Violencia!

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “It’s hateful,” he said, “and believe me, I’m not proud of it, but it’s there, all right, in some small, disgraceful, possibly genetic chamber of myself.”

  “Well, that’s just awful,” said Miss Hottle. “How can you live with yourself? I don’t have any of that in me.”

  Gurney saw that he had made a mistake in being so fiercely honest with Miss Hottle and tried, unsuccessfully, to tease his way out of it.

  “Ah, c’mon now, not even a little tiny bit, if you really dig down?”

  “No, not a drop,” she said, “no matter how far I dig down. And I think it’s disgraceful that you have some of it in you.”

  Though she found Gurney suspect in his social thinking, Miss Hottle was kind to him in every way, lining up excellent tickets for hit shows, taking care of his meagre correspondence, and even sewing buttons on his one sports jacket. She was a curious contradiction and saw nothing wrong with taking part in a lunchtime protest for the homeless, then dashing right back to work for Undertag, whose vast property interests had led some to describe him as a piggish real estate hustler and world-class slumlord.

  After his work on the Violencia libretto was finished for the day, Gurney would often linger at the office, sometimes wandering into Undertag’s inner sanctum just to lounge around for a bit. Undertag had told Gurney to make himself at home in the office, and the ex-dick, behaving in a manner that wasn’t typical of him, took advantage of the offer, smoking the producer’s choice Havana cigars and taking sips of his vintage Scotch whiskey. On occasion, he would sit at Undertag’s huge mahogany desk, swiveling about in his chair—and at other times he would kick off his shoes and sink into the producer’s couch. The net effect was sexually arousing. It crossed his mind that he might make some sort of proposal to the woman who tidied up at the end of the day. But he held off. He just wasn’t ready for cleaning-lady sex.

  Not that he was was afraid of being arrested. If the woman were to call the police, that wouldn’t be much of a problem—the dicks took care of their own. But they would certainly have a field day teasing him about his fancy new job in show business. They were merciless about anyone in the Bureau who was stuck-up and put on airs. Gurney recalled the case of a certain detective in Art Fraud who gave a party and made the mistake of hiring a uniformed waiter to serve drinks; they practically rode him out of the Bureau for that one. There was no question that Gurney’s new line of work put him in the fancy and too-good-for-the-rest-of-us category.

  As for Violencia itself, Gurney couldn’t quite tell with any certainty exactly how it was going. A distracting presence was Undertag’s assistant, the distinguished-looking, always nattily dressed Tom Toileau, who operated as a kind of watchdog against the use of harsh or abusive language that he felt would drive audiences and theatre party people away from the show. This put him in conflict with Gurney and Hartog, who had decided to be forceful in dealing with the show’s language, since detective talk was by its nature strong and colorful. A no-holds-barred approach seemed the proper way to proceed. Actually, Gurney was not as much of a stickler in this area as Clement Hartog, who seemed to be trying to prove he was tough and ballsy after a career hitherto thrown over to successful but more or less light family fare. (Indeed, one critic had referred to him derisively as “Mr. Frothy.”)

  Gurney had told Clement Hartog about a certain old-timer of a detective who used the word “doody” quite often, saying “Doody on you” to other detectives around the Bureau, to suspects, and even to puzzled everyday citizens encountered during routine investigations. He was a rugged dick from the old school, and though no one ever called him this to his face, his nickname around the Bureau was “Detective Doody.” The question before the two collaborators was whether to feature the word in the show, Gurney not caring one way or the other and Hartog, after musing over it, taking a strong position.

  “It adds texture to the show, and I see no reason to back away from it.”

  Toileau, quite typically, drifted by during the discussion and said, “I couldn’t help overhearing you two fellows. And all I can say is why in the hell do you want to lose them out there?”

  He made it clear that he wasn’t objecting to the word on a personal basis.

  “I myself have used the word ‘doody’ on more than one occasion, and I wouldn’t pull back from using it at a cocktail party, if the situation warranted it. I’ve used ‘titty’ and ‘bum,’ too, many times, as a boy and as a grown man. But that does not mean I would want to see those terms used in the theatre. I just say to you that they’ve come in to town for a good time, they’re pulling for you, they ask for so very little—why in the hell drive them out?”

  “I disagree with you, Tom,” said Hartog.

  The director then brought into play a special authority that comes with having registered an enormous number of successes in the past. That his triumphs were essentially light and fluffy ones was beside the point—and may have even been a strength in Toileau’s family-oriented eyes.

  “I think ‘doody’ works for us,” the director continued. “Now if you were telling us to avoid using ‘doody’ as the theme for a musical number, I’d go along and follow you there. Music does enhance theatrical values, and with all of the brass and violins behind it the effect might be just too strong. But otherwise, I don’t think it’s anything to back away from.”

  “Okay, fellas,” said Toileau. He was quite reasonable and good-natured in defeat. “Doody it is, and I’ll defer to you boys as creators. I just don’t think there’s any theatrical gold there. You’re giving up a lot for a little.”

  Gurney did not feel that Toileau had been in the least bit intractable. Nontheless, after he left, Hartog was clearly annoyed.

