by Bruce Wagner
“A sausage—a fat, hairy sausage with a ‘Donny’ tattoo.”
“You’re terrible,” she said, laughing. She could still laugh.
“Have you ever heard of Eckankar?” Ursula shook her head. “They call it the religion of ‘the Light and Sound of God.’ The name’s from Sanskrit—it means ‘co-worker with God.’ But it isn’t a Christian thing. It isn’t an anything.”
They said the odd word a few times together. Phylliss told Ursula that she turned to the practice out of desperation: her movie had fallen apart, and she’d suffered the death of a fetus and father—how she’d gone to a hospital to heal but emerged more shattered than whole. ECK reached out and stopped her fall. Since then, it was the most important thing in her life, bar none. “I’ve become a ‘spiritual activist,’” she said. “My New York friends are about ready to do an intervention. I just tell ’em I want to have Yanni’s child. Or John Tesh’s, in a pinch.”
From what Ursula understood, Eckankar was less a religion than it was about dreams and soul travel and accepting other planes. That was familiar ground. She was impressed someone as cynical and sophisticated as Phylliss could have allegiance to a thing so radically ethereal; then again, with the terrible abuse Phyll had been through with her dad and all, you would have to let in something new, unless you wanted to go bonkers. When she brought up Urantia, Phylliss yelped “Dueling cultists!” and strummed an imaginary banjo, laughing her coarse cigarette laugh. Ursula said she had considered converting to Judaism as a way of winning Donny back—that sent Phylliss on a coughing jag. “You’re the only person I know,” she said, “who’s more fucked up than I am.” She invited her to Sunday morning worship services at the ECK Center. After a month of wheedling, Ursula gave in.
She wandered the sunny rooms at peace, as if having already dreamed such a place. Phylliss said those kinds of feelings weren’t unusual—it meant the Eckankar Masters had been busy nudging you to the point where you had enough power to seek them out. As more people arrived, Ursula scanned brochures on “the ancient science of soul travel” and the soul’s return to God. God was sometimes called Hu, pronounced hue, or Sugmad. Through a series of exercises that took just twenty to thirty minutes a day, it was possible to reach a supreme state of spiritual being. One was guided in this pursuit by the Living ECK Master, or Mahanta, who was descended from the first Living ECK Master of around six million years ago. (The first was called Gakko.) The current Living ECK Master, also known as the Inner and Outer Master, was a married man from Wisconsin named Sri Harold Klemp. His picture hung in a modest frame on the wall of the meeting room. The Mahanta’s hair was thinning; there was nothing grandiose about him and Ursula liked that.
Around fifteen people gathered in a circle to discuss the morning topic, “The Golden Heart.” Passages were read from a book of the same name, written by Sri Harold. It was a diverse bunch: an impeccably dressed couple, married fifty-two years, ECKists for seventeen; a carefree, homely, shoeless girl with a wide-brimmed straw hat; a heavy-set, dikey-looking nurse; a couple of friendly, formidable-looking black ladies in their sixties; and two or three fresh-faced professional men who might have been marine biologists or aeronautical engineers. One of them looked disarmingly like the Mahanta. They broke into groups of three. Ursula wound up with the old man and one of the churchwomen.
“The Golden Heart,” he stammered. “Well, that’s just another way of saying Conscience, isn’t it?” He sounded just like Jimmy Stewart and it beguiled her.
When the lady’s turn came, she said one day she found herself en route to an ECK convention in Las Vegas to see the Mahanta. “I said to myself, ‘What are you doing?’ Because I’d followed Jesus all my life and now here I was on my way to see Mr. Klemp. When I got to the convention hall, I saw a halo around his head—I knew pretty well then, I was on the right path. For me, that path is the Golden Heart.”
The leader said it was time to chant Hu, and everyone closed their eyes. Ursula blushed as the voices raised around her, blending, fusing, overlapping—a celestial curtain rose behind the lids of her eyes, wafting so tender in the dark, and she knew what was meant by “the religion of Light and Sound.” How could something so beautiful emanate from people so common and undemanding, people just like her? Yet there it was, irrefutable, like the whistle of a thousand trains, heaven-bound.
She cleared her throat and began, her voice a rivulet joining the stream that fed the Golden Heart.
