Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  There’s a shop in Los Angeles on Melrose where the used clothes of movie stars are sold to the public. The appeal of an autograph, I think, is the homeopathic magic it contains, the voodoo I-touched-yous—and not just the voodoo I-touched-yous, however farfetched or removed (the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand), but the voodoo you-touched-mes, too. Ain’t it feasible, I mean, that the inventory in that Melrose shop and the rags, bones, and hanks of hair of the saints and martyrs should have, at least from the consumer’s point of view, something in common—that religious feelings, the love of God even, may only be a higher type of star-struck awe and agape, what there was before TV and the talkies? We do some of our best business in the atmosphere of angels. Be still, oh, be still, my bobby-soxer heart!

  It’s hard, at the Academy Awards, to distinguish between those stars I saw outside, in the flesh, and those I see on the stage. Joan has the same difficulty. A couple of months later, watching a video of the ceremonies, both of us will be unable to remember having seen particular parts of the show. We sat through all but the last ten minutes or so—missing Best Performance by an Actress, missing Best Picture, to beat the crowds, to put dibs on the rest rooms—but neither of us remembers having seen Cher, or Richard Dreyfuss, or Carrie Fisher. Jane Fonda has dropped through our short-term memory, Merv Griffin. Angelica Huston and Donald Sutherland are out of the loop. Indeed, both of us have more vivid memories of the acceptance speeches of people we’d never heard of, achievers in art direction, achievers in sound, than we have of the coy presenter banter of the household names. Television and movies at once create and obliterate fame. I recall what Dustin Hoffman said in his acceptance speech because he said it clumsily, because, unless he was acting, there was this unscripted slippage into the human register.

  It’s easy to knock these ceremonies, of course, which, on television at least, and even in person, seem an invitation to archaeologists, some artifacts from the Zircon Age. It’s easy to knock these ceremonies because here at the Academy Awards, where glitz hands off to glitz and it’s this Mardi Gras of diamonds larger than rhinestones, structure surrenders to motion, to din, to appearance as arbitrary and frantic as a chase scene. Ironically, at the Academy Awards, all sense of the theatrical gives way neither to wit nor spectacle but to stunt—how many presenters, like so many clowns, can be crammed into the Volkswagen. (And I’m failing the form here, am insufficiently a stand-in for the little guy. The slicker/rube is inoperable. There is no awe, only humiliation, stripped privilege like a scuttled form, and I’ve slipped genres, my piece at one remove—I blame Galati, I blame S. Lazar, I blame Roger Ebert, I blame Molly, my daughter, who at approximately the same time her father is being denied access to the Action is taking the Middle East by storm, is dining with the Rabins at their home in Jerusalem through the good offices of a connected friend—from the freshman’s classic theme about why he can’t write one.) The show—and I had almost said “services”—reminds one of summer camp, of tacked-on, interminable verses, stanzas of pointless, round-robin story told first by A and kept up by B, by C and D and E and all, that do not so much advance the plot as simply continue it.

  The president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduces Tom Selleck, who brings on Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, who banter reflexively, list the nominees for Best Supporting Actress (always, somehow, all nominees and the films for which they’ve been nominated will be announced in the vaguely runway accents and unnatural singsong of a fashion show, almost, it would seem, in Don Pardo’s descriptive RV and Turtle-Waxian tropes), open the envelope, and give Geena Davis an Oscar. Miss Davis thanks Anne Tyler, Ruth Myers, Larry Kasdan, Ray London, Bill Hurt, and Jeff Goldblum. And we go to commercial like a seventh-inning stretch.

  Rhymeless and reasonless, this is how the evening happens. It’s the show again. A Voice, like the disembodied sound of some Las Vegan casino god, introduces Jane Fonda, who talks about Best Pictures and presents a film clip. (With its film clips, all of which are identical to those I’d already seen on Carson and other American hype outlets, the Academy Awards may be the quintessential TV show.) In keeping with the evening’s surrealism, the dead-solid arbitrary of its auf zulachen will, Ms. Fonda brings out Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, who give the awards for achievement in sound-effects editing.

