20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  The End came up on the screen.

  “Oh God! It can’t end yet!” one chubby candy counter cashier cried out, and then shushed herself with a hand over her mouth.

  There was silence, silence, and then from above us, from the huge balcony above where all the young people, our audience, all of our Schiller and Hall kids, had been seated, all those loyal followers of all those decreasingly frothy six movies, began a rumble that slowly grew, turning into thunder, and I realized that they were stamping their feet.

  The accountants shoved me forward into the auditorium’s totally exposed central aisle as the credits rolled and rolled and the house lights began to come up.

  I turned around and looked up at the young people, and they were standing and stamping their feet in the otherwise utter silence of the huge theater. They sounded and, even more so, they resembled soldiers on the march.

  One girl pointed down at where I was, and she called out: “There he is! That’s Christopher Hall!” and the teenagers on that big balcony exploded into foot-stomping applause and screaming, hanging over the railings, snapping photos with Brownie cameras of what must have looked like a completely astonished me. Suddenly, the rest of the seemingly hypnotized audience around me stood up and began to applaud.

  I could see MGM people dashing up the aisles, speaking excitedly to each other, while gossip columnists and known reviewers for the papers and magazines and radio stations charged up the aisles behind them, men and women both blowing their noses and drying their eyes as they stumbled around and past me, not even seeing me.

  Sid Devlin found me. He was almost unrecognizable with his slicked-down ginger hair and dressed in his tuxedo. He grabbed me by the shoulders and he screeched, “I was good, wasn’t I, Junior? I was good up there! Geez! Who’da believed it!”

  Suddenly it seemed like everyone I’d ever met surrounded me, congratulating me, shaking my hand, kissing me, and after that I remember nothing at all that happened for the next fourteen hours.

  *

  The Academy Awards were held that year at the “Biltmore Bowl” in the downtown Biltmore Hotel. The nominations had been announced the last day of December and the winners announced at the end of January and we met to celebrate on March 4, 1937.

  Luise Rainer won featured actress role for The Great Ziegfield, and Paul Muni for featured actor role in The Story of Louis Pasteur, but Sue-Anne Schiller edged out Gale Sondergaard’s misbehaving society girl in Anthony Adverse and Sid Devlin slipped past the previous favorite, Basil Rathbone, in Cukor’s Romeo & Juliet to take a supporting actor Oscar. Among the total of twenty-four awards available that year, American Boys swept best picture, best original script, best cinematography, best director, and best assistant director (me). Its total of seven awards, a ten-year high, edged out a pretty good field of movies that year, consisting of The Great Ziegfield, Romeo & Juliet, San Francisco, A Tale of Two Cities, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and The Story of Louis Pasteur. Among the most interesting awards that year were those for assistant director, three short film awards including one for color short, and the Oscar for dance direction, given on alternate years to Busby Berkeley and Hermes Pan. Why was that one ever dropped?

  So the only suspense was halfway through the convivial and increasingly alcohol-fueled awards celebration evening at the Biltmore among five hundred people, when the screenwriter Blaine Anthony was announced to come get his award for writing the screenplay to American Boys up on the little dais.

  No one, no one…then l stood up and went onstage.

  I could hear Roz Russell saying to Spring Byington as I passed their table, “What a nice boy! He’s getting it for the writer.”

  So when the cursory applause died down and they were all expecting the speech explaining that Blaine Anthony wasn’t there and I was accepting it for him, I amazed them all by saying quite distinctly, “I thank the members of the Academy and all who voted for American Boys. I am Blaine Anthony.”

  That was the second example of thunderous applause I received, although from only half of the people who’d been at the premiere.

  19

  The restaurant that Larry Allegre and I finally met at for dinner was located in Santa Monica Canyon, where the Pacific Coast Highway met Channel Road, a seafood restaurant, naturally, being right at the ocean’s edge. It hadn’t been there in 2010, long replaced by a gas station.

  Larry Allegre had set dinner for nine p.m., late for this place, and it emptied out completely during our meal until we, one waiter, and the manager were the only people in the place by the time the entrées arrived.

