About lunchtime I got dressed and wandered out on Fifth Avenue, ready for a little sight-seeing. It seemed remarkably cold. Leaves were blowing off the trees in the park; they blew along the sidewalks and into the street, crunched by pedestrians and taxicabs. No one but me seemed to think it was at all cold. Most of the people on Fifth Avenue seemed actually to be enjoying the weather. They looked strong, smart, and indestructible. Their faces were sharp. They all seemed to be talking to others of their kind, and for some reason they reminded me of Indians—American Indians, those that had apparently existed in the nineteenth century. Like them, the New Yorkers seemed total masters of their environment. They knew when to step off the curb and when not to step off the curb. They knew where to buy the best salami and how to avoid muggers and other evils of the wilderness. The wind didn’t bother them. New York was their desert, their plains, their Canyon de Chelly. They were as tough as the Indians in good Indian movies—as tough as Burt Lancaster in Apache.
I was not of the Manhattan tribe, however. I was simply freezing. It occurred to me that I must be up against autumn, something I had never really had to deal with. It had been colder in Point Barrow, Alaska, when we were making Igloo, but I had never been required to go outside. I sat in a quonset hut all day, rewriting the grunts that were supposed to represent Eskimo dialect. All movie crews drink to excess, but the crew of Igloo set records in that respect that may never be equaled, and I certainly pulled my weight.
There were no quonset huts on Fifth Avenue, so I hurried along, pushed by the wind, until I came to the St. Regis Hotel. There I found a bar, installed myself, and ordered a Scotch.
“You look cold,” the bartender said. “I guess you must be from California.”
“Why California? There are other warm places in this country. I could be from Florida.”
“Not a chance,” the bartender said. “I been to Florida.”
I refused to admit to being from California, though the bartender badgered me through two or three drinks. As I drank I had a conversation with him that could have fit right into any of about fifty movies from the ’40s and ’50s, some of which I had probably worked on. The bartender was stock—I knew twenty character actors, some of them gone to their graves, who could have played him better than he played himself. He was short and pugnacious. Since I was seeing Manhattan in terms of Indians, I decided he was either a Digger or a Ute. Probably a Digger.
“Then you’re a writer, if you ain’t from California,” he concluded.
“What makes you think so?” I asked.
“You drink like a writer,” he said. “They got thin blood, you know—them and Californians.”
If I had been willing to play the role he assigned to me I would have soon been tipping him lavishly and calling him “my good man,” but in fact I thought he was a pugnacious little turd and I didn’t want to tip him lavishly. When he figured out that his witty analyses weren’t going to make him rich he left me to nurse my drink for twenty minutes.
After a while I became depressed. My depressions are like thick cloud covers: not a ray of light gets through. It seemed to me I had reached a strange stage. Life wasn’t really life any more—it was just a straight imitation of bad art. Nine-tenths of the time I found myself playing the roles I was type-cast for: the jovial drunk, the versatile hack. I didn’t seem to have the energy to play against the roles any more—it was easier just to play them.
No one would have thought to cast me as a proficient adulterer, which is what I have been for several years, but for some reason coming to New York had given me sudden doubts about my proficiency. I had been too content to sit around the hotel room all morning, making no effort to get anything going. One could argue that at my age I could safely allow myself a vacation, but such an argument would be wrong. It is the young who can afford vacations. At my age any lapse into inertia might well prove permanent. Up until about a year ago I was a fine handball player—my handball balanced my drinking, in some way. Then my favorite opponent retired and moved to La Jolla, and I dragged my feet about finding another one until it was too late. Within weeks, I lost handball—I am no longer capable of a really hard game, and if I tried to force myself to it, it would probably kill me.
Compared to adultery, handball is relaxing. The heart doctors are right about adultery being the most demanding sport. It’s faster than squash, and it goes on longer. It requires range, energy, and great shiftiness—not to mention peripheral vision. The more directions one can see in, the better it goes. The right touch is hard to get and easy to lose.
In my depression, it seemed to me I was losing it, right there in the St. Regis bar. I should have been in a phone booth, calling Page. Women love to be called from odd places. If I exerted myself, I might keep things in synch until I got home; but an unfamiliar fatalism was weighing me down, and I didn’t much want to exert myself. The season outside and the season inside were one, and that season was autumn. I had flown east and aged, otherwise I wouldn’t have felt so tranquil that morning, in a womanless room.
“Where’s the warmest jewelry store?” I asked the bartender when he finally showed up again.
“What you need ain’t jewels,” he said. “What you need is a coat. This ain’t California you’re sitting in. You don’t see no palm trees, do you?”
“No, but I see a wiseass,” I said.
“I knew you was a writer,” he said. “Writers can’t take jokes. You better run over to Bloomingdale’s and buy you a coat. Get one of them kinds with the fur collars.”
He then directed me to a jeweler’s in the hotel. The wind had deposited me more or less where I needed to be. A short Italian who moved like a leopard showed me some jewels. He slipped noiselessly from case to case. There had always been a leopard or two around the set of the jungle serials I worked on, but I hadn’t thought of one in years. The carpet in the jeweler’s was so deep that anyone would have moved like a leopard, with it underfoot. Even so, the man was liquid and sure. Brilliants hung from his deft paws, and he scattered them like entrails on a black velvet cloth.
