The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  The reunion was short and to the point. File impatiently allowed the necessary time to renew old acquaintance and for an introduction to Wanda who spoke just enough English to say hello, and then he said abruptly to Mel, ‘How much have you done on the script?’

  ‘On the script? Alex, we just got in this morning.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? You used to take one look at a script and start popping with ideas like a real old-fashioned corn popper. You mean making out big on the idiot box has gone and ruined all that gorgeous talent?’

  Once, when payments on house, car, and grocer’s bills depended on the inflections of File’s voice, Mel had been meek as a lamb. Now, braced by the thought of those residuals pouring out of the TV cornucopia, he found he could be brave as a lion.

  ‘You want to know something, Alex?’ he said. ‘If my gorgeous talent is ruined you’re in real bad trouble, because the script is a disaster.’

  ‘So you say. All it needs is a couple of touches here and there.’

  ‘It needs a whole new script, that’s what it needs, before we make sense out of all that crummy wordage. After I read it I looked up the life of the emperor Tiberius in the history books—’

  ‘Well, thanks for that much anyhow.’

  ‘—and I can tell you everything has to build up the way he’s corrupted by power and suspicion and lust until he goes mad, holed up in that palace on Capri where they have the daily orgies. And the key scene is where he goes off his rocker.’

  ‘So what? That’s in the script right now, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all wrong right now, with this Jekyll into Hyde treatment. All that raving and rug chewing makes the whole thing low comedy. But suppose no one around him can see that Tiberius has gone mad – if only the audience realizes it—’

  ‘Yeah?’ File was warily interested now. ‘And how do you show that?’

  ‘This way. In that corridor outside Tiberius’ bedroom in the palace we want a row of life-sized marble statues. Let’s say six of them, a round half dozen. Statues of some great Romans, all their traditions. We establish in advance his respect for those marble images, the way he squares his shoulders with dignity when he passes them. Then the big moment arrives when he cracks wide open.

  ‘How do we punch it across? We leave the bedroom with him, track with him past those statues, see them as he sees them – and what we see is all his madness engraved on their faces! Get it, Alex? The faces of those statues Tiberius is staring at are now distorted, terrifying reflections of the madman he himself has finally become. That’s it. A few feet of film and we’re home free.’

  ‘Home free,’ echoed Cy Goldsmith. He gingerly pivoted his head toward MacAaron. ‘What do you think, Mac?’ and MacAaron grunted, ‘It’ll do’ – which from him was a great deal of conversation, as well as the stamp of high approval.

  ‘Do?’ Wanda said anxiously. ‘Che succede?’ – because, as Mel knew sympathetically, what she wanted to hear was her name being bandied about by these people in charge of her destiny; so it was only natural when Betty explained to her in her San Francisco Italian what had been said that Wanda should look disappointed.

  But it was File’s reaction that mattered, and Mel was braced for it.

  ‘Statues,’ File finally said with open distaste.

  ‘Twelve of them, Alex,’ Mel said flatly. ‘Six sanes and six mads. Six befores and six afters. This is the key scene, the big scene. Don’t shortchange it.’

  ‘You know what artwork like that costs, sonny boy? You look at our budget—’

  ‘Ah, the hell with the budget on this shot,’ Cy protested. ‘This scene can make all the difference, Alex. The way I see it—’

  ‘You?’ File turned to him open-mouthed, as if thunderstruck by this interruption. And File’s voice was penetrating enough to be heard over all the racket of the traffic behind him. ‘Why, you’re so loaded right now you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you miserable lush. And with the picture almost ready to shoot, too. Now go on and try to sober up before next week. You heard me. Get going.’

  The others at the table – and this, Mel saw, included even Wanda who must have got the music if not the words – sat rigid with embarrassment while Cy clenched his empty glass in his fist as if to crush it into splinters, then lurched to his feet and set off down the street full-tilt, ricocheting into bypassers as he went. When MacAaron promptly rose to follow him File said, ‘Where are you going? I didn’t say I was done with you yet, did I?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ said MacAaron, and then was gone, too.

