‘When?’
‘About five weeks.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, though with an alarming sense of misgiving which was not related to the show. ‘We’ve done our best with it. I think it’s about ready to go, whether you put it on in Boston or here.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Erwin. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be taking this sort of chance. But it won’t be easy. We’ll have to work like crazy.’
‘OK.’
‘No more hangovers.’
‘Oh, come on, Erwin – this was the first one.’
‘It’s the first one that got into the record books. I’ll want you all the time, Johnny. How soon can you get down?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘I’ll be looking for you.’
I put the phone back, with a feeling that something beyond price – some healthy limb, some conviction of piety – had been ripped from me while I was off-guard. God, how did a man ward these things off, and still get a little sleep … For now I had my urgent assignment, and it wasn’t going to be Kate after all. Erwin’s call had seen to that.
Now I was foul-hooked elsewhere, and I had no choice save to follow the wrenching drag of the line. For a thousand reasons, The Pink Safari had to have all the priority; I was doomed to give Kate second place again, and in our present wasteland the demotion might be fatal. This was the one priority she would never recognise.
But there could be nothing else on the list, till the show was mounted. And if, after that, there were no list left to turn to, I might be foul-hooked forever.
Chapter Eight
Erwin Orwin’s after-the-first-night parties were never geared for failure, and the party he put on for the premiere of The Pink Safari was no exception. It was, as always, held on stage, as soon as possible after the fall of the curtain; he kept the set as it was, except for taking out the backdrop, and filled the vast available space with tables, bars, an enormous buffet, and a throng of people to match.
It was part of Erwin’s touch-of-Napoleon technique that he never followed theatrical fashion, neither in this particular area, nor in most others. He did things his own way – and thus, after a first night, he did not go to Sardi’s. Sardi’s, with bulging hampers, a fleet of heated trolleys, and crate after crate of the right stuff, came to him.
The curtain had rung down, reasonably near to schedule, at eleven-thirty; by twelve o’clock, the stage was jumping again. It was a merry charade, because we thought we had cause to be merry – the show had romped through without a hitch, the audience had seemed to love it, and everyone was saying, between drinks: ‘They can’t pan this one …’ These were famous last words, of course, and Broadway was littered with expensively embalmed theatrical corpses to prove it; but this time, this time it seemed they really couldn’t … So we celebrated, with a good heart, steady nerves – until the time for the reviews drew nearer – and most of the stops out.
An orchestra played for us, and in between times Teller’s mother’s cousin took over at the piano, pounding out the Safari tunes which people were already beginning to hum. The guests danced – there were loads of pretty girls available, all with hair like Susan’s – and ate a lot, and drank more, and gathered into knots and wandered around the set, arguing, or melted into the shadows for a brisk clinch.
There was probably some kind of esoteric message in the fact that this celebration party, held on stage, put some people into the full glare, and others wandering in and out of the wings, and others nowhere to be seen. Life, my boy, life … Myself, I had the glare, and it was beginning to blur a little at the edges.
It was a theatrical crowd, the famous and the infamous jumbled together like differing grades of egg; the only grade not represented were the critics on the dailies, absent with leave, crouched even now, with the knives or unguents of their trade, over the prostrate body of my brainchild. There were moments, many moments, when I did not care what they did with it; moments when this whole evening seemed to slop over into absolute falsity – a falsity presented in specific terms by our own Safari cast who, ruthlessly coy, delayed their various entrances until the moment seemed propitious, and then swept back upon the stage, ready, they hoped, to take the best curtain call of the evening.
Actors … But I could not deny that they deserved it. They had all been wonderful, and they knew it, and we knew it, and thus they were entitled to this little extra slice of nonsense. Dave Jenkin, attended by his raucous girlfriend, was especially prominent, prancing around the stage like a compatriot boxer at the moment of victory; but he had risen to the very top of his form that evening – agile, cheeky, sometimes very funny, and always timing to perfection – and he now had, as far as I was concerned, a free hand to put on any kind of an act he chose. He had proved himself a star. Let the star gyrate a bit.
