by Woody Allen
NUTMEAT (reverentially) Only you. Only you …
(Paula Pessary, now Mrs. Umlaut, enters in a tight Versace dress that breads her voluptuous contours like matzo meal on a cutlet.)
PAULA The advance notices of Reverse Peristalsis are in. They’re calling me this generation’s Garbo and you the brooding Svengali who pulls the strings.
(Umlaut produces a tiara from his pocket and lays it on her. They kiss.)
GELDING Isn’t love something? Clock this golden couple. While flood and famine cloak so much of the blue marble, these two coast through, buttressed only by devotion and high grosses.
(Dissolve to the set of a film on location in Coonabarabran. The director, Lippo Sheigitz, is raging at Umlaut.)
SHEIGITZ You crass philistine! This was supposed to be my picture! I was to have total artistic control!
UMLAUT What’s a few line changes?
SHEIGITZ Line changes? The blind concert violinist is now a Navy SEAL?
UMLAUT It gives more oomph. Look, Sheigitz, you know that I’m not one of those passive suits who just busy themselves with arithmetic. I’m a creative, hands-on guy. By the way, forget Mozart, I’ve decided it’s going to be a rock score. I’ve hired the group Epicac to handle the music.
SHEIGITZ (attacking Umlaut with a prop hoe) I’ll dismember you, you ham-fisted meddler!
(Guards rush in and remove Sheigitz.)
NUTMEAT Not to worry, M.U. He’ll be replaced toot sweet by a more malleable weaver of dreams. Town’s full of ’em. Say, why the ductile puss? Don’t let that ersatz auteur put you uptight.
UMLAUT It’s not that. It’s Paula, my wife.
NUTMEAT Uh-oh, what gives, M.U.?
UMLAUT She’s been having an affair with her co-star, Agamemnon Wurst. And who can blame her? Workaholic that I am, I turned a blind eye when she went off to make a film on location in Paris with the number one box-office attraction in America. The film wrapped two years ago, and they’re still on location. It doesn’t take much to put the pieces together.
NUTMEAT That gonzo? You could ruin him in the business with one phone call.
UMLAUT No, I prefer the high road. I wished them Godspeed. Funny, we once vowed eternal love—now she won’t tell me where she hid the car keys.
(Cut to chopper landing, and an excited Arvide Mite runs at Umlaut.)
MITE What figures—what gorgeous numerals. The remake of Love Tsimmes is a monster hit. M.U., you could film the L.A. phone directory and make it into a bonanza.
NUTMEAT You’ve got a wild look in your eyes, M.U. I’ve never discerned it before. Add a crooked Jekyll-and-Hyde smile. I pray you’re not about to overreach.
(Musical sting. Dissolve to six months later. Umlaut’s Holmby Hills estate. Here, as in his office, the walls are littered with Rauschenbergs and Johnses, with a casual sprinkling of Vermeers to leaven the modernity. Nutmeat is consoling Umlaut as a half dozen impassive furniture movers are removing paintings and repossessing everything he owns.)
NUTMEAT Did I say take it easy? Did I not lecture myself blue in the punim on overweening ambition, using as a for instance Icarus?
UMLAUT Yes, but—
NUTMEAT What but? Arvide Mite was only waxing hyperbolic when he said you could make the phone book into a hit. Only an idiot or a megalomaniac would have accepted the challenge. Especially the Yellow Pages.
UMLAUT What did I do?
NUTMEAT What you’ve done is taken a record budget of two hundred million iron men and fabricated a concrete latke that opened to bupkis. I guess you can’t blame the board of directors of Amalgamated Sushi for ousting you. That Japanese conglomerate’s going to have to sell a lot of yellowtail to break even.
(As the last of Umlaut’s furniture is toted off, he is picked up bodily by local marshals and heaved into the service alley while a family of Bedouins drop anchor on the property. We dissolve back to the present, to find Umlaut scurrying to fill an order of Orange Nectars for six impatient hard hats. A car pulls up to the curb, and Umlaut’s lawyer, Nestor Weakfish, emerges, waving a document.)
WEAKFISH Umlaut! Umlaut, your faithful Solon bears news.
UMLAUT If it’s about the retainer, I’m tapped.
WEAKFISH Stop blathering. All is roses. Our claim against Amalgamated Sushi took years, but we’ve won it.
UMLAUT You mean, the studio’s no longer contesting my golden-parachute clause?
WEAKFISH You got it. Under your deal, the termination of your contract sluices them to the tune of six hundred million clams. My boy, you’ve been made whole!
UMLAUT (tearing off his apron) I’m rich! Six hundred million! I can buy this whole papaya chain and fire Mr. Ectopic. I can buy my house back, my airplane, my Vermeers!
WEAKFISH Hey, wait a minute—we beat a sushi conglomerate. I said six hundred million clams—we’re talking bivalves here.
(Weakfish gestures outside as a refrigerated truck starts unloading Umlaut’s settlement. As Umlaut turns on Weakfish with a shucking knife, the camera pulls back and rises on a crane to view it all from on high, paying homage to the shot of the wounded Confederacy in Gone with the Wind, while we fade to black.)
THE REJECTION
HEN BORIS IVANOVICH opened the letter and read its contents he and his wife, Anna, turned pale. It was a rejection of their three-year-old son, Mischa, by the very best nursery school in Manhattan.
“This can’t be,” Boris Ivanovich said, stricken.
“No, no—there must be some mistake,” his wife concurred. “After all, he’s a bright boy, pleasant and outgoing, with good verbal skills and facile with crayons and Mr. Potato Head.”