  “There are times when I think we picked the wrong producers. They’re telling me what works in the theatre,” he said, with a contemptuous shrug.

  “Doody stays!” his powerful directorial voice boomed out. “Now let’s get on with it.”

  Gurney was all for moving along, but the work had a frustrating way of not going forward. Most of the time, Gurney felt it was his inexperience that was getting in the way; but he also had a hunch that another factor was Hartog’s extreme care and concern with being absolutely right on each decision. At first, Gurney found this appealing—he was allied with a man who strove for perfection; how could this fail to make him happy? On other occasions, Gurney allowed himself to think that Hartog was a trifle indecisive. No sooner would the team agree on a sequence, with Gurney poised to record it, than Hartog would say: “Now hold off a minute, Paul, maybe we’re going off half-cocked. Let’s think about it.”

  Gurney, who in so many ways was hanging on to the great director’s coattails, would sit back and see clearly, of course, that there was cause for reexamination. The result was that after a month of effort, the two had tons of ideas but didn’t have a single page of the libretto on paper. This was troubling to Gurney, who tended to have a quantitative approach to life—i.e., the man with two pages of libretto was better off than the man with none—though he realized it led him to preposterous conclusions, such as that someone with four marriages was much better off than the individual with only one. He did not need a cheap analysis having to do with penis size to account for these feelings. He had them—that was enough.

  Still, the two really did have a rough scheme for the libretto; the first act, for example, would end with a major song-and-dance production number in which the handsome rogue dick is apprehended and hauled into the Bureau. The general theme of the number would be “I Think We’ve Got Him,” the dicks singing and dancing in a manner that highlighted the division in the group—one faction wanting to beat the living shit out of him, the other choosing to examine the childhood and societal factors that forced him to become a killer of pants-pressers.

  Hartog felt they had the finale licked as well. Almost inevitably, it had to be a musical number in which the Homicide Chief—played, of course, by Essie Hartog—packs up and leaves the
Bureau while her enlightened son, chosen to take over, looks on, torn between love and hatred for his defeated dad.

  “I know where we’re driving,” said Hartog. “If only I had a clue as to how to get there.”

  At the musical end, Welles kept pushing forward, although the two collaborators rarely saw him. They would sketch in notions for songs and Welles, after a few days, would phone them so that they could rush over and listen to what he had. The songs were unfailingly quite appealing and attractively varied in rhythmic approach. Irritatingly, however, they went off in lyrical directions that, to put it charitably, had nothing to do with the show. As an example, Gurney and Hartog felt that a sequence involving the brutal grilling of an aggravated-assault-and-battery suspect should take the form of a duet:

  Detective (singing): Did you kick the victim’s ass?

  Suspect (singing): Nosiree, nosiree.

  Detective: Did you smack him in the head?

  Suspect: No, I didn’t.

  Welles’ answer to their suggestion was a number about the delights of ragtime Broadway during the twenties. Hartog thought there were strong comedic possibilities in the activities of Detective Centro, who invested hours of his time peering in through hotel room transoms to watch hookers giving blow jobs to out-of-town johns. But Welles’ song, curiously, and maddeningly, dealt with a disappointed young man who passes a restaurant, looks through the window, and sees his lost love “dining with somebody new.”

  The two collaborators then came up with what they felt was a can’t-miss possibility for a number involving a detectives’ dance, at the height of which a young rookie prankster shows up with a nicely attired dead body from the morgue as his partner. Welles’ musical attack on the idea dealt with a small-town girl who can’t keep her feet still and feels compelled to leave her waitressing job in Topeka, hitchhike to New York, and pursue her deam of becoming a Broadway star. A tried-and-true notion, decent enough, but drastically out of sync with the scene it was intended to incorporate in music.

  Hartog, and Gurney as well, to a lesser extent, battled the composer on each of the songs, but the process was wearying, and even though Welles backtracked a bit now and then, the effect was discouraging. In each case, Welles would say he knew the lyrics were a little sketchy but that repairs would be simple. If they’d just let him go about his business, they’d see that he would be able to make the corrections easily, most of them light, insignificant, out-of-town fixes.

  “Being new to this and understandably bewildered,” he would tell Gurney, “you probably feel let down from time to time and don’t see how a show like this—with all its bits and pieces— can ever come together. But you’ll be amazed when you see how it does.”

  Hartog’s fights with the composer over the songs became less spirited. Gurney felt he could see the energy leaking out of him. After a while, it was as if Hartog had blacked out the musical problem entirely.

  “Let’s just attend to our side, Paul,” he said. “If we nail the libretto, and it’s good and strong, the rest will fall into line.”

  Oddly enough, it was Gurney whose feelings welled up one day and who snapped.

  “Look, Clement, the goddamned songs just don’t fit the show we’re trying to put on stage. They’re all light love songs, and it’s crazy to go along this way. With all due respect to your vast experience and my lack of any.”

  “Do you think I ought to bring this to a head?” the director asked, sadly.

  “Yes,” said Gurney. He was convinced for a change that he was right—and consequently not at all shaky about taking the strong position.