I was gyrating myself, though in smaller and smaller circles.
People congratulated me. I congratulated people. Erwin Orwin held court behind a massive corner table, piled with food. Teller’s mother’s cousin gave of his best. On my side – it was a night for remembering that there were two sides to everything – I had Jack Taggart, looking all-competent, and Hobart Mackay, looking out of place, and beautiful Susan Crompton, looking just fine.
Beautiful Susan was excited, but full of the pangs of remorse, for something really important. She had fluffed one of her only two lines, though with an air of such ravishing incompetence that the audience had roared with laughter. (I could imagine Erwin saying, out of the corner of his mouth: ‘We’ll keep that one in.’) But Susan, at the moment, was not to be consoled. It was obvious that she would talk about this setback for many months to come.
‘I thought I’d die, right there on the stage!’ she declaimed, as soon as we had met, and I had told her how wonderful she was. ‘And I’d rehearsed it so many times!’
‘It didn’t matter,’ I assured her. ‘Really it didn’t.’
‘It did, it did!’ she wailed. ‘It was awful! And what will people think? What will she think?’
‘She?’
‘Your wife!’
I felt able to promise that Kate would not, for this particular reason, think any the worse of her. I had no doubt that this was true. I couldn’t check it with Kate, because I couldn’t see Kate, at that moment. I was not in good shape, for all sorts of reasons. It had been a long evening, a raw evening. I had spent a lot of it with Kate, but now, in the midst of the crowds and congratulations and the merry merry fun, I was finishing it alone.
It had been very exciting; one could not be blasé about an evening which had gone with such a triumphant swing, the glittering culmination of nearly a year’s hard work. Like Dave Jenkin, I felt entitled to my own little prance of victory … I had sat in a box beside Kate, with an unauthorised row of drinks close to hand, and watched the thing unfold, so well and so smoothly that presently I stopped sweating, and drank only to success, and for pleasure.
Safari had been funny, as I hoped it would – wildly funny, bitterly funny, cruelly funny on a cruel strand of the world’s multiple troubles. I enjoyed it, and nodded when bits of it went especially well, and glowed a little when people laughed, and glowed even more at the final applause. But all the time, I could guess what Kate must be thinking. Indeed, I knew. Was racial strife ever funny? Were there jokes to be made out of side-by-side squalor and affluence? What had happened to Ex Afrika? What – that famous old conundrum, the despair of the leading savants of two continents – what had happened to me?
Her main reaction to the play itself had been silence; in fact, we had only spoken to each other twice during the entire evening. When Susan came on, Kate said: ‘So that’s your Miss Thing.’
‘She was,’ I said, with a slight extra emphasis.
‘Well done.’
It was rather too elliptical for me.
Later she
had seemed to have a moment of tears, though for what and for why I did not know. Was it when the Negro child died, and a single sad guitar theme picked its way out of the jungle of the native-location music? Or was it for other things? For me, for herself, for us? I could not tell, I did not know how to ask.
At the second interval, she put a curious question: ‘Do you remember “God is black”?’
I did remember, though I could not see why she had recalled it tonight. It had been something long ago, in Johannesburg, when I had told her: ‘If you want to know what it feels like to be a native in South Africa, go along to the steps of the Town Hall, and take a look at the pillar at the far end.’
I would not tell her why, so she had gone to look, and found what I had found earlier that day – the words ‘God is black’ scrawled in chalk on one of the civic pillars. When she came back, she had asked: ‘But what does it mean?’
‘Despair and hope, in three words.’
It was a hot day, and she was rather cross. ‘You might just as well have told me what it was. I never walk as far as that.’
Now, in the theatre, it was my turn to ask: ‘What made you think of that?’