  I recognized Larry’s two-toned Chevy Six coupe from our first (and until now, only) meeting. Even though I was staying just up the road, I was a little late, and drove up and parked right next to it in my Auburn boattailed roadster.

  In 2010, the few examples of that model Auburn still around would cost a quarter of a million dollars if any came up for auction. I’d gotten mine new for a cool $2250, f.o.b.—exactly my new bi-weekly salary at MGM. I planned to hold on to that car and to add a Cord Sedan, then a 1940 Packard Super 8 Convertible, and then more… I thought vintage autos could become another casually profitable collectible area for later life.

  Allegre was in a booth by the window and he waved at me. He looked exactly the same as before, with the curved-down hat brim and everything, although his overcoat was off and he was in a dark suit jacket.

  He’d ordered a beer and I ordered lemonade.

  The waiter called me “Mr. Hall, sir.”

  After we’d clinked glasses, Allegre said, “The soft-shell crab here is pretty decent. The fish and chips too.”

  I ordered both entrees, explaining that I was “still a growing boy.”

  “I’m not going to embarrass us both,” Allegre said, “by asking how your stay in Los Angeles has been, Christopher. Also, it’s extremely evident that you sensibly failed to take my friendly advice and not go into the pictures.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve seen any of the monstrosities?” I asked.

  “One doesn’t have to actually see them to be aware of them, you must know,” he riposted. “But of course I saw American Boys. Everyone has, no? Everyone in America?”

  “And England, and France, and Mexico and Japan and…”

  “As I said, you’re all over the place in one way or another. You are almost ostentatiously present, one might say,” he concluded.

  “While you, Mr. Allegre, are just the opposite, not to mention strangely difficult to get hold of,” I replied. “It’s been quite a while.”

  “I’m a jobber. I travel…” Allegre began.

  “Sure, you do,” I said.

  “Do I detect a wisp of disbelief? Why? Just because you can’t reach me?”

  “That,” pointing to bits of fog coming across the Pacific Coast Highway toward our window, “is a wisp,” I explained. “I’m talking about something a little more…substantial.”

  He was amused. “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning that there is such a thing as a private detective that one can hire, Mr. Allegre. You’ve heard of that profession, I take it? After all, half of RKO and Republic Pictures movies in the past year have utilized them as protagonists, I believe.”

  “You hired a detective to find me?” he asked, unable to hide his surprise.

  “I’m a well-off man, Mr. Allegre. I hired two detectives.”

  “Why would you do a thing like that?” he asked, sipping his beer out of a glorious old side-handled Stein.

  “Well, because you were so hard to find. At first.”

  “At first…?” he said. “And at second?”

  “At second, because your flat in the Alcott Arms appeared to be unlived in for weeks at a time, and then suddenly there you would be, living in it, with no one ever figuring out how you came and went. Since you aren’t the Invisible Man. Or are you, Mr. Allegre?”

  When he didn’t answer, I went on, “No, you aren’t, since th
at is a fictional work by H.G. Wells and a successful James Whale movie of a few years ago. And thirdly, because no one, including your telephone secretary, knew how to reach you. Not ever.”

  “I’m a jobber. I travel.”

  “He explained unpersuasively,” I commented aloud. “Since I happen to know that your little coupe there,” pointing to it, outside the window, “which you said you used while traveling, instead tended to go into storage inside a garage on Sixth Street, off Harvard Avenue, with a canvas cover over it, whenever you were not at your flat and whenever you couldn’t be reached by telephone or telegraph.”

  “Leading your detectives and yourself to conclude?” Larry asked, now quite amused.

  “Well, you completely befuddled them, I’ll admit that. After several months of watching you as closely as he could, the smarter of the two actually said to me, and here you won’t mind my imitation, ‘He’s gotta vanish into thin air, Mr. Hall. Thin air!’”

  “I see.”

