The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Even their clothes had become a uniform. This season it was narrow-shouldered suits, cuffed sleeves, cream shirts, pointed black shoes, and those awful little hats with no brims. Next season it would be something quite different. But unless you wore the whole outfit, you were improperly dressed, like a soldier with a missing epaulette, and you suffered the same fate – the big black mark which defaced your conduct sheet forever. I was improperly dressed myself, and it was a pleasure. But I was not shamed before my own clan. At these prices, there weren’t any other writers.

  A hand fell on my shoulder, a gritty voice said: ‘Hi, Tolstoy!’, and I turned to face the man I was waiting for, Jack Taggart, my agent.

  He was a large, not too talkative, somewhat unfathomable man who, in the jungle world of agency, sometimes seemed more like a game warden than anything else. Agents could not afford to have split personalities; Jack Taggart came as near to it as any other man at the top of his heap. He was a born ten-per-center, a driving salesman who took whatever I sent him, judged it, categorised it, and then sold it in the precise market which suited it best, to the nearest five dollars. Yet he managed to remain curiously uncommitted; accepting without praising, acting without involvement, selling without ever declaring his critical hand.

  He had loved Ex Afrika, and done his formidable best for it; he had not liked Wrap-Around at all, and never said so, and never pretended that it was anything more than the hottest piece of merchandise that had ever come into his office. But he had gone in to bat for it with the same tough skill, and come out of the game with $500,000 for me – and still no pretence of admiration.

  He did not flatter me, he did not bolster me; he did not play either God or Uriah Heep. He was my agent; not my mentor, not my fool. For all sorts of reasons, some of them stemming from conscience, some not, I was very fond of Jack; and one day I would recapture his regard. But that day was not yet, and we both knew it, and we never said a word on the subject, because neither of us was going to yield, nor change our rules, nor relent.

  Now I gave him a greeting of equal and agreed falsity – ‘Good morning, Svengali,’ – and we settled down at the bar. No Farah Dibah for him; plain whisky, plain water, plain ice, plain glass. It was all he needed to say, or would ever say, about stuffed dates and sawdust people.

  Jack Taggart wasn’t wasting any other kind of time, either.

  ‘Before he comes,’ he said, as soon as his drink was poured, ‘I’d better bring you up to date. I think we have a deal, if you want one.’

  ‘I want one.’

  ‘OK. Like I said the other day, it involves you as well.’

  ‘What do I have to do?’

  ‘Write the book. Give the cues for songs, and what they should be about. You might have some ideas of your own for lyrics, but it’s not necessary – and of course no music from you.’

  ‘Who does that part of it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He’s probably got a team lined up already – maybe the best – but he won’t say until he’s sure of you and Ex Afrika.’

  ‘Sounds all right. I know how much of the story I want to use. What about the money side?’

  Jack Taggart sipped his drink, as I did; the small pause before the vital statistics.

  ‘It’ll be a percentage deal,’ he said after a moment. ‘A cut of the box office gross, after some of the production costs have been taken care of. It’s complicated, but I’ll work all that out with the lawyers. Will you want something now, on account?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This afternoon.’

  He grinned. ‘I don’t know what you do with your money. All right. How about this? Fifteen thousand for saying yes to the idea. Fifteen thousand and expenses for writing all the non-musical side of it. That’ll make a thirty thousand advance, against your percentage of the box office. If it works out properly, and the show goes, that will mean a four or five year income.’

  ‘Tell me again,’ I said, mock dreamily, ‘about My Fair Lady.’

  ‘I doubt if there’ll be any sort of parallel. But you never know.’

  ‘How about an outright sale?’

  Jack looked at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want an outright sale.’

  ‘I might.’

  He was dubious. ‘You’ll lose on it. I doubt if he would go to more than fifty or sixty thousand, for all the rights, all your work, everything. You know what it costs, to put on a big show like this. They like to cut down on the authors … My way, you ought to make a couple of hundred thousand, spread over the years. It isn’t worth doing on any other basis. You’ll just be giving it away.’

