“You mispronounced hypocritical,” Shelly murmured.
“Go do it to yourself, you leech! You been suckin’ thirty percent of my skin the longest while, and now you got the gall to come up and lean on me because I done took down a little dark meat. I guess you’ve poked the same place…what makes me such a criminal?”
Shelly stood up and approached the boy. It was obvious Stag could take him, even half coordinated as he was from the Colonel’s beating. “I’ll tell you why, you little hard-on. Because she isn’t a girl to you, she’s some kind of black plaything and it’s all right if she has a litter of pickaninnies, because the Great God Stag Preston needed a place to dump his load, and whatthehell, she’s only a jungle bunny, anyhow. That’s why you stink, you little bastard!
“All that guff you fed me about your old man and the dope and your mother and the orphanages…I figured any slob who went through that deserved a lot of breaks, but brother, you’ve used up all your turns. You can turn in your soul now, fella. You smell bad.” He turned to walk away and felt the hand on his shoulder only an instant before he was spun, and the fist drove into his stomach.
It was the only blow.
Shelly doubled, all air exhaling, and tumbled over onto the carpet, on his side. Stag stared down at him, then brought back one Italian loafer and kicked him solidly in the groin.
Pain groped for Shelly, found him, and for a moment he was certain he would faint. Above him he heard Stag mouthing words. “You high-talkin’ sonofabitch!” Stag snarled, “I’d tell you any damn thing to keep you on my side. That was crap just like you’re crap.
“My old man was like any other old man, and my old lady was too dumb to stop me from robbin’ her purse when I needed the dough to get away. I’d do anydamnthing to get away from them self-made, pious assholes, and you’d better know I’ll do the same to stay where I am. You just ain’t sharp enough, Shel-baby, to know when someone’s snowin’ the ass off you.”
The pain receded. There were greater pains. Shelly felt, all at once, like crying.
“And now that I’m big time, sucker, you can shove it. And if you don’t like it, you can sell your thirty percent and get the fuck away from me.”
Shelly stared up at the boy. He saw very clearly the face of the boy, not as he had deluded himself into thinking it looked, but as it really was. The face of the…the …creature he had helped create. He was stung and bled dry by his naiveté in actually believing what he had wanted to believe—that there were any sparks of decency in the boy. All at once he knew how Einstein must have felt, or Victor Frankenstein, or the obscure Chinese who had first invented gunpowder. He knew what it was to feel responsible for turning loose something hideous.
Check out? Forget the boy? Let him shift for himself? That was no longer possible. He was responsible. He had molded Stag out of inert matter, and now it was his job to stay handy, to mitigate the evil Stag could turn loose on others.
(And somewhere in him, the Sheldon Morgenstern who had himself prowled and eaten in Jungle York reminded him:
Your investment is at stake.
Carlene will leave you.
You’ve grown accustomed to the good life.
What will you do on your own…you aren’t a hot shot kid any more.
You aren’t your brother’s keeper.
But it was a voice from someone else, someone dying, who had occupied this Sheldon Morgenstern’s body with him. A voice from a life before Stag Preston had knocked him down and made him see the truth, unglossed with greed. He heard that voice.)
But he just lay there, watching the boy’s retreating back. Stag stopped at the door and turned. Everyone was making exit speeches these days.
“Take care of yourself, Shelly. See you later. I got a date with one of these Sands chorus girls. Get back to ya later, sweetheart.”
Then he was gone, and Shelly lay there enjoying his pain and his penance.
TWELVE
Trudy Quillan had not been as young and simple as she had looked. Or perhaps it was simply that contact with Stag had hardened her. She would not accept Freeport’s first two offers of settlement in Stag’s name. She jacked them ten thousand dollars higher, gave ten percent to Golightly (who gladly signed the release Freeport’s lawyers drew up), and went off to Pennsylvania by jet to find the Good Doctor there who would scrape and cleanse her.