  File shrugged off this act of mutiny.

  ‘A great team,’ he observed. ‘A rummy has-been and his nursemaid. A fine thing to be stuck with.’ He picked up his cup of tea and sipped it, studying Mel through drooping eyelids. ‘Anyhow, the statues are out.’

  ‘They’re in, Alex. All twelve of them. Otherwise, it might take me a long, long time to get going on the script.’

  This was the point where, in the past, File would slap his hand down on the table to end all argument. But now, Mel saw as File digested his tea, there was no slapping of the table.

  ‘If I say okay,’ said File, ‘you should be able to give me a synopsis of the whole story tomorrow, shouldn’t you?’

  You give me my synopsis and I’ll give you your statues. It was File’s way of bargaining, because File never gave something for nothing. And even though it meant a long night’s work ahead, Mel said, with a sharp sense of triumph, ‘I’ll have it for you tomorrow.’ For once – for the first time in all his dealings with File – he hadn’t knuckled under at the mention of that sacred word Budget.

  When he and Betty departed, not even the thought of the ugly scene with Cy could dim his pleasure in knowing he had browbeaten File into allotting the picture a few thousand dollars more than his precious budget provided. After all, Mel told himself, Cy hardly needed others to comfort him in his sad plight when he had MacAaron to do that for him on a full-time basis.

  Back in the hotel room, Mel stretched out on the bed with the script of Emperor of Lust – a title, he was sure, that had to be File’s inspiration – while Betty readied herself at her portable typewriter, waiting for her husband to uncork the creative flow. Fifteen years before, she had been the secretary assigned him on his first movie job; they were married the second week on the job, and ever since then she had admirably combined the dual careers of amanuensis and wife. Married this long and completely, it was hard for them to surprise each other with anything said or done, but still Mel was surprised when Betty, who had been sitting in abstracted silence, said out of a clear sky, ‘She isn’t the one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wanda. I mean, she’s not Alex’s playmate-of-the-month. She’s not the one he’s going to bed with.’

  ‘I’d say that’s their problem. Anyhow, what makes you so sure about it?’

  ‘For one thing, she’s too old.’

  ‘She must be a fast twenty or twenty-one.’

  ‘That’s still past the schoolgirl age. And she’s just too much woman for him, no matter how you look at it. I think Alex is afraid of real women, the way he always goes for the Alice in Wonderland type.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you know what I’m getting at. We’ve been through it before with him. Sooner or later he’ll turn up with some wide-eyed little Alice, and it makes me sick if it does sound terribly quaint, but I think a man of sixty parading down the Via Veneto with a kid in her first high heels is really obscene. And sitting at the table with us, playing footsie with her. And showing her what a big man he is by putting down someone like Cy—’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mel. ‘And which one is really on your mind? The Alice type or Cy?’

  ‘I pity both of them. Mel, you said last time you’d never work for Alex again. Why did you take this job anyhow?’

  ‘So that I could put him down, the way I did about those statues. I needed that for the good of my soul, sweetheart; it was long overd
ue. Also because The New York Times said that the last one I did for Alex was surprisingly literate, and maybe I can get them to say it again.’

  ‘Still and all—’

  ‘Still and all, it’ll be a hectic enough summer without worrying about Cy and Alice in Movieland and all the rest of it. Right now we’ve got to put together some kind of story synopsis, so tomorrow we’ll run over to Cinecitta to see what sets we’ll have to work with, and after that we’ll be so busy manufacturing stirring dialogue that there won’t be time to think of other people’s troubles.’

  ‘Unless they’re shoved down your throat,’ said Betty. ‘Poor Cy. The day he kills Alex, I want to be there to see it.’

  Cinecitta is the Italian-style Hollywood outside Rome where most of File’s pictures were shot. But when Mel phoned him about meeting him there, he was told to forget it; this one would be made in a lot a few miles south of the city right past Forte Appia on the Via Appia Antica, the Old Appian Way.

