That is what I told John, and I am sorry if you think I was unjustified in saying as much. Without me I feared that you would simply succumb and do whatever they wished, and that made it even worse, because in preserving my own self, even though I insisted to myself, and to you and John and others, that I was trying to protect you, to allow you to have your life, I secretly knew that I was doing the opposite. I was saving myself on the altar of your sacrifice. If I had stayed I am certain we would have faced other, different horrors, but I might also have saved you from disaster. I am equally certain that if I had found the courage to stay, that day would not have ended as it did.
John slumped in a chair against the wall. His color was bad, skin turning purple, as if he was on the verge of cardiac arrest. Isn’t there anything we can do? His voice was choked and for the first time in our acquaintance he looked to me like an old man.
Nothing short of starting our own company.
No one would work with us, Desmond.
Myles would. Helen would. I can name a hundred people who don’t look or act the way Hollywood expects and can’t get the parts they deserve who would. Mozelle for one. I bet she could act rings around Mary. Imagine if everyone too black or brown or yellow or Red or queer teamed up to make movies like we wanted to make them. Movies that show America like it really is.
John stared at me as if seriously considering the idea but after a moment shook his head. No one would want to see them. Look at this country. People don’t want to be forced out of their complacency. America will never see another revolution so long as the stores are full and a bare majority still believe they might be rich one day.
That assumes mainstream America is emptied out of people with sympathetic hearts, John, or that there aren’t hundreds of thousands of people every bit as alienated as we are. This is not just a nation of Red baiters and racists and people who want to throw men like me in the fire. I have to believe at least half the population doesn’t actually feel that way. We can’t know how people will respond unless we try.
Maybe, but we’d still never get distribution. You know I’m right.
Well then, that’s your answer, there’s nothing we can do. I quit my job this afternoon hoping such sacrifice might save a few others but the truth is I doubt it. My own sacrifice means nothing to anyone but me.
And the people you might have named, John said, as if he meant himself in particular.
Names would have turned to ash in my mouth. I wouldn’t have been able to speak. I would have gone to prison before naming names. And if I don’t get out of the country in the next few days that might still be the outcome.
I hope I can be as brave as you.
I don’t know that it was brave, John. I wonder now if it was just the opposite. Is running ever brave? It might be sensible or logical, but I’m not sure bravery comes into it. It takes courage to turn my back on what I have here, but part of me wonders if it’s cowardly not to stand and fight.
From my desk I looked out for the last time at the falling dark and the glow of the studio and the lights on the streets beyond, lights illuminating bungalows and empty lots and the more distant lights spreading far across the city and into the hills.
Under the circumstances, I don’t expect you to come this evening, John said.
It’s my last Hollywood party. I’d be ashamed to miss the shame of attending.
Why don’t we sneak in to watch the dailies one last time?
This was something John and I did whenever we were making a film together, stealing in through the back door of the studio screening room late in the afternoon as Porter and Krug reviewed the footage shot over the previous day.
I dialed the operator and asked her to arrange a messenger to take the crates back to the house. Empty, the room looked like it was in mourning, evacuated of hope and promise. It had the same look when I first moved into it, filthy with its previous occupant’s defeat, but during my tenure I had tried to ignore that haunting energy and revive it with my own. I guess that’s that, I said, and shut the door behind me.
Before we had turned the corner at the end of the hall Nick Charles was removing my nameplate and putting up a new one.
John eased the door of the screening room closed so the latch clicking into its slot would not attract the attention of Porter and Krug sitting halfway down the auditorium. Light from the screen flickered across the empty seats as we slumped into the back row, nodding at the projectionist who kept our visits secret in exchange for a bottle of scotch every Christmas.
On the screen, her eyes half closed, Mary was slinking across a silvery room towards a desk from whose bottom drawer she swiped a pistol, checked its chamber, and dropped it into her black patent pocketbook.
All movies should be in black and white, John whispered.
CLACK! went the slate between takes.
The scene changed and Mary was opposite Victor Grace in another room. Close shot, over his shoulder, tight on Mary’s face, a composition of planes and protuberances. I knew John was aspiring to a visual style reminiscent of Double Indemnity but the framing and camera movements were rougher, grainier, less machined than Billy Wilder’s work. There was life and dirt and ugliness in John’s films and that was what made them distinctive.
Krug hunched forward in his seat, shoulders bowed under the light pouring onto the screen.
Wait for me till I come back, baby.
What if you don’t come back?
Eddie’ll take care of things. He’ll take care of you, too.
What use is Eddie if you don’t look after me? Nothing good’ll come of it, Jack.
From off screen John’s recorded voice called Cut! and next to me the real John twitched. CLACK! went the slate. The next take started and Mary and Victor did the scene differently this time so it ran long enough for him to say his last line.
Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll have justice, and no mercy.
It was not how I had written it, but no matter. Porter’s hand shot into the light, middle finger pointing at a corner of the image. Boom shadow against the stairs, he said.
