by Hugh Hood
“Over here, Rose, over here,” people shouted. She glanced at the police lines; they had barricades which looked fairly firm. It was not an insurgent crowd, and there was no anger in their cries. People strained at the barricades and beckoned beseechingly at her. It was allowable on these occasions to approach the cordon and sign a few of the nearest autograph books, so that the photographers might catch the gesture, making you look good in the fan books. This was a big picture, a major release date, a world premiére, and the stars were Tommy Dewar and Rose Leclair, and there were other gay and vivid personages to be glimpsed, a couple of Kennedys, Senator Dirksen, Mickey Mantle despite the upcoming Yankee home opener, one of the Gabors, Ed Buchanan. Nobody was missing Charity, Rose decided, and in all this noise perhaps nobody would think to wonder where Seth was, or remember that he had just got rid of her. She realized suddenly why Horler and Lenehan had supplied this convenient, if offbeat, Frenchman; he had that faint resemblance to Seth. The public were used to seeing her with a tall thin man who looked like a younger Fonda. He was, in short, an unconscious stand-in, and she felt a bit embarrassed for him.
“Over here, Rose, over here.”
Rose had perfect eyesight, and all at once, as if she’d zoomed in with a special lens in her eyes, she isolated an elderly motherly woman with an enormous satchel over her arm. She wore glasses and her mouth yawned open, disclosing ill-fitting dentures. Like the rest of the crowd, she was shouting happily with no idea of being noticed or addressed. Rose looked deliberately straight at her, caught her eye, and smiled as politely as she could. The woman drew an excited breath, aware that she had been noticed. A quick human communication passed unspoken between the two women. Seized by a sudden impulse, Rose grabbed Jean-Pierre again and drew him with her as she went up to the fan. As she came near the barricades, a lot of waving arms stretched out like tentacles from an aquarium tank. She evaded them, refusing to go within grabbing distance. She called to the woman.
“How do you like it?”
The woman dug frantically in her satchel for an autograph book, which she suddenly produced and held mutely forward, delighted to be spoken to. Rose felt ambiguously like a queen; she took the book.
“What’s your name?” It was necessary to yell.
The reply came slowly, as from a long distance. “Mrs . . . . Mrs . . . Thelma . . . Sloper.”
“What? . . . WHAT?”
“Sloper . . . Sloper.”
Aware that the cameras were on her, she opened the book to the first empty leaves and quickly wrote, “To Thelma Sloper at the ‘Goody’ premiere with best wishes from Rose Leclair:” She hastily added the date and handed the book to a surprised Jean-Pierre. “Write in French,” she said, and he scribbled, “Meilleurs voeux,” as though it were a Christmas card. She took the book and leaned towards its owner. “Are you staying for the picture?”
Thelma Sloper smiled beatifically: “I’m coming tomorrow.”
Rose handed her the book; she opened it and read the friendly inscription and you could see her melt with pleasure. The fans applauded cheerfully, and Rose felt mixed gratification and self-disgust.
It was time to go inside, and their cries grew louder and a little desperate as she turned away. Other stars and celebrities were arriving, and soon the picture would begin. She and Jean-Pierre walked into the theatre and up past teeming shoals of photographers to where Bud and Danny stood like little Caesars among a horde of interviewers who, transistorized tape recorders in hand, clamoured with insistence for direct speech with the star, the real thing.
“Here, luv, here, over here, dear,” called Danny, beckoning. He held a small sheet of paper, and four privileged choices were ranked next to him.
“We’re giving you to these four exclusively, two TV and two tapes for network radio. Do thirty seconds apiece.” Rose thought he was pretty peremptory, but this wasn’t the time or place to take him up on it.
“I’d love to, Danny, who’s first?” A cadaverous TV interviewer put his apparatus up close to her and said, 1ooking at his watch, “Three seconds, O.K.” He turned to her, smiled expansively, and said, “Are you glad to be here, Rose?”
“How are you, Barney? Yes, it’s one of the happiest evenings of my life. I’m looking forward to seeing the picture very much.”
“Haven’t you seen it yet?” A stock gag.
