The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  “Jasper . . . let me ask you this; Jasper . . . listen to me, will you, as a courtesy?”

  “As a courtesy, since you put it so.”

  “Have you worked with the Ryan girl yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Wait till you’ve rehearsed her, would you do that for me as a favour? Would you talk to me again when you’ve handled her?”

  “I need respect as an artist,” said Jasper.

  “You have my fullest respect. Just give Miss Ryan a chance, give her your full attention. Speaking to you as an artist, Jasper, whose reputation is very valuable to me in terms of this production, I think I can assure you that Miss Ryan will satisfy your demands, as a dancer of course. Will you wait and see?”

  “All right.”

  “You can mold her, Jasper, you can shape her.”

  “I have heard she is shaped already.”

  “As a dancer, as a dancer.”

  “I will do what I can.”

  “I ask only that,” said Bud, wiping his brow.

  Letting the breeze cool his sunburnt face, he lay back against the cushions and felt around with one hand for the sexy, almost dirty, pictures. He would have to go into the question when Danny turned up. Meanwhile, if he could just doze for a minute or two . . . He felt the boat rock under him, lulling him into an innocent drowse. He wasn’t a young man, though he dressed and tried to think like one. He would be dead tired for the next three months—the first three to four months on a production were always his hard time. Afterwards the others had their turn at bat, the stars, the publicity people. He and Danny corralled the crew, put them in motion, then let them run within the limits set for them. Detail, detail, he felt exhausted; the boat cradled him. His fingers closed on the aphrodisiac envelope.

  The boat rocked harder. Horler opened his eyes reluctantly and the sun glared in them. Danny stood over him, a black silhouette rimmed by sun.

  “Pleasant wet dreams,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “From publicity?”

  “You’ve seen them too?”

  “They were passing out prints this afternoon at the studio. She’s a discovery, no question about it. Let me have another look.” They divided the pictures.

  After a moment Horler said, “I don’t see that there’s all that much skin.”

  “Not a bit of it, not at all, not at all.’’

  “I mean, they could go through the mails.”

  “She’s a decent girl,” said Danny.

  “And yet . . . and yet . . .”

  “It’s that ‘and yet’ that will make her fortune, the darlin’ little milkmaid. She bursts out of her clothes. Not many do that, and you can feel the flesh underneath, though you aren’t allowed to peek. Look at her, she’s a duck.”

  He seemed very pleased with his find. Horler felt mildly envious and said, “You only tied her up for one picture, isn’t that so?”

  Danny’s face fell. “Quite right, the more fool I. I might have had her for three.”

  “But not for a long term?”

  “They wouldn’t hear of it, she and her piddling little agent.”

  “Has she got rid of that agent?”

  “Yes. She’s looking around for a new one.”

  “Lyricart?”

  “I told you, she’s looking around. She won’t decide quickly. She knows a lot, in my opinion too much. I believe she knows how valuable she is.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “It makes it hard for us to cheat her.”

  “We can cheat somebody else.”

  “There’s always someone.” Lenehan examined some folded estimate sheets while Horler watched his face. The noise of racing powerboats came across the water like the peaceful, unquarrelsome drone of summer bees.

  “We’ll be a bit short,” said Lenehan suddenly.

  “You really think so?”

  “We’re already a day or two behind and it’ll get worse.” He gestured vaguely towards North Hollywood, far away across town. “Rose is in four big numbers, very prominently, and briefly in a fifth. They’re all going to run over.”

  “Max will arrange things. He can shoot around her.”

  “He’s already talking about back-projections, a whole series of them.”

  “Can’t she dance at all?”

  “She’s danced plenty. She danced in six pictures when she was under contract at Metro. Do you think I wouldn’t check something like that?”

  “Oh no, no,” said Bud.

  “She’s like Crosby, who walked through dance routines for years, but nobody would call him a dancer; that was comedy. But Rose can’t kid herself like that, no woman can. It isn’t a woman’s kind of comedy, if there is such a thing.”