Severin Welch
This man, seventy-six years old, in robust health and reasonable spirits, has not left his home in some fifteen years, initially because he was waiting for Charlie Bluhdorn to return a call.
That was the putative reason, now hidden somewhat by time’s seductive sleight of hand. His name is Severin Welch, a widower who once wrote for Bob Hope; Charlie Bluhdorn, of course, being the legendary founder and ceo of Gulf + Western. Some decades ago, after indentured servitude to set-up and punchline, Severin Welch began a preposterously ambitious big-screen adaptation of the Russian masterpiece Dead Souls, set in the Los Angeles basin. Where else? It took a certain comic gall. Why Dead Souls? He’d read it in school, written papers on it. He once met a fellow at the Hillcrest named Bernie Ribkin. Horror was where the money was—that’s what Ribkin said when Severin took him to Chasen’s for a little interrogation; horror was the future. He told Ribkin about Dead Souls and the producer liked the title. “Just don’t call it Undead Souls,” he smiled, chomping on his cigar, “or I’ll be suing your friggin ass.”
He worked the script ten years, finishing in ‘seventy-five. Over at Morris, his then-agent—the still redoubtable Dee Bruchner—took a month to read, hating it. But Severin wanted Paramount to have first look and (back then) the client was always right. Dee morosely messengered it to a Yablans underling. Over ensuing months, the agent dutifully tracked the hundred-and-ninety-three-page ms. from suite to suite until it was the faintest blip on the radar screen, then no more.
Severin kept his day job, tinkering with Souls on weekends, a hobbyist possessed. Meanwhile, he wrote sketches for Sammy and Company and worked on specials: Mac Davis and Flip Wilson, and Hope’s twenty-fifth anniversary, with a hundred guest stars—Cantinflas, Neil Armstrong, Benny, Crosby, Sinatra, Chevalier—those were the days. Aside from Lavinia’s painful divorce in wake of her husband’s nervous collapse (she somehow blamed her father for The Chet Stoddard Show fiasco), it was a ring-a-ding good time. Severin and the wife had dinner parties twice a week, and bought a place in Palm Springs on a course. He had just one complaint and it lay in wait at the end of each day: the gargantuan discourtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Months passed—why hadn’t someone the decency and professionalism to respond? Because he was a television writer? That seemed bizarre. Chayevsky had been nominated up and down the street for Network. Didn’t that ring anybody’s bells? Didn’t the Morris agency have any clout? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable for Dee to phone someone up at the studio and say: “Listen to me! You have not responded and my client is angry. He is important to this agency and you owe him that courtesy. Call him—now.” If you don’t like something, come out and say it. I want to hear about it, don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair. Give it to me with both barrels—what doesn’t kill me sure as hell will make my script stronger. That’s the way Severin looked at it. Anything but the silent treatment.
Another year. Severin, with his golf and gags and pool parties under the HOLLYWOOD sign. He’d throw back a few, then go on a Paramount rant: if the script came over the transom, then, he said, then it would be something else. Whole different story. But Dead Souls arrived by the book, so to speak, through a powerful agency—and Severin Welch was an established writer! One of the wiseacres said he should stand in front of the studio gates naked with a sandwich board, and Severin thought that a swell idea, especially when Diantha bridled. It’d probably kill his agent, but hell, Dee was dead already for all the good he did—sitting on El Camino scratching his ass like a
dull-wit stonewalling Buddha. The tragedy was, Severin knew it would be a perfect marriage—the studio that so handsomely produced The Godfather would be the ultimate venue for this multi-textured classic. Knew it from day one but was forced to go elsewhere, finally persuading the agency to send the script to other majors. At least they had the courtesy to eventually express their disinterest. Or maybe Dee’s secretary typed the rejection letters to get him off their backs. Maybe the damn script never left the mailroom—Severin didn’t really know anymore. The whole rude, unseemly business had thrown him for a loop.
With dull awareness of his compulsion, he began to place morning calls to his agent, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, year in and year out, urging him to appraise “the progress at Paramount.” To keep his finger on the pulse. The first few weeks, Dee thought it another gag from the gagman, but as the inquiries persisted, the agent grew irritated, then angry and finally intrigued by the underlying pathology. It became something of a joke among Morris acolytes; when they saw Father Bruchner at the Polo Lounge or Ma Maison, they never failed to ask after “the progress at Paramount.” Severin still made money for the agency, so his eccentricities were grudgingly tolerated.