“You know how it goes, Barney, you see a bit here and a bit there. This’ll be the first time I’ve seen it through, and I can’t wait.”
“Look, Rose (over here, Tommy, over here), Rose darling, it’s been a pleasure talking to you and to . . . uh . . .”
“Monsieur Fauré.”
“Yeah, to Monsieur Fauré, and I think you’ve got a great picture going for you, a real contender for picture of the year. Congratulations.”
“Thanks very much, Barney, I hope so. Bye for now.” She stepped adroitly out of the picture and moved to the next man.
“. . . she is everybody, the sweetest kid, one of the top stars in the business, and the really big attraction at tonight’s premiere, Rose Leclair. Hello, Rosie.”
“Sandy, dear. Glad to see you.”
“Awfully glad to see you, baby, and I’m sure the picture will be a sensation.”
“We all hope that, Sandy. Can I say hello to the people?” She smiled brilliantly at the camera. I hope they zoom, she thought, make a good shot. “I hope everybody enjoys seeing Goody as much as we enjoyed making it.”
“Aw, gosh, thanks very much, Rose. Nice having you.”
“Nice to be on, Sandy.” Out of it and on to the next. She could see Jean-Pierre watching this routine; she was going through her hoops pretty well, like a well-disciplined little circus pony. Now they were taping, “. . . for seven hundred syndications across the nations it’s JUBILEE at the Goody Two-Shoes opening, your reporter Harry Goldston here now with Goody star Rose Leclair, looking radiant in . . . what is it, Rose?”
“Why, Harry,” she said, “it’s nothing very special. It’s a fairly fitted sheath, I guess you’d call it, in a raw silk. In a café tone. The girls will know what I mean.”
“So will the boys, sweetheart, it looks divine. And this is . . . “He looked at Jean-Pierre, slightly puzzled.
“The French producer-director Jean-Pierre Fauré. We’re conferring about a picture.” She said this out of simple courtesy, and could sense his shrug and lift of the eyebrows.
“You’re keeping pretty busy, Rose, way to go, sweetheart, aat’sa way. We’ll be coming inside in just a second, dear, to report on the picture, and congratulations.” She moved on, did a very short fourth interview, and found a young man from the production office at her side.
“Your seats are right over there, Miss Leclair,” he whispered, leading them along. “Next to Mr. Mars. Then comes Tommy with Miss Starr, then Mr. Lenehan with a lady—I don’t have her name.”
Rose slid along the row. “Right here?”
“Uh-huh. There you go, Mr. Fauré. Is it all right, are you comfortable? Here’s the special souvenir program with places for your friends’ autographs.”
“Thanks for your trouble. What’s your name?”
“Eddie Blanda.”
“Oh sure, you were on the Coast. I knew I’d met you before. Are you coming back to the house?”
“I haven’t been asked, Miss Leclair. I don’t want to seem to be hinting around.”
“But you aren’t at all; be sure you come along. You know the address?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be expecting you. This is Jean-Pierre Fauré, you know.”
Blanda pulled a rabbit from a hat. “I know. I saw Les bonnes petites filles when I was in Paris, and I loved it.”
Rose said, “There, you see? In the long run you’re more important than I am.” Jean-Pierre shook his head, and Blanda stared. “A family joke,” she said, a little wryly. By th
is time Horler and Lenehan were seated, towards the other end of the row. It grew quieter. Blanda went away and the house lights came down. No cartoons, no trailers, right into the feature.
The vast screen lit up instantaneously in a wash of peachy-rose light. In the 2.5:1 aspect-ratio, it looked like a long slit out of a ballroom, or like a theatre cyclorama when the sets have been removed. In astonishingly lifelike sound, strings were bowed rapidly, around and behind you in low urgent figures. Horns in. All at once a gigantic Charity Ryan appeared alone on the screen in a medium shot, dancing à gogo. The anticipatory strings stopped abruptly and the soundtrack crashed into a dreadfully loud orchestration, a solo for Charity on the grandest scale. As though she were running on a treadmill up a low hill, she advanced upon the audience, belting out in a roar a song almost nobody had ever heard before:
Honey baby sweetie cutie little dolly-bird,
Brand-new girl in old New York and haven’t you heard?
