between them. Somehow he didn’t care, somehow he preferred the bad feeling.

  Later he went to the lavatory. In the lavatory standing side by side at the urinal he heard two young men talking about skiing. ‘She had the bottom part of her leg in plaster, you see,’ one said, and the other laughed.