Jilly, prevented by his bulk from getting anywhere near La Pisa, blew her a kiss. She favored him with a shrug of resignation and was swept away, even as the sparks fly upward.
I secured another drink and stood around with it, feeling like Dr. Brydon, the lone survivor of the British retreat from Kabul. There is a famous picture—called “Remnant of an Army”—which all students of the Afghan campaign know well. It shows Dr. Brydon—the last of 15,000—straggling into Jalalabad on his exhausted horse, to inform the garrison that 14,999 of his colleagues lay dead in the Afghan passes.
It was looking around the glittering crowd in the entranceway to Lincoln Center that made me feel like Dr. Brydon. I saw so many new faces that I began to miss all the old faces: the ones that weren’t there, never had been, and never would be. No artist was likely to paint my picture, standing with my drink, on the rich red carpet, but I was the last of 15,000 nonetheless—maybe even the last of 16,000. My companions had been slaughtered in passes, too—the passes of Benedict Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Topanga Canyon, and all the other canyons. They had not fallen to Afghan hordes exactly, but they had all fallen, one way or another. One couldn’t even blame Goldwyn or Mondschiem or Harry Cohn or any of the other moguls—not really. We had been our own Afghan hordes, cutting ourselves down ruthlessly out of childish disappointment at our own inadequacies and the stubborn intractability of life. It was just not like the movies—life, I mean: not Gary Cooper’s grin, not Paulette Goddard, not dancing in the rain. The direction was poor, the staging hasty, and there was no one competent in the editing room. Life was like pictures only in that it hardly ever managed to be as exciting as its previews.
I guess what I have never been sure about is whether other places engender the same intensities of hope as Hollywood. Do people in Ogallala and Far Rockaway keep on expecting the golden moment—or, perhaps, living so far from all forethought of stardom, do they accommodate themselves more happily to the humdrum days?
That one I couldn’t answer, but I had begun to feel, looking about me at all the glamour, that it had been a mistake to come. I was a working man, from a working man’s guild. What had I to do with all this fanciness? The camaraderie of crews had made pictures worth it, if they had been worth it: all that yakking, those tales of girl friends and wives, the fuck-ups, the loneliness of locations, the pettiness of the petty and the pettiness of the great. I was lonely for all those light-foot lads and rose-lipped girls—sunk in sentiment, a wobbly old Wobbly. Absurd, the turnings of the heart, not to mention the ironies of station: for crews are the most star-struck people of all; that’s why they’re crews. And I had never been a real Wobbly, or black-listed, or even very poor: yet the sight of all those monkey suits and trailing gowns caused me to pulse with resentment. Frippery, pretense, indulgence, overconspicuous overconsumption: that too was what Hollywood was all about, only in a workaday life one tends to forget it. Eight hours’ work, Jell-O in the commissary, and an occasional trip to Vegas do not prepare one for a film festival. I had the mad urge to run up the stairs singing the Internationale.
Fortunately, while on the third drink, my mood passed. I forgot the 15,000, of which I was probably the last. It occurred to me that probably nobody in the hall would recognize the Internationale, except possibly young Bertolucci, who had shambled in with Shirley MacLaine and a crowd of people with trench coats over their tuxes—reporters, no doubt.
I waved at Jill as she was going up the stairs, and she waved back. Marta, across the room, motioned for me to come with her. Before I could move, the whole place was brought to a halt by the entrance of Lulu Dickey, all six three of her, dressed, essentially, in some gauze and a large ruby.
The ruby was in her navel, of course. If the ruby was intended to draw one’s eye away from her somewhat inadequate bosom, it succeeded brilliantly. It easily overshadowed her bosom, and everything else she had except her wild, kinky hair and peregrine features.
Her escort for the evening was none other than Mr. Swan Bunting, Sherry Solaré’s boyfriend and, as the papers always said, “a celebrity in his own right.” Swan wore a denim tux, an unusual concession on his part. As Sherry’s lover he was, in effect, the Prince of filmland, and he could have come in wearing sandals and a beach towel and no one would have said him nay. His shoulder-length black hair was nicely combed, no doubt by Sherry’s hairdresser, and he and Lulu moved right on up the staircase, as if they were just coming in from walking the dog. They gave no more than an offhand nod to the people lining the way.
