Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  I drove to pick her up in the Hudson phaeton. She had a small studio apartment on Budlong not far from the USC campus. By long custom I didn’t go in to get her at the door; I just tapped on the horn. She came out and got in the car without a word, in a slim jersey skirt, a sleeveless sweater, and some ceramic costume jewelry, with flat sandals that left her ankles bare. She never wore hose. Her blond hair was loose and she pushed it back carelessly with her hands. She was tanned, blithe, and slightly ironic as usual. We didn’t talk very much in the drive out to the Museum. Once she said, “Been working in the library?”

  She meant the Doheny at USC I said, “In the L.A. Public, downtown.”

  “You should get more fresh air. You’re looking rather pale.”

  “Pale?”

  “Pale and hectic. You have an Edvard Munch look. As though pursued by demons.”

  I didn’t comment on this image. “How do you get your tan?” I asked her.

  “There’s a reflector booth in the health club I belong to. I spend a couple of hours a week in it.”

  “I thought you used to play tennis.”

  “I did,” she said, “but in the reflector booth you can get tanned all over.”

  I didn’t take up this gambit, if that was what it was. We arrived at Wilshire and Fairfax and I put the car in the May Company parking structure. We walked out through the store and across the street to the Museum.

  She caught me covertly examining her, and she saw that I was looking at her tan. “If you don’t believe me,” she said, “I’m prepared to prove it.” She smiled. I was struck with something odd and slightly artificial about her. Then I realized it was her pale pink lipstick, almost white, which stood out strikingly against her tan. Her blond hair too was lighter than her skin. It was as though she were a photographic negative of a dark-haired woman with dark lipstick. For some reason I found this repulsive and at the same time attractive.

  We went into the lecture hall and found some seats. I took the folded program out of my pocket and studied it again. By now I knew it almost by heart. There were some comedy shorts and then a pair of two-reelers, The Coquette with Moira Silver and THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR 1924 starring Charles Morton and directed by Hans Reiter. It seemed that this second film was supposed to be socially significant. “The Great Emancipator. 1924. The first picture in which the young and adolescent Hollywood deliberately came to grips with political issues, even if only at a rudimentary level. Lincoln is shown not only as a myth figure and folk hero, but as a political thinker of a certain profundity, struggling with the problems of freedom and responsibility and of the human condition. This early Reiter film marks a step forward in the political development of the director who is later to become a prominent anti-Fascist, and then to be banned from the screen in the Fifties as one of the controversial Hollywood Ten.”

  It didn’t have much to say about The Coquette. “1925. Hans Reiter, Director. John Condon, the Bogart of the Silent Era, demonstrates his skill at sinister and blasé eroticism. This two-reeler set in Paris is Moira Silver’s first starring vehicle. Bryan Gilbert and Mary Frances are seen in supporting roles.” I handed the program to Belinda. She glanced over it for a moment and then stuck it into the space between our two seats.

  The lights went down and the comic shorts came on. Some firemen in oversized helmets dashed around at terrific velocity trying to extinguish a burning barn. They pulled out a hose from the fire truck, stuck it into a duck pond, and then started up their pump. Along with the water, ducks, geese, smaller waterbirds, and finally a large and indignant white swan came flying out of the nozzle and hurtled toward the flames. The farmer, a yokel in Dutch chin-whiskers, took off his straw hat and stamped on it in rage. In the other short some boys chased a flapping chicken which suddenly swelled until it was four feet tall. They dashed back across the screen in the other direction, the chicken now chasing the boys. They ran through a henhouse where men were at work plucking chicken corpses. When they emerged from this the boys were covered with feathers and the chicken was nude, still in hot pursuit.

  Belinda laughed. I pulled out the program and tried to study it again as well as I could in the semidarkness. It didn’t tell me any more than it had before. Moira’s name was mentioned only once, and then only in passing. When I looked up Belinda was still laughing and the boys, feathers streaming from them, had fled into a bank where a bunch of comic cops were chasing some inept robbers around and around in circles, leaping over counters and vaulting over the benumbed employees. The robbers dropped unbelievable amounts of money from their open suitcases as they ran. The boys shot out the other door of the bank, now covered with ten-dollar bills instead of feathers.