I chose a sapphire, dark as blood, a pendant on a gold chain. It took half my savings, but then I was tired of saving my savings. I had never meant to save them, particularly—they had just accumulated faster than I could spend them. One of the things I almost never spent them on was presents for women. The women I kept company with had usually received so many presents that they had forgotten that there is a difference between presents and love. I reminded them of the difference. I made myself the present. It took them by surprise, and most of them were delighted to have a man for a while, instead of just more presents. They could always go back to getting presents, once they were through with me.
The leopard man looked at my check a long time before he let me take the sapphire. The check was for $4000, so I couldn’t blame him. He took the check with him to another room, for several minutes. Probably he was examining it under microscopes, or running it through chemical tests. Fortunately I had so many forms of identification that I would be no trouble to track, if such were necessary. He and other leopard men could creep through the Hollywood hills in Fiats and swarm over me in my hut.
That was more or less what leopard men had done in the jungle flicks, when someone made off with a jewel or a beautiful princess. I once had a neighbor named Max Maryland, a professional extra, who had a particular fondness for leopard-man roles. He used to hang around Columbia and Republic all the time, hoping to get to put on some claws and creep through the jungle. He could have made more money at Fox, carrying spears, but he preferred claws to spears. Once he even got to play a Crocodile Man, in some serial or other, and it was the high point of his life. It would have made some people wonder about his sex life, but not me. I knew perfectly well he didn’t have one. His wife Belinda ran an insurance office over on Highland—it was a lot more profitable than being an extra. Since Belinda was supporting Max’s fantasies, she considered that she had a right to her own, and her own
ran heavily to rodeo cowboys. She spent her weekends roving around the Valley, looking for rodeos, and Max spent his drinking in low dives, sometimes with me. The end of it was that Max got too drunk one week night, went to sleep in the street, near a curve, and was run over by a school bus, early the next morning. It made Belinda pretty sad; despite her need for rodeo hands she really loved old Max.
That was in the early ’50s. I comforted Belinda as best I could by pointing out that Max wasn’t really happy at his work any more, what with the death of the serials and the decline of jungle pictures. There were no longer any paws to don, or even many spears to carry. That and other things broke Max’s heart. The last I heard of Belinda, she was living in Oregon with a stock contractor.
I hate it when people take too long to okay my checks—it makes a break in the dike of activity, through which all the wrong memories are apt to flood. I had had a big soft spot for old Max Maryland. He was one of the sweet innocents of Hollywood. At one time there were so many of them that no one could have kept count: people who weren’t meant to grow up and live in marriages, or work at jobs. I guess they had come to Hollywood because pictures had seemed to them the answer to their need, which was to make a life of the games of childhood. Unfortunately, most of them weren’t able to stay true to their obsessions. They embarked on sloppy attempts at normalcy, and only a few of them—those with the madness of monks—refused to be teased by reality, or love, or anything else.
Old Max was not one of those. He couldn’t act and he couldn’t grow up, but he lacked the madness of monks. He was just a big kid from East St. Louis, who liked to play jungle.
The leopard man was unable to find anything wrong with my check, so he was forced to let me have the sapphire. He put it in a black felt box and handed it over, suddenly languid with disinterest.
I hurried right up the windy avenue and put the sapphire in the hotel safe. Then I went up and had a club sandwich in our suite. The potato chips that came with the club sandwich didn’t seem to me to have quite the freshness and spring of the potato chips in the major L.A. hotels, but then probably potato chips are not such an important part of life in the East. In the East there were autumn leaves to crunch, something the major hotels of L.A. have never so much as seen.
When I finished my sandwich it was nearly time to go to Jill’s press conference, so I went to the closet and stared at my wardrobe for a bit, wondering if I ought to change. The bartender had made me acutely conscious of being from California, and I suspected that my attire had given me away. Unfortunately, the closet held nothing cheering—everything I owned, or at least everything I had brought, seemed to have checks in it. Travel suddenly gave me a new perspective on my wardrobe: it was checked. I didn’t seem to own anything in solid colors. Here I was on the one day in the last several years when I needed to dress soberly, and I had nothing but silly clothes. They hadn’t looked silly in Los Angeles, but in New York I could hardly bear to contemplate them, even as they hung in a closet.
After a time I decided that the best way to handle the matter would be to put on my overcoat. Fortunately some fleeting memory of cold weather had prompted me to pack it. It was a solid color at least, namely green. I had had it for about thirty-five years, a relic of a week in Chicago when I was briefly involved with an ill-fated attempt to film Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The project went nowhere, because the director, a little Britisher named Morris Seton, developed a paranoid fear of being locked in a meat freezer. The jolly Poles who worked in the slaughterhouse we were using as a set were full of stories about frozen people, and Morris heard one too many. As a result he decided to change the setting and shoot the picture on the lake front, which upset Upton Sinclair so much that he threatened lawsuits. In those days projects were abandoned with abandon, more or less—I barely had time to buy an overcoat before I was back on the train to L.A.