  Until gradually I’m proved wrong and the true structure of the ceremonies (neither car chase nor stunt, motion nor din, how many presenters on the head of a pin, nor even long summer’s endless ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall or its row, row, row your boats around the campfire) finally begins to emerge. Why, it’s a board game is what it is! Certainly! Of course! Drama and suspense, action and irony, the Oscars according to Parker Brothers! The Academy Awards designed for the long, lazy laid-back of a rainy day. All the culs-de-sac, skipped turns, jumped spaces, bonuses (a Special Achievement Award to Richard Williams for animation direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit; an honorary Academy Award to the National Film Board of Canada), and even its graduated values (Achievement in Art Direction is less important than Best Actor exactly as Baltic Avenue is less valuable than Park Place) suggest all the drawn-out, delayed gratification and jittery interruption of the final winner-takes-all, Best Picture, like the kid holding the most houses, hotels, and cash.

  At the Academy Awards, you can’t get there from here. It’s a de-Ezekielized world of detached and scattered bones. The Voice produces Walter Matthau, Walter Matthau produces Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. At the Academy Awards, it’s a pointless, incomplete vaudeville. Bob Hope and Lucille Ball present nineteen “Oscar Winners of Tomorrow” in an endless every-man-for-himself song and dance about ambition and narcissism philosophically distilled from A Chorus Line without the benefit of that show’s melody, passion, talent, or wit. At the Academy Awards, it’s a drawn-out, almost fastidious, customary kowtow. It’s the obligatory standing ovation. You could put money down on who’s going to get one, but who’d be sucker enough to take your bet? Bob Hope and Lucille Ball get one. Out of almost Chinese respect, only it’s not so much ancestor worship as a gift for survival, for longevity, and, really, in a business where it ain’t any Oscar winners of tomorrow who take the cake or stop the show, not even for talent so much as for the legendary, inoffensively bankable. We love Lucy. We’re nuts about Hope. We eat up their routine. They eat up their routine.

  HOPE: What a night! I haven’t seen so many gorgeous girls since I spent Father’s Day with Steve Garvey. (Lucy laughs heartily.) But I’ve got the most gorgeous girl right by my side—Lucille Ball, right there!

  LUCY: Thank you. It really is wonderful to be here, and a particular thrill especially with you, Bob. It’s a very secure feeling being up here with a man who’s been on the Oscar show twenty-six times.

  HOPE: That’s true.

  LUCY: And never won.

  HOPE: You had to mention it, huh?

  LUCY: Well . . .

  HOPE: It’s not that I haven’t begged. I’ve been on my knees more than Jimmy Swaggart. Anyway, a lot of people are wondering what Lucy and I are doing up here together. You know, we made four pictures together.

  LUCY: Yeah, talk about dangerous liaisons.

  HOPE: Even though we haven’t been working in a while, we still keep in touch with everything. In fact, today the Ayatollah Khomeini called me and asked who wrote lshtar.

  LUCY: And I heard they’ve offered you a role in the picture about Dan Quayle’s visit to the White House.

  HOPE: Yeah, The Accidental Tourist. Actually, I was called back to Washington to paper-train the puppies.

  LUCY: Aww.

  HOPE: You know Millie, the White House dog, had three puppies. Actually she had five, but the Senate rejected two.

  LUCY: Bob, can we stop now? . . .

  HOPE: Yeah. (in his but-seriously-folks voice) You’re about to see nineteen of the hottest young actors and actresses in pictures. These are the people who will be winning Oscars way into the next century.

  LUC
Y: (In a but-seriously-folks voice of her own) That’s right. You’ve already seen them act in hit movies, but tonight you’re going to see them sing and dance.

