Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  “Hal Roach,” he says, “Ninety-seven.”

  “Stanley Elkin,” I tell him, “Fifty-eight.”

  Two immense screens flank the front of the Beverly Hilton’s big ballroom. There are gifts at each place setting, medallions of the Reagans, bronzed bas-reliefs, peculiarly flattering or unflattering, aging them or taking years off, changing in accord with the angle at which you hold them, like the little holograph on a Visa card.

  Already I’ve grown accustomed to my gifted, chipped-in-for luxury, miffed that our table (at $25,000 per), a charity table, miles below the salt, almost closer to the kitchen than the ballroom, is so oblique to the action. Though, oddly, so uppity I’ve become, it’s exactly the table I’d have put me at if I were in charge of the seating arrangements. Whoever is has perfect social pitch. (At our table is a woman who was on the organizing committee for Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Ball, her husband, an undersecretary of the Treasury in the days of Donald Regan; a couple from Santa Barbara. When we introduce ourselves, the lady from Santa Barbara stunningly inquires, “Do you teach at Washington University?” “Why yes,” I reply, all smiles. “Then you must know Howard Nemerov,” she says. “He was my professor at Bennington.” “Uh-huh.” “Darling,” she tells her husband, “this is Stanley Elkin. He teaches at the same university as Howard Nemerov.” “You’re kidding.” Something like this will happen to me often out here. But the real point is this sort of flat-out, bungled schmeikling. In Berkeley, at the Saul Zaentz studio, a young man, a writer/director getting his first film ready for a screening for distributors in Utah, has hired the hall so technicians may do the complicated transference of sound from 16mm to 35mm. When he hears my name, and that I’m from California magazine, he’s all over me. I have witnesses. “You’re him? You’re Stanley Elkin?” “Why, yes,” I modest. “Gee,” he says, do you know what a pleasure this is for me? Have you any idea? Do you know who this is?” he asks his producer. Handshakes all ’round, then back to the tedious process of looping. Fun’s fun, and Emily, my schlepper in northern California, and I watch for a while without much understanding what’s going on, but we do have another appointment. I convey this to the young man, who’s downright disappointed to hear it. But resigned. “Say,” he says when I get up, “before you go, can you tell me the names of some of the books you’ve written?”) Only if we’re to see the entertainment—Sinatra’s down on the program for some songs—we shall have to watch it—I can just see the band if I put my head in my plate and look past the Republicans when they lean into one another to catch something they’ve missed in the din—on the huge screens. It’s a huge screen I’m watching—people are still filing in—when it starts to register images of big shots I’ve seen in the lobby. Shelley Duvall, Mary Martin, Zsa Zsa, Merv Griffin, the Collins girls (Jackie and Joan), Betsy Bloomingdale, Charles Bronson, Cesar Romero, Gary Coleman. Where are they now? Nowhere near my table! (I’m like someone bumped up to first class in an airplane. How you gonna keep ’em down in coach after they’ve seen Paree?) The table behind ours, which is next to the kitchen, the Inaugural Ball lady informs, is occupied by Secret Service.

  “Really?”

  “Well, sure,” she says. “To block the exits if, you know.”

  “Look,” Andy nudges. “Up there on the screen.”

  It’s me, big as life, bigger, eight-foot-nine, -ten; cool as I could have hoped, cooler, a dignified gimp in a tux, so devoid of expression my face is absolutely cruel, me, the sweetheart of Sigma Chi. And it’s on my image, held up there so long it could be the fix is in, like, oh, the surprise birthday cake you’ve had baked for your kid and served up in the restaurant and the waiters all sing “Happy Birthday,” that the screens finally go to black, the lights come down, and a color guard brings the flag by. They Hail to the Chief, who I’m sure is saluting, or would be sure if I could actually see him.

  This will give you some idea. It’s the first sentence from the “Certificate of Authenticity” in the jewelry box with our medallions:

  “They came like the fresh breath of a California wind at a time our nation needed them most.”

  It’s the rhetoric of myth, the rhetoric of epic. It’s the language of coming attraction. It’s the copy in block, three-dimensional lettering, on a poster in a glass case outside a movie.

