The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  9

  “If Antonioni hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for Fellini to invent him.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Seth.

  Hank Walden paid no attention. He said, “The one baroque, the other classically pure. The one all ornament, the other essential intention.”

  “God.”

  “I’d have thought Antonioni would be your idea of a director, wouldn’t he? He thinks actors are puppets.”

  “I’m no puppet,” Seth said, “and I won’t talk to you when you’re in this frame of mind. What’s got into you anyway?”

  “I’m following the Antonioni retrospective at the MacMahon.”

  “The MacMahon?”

  “In the seventeenth. You must have been to the MacMahon.”

  “On MacMahon?”

  “You can see it from here, just the other side of the Arc. You’re right in the middle of things here, aren’t you? I never heard of this place before.”

  “Charity wanted to stay at the Georges-cinq. She said all her friends stayed there, can you beat that? Five minutes off the Redlands campus and her friends stay at the Georges-cinq. She’d never even been East before Goody.”

  “How did it do here?”

  “It did good business . . . and you should have seen her when the titles came on; she kept wriggling. It was sensual.”

  “How long is it now?”

  “What?”

  “Since you got married?”

  “Eons.”

  “No, really?”

  “Rose had her decree the beginning of March, around there.” He grimaced when he spoke of Rose. “I guess it was just before Goody opened in New York, around six months.” He stood up and crossed the carpet of gray and dusty pink, going to the balcony and looking down at the Avenue Kléber; you could see for miles. “She’s gone to Saint-Cloud on a picnic for the day. She went out of here in a wide-brimmed hat and one of those chaste little-girl dresses she’s been buying, and a straw basket with wine and strawberries in it. Strawberries. I don’t know where she learns these things, but sometimes I have the impression that she’s climbing all over me.”

  “How did they like her here?”

  “Pretty good. It isn’t indigenous American opera, Hank, but it’ll play.”

  “It’s doing very well at home.”

  Seth kept his eyes averted, looking at the sky and the roofs and the Etoile up the street. “Why do we have to be in the sixteenth anyway?”

  “You couldn’t not.”

  “People would say I was slipping. So how did you like the Antonioni retrospective, I mean do you really think he ever had anything? All that hemming and hawing, and do you love me—l don’t know, I don’t know. The last one I saw was Red Desert. Red trees and gray sky, Jesus. At first I thought the process was off, till I saw he meant it.”

  “He doesn’t get big grosses.”

  “None of them do, do they?”

  “I haven’t got any figures with me, but none has ever grossed over three and a half million, except perhaps And God Created Woman and maybe Fellini.”

  “Yeah, Bardot.”

  “Ten years, eleven years, it doesn’t seem that long.”

  “Boy, I remember when that came out in the States; the colour was the end, and the scenery.”

  “Yeah, the scenery.” Walden snickered.

  “Who else? Godard, Fauré, Truffaut, Chabrol?”

  “Oh, no. You’ve got to have saturation bookings and an international name or two. Truffaut, say, makes a good picture; it wins a couple of awards, and that boosts the star to the point where she’s usable internationally, to tie up the European market. But she doesn’t mean a thing in Waukegan or Singapore, and she isn’t a star like you’re a star. What happened to your deal?”

  “You’re my agent.”

  “I work for your agent.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. When are you going back to work?”

  “You know when.”

  “You’re a foolish idealist, a thing like that helps a picture. Look at all the fuss over Cleopatra. That didn’t hurt it at all.”

  “I believe it did.”

  “Who can tell?”

  “I can tell. I’ve been in this business twenty years, Hank, and I can feel it when a picture isn’t going right. If I came out with a release around Christmas, they’d be saying, ‘Him, remember?’”

  “It could have been worse.”

  “You mean she could have died? Yeah, boy, that would really have packaged things up nice. Boy, when I think.”

  “Seth, you can release a picture any time you want, and you better get busy and make one. You can’t sit in Paris and wait for them to come to you.”

  Seth gave his representative a very dirty look.

  “Do you know what Jean-Pierre Fauré’s doing this fall?” asked Walden, following up his advantage.

  “I’ve heard rumours.”

  “The rumours are true, lover.”

  There was a long silence as Seth stretched his legs; back and forth he walked across the beautiful carpet, while Walden squinted at him through beams of afternoon sunlight. Shutters creaked on the balcony, and there were sounds of leaves and breeze.

  “It isn’t that I haven’t tried to line something up. As soon as I came over I went into the question of finance, with the idea of setting up a Swiss coproduction deal—for the tax situation—and retaining real ownership of the property. I own a number of scripts, as you know.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t bypass us like that.”

  “Hank, in Europe you don’t count; this is another world. Anyway the banking looked sound, and I started looking for a director. I even considered Fauré, but he was in the States.”

  “Minding the store,” said Walden, and they both laughed.

  “But the thing is, I don’t own a property suitable for both of us, Charity and me. She’s basically a musical-comedy type, and she’ll never be anything else, at least I can’t see any dramatic potential there. A smart director might shoot around her, but she’d still be in the middle of half the frames, bouncing and jiggling and moving her arms and getting up on her toes, the way people do in musicals.”

