Dr. North shook her head. Her voice was shadowed by sadness as she replied, “I wish I knew. I call it Czadek.”
* * *
There used to be (and perhaps still are?) certain dry, flavorless wafers, enemies of emptiness, which, when eaten with copious draughts of water, coffee, or other beverage, expanded in the body, swelling up, ballooning, becoming bloated, inflated, reaching out, ranging forth, stretching from stomach wall to stomach wall, touching and filling every corner, conquering and occupying the most remote outposts of vacuous void; in that way creating an illusion of having dined sumptuously, even hoggishly, scotching hunger, holding at bay the hounds of appetite, and yet providing no nourishment.
Estes Hargreave always reminded me of those wafers, and they of him. Other things have brought him to mind, over the years. When, for example, I encountered the publicity for a Hollywood film (ten years in the making, a budget of sixty million dollars, etc.) and was able to check the truth of those figures with the producer, who is a friend of mind, the thought of Estes promptly presented itself. What my friend told me was that the movie actually had been made in a little over one year and had cost about six million dollars. As he revealed this, in the living room of my apartment, over the first of the two vodka gimlets that are his limit, the image of Estes absolutely took over my mind, expanding in all directions like one of those wafers. I saw him as he had been, a very tall but small-time actor, indignantly resigning from Equity, a move he’d hoped would be shocking, sending ripples of pleasant notoriety throughout Thespia. But it had gone unnoticed. The only reason I remembered it was because I’d been a small-time actor myself in those days, and I’d been present at the resignation. Where was Estes now? Was he alive? I hadn’t heard of him in years.
“That stuff you see in the papers,” said my guest, the producer, “that’s the work of my P. R. guy, a very good man with the press. I asked him to pick me up here in about half an hour, by the way, hope you don’t mind. He’s set up an interview with one of the columnists for this afternoon, to plug the product. I wouldn’t do an interview without him. He’s great, this fellow.”
Intuition flared like brushfire through my brain. “Did he used to be an actor?”
“As a matter of fact, I think he did, a long time ago.”
(I knew it!)
“Is his name Estes Hargreave?”
“No. Wayne McCord.”
“Oh.”
Talk about anti-climax. My intuition, it seemed, was not so much brushfire as backfire. The reason I had homed in on poor old Hargreave was because he had always employed a Rule of Ten when reporting the statistics of his life. He just added a zero to everything. If he received a fee of, say, $200 for an acting engagement, he airily let it drop that “they paid me two grand,” or, if a bit more discretion was advisable, he would resort to ambiguity—“they laid two big ones on me”—knowing that, if challenged, he could always claim that by “big ones” he had meant “C-notes.” His annual income—which, according to him, averaged “a hundred G’s, after taxes”—was, by this same rule, closer to $10,000 in the real world. Before taxes.
He applied the Rule of Ten to his very ancestry. His branch of the Hargreaves had been in the United States for a hundred and fifty years prior to his birth, he would proudly claim; but he and I had grown up in the same neighborhood, and I knew that his parents had arrived in this country just fifteen years before he had come squalling into the world, bearing their spiky Central European surname, which he changed after graduating high school and before being drafted into the Army (World War II). “First Lieutenant Hargreave” was another figment of his fecund mind: he never rose above the rank of buck private, and, in fact, took a lot of kidding with the phrase, “See here, Private Hargreave,” a paraphrase of the title of Marion Hargrove’s bestseller. I used to wonder why he didn’t say he’d been a captain or a major, as long as he was making things up, but that was before I tumbled to his Rule. In the Army rankings of those days, First Lieutenant was exactly ten rungs from the bottom: (1) Private, (2) PFC, (3) Corporal, (4) Sergeant, (5) Staff Sergeant, (6) Tech Sergeant, (7) Master Sergeant, (8) Warrant Officer, (9) Second Lieutenant, (10) First Lieutenant.
The Rule of Ten was applied to his losses and expenditures, too. “I dropped a hundred bucks last night in a poker game” could safely be translated as $10. A new wardrobe had set him back “three and a half thou,” he once announced; but his tailor also happened to be mine, and I quickly learned that Hargreave had spent $350 on two suits at $150 each plus a parcel of shirts and ties totalling $50.