Who’s the teeny-bopper swinger everybody wants to know?
Mini-mini-mini-mini-Goody-Go-Go.
Ring-a-dinger real swinger everywhere in town
Downstairs, upstairs (BOOM BOOM) putting everyone down,
Hipster, mister, take-a-tripster, man you gotta go
For mini-mini-mini-mini- (BOOM BOOM)
Goody-Go-Go.
The boom-booms came from a fleet of bass drums tuned in a simple chord. The scoring was all drums and brass on top, with strings under, very up-tempo, insistent drumming. In front of you, frighteningly, loomed enormous GOODY, dancing and shouting to this insistent BOOM BOOM.
Teeny-bopper swinger-clinger, man you gotta go
For mini-mini-mini-mini- (BOOM BOOM)
Goody-Go-Go.
Charity wore a skintight beach-pajama top which left her forearms bare, and a blazing tartan mini-skirt about thirteen inches above the knee. Her breasts, thighs, and buttocks might as well not have been covered at all, so prominently displayed were they, and so mobile. There was much vibration, and all over the theatre you could hear through the great blasts of music awed and reverent sighs, in-takings of breath, half-spoken exclamations. That it was a distinguished black-tie audience made no difference. Men predominated in about a 60-40 proportion, and their reaction filled the auditorium. Seats creaked. People shifted from ham to ham, suddenly feeling a bit crowded.
The mauve beach-pajama top had curious fins or flaps at the sleeves, probably along the seams, long strips of material which were agitated partly by Charity’s undulations and partly by an invisible source of air current; they must have had a fan or a wind machine on her, because these little fins blew backwards in the slipstream giving her an oddly machined look, like a piece of radiator sculpture from the early 1950s, a smoothly streamlined chromium quality. All her curves had this same combination of smoothness and hardness, as though she had been die-cast in chrome. Her hair tumbled wildly behind her as she gyrated, caught in the artificial current from the fan. She strutted, turned right, left, trotted rhythmically the length of the screen, flopped on her back in a tight close-up, fifty-feet long, kicked up her thighs and bicycled briefly, her legs glistening in their bath of peachy-pink light, and all the time the thundering orchestration allowed no respite. Then she jumped up, arms akimbo, and threw her head back and her breasts at the camera with gorgeous insolence.
The light changed from peachy rose to bright sunny yellow and up behind her came the singing and dancing choruses, all the boys and girls from the L.A. company, Ray and Elmer and the rest, dressed like members of the Sanitation Department, with wheeled carts and stiff push brooms which could be used like majorettes’ batons. Eight dancers, running wildly around with these brooms, did a complex routine where they fenced with the broom handles, then twirled them, tossing them in the air and catching them, then rode them like hobbyhorses while Charity stood in their midst and laughed.
When the screen was full of street cleaners, after about two minutes of the number, the titles came over. TOMMY DEWAR . . . ROSE LECLAIR. There was a big laugh at this. They got top billing all right, all right. Ha! Then, timed to coincide with her doing a split and sliding towards the camera, the words AND INTRODUCING CHARITY RYAN as she held the split and threw her hair forward, cascading over the camera lens in a warm furry wave. Enormous letters: AS GOODY TWO-SHOES. Cut to ranks of dancers and super the rest of the titles over the third chorus.
Titles, Charity’s solo, the dance routine, came to about four minutes, and there seemed to be strong feeling in the audience that this was the most taking set of titles, the most memorable, of the year. If they gave Oscars for titles these would win, as being chemically pure sex. As the last members of the production staff received their acknowledgements in small lettering, the lighting went to pink peach again. Under PRODUCED BY BUD HORLER AND DANNY LENEHAN, Charity retreated from the camera, blowing kisses, for God’s sake. Then she turned, stuck out her bottom under DIRECTED BY MAX MARS and gave a very solid bump as the sequence ended. The audience cheered, and it isn’t often they cheer the titles.
