The agitated young man was on his feet again, even more agitated. “What a crock this is!” he said. “How does she know how long they are to suffer?”
“I was just trying to elicit her views on feminism,” the lady said, somewhat taken aback.
“Well, I’ve got a question for Miss Lyle,” the young man said. He hesitated a moment, as if he suspected he might be arrested before he could get the question out of his mouth. His fears were totally ungrounded. The crowd paid him practically no attention. They were either reading the press sheets or staring fixedly at panelists.
“Uh, Miss Lyle, what was your favorite scene in the movie?” the young man asked quietly.
Anna looked dreamily around the room. “Oh, when I put on the wig and talked to the salesman,” she said. “Just before I run over Pete.”
Jill and Pete both looked uncomfortable. Anna had been away, doing television work in Toronto, and didn’t know that the scene she referred to had been drastically cut, mostly because she had overacted so badly.
No sooner had the young man sat down than a thin little man popped up. He wore the most rumpled trench coat of all, and he too was sweating. It was obvious to me that we could have used this whole gang on the crew of Igloo. They would have welcomed the cold.
“Miss Peel, one quick question,” he said. “Do you think it’s quite fair to choose a car salesman as a symbol of post-industrial man? Don’t you think you might have gone after bigger fish? After all, he doesn’t make the cars. The cars come from Detroit, ya know. I mean, to just put it very simply, what about the higher-ups? I mean, I saw the poor guy as a victim, I really did. All that pressure, my god!”
The sardonic man in the front row, still reading, said, “Sidney, you probably consider Attila the Hun the victim of Mongolian itch.”
The little rumpled man was outraged. “Pardon me, Victor, it’s all very well for you to sit there and read,” he said. “You’re a symptom, if you want to know the truth. A symptom.”
Then, having apparently forgotten that he had asked Jill a question, he sat down. The young man had already risen to his feet again, in outrage, but the fact that the little man had already plopped down took him aback. It was clear that the little man’s question had been its own answer, because he was hurriedly taking notes on it. Abashed, the young man sat down.
The reading man looked up briefly. He had a bemused, English-gentry manner, which contrasted a bit with his kinky hair. “Miss Peel,” he said, “are you conversant with the theories of Kracauer, Bazin, and Bela Balazcs?” He pronounced the last name in which I judged to be faultless Czech.
“No, I’m not,” Jill said. Abe Mondschiem abruptly put on his dark glasses.
“Well now, that won’t do, will it,” the man said, and went back to his reading.
Abe decided to throw a little weight around. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re neglecting our stars,” he said. “Our stars are here.”
Silence fell on the room. It lasted for about a minute. Pete Sweet began to get red in the face, I guess from embarrassment.
“I’m conversant with the theories of Kracauer, Bazin, and Bela Balazcs,” Anna said. She too pronounced the last name in faultless Czech, if that was what it was.
“Blow them out your ass,” the reader said, unperturbed. “I didn’t ask you.”
“All right, that’s outa line, that’s really out of line,” Abe said, getting to his feet.
The young man was on his feet again too. “Jesus, is this a hype!” he said. “Is this all I’m going to get to hear? I came all the way from the Village. I rode the subway!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I find this perplexing,” Abe said. He had begun to sweat. “We set up the screening, you saw the picture, and this is what you come up with in terms of questions? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m embarrassed.”
“I have a question for Mr. Sweet,” a new voice said. The new voice came from a young woman with long lank hair, who stood at the very back of the room. She had a long face, wore a trench coat like everyone else, and looked expressionless.
“My question is about the portrayal of sexuality on the screen,” the woman said, her eyes quite blank. “Would you perform a sex act before the camera, Mr. Sweet?”
“Oh, Athené, for god’s sake,” someone said.
“Well, I’ve been photographed biting an ear, if I remember right,” Pete said. “I guess that’s a sex act.”
“You bit mine once,” Anna said, smiling pleasantly.
“I do not think your answer funny,” the young woman said. “I didn’t mean foreplay, I meant the sex act. Sexual intercourse, in other words.
“I was not speaking of mere performance,” she added, in a noncommittal voice.