  “But, Mr. Allegre…that’s not your real name, is it? I happen to myself and quite personally know of a way in which someone can suddenly appear out of thin air and into Los Angeles of, what’s the date now, February sixth, 1938?”

  “Indeed, and you know this how?”

  “Because I did appear here suddenly myself, Mr. Allegre. On April twelfth, 1935.”

  “That’s right, on a corner of Laurel Canyon and what was it? Sunset Boulevard,” he said, not taking the bait I’d thrown him.

  I ignored that. “And the longer I’m here…in Los Angeles,” I qualified, “the more I feel that you already knew that particular fact. And also that you yourself are not from…here…either.”

  He laughed. “Keep in mind, Christopher, that it was I who thought you seemed lost the minute I saw you. But then again, look how wrong I was about your arrival here. Why, I never encountered a young fellow who fit so perfectly into a new…” He settled for the word “town!”

  Our appetizers arrived. Shrimp cocktail: giant Pacific shrimp, luscious and pink. He looked at his the way I suspect a child molester looks at a six-year-old pageant beauty.

  “And now what?” Allegre said, for the waiter to hear. “You’ll be acting in more movies?”

  “Acting in more of them. Writing more of them. Co-directing them. Louis B. said my instincts are so good, he wouldn’t be surprised if I began producing them before too long.”

  “Nor I. Well then, I couldn’t have been more wrong in my advice to you back then, could I?” he said as he attacked the shrimp ruthlessly.

  The waiter was gone.

  “Now that I think on it,” I said, “it was you who brought me to the Alsop House. Wasn’t it?”

  “It was. But remember, Christopher, I wanted to take you to Father Flint’s church. Or was it the YMCA? You wouldn’t go to the first and we couldn’t get in the second because of the hour.”

  “And it was at the Alsop House,” I continued, undaunted, “that I fell in with my bedmate Hank and his three pals, all nice guys, talented guys in their own right, and they were all unemployed and working as movie extras. Trying to break into the pictures.”

  “Your point being?” Allegre asked.

  “They’re not unemployed now, are they?” I asked. “No, they’re all working. In fact, now that I think about it, it was me that got them all jobs.”

  “Well, then lucky for your friends that you came along! It seems as though I inadvertently did all of you all a great big favor that night. Here’s to me! Wonderful me! So…tell me again…what exactly is the nature of your problem with me, Christopher?”

  Red sauce mixed with clam juice shamelessly stained his chin, which he was imperfectly cleaning. He seemed to be eyeing my appetizer, barely touched so far, and I pushed it toward him to finish it off. And I swore he was going to add, “And that’s not your real name, either, is it?”

  “Bear with me a minute longer,” I went on. “Okay, so I went with them the next morning after I arrived in…town here…went with them to be an extra too, and there I was pulled out because I was too young. But then, somehow, I ended up with Sue-Anne and at MGM being a player and eventually a featured player…The rest is history,” I trailed off, having lost my precise train of thought.

  He was looking at me in an odd way.

  So odd that I suddenly said, “Tell me, Mr. Allegre, where do you go when you aren’t around your office?”

  “Oh, all around. I’m a jewelry jobber, you know. All around Southern California.”

  “Right. But we’ve established that you don’t take your car. The reason I ask is that I’m all of sudden thinking how all of that happened a little too neatly. Very quickly too. As though it was a…as though it was some kind of set-up that only needed someone to fill it.”

  “Well, Christopher, if you believe that, then here’s where I ask for your money or your life.” He sipped. “Actually, I’d settle for that Auburn I saw you drive up in. Gosh, that is a honey!”

  His attempt to change the subject fell astray, however. Because his last statement was so of the time and place that it sounded all wrong to me. As wrong as I often sounded to myself at times: a stranger in this time and place using language of the time that didn’t somehow belong to me.

  And now I was furiously thinking as our salads arrived—ghastly things, a wedge of iceberg lettuce, a few sliced cucumbers and sliced tomatoes with a gunk of a white dressing, one step beyond mayonnaise.

  Once the waiter was gone again and I could see the booths on either side of us were empty, leaving only a seascape studded wall as company.

