That was more than I could absorb.
I sighed.
I ate pie.
I yawned.
I ate more pie.
We ate the rest of our desserts in silence. The place was empty but for us and the manager, counting cash in a far booth, listening to the radio, turned low.
Finally I asked, “What happens to me?” I wanted to know. “What about me now? A doctor said I had a heart flutter. I never had that before, and at this young an age.”
“If the plan works, Ministry pre-analysts believe that stem cell research is in full force by approximately 1960. Two and a half decades from now. You’ll certainly be able to afford it, even if it’s still experimental.”
“In other words, no problem?”
“The Ministry of Other Times takes care of its friends.”
“And my personal life? Won’t that…get in the way of all this fame and influence you seem to believe I’ll require? I’m not changing anything, you know.”
“No reason to. You will continue to be discreet, as you are now, and others will busily cover for you until your work on The Golds is done and it goes all over the planet. Anyway, the Ministry predicts that in the new plan, tolerance of other’s races and sexuality also leaps forward in time: racial integration could begin in the ’40s; sexual tolerance in the ’50s. Perhaps you’ll take part in those movements again.”
“You have all the answers. At the Ministry, I mean, don’t you?”
“No, Christopher. What we have is forty-seven young people who have lived and who, like you, abhor what has happened, and what will happen if they don’t interfere.”
Outside, shortly after, with a bag of uneaten fish I was taking home for Randolf wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into a brown paper bag, I said, “Poor Mr. Allegre. All that work and no Auburn for you, huh?”
“I’m a jewelry jobber.” He shrugged. “I drive a Chevy Six.”
“And you’ll keep in touch? Just so I don’t screw up. Right?” I asked.
“I’ll keep in touch,” Allegre said and got into his car. “Don’t worry!” he added. “And don’t drive that damn thing too fast and get yourself killed.”
20
It’s possible that nothing further would have come of that very strange conversation at dinner. But not a few weeks later, on one of those surprisingly summery, hot L.A. days in late February, I found myself in the backseat of Jonah Wolff’s new Lincoln V8 Phaeton convertible, not quite squashed between Sid and Hank in the luxurious, special pony leather upholstery of the backseat. The car had been built by LeBaron for Mae West, who had unaccountably thrown it over for a Dusenberg S.J. Jonah heard of that contretemps at the MGM Commissary while visiting me and Sue-Anne, there and he had swooped in and picked up what was a relative bargain.
Ducky was in the front passenger seat, replaying the Bulldogs game of the day before, which Jonah had missed, an extremely notable game because Ducky had unexpectedly caught a flubbed pass to another receiver and had run it across the field, turning every few seconds to wonder why no one was chasing him. They couldn’t believe he could run, that’s why—and so he’d made a seventy-yard touchdown, to the loudest, most thunderous noise and celebration that I’d ever heard in my life.
But today was Sunday and all of us were—surprisingly, given our busy schedules—at leisure.
We were also all of us moved out of the Alsop House. Yes, an era had ended. Further, we were all spread out, so it was a job getting us together for breakfast.
Jonah had moved with Frances Wannamaker into her oversized Mediterranean in Hancock Park with its many columns and even more numerous awnings, gardens front and back, a porte cochere, and a barely attached solarium.
Sid and Ducky had moved out and bought a single-story cottage together in back of Norma Talmadge’s film studio on Cynthia’s Lane, in what would later become West Hollywood. Here Ducky could cook to his heart’s content in the big, wonderfully tiled kitchen and serve his constantly hungry friends. Here Sid could bring his new string of girlfriends, as the house had two bedroom suites separated by the more public rooms. Even so, more than once I’d gone in to use a lavatory and found only one bedroom looking at all lived in, and only one bed unmade, and I guessed they still slept together whenever Sid felt lonely. And if I noticed others must too, no?…Apparently not.