  Because there’s always the “but-seriously-folks” voice. Because there’s always the silly double entendre of show business’s mixed signals, its Trust Me idiomatics like some dead language. (Because I never heard of these “Oscar Winners of Tomorrow” and neither have you.) Because it is a sort of archaeology here, because in a real way, here, at the Academy Awards, we’re on site, in the very future’s very digs, at Routine’s locale, perhaps the single place in all geography at the one moment in all time when so many could understand without recourse to footnotes the merely momentarily humorous argot of the Proper Noun, self-referential, egocentric. The “Father’s Day with Steve Garvey,” “Jimmy Swaggart,” “dangerous liaisons,” and “Ayatollah Khomeini/Ishtar” lines (Salman Rushdie understood): the incredibly labored setup and syntax of Bob Hope’s playing the lead in a movie about Dan Quayle’s visit to the White House and calling the film The Accidental Tourist; the joke about the Senate rejecting two of Millie’s puppies, are already like relics, like stuff pressed into geology.

  And these anger me too—his banter, these “jokes.” From my resentment pool, deep as some sea trench, rises a personal bile. It’s the second time I’ve felt had, and this time “betrayed” wouldn’t be overstating it. It ain’t the papered house now but something on actual behalf of actual art. It’s stupidity that has me down, Bob Hope’s simplistic, condescending view of history and of ourselves, me. Because I take it personally, the good-natured contempt, the artificial scorn, the false assumption like a wink up in your face like a slap, or the car salesman’s nudge like an elbow to your rib that we’re all pals here, that we’re in it together. Well—we ain’t.

  (Physically, it’s been a hell of a year for me. In February my multiple sclerosis started to multiply. In March I got my wheelchair. In late June I went into the hospital for a course of Solumedrol and Cytoxin in the hope that those drugs would strengthen me, or at least freeze my disease at its current level, but before they were even started I had a strange experience. I was trying to tell Joan I had a terrible headache, but all I could say was “I have this awful haircut.” I knew what I said was wrong and understood everything Joan and the nurse were trying to tell me. I thought I was having a stroke. “I think,” I told them, “I’m having an Australian crawl.” I was taken for Doppler exams, for angiograms to the head, and it was discovered that only 2 percent of my right carotid artery was open. The left carotid artery had shut down completely. I was given an endarterectomy on the right side of my throat. They cleaned my plugs and points, but I suffered a mild heart attack from the anesthesia. This is the House that Jack built. After a time, they said, when I was strong enough, they said, I would need a heart angiogram to check out the damage. I would have, they said, depending on what the pictures showed, three options: I could be “managed medically”; I might be a candidate for an angioplasty—they send tiny balloons up your arteries and Roto-Rooter the schmutz from your system, all that old lox and cream cheese, all that ancient butter and eggs, all that red meat and smoke—or, they said, I would have to have open-heart surgery, a second heart bypass. “Out of the question,” I told them. “Never again.” But there is more to the quality of life than the quality of life, and when the angiogram showed I would either have to have the bypass or die, I chickened out and chose to live.)

  Because there is more to the quality of life than the quality of life. Because one would to the woods no more with flibbertigibbets. Because camp is not enough, nor hype, nor kitsch, nor glamour, nor glitz, nor all pop culture’s various altitudes, low to high like some kid’s practice scales. Because vita’s too brevis and ars ain’t longa enough by a country mile. And because here, at the Academy Awards, it isn’t good enough finally to fabricate quality and celebration like some currency minted by hoopla, ads taken out in the trades—the clang and bang and claque of cash. And because it’s a masque here, finally, some deal with the graced and favored, power in league with bone structure, haute couture, physiques as mannered and looked after as French gardens—Youth and Beauty like some topiary architecture of the only platonically human. (And it may just be something this side of sin in the actor’s art, a stooping to conquer, a feeling I cannot shake all evening that pacts have been signed, the stronger pledges taken, temporal quids for immortal quos.) Of course, if Galati had only returned my calls to the Four Seasons it might all have been different: Galati, up for an award himself for his screenplay for The Accidental Tourist; Galati, whom I’d put into pictures, the single person in all the world—save one’s children—whose life I’d changed, whose name in those brief old days when I could have been a contender, Charlie. I had at once volunteered when asked if I could think of anyone who could do the adaptation of a book I’d written and on which this teensy little option had been taken out like an inexpensive hit. Who might have gotten us a place, tourists at the Tourist table, supping with Geena Davis, with Jeff Goldblum, with Lawrence Kasdan, with Charles Okun and Michael Grillo, producers, with Bill Hurt if I really got lucky and my theory proved wrong about no one coming to these dos unless something was in it for him. Perhaps then the grapes would not have been so sour.—Or not. Maybe it was the time zone, hours behind my own, psychological months even, the overlapping seasons of my humiliations between hospital and Hollywood, the bleak occasion of my below-stairs perspectives, the gut-hard feelings between my mortality and their own blessed lives like gifts from the Genes Fairies.