Shelly did his work as he was expected to do it, and no mention of the affair was even breathed to the Hedda/Louella/Sheilah set. The matter faded, from everyone’s mind but Shelly’s who had noticed something:
Stag had had difficulty raising the money to pay Trudy Quillan and Golightly. His spending had been catching up with him, and while it was nothing that serious, a few more peccadilloes and Stag might be working for a small salary from his stockholders.
After the Sands engagement they made short work of San Diego, San Francisco and waded through a hard four days in Los Angeles, aware constantly that they were being watched by the Eyes of Movie Town. Freeport grew pensive, distant, cautious. Stag grew more arrogant, skittish, as he was discovered by the night-flying wastrels of the area, and smug toward Shelly, who did his work, kept his own counsel, and took to drinking Mexican hot chocolate in espresso houses along the Strip.
The status remained quo.
Waiting.
When the time finally came for talks with Universal, Freeport went into them—Shelly saw it—the way Roosevelt went to Yalta. Banks of lawyers, accountants, statisticians, recorders and secretaries followed the Colonel, Stag (who insisted on being present), and Shelly into the offices of Milt Rackmil, head of Universal. It took three days, and in that time thirty-five butcher’s pads of scratch paper were consumed, fifty-nine pencils were worn to nubs, eight hundred and nine cigarettes, cigars, pipes and hookahs were smoked, one tape recorder blew a fuse, three gallons of coffee and other assorted beverages passed down throats, innumerable suspicious glances were cast, and not one curse word was used.
When the smoke cleared, everyone was happy. Both sides thought they had pulled a grand coup on the other. What neither side realized was that there had been three sides in the affair. Theirs, ours, and
Stag’s.
During the third week of shooting, Ruth Kemp’s letter came for Stag. The months of preparation for the filming of Rockabilly had been so crammed with early risings and late takes that the time had passed without Shelly’s noticing it. Stag had been effectively put out of commission insofar as night life was concerned by the very rigors of his schedule. A week of screen tests (which, not having been taken before the contractual talks, led Shelly to believe Universal’s spotters had been watching Stag for some time, and knew he had a well-developed stage presence), a week of costumes, makeup, sittings before the publicity cameras, interviews with the hennaed harridans from the fan magazines, “deportment talks” with the high brass, all these (and back through the gantlet again) combined to whisk the time away, and dull both Stag’s and Shelly’s interest in extracurricular endeavors.
As though magically, a script appeared, and Shelly stood in awe of Stag as the boy disappeared for three days, no one knew where though nails were chewed to the quicks, and returned with a solid working memory of the entire screenplay. Everyone was amazed at his quick study, and a memo came down from Olympus praising him.
Stag said nothing, acted as though he had been getting “into” scripts all his life.
Shelly appeared on the set daily, appeared at the reading rooms, showed up at walk-through and blocking sessions, and soon knew the script himself. He was of the (silent) opinion that Rockabilly would not give the producers of Black Orpheus or Paths of Glory any heartaches. Avant-garde, it wasn’t. Chopped liver, it wasn’t, either, but only by the barest margin.
The screenwriter assigned to the project had made a sizeable income and a residence in Coldwater Canyon on the strength of forty-eight “B” melodramas alternately extolling the merits of various gangsters and life in The Big City. It was competent hac
kwork. From the outset, it was obvious the sole redeeming facet of Rockabilly was its star, young and scintillant Stag Preston. The director, the producer, the Senior Toady, everyone agreed they had something hot here. Whatever Stag had on stage, in person, it was not lost on the screen. And by the studious application of shadow to the face (much in the same manner Joan Crawford had been shadowed), the hardness of Stag’s features was diminished. The cruel set of the mouth was retained; the masses liked their gods with a touch of what they thought was strength.
Which brought forcibly home to Shelly how little anyone really was able to differentiate between strength and cruelty. He had only recently ingested the knowledge himself.
But Stag worked. Lord, how he worked!
Then, in the third week, with shooting ahead of schedule, the letter came from Louisville. It had been forwarded by Joe Costanza from the New York offices, the name familiar to him, but to no one else in the office.