  This arrangement, as File described it, was typical of his manipulations. Pan-Italia Productions had built its sets on that lot for an elaborate picture about Saint Paul, and when the picture was completed File had rented the lot, sets and all, dirt-cheap, on condition that he clear away everything when he left. The fact that the sets might be useless in terms of the script File had bought – also dirt-cheap – didn’t bother him any. They were out of Roman history and that was good enough for him.

  In a way, it was this kind of thing which often made working for File as intriguing to Mel as it was infuriating. The script he was handed and the sets and properties File provided usually had as much relationship to each other as the traditional square peg and round hole, and there was a fascination in trying to fit them together. When it came to an Alexander File Production, Mel sometimes reflected, necessity was without doubt the mother of improvisation.

  The next day he and Betty rented a car and drove out to the lot to see what Pan-Italia had left him to improvise with. They went by way of the Porta San Sebastiano, past the catacombs, and along the narrow ancient Roman road through green countryside until they arrived at what looked like a restoration of Caesar’s forum rising out of a meadow half a mile off the road. Beyond it was the production’s working quarters, a huddle of buildings surrounding a structure the size of a small airplane hangar which was undoubtedly the sound stage.

  There was a ten-foot-high wire fence running around the entire lot, and the guard at its gate, a tough-looking character with a pistol strapped to his hip, made a big project out of checking them through. Once inside, it wasn’t hard to find File’s headquarters, which was the building nearest the gate and had a few cars parked before it, among them File’s big Cadillac convertible. The only sign of activity in the area was a hollow sound of hammering from inside the sound stage nearby.

  File was waiting in his office along with Cy, MacAaron, and a couple of Italian technicians whom Mel remembered from the last picture, a Second Unit Director and a lighting man. Neither of them was much good at his job, Cy had once told him – DeMille wouldn’t have let them sweep up for him – but they came cheap and understood English, which was all File wanted of them.

  Mel found that the procedure of starting work for File hadn’t varied over the years.

  ‘All right, all right, let’s see it,’ File said to him without preliminary, and when the story synopsis was handed across the desk to him he read it through laboriously, then said, ‘I guess it’ll have to do. When can you have some stuff to start shooting?’

  ‘In about a week.’

  ‘That’s what you think. This is Friday. Monday morning, Wanda and the other leads are showing up bright and early along with a flock of extras for mob scenes. So eight o’clock Monday morning you’ll be here with enough for Goldsmith to work on for a couple of days. And you’ll have some interior scenes ready, too, in case it rains, then everybody won’t be sitting around on the payroll doing nothing.’

  ‘Look, Alex, let’s get one thing straight right now—’

  ‘Let’s, sonny boy. And what we’ll get straight is that it don’t matter how big you made it on TV, when you work for me you produce like you always did. You are not Ernie Hemingway, understand? You are a hack, a shoemaker, and all you want to do is get some nails into the shoes before the customer gets sore. And no use looking daggers about it, because if you got any ideas of making trouble or walking out on this contract, I’ll tie you up so tight in court you’ll never write another script for anybody for the next fifty years. What do you think of that?’

  Mel felt his collar grow chokingly tight, knew his face must be scarlet with helpless, apoplectic rage. The worst of it, as far as he was concerned, was that everyone else in the room was embarrassedly trying to avoid his eye the way those at the table the day before had tried to avoid Cy’s when File had put him in his place. Only Betty aimed an outraged forefinger at File and said, ‘Listen, Alex—!’

  ‘Stay out of this,’ File said evenly. ‘You’re married to him, so maybe you like it when he makes like a genius. I don’t.’

  Before Betty could fire back, Mel shook his head warningly at her. After all, the contract had been signed, sealed, and delivered. There was no way out of it now.

  ‘All right, Alex,’ he said, hating to say it, ‘Monday, I’ll have some nails in your shoes.’

  ‘I figured you would. Now let’s go take a look at the layout.’