‘I was remembering,’ she answered, and that was all she would allow me. Though we sat together, sculptured, like royalty, with fixed dynastic smiles, we were utterly divided still. It was part of the rawness of that evening, and it came at the end of five weeks of the same forlorn, contemptuous, bitter disengagement.
When next I thought about the time, it was 1 a.m.; the party was thinning out, though not very much – no party with a theatrical basis ever broke up before the food and drink were finished, and there were still those reviews to come … I sighted Kate once, talking to Jack Taggart; across the stage, they noticed me looking at them, and they smiled back, but it did not seem that they smiled very much. Hate Steele Month was still on.
A rather pretty girl, with bare feet and her dress torn, came walking hurriedly out of the wings; then she turned, and called to some unseen adversary: ‘You don’t have to rape me!’ ‘I would say that was true,’ said the cynical fellow standing next to me at the huge central bar, and I laughed with him. But suppose it had been my sister … Dave Jenkin was doing a wild tap-dance routine in the middle of the stage, putting most of it out of bounds for other dancers. Erwin was at his post, still eating, talking very gravely indeed to one of his backers, who talked very gravely back.
I overheard Susan say: ‘You know, I think you’re absolutely right! I was over rehearsed!’
It was my newly adopted world, and I didn’t like it at all.
Then the man on the other side of me suddenly turned out to be my publisher.
‘It’s past your bedtime, Hobart,’ I told him.
‘It’s past our bedtime,’ he said precisely.
‘I hope no one misconstrues that.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘That would not surprise me at all. What very peculiar people you have in the theatre.’ Then he turned to look at me more closely. ‘Aren’t you rather pale?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been working. Si monumentum requiris – can’t pronounce the rest of it. And worrying. And of course drinking. All people like me are pale … Tell me that you liked the show.’
‘I liked the show.’
‘More!’
‘It should do very well.’
He was something less than effusive, and I couldn’t quite let it go. ‘Don’t have a complete mental breakdown over this.’
‘No, I really did like it, Jonathan. I thought it was very good.’ He added, with a certain amount of care: ‘You know – of its kind.’
‘Like a beautifully designed sewer?’
He laughed, while I drank. ‘Like a beautifully designed musical. But don’t forget, I published Ex Afrika.’
‘There’s plenty of Ex Afrika in this.’
Now he was looking worried, as if he did not know whether to answer me seriously or not; he seemed more than ever, like a professor – a professor with an unruly class which might start acting out the Blackboard Jungle while his back was turned. At length he said: ‘Well, it’s half the story, isn’t it? The funny half – no, that’s not it exactly. The top half, sad and funny both, but basically the part that doesn’t matter.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘You see I’m trying to be quite honest about this … All the part under the surface, the core of Ex Afrika, is still in the book. And only in the book.’
I drank again. What was it Kate said about criticism? I must learn to be brave about it … ‘Then we’re both satisfied. I have a show, you have a book.’
His brow cleared. ‘I’d be completely satisfied if you’d write me another one.’
‘I will, Hobart, I will. Don’t crowd me.’
I passed my glass across the bar for a refill, and the barman, a refined youth not quite at home in these raffish surroundings, asked: ‘Something similar?’
‘Too right!’ I said, in my Australian accent.
He sniffed as he passed the champagne glass back to me. I had made another enemy – and a barman at that.
‘I’m not crowding you,’ said Hobart.
‘What?’
‘You said, “Don’t crowd me”, and I’m not.’
‘Oh.’ He had sounded rather irritated. ‘That’s good to know.’
I had the impression that he was not going to talk to me very much longer.
‘How are things at home?’ he asked presently.
‘Terrific,’ I said. ‘One long honeymoon.’
‘Kate was looking very well.’
‘What’s “was”? She is!’
‘I meant, when I talked to her.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t think I’ll wait for those reviews after all. I’m sure they’ll be wonderful.’
‘You wish to leave me?’
‘It’s time to go.’ For a small man, he could be firm enough when he wanted to be. ‘Good night, Jonathan. Let’s have lunch, one of these days.’