There were, of course, areas that needed no amplification: his height, for instance, which was impressively towering without embellishment. It was to Hargreave’s credit that he never felt compelled to diminish any numbers even when it might have seemed advantageous to do so: he never peeled any years off his age, and, to the best of my knowledge, was meticulously honest in his relations with the IRS.
Hargreave was clever. If Truth-times-Ten resulted in an absurd, unbelievable figure, he still produced that figure, but as a deliberate hyperbole. There was the time he was involved in a vulgar brawl with a person of slight frame who weighed not much more than a hundred pounds, and yet had flattened him. This was particularly humiliating to Hargreave because his opponent in that brawl was a woman. In recounting the incident, Hargreave first made use of another favorite device, simple reversal, and said that he, Hargreave, had flattened “the other guy.” He did not, of course, claim that his opponent weighed a thousand pounds. Not exactly. But he did say, with a chuckle and a smile, “This bruiser tipped the scales at about half a ton.” The Rule of Ten was thus preserved by lifting it out of the literal, into the jocular figurative.
When it came to matters of the heart, Hargreave applied a Rule of Ten to the Rule of Ten itself. For example, the oft-repeated boast that he bedded “two new chicks every week” (or 104 per year) was his hundredfold inflation of the actual annual figure, 1.4—the fraction representing misfires: couplings left unconsummated due to this or that dysfunction. Of course, I’m guessing about these intimate matters, but it’s an educated guess, supported by the testimony of talkative ladies.
There were some Hargreavean inflations, however, that did not conveniently fit into the Rule of Ten or the Rule of Ten times Ten. The infamous Macbeth affair was one of these. That time, he utilized an asymmetrical variant somewhere between those two Rules—sort of a Rule of Thirty-Seven and a Half.
A summer theatre group had made the understandable mistake of booking him to play leads in a season of open air repertory—I say understandable because his brochure (a handsomely printed work of fabulistic fiction) would have fooled anybody. “Mr. Hargreave has appeared in over fifty Broadway plays” was one of its claims. He’d appeared in five, as walk-ons, or over five, if you count the one that folded in New Haven and never got to Broadway. ‘“OF OVERPOWERING STATURE . . . PRODIGY!’—Brooks Atkinson” Atkinson had indeed written those words about Hargreave, though without mentioning his name: . . . But focus was diverted from Mr. Olivier’s great scene by the unfortunate casting of a background spear-carrier of overpowering stature, who seemed to be nearly seven feet tall. It was impossible to look at anyone else while this prodigy was on stage.” Hargreave was actually only six eight, but he may have been wearing lifts. (I’ve often wondered if he realized that Atkinson had used “prodigy” not in the sense of “genius” but in its older meaning of lusus naturae or gazingstock . . .)
Anyway, the brochure was an impressive document, and considering the fact that the prodigy it described was available for a reasonable $150 per week (or, as he later put it, “a thou and a half’), it was not surprising that the outdoor theatre snapped him up. There were half a dozen stunning photos in the brochure, as well, showing Hargreave in make-up for everything from Oedipus Rex to Charley’s Aunt, as well as in the clear: he was a good-looking chap.
The first production of the summer had lofty aspirations: Macbeth, uncut, with faddish bo
rrowings from other productions: a thick Scots burr (in homage to the Orson Welles film) and contemporary military uniform (shades of several Shakespearean shows, including the “G. I.” Hamlet of Maurice Evans, but dictated by economy rather than experimentalism). To this outlandish medley was superimposed incidental music filched from both operatic versions of the tragedy, those of Verdi and Bloch (oil and water, stylistically), rescored for backstage bagpipes.