  “THE END.” Some dots, streaks, and black frames with numbers ran through the projector, and the lights came on again. Belinda took a breath to recover from her laughing spasms. Everyone else had been laughing too. The hall was only about half full but the comedy shorts had produced a great air of camaraderie. People looked at each other and grinned.

  Next came The Coquette. When the familiar face floated onto the screen I felt a kind of cool slow shock, a vibration of the nerves. There were not very many close-ups, and Moira was seen only in full-length views, with an occasional medium shot so that she was visible from the waist up. The photography was crude, with hardly any shading or nuance; she resembled a plaster statue with dark expressive eyes. She spent most of her time turned away from the camera talking to the other characters and then listening as they replied. There were many captions. Only now and then did she direct her drooping, faintly mysterious glance toward the camera. Each time she did so I felt a trickle of icewater running through my limbs. I scarcely noticed the other characters, and anyhow the plot was so rudimentary that it was hardly worth following. Moira, as Renée Renaudet, a French girl no better than she should be, was engaged to marry a businessman, Bryan Gilbert. The caption explained,

  BUT SHE HAS NOT TOLD HIM OF

  HER SULLIED PAST.

  The past turned up in the form of John Condon, his hair slicked greasily down onto his head, who was described as a “theatrical manager” but was obviously a pimp. He threatened to reveal Moira’s secret to her rich fiancé unless she returned to her former trade (the theater of course). She pouted, vacillated, and stared at him languorously from under her dark lids.

  HELPLESS, HE TOO BEGINS TO FALL

  UNDER HER CHARM.

  Finally she made a deal with him. She led him into a cheap hotel. The screen went black again.

  A HALF AN HOUR LATER.

  They came out, Moira now a free woman, although there was a mask of shame visible on her face like a faint spiderweb. The ending, I thought, was neatly done. Of course it was Condon’s picture and not Moira’s. Instead of following her back to the obligatory clinch with her intended, the camera stayed with Condon as he glanced around once at her departing figure, shrugged, and idled on down the boulevard, a cigarette dangling carelessly from his lips. Sure enough, on the next street corner he found another “actress” to manage. This one had a dark Mediterranean face and a sullen manner, so the audience didn’t mind if she was “sullied.” She and Condon went off together, and he pointed down the street at a client for her to proposition. Iris out.

  THE END

  The lights went on again.

  “I do love that old corn,” said Belinda.

  I said nothing. I felt cold and odd, a little light-headed.

  “And now, it seems,” she said, “we have social significance.”

  The hall darkened again and the titles for The Great Emancipator came on. Charles Morton, in rustic garb and without his beard, was seen splitting rails. Still young but in a clean white shirt, he addressed a political gathering in Illinois. He ran for President. He was inaugurated and paced about in a melancholy way in a White House made of canvas flats. He spoke in gentle terms to his wife Mary Todd Lincoln about her unfortunate tendency to insanity. “Mary, you must …” The two of them disappeared for a few
seconds while the white letters trembled on the black screen.

  “MARY, YOU MUST GET A

  GRIP ON YOURSELF.”

  They reappeared, as Morton silently mouthed “yourself.” She got a grip on herself, the War began, and Blue and Gray soldiers charged up and down hills, spiking cannons and falling dead. This grieved Lincoln, or Morton, so that long wrinkles full of shadows appeared in his cheeks. He had his beard by this time, and almost as we watched white hairs appeared in it on account of the War.

  “MARY, MEN ARE DYING AND

  I MUST ACCEPT THE RESPONSIBILITY.”

  Evidently this was what the program meant by calling him “a political thinker of a certain profundity.” The plot of a silent film, I reflected, could somehow make even the life of Lincoln seem implausible. Mary hardly paid attention to him because she was about to go crazy again. This only added to his concerns and the wrinkles grew deeper. The makeup girl was busy with her black grease brush.