After all, who had ever heard of Luther Sellers?
Shelly shuffled the letter out of the morning’s stack; he stared for a time at the return address and Luther’s name in Ruth Kemp’s handwriting (he assumed); a carefully-worked script that struck his memory as resembling the cards his first grade teacher had put on the blackboard illustrating how the letters of the alphabet were written. He considered opening it and reading the contents; he also considered burning the letter and flushing the ashes down the toilet, but thought better of it; if it was something that might touch Stag, then it might ameliorate the current tense situation. If it was bad news, then the little bastard deserved to suffer. If that was inhumanly possible.
He took the mail over at the noon break. The boy was having lunch with Leslie Parrish, his costar, in the studio commissary; when Stag saw his publicity man, the curling sneer appeared unbidden. “Well, if it isn’t my man Shelly. Whatcha got for me, guy?”
Shelly handed him the letter.
Stag’s grin melted away like mist on the moors as he read the return address. He fingered the short, squat envelope for a moment, then ripped it open carelessly. He unfolded the two sheets of note paper, a pink self-conscious shade that somehow seemed proper, coming from Ruth Kemp. He excused himself from the girl and she smiled briefly, politely, at Shelly before addressing herself to the pineapple and cottage cheese salad.
Stag read the letter, a tiny nerve in his jaw tripping. When he had read both sheets, he refolded them, put them back in the envelope, and tore the entire packet neatly in half. “So?” he said, turning an innocent expression on Shelly.
He handed the pieces to the older man and turned back to Leslie Parrish, his steak sandwich and his own world.
“So nothing,” Shelly answered, shrugging.
“So I’ll see you around.” Stag dismissed him without turning around. Leslie Parrish smiled briefly, politely. She looked uncomfortable.
Alone in Stag’s dressing room, Shelly fitted the pieces of the letter together. Once assembled, they read
Dear Luther,
Both myself and Mr. Kemp are very happy for the way you have been making such a success of yourself. Things here have not been so good as with you.
Asa has been very sick, and to be truthful the doctors do not see much hope.
The truth is that Asa is very sick and I don’t know how to put it down properly, but we are all afraid he will die.
Luther, Asa keeps asking for you and if you can see your way clear to doing it for him, he loves you so, we have your old room all made up and it would only be for a couple of days. Do you think you can make it? He wants to see you so much Luther and it would make him so happy. I know we have no right to ask this of you as the last time we spoke it was not on the best of terms but this you can see is something that is breaking my heart. I am all alone Luther and as you know Asa and I have been hard pressed to make ends meet so every cent I have will have to go to make Asa comfortable for what ever time he has left—and after. I cannot write any more Luther except to beg you please to come to Asa now when he wants to see you so much.
You know you are like a son to him. Please.
With love,
Ruth Kemp
Shelly read it over again. The jagged tear lines where Stag had ripped the letter only made it easier to read. There were smudges on the paper, and small wrinkled spots where Ruth Kemp might have cried. He pictured little Asa Kemp, lying in a big bed, alone, prepared to go, not too unhappy about it, except he wanted to see the boy he had taken in, and wondering what his wife would do now that he could not run the bicycle shop. It was every man’s inevitable finis, and Shelly could not work up too much sympathy, yet the callousness of the boy ignoring the letter made him queasy. Was such utter disregard for human emotions possible? Or did Stag feel a demand, a drag, from his past? Was all his callousness merely affectation, a bulwark against a return to the days and memories Stag hated and feared so much? Abruptly, Shelly remembered Stag’s words on the plane as they had left Louisville that first time:
Goodbye, you sonofabitch poor, goodbye.
How much fear could one mortal shell contain? Didn’t it reach a surface tension where it domed up and spilled over? Or was it like “hitting bottom”? No bottom, really, just falling and falling deeper and deeper, and never hitting the bottom that did not exist. Was it like that? Was fear like cancer? Could it rot someone out like a tree stump, like a rotten tooth, like rust on a piece of iron? Could it eat away all decency and leave something not quite human?