Hank and Sue-Anne and I too had all moved into an all-but-hidden-from-the-street-by-banana-and-ginger-bushes, four cottage and central alley complex within walking distance of MGM, off Overland in Culver City, on a “temporary basis.”
I knew this was a blind for the two of them to be together, and I rented the third little house in front for myself and also the fourth cottage, which became my writing office and Hank’s private design and sculpture studio. Sue-Ann also took over a few rooms for her L.A. Cares work. I made certain to appear at the cottages whenever there was company or an event for the charity or an outdoor barbecue or a party all of us shared.
By now, I was mostly living in that Cape Cod Malibu too, and that had turned out very interesting indeed. If any of the others knew where I stayed most nights, or what I was doing and with whom I was doing it, they never once breathed a word.
Surprisingly I’d been home that Saturday night, as Randolph was away on location, spending time up in Chatsworth filming a forgettable Western, the final film in his current studio contract with RKO, when Sid phoned me to make up this Sunday plan and then also again this morning when he’d come to pick up me and Hank, and here we all were.
We’d even stopped at a place on Venice and Motor for breakfast, like we used to do all the time at Anderson’s Diner on Selma in Hollywood. Here too we read the Sunday papers, with Sid doing the voices of all the characters in the funnies, and then complaining that Ducky only got “one stinking paragraph” on the sports page and threatening to sue the L.A. Times.
Jonah meanwhile sighed over the news of the signing by a rival of a hot new actor that he and Frances had wanted, guy named Tyrone Power. Hank sketched my blank face and very detailed hair—I’d let it grow long and hadn’t much tended it lately as I wasn’t shooting anything—over and over on his pad. When I saw what he was doing, I yelled “Stop!” and tried hand-brushing it.
Hank knocked my hand away, aggrieved. “Leave it alone. It’s beautiful! Beautiful! Just the way it is!”
Sheesh! I tried to finish a crossword puzzle.
Ducky “watched” our meals in the kitchen, meaning he made them himself, unsatisfied with the cook.
Not an hour later, we were at the Venice Pier and then under it and on the sand.
I’d turned Ducky and Sid onto my health food store nearby on Rose. This area would soon become Muscle Beach!
“What is this place?” Jonah groaned once he was in the health food store. “People don’t actually eat this stuff, do they, kid? This grass and…Geez, what is that?” Until he all but fell into the display of honeycomb and discovered he couldn’t get enough of the sweet stuff.
The beach had not been populated that day as it might have in the summer or fall. The warm weather was unexpected, and so few people had planned for it. We’d spent most of the afternoon there, swimming, surfing, wrestling on the sand, playing a game of catch with an old football Ducky had brought. Eating, and in general having a great, exhausting beach day.
It was now five p.m. and already the marine layer was advancing and would soon cover us.
After a shoreline walk, Hank and I had returned to where we’d parked the car—i.e., right up against the sands (no paved parking lots)—where there was still some hazy sunlight.
As soon as we’d arrived back, Sid and Ducky and Jonah had taken off for their own stroll.
Sid broke off from the others, having been spotted by two young ladies who’d seen him in American Boys. He hunkered down on their beach sheets to chat, and then knelt down, and then sat between them.
I didn’t know anyone who enjoyed his celebrity more than Sid Devlin. Partly that was because he d
idn’t quite believe it. Before shooting, he’d read his own parts in my script but no other parts and so, when he’d seen the whole film of American Boys at the premiere, he’d been surprised and impressed by it—that was the word he used: “I’m impressed, Junior. I’m really impressed.”
Meanwhile, Sid knew that his lifetime in films wasn’t destined to always be in front of the camera for many more years, or if so, then in a limited capacity. So he was enjoying it while he could. Of course he had signed up with Jonah, at the renamed Wannamaker and Wolff Agency.
On the beach earlier he’d whined: “They send me parts only good for a Dead End kid. What do I look like? Don’t answer that, wise guys!”
“What did you expect?” Jonah had asked. He was Sid’s agent. “Hamlet?”