From atop his hill, the television writer watched the bilious Paramount parade: Orca, the Killer Whale; Bad News Bears Go to Japan; Players; The One and Only; Little Darlings; Going Ape!; Some Kind of Hero. No wonder they’d been too busy to respond! It was like the marathon dance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—yet the band played on. He was rankled in some deep, unapproachable place. When his wife delicately suggested he might “talk to someone,” Severin reacted so harshly that Diantha half thought he’d try fingering her as a Paramount spy.
Then one day in nineteen eighty-one, a Morris secretary called to say “there was movement.” In measured tones, cryptic and grave, she told him Charles G. Bluhdorn himself was in possession of Souls. “Mr. Bluhdorn wished to give the script his personal attention,” her words went. A senior agent at Morris who dealt exclusively with the chairman would be calling Severin with a follow-up. In the excitement, he didn’t write down the name. He waited by the phone until six, finally calling Dee’s office. No one was in. After a fitful night, he left messages with the switchboard “regarding Charlie Bluhdorn.” He was on his way down to the agency when Dee Bruchner called back. It had been a few months since they spoke; work had been drying up.
“Severin, what the hell is going on?”
“I want to know what’s happening with Bluhdorn.”
“I don’t have time for this crazy shit!”
“Someone called from the agency—”
“Nothing’s fucking happening with Bluhdorn! Okay? Why don’t you go see a fucking shrink, Severin? All right? How many years have we been doing this?”
“A secretary called, from the agency,” said the client, undeterred. “She said Charlie Bluhdorn was reading my script.”
That night, Dee phoned from La Scala. He sounded drunk and vaguely repentant. The whole thing was a practical joke, he said. When Severin asked what he meant, Dee said, “It must have been a joke.” He reiterated his desire for Severin to seek medical help. “You really should,” he said. “For Diantha. It’s not fair to put her through this. You know, people love you, they really do. They really care.” What the hell was he talking about? In the morning, the disbeliever reached Bluhdorn’s office in New York but was rebuffed. He kept calling, and when Dee found out, he sent a telegram saying the agency no longer represented him and that Severin Welch should “cease and desist” contact or run the risk of becoming a “nuisance.”
Came a gentle temblor in his head, a shifting of plates, and so it was decreed: the matter would be resolved by the definitive telephonic intervention of that high-flying commander, that Mike Todd of ceos, Charles G. Bluhdorn, whose imminent call was not open to conjecture. Severin withheld this magical revelation from world and wife; he wanted to live with it a spell, try it on for size, test its sea-legs. Fear of missing the Call soon tethered him to the house. He might have laughed about such an arrangement—how could he have not, particularly after Bluhdorn’s subsequent death?—but there it was, unreal yet present as the HOLLYWOOD sign. The occasional women’s magazine had been perused, Redbook and Reader’s Digest, but these were the pioneer years of phobic disorder: no clubby Internet or national network of like confederates, mystically moored by zip code demarcation and sundry voodoo Maginot lines. Diantha indulged his epic call-waiting best she could. When she died, swept away by the flash flood of cerebral hemorrhage, Severin could not leave the front yard, so missed the procession. Lavinia poignantly misunderstood, thinking her father unhinged, which he was, though not entirely by grief.
That the Call didn’t come never disheartened, for its presentiment rang in his ears, an astral tintinnabulation like the warm, flirty scent of a holiday roast; Severin, wrapped in a comforter of acoustical yearning. Pink Dot delivered groceries and laundry, and daughter Lavinia picked up the slack—thus ensconced, the old fossil roamed the low-tech shagscape of his Beachwood Canyon home, listening to his precious scanner, reading aloud from Thurber and Wodehouse, Gogol and Graham Greene, anchored by his powerful Uniden cordless and the entropy of the years. Did he really expect a call from a dead man? No: after all, he wasn’t crazy.