Hargreave wasn’t to blame for any of this, of course, even though he went on record as praising the “bold iconoclastic flair” of the production—which may have been no more than diplomacy rather than his own vivid absence of taste. No, Hargreave’s transgression was the interminable interpolation he wrote into the classic script and performed on opening night, after first taking great care not to seek the approval of the director. What he did, exactly, was to apply the aforementioned Rule of Thirty-Seven and a Half to the familiar couplet—
I will not be afraid of death and bane
Till Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane
—bloating it up to a rant of seventy-five lines. If that doesn’t seem particularly long as Shakespearean speeches go, be reminded that, of Macbeth’s other major speeches, “Is this a dagger” is only thirty-two lines in length, “If it were done” but twenty-eight, and “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” a scant ten.
The production, as I’ve said, was uncut, retaining even those silly witch-dance scenes considered by some scholars to be non-Shakespearean in origin. Hargreave’s seventy-five leaden lines—delivered in no great hurry—made an already long evening in the theatre seem endless to the mosquito-punctured audience. I wasn’t there, thanks for large mercies, but plenty of people were, and their reports all coincide to form one of the minor legends of contemporary theatrical lore.
The worst part of this depressing farrago was what happened after the seventy-fifth and final line had been bellowed. The spectators, mesmerized into mindless automata, to their everlasting shame gave Hargreave a standing ovation lasting a clamorous sixty seconds (ten minutes, according to him). Maybe they just wanted to stretch their legs.
The drama critic of the local paper did not join in the ovation. Although not enough of a scholar to spot the interpolation as such, he knew what he didn’t like. Hence, he allotted only one sentence to the male lead: “In the title role, Estes Hargreave provided what is certainly the dullest performance I have ever seen in twenty-two years of theatre-going.” There’s a divinity that protects ham actors: the linotypist drunkenly substituted an “F’ for the “d” in “dullest,” resulting in a rave review that Hargreave carried in his wallet until it disintegrated into lacework.
Surprisingly, the unscheduled interpolation did not in itself cause Hargreave to be fired—or not so surprisingly, perhaps, considering the standing ovation and the lucky typo. What cooked his goose was his demand that, for the remaining Macbeth performances that season, the programs be overprinted with the line, “ADDITIONAL VERSES BY ESTES HARGREAVE.” That broke the camel’s back. He was handed his walking papers, and his understudy took over for the rest of the season. Hargreave, naturally, gave it out that he had quit. “I ankled that scene, turned my back on a grand and a half a week rather than prostitute my art.”
But the director had his revenge. He reported Hargreave’s behavior to Actors Equity (enclosing a copy of the seventy-five-liner that I’ve treasured to this day), and his complaint, added to others that had been lodged from time to time, not to mention the persistent rumors that Hargreave often worked for much less than Equity scale, caused him to be casually called on the carpet before an informal panel of his peers that included me.
“Sit down, Estes,” I said chummily, “and let’s hear your side of all this.” He sat. With a grin, I added, “Preferably in twenty-five words or less. Nobody wants to make a Federal case out of it.”
Hargreave did not return my grin. He looked me straight in the eye. Then he looked the other members straight in the eye, one by one. He cleared his throat.
“I stand before you,” he said, hastily rising from his chair, “a man thoroughly disgusted with the so-called ‘legitimate’ stage and with this ‘august’ body. I am sickened by the East Coast snobbery that persists in promulgating the myth that the almighty stage is superior to the art of film. I have given my life, my dedication, my blood to the stage—and how have I been rewarded? Oh, I’m not saying I haven’t made a good living. I’m not saying I haven’t received glowing reviews from the most respected critics of our time. I’m not saying I haven’t been mobbed by hordes of idolatrous fans. But all of this is Dead Sea fruit when I find myself here before a group of greasepaint junkies, none of whom are better actors than I, all of whom have the infernal gall to set themselves up as holier-than-thou judges of my behavior. Well, I am not going to give you the satisfaction. I hear they’re preparing to do a remake of that classic film, Stagecoach, out there in the ‘despised’ West. Yes, I hear that clarion call, and 1 am going to answer it. I have been asked to test for the role John Wayne created in the original version. An artist of my experience and caliber does not usually deign to audition or do screen tests, of course, but I have no false pride. I will test for that role. And I will get it. You clowns will have my formal resignation in tomorrow’s mail.”