  I did some figuring, and agreed. ‘All right. What you said the first time.’

  ‘Good.’ Jack Taggart looked over the rim of his glasses towards the door. ‘There he is now,’ he said, and got down off his stool. ‘Just one thing, Johnny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s very keen on this. Try and take him seriously.’

  ‘“Follow that Lord,”’ I declaimed. ‘“And look you, mock him not.” All right, Jack. I’ll mock him not.’

  ‘That’s my boy.’

  Close to, it needed very little time to see the point of the warning. It was not easy to take Erwin Orwin seriously, unless you were utterly dependent on his grace and favour; if I had wanted to produce a caricature of the world’s idea of a Broadway big wheel, this was the way I would have written him. Vaguely I had known he would be like this, since he was very much in the public eye, and his current musical, Oh My Darling Josephine, which Kate called ‘that awful Napoleon thing,’ was just completing its second year on Broadway, and looked all set for a third. But the great man himself, in the flesh, was still a surprise.

  To begin with, there was a lot of flesh. Erwin Orwin was an enormously fat man, and he made a cult of it; he positively barrelled into the restaurant, wheezing and snorting, scattering other customers like so much chaff; when he shed his coat, it was like an elephant shouldering its way out of a circus tent lined with astrakhan. He was obviously well known to the Satraps; at his approach, fingers were snapped like castanets, waiters scurried like ants on overtime; even the Head Shah came down into the Persian marketplace to greet this rival potentate.

  He boomed out a welcome to me: ‘Mr Steele, it’s my pleasure!’ and then he laughed uproariously, for no reason at all, and it was like a thunderclap; his jowls shook, his vast stomach heaved and swayed. I was reminded of an inverted proverb which Kate once made up: ‘Inside every fat man there’s an even fatter man trying to get out.’ Erwin Orwin seemed intent on making this come true.

  At the table – and he occupied one entire banquette, while Jack and I sat opposite him, on mere four-legged chairs – he went straight into his act. His own personal bottle of whisky, which bore the extraordinary title ‘Colonel Wilberforce’s Entire Old Sour Mash,’ was brought out with a flourish, and sent away again with an even bigger one when he changed his mind about his particular mood-of-the-moment; he finally elected for a vodka martini with three drops – ‘No more, God damn it!’ – of Pernod.

  Ordering lunch was an equally tremendous business; while I settled swiftly for grilled marrow bones and an odd, rather whiskery fish which I had enjoyed before, Erwin Orwin inspected dozens of dishes, from bouillabaisse to rack of venison, and consigned them all to outer hell before ordering a sixteen-ounce blood-red steak from a certain ranch in Texas where, he claimed, he had once worked as a chuck-wagon cook. (Too much TV, I thought; but it could have been true – he had the build, and the gall to match.) So it went, anyway; as well as the build, he now had money, crude showmanship, and current success; and there wasn’t a man, woman, child, or dog in the Court of the Sixteen Satraps who wasn’t made blindingly aware of all three facts.

  I might have been embarrassed or angry at being mixed up with all this nonsense, but I was neither. Some children behave so o
utrageously that, as long as they do not hack one’s own shins, they are funny. This was one of them. Appalling as he was, I liked him.

  He liked me. ‘Mr Steele, I want to make you a rich man,’ was his opening declaration, when the main uproar had subsided, the table-hopping by other extroverts dropped off, and we finally got down to business; and when I answered (feeling the need to put my own point of view) that I was a rich man already, he said: ‘And you deserve to be, God damn it! You’re a genius!’ in a voice that rang through the building. It was irresistible. I suppose it was meant to be, but I didn’t mind that, either.

  Already he had lots of ideas about a musical version of Ex Afrika. ‘Let me tell you how I see it,’ was how he started the discussion, and I would as soon have interrupted Moses’ first précis of the Ten Commandments. But the principal surprise was how closely his ideas sat with my own.