Swan’s disdain was Olympian—though to say so is to malign the Greeks. The expression “could have cared less” might have been coined for him. For a while, before Sherry seduced him, his name had been Boggs-Bunting—Dr. Boggs-Bunting, in fact. He was the very successful practitioner of a sex therapy that would have caught on only in California. He called it “psychic gynecology,” but it was really only a cheap spin-off of the talk-to-your-plants movement. In this case, what you talked to was your privities. The idea was worthy of Diderot, which is probably where Swan got it: he had passed through the Sorbonne on his way to becoming a punk.
In good old whacked-out California talking to cocks and cunts seemed like a spacy thing to do, and Swan got rich enough instructing lonely ladies and not-quite-gay young men in how to reassure themselves to be able to start a line of health-food vaginal products: douches in such basic scents as wheat germ, wild rice, and barley. For a while he even had a talk show, for which he dressed in a wheat-colored shirt and corduroys and explained psychic gynecology to the masses of Westwood, Santa Monica, and Bel Air.
Sherry Solaré broke up with somebody at about that time. Feeling down and out, she hired Swan at a fabulous fee to come and teach her to talk to her pussy. Everyone assumed that Swan was basically gay, but evidently Sherry’s pussy did some fast talking. In no time at all he was established at the absolute pinnacle, as the lover of the only love goddess left. To celebrate, he took the confident step of dropping the Boggs from his name. He gave up his TV show, sold his health douche company, and was soon devoting himself full-time to Sherry. Of course, full-time devotion was the only kind Sherry tolerated. In her view, she alone was keeping superstardom alive, and her designated consort had numerous, maybe even onerous, responsibilities.
The fact that Sherry had not bothered to come to the opening of the Festival surprised no one, since an account of her latest illness, a raging nose-cold, had been carried on the front page of the evening Post. As everyone knew (since The Times and the Post had both informed them), Sherry was only pausing in New York en route to London, where she was to attend an auction of Victorian hat-pin holders.
Regularly, when Sotheby’s Belgravia held its annual auction of these increasingly rare objects, Sherry flew over and bought wildly. She did not, however, hold undisputed sway among collectors of Victorian hat-pin holders—a source of great bitterness to her. An aged Swiss collector, as rich as she was, hotly contested her bid for dominance, and in fact only last year had broken her resolution and taken the prize of the auction, a rose-tinted hat-pin holder belonging to Lord Curzon’s wife. The price had been a staggering £18,000. That auction had almost been the ruin of Swan Bunting. Unable, temporarily, to forget his humble origins in Carne-on-Sea, Swan had persuaded her she didn’t really need Lord Curzon’s wife’s hat-pin holder. Sherry, whose own origins were Teaneck, New Jersey, momentarily forgot that she could buy the world, and the aged Swiss collector carried off the prize.
It had been a rare and nearly intolerable defeat, and Sherry meant to see that it didn’t happen again. She was holed up in a wing of the Carlyle, studying the catalogue and taking saunas.
Swan and Lulu paused on their way upstairs only long enough for Lulu to bend double and kiss Bo Brimmer. Bo might be little, but he had teeth in his head, and even Swan was politic enough to smile at him. Then the whole crowd of them vanished through the balcony door, leaving me, Marta, and a few straggling socialites to make our way to the bleachers, as it w
ere.
“What’s the delay, never seen a movie star before?” Marta asked.
Our seats were low and outside, so far to the right in fact that I could see only a small corner of the screen. That was fine with me. I had seen the movie and only wanted to watch the crowd, but it annoyed Marta.
“Thirty years, and this is where I’m sitting?” she said. “Mr. Mond’s gonna hear about this.”
“With his big heart, he’ll probably buy you the theater,” I said.