  The two held a showdown meeting with Welles. The director hemmed and hawed and was extremely polite and diplomatic. But finally he suggested that Welles might need some help.

  “Not on your melodies, Norman, which God knows are beautiful … but on the lyrics.”

  Gurney gripped the sides of his chair, expecting a storm of protest, and was surprised to see Welles seem to collapse into himself, his eyes wet, his voice choked and barely audible.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, as if a confession had been slapped out of him. “My God. You can’t do this to me. I’ve got millions and don’t need this show the way another fellow might … you, Paul, as an example, who probably don’t have a pot to piss in … but do you realize what you’re suggesting?”

  He begged for another chance to show what he could do.

  “I think we owe it to him, Clement,” said Gurney, who was touched by the composer’s apparent collapse.

  The two agreed to give Welles another try, but when they left the office that night, they were not optimistic about his chances for success, his first efforts being so obviously wide of the mark.

  The next day, Welles called them down to his town house and sang a number, to be delivered by an older man in the Bureau to his young boy, called, “Son, Be a Cop for Your Pop.” The thrust of the song had to do with the father’s urging his son to follow in his footsteps and to give up his dream of a career in retailing. It was a simple, somewhat sentimental tune which did nothing but state the same theme over and over. But it had a mawkish honesty to it and the two had to admit that although they weren’t planning such a sequence, at least it had a remote connection to the show.

  Gurney gave the composer a hug. Hartog chucked him playfully on the chin.

  “I knew you could do it, you sonofagun. Why have you been holding out on us?”

  Welles hung his head and accepted the praise with that terribly appealing grin of his. The three then sat down and had a celebratory drink.

  Later, after leaving the composer’s place, Hartog said: “I think I know the secret with this guy. You’ve just got to give him a kick in the ass once in a while.”

  Gurney, who had been elated, sobered up quickly and suggested that apart from the new song, which they would probably end up not using, they were not in much better shape than when they had walked into the meeting.

  “What about the other songs?” he said. “I know it looks as if I’m focused on the dark side, but they just don’t agree with the rest of the show. It’s as though they were written for another musical.”

  “Sonofabitch,” said Hartog, smacking himself on the head. “I never thought of that. I’ll bet the bastard really did write them for another show and is slipping them to us, one by one, to save work for himself.”

  Despite this fear, the two pushed on with Violencia, mostly because of Hartog’s dogged urging. Gurney considered just quitting cold, not showing up one morning and going back to his routine of sitting around in the apartment he loved. But he felt he owed allegiance to the director, who seemed to be aging at a rapid clip right before Gurney’s eyes.

  One morning, Hartog became obsessed with the possibility that the producers were just jerking them around for the fun of it.

  “Why do you feel that way?” asked Gurney.

  “I don’t know … it’s just a feeling I have. We’re in here each day, busting our butts. And what have they done, really, except let us use their offices? The sonsofbitches don’t have the faintest inkling of what they’re sitting on with this property.”

  “But we don’t have have a word on paper. How could they be expected to proceed with plans for the show?”

  “Fuck it,” said Hartog. “We’ve given them enough of a taste to go by.” He suggested getting Welles down the next morning and having a cards-on-the-table meeting with the producers.

  The three collaborators joined Undertag and his staff the next morning in the producer’s office, Gurney experiencing a pleasing sense of solidarity as he sat with his two partners opposite the producing team. He had never felt that close to Welles, yet on this occasion he found himself exchanging winks with the handsome composer as the meeting got under way.

  Representing the producers were Undertag, of course; Toileau; a fledgling producer associate of Undertag’s named Greg Mandarin, and Miss Hottle, who took notes. Undertag kicked off the meeting.

  “Let’s
be as frank as we can, boys, because we want to stay friends, even if this project goes down the drain, as all my others have.”

  Toileau then took over and said he sensed the writers were displeased by the lack of effort on the producer’s part.

  “But fellows, all I for one know about the show is that you’re highlighting the word ‘doody.’ As I’ve said quite openly, I don’t see how you’re going to hold an audience with that.”

  “May I put in something?” said Hartog, quite modestly, but firmly, causing Gurney to relax—his team was about to come to bat. Legs crossed in an almost feminine manner, and hunched over as if to defend himself, the director proceeded to deliver a thrilling speech worthy of the Founding Fathers. He sketched in the forces that had first led him to Violencia, the reasons he felt the play was important and had to be done, not only for audiences but for the welfare of the nation. He praised his two colleagues, making the point that although he’d had differences with Welles in particular, he had a new respect and the highest regard for the composer.

  “I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the effort Norman is putting out.”

  His speech was delivered with an open-faced, naked candor and a tremendous sense of integrity, all of this coupled with the dignity and presence that only a man long schooled in the theatre arts can muster.

  “Frankly, gentlemen,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t think you fellows have played fair with us.”

  So great was the impact of his speech that when it was over, each person in the room rose and applauded for what must have been a full thirty seconds.

  At this point, Undertag, who was not without a rough-hewn Broadway wit, said: “I hope the show gets this much applause out of town.”