  The buzz in the room is that Sinatra has canceled, that he sulks in Palm Springs. He’s mad, the buzz is, at the president, or the Republican Party, possibly at the republic itself. The rumors are received, digested, grudgingly accepted by the tribe, but it’s too bad. I’m just a guest here, it ain’t my place, but seeing Sinatra in his native element would have been a feather in this American in California’s cap. (Finally, it turns out, more things won’t happen to me in California than will. Danielle Steel won’t give a party in San Francisco, and I won’t be invited to it; Ann Getty won’t be having me over; George Lucas won’t come through in time with an invitation to Skywalker Ranch. I will, on my own hook, skip a wine tasting at Yosemite. There’s to be a gala in honor of renaming Fred Hayman’s of Giorgio’s store, the debut of his new fragrance. The boys and girls from Chasen’s, La Scala, Jimmy’s, the Bistro and the Bistro Garden, Spago, and the Grill are down on the invitation as “Dinner Present[ers].” It’s not to my taste. I will decline. Likewise, I won’t be signing up at the Center for the Investigation & Training of Intuition’s seminar on Enneagram Studies.) So I sit back to enjoy the show on those humongous screens.

  It is a show. I do enjoy it, some of it. Merv Griffin’s anecdote about the first time he was invited to the White House. How can anyone, I’m trying to figure, the owner of this very hotel, and something, I hear, of a billionaire, still pack such boyish, open-eyed astonishment and prodigious, drawn-breath wonder, all those magical pinch-mes-I’m dreamings? Except for Don Rickles’s predictable, if remarkably fitting, routine (because suddenly it ain’t the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton anymore; it’s not even this century; we’re all of us at, oh, court, say, in Shakespearean tragedy, and Reagan isn’t just the president, he’s the king, and Rickles isn’t a comic, he’s his court jester, and it’s very scary, really, and I’m wondering if perhaps there shouldn’t be a Constitutional amendment somewhere about the separation of State and Show Biz—no more commercially sponsored Bob Hope Christmas specials from the decks of aircraft carriers, no more Army and Navy troubadours; more bread, fewer circuses), it’s a good show, I’m enjoying myself, but the thought recurs even during the program’s most fantastic, dazzling moment.

  Because Sinatra’s a no-show—nursing a severe cold, protecting his voice for a long projected tour, and saddened, according to Merv Griffin, insult-to-injurywise, because he can’t be with us tonight—Mary Martin is run in as a last-minute substitute. Well, all right, I’d never seen Miss Martin, and one legend in its own time is about as good as another. Mary Martin does her stuff, then talks Nancy Reagan up from the president’s table to join her. I’m certain it’s spontaneous, but who knows from show people? It seems they’d worked together in the 1946 Broadway musical Lute Song, and Mary convinces Nancy—it’s all right to use first names if you’re a citizen in a public-domain sort of country like ours—to join her in singing “Mountain High, Valley Low.” Well, the highs ain’t as high, and the lows ain’t quite as low, and Nancy can’t quite remember all the words, but, like good sports everywhere—my God, how we’re suckers for a good sport!—they bring down the house. They bring down my house, too. Until I remember Mr. Rickles and the blurring of State and Show Biz. Christ, I’m thinking, probably they do put their pants on one leg at a time! And these are folks we trust with the bomb? And I think to myself, then amaze to Andy, how the United States has surely got to be the most remarkable country in the whole damn world, that you couldn’t imagine it, that you could never make it up, that you’d almost have to live in it to believe it!

  When it comes down to doing my haggle on Rodeo Drive, I don’t have the guts, of course. Michelle drives around the block a c
ouple of times, even pulls up along one or two of the shops. We discuss what sort of thing I can say I’m looking for, but, as I’d told management, it doesn’t make any difference, a rag, a bone, a hank of hair. I don’t have the stomach to play the fool anyway. So we go on.

  Michelle has me today. Michelle does the restaurant column for the magazine, reviews restaurants in the valley for the Times. Frankly, I don’t understand that kind of writing. Me, I’m a gossip. I love a lowdown, insider-trader information. And though people sometimes deign to gossip with me, they don’t like to violate the other guy’s confidence. This drives me nuts. Because it takes the juices out, freeze-dries the scuttlebutt and the tittle-tattle, and always raises to a level of pure theory and platonic proposal what might have been more interesting with names and dates. Gossip with some people is just, well, scholarship. My friends know my secrets. I have their opinions. With me it’s always personal. The personal is what it ought to come down to, a way of dealing with relationship, as if it were—well, as if it were death, reminiscence and eulogy just a polite way of talking about people behind their backs. Which is why, I try to explain, I won’t read a restaurant review unless I’ve not only been to the same restaurant as the reviewer but practically ordered the same meal.