“Oh, his performances are never mere,” Anna said with a little laugh. Pete said nothing. I could tell that he was wishing he had gone to the races.
“We should all be glad we didn’t go to Radcliffe,” the reader said. He got up, slipped his book into his trench coat, and walked out.
“I am speaking of integrity,” the woman said. “Could you perform with integrity, if the script called for it?”
“More likely with nervousness, ma’am,” Pete said nervously.
Abe decided he had had enough. “This has been interesting,” he said, “but our time is about up. We have time for one more question for Miss Peel.”
To everyone’s dismay, Jaime Pratto stood up. He had been sitting over near a pillar, nursing his failure like it was the last drink before the bar closed. I hadn’t noticed him and neither had anyone else, but the minute he surfaced we all knew what we were in for. The Phantom of the Press Conference had suddenly swung down from the balcony, to hector those who had disfigured him.
“Miss Peel, do you consider yourself a sellout?” he asked, the archetypal New York director returning once again to challenge the philistines of Hollywood.
“No,” Jill said.
“Oh, you don’t consider yourself a sellout?” he asked, phrasing it another way. His skin was the color a bruise is, after the bruise has stopped being purple and become a sick yellow. Like the bruise, he had a greenish tinge, particularly around his bitter little mouth.
“No,” Jill said again. “I don’t, Mr. Pratto.”
“Oh,” he said. “You know me. I’m amazed. I wouldn’t think those cocksuckers you work for would talk about me much. If they had a decent bone in them, they’d be too ashamed, knowing what they did to my picture. But they do it to so many pictures they’ve probably forgotten mine by now.”
Abe was only a growing boy—he had not been programmed to take much abuse. He grabbed the mike like it was Jaime’s throat.
“We remember you, you little prick,” he yelled. “We remember you made the worst piece of crap ever released over our name.” Someone accidentally turned up the P.A. system, no doubt meaning to turn it off. His words deafened half of us.
Marta rushed on stage and grabbed Abe’s arm, but evidently more or less to anchor him, in case he started after Jaime.
“My grandfather nearly had a heart attack, right at the screening, when he seen how bad it was,” Abe spluttered.
“Your grandfather wouldn’t know art from a baloney sandwich,” Jaime said. “Neither would you, you fucking’ butcher. That was a lamb of a film and you butchered it. Nobody who wasn’t a sellout would sit on the same stage with you!”
“Aw yeah? Listen, we could buy you tomorrow!” Abe yelled, “only we ain’t going to because you can’t direct your ass going out a door.”
Just as he said it, Jaime went out the door, and by common consent the press conference was at an end. A crowd of trench coats immediately surged toward Jill. Folsom, miserable as ever, began gathering up unused press kits.
“I asked for security, just a little security, and I get that cocksucking’ little motherfucker,” Abe said, muddling his perversions. His round, oily face was so wet with sweat that he reminded me of a young hippo, rising from a tank. Marta was getting into her coat
—in her life, tirades were no big news.
“All right, we fire everybody,” Abe said, causing Folsom to drop several press kits.
“We can’t,” Marta said. “The security men work for the hotel.”
“So what?” Abe said. “They know us at this hotel. Believe me, they know us. Tell them it was not satisfactory, not fucking satisfactory at all. An’ how’d that kid get in? We don’t need no kids. Where was Canby? Where was Pauline Kael?”
“Miss Peel’s having lunch with Mr. Canby tomorrow,” Marta said. “Miss Kael we still don’t know about. Maybe Saturday.”
“We never should have brought this fucking picture,” Abe raved. “These fucking highbrow pictures always get you into shit like this. We should have brought Baby-Killer, if we had to come at all.”
“Oh, well, it don’t hurt to make a picture for the kooks now and then,” Marta said soothingly.
“Folsom, is the car here?” Abe asked. “You didn’t get no Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, like I told you, either. Is the car here?”
Folsom by this time was carrying so many press kits that he looked like a pack animal, and a desperate one at that—one that might dash over a cliff, load and all, the way pack animals sometimes did in trek movies. The desperation resulted from the fact that Folsom had been asked two questions but only had a one-question-at-a-time brain.