There was a piece in the Times about John Calley that he’d read with great interest. The United Artists head had returned to the business after years of lying fallow and was now in the methodical process of sifting through studio archives—the idea being to discover old projects, then revise, update and order to production. They had stuff going all the way back to Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
“It’s very much of an archeological expedition,” says Creative Artists Agency’s Jon Levin, who has researched everything from old production logs to the memoirs of Hollywood legends. “There are only so many movies that were made every year, and a number of more scripts that were developed. So chances are there are good [unproduced] works.”
It went on to say that because of rights issues and liability concerns, boxes of unproduced scripts—some of which had been donated to the AMPAS Margaret Herrick Library—now resided at a remote storage facility for “things that are not supposed to be seen…a no-man’s land.” Severin Welch’s Dead Souls had to be out there somewhere, waiting. If you write it, they will come! And when they did (perhaps Bluhdorn progeny, that would be a nice, a fine irony), Severin would have a surprise: the work of the last five years, gratis. For the busy shut-in had been revising all along, retrofitting for these hard, fast times. The money boys would like that—it would save the expense of hiring a pricey rewrite man. Severin wasn’t too worried about ageism. Charles Bennett (the initials alone were auspicious) had sold a pitch right before he died. Bennett wrote for Hitchcock and had to have been in his nineties. No, the tide was turning. Everything old was new again.
He sat by the pool with the scanner, monitoring car phone transmissions. That was illegal now, but Severin had no fear. He used it as a tool, plucking characters from the vapor, finessing dialogue, shoring up unsafe sections of his work. Writers were mercenary—had to use whatever they could. Originally, the old man’s presciently “virtual” adaptation of the Gogol book submitted Chichikov wandering an antiseptic city buying memories of the dead. Now, as if in sly homage to Mr. Bluhdorn, it would be voices the man coveted instead.
Voices on the phone.
Rachel Krohn
On the first night of Passover, Rachel had a dilemma. She was supposed to go with Tovah to an Orthodox seder but now the agent was in bed with a fever, insisting Rachel go alone.
“But three hundred people!”
“It’ll be easier. Less intimate.”
“Tovah, I won’t know anyone—”
“No one knows anyone, that’s the point. It’s skewed toward singles.”
“I haven’t been to a seder since I was a kid.”
“There’ll be lots of Jews who’ve never been to a seder, that’s what th
is is, an outreach for singles. You want to meet someone, don’t you? Then just go.”
Rachel was in a cold sweat. For some masochistic reason, she arrived early, and because there weren’t a lot of people yet, it was harder to hide her discomfort. She thought about leaving but remembered her pedigree: her father was a goddam cantor. Rachel Krohn didn’t have to prove a thing to these people.
She mingled awkwardly, admiring the rabbis’ long coats, very Comme des Garçons. A woman asked her to light a candle. Were candles lit each Sabbath night or only on Passover? She was clueless. She only knew you lit candles for the dead, though her mother never did.
Nondescript men in poorly cut suits approached, abashedly letting on how they were Fallen Ones, come back to the fold. There were South Africans and San Diegans, Australians and Czechs, Muscovites and New Yorkers, and a dance troupe from Tel Aviv—the girls were gorgeous. Rachel stared like she used to at counselors during summer camp, envying their tawny bodies and musky élan. Again, she felt like bolting.
She was targeted by a schlemiel. He was about to speak—the mouth opened, showing braces—when a rabbi bounded up and introduced himself as “Schwartzee’s son.” Rachel put a hand out but he demurred.
“I’m a rabbi, I don’t shake hands! I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just a choice—the only hand I touch is my wife’s. Let’s just say I don’t like to start what I can’t finish!”
A woman lunged forward. “Then I’ll shake it, I’m his sister!” She pumped Rachel’s hand, exclaiming, “I’m not so choosy!”
Schwartzee himself appeared, holding a clipboard in such a way as to discourage the flesh-pressing impulse. He was coatless and wore Mickey Mouse suspenders. “Moishe Moskowitz,” the rabbi crowed, thumbs tucked in each side, “for the children!” He checked off Rachel’s name and was sorry to hear “my old friend Tovah” was sick. The rabbi’s naked, musty breath evoked a weird mosaic of memory and sensation—of synagogue, family and dread. The doors to the banquet hall swung open and Schwartzee shouted after the guests, “It’s fat-free, so enjoy!”