  Walden thought that this didn’t sound like a six months’ bridegroom, but he didn’t mention it. Seth scraped the carpet with his foot; the room seemed full of dusty pink and gray light, and he was framed in it, storklike and angry. Walden remembered the first time they’d met, in the Lyricart offices. Seth had been bullying his personal representative into demanding a bigger percentage of the package. Later on, Seth had picked him out for that difficult spot, and had taught him much.

  He thought of his predecessor, Vogelsang, without pity. “Rose left us,” he said suddenly, implicitly blaming Seth, “almost as soon as she came to. Must have been the first thing she did.”

  “I’ll bet Vogelsang misses her.”

  “Vogelsang cried,” said Walden contemptuously, “but it was really us she was hitting at, you and me.”

  “She hated you, Hank.” Seth came across the room and took his agent by the lapels. “You think I don’t know what they’re saying in New York? ‘He drove her to it.’ That’s what they’re saying and they’re probably right. It doesn’t look good, and what’s more I feel it. I could always make a picture with Rosie. We made four, and one was perhaps the worst movie ever made, but it made money. None of them lost a nickel, and Sailor Take Warning grossed twelve million on a very small investment. She isn’t just a musical-comedy star. Sure I drove her to it, doesn’t everybody?” He was very disturbed. “I’ve never made a picture with anybody like Charity.”

  “Wasn’t there something at Universal with Piper Laurie?”

  “For Pete’s sake, that was close to twenty years ago, and don’t kid yourself, Piper Laurie wasn’t a bad act
ress at all. She just got into a rut, one that I was lucky to get out of.”

  Walden ruminated. “I can see you and Charity together. Might be quite a switch for you.”

  “She doesn’t listen to anybody else’s lines.”

  “At home or at work?”

  “Anywhere. What is the kid, twenty? Nineteen? I tell you Hank, she scares me. I’m not exactly in my grave, you know. I’m thirty-eight, and I mean, I really am thirty-eight.”

  “We’ve got a photostat of your birth certificate in your dossier.”

  “I love the way agents talk about dossiers,” Seth grumbled. “Like the secret police. ‘Pull Lincoln’s dossier from the files’ But don’t forget, somebody somewhere is keeping a dossier on you.”

  Walden shrugged. You’re twice her age, he thought, what did you expect?

  “I’m in real good shape,” Seth complained, “I play a lot of tennis and I swim when I can, but she wears you down. I’m too old for the Olympia. I will admit, she’s a terrific dancer.”

  “That’s a major sector of the human experience.”

  “It is if you’re in musical comedy.” He looked at Walden desperately.

  The agent was pitiless. “You know where she was really terrific, don’t you? In those titles. Guys all over America must have envied you.”

  Seth looked ready to cry. “It was my idea,” he said, “I suggested it to whozis-you know, Faiers.”

  “I thought it must have been.”

  “It was me all right. I said to Bud and Danny, ‘Build her up. Cut Rose down’ And they obeyed me, to this day I don’t know why. I’ve been wrong often enough.” That was correct. He had made a number of very bad guesses about scripts. But somehow or other his most inartistic choices of story had a way of turning out well at the box office. He had no taste, or not much, but was extremely prudent commercially, and this paradox confused his life continually. His pictures were mainly artistically unsuccessful money-makers; once in a while, when he had good direction and a good script, he made excellent pictures that made money. Either way, he made money, and was therefore a great star. He felt awfully uneasy, as if somebody was about to knock him off. Not Rose, who had never really been in his class, but somebody out there somewhere.

  “You’ll be in the top five for 1967,” said Walden, “but not for 1968. Nothing in release.”

  “I will have two pictures in release for 1968.”

  Walden suddenly showed his anger. “It’s as simple as that, is it? If you want two pictures in release next year, neither can be a musical. Do I have to spell it out for you? You should go into production this afternoon, like right now, and you should keep working for eight months, and you can’t make a musical because there isn’t time, which leaves Charity out on a limb. Do you want to risk her in a straight part, at this stage, of the size she’ll demand? She may be your wife this year, but she’s in pictures permanently. Christ, she’s tampered successfully with you; how does she know somebody else won’t? Do you want to go into production on a film where you can’t work with the other star because she plays in a different style, in a medium you don’t understand? Or do you intend to try and fit her into your style? I can’t really see her in light comedy, musicals apart, or in serious drama, and I sure to God can’t see you in musicals. You’re a valuable property as far as Lyricart is concerned; that’s why I’m here. If you want to work in Europe, that’s great; everybody works in Europe these days. Just so you work.”

  “I’ll work.”

  “With or without her?”

  “Without, if necessary. I’d like to try one with her, but she’s so completely corn-fed, fresh-faced heifer; how could we cast her? I haven’t seen a story that makes sense for us, and I’ve been reading scripts for months.”

  “You need a light comedy script with a part for each of you, producible over here. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “So find one; you’re so smart. God, that girl is insistent.”

  “Something to cost around three and a half million, with your percentage off the gross, if we set it up that you aren’t the producer of record?”

  “Yeah,” said Seth. He brightened up a bit. “Rose never worked off the gross.”