If it could, then Stag Preston was a prime example of the disease. “And somebody’d better get up a telethon for him,” Shelly concluded aloud.
He neatly whisked up the pieced-together letter and dropped it into the wastebasket.
That afternoon, on the set, Stag ran through a scene of deep emotion, with a quaver of sincerity and hopelessness in his voice that Shelly grudgingly admitted sounded honest as hell, without a drop of phoniness or “acting” in it. At one point Stag dropped out of character and politely, in a dulcet tone, asked the director if the phrase shouldn’t be put thus, rather than so, as the script offered it. The director snapped for his script girl, who came running, the place marked with a silver fingertip, and she stared over his shoulder as the page was studied. Shelly shivered inwardly as the director looked up with respect in his expression.
“Go ahead, Stag, try it that way; I think it’ll play.”
Stag read the line—no, that wasn’t right: he lived the emotion of the line—in his personal manner, and it added, it dragged from the prosaic script a nuance Shelly had missed completely when reading it.
Around the set smiles and nods of admiration came and went…leaving behind them another glowing facet of the legend.
Shelly went out and got very drunk. That night he found himself lying naked in a heap of four girls with unpleasant body odors, unclipped and straight hair, and fingernails bitten down to the quicks. When he extricated himself, smelling musky and like the aftermath of something he had never known existed—dirty sex—he put on his clothes and staggered out of the Venice Beach bohemian pad. How he had gotten there he never knew. His car was nowhere in sight. He was broke, save for twenty-four cents caught in the turned-around lining of his left pants pocket.
He used a dime of the money to call Carlene collect. There was no answer at the apartment. He managed to get a cab that drove him back to the bungalow he rented; and the owner, recognizing his tenant, paid the cabbie, put it on Shelly’s bill, and half-carried the exotic-smelling publicity man to the proper bed. He undressed him to his shorts, slipped Shelly between the cool sheets, and shut off the lights on his way out.
But Shelly was not asleep.
Drugged by dissipation, gagged by remorse and the itch of new ethics, sour stomached with the realization that Life Is Not A Fountain, and bewildered by the disappearance of the creature who had been Sheldon (I Want Mine) Morgenstern. But not asleep.
Never asleep.
Cerberus standing guard to insure no one’s entering the gate
of Stag Preston’s evil.
Ever-faithful, hammered out of his nut, grin as big as all outdoors Sheldon Morgenstern, whose Poppa said a kaddish for a dead son gone to Hell in Hollywood. But not asleep.
For several hours he lay there, staring at the play of lights on the ceiling from night-running trucks grinding past on the highway. Staring at lights, with his hands crossed against his chest as though he were laid out with lilies, smelling the embalmer’s formaldehyde.
THIRTEEN
Rockabilly was completed and in the cans ten days ahead of schedule. The Gods Upstairs threw a cast party at which Stag was gifted with a solid gold cigarette case and lighter, his first name tastefully spelled out in rubies on the face of it. Leslie Parrish kissed the boy several times, but for the most part smiled briefly, politely. The director made a short speech about how they had accomplished more in Rockabilly than they had set out to do, chiefly because of their friend the star, Stag Preston; the producer ventured a darkling hint about Academy Awards, and the hint was chased by impressed oooh’s and aaah’s. Stag found it necessary only to smile and bow and wink knowingly during the proceedings—until he was able to break away to ball an extra, a short girl with pixie black hair named Marcie, from Joplin, Missouri.
The film was sneak previewed in five locations simultaneously: The State Theatre in Kalamazoo, Michigan; The Varsity Theatre in Evanston, Illinois; The Boyd Theatre in Philadelphia; Radio City Theatre in Minneapolis; The Esquire Theatre in Stockton, California. There had been some talk of letting word slip at The Manor in San Mateo, California—word that Stag’s first picture would be screened there—but the studio decided not to rig the results with a horde of teen-aged admirers. The sneaks went off as scheduled and when the cards had been returned, no one doubted they had a star and a money maker.
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