“They was out of Wint-O-Green,” Folsom said, meekly offering his neck to the axe.
“So, was that the only newsstand in the world?” Abe asked. “Did I tell you to refrain from setting your feet on the sidewalk or something? Instead of looking’ around—you know, being resourceful—you brought me these fucking’ cherry-flavoreds. I’d like to shove ’em right up Jaime Pratto’s ass. Give him a cherry suppository, how’s that?”
This notion amused him; a pleased light came into his eyes just before he put his sunglasses back on. Then, evidently, his eye fell on me. The sunglasses focused on me unwaveringly, like gun barrels in Western movies. Gun barrels never waver, and neither do Mondschiems.
“Don’t look so glum, Abe,” I said. “Press conferences don’t mean anything. You got a winner.”
“Are we speaking to him?” Abe said, turning to Marta. “Why should we be? He ain’t with us.”
“You may not remember it, young fellow, but I went to your first birthday party,” I said. “You were about three.”
“It don’t mean you ain’t a nobody,” he said. “It don’t mean we’re speaking to you.”
“You’re the nobody, you young puppy,” I said, in my best Sydney Greenstreet manner.
The notion that he was a nobody bounced off Abe like birdshot off a barrel. A sense of the arch of history and the puniness of man is not common among Heads of Production. My impudence did cause him to register mild surprise—the surprise a shark might feel at being attacked by a perch.
“Listen at this one,” he said to Marta, but vaguely. His mind, insofar as it could be called a mind, was already elsewhere.
Folsom, who had just left, reappeared, his face twisted into what I would have called a grimace. Evidently, though, it was a smile of triumph.
“Car’s ready, Mr. Abe,” he said. “So’s the elevator. I’m holding it for you.”
It was a bold effort at rehabilitation on Folsom’s part. Abe took it as a matter of course. “How about the Wint-O-Green?” he asked as they left.
I walked over to Pete Sweet, who was nervously lighting a cigarette.
“Well, famous at last,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, fuck,” Pete said. “I wish I’d gone to the track.
“I guess it beats television,” he added, with some melancholy. No one had ever quite fathomed the sorrow in Pete, but it was there. It slowed his walk and caused him to stare into space a lot; it also led him to gamble inexpertly. A sad, big man, he was irresistible to women, but he had a penchant for nondescript ladies, whom he quickly married and just as quickly divorced.
Anna came over and gave me a kiss. “Isn’t he cute when he’s moody?” she said, putting her arm around Pete. She looked flouncy and ready to rhumba, and Pete tucked her under his large arm, where she seemed right at home. The two of them had had an on-again off-again romance going back so many years that we had all lost count.
Jill was soberly and dutifully listening to the questions of two earnest students. Somehow they had managed to infiltrate the press conference, and they were pouring out long-pent-up needs: namely the need to talk to someone professional who would actually listen. Pete and Anna and I looked on as parents might, watching a favorite daughter. Anna was very maternal toward Jill, and Pete sort of gloomily paternal. He was convinced Jill had no judgment about men and would end up with the worst possible person. I agreed she had no judgment, but I was placing no bets on how she’d end up—much less with whom.
When the students finally left, Jill came over to us, looking a little blank. Pete tucked her under his other arm.
“Have you really read Bela Balazcs, or whoever he is?” she asked Anna.
Anna laughed. “I was just mimicking,” she said.
Outside, on a windy streetcorner, we split up, and Jill and I stood on the curb, watching a yellow river of taxicabs flow down Fifth Avenue.
“It’s not much like Malibu, is it?” she said, looking up at the great greenish towers of the hotels. Nearby, a pretzel vendor stoked his coals, and smoke billowed up. The smell of salty bread wafted past us. Up the sidewalks came the tribesmen of Manhattan, their breaths as smoky as the charcoal. Tribeswomen too, the young ones tall and elegant and serene, the old ones twisted and squat.
“I said that because it started on Malibu,” Jill said. “I wrote the first ten pages of the script sitting on the floor while Pete and Anna smoked pot. I didn’t realize this would be where it would end.”
Her hair was short, but the wind had still managed to whip it into a sexy disarray. Her cheeks were reddening, and she no longer looked blank. She looked vivid: a woman enjoying the fullness of the moment.