“Well, I hear they’re making this other play of Shakespeare’s. What was the name, Junior? A Summer’s Dream or something?”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Do you mean the role of Puck?”
“Rooney’s already got it,” Jonah said, unfazed and immovable.
Sid would fade back into Special Effects and Stunts, I figured. He was already a whiz at both of them. From certain angles he filmed a lot larger than he was, especially alone onscreen, and he was utterly fearless, more so than I was, and would try any stunt once, no matter how crazy, a half century before the Jackass movies came along.
What Sid didn’t know was that I’d already pictured him in my mind as Randolph Scott’s sidekick in my next project. I’d written Sid’s part into the first, rough version of the script for The Golds, my so far pie-in-the-sky dream. Sid would play the part of “Brooklyn” and he would be the few minutes of comic relief in the film whenever he appeared, especially when the two G.I.’s sneak into Germany via the Austrian Alps and attempt to rescue Scott’s pre-war love, Marlene Dietrich. Who knew? Sid might even get another Oscar!
I could see Jonah and Ducky trying to get Sid moving again, then give up in disgust and move on ahead without him. After a minute, as they walked on, Ducky draped an arm over Jonah’s shoulder, one of his absolutely typical, almost unconscious “pal” gestures. I could see Jonah’s entire body flinch slightly before he let Ducky keep holding him like that. Jonah had intimacy issues and also male-male issues, which Ducky was completely oblivious to. Earlier in the week, I had put a flea in Jonah’s ear about someone doing a college football movie based on some of the gridiron experiences that Scott had told me après-sex, and our up-and-coming agent was looking for talent to be in it.
Hank had gone into the water again and a few minutes later he headed back to our makeshift base, toweled off the sand he’d picked up, chugged some watered-down hooch out of my silver flask, and then collapsed onto the beach towel.
I’d been leaning against a towel-pillowed Lincoln front bumper, reading a John O’Hara story in The Saturday Evening Post, and after a while, Hank turned around and fell backward, his head square into my lap. He made himself comfortable there and I thought he was going to go to sleep. But after a while, he pushed the magazine away from between us and, pointing ahead, said, “Look, Chris!”
I looked at the beach; a fog bank drifted slowly toward us. Behind and above it was one of those ultra pink and aquamarine skies, shot through with cantaloupe, raspberry, and chartreuse, that defined a West Coast sunset. At the very edge of our vision we could see Jonah and Ducky walking, little figures arm in arm, the smaller gesticulating to the larger. Closer by was Sid on the blanket paying cards—Old Maid?—with the two young women. They were wrapped in sweaters, he in his porkpie hat and singlet, a towel curled like a scarf around his neck.
“There’s no one, but no one on the beach but us,” I said.
“It’s perfect,” Hank said.
Odd that he’d say that, since I would think that he’d want Sue-Anne to complete the picture.
“Pretty close,” I admitted.
“I wish…I wish nothing ever changes. That we can continue to be like this and come here and do this for…Well, for the rest of our lives,” Hank said with his usual utter sincerity.
He was expecting me to say that we could, don’t worry, Hank, we will, and it won’t change. But I knew better. I knew that across the Pacific, plans were already being hatched in Yokohama for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and in Berlin plans to take over all of Europe were in advanced stages, and that soon all of my friends would be in one theater of war or another, destined to probably never return to this beach: or if they did return, then never entire again in body or mind.
“Me too,” I said then. But it didn’t sound convincing to Hank.
“You’re not planning to go anywhere?” he asked.
“No. No, Hank. Not at all. I’m staying right here.”
“Good. I never had a friend like you, Chris. Never. I don’t know how I’d get over not having you as a friend.”
“I said I’m not going anywhere. What this all about, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Aw! Yes, I do. Those sets I’m drawing following your descriptions. Those war…camps…what did you call them? Concentration camps? Death camps? For the new script you’re working on…That’s what it’s all about?”
I wanted to tell him that plans for them already existed in 1938.