  “We can’t have her look silly.”

  “Max and Jasper will see to that. But I’m afraid her numbers will look obviously edited, no pow, no pizzazz.”

  “There’s a million things Max could do,” said Horler anxiously.

  “Then there’s her billing clause to think about.” They sat beside each other in the boat and looked sad, like a stranded vaudeville team.

  “There’s still Charity,” said Horler brightly.

  “Graham wants to rewrite all the publicity.”

  “Not Tommy’s too? I’d sooner wrestle a barracuda.”

  “All but his.”

  “Including Rose’s.”

  “That’s it.”

  “You know who’s an even bigger star than Tommy Dewar?”

  “I do indeed.”

  “Able to cause trouble with our distribution if he feels like it?”

  “Quite right.”

  “We ought to make some kind of overture.”

  “We certainly ought.”

  After Seth had worked for the partners, they had wondered who had been working for whom. When he came in the door, followed by Hank Walden, his personal representative from Lyricart, their impulse was to put the lock on the safe and Satan behind them. Three times they had given Seth so much that there was little left for them, comparatively speaking. The one exception to the pattern had been Sailor Take Warning, which had starred Seth and Rose and featured Peggi Starr. It had been made when Seth had no real coercive power, and had done much to put him in the front rank. How he had bitched about that picture! He had been on salary with no percentage, and they had kept him to well under six figures by shooting to a very tight schedule, numbered shots, one take to a shot. He had never forgotten that, and when he saw Danny and Bud he treated them with the veneration a horse trader feels for a used-car salesman.

  Seth wasn’t a drinker, but sometimes he would take a second cocktail at lunch, and would then speak of Horler and Lenehan in very precise language.

  “Bandits, assassins, thieves, thugs, murderers, robbers . . . aaaargh.”

  One day they heard him going on like this to a lady columnist syndicated by four hundred papers, and Danny had had to take the woman aside and threaten her with blackmail.

  “Mark it DON’T USE, darling.”

  She stared at him, shocked that a producer should dare to speak to her like that. “Who do you think you’re addressing?”

  “That stuff isn’t meant for your readers. We don’t want to have to bring suit, so why not forget it?”

  “Are you trying to intimidate me?”

  “I’m not just trying, I’m succeeding.” He stared at the woman very hard, without loosening his tight grip on her arm. “DON’T USE.”

  She felt an extreme anger. “It’s columnists who frighten producers. Where do you get off with that crap?”

  Lenehan looked at her with a blank level stare, saying nothing.

  She rubbed her arm anxiously and tried to guess how much he knew about her, and to remember what she had been doing lately that was
disgraceful and disgusting. There was plenty, but she couldn’t imagine how he could know about it. He was just guessing, had to be guessing, but she didn’t know for sure. She judged it wiser to submit now and plan future revenge. The trouble with Horler and Lenehan, she decided, was that they were criminal only in socially approved ways; that they lied, cheated, and intimidated was only what people expected and accepted.

  “If I ever get anything on you, Danny dear . . .” She left the sentence hanging, hoping it would stay in his mind, and hopped off to another table, unwanted and unwelcomed wherever she alighted.

  “Mercy me,” she whispered to a terrified ingénue, “I haven’t seen you since you were drunk in the studio at CBS.” She sat uninvited and proceeded to extract intimate confidences from the hapless girl by the identical means that Lenehan had used on her, unvoiced threats of ridicule and exposure.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that in front of her,” said Danny to Seth.

  “I say what I like. And every word of it was true. I’m re-dedicating myself, Lenehan, to making you pay me too much money. From now on the lion’s share comes to me, or else I won’t play.” He thought of his paychecks from Sailor Take Warning and cursed heartily. “I’ll never make that mistake again,” he said, and he never did, not that one, though he continued to make certain others.

  “I’m damned glad he’s not in Goody,” said Horler.

  “But Rose is.”