The people nearby looked at us strangely—responding, I guess, to foreign tones of voice. There was not a movie person in sight. We had ended up with two of the half-dozen worst seats in the house—seats that no one with the slightest real status would have accepted. It followed that the people around us hadn’t the slightest real status. They looked good, though, from what I could see of them. It was like sitting in on a class reunion at Harvard or Princeton or Yale. The men all looked like they should have been holding martinis with olives in them. The women should have been having Dubonnet. Every woman in sight could have been Page’s mother—it was a sobering thought, but in all likelihood Page’s mother was somewhere in sight.
While Marta savored her own bile, I watched the people around us, these Easterners who hadn’t left home, to see if they were any different from their look-alikes who had left home. Those—the Easterners of the West—I was long familiar with, from visits to San Marino and Hillsboro, Atherton and Marin County. Fortunately they hadn’t turned off the lights in the theater yet—it is hard to make these distinctions in a dark theater—and I was able to conclude that the Eastern Easterners had been cut with a somewhat finer chisel. Western Easterners, once out of reach of the winds of Cape Cod or the rocky shores of Maine, tend to puff up, not much, but just noticeably, as people will who have lost their purity. The skin over their cheekbones becomes a shade less taut, the lines around the men’s mouths not quite so deep and aristocratic. It was sort of like the difference between a carbon and an original. The words are the same, but the effect of the original is a little crisper.
Of course, it was the same tribe, east or west, but it was nice to get a look at the bucks and squaws who held the original hunting grounds. It was clear from the set of their mouths that they meant to hold them forever, and perhaps they would, unless a Jacobin-Zionist army arose in the suburbs and carried them kicking and shrieking to the guillotines. The thought of all those waxen ladies and granitic gentlemen, kicking and shrieking in the tumbrils of Jews, being pelted with bagels and patties of cream cheese, amused me so that I nodded blissfully off in the early moments of the film and didn’t awaken until there was a clatter of applause. The clatter became nearer a frenzy, at least as much of a frenzy as such an audience could manage, and I looked up and saw the spotlight shining on Jill, in the front row of the balcony.
All the elegant people turned, craning their necks inelegantly, to see her. I felt apprehensions of loss. I was the father whose daughter had just married a boy he couldn’t stand; the lover who finally has to admit his woman is going to find another; the friend who had begun to miss his friend even before the friend has gone away.
“They liked it, nobody whispered,” Marta said. “Usually you get whispers from this kind of crowd.”
Marta and I parted company—for good, we both hoped—and I stumbled into the foyer, feeling lost as a baby. Jill was up there with all the celebs, as they are now called. I wanted to take her right home and put her back in her bungalow and tell her to get back to her drawing.
Before I could even go to the men’s room Leon O’Reilly tugged at my arm.
“This picture will make fifteen to eighteen million,” he said. He had evidently arrived at that calculation while in the men’s room toward which I had been headed. I was the first person he saw when he emerged, so he laid it on me. One thing about Leon, he was no snob. He wasn’t normal enough to be a snob. He was twirling his Phi Beta Kappa key, and the old, mad light was in his eyes.
“Yeah, but what if it ruins her?” I asked.
Leon could not quite grasp the concept of ruin. Having—evidently—emotion only for his profession, he couldn’t understand its more prosaic manifestations. He was convinced, for example, that Juney tripped and fell to her death because she insisted on wearing high heels. Tell him Juney killed herself because he married a woman who later left him, and his bullet-proof psyche would deflect the comment and cause it to ricochet back and pierce whoever uttered it.
“Fifteen-eighteen million won’t ruin her,” he said. “All she needs to do now is make a Western.”
“A Western?”
“Certainly—the first Western to be directed by a woman,” he said. “All the men in America will be outraged, as well they might. A woman will be invading the last domain of the male. Or next to last—penultimate.”
“What’s the very last?” I asked.
“Gas stations,” Leon said, with no hesitation whatever. “Gas stations are the ultimate domain of the male, strictly speaking.”
Leon’s posture was perfect, his pinstripes exactly vertical. He was the most perfectly preserved Western Easterner I’d ever seen. Preston Sibley III, husband of Page—he too was undoubtedly somewhere in the lobby—was a slouch when compared to Leon.