Throw the wrong shadow and the audience knows it’s a sham. John squirmed. Flaws in a film he directed were magnifications of the flaws he saw in himself. In the dark I could see him coming out in a sweat. CLACK!
Wait for me till I come back, sw—
Cut!
CLACK!
Wait till I come back for you, ba—
Cut!
CLACK!
The pictures used to look good. The pictures used to be beautiful, Krug grumbled. Rings of cigar smoke hung in the air, the world stripped down to grays, and CLACK a vision of nightmare sprang to life. Why do we make such ugly pictures now? Why can’t you find me a director and cameraman who know how to shoot pretty? Would you fuck that girl? What’s she wearing? Looks like a potato sack. Why do we make pictures like this?
People want to see real life, Porter sighed.
This is real life? A wimpish ex-soldier chased by chorus girls and trees that talk and hounds of hell and you think anyone’s gonna say that’s real life?
CLACK!
That’s from the dream sequence, Leo.
Not like any dream I ever had. Why can’t it be a nice dream? If a dream’s a dream it should be a ballet with Gene Kelly and a girl in a cat suit. Not this mopey crap.
People aren’t going to musicals as much these days. The numbers are down.
You think I don’t know my own business, Porter? I was making pictures before you were sucking tit. Audiences want escape. They go to movies to see the image of a perfect life.
But people also want to see themselves. Ordinary people in ordinary apartments on ordinary streets with ordinary, grubby lives. They want stories about other ordinary people who struggle just like them, Leo. Even ordinary people have dreams.
CLACK!
At that moment your image flashed onto the screen, Myles, and Leo pointed into the projection. What are we doing about this faggot?
A bale of twigs, bound, kindling for fires, fuel to keep warm, that is a faggot. Fuel to burn heretics, bind them alive at the stake, stack the faggots at their feet, light them bright, watch them burn, what more cruel pain, I pray, than fire and faggot? Or the embroidered image of one, a faggot, applied to those who might recant, a yellow star before its time, for heretics instead of Jews, a bundle of sticks in brown thread stitched to the sleeves: see what I was, what I am no longer, I have repented, admitted I was duped and then named my fellows, other apostates. The word was a lance between my lungs. Use it as a verb: faggot two heretics together, bound up, hand and foot, to stand on the pile of faggots where they’d burn. Faggot them up together and faggot both on the pile of faggots. Even better if they were, themselves, faggots. Faggot (recant) and you won’t be faggoted (bound) for blasphemy on the faggots (bundles of fuel). Ornament your sleeve with faggots, you faggot. Perhaps we should blame it on the French: fagot, fagoter. Look how poorly it’s been faggoted! one might cry. Or Call the faggoteer! Or even Alas, the cupboard is faggotless! We shall have to look elsewhere.
God, I hate faggots! Krug roared, and pain blossomed anew in my chest.
Or it can mean a simple truss, herbs and rushes, bundles of any ordinary thing: My faggot of compliments, good sir; a faggot of films, of actors, of motion picture executives, a parcel of rods, iron, steel, tethered together. A barrage of knives driven through the air and piercing my eyes.
Look at this faggot! Krug laughed.
And of course its use as a term of slander and violence was first directed at women, signifying some man’s idea of a bound-up wad of a creature, an assortment of sticks or iron, a collection of household nothings, call a woman a bundle and dismiss her as such. Attach the word to woman, for instance Joyce’s Mrs. Riordan, use it to mean the womanly, the household and domestic, mean and miserly, a bore and devout, make all those meanings signify women and then fling the word at men not male enough in the eyes of the many. We should be more faggoty-minded (disposed to burn them on a pile of faggots) about the faggoty boys on the lot.
Quiet, Leo. Someone will hear, Porter said. I was aware of him lisping, and conscious of myself thinking, even despite myself, How faggy Porter sounds.
I’ll call any man I want a faggot, Krug snapped. Let’s see the dumbshow with the talking trees.
We only have yesterday’s footage. They reshot it today.
Roll it anyway.
From his red velveteen seat Porter shouted the order over his shoulder and the room went black as the projectionist changed reels. When the scene began to flicker I caught my breath at the sight of you stumbling, blood-streaked and pursued by the Arran Sisters in their black feathered gowns. Because music would be overlaid later John had shot the scene without sound. For a moment it felt possible to lean back and gaze forever at the silent gray movements of figures in space, placing my mind in your body, you as Orph, you as yourself, a man beloved and beholden to me. Then came a sudden freeze frame of you and me, removed from society, coming together in nature, noble savages joining only for pleasure – no child could be born, no risk of property or responsibility. Why should it not have been possible if our bodies were willing and our minds unfettered? The freeze frame, of course, was only in my mind.
You believe this faggot ever wanted to fuck a girl?
Porter sighed. He has a wife, Leo.
Put someone on Fairdale. I want to know what’s the story with her. Oh Jesus, Krug groaned as the camera lingered on your face. Now every time I look at Haywood all I can see is him taking it backdoors from that Park Avenue pansy. They should put all those faggots on an island until they screw themselves dead.