  A shot of some graves on a grassy hillside. Back to Morton again. He had his stovepipe hat on now and was standing on a platform draped with bunting. He raised his hands in various histrionic gestures.

  “BUT, IN A LARGER SENSE”

  The camera cut to the crowd, who were listening intently, and then back to Morton.

  “WE CANNOT DEDICATE”

  He lowered his right arm and stretched out the left. He disappeared from the screen again while the white letters, bobbing slightly, remained for somewhat longer than was necessary to read them.

  “WE CANNOT CONSECRATE”

  Another shot of the crowd. A man standing in the front row uncrossed his arms and crossed them the other way.

  “WE CANNOT HALLOW”

  His wrinkles seemed to deepen. He turned toward the crowd and spread out his arms.

  “THE GROUND”

  The short crude takes and the wobbling captions on the black screen continued in alternation, one after the other. Morton had his stovepipe hat off now and was talking to his wife, who seemed not so much demented as bewitched. She stared into the camera wide-eyed and pale, as though she could see into the future.

  “MARY, MY MIND IS MADE UP”

  I began to feel odd again. There was a kind of cold empty place inside me, as though one of my viscera were missing.

  “I AM GOING TO FORD’S THEATRE TONIGHT

  NO MATTER WHAT THE DANGER.”

  Mrs. Lincoln raised her hands in remonstration, begging him to stay in the safety of the canvas White House. But his expression firmed and his brow deepened in thought.

  “I MUST SHOW MYSELF TO THE PEOPLE.”

  The camera, still fixed on Lincoln’s face, did a fade. It wasn’t an iris-out or a blur-out. I wasn’t quite sure how it was done. The figure on the screen slowly evaporated in a ghostly way, as though it were made of sugar and dissolving into water. A few uncut frames flicked by, scarred with dashes and white spots, and then there was another caption.

  THAT NIGHT, AT THE THEATER.

  I closed my eyes. I could hear programs rustling, people shifting in their seats, a whisper or two, and a faint mechanical murmur that was perhaps the projector running in the closed booth to the rear. I could feel Belinda’s bare arm touching my own. I opened my eyes again. Lincoln and Mary were gravely watching the play, he all hung over with philosophical resignation, she twitching with anxiety.

  BOOTH, THE DISAFFECTED ACTOR AND

  CONFEDERATE SYMPATHIZER

  I shut my eyes again. When I opened them a few seconds later the caption had changed.

  … STEALS UNNOTICED INTO THE

  THEATER.

  A figure appeared on the screen, horse pistol in hand, glancing over his shoulder to be sure no one was following. I caught a glimpse of a thin handsome face frozen into a grimace of determination, a kind of a wince. It was visible only for an instant. The vacuum inside me widened until I felt I was only an empty space. All at once I was in the grip of an uncontrollable terror. I stood up, seizing Belinda’s arm.

  “What is it?”

  Without answering I pulled her after me. We crossed the row of seats to the aisle, stepping on everyone’s feet and raising a murmur of protests. People stared at me, either because I was acting strangely or because they too had recognized me on the screen, I wasn’t sure which. I didn’t look back at the screen. Releasing Belinda’s arm, I hurried up the slightly inclined carpet to the rear of the hall and out into the lobby. She followed me.

  She was only mildly exasperated. “For heaven’s sake. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You started up like Macbeth at the sight of Banquo’s ghost.”

  “That’s what I saw.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t you feel well?”

  “Didn’t you see it?”

  “I saw a rather bad picture about Lincoln.”

  I didn’t say anything to this.

  “Was it because you thought it was such a bad picture?”

  “No.” After a moment I said, “It was just that I thought I saw … somebody I knew.”

  “In the audience?”

  “On the screen.”

  “Charles Morton has been dead for thirty years.”

  “Yes.”