  (I forgive Galati. I even understand him. He’s up for an award, there’s lots on his mind; there are probably studio flowers in his suite, baskets of fruit, congratulatory telegrams all over the place. It’s a simple question of who needs the aggravation, hospitality to some guy you’re into for your career, a pain in the ass on unfamiliar turf. It’s Swifty L., who doesn’t even know me, I’ll never forgive.)

  Though we get to go to a couple of parties anyway. (And, later, I even have an opportunity to speak to Larry Kasdan personally. Joan is calling for a cab from a bank of phones at the Shrine. I’m right behind her, maybe five feet away, in my wheelchair. At the next phone over there’s this important-looking young man, and I hear him say something like “Tell him Larry Kasdan. Yeah, thanks.” When he hangs up I say, “Excuse me, sir, but are you Mr. Kasdan?” I don’t think he sees me in the chair because he’s looking around to see where the voice is coming from. Then he glances down and spots me. “Yes,” he says. “Aren’t you with Frank Galati?” I ask, syntactically putting, as it were, the accent on the wrong syllable. “He was at my table all evening,” he tells me, annoyed, and stalks off.)

  The Shrine Exposition Hall looks like a soundstage. It’s been made over for the Board of Governors Ball, but it could be a set for an immense wedding party or the most expensive prom in human history. Or, indeed, the venue for almost any formal “affair,” from bar mitzvah to state dinner. There’s a kind of carpeting, there are ice sculptures, a tiny dance floor around a round raised platform for the band. Everywhere, as decoration, there are battalions of those muscular art deco Oscars like some futuristic fascist coinage. Our table, in the two-hundreds like a dangerously elevated blood pressure, in deep steerage, is maybe a block-and-a-half from the entrance as the wheelchair rolls. I pray there isn’t a fire.

  I cast my eyes around the huge hall for a celeb but come up empty. Of course, we are, in terms of the seating, somewhere in space, about, if this were the universe, where Voyager 2 might start to give out. It’s all, as far as the eye can see, limbo hereabouts. At our table there seem to be a bunch of folks down from Sacramento—politicians, their spouses. There are no place cards. No effort is made at introductions. The cat has got this reporter’s tongue. Joan breaks the disinterested ice, and it turns out there is a celebrity at the table. It’s Willie Brown’s, the influential California Democrat’s, daughter. She’s there on a date. The presence of the others at the $45
0-per-person sit-down dinner is, and remains, completely puzzling. I wonder aloud if anyone in this immense room has actually put out cash money to be here and have again the sense that we’re all beneficiaries of some huge, pointless charity, a sort of Sunshine Fund for the already tan. No one responds to my observations, but it could be the din. We’re on a sound stage indeed. I find I can talk (save Joan’s grace) only to the woman on my right, a political spouse (I think) and, in her own right, a travel agent. We spend the evening, or she does, discussing frequent-flier miles, letting me in on the almost Hermes Trismegistean arcana—tricks of the trade, arrangements, how to crack the system, all the secret alchemicals of turning paper credit into distance and upgrades. You must never cash your miles in for a free flight, you buy your tickets at the discount. I don’t think I understand a word she says, but I recognize passion when I hear it. She’s flown farther than the Secretary of State, she tells me proudly. Sitting there in my tux, I’m too ashamed to admit that we beat the system by coming out here on this flying trolley car that keeps stopping to pick up passengers along the way and gives you a transfer in Phoenix, Arizona.