  He thought of his first sight of her, up at Lake Arrowhead sixteen years ago. She had been modelling sportswear for a teen magazine, being then at the end of her teens, just Charity’s age. She’s smarter than Charity, he realized suddenly, though not as stacked. At nineteen, without makeup, she had been fresh and alight, alive, a perfect ingénue, and had been picked up to do a series of clean American-girl parts at Metro. That was all she could handle for a long time, ingénues and fan-magazine layouts, where she wore girlish prints and shared the space with an animal, a horse or dog.

  As he stood talking to Walden, the voice of his superego, whom he had always disliked intensely, Seth felt more and more certainly what he had suspected all summer, that his taste had betrayed him again. Perhaps, he let himself reflect for the first time, perhaps a man is entitled to only one nineteen-year-old girl per lifetime. Perhaps he can’t handle more than one. Rose danced mistily in his imagination, rather short, with pretty dark brown hair and clearly drawn features, no raving beauty. Her big weapon had been her diction, which was naturally clear and precise and which recorded beautifully; she had never needed a voice coach, while he, Seth Lincoln, big star, had been working on his speech for years after they were married.

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s just phonetic geography,” she used to tell him. “Nobody cares about it but smart-ass reviewers.”

  “Dis, dat, dese, dem, dose,” he would say worriedly.

  He remembered her smile. “What are we doing this crazy thing for? Who would cast a kid from Bristol, Connecticut, as the Lady Aminta, with a boy from the Upper West Side as Sir Grishkin? It’s loony, no?”

  “Sir Gawain,” said Seth. “Spell my name right.”

  That had been an awful movie in almost every conceivable way, except that it had earned back its production costs in the neighbourhoods and had gone on earning afterwards. Kids loved it, and it still ran and ran, all over the States. After that, when Rose wanted to be specially nice to him, she called him Sir Grishkin.

  “I’ve come a long way,” he would tell her:

  “Sure you have. Let me hear you say, ‘THis, THat, THese, THem, THose.’”

  “THis, THat, THese, THem, THose.”

  “Very good. Let me give you a kiss.” Where had she got her clear diction and her fresh face? She was a nothing and so was he; but she hadn’t become as big a star; he’d outgrown her. She’d never really learned her trade. After they were married she’d been content to go on doing solid leads in not quite top productions, while he had acquired a lot of prestige.

  I could have stayed king of the teens, he thought, but I wasn’t able to accept that. I improved myself. I didn’t do television. I cleaned up my diction, and it wasn’t easy. I worked for good directors and associated myself with the best people, and I got better. Rose depended on my reputation, and on me personally, and I just got tired of carrying her. I’m no kid. I’m almost forty.

  One nineteen-year-old to a lifetime, was that the regulation? He had used up fifteen years of Rose, would he get as much of Charity? He remembered some idiotic debutante’s line to the press: “It’s wonderful to be getting married for the first time.” This had always seemed to him comically corrupt, but how was he any better? He added fifteen years to his present age, and wondered if he would catch another youthful virgin at fifty-three. Maybe I won’t need them any more, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Fifteen years of Charity . . .

  “What is this stuff?” said Walden, picking at the wall with his fingernails.

  “Ormolu. Or-moulu. Ground gold, powdered up and brushed on. Actually it isn’t gold, it’s bronze. Don’t pull it off; that’s real authentic inlay and they couldn’t replace it.”r />
  Walden picked up a white and gold clock that stood on the chimneypiece. “Really works,” he mumbled, listening for the delicate tick. “Pretty nice place for a West Side boy.”

  “That’s the real West Side story, Hank, from slavery to ormolu. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. Listen, let’s go have a couple of drinks. I told Charity we’d be in the bar or the restaurant, and I think we’d better try to come to some kind of agreement about script possibilities and a director before she gets back.”

  “Too bad we can’t get Fauré,” said Walden. “He’s really a virtuoso, working with inexperienced people. He may be able to do something with Rose; there’s plenty there to start with.”

  “Ah, she never liked you.”

  “What do they call this place again?” asked Walden vaguely.

  “The Raphaël, but I’m no archangel.” They went in search of drink.

  10

  “She’ll be here tomorrow; she might be in full flight at this moment.”

  “And I suppose I’m not,” said Charity, with explicit nastiness.

  “Oh, you. I don’t give a damn who you eat strawberries with, as long as you do it on your own time.”

  “That jerk never laid a hand on me. I’m famous and I’ve got a reputation to protect. I’m going to be above suspicion and gossip, like Rose.”

  “How can you, of all people, talk about her to me? It was you made me betray her.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  “You were making eyes at me before I ever spoke to you. I remember how it was. I never even looked at you till she introduced us.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Your wife.”

  “You are my wife.”

  “Like hell I am. I’m your whore.”

  “Don’t be silly; we’re married.”

  “I’ll never get you away from her; you’ve got her in your bones and you’ll never get her out—I’m not talking law, I’m talking feelings.”

  “How old are you, Charity?”

  “Never mind that, you’ve been telling me how young and insignificant I am for a year. Why didn’t you leave me alone?”