  But I see I’m going to get along fine with Michelle. Like me, she’ll talk about herself. And she’s a gutsy driver. We’re touring Los Angeles by car. We drive by the Reagans’ home on Saint Cloud Road in Bel-Air to study their fence—you can’t see much of the house—all their electronic bristle and doodad, while a vaguely generic utility truck I recognize from stake-out movies studies us, and—who knows?—maybe transcribes what we’re saying even as we say it.

  We see more of the sights. Château Marmont, where John Belushi went up in smoke. The freeways where, I’m told, rush hour can sometimes go on for an eight-hour day and Californians, to-ing and fro-ing, play out their slot-car lives. Me and the restaurant reviewer dine where the chef is John Sweeney, who killed John Gregory Dunne’s niece, Dominique, and got three years for his trouble. (A chef pal of Michelle’s, who never murdered anyone, wonders why his career’s on hold and he’s still just a caterer.)

  Weatherwise, sunwise, it ain’t much of a day. Indeed, it’s almost blustery, some late-fall day back home again in Indiana, say, the kind of day that, if I were actually resident here instead of merely this Marco Polo sort of American in California, I’d find excuses for, a way to write off, like someone parsing his tax deductions. Michelle (a sabra herself, who still lives, I take it, in the same neighborhood in Pasadena where she grew up) has seen Rose Bowl parades, all southern California’s higher meteorology, known that perfectly climateless condition where there’s no real difference between outdoors and in, and doesn’t even mention it, let alone try to apologize for it.

  Melrose, touted as the new place to shop, is a little disappointing. I want to see bizarre, outlandish fashions, outrageous prices, stuff no one in their right minds . . . But Ecru, the one place we actually stop, seems almost reasonable to me, its clothes and prices of a piece with clothes and prices I remember back in the States.

  And maybe it’s the American weather, the gray average of this ordinary day, but all California seems strangely familiar today. Of course it’s always familiar, but always before familiar in some déjà vu sense, like prepared nerves, old synapses like track laid down in the nervous system. This is different, and much stranger, I think. Different, I mean, in the sense that this isn’t any message California has consciously sent. I’ve a feeling I’m being let in on something, that there’s something quite extraordinary about the ordinary out here. This evening I will watch local television news and see officials in overcoats.

  When they pronounce into microphones, I will see their breaths. (And no one is in the streets! Michelle points it out, but I’ve noticed this before. They’re not in the streets, they can’t all be in their cars; and from the look of the houses, they don’t even seem to be at home. Perhaps they’re like frogmen in the navy, or submariners, say, sent off to decompression chambers for bends avoidance; maybe that’s where they hang out, in mysterious closets and pockets and bottlenecks, all the hidden arrondissements of space.) Some of the buildings in downtown Los Angeles are equally familiar and look as if they may have been made from actual rock rather than petroleum byproduct, steel, concrete, or glass. City Hall, for example, like some twenties’ Brigadoon. Union Station, the Ambassador Hotel, the shadow, it could be, of L.A.’s old Art Deco days with its shoulder-padded, fedoraed, double-breasted Art Deco men and women. Echo Park is as east as I get to East Los Angeles and the gangs. But I see Little Tokyo. I see Chinatown. I see boat people and understand that what’s going on here is sure to change the country at least as much as it was changed during the great waves of immigration of the last century, the first couple of decades of this one. Then, before swinging across Mulholland Drive in fog, low clouds, and rain, we do a pit stop at Philippe’s, this sawdust-on-the-floor, working-class restaurant, and eat the same French-dip roast-beef sandwich served up, I swear it, on the same bread as in a place—Garavelli’s—I used to go in St. Louis. It’s pure, sweet, Proustian madeleine, this roast beef, this bread. This day. This weather. This chill. No wonder I’m feeling nostalgic. (And, too, sawdust is a wood product, don’t forget.)