Good as it was, the rest of the picture was an anticlimax. The colour was less fantastic than in the titles, more lifelike, and the soundtrack not so strident. When Tommy and Rose were alone together, the music grew almost quiet, but these moments were few. The editors had simply taken the whole stinking picture and handed it to Charity on a platter. Max had obviously done the cutting and editing, or overseen it. so he was to blame for the final cut. But who was to blame for the titles?
Rose was in shock; she couldn’t straighten things out. After the longest four minutes of her life, when she saw exactly what they had chosen to do to her and how the picture would be twisted, all she could do was grip convulsively whatever came into her hands—she nearly took the armrests off her seat. Tears flowed from her eyes and her face twitched, but luckily she was in darkness and nobody could see. Beside her in the dark, she was sure, Fauré would see what they had done. You take a big star and rub her nose in the dirt; when she’s been given top billing you allow her the footage of a minor supporting player; you cut her numbers to nothing and hand the picture to an unknown, exalting her above the star in every way—what can you expect? Rose cried bitterly in the darkness.
Her nice little scene with Tommy, where she kissed the poodle, which had been so good, so warm and humorous in the rushes, was almost gone, cut unrecognizably. In its place was a reprise of “All I Do On This Green Earth Is Dream” with that bitch acting as if she was a pure fifteen-year-old. No wonder the song was a hit; they plugged it like the “Ave Maria” or something. The good little scene with the deep blues and warm greens, and the sweet feeling of twilight that she and Tommy had liked so much, the pleasant atmosphere of West Tenth Street, something quite spontaneous which they had enjoyed and done well, just about gone.
The Automat stuff was worst of all. The audience couldn’t help seeing that Rose Leclair was such a shitty dancer she had to go. The number made no sense. They had contrived so many sudden cuts and tricks and evasions that you were left with the impression of a big nothing, a lot of choppy shots of people waving their arms in a bizarre setting, with no star to pull it together. That last swing and slide down the chute, which had made her so afraid, through which she had shut her eyes and hung on tightly so many times, didn’t even get into the picture.
The number was a senseless bore, making no advance in the final story line. Rose was sure that everybody must know. She looked at Jean-Pierre surreptitiously several times, but he continued to stare in front of him, his eyes averted because of friendly feeling or embarrassment, certainly not because of his absorption in the movie. He must see it, she concluded, and writhed with shame. She had been coming on like the big star, the queen of the premiere, and this film, of all those she had made, had to be the one he saw right after her big-star act.
I should have policed the production, she thought, or had the agency do it, while I was getting the
divorce. It was a mistake to hide away like that. Why couldn’t they have come to me and said “Rose, dear, it isn’t working out, your dancing isn’t right, you aren’t right for musical comedy, we’re cutting your footage and we’ll bill it as a guest appearance or a cameo.” They could have done that. I’d have gone along with that. She cried some more, a bit more noisily, and felt her escort’s hand on her arm. I wonder how much screen time I got? Twenty minutes, tops? It couldn’t be any more. That she got Tommy in the closing frames made no sense—she hadn’t spoken to him more than half a dozen times in the picture. The new footage was all lines for Charity or new songs or new arrangements like those damned titles.
Every time Charity was on, the producers’ decision grew more obvious and humiliating. Rose knew that she was still pretty, that she kept herself shapely and in good health, that she maintained her stock in trade, her looks and good humour and appeal, what she traded on, by diligence, skill, practice, and, considering her age, she was in wonderful shape. She was a marvellous thirty-four, and that’s young. Young.
But every time Charity appeared she rolled over the audience like a division of mechanized infantry. She had physical presence, health, prettiness, bloom, sexual power that simply steam-rollered you. In the final cut they only had about ten minutes together, and in that time she completely eclipsed Rose, who had imagined that she was pretty much of a woman, a nice piece of ass; but seeing all that spread out beside her, pushing and oozing and pulsing, made her feel like a peanut-butter sandwich beside a platter of prime porterhouse. The comparison, and her own loss of face and force, was acutely depressing. Worst of all, she saw that it was her own fault.