  “She’s nothing compared to Seth, and Vogelsang is a babe in arms compared to that bastard Walden. We gave her four-fifty and a percent of the net. Think what Seth would ask for!”

  “Title to the picture.”

  “Yeah. And if we start fooling around with Rose’s personal publicity, he may want to make trouble.”

  “Does he care about Rose’s personal publicity?”

  Horler said, “Why do you think we’re playing down the husband-wife bit?”

  “I thought we might work it hard at Christmas.”

  “For God’s sake, Dan. Are we making a family picture or an adult picture?”

  “Son of Flubber grossed over seven million.”

  “But we’re spending over eight. I think we’ve got to make a dirty picture. Not too dirty, so we have any trouble with the decency lobby, but good and dirty.” He poked at the pile of photographs. “Sex it up, in short.”

  Lenehan said, “Up the Princess Margaret Rose,” and giggled.

  3

  In a rented rehearsal hall in North Hollywood under the oppression of deep August heat, sweating in half-darkness, the Goody dancers prepare the Automat dream sequence, which Jasper hopes to block this morning. A crew member makes marks on the floor. With his chin cupped in his hand and a worried look on his face, in sweatshirt, tights, and ballet slippers, Jasper examines these guidelines as they are drawn. Next he watches the boy and girl dancers practicing steps and lifts at the other end of the hall, and finally he looks at Rose, who is off in a corner doing a set of limbering-up exercises he has given her. She wears a beige leotard which is unkind to her figure—she isn’t very tall, but will seem taller in her dream headdress, all plumes—and a pair of soft, scuffed slippers. Like everybody else in the hall, she looks hot, upset, uncomfortable, and overworked.

  Charity isn’t in this number. The Automat stuff is mostly Rose’s, and is important to the story line, which is why it has been scheduled early, when everybody is fresh, particularly Rose. They are going to have to lead her through it shot by shot, and a number like this is the hardest thing in the world to do. You have to make a non-dancer look great, while concealing the fact that the real dancers are creating the whole effect. Jasper has four boy dancers backing her up in this number, any one of whom could handle leads in all but the very best companies in the world, really technically accomplished people. It’s no treat for them to work at half-speed while the nominal star is lousing up the routine.

  Jasper calls the boys over for final instructions.

  “We’ll take it from B, and you’ll be on this line, doing that shuffle I gave you. Can you show me that again? Walk through it, all of you.”

  The boys do a complicated sequence step in which Ray leads off with two fast bars, Elmer joins him for two bars of duet, Gene comes on to make it a trio, Harry is in for the next two bars and HERE Rose is supposed to spin and fall backwards into Harry’s arms. This will run for ten seconds if we ever get it on the screen; the whole number is timed for close to five minutes. The sets, the score, the arrangements, dancers, musicians will send the cost of this five-minute strip of film way up into six figures, and this is the way we put it together, ten seconds at a time in this cheesy rehearsal hall, with everybody terrified and afraid to say anything, because the person on whose shoulders rests the responsibility for getting people into the theatre, the name, the box-office factor, is just barely staying in the number.

  “One more time,” says Jasper. “That looks clean.”

  They whistle through the pattern again, faster than before and with perfect precision; it looks superb. One of them, the tall blond boy named Ray Waites, perhaps the best male dancer on the Coast, has come on from several seasons as the male lead in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and a subsequent stint on TV. Strictly speaking he isn’t in the chorus. He’s more or less bellwether to the flock, in all the numbers. The chorus learns the routines by watching Ray—he’s very highly paid. Nobody who sees the picture will know he’s in it, and yet the dance numbers would be ineffective if he weren’t there. Jasper walks Ray off to one side, while Billy B. Jay, the assistant dance director, goes over to where Rose is standing by herself huffing and puffing. He nods to the rehearsal pianist, who strikes up a waltz. Billy seizes Rose around the waist and whirls her away from the walls onto the marked floor.