‘With a new book by Steele?’
‘With or without a new book by Steele. But in a perfect world–’ he gestured, and smiled, and was gone.
I turned to the barman, and said: ‘Something similar.’ But he was now a different barman, an oldish, disgruntled, rushed-off-his-feet man who did not speak the language of leisure. He snatched my glass, and asked curtly: ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘Don’t you know a champagne glass when you see one?’
He glared at me, and stuck out a bristly chin. ‘Yeah. That’s why I asked. Champagne’s finished.’
‘Who says so?’
He pointed to an empty bottle. ‘Look for yourself, Mac.’
‘Good God! Don’t you know who I am?’
‘No.’
‘Good God!’
Very weak dialogue, Steele, I thought, as I turned away; we won’t keep it in. But I knew where the champagne would be, if there was any left in the theatre. Like Lord Muddley, it was the kind of thing I heard about.
Erwin – enormous, overflowing, massive old theatrical czar Erwin Orwin – made room for me at his table as I sat down beside him.
‘Hallo, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Have some more champagne. You know my associate, Mr Ehrlich?’
‘No.’ I shook hands with Mr Ehrlich, a tall, thin, precise Jew with very formal manners and, I should have guessed, lots of money. ‘But I do now. And yes, Erwin, I’d like some champagne. I feel bound to tell you that in certain parts of this building, the champagne has run out.’
‘Mine hasn’t,’ said Erwin. ‘There’s got to be a limit for actors, that’s all.’ He snapped his fingers, and a man jumped forward, with a magnum of Louis Roederer at the ready; he snapped them again, and a cigar was brought, and a third man lit it almost before I knew it was in my mouth. ‘Well, Johnny,
how does it feel to have a hit?’
‘We have a hit?’
‘What else? This is going to be the toughest ticket in town.’
‘Five stars,’ said Mr Ehrlich. ‘Not a star less.’
‘Ehrlich is the German for honourable.’
‘Even so,’ said Mr Ehrlich.
‘Your girl was terrific,’ said Erwin.
‘All right, Erwin. But thanks for giving her a try, anyway.’
‘Have you another work in mind?’ asked Mr Ehrlich.
‘A novel.’
‘May it make another great musical enterprise!’
We talked about that, and this and that, and the theatre, and how good Dave Jenkin had been, and how The Pink Safari would make a fabulous film (side glances exchanged between Mr Ehrlich and Mr Orwin), until two o’clock, when there was a sudden outbreak of ooh-and-ah on the other side of the stage, and people came running in with the morning papers, and we had our reviews.
Suddenly everyone was kissing and laughing and shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. The party took a wild upward swing. Dave Jenkin was uttering loud yells of delight, hugging his girlfriend, turning cartwheels all round the stage. The orchestra, which had been flagging, began to roar and thump out our songs, with many an extra clash of cymbals. More champagne appeared, released from some prudent reserve, and with it came fresh smiles and whoops and people joining hands and dancing. Erwin, delighted, put his arm round my shoulder; even Mr Ehrlich gave my hand a small informal squeeze.
People crowded up to our table, waving newspapers, pointing to headlines, upsetting glasses, clapping me on the back, kissing the nape of my neck. ‘They mentioned me!’ Susan cried, and collapsed into the nearest chair, overcome by the sheer grandeur of fame. Someone yelled: ‘Three cheers for The Pink Safari!’ and the cheers came up like high-pitched thunder.
We had a hit.
They were fantastic reviews – the dictionaries must have been combed for adjectives, and we had enough quotable comments to crowd a full-page ad. ‘Safari a Smash!’ ‘Rip Roaring Success’, ‘Five Star Hit!’ ‘My Fair Safari!’ ‘Dazzling Display of Talent’, ‘Resounding Triumph’, ‘You MUST take This Safari!’ – there it was in black and white, quotable, memorable, unarguable. Erwin Orwin’s press agents couldn’t have done better. I couldn’t have done better myself.
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