“Outrage is excellent for box-office,” Leon said.
“What could she make a Western about? Invent me a plot.”
“Why should I?” Leon said. “This is a cutthroat profession. You’ll just sell it to Warners. I’ll invent it tomorrow and sell it to them myself.”
“The real truth is that you don’t have a plot,” I said, to goad him.
“Oh, the plot is easy,” Leon said, forgetting that I was going to sell it to Warners. “It’s about a gang of frontier housewives. They are fed up with domesticity and the slavery of the kitchen. Male chauvinism disgusts them. Stealthily, they organize. No one suspects them. By day they sew and cook and scrub, and by night they rob stagecoaches. Sometimes trains. They invent the device of the silk stocking over the head. For a while no one even knows they’re women.”
“Beautiful,” I muttered. The mad light was dancing in Leon’s eyes. Juney would have loved it.
“Beautiful,” Leon echoed. “Of course some of them are beautiful, though some of them must be plain. Their leader is Katharine Hepburn, wife of the revered local sheriff, who is of course John Wayne.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Then one of the women tears her shirt during an escape and some breasts pop out,” Leon went on. “So they know they’re women. This sets the stage for the climax, which is that John Wayne discovers a silk stocking in his front yard one night after a raid. His wife, Kate Hepburn, has dropped it coming home. Naturally he puts two and two together.”
“Can’t she allay his suspicions, for a while?” I asked. “Can’t she fuck him or something?”
“Are you serious?” Leon asked. “They’re much too old for that. They are in their twilight years.”
“You haven’t kept up with the latest research,” I said. “Sex sometimes happens even in the twilight years.”
“Not in this picture,” Leon said. “This is a family picture—we’ll go for PG. As the plot thickens, more and more men get suspicious. The women realize this. They decide to pull off one last big job. The men find out. A posse is formed, consisting of the husbands of the gang. The posse ambushes the gang. There is a big chase. The men chase the women.”
“Terrific suspense,” I said.
“There’s not much more,” Leon said. “The men have better horses, obviously. All the women get caught. It’s a trauma for the possemen. What do they do, hang their wives? It’s worst of all for John Wayne, since his wife is the ringleader. There’s a bounty on her head. He’s torn between love and duty, as you can well appreciate.”
“I hope love wins,” I said.
“You must be atypical,” Leon said mildly. “Obviously he has to do his duty, otherwise Kate Hepburn won’t respect him.”
>
“Then how do the women get off?”
“They make an impassioned plea,” Leon said. “They point out about the drudgery of their lives, and the judge is moved. I think they get suspended sentences.”
“But what about justice?” I said. “These women committed crimes. Somebody ought to go to the slammer for a year or two, at least.”
“The writers can work that out,” Leon said. “We’ll call it The Silk-Stocking Gang.”
I was almost respectful. Leon had become a real producer, in spite of everything. For an off-the-cuff plot, his was not bad. It was probably one of the two or three best plots going around the room.
“Allow me to make a small contribution,” I said. “You have no heavy. Get Lee Marvin for the heavy. Make him a bounty hunter. He finds out about the women first. Probably one of them is Catherine Deneuve, and he rapes her.”
“Lee Marvin’s not a bad idea, but what would Catherine Deneuve be doing in Kansas?”
“I didn’t know we were in Kansas,” I said. “I assumed we were in the Dakotas, or Montana, maybe.”
“Even so,” Leon said.
“Very simple,” I said. “She’s in love with the Marquis de Mores, a French nobleman, but he’s tied up fighting the beef lobby. He has no time for love. She is forced to teach school. Cowboys come by and make passes at her.”
“Could Steve McQueen come by and make a pass at her?” he asked.
“McQueen, whoever,” I said. “The rest of the plot is simple. Lee Marvin shoots down a few ladies, but he only wings Katharine Hepburn. John Wayne’s horse has fallen on him, so he can’t shoot, but fortunately Jimmy Stewart, the local druggist, gets Marvin with a ten-gauge shotgun.”
Somebody's Darling Page 9