  Dancers creep out of the gloom to watch Billy, a great dancer, for years a sensation in clubs with a partner who died a couple of years ago. Nobody waltzes like Billy B. Jay. He can even make Rose look fairly good. If you saw her in a dance hall somewhere on a Saturday night, you’d think her a pretty good dancer, certainly better than average. But put her in the arms of somebody like Billy or Ray Waites, and the difference between amateur and pro becomes apparent. It’s the same in all the professions. Ray and Billy aren’t as good as Rose at being movie stars, but they’re better dancers.

  Billy does what he can with Rose. They laugh together, and Jasper feels more hopeful. He looks around the vast old barn, once an armoury, and decides that despite the miserliness of Horler and Lenehan, and the inadequacies of the star, they may make something of the numbers after all.

  It’s dim in the hall, dusky, dusty. There are no windows at ground level, just tiny slits in the wall that admit scarcely any light, crusted over as they are with the dirt of decades. High up towards the roof in small classical wells, daintily recessed from the main walls, are the little windows that let in what light there is. Outside, the sun sizzles on the metal roof; passers-by shade their eyes from the glare. The day is intensely hot; we haven’t been on the picture more than ten days, and we’re already feeling the heat.

  Down in the great expanse of space under the metal crossbeams, pretty much in the dark, Jasper calculates. He asked the producers for proper equipment for the dancers, but there is none, not even bars to get loose on. He asked for a mockup of Rose’s headdress from Wardrobe. If she’s going to wear plumes nearly a yard long in the fantasy parts of the number, she should have something like them to rehearse in, to accustom her to the weight and to the drag on her head and neck, which will affect her balance. Trust Wardrobe to ignore all such requests. He still has no idea what the dancers will have on their feet. Probably patent-leather fake oxfords for the men. He doesn’t know what for the girls. Girls in Automats are often cashiers. How do you fantasticate a woman cashier in a dream musical number? What does she wear? He looks at his watch. Nearly time for a midmorning break, and they haven’t done anything apart from reass
uring Rose, and he isn’t even sure he’s managed to do that. She and Billy make a last turn and come to a stop in the middle of the floor; the company dutifully applauds and Jasper steps forward.

  “I want Rose, Ray, Elmer, Gene, and Harry down here, please. Billy will take the rest of you over your marks. Learn them as fast as you can, I beg of you. If we can rough out the number today, we might be able to think about shooting it next week. Supposing, that is, that they have something for you to wear. I can’t have you cavorting about in the nude.”

  “I don’t know about that,” says Billy B. Jay.

  “I’d love it, myself,” says Jasper, looking at the girls and caricaturing lasciviousness. “But would our audiences love it?”

  “Yes,” shouts the assembled company.

  “Then why don’t we do it?”

  Everybody groans.

  “Let’s take off all our clothes and run around in the lewd lewd nude.”

  Nobody moves·.

  “Built-in censorship,” says Jasper mockingly.

  Watching this byplay, Rose marvels at the loyalty the little director elicits from his people, like some pygmy king. In pictures, the dancers are a race apart, with their own kings and queens and hierarchies, like an obscure hiving system or pecking order.

  In this complex society Jasper ranked at the top because of his gifts, his knowledge of what he wanted, and his really extraordinary talent as a teacher. Time after time he had worked miracles with unformed dancers, untrained people.

  Rose knew that he had been engaged principally to work with her and lick her into shape, and she was ready to go just as far as she could with him. In the ten days since production had started, and for weeks before, she had worked, how she had worked. Driving out to Pacific Palisades every night, she was so stiff and tired she could hardly handle the steering wheel. Her thighs ached, and her buttocks, and her shoulders, and, above all, her calves and ankles. Many times she was sure she’d broken or chipped an ankle, the pain was so severe.

  She had listened to everybody’s advice, had gotten her weight down, started exercising months ago, slept a lot—the whole health bit. She had never been a party girl, and for the last few years had felt less and less wish to get around on the social circuit. When she and Seth were together in the evening nowadays, the most they would do was open a really good bottle of wine and drink a couple of glasses each. So she was feeling pretty good physically.