The overcoat had never been worn, so it looked almost as good as it had the day I carried it out of Marshall Field’s. I put it on and brushed what remained of my gray locks, most of which were gathered in fuzzy tufts over my ears and on the back of my neck. I decided the overcoat made me look a little bit like a Central European director, so many of whom are even now ending their days in little houses off Melrose Avenue or Sepulveda Boulevard. The overcoat bolstered my confidence a bit, but I still took my time getting across to the Plaza, making sure I went with the lights. I had my own days to think about, and I didn’t want them to end on Fifth Avenue.
8
DESPITE MY IMPERSONATION OF A CENTRAL EUROPEAN director, no one at the Plaza was anxious to rush me up to the press conference. I asked several bellboys where it might be and they curtly referred me to the bulletin board. Ten minutes of aimless wandering failed to bring me to the bulletin board, and when I asked where that was, I was more or less brushed aside. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t spotted Abe Mondschiem’s gofer buying some Lifesavers. He was a mousy little wretch named Folsom, but I was glad to see him. If dandruff were considered desirable in our culture, Folsom could have made millions doing commercials. He even had dandruff in his cuffs.
“Hi, Folsom,” I said. “Has the press conference started yet?”
“Mr. Mondschiem sent me down to get Lifesavers,” Folsom replied. He took life one thing at a time. Dandruff was his only indulgence.
“Good, I’ll follow you,” I said.
Folsom made it clear that I was irrelevant to his mission by hastening up some stairs. I didn’t take it personally. A gofer’s job hangs by a thread. If Abe didn’t get the Lifesavers quick, Folsom would probably have to walk back to California. Abe Mondschiem was a Head of Production, which meant that waiting was unthinkable. To think Lifesavers was to have Lifesavers appear. If they didn’t, Folsom would disappear. Abe’s whims had the weight of moral imperatives, at least to those who served him. Folsom was wise not to linger.
I got to the room just as Abe was making his opening remarks. He was a big boy, nicely dressed in a dark blue suit and a white shirt, with amber cufflinks, a more subdued touch than I would have expected of Abe, considering his fondness for Las Vegas. Jill sat at his left, Pete Sweet and Anna Lyle on his right. Marta stood in one corner. Pete looked flushed, Anna softly distracted, and Jill nervous but poised.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Abe said, “here we are and we just hope you love the picture as much as we do. We’re very very proud of these people. Very very proud. We’ve arranged this little get-together so you can ask them any questions you might have.”
He sat down and took his dark glasses out of his pocket, but he didn’t put them on. I think he felt better just having them in his hand.
The speech had been delivered to a roomful of people in trench coats. Most of the trench coats were worn by men who looked like they might be middle-aged professors in small state teacher’s colleges. Some stood and some sat, but all had little oblong reporters’ notebooks. They were a poorly barbered lot—no doubt the rush of their profession left them little time for tending to their hair. Most of them looked like they had combed their hair at the beginning of the week—since it was Thursday, the results were beginning to fray. The women among them just looked grateful to be off their feet.
A tall man with an intense sweaty face rose to his feet, looking around the room to see if anyone had been quicker. Several people smiled fatigued smiles at the sight of him still so eager.
“I have a question for Miss Peel,” he said. “Miss Peel, in the press sheet it refers to Womanly Ways as your directorial debut. That leaves me wondering about Chili-Dog. Didn’t you actually do the major part of the direction on that picture?”
Jill blushed. I don’t think she had expected that to be the first question. She looked quite sweet. Chili-Dog was a 25-minute home movie she and some of her chums at U.C.L.A. had made about Pink’s, the world-famous hotdog stand at Melrose and La Brea.
“Well,” Jill said, “I don’t think Chili-Dog was really directed. It was just sort of a class pro
ject. I held the camera a lot, too.”
The man’s face became so sweaty that he was forced to mop it.
“Miss Peel, Miss Peel, how can you say that?” he said. “Those of us who maintain a commitment to documentary revere Chili-Dog. It was acute! It was biting!”
A number of people nodded, looking intently at Jill. It was obvious that they all maintained a commitment to documentary—cheaper than maintaining a mistress or a lover, I suppose.
A man in the front row chuckled sardonically. He had kinky hair and he was reading a book even as he chuckled. “Harris is being simpleminded again,” he said. “He thinks that because people were biting things in the film—namely chili-dogs—that the film itself was biting.”
“Pardon me, but it was my question, my question,” Harris said.
“I thought the lady answered it, Harris,” a third man said. He was portly, not unlike myself, and his shirt had come unbuttoned across his belly, exposing an undershirt.
A very young man in the middle of the crowd became agitated. “I thought the panel was supposed to talk,” he said, standing up. “I want to hear the panel, not you fucking reviewers.”
A dumpy little woman in the front row looked at Jill with an auntielike smile.
“Miss Peel,” she said, “is it true that you plan to insist on an all-woman crew for your next picture?”
“I don’t think so, no,” Jill said. “I have no definite plans for a next picture. It would be premature to start choosing a crew.”
“But don’t you consider that you have a duty to your sisters in the industry?” the little woman said. “How long are they to suffer?”
Somebody's Darling Page 7
