Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  The second reason is Halorite 1219. Nitrocellulose is passionately flammable. It can combust for no good reason, and once it starts burning you can’t stop it because it makes its own oxygen. However, before the Hearts in Darkness film was shipped from Spanish Honduras back to the United States at the end of 1957, every inch of it was sprayed with a proprietary halocarbon fire-retardant called Halorite 1219, which is manufactured by Apex Chemical in Michigan but has never been cleared for civilian use. I had no personal involvement in that phase of the operation, but I couldn’t object to the choice, because I’d been a loyal Apex Chemical customer going back to my days at the New York Evening Mirror. It was from their catalogue that I ordered the benzoic oxymorphone I used regularly in both eras of my career, and I believe they also developed the active ingredient in an emergency hangover cure I took once or twice. The Halorite coating significantly degrades the image quality, and I’m sure the fumes do much the same to my renal tissue, but it’s a necessary evil: without it, that warehouse would be a bomb on a short fuse. The salient point here, however, is that no living organism could survive on a surface sprayed with Halorite. And yet I’ve brought those scrags of film home with me because I have to be sure.

  Not only am I an alcoholic who’s too sick to drink, I’m also a career spy with no security clearance, which is just as liable to give a guy the shakes. I’m judiciously paranoid even at the best of times, and right now my assistant is missing and I have contraband in my apartment. I hope I can be indulged, therefore, if I admit to a preoccupation with the cream-colored convertible Chevrolet Bel Air that’s been parked in different places on my quiet street the last three nights. I know a stakeout car when I see one, even if I can’t necessarily explain why.

  * * *

  Once again my thoughts have turned to the whelp from the agency who’ll be responsible for searching through my papers after my death. He may be skimming this journal like a ninth-grader with a book report due in the morning. But I hope that, on the contrary, he’s too afraid he might miss something important if he doesn’t cross-reference every detail, and this assignment annexes his weekends, curdles his dreams, makes him wish to God he’d chosen a different career.

  In that case, he certainly won’t have forgotten about Meredith Vansaska, my former colleague in the newsroom of the New York Evening Mirror, who is not irrelevant to this history just because Trimble nabbed her berth on the SS Alterity in 1938. The full chronology of her life is a context in which some skimming may, in fact, be acceptable, because for nine years after that she got no closer to the temple. But then one morning in 1947 – quite out of the blue, in the most inauspicious circumstances, like a block of Mayan limestone dropping from the cloudless Santa Monica sky – the temple got closer to her. Two minutes before it happened, she was still smoking a cigarette in the living room of an apartment at the Miramar Hotel while she and the piano player waited for Wilf Laroux to finish masturbating.

  They were now working on the chapter of Laroux’s autobiography that would cover the season in 1918 when he played his first big part on Broadway. Because his diaries showed that he ate almost every night at the Chalfonte on 45th Street, he had called down to the kitchen of the Miramar for a breakfast of Tyrolean beefhash with sauce gribiche and white asparagus. Because his diaries showed that the song he most liked to dance to at Pluto’s was ‘Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine’, the pianist was playing it for the twenty-eighth time in a row. And because his diaries showed that the person with whom he most frequently had sexual intercourse during that year’s production of The Rainbow Girl was Verree Dietz, he was now in the bedroom pleasuring himself to a contemporaneous photograph of the actress.

  Vansaska very much wanted to dismiss this method as ridiculous. The trouble was that it worked so well. Every day, the 49-year-old actor would come rushing out of the bedroom of the apartment, an old publicity shot and a warm hand towel lying jilted on the carpet behind him, and he would explode into reminiscence. Before he went through the ritual, any questions about his past would elicit only the muzziest generalities, and half the time even those contradicted one another. (The diaries were not much help because he’d never bothered to put anything down except unannotated ledgers of auditions, paychecks, songs, dinners and sexual partners.) After he went through the ritual, he didn’t turn into Proust all of a sudden, but he could at least achieve an elementary nostalgia, and for the episodes that really meant something to him he might produce a rather marvelous bouquet of sensual detail. The price of this, however, was that Vansaska had a hard job assembling the sort of background facts upon which her journalistic training insisted, because Laroux was so besotted with his own sensorium that he had no patience left over for any events or relationships that he had not directly experienced. Husserl, the great sleuth of the phenomenal consciousness, described his preparatory investigations as an Egologie, or ‘egology’, and the term had not caught on, but Vansaska, who had read a little Husserl at Radcliffe, felt that Laroux was one of the world’s foremost egologists.