  I also had done a lot of thinking, in the past week; I had roughed out the shape of the thing, what we would have to lose, what we would have to spotlight, what we were trying to say – in short, what the author should do to the show, and what the show should do to the customer. Erwin Orwin, between gulps of raw meat and absurd commands to the waiters, produced a pattern remarkably like my own.

  At one stage of this, he said solemnly: ‘It’s a work of art, of course, but I think we can lick it.’ That was the only moment when Jack Taggart, for the most part a silent witness of our exchange, looked anxiously in my direction. But I answered, with equal solemnity: ‘That’s the only way to stay in the ball park,’ and Erwin Orwin, after a brief flicker of a stare which showed that he knew he was being mocked, laughed with such all-embracing violence that a lamp over his head went out, shattered beyond repair.

  It was a good match, in a lunatic sphere of endeavour, and for that single moment I didn’t mind whether I won or lost, and neither did he.

  But such moments were not meant to last. With coffee and brandy, he asked suddenly: ‘What about money?’

  ‘As long as there’s plenty,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave all that to Jack.’

  ‘That’s what I like,’ said Erwin Orwin. ‘The artistic approach.’

  Jack Taggart bent forward, entering, as I knew he would, exactly on cue.

  ‘Johnny agreed to my idea of a small advance,’ he said. ‘Against a percentage of the box office. I’ll work out the main details, and bring them along tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s a small advance?’ asked Erwin Orwin.

  ‘Thirty thousand. Half now, half on delivery.’

  Erwin Orwin made a pretence of clutching his temples in agony. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘Brandy!’

  Jack Taggart grinned. ‘Oh, come on, Erwin! It couldn’t very well be less, not at this level. For that, you get the name of the book and the name of the man. And all the work he’s going to do on it. Don’t forget, you said he was a genius.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was a genius at this … All right.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘It’s the percentages we’ll be arguing about, anyway.’

  I drew on my cigar, aloof from this sordid chaffering. A woman, old, seamed, grey-blonde, with the death’s-head look of an abandoned whore and a mink coat which, in this context, had died in vain, approached our table, and was waved away by Erwin Orwin, with the brusque dismissal: ‘Not now, damn it!’ There could, in this wonderful world, be losers as well as winners … I said: ‘Who’s going to do the music and the lyrics?’

  ‘Same as for Josephine,’ answered Erwin Orwin. ‘Teller and Wallace. OK?’

  ‘Very much so.’ I was beginning to like all of this, and now it didn’t matter if I showed it. ‘I’ll have to get together with them, before too long.’

  He nodded. ‘They’ll be ready. I want this thing to get rolling as soon as it can. My idea is, you work out your part of it – doesn’t matter how rough it is – so as to give them something to build on, then you can meet up for the real working sessions. Might be a good idea if you all came to stay at my place.’

  I said: ‘Yes,’ not too enthusiastically. I had heard about his place, a vast, split-level, ranch-type hideaway up in the Catskills, with a barn converted into a fifty-seat cinema, and bathrooms labelled ‘Guys’ and ‘Dolls’. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’

  ‘You could bring your wife, too. I hear she’s very beautiful.’

  I shook my head, Chinese-like. ‘She has some pretensions to good looks.’

  ‘That’s not the way I heard it.’ But he wasn’t really interested in anyone else’s world, good or bad. ‘We’ve got to find a name for this thing,’ he said. ‘That’s going to be very important.’

  ‘Something with Africa in it,’ I said. ‘African Song. Song of Africa. Something like that.’

  ‘I thought of X is for Africa,’ said Erwin Orwin.

  ‘Or a word with African connotations,’ I said, shying away speedily. ‘Spoor. Jungle. Safari. Drums.’

  ‘Safari Song,’ said Jack.

  ‘Notes from the Jungle.’

  ‘Jungle Drums.’

  ‘Jungle Bells.’

  ‘Black and White Notes.’

  ‘Black Melody.’