  So I decided to go for it. “Tell me something, Mr. Allegre. You wouldn’t happen to have one of those little three-dimensional, hand-sized screens that connect to the National Mint in Denver that Mr. Morgan once showed me, would you?”

  I thought for a moment he was going to ignore my words or ask what I was talking about.

  Instead he said, “Oh, dear, are we going to have that conversation already! As a rule it takes three or four meetings before it comes up. Well, Christopher, since you ask, what I have is not exactly what you described.”

  He looked around and then, holding a tall menu up next to his hand, he opened up the crystal on his Bulova wristwatch and handed me a tiny plastic thing resembling a wireless speaker bud that I could see fit into an ear.

  “On!” he said, and the watch immediately projected a hologram maybe six inches high off the watch lens, first of Mr. Morgan, my uphill neighbor from 2010, along with Ralf, waving and saying “Hello,” and then of a woman about the same advanced age, who said, “Hello, Mr. Hall. We’re all extremely pleased with you and with your progress.”

  Allegre kept checking that no one could see what I was seeing. But the place was empty.

  “My progress?” I asked in a low voice. Then, “And you are who?”

  “My name’s unimportant. I’m the International Minister of Other Times, of course. We cannot converse too long. We do have your best interests at heart, Mr. Hall. But also our own interests and our own situation.”

  Whatever that meant. “I’ll just bet.”

  “And that situation is very dire indeed. Please listen to Allegre. Everything we wish for you to do there is moral, it’s legal, and it’s good for you personally and professionally. That’s the truth and it is all really that I can say. What’s the appropriate sign-off?” She turned half-away and seemed to be asking someone off screen. “Oh, yes, that’s right!” And to me, she said, “Good-bye now.”

  The watch was normal once again, the ear bud was silent. I handed them back to him, he put down the menu, and we finished our salads.

  The soft-shell crab and fish and chips arrived and I dug in. Allegre had a tuna steak, rare—“I’ve heard so much about tuna. None around for us, of course. Or if there is, too difficult to get to. So many nice things gone.”

  “Gone from 2061, you mean?”

  “No. That was Morgana’s time. Ours, the Minister’s and mine, is ahead several hundred
years from that.”

  “The future time of a ‘dire situation,’ she said,” I clarified.

  “Yes. Believe me. I’m here and now as often as I can be—or at least, not there and then as often as I can be.”

  “Go on,” I prodded.

  “One reason is because I’m one of the healthiest people alive. Most would look like cripples or appear deformed today.” He removed his hat, and he was completely bald. Odd in one so relatively young.

  “Solar radiation is mostly to blame, unstopped now by any thick atmosphere or by magnetic fields. Those shifted several times and then seem to have shifted away altogether. All of North America, by the way, now consists of four completely partly underground, domed cities. One is approximately here in Southern California, although inland a great deal, and not far from your town of Banning, stretching up to about Victorville and down to around Julian. A second one comprises San Antonio to about Austin. A third city is in the highlands of what had been Guadalajara, Mexico, and the largest and southernmost lies in the hills around old Puebla. The total national population is seven hundred thousand and dropping. All of our food production and manufacture is within the cities themselves, as outside our domed cities is completely hostile to life. What atmosphere does exist there is very thin, and of course very frigid.”

  “That’s the United States?” I asked to be sure.

  “That’s the United States of North America. Europe consists of three underground cities, one near Gibraltar, another at Messina, Sicily, and a third in north central Greece.”

  “So it’s a full ice age, then, like the one of a hundred thousand years ago?”

  “No, Chris, that was a small ice age. This ice age is far more severe. Africa and Australia are iced over. South America is ice up to what used to be Caracas and Cartagena. Asia is reduced to Greater Madras, Sri Lanka, Rangoon, Bangkok, and Singapore. That’s the world capital now, and our largest city. It’s three times in size what it is in this time because the oceans are so much smaller.”

  “Didn’t California freeze over? Morgan told me it was icy in his time.”