  She hadn’t planned on becoming a ghostwriter of autobiographies. But at present she had no other means of supporting herself and nobody else to support her. At the beginning of 1939, four months after her reckless afternoon in the motor hotel with that long-lashed young film director she met outside Arnold Spindler’s mansion, she still hadn’t worked up the conviction to break off her engagement with Bryce. So she had asked her loving virgin fiancé to arrange an abortion for her. This was the cruelest thing she had ever done to another human being, but it was for the best, because he told her that if he did as she asked he could no longer become her husband. There were two terminations that winter, but at least Bryce, after the amnion of his devotion was finally lanced, could get up and wipe himself off. And indeed by the time America entered the war they were both happily married to other people.

  The actual procedure made for a bleak season, and she felt the loss for much longer than she’d insisted to herself she would. But in the ranking of horrors it was nothing compared to crouching in the back of that cab as it pulled up to the gate of Creedmor State Hospital four months prior. When Trimble had tricked the driver into taking her there as if she were a patient to be committed, he couldn’t have known that all her life she had been scared she would end up in exactly such a place. But perhaps he’d made a lucky guess. After the misunderstanding was sorted out, she told the driver that at best he could expect to get his license revoked and at worst face charges for kidnapping. But in fact when she got home and realised she wasn’t going to the jungle after all she did no more than call in sick to the Mirror so she could pull the curtains in her apartment and spend four days sleeping and crying. She felt she had been toyed with in order to remind her of a rule of life: you can light out for a hiding place but what you always find instead is just what you are trying to hide from.

  Bryce had known his new wife since freshman year at Harvard. Vansaska had known her new husband for two weeks before their wedding. He was a cowboy, an actual cowboy, with big rough hands like in a dime novel about a cowboy with big rough hands, whom she met in a bar near Grand Central. The eighteen months they spent together were the most blissful of her entire life. She would give him one of her favorite poets to read, or show him how to eat an artichoke, or leave him alone with three of her most acid girlfriends at a party, and watch him square up to the task with the sort of good humor – earnest and self-mocking and clumsy and capable all at the same time – that she hoped she would have shown picking her way across a gully in an evening gown. Those were the times she felt the most deeply for him.

  But then, all at once, like the lights coming up at the end of a movie, their love just came to a stop. They both realised it almost simultaneously and they parted without rancor. At the time, neither of them felt diligent enough to organise a divorce (although she expected to get a letter about it from him one day when he met someone else) so instead he just went straight back to New Mexico and later joined the
army. She felt it had been a good marriage, much better than any of her friends’. By then she was estranged from her parents and she wanted a new start, so she moved to Los Angeles to take up a job at the Herald-Examiner. The black basalt prison felt distant there and she decided to stay. She grew to love the stretch and diffusion of it, the long walks she took in the dusk from her place in Silver Lake, meeting almost nobody but the dogs who seemed to her so much more real than the owners they towed along behind them like mannequins on wheels. Around the end of the war she moved across to the Times, where, having nothing better to do with her lunch hours, she began an affair with her editor. She’d assumed they both understood it was strictly utilitarian, but when she broke it off he got so angry he found a pretext to fire her. With less than $60 in her bank account, she started calling around for favors. At last a friend at the Dial Press back in New York recommended her for this job, and she was summoned for an interview to the bungalow apartment at the Miramar where Wilf Laroux was staying until the renovation of his mansion was complete.

  The memorious egologist burst from his chamber, his hands still fumbling with the cord of his dressing gown. ‘The New Amsterdam theater!’ he exclaimed. ‘Opening night!’

  Vansaska stubbed out her cigarette and picked up a 2B pencil to start taking shorthand. The pianist played on.