  After that we didn’t talk very much. I asked her, “Have you ever had that dream where you go to a funeral and approach the casket and look in, and the corpse is you?” She said, “It’s in every psychology book.” We walked around the corner and into the side entrance of the parking structure, since the May Company was closed by this time. Belinda still seemed to be more amused than puzzled. She was used to my eccentricities by this time, although this—she evidently felt—was one of the more bizarre ones. I allowed her to think whatever she wanted. We got into the car and I drove it rather violently out onto the street.

  After a block or two on Wilshire, seeking about for some kind of conventional phrase to articulate, I said in a rather strangled tone, “Where do you want to go now?”

  “It’s still only eleven. We could go to a late movie.”

  Seeing that her attempts at humor didn’t amuse me, she inquired after a moment, “What did you have in mind?”

  “Would you like to come back to St. Albans Place?”

  “I’d be enchanted.” “For a drink,” I said savagely.

  She often came back to the house with me, of course, after we had been out in the evening to a concert or a film. Our behavior was always quite correct—a drink or two, perhaps a kiss or a light embrace—all playful and committing neither of us to anything. But this night was different, and we both knew it. I handed her a Bacardi on the rocks and she sipped it, regarding me gravely over the rim of the glass. I set my own glass down and began pacing around slowly in the big living room.

  “It seems you have something on your mind,” she said.

  She was a nice person, really. She wanted to help. But I wasn’t sure I could explain it to her. The sight of my own face on the screen had disoriented me so badly that I wasn’t sure any longer who or where I was. The word estrangement came to me and hung fixed in my thoughts. Everything seemed strange to me, as though I had never seen it before: the house, Belinda, my own body, even my own thoughts. There were two explanations, it seemed to me, for what had happened—for what was happening. One was that the world behind the Screen really existed and I had really been there, and that a little rift through to this world had been broken when I caught a glimpse of my own face in the Lincoln film. The other was that the general oddness of my life and the strain I had been through recently had induced a mild nervous disorder—that I had simply fallen in love with a picture in an old fan magazine, and my visit behind the Screen and my encounter with Moira had been only a harmless hallucination, or a waking dream, rather than something that had really happened. According to Ziff, some psychiatrist had said that it was all in my mind. In this case, I would have to pretend that I had not seen my own face appearing in the Lincoln film, that I had simply m
istaken some other person for myself, and also that my recollection of having previously acted the part before the camera was somehow a false memory that had formed in my mind after I had seen the Lincoln film at the museum. Whichever it was, that glimpse of the uncanny in the flat black-and-white world of the screen had frightened me to the point where I felt that my only chance of recovering reality, of recovering my sanity, was to take shelter in Belinda’s arms, the only warm and living flesh immediately available, in an embrace that would reassure me of the existence of the daily and mortal world. I switched on the stereo and dropped a record onto the turntable: the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Salome.

  She began to laugh. “Where on earth did you find that?”

  “In a sale bin at the drugstore. It’s very sensuous, don’t you think? Let’s go up to the bedroom.”

  “All right,” she said, “as long as we can hear this beautiful music from there.”

  We went up the stairs with our drinks, taking the record with us. She looked around curiously. She had never been in the bedroom before. “Why all the mirrors?”

  “It gives me something to look at.”

  “Now you can look at me.”

  It was true. Everywhere I looked I could see the two of us: she calm and amused, I distracted, nervous, and jerky. I felt desire though—an adequate amount, in my estimation, although it was marginal. I was desperately anxious for the thing to come off, feeling that it was my only chance to retain my grasp on the solid world that I felt fading and slipping away from me by the moment, like Lincoln dissolving on the screen. I turned to her and took her in my arms and we engaged in a long cinematographic clinch. I could feel her neat hard breasts against my chest, and I raised my hand with the idea of caressing one of them. Then I changed my mind and decided to wait until later, although I had the impression that she drew the upper part of her body away slightly in order to permit this gesture in case I attempted it. We separated and I took another sip of my drink, which I had set down on the antique sideboard.