Frank was a bad influence but we’re getting Myles help, Porter said. At his age – there’s every evidence it’s a variety of mental illness, which with the proper treatment can be cured.
In the dark John turned to me, reaching out to squeeze my shoulder with such sympathy and tenderness I nearly cried.
A faggot’s still a faggot, Leo laughed. Can’t change their stripes. They’re unnatural aberrations. We should throw them all into the fire, I tell you.
Such men as Leo take delight in restriction, in rules and law and regimentation, recriminating any slippage, any pairings of like with like. Continuity editing was a symptom of their psychosis: keep to a strict progression of shots or the audience has to think too hard, realizes the story on screen is a construct instead of real life, and so forget the unreality, fail to suspend disbelief. Perhaps a boom shadow was not so great a flaw. Show the joins in the artifice and make the audience think. Brecht would agree, Brecht the apostate who denied his own beliefs and fled: exile, it occurred to me, was the refuge of the self-preserving, flight the recourse of those too tired, too afraid, too ill-equipped to fight.
Our research shows that Myles is very popular with men and women alike.
Krug snorted. I can only imagine what kind of men like Haywood. Kind I wouldn’t want to be alone with. You, Porter, you’re the kind. You know a faggot stands up to me I’ll knock the fucker flat. What’s going on with this wasted footage? Are we running a celluloid charity? Who’s the cameraman?
Between two takes the camera had kept rolling and, in the background, while one of the young assistants touched up your face, I watched myself shy into view. As you and I spoke my hand rose to touch your forearm, then you pulled away from me, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed. From his seat Krug belched with disgust. Right under our noses! These perverts have no shame. If Frank hadn’t quit I would have taken out a hit on the faggot. Maybe I’ll do it anyway. Can we trust him to keep quiet?
It’s not in Frank’s interests to say anything, Leo.
The next take was rolling and then, at the end of it, the operator had failed again to turn off the camera and as places were reset I wandered back into the edge of the frame. This time you and I spoke at length, faces turned away from the lens, heads inclining towards each other, the makeup boy there again, correcting the shading of your cheeks. Who thinks he can waste film like this? Krug shouted.
Before the next take began, you and I moved alone in the frame. I was the shorter, and although still a young man myself at the time, I was visibly older than you. From certain angles we could have been brothers, hounded by the same avengers, one perhaps suffering more than the other, but both condemned by the same foul court, while from other angles you appeared so young that we might almost have been mistaken for father and son. Faggots aflame for each other, faggoted together. How gentle and equal a gesture it was, my hand on your sleeve, so sensitive and unpossessing. That is
what I saw.
Once John asked me whether in a pairing of men we were both equals or if there was, as between a man and a woman, the risk of imbalance. I knew it was his way of asking me which of us was the woman and which the man, only he could not bring himself to say it so directly. If he had I would have told him it was not nearly so straightforward, our experience was not directly comparable to his with a woman, that we were both always men, assuming whichever position, active or passive, as suited us both in the moment. If only you and I could have turned from our private conference on screen to look out on the audience we did not know we had, and address John from the other side of our projection. There’s always the risk of imbalance, I would have said, human relations are nothing but negotiations of balance. It’s a game of give and take. I take and I give, I receive and I offer, Myles takes and he gives, he receives and he offers. You have taken and given, but you must also receive and offer, John. That is the formula for balance. It is not unidirectional, uniplanar, unitemporal, it is balance in all directions, ongoing, through time, and we will each of us fail. Certamen prosequitur. A luta continua. The struggle for balance.
John shook his head, CLACK!, and the scene changed. You were alone on screen, a close shot of your face, such delicacy of structure, brows carved, cheeks sculpted, as if by magic throbbing with life: a Pinocchio or Pygmalion. There was no pride in you, not the kind religions condemn. You moved with grace and humility. Pride of that kind is a gift.
Are we making horror now? Krug howled, the shadow of his hand fisting an image of you devoured by dogs. On the set, the mannequin had appeared artificial, but in black and white it gushed with realism.
The takes ran on, scene to scene, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK. I hoped that come Monday John would arrive at the studio assuming his right to finish the film until someone presented him with an ultimatum similar to the one Porter had given me. Even prior to the threat of Mary cooperating with federal agents, the net had been closing around us both for the better part of a year, every time our names were mentioned in the wrong company. If John failed to cooperate it would be impossible for him to keep working. He would have to kill the John Marsh he had been up until that day if he wanted to continue. I could guess what he might be thinking, sitting in the dark next to me, perhaps imagining how others had already sacrificed themselves, so it would not be so immoral to give their names to the authorities. Maybe he convinced himself there was no harm in implicating people already known, in throwing another faggot on the fire burning the Communist heretics even if John would have to wear the sign of his apostasy on white sleeves for the rest of his days: in place of an embroidered bundle of sticks a small black microphone.
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