  ‘… and that was how Verree got her start, of course,’ said Laroux a little while later, ‘because she was understudying for Ada Coehorn and the day before we opened the woman just vanished. To tell you the truth I was happy about it. She was so thick with Verree I could never get Verree alone. They were always curled up together in her dressing room talking about, you know, whatever it is that women talk about. One night I had such trouble peeling them apart that I just gave up and went to a cat-house.’

  ‘Ada Coehorn?’ said Vansaska. ‘Did she have anything to do with the Eastern Aggregate Coehorns? Didn’t Elias Coehorn once have a wife who was an actress?’

  ‘I never met any of her clansmen,’ shrugged the exact opposite of an omniscient narrator. ‘But she wore a lot of diamonds. Rockslides of diamonds. She was a lovely thing, even better looking than Verree, really got your marrow melting. I tried to make her at a party once and she said, “I’m sorry, Wilf, but I belong to someone else.” I’d already noticed she wore a ring. “Didn’t you hear?” I said. “The statute of marriage expired at midnight. They forgot to renew it. Everybody in the state of New York is unmarried until they sign a new bill in Albany tomorrow morning.” That was a line I used a lot back then, and it did make her laugh, but then she said, “Oh, I don’t mean my husband.”’

  ‘So she had a lover?’

  ‘Maybe. Once during the rehearsals I walked in on her screwing Arnie What’s-His-Name.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘An impresario type. He produced a lot of the shows at the Knickerbocker. That was the last time I ever saw him in New York, as a matter of fact, up to his balls in Ada Coehorn. Then some time in the twenties, right after I moved to Hollywood, I ran into him again. He was a big shot at some studio by then … Oh, it’s tap-dancing on the tip of my tongue. Sweetheart, hand me my diary for ’29.’

  ‘I don’t know if this is necessary, Mr Laroux. We’re making terrific progress on 1918.’

  ‘But you’re always saying you want all the boring details.’ He flipped through the diary. ‘Johnny, give me “You’re Getting to Be a Habit”. You know that one, don’t you?’ The pianist played the opening chords. ‘Mary Rialto,’ said Laroux. ‘Chicken-and-ham galantine.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Mary Rialto. Chicken-and-ham galantine. Mary Rialto. Chicken-and-ham galantine. Mary Mary.’ He closed his eyes and his hand began to slide towards his crotch. ‘Mary Rialto.’

  ‘Let’s get back to The Rainbow Girl, please,’ said Vansaska sharply.

  ‘Mary Rialto. Yes, that’s it. That’s the stuff. Mary Rialto.’

  ‘Do you want us to, uh, step outside for a minute, Mr Laroux?’ said the pianist.

  ‘No, keep playing. Mary Rialto; Mary Rialto. Mary Rialto. Chicken-and-ham galantine. Mary Rialto.’ Then Laroux’s eyes snapped open. ‘Arnold Spindler! The head of Kingdom Pictures! It was an overcast morning with the smell of gardenias in the air and I was up for the part of a navy captain in a movie that at that time they were calling Officer on Deck—’

  But Vansaska had put down her pencil. ‘Arnold Spindler was having an affair with Ada Coehorn?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve forgotten why that seemed interesting a moment ago. Where were we? Johnny, play “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine” again. Thank you. Now, Jim Huneker was in the audience that night and he had published the most unforgivably snotty review of our Julius Caesar so in the interval I sent a boy to him with a note that said … hold on, let me remember the phrasing exactly …’

  Vansaska could laugh all she liked at Laroux, but it wasn’t as if her own memory was a device of industrial precision. The long-lashed boy, the promise of the jungle, the ride to the asylum, the abortion, the broken engagement: even after all this time she still had a feeling in her skull like coathangers rattling on a closet rail whenever anything reminded her of those months (whereas she would struggle to come up with a single impression from the pastel expanse of 1944). The period was so intense it seemed to deserve a name, like la Terreur, and she sometimes thought of it as the Pinch, borrowing a term a friend of hers had coined. Arnold Spindler’s disputed sanity was far from the only story she’d pursued at the Mirror that had come to nothing. But it had stayed with her longer than any other – not only because, in general, artifacts dating from the Pinch were exceptionally well-preserved, but also because, in particular, she associated Spindler’s Hearts in Darkness with the escape to the Torrid Zone that would somehow have fixed everything in her life (or so she had felt at the time and perhaps felt still).