  ‘Black Tracks.’

  ‘Black Safari.’

  It didn’t matter which one of us was speaking; we were gradually losing ground. The process of just thinking aloud was reaching its usual murky depths. Presently Erwin Orwin, a man of practice at such sessions, looked at his watch.

  ‘Well, back to the salt-mines,’ he declared. He levered himself up, quickly enough for so vast a man; when it was time to move, he moved. ‘Mr Steele, I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Jack, call me tomorrow morning. We can probably do this by phone.’

  Jack smiled. ‘I would doubt that.’

  ‘Well, we can try on a few hats.’

  We left the Sixteen Satraps on a swirling tide of other people’s goodwill. The Head Shah bowed to us – or rather, he bowed to Erwin Orwin, gave me a distinct if distant nod, and ignored Jack Taggart, an anonymous man who doubtless had hardly any money at all. In the foyer, the Persian Lambs closed in, coats and all else at the ready. Largesse was distributed like oversize confetti. Erwin Orwin, laughing loudly once more, was whisked away in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce which had the word ‘his’ embossed on the nearside door; and Jack Taggart and I were ushered into a taxi by the Turkish-style doorman, who bowed, touched his fingertips to his forehead, flourished his scimitar in formal farewell, and said: ‘Come back real soon.’

  Riding back up town with Jack Taggart, whom I was to drop off at his office in Rockefeller Centre, I was well content. Lunch had been excellent, the drinks very adequate, the company just right for the occasion; if all lunches were as good, with a cash bonus of $30,000 at the end, this would be a happy life indeed for the dedicated man of letters … I threw away the last of my cigar, and gave the credit for all this where it really belonged.

  ‘Thanks, Jack. Another win for the old pro … I liked Orwin, in spite of all the snow. He ought to be an easy man to get along with.’

  ‘Don’t fool yourself. When he gets exactly what he wants, he’s as sweet as pie. Otherwise–’ he gestured, ‘–a heart as big as all indoors. He can be the toughest man in this fair city.’

  ‘Will there be much wrestling about that box office percentage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It didn’t sound that way.’

  Jack Taggart smiled. ‘Oh, that’s just part of the act. I know what he’ll give, he knows what I’ll take. The figures happen to coincide. End of drama.’

  I sighed. ‘Thank God I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘Now don’t go into your act … That was good news about Teller and Wallace. They’re right at the top of their form now. It must have cost Erwin a fortune to get them. Which means that he’s really serious about this.’

  ‘How will they be t
o work with?’

  ‘Strictly professional. You’ll have to run to keep up. It’s Erwin who takes his own sweet time.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He likes other people to work fast. Then he looks at the result, and tears it all apart, and sends it back for repairs, again and again. It’s the only thing he ever wastes money on, and he can afford to, with what he’s got going for him. He breaks all the rules. I’ve known him take a year producing a show. Josephine was nearly five months in rehearsal. But that doesn’t mean you can dawdle. Your rules aren’t breakable.’ Our taxi was slowing for the lights of 49th Street, and Jack Taggart leant forward. ‘I’ll get out here … How’s the book coming along?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it be finished about now?’

  ‘It’s turning out longer than I expected.’

  The taxi was stopped. ‘I don’t want to hurry you, Johnny, but Hobart Mackay shouldn’t have to wait forever.’

  ‘Has he said that?’

  ‘No. He would never press you. But it’s in the air, just the same.’ Jack decided not to get out, and the taxi moved on a block, caught in sluggish traffic. ‘It really is time for that third novel.’

  It was now my turn to say: ‘Haven’t they made enough money out of me?’

  ‘I’m not arguing on that. But they did advance forty thousand, and that was two years ago.’

  ‘This musical will take care of the rent.’

  ‘I’m not arguing on that, either.’ The taxi was stopped again, between streets, and he opened the door, prepared to make the necessary suicidal dart for the sidewalk. ‘But we want to take care of you, too. You’re a writer, with books in your head. Remember?’