“No one sees the end in the beginning,” I said. “Not even me.”
“Shit,” she said, jabbing me with her elbow and tugging me off the curb. “I might have known you’d croak out a pronouncement before I could even get you across the street.”
The river of taxis had become a yellow log jam. In high good spirits, we picked our way across it.
9
JILL WAS COMBING HER HAIR WHEN I CASUALLY LAID THE jewel-case on her dressing table. We were to leave in five minutes, which is how I’d planned it. “Uh-oh,” she said. She was wearing a white dress that only covered one shoulder, an unusually daring exposure for her.
When she saw the sapphire, with its subdued lights, she picked it up and held it against her bosom. She sighed and looked at me gratefully. “We’ll speak of this later,” she said, and put the necklace on.
“You should have been a mâitre d’,” Marta said when she saw me in my tux. I decided she was warming toward me a little. The ride to Lincoln Center was made in total silence. Jill and I, who had talked in all manner of situations, found that in limousines we had nothing at all to say to one another.
As we were walking into Lincoln Center, toward a line of photographers, Marta made a very professional move. She took my arm suddenly, linking it with hers, and bore me slightly to the left. Abe, in a violet tuxedo, materialized out of nowhere and took Jill’s arm. Although mildly surprised to find myself arm in arm with Marta, I was not irked. Publicity is publicity. Marta and I circled the gauntlet of photographers and made our way unnoticed into the great red-carpeted entrance hall.
The moment we were inside the building Marta released my arm. She spotted Pauline Kael far across the hall and made for her like an arrow released from a bow. At once I spotted Mayor Lindsay, and Andy Warhol, ghostlike near the draperies. Like many of my kind, my appetite for the sight of famous people has never abated. All I like to do is look at them, though. Talking to them usually aborts the fantasy.
&
nbsp; A feast of famous people lay before me, so I sort of nibbled my way around the edges of the table, secure in my anonymity. Even the few of them who knew me wouldn’t think it was me, if they saw me so far from my customary haunts. If I had bothered to bring myself to their attention, it would have registered as a minor shock, like a pothole in the highway—nothing more.
Jilly Legendre was standing near the banisters. He resembled the Goodyear Blimp, painted black and come to earth. Bo Brimmer stood on the steps leading up to the balcony—Bo had a genius for finding steps to stand on. Since it took steps to make him appear to be a normal-sized human, no one could dislodge him once he found some. He was wearing a bow tie that dwarfed his head, a rare sartorial gaffe. Both he and Jilly were listening to a little fellow who could only be Jean Joris-Mallet, the renowned French documentarian. Joris-Mallet had just emerged from the rain forest with another of his renowned documentaries. Both Bo and Jilly wore the glazed looks of men who were enduring a boring monologue by someone too prominent to be ignored. Joris-Mallet wore a suede tuxedo, more Hollywood than Hollywood.
“Ah don’t know about the Seychelles,” Bo said with a touch of gloom, causing no break in the stream of French.
“Je ne connais pas,” Jilly echoed, passing a finger back and forth across his mustache as if he were trying to rub it off.
I could tell they both wished Monsieur Joris-Mallet had had the ill fortune to be eaten by an anaconda. Before they could proceed with the conversation, Bo and Joris-Mallet were crushed against the banister by the sudden arrival of enough Italians to fill a Fellini movie. At their center, radiant, one golden breast almost pushed out of its cup by the crush, was Antonella Pisa, the star of the Italian entry in the Festival. She was something. Even Bo, oblivious as he was to the beauty of everyone but Jacqueline Bisset, could not restrain himself. He hopped boldly into the stream of Italians, was carried up a few steps, and made it to Antonella, who stooped, serenely, so he could kiss her. Joris-Mallet, who clearly thought she was a pig, abandoned Jilly without another word and trotted down the steps. He darted off in the general direction of the always sympathetic Leon O’Reilly, who was twirling his Phi Beta Kappa key and talking to a tall woman who, from a distance, I took to be Mrs. Kissinger. Later in the evening I discovered she was Alexandra Schlesinger, wife of Leon’s old professor.
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