I never knew how he did it. Was it a kind of genius? Did he have a built-in computer in his head? I only know that later, when we played back the tape that one of our cagier members had secretly made of the proceedings, and had a stenographer transcribe it for us, I discovered to my wonder that Hargreave’s resignation speech totalled exactly ten times the length I had waggishly requested of him: two hundred and fifty words on the button, if you think of “so-called” as two words. I had to admire the man. He was a phony, he had no talent, he was as corny as a bumper sticker, but he was so consistently and flagrantly appalling in everything he did that he was like a living, breathing, walking, talking piece of junk art. Whether or not he actually tested for the John Wayne role, I don’t know. Maybe he did. I tend to doubt it. At any rate, the job went to Alex Cord.
The doorbell rang.
“That must be my man now,” said my guest, draining his second and last drink. I got to my feet, opened the door, and looked up into a smiling, sun-browned, middle-aged but very familiar face, on top of a tall—prodigiously tall—frame.
“Estes!” I cried.
“Long time no see,” he said, jovially, in the pidgin of our youth.
My intuition began brushfiring again, quickly making the John Wayne/Alex Cord/Wayne McCord connection, and I realized that Hargreave, after his Stagecoach disappointment, had taken on the names of both actors, probably in the hope that their good fortune would be mystically transferred to him. In a way, it had. He looked happy. He radiated success. He had found his true vocation.
“Come on in!” I boomed, genuinely glad to see him. “Have a drink!”
He shook his head. “No time. Can I have a rain check?” Addressing his employer, he said, “We’d better shake a leg or we’ll be late. It’s close to rush hour and we have to fight about ten miles of crosstown traffic.”
“No, Wayne,” the producer said with an indulgent sigh, “it’s just eight short blocks up the street. An easy stroll. We could both use the exercise.”
That was two or three summers ago. I ran into my producer friend again earlier this year, and asked about Wayne. He shrugged. “Had to let him go. He suffered a . . . credibility gap, I guess you could call it. People just stopped believing him. I suppose it was bound to happen. I mean, how long can you tamper with the truth the way he did, and hope to get away with it? There’s always a price tag, my friend, a day of reckoning, know what I mean? Anyway, I gave him the sack. No, I don’t know where he is now, but I’ll bet a nickel he’s still in” show business.”
* * *
“The gods are cruel,” Dr. Emily North said this morning as she told me about the creature in the jar:
“Some friends of mine had mention
ed it, how they’d seen it in a little traveling carnival. But I had to see for myself, so I drove to the outskirts of town and managed to get there just as they were packing up to move on. It was a real relic of a show, the kind of thing I’d thought had gone out of style. Shabby, sleazy, tasteless, probably illegal. But I did see what I went to see. Czadek was all they called him. Like the name of one of those outer-space villains on a TV show. But he wasn’t rigged out in outer-space gear. He was dressed like a cowboy—Stetson hat, chaps, lariat. He twirled the lariat, and did a not-very-good tap dance. And he smiled—a desperate, frightened smile, full of anguish. I tried to talk to him but he didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak—or wouldn’t, I never knew which. A few months later, when he died, the owner of the carnie phoned me long distance and asked me if I wanted to buy the cadaver for scientific purposes. So there he is. In a jar. Without his cowboy costume. Naked as a foetus, but not a foetus. An adult human male of middle age, well-nourished and perfectly proportioned, quite handsome, in fact. But only eight inches tall . . .”
No, I can’t explain it. I won’t even try. But I think about those words “A day of reckoning” and “The gods are cruel” and “How long can you tamper with the truth the way he did, and hope to get away with it?” I recall some lines from Estes’ awful amplification of Macbeth—
For by this fatal fault I was cast down,
Ay, to damnation, by mine own fell hand!
None but myself to censure or to blame . . .
—and I think of Estes, who stood six feet, eight inches tall without his shoes. Eighty inches. Exactly ten times taller than the creature in the jar. The tiny dead man with the hauntingly familiar face. And I remember the original surname by which Estes was known before he changed it. A spiky Central European name. . .
The Old Men Know
Charles L. Grant
Masques Page 16