“The more real, the more horrible you draw them, Hank, the better.”
“I’m getting the heebie-jeebies out of doing that,” he admitted. “It’s really scaring me.”
“Don’t worry. You’re safe. We’re safe.”
“‘Work Will Make You Free’?” he asked. “Would people put that up at the front of a place where they intend to work you to death and starve you to death?”
They would; they could; they will.
“Don’t think about it. It’s only speculation, I told you! Like Weird Tales or Amazing Stories. It’s just science fiction, Hank.”
“It seems awfully real to me the way you described it and all.” He shuddered. “What a nightmare.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“You know, for a wonderful fellow, you’ve got some…I don’t know…some really bad ideas inside you.”
“Forget about it, Hank…Think about this perfect beach day and all of us. It’s only a bad dream, a bad dream.”
I began reading aloud the story in the magazine.
After a while I could feel my voice calming him as it always did when I read to him, and I could feel his head drop in my lap and he was asleep.
I picked up my book to read again, but I couldn’t concentrate on these Main Line suburbanites and alcoholic attorneys in Pennsylvania.
All I could think about was what a great place it was now here, what a great time it could be if we fixed some stuff like racism and tolerance. So why couldn’t it last, why couldn’t we all be here five, six years from now? Maybe not young and perfect and innocent like now, but…Yes, innocent, because that’s what they were, my friends, and most of our life was pretty innocent too, and our country was too, even with the Great Depression. I was sure we would forever lose that innocence in 1941 with Pearl Harbor’s treachery, then even more so in 1945 when G.I.’s (possibly including one of my friends) stepped into their first Nazi death camp and saw what they saw, and heard what they heard, and then slowly taught themselves to believe it. But right now they were all so innocent.
There would always be a lingering question for me of how it was that I had found and then fitted in so well with these four young men. I was already working with three of them, and perhaps would also work with Ducky. He was moving his mother out to L.A. to open that diner, their long-deferred dream, and the rest of us had told him that we would invest in it and patronize it. So it looked like we would all be together as friends—at least for a while yet. I’d realized that was one of the things I’d missed about not being young anymore: the ease with which younger people came together. Would I ever be certain that somewhere in the Ministry of Different Times they hadn’t arranged it all? Not really. And suddenly I didn’t care about that. Because I had a
much more important decision to make.
“It’s not a perfect life, but you know what, it is close, Hank,” I whispered into his sleeping face. “And I promise you to make it last as long as I can.”
Having said that, I knew what I was going to do. I would move heaven and earth to write, direct, and produce The Golds. I would make it if it destroyed my career, I would make it if it bankrupted me, and I would make it if it killed me.
He stirred a bit and I whispered again into his unhearing ear:
“I promise you, Hank. I promise you and everyone I know. In fact, I swear it!”
Epilogue
To: A. Lewis Folteroi
School of Film
U.C.L A.
Westwood, CA
June 13th, 2014
Dear Dr. Folteroi,
As per your request, we are forwarding to your office all and any documentary evidence found among the rather sparse remains of Christopher Hall’s house at 2251 North Crescent Heights Blvd.
As I mentioned to you by e-mail, the house was one of four upon that road and on that side of the hill that were affected by a large storm and a resulting mudslide on February 22nd of this year. Because of the apparent damage, it was the task of this office to investigate the property and assess structural integrity and compromised living conditions. Those having been found to be completely substandard, the house at 2251 has been condemned and is slated for demolition, at a date and time to be determined by this office.
Aside from this manuscript, discovered upon what appeared to be a coffee table in an upper room apparently unaffected by the slide, very little else was found. This was found in a sealed plastic box, within a leather binding with a slide clasp for the pages, exactly as you are receiving it. It was addressed to you. In your e-mail response, you expressed surprise at this, saying you had only met Mr. Hall one time, some years ago when he was a guest lecturer at the school. Nevertheless, here it is. The accompanying note reads, “Hi Lew. You might find this interesting.”
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