  They all trooped out into the blazing sunshine, File leading the way, Mel lagging behind with Betty’s hand clutching his in consolation. As insurance against mud and dust, Pan-Italia had laid down a tarmac, a hard-surfaced shell, on this section of the lot, and although it was hardly noon Mel could feel it already softening underfoot in the heat. Most of Rome closed up shop and took a siesta during the worst of the midday heat in summer, but there were no siestas on an Alexander File Production.

  Cy Goldsmith fell in step beside Mel. The heat seemed to weigh heavily on Cy; yesterday’s ruddiness was gone from his face, leaving it jaundiced and mottled, and his lips with an unhealthy bluish tinge. But his eyes were bright and sharp, the bleariness cleared from them, which meant that he was, temporarily at least, off the bottle.

  ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘It figured Alex would want to slip the knife into you because of those statues, didn’t it?’

  ‘Did it? Well, if it wasn’t for the contract I’m stuck with he could shove his whole picture. And if he thinks I’m going to really put out for him—’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Mel. Look, for once we’ve got everything going for us – a good story, first-class sets, even some actors who know what it’s all about. I signed them on myself.’

  ‘Like Wanda, our great big beautiful leading lady? Who are you kidding, Cy? What kind of performance can you get out of someone whose lines have to be written in phonetic English?’

  ‘I’ll get a good performance out of her. Just don’t let Alex sour you on this job, Mel. You never dogged it on the job yet. This is no time to start doing it.’

  The pleading note in his voice sickened Mel. Bad enough this big hulk should have taken what File dished out over the years. Now, God help him, he seemed to be gratefully licking File’s hand for it.

  The tarmac came to an end beyond the huge structure housing the sound stage, and another high wire fence here bisected the property and barred the way to the backlot and the replica of the forum on it. The guard at the backlot gate, like his counterpart at the front gate, wore a pistol on his hip.

  When they had passed through the fence and caught up to File he jerked a thumb in the direction of the guard.

  ‘That’s how the money goes,’ he said. ‘You need a guy like that on duty twenty-four hours a day around here. Otherwise, these ginzos would pick the place clean.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ said Betty, whose maiden name happened to be Capoletta. ‘Mille grazie, padrone.’

  ‘Don’t be so touchy,’ File said. ‘I’m not talking about any Italians from Fisherman’s
Wharf, I’m talking strictly about the local talent’; and Mel observed that the pair of technicians who must have understood every word of this looked as politely expressionless as if they didn’t. After all, a job was a job.

  The tour of the sets on the backlot indicated that File had got himself a real bargain. Pan-Italia had built not only the replica of the forum for its Saint Paul picture, but also a beautifully detailed full-scale model of an ancient Roman street complete with shops and houses, and a magnificent porticoed villa which stood on a height overlooking the rest.

  This last, said File, would serve as Tiberius’ palace in Capri, although its interiors would be done on the sound stage. MacAaron and a couple of the camera crew had already been to Capri the week before and taken some footage of the scenery there to make establishing shots look authentic. A Cy Goldsmith brainstorm, that Capri footage, he added irritably, because what difference could it make to the slobs in the audience—

  To get away from File, Mel climbed alone to the portico of the villa. Standing there, looking out over the forum and the umbrella pines and cypresses lining the Appian Way, he could see the timeworn curves of the Alban Hills on the horizon and had the feeling that all this might well be ancient Rome come to life again. Only a dazzle of sunlight reflected from a passing car in the distance intruded on that feeling, but even that flash of light might have come from the burnished armor of some Roman warrior heading south to Ostia in his chariot.

  Then Cy was there beside him, looking at him quizzically.

  ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘And everything fits in with the Tiberius period. Now do you get what I meant about making an honest-to-God picture this time out? I mean, with everything done right. It’s all here waiting to be made.’

  ‘Not by us. Why don’t you quit pushing so hard, Cy? It takes rewrites and retakes and rehearsals to make the kind of picture you’re talking about. The three R’s. And you know how Alex feels about them.’