  On a day so absolutely sharp and clear it might almost be off an engraving, Ed (from the magazine) calls to tell me he has the loan of Sharon’s BMW, that it would be a swell day to go to the beach.

  He means drive by the beach, of course. He means swing by the hotel and pick me up. He means, without saying as much, no heavy lifting, only what the mind and eyes and heart can take away with one. Well, I’m game, a game-legged old guy trapped in this trick body like someone strapped to a myth. Even before even. Like most. Come down damaged with the cat-got-your-tongue, with whatever, not modest, probably not even shy, just maybe only somebody for whom courage was always pretty much a nonstarter. Ladywise, I’m speaking. Who never had the courage not only of his convictions but of his secret tastes. Who doesn’t have them now. As harmless as a dirty old man as ever I’d been as a young one. Because California’s supposed to be the capital of this sort of thing, it’s honeypot Mecca, I’ve my eye out for high-impact aerobicizers, champs, surf queens, blondes from Ipanema, girls who do their bodies the way, in my day, they worried over their nails—tan, pumped-up types who know holds to break your holds and can do the fireman’s carry.

  But it’s the same story. Nobody’s home in Los Angeles. They’re not in the streets, they’re not in the sea, they’re not on the sand. Venice, except for the builders and rehabbers, seems deserted, Muscle Beach abandoned. Still, as it happens, it’s never too late to be impressed. You’d be surprised with all, in the right mood, you can take in, even from a sickbed, or from a passenger seat either, how sheer damn breathless beauty can leave you, breaking your hold and doing fireman’s carries of its own, lifting you above your expectations. Like this lovely city with its toy canals. Anyone can call anything anything, of course. Easy enough to come up with names like Appian Way or the Via Dolorosa, and there’s certainly plenty of contrivance with the place names here, but even Eden had a naming day, that old heroic festival of roll call and nomenclature. There’s a sweetness, however corny, to the local monikers, a touch of the poet, must have been, in those old developers and founders.

  We’re driving back to meet Andy for The Newlywed Game, and, though it’s chilly, the light is impeccable. I am this planetarium of focus. In the distance I can see bright foundation lumber for a new house spread-eagled across half a mountainside, an incredible necklace of wood. Would it have been so terrible if I could have changed my life?

  Movie lots, television sound stages, have tighter security procedures than most airlines. It isn’t a metal detector you have to get past, it’s a guest list.

  Andy, who used to be a writer for TV Guide, does the song and the dance. While I hang back, feigning indifference, throwing my attenti
ons like some ventriloquist of the elsewhere, Andy Mr. Elkin’s me up and down the Sunset Gower Studios to the producers and crew. We make a team, Andy and I. Good cop, lazy cop. (Because, although it seemed like a good idea at the time, I have absolutely no idea why I’m here. Because there’s nothing I want from these people. Because they’re just doing their job, and I haven’t a clue what mine even is. Literally, I have nothing to ask them. Well, maybe one thing: what Chuck Barris—whom I’ve admired for years and who, in my opinion, should have first earned and then retired the Nobel Prize for Television long ago, for his exquisite feel for our nation’s great voyeur heart, not only for just how much it can take but for exactly how much it needs, for our vampirical cravings, as if vulgarity were one of prime time’s vital blood sugars, and who, long before there was ever a Geraldo, ever a Sally or a Phil or a Morton, invented reality programming, and who for my money is smarter than they, better, and certainly, God knows, a lot more fun, who may have been blessed from birth, with, I don’t know, this—what, Sweeps Week vision?—is really like.) Besides, it’s cold in this place. The only heat is that generated by the show’s announcer and warm-up guy, an old smoothie in a black turtleneck who works the largely high school crowd like some professional summer-camp demagogue, a pep-rally emcee, say, the host of the campfire and marshmallows. What he needs from us, he keeps saying, is noise and energy. (During the show, Andy, a better sport than I’ll ever be, applauds, yuks it up, observes the house rules, and, I’m thinking, acquits himself with considerable grace and class.) Meanwhile, the warm-up man moves through the audience with his mike, asking personal, devastating questions. I’m dangerously close, in the first row, and hope he will not sing to me. He sees me, of course, but this old smoothie is a smooth old smoothie, and I see I had nothing to worry about.