  She was an adult and she could give a sensible account of the events of the Pinch. And yet she also felt that she understood nothing of those events, that she was as bewildered as an animal. A connection or a logic seemed absent, grievously absent, absent like something stolen. Spindler’s fate was the sort of mystery you could summarise in a two-sentence lede, but everything adjacent to it was the sort of mystery where you couldn’t even articulate just what was so mysterious. She had no good reasons for thinking that somehow if she solved the former it might help her solve the latter. So this was foolishness upon foolishness. No, her world would not be mended by the jungle. No, it would not be deciphered by a studio boss. She knew she should grow out of her fixations. But that wasn’t easy.

  She’d waited a long time for Hearts in Darkness to come out, anticipating that she would go alone to torture herself at least two or three times – but it never did. So at last, one slow afternoon at the Los Angeles Times, she went down to spend a few hours with the news librarian in the clippings morgue. She couldn’t find a single reference to the movie after that initial announcement. Kingdom Pictures had never released a full cast list, but she knew that George Aldobrand and Adela Thoisy had been cast in the lead roles, and it turned out that after 1938 neither of them had ever appeared in another movie. Aldobrand was featured in ‘Say, Whatever Happened To …?’ in Photoplay in ’44, but the column contained no new information and implied that his career had simply ‘hit the skids’.

  What surprised her the most, however, was a story in the Times itself about the board of Kingdom Pictures electing a new chairman, because she couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard about it at the time. Arnold Spindler was mentioned only in passing as the founder and former chairman. Had he died or just stepped down? Either way, what was the cause? Had he shown himself in public at any point? The story didn’t bother to answer any of these questions, nor did it acknowledge the theories about Spindler that at one time were so commonplace in Hollywood. The writer had left the Times and Vansaska couldn’t get a telephone number for him, but she asked the current head reporter on that beat if he knew anything mo
re about Arnold Spindler or Hearts in Darkness or George Aldobrand or Adela Thoisy. Patronising as ever, he informed her that the war had put America through a centrifuge and sometimes the leads you might have been able to find before Pearl Harbor just weren’t there any more and never would be again. This seemed pretty defeatist to Vansaska – Los Angeles wasn’t exactly occupied Tokyo and VJ Day wasn’t exactly Year Zero – but she knew from her own reporting that in certain cases it was close to the truth. They called it a clippings morgue but it was more like a cemetery, marking time with its expansion. The librarian had a year-round cold and if you spent too long in there with him you’d catch it too.

  Since then she’d largely succeeded in pushing Arnold Spindler to the back of her mind. But Laroux had undone that in a few words. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you again, Mr Laroux,’ she said, ‘but I have a few more questions about Ada Coehorn.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to get back to The Rainbow Girl. Ada Coehorn never went onstage in The Rainbow Girl.’

  ‘She vanished before opening night. Right.’ Vansaska knew that when Laroux said ‘vanished’, he didn’t necessarily mean that Ada Coehorn disappeared without trace, only that he never saw her again with his own eyes and therefore as far as he was concerned she passed out of existence. ‘Did anyone ever explain where she went?’

  ‘I can’t see what this has to do with the story of my life,’ said Laroux. ‘I don’t remember anything else about Ada Coehorn or where she went or who she was fucking.’

  ‘But I guess Verree Dietz would probably know. What happened to her?’

  ‘She stayed on Broadway. For the best, I think. She was a little older than me and I’m not sure she would have taken to Hollywood.’

  ‘Could I telephone her? Strictly for background, you understand. I’m a newspaper reporter and I guess the old habits die hard,’ she added, smiling humbly, trying not to sound too eager. ‘I just wouldn’t want to get any of the facts wrong.’