Boris Ivanovich had tuned out and was lost in his own reveries. How could he face his co-workers at Bear Stearns when little Mischa had failed to get into a preschool of reputation? He could hear Siminov’s mocking voice: “You don’t understand these matters. Connections are important. Money must change hands. You’re such a bumpkin, Boris Ivanovich.”
“No, no—it isn’t that,” Boris Ivanovich heard himself protest. “I greased everybody, from the teachers to the window washers, and still the kid couldn’t hack it.”
“Did he do well at his interview?” Siminov would ask.
“Yes,” Boris would reply, “although he had some difficulty stacking blocks—”
“Tentative with blocks,” Siminov whined in his contemptuous fashion. “That speaks for serious emotional difficulties. Who’d want an oaf that can’t make a castle?”
But why should I even discuss all that with Siminov? Boris Ivanovich thought. Perhaps he won’t have heard about it.
The following Monday, however, when Boris Ivanovich went into his office it was clear that everyone knew. There was a dead hare lying on his desk. Siminov came in, his face like a thundercloud. “You understand,” Siminov said, “the lad will never be accepted at any decent college. Certainly not in the Ivy League.”
“Just because of this, Dmitri Siminov? Nursery school will impact on his higher education?”
“I don’t like to mention names,” Siminov said, “but many years ago a renowned investment banker failed to get his son into a kindergarten of ample distinction. Apparently there was some scandal about the boy’s ability to finger paint. At any rate, the lad, having been rejected by the school of his parents’ choice, was forced to … to …”
“What? Tell me, Dmitri Siminov.”
“Let’s just say that when he turned five he was forced to attend … a public school.”
“Then there is no God,” Boris Ivanovich said.
“At eighteen his onetime companions all entered Yale or Stanford,” Siminov continued, “but this poor wretch, never having acquired the proper credentials at a preschool of—shall I say—appropriate status, was accepted only at barber college.”
“Forced to trim whiskers,” Boris Ivanovich cried, picturing poor Mischa in a white uniform, shaving the wealthy.
“Having no substantial background in such matters as decorating cupcakes or t
he sandbox, the boy was totally unprepared for the cruelties life held,” Siminov went on. “In the end, he worked at some menial jobs, finally pilfering from his employer to keep up an alcohol habit. By then he was a hopeless drunkard. Of course, pilfering led to thievery and ended up with the slaughter of his landlady and her dismemberment. At the hanging, the boy attributed it all to failing to get into the correct nursery school.”
• • •
THAT NIGHT, Boris Ivanovich could not sleep. He envisioned the unattainable Upper East Side preschool, with its cheerful, bright classrooms. He pictured three-year-olds in Bonpoint outfits cutting and pasting and then having some comforting snack—a cup of juice and perhaps a Goldfish or a chocolate graham. If Mischa could be denied this, there was no meaning in life or in all of existence. He imagined his son, a man now, standing before the CEO of a prestigious firm, who was quizzing Mischa on his knowledge of animals and shapes, things he would be expected to have a deep understanding of.
“Why … er,” Mischa said, trembling, “that’s a triangle—no, no, an octagon. And that’s a bunny—I’m sorry, a kangaroo.”
“And the words to ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man?’” the CEO demanded. “All the vice presidents here at Smith Barney can sing them.”
“To be honest, sir, I never learned the song properly,” the young man admitted, while his job application fluttered into the wastebasket.
• • •
IN THE DAYS following the rejection, Anna Ivanovich became listless. She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Mischa’s teeth sideways rather than up and down. She stopped eating regularly and wept to her shrink. “I must have transgressed against God’s will to bring this on,” she wailed. “I must have sinned beyond measure—too many shoes from Prada.” She imagined that the Hampton Jitney tried to run her over, and when Armani canceled her charge account for no apparent reason, she took to her bedroom and began having an affair. This was hard to conceal from Boris Ivanovich, since he shared the same bedroom and asked repeatedly who the man next to them was.
When all seemed blackest, a lawyer friend, Shamsky, called Boris Ivanovich and said there was a ray of hope. He suggested they meet at Le Cirque for lunch. Boris Ivanovich arrived in disguise, since the restaurant had refused him admittance when the nursery-school decision came out.
“There is a man, a certain Fyodorovich,” Shamsky said, spooning up his portion of crème brûlée. “He can secure a second interview for your offspring and in return all you have to do is keep him secretly informed of any confidential information about certain companies that might cause their stocks to suddenly rise or fall dramatically.”
“But that’s insider trading,” Boris Ivanovich said.
“Only if you’re a stickler for federal law,” Shamsky pointed out. “My God, we’re talking about admission to an exclusive nursery school. Of course, a donation will help as well. Nothing showy. I know they’re looking for someone to pick up the tab for a new annex.”
At that moment, one of the waiters recognized Boris Ivanovich behind his false nose and his wig. The staff fell upon him in a fury and dragged him out the door. “So!” the headwaiter said. “Thought you’d fool us. Out! Oh, and as for your son’s future, we’re always looking for busboys. Au revoir, beanbag.”
At home that night, Boris Ivanovich told his wife they would have to sell their home in Amagansett to raise money for a bribe.
“What? Our dear country house?” Anna cried. “My sisters and I grew up in that house. We had an easement that cut through a neighbor’s property to the sea. The easement ran right across the neighbor’s kitchen table. I remember walking with my family through bowls of Cheerios to go swimming and play in the ocean.”
As fate would have it, on the morning of Mischa’s second interview his guppy passed away suddenly. There had been no warning—no previous illness. In fact, the guppy had just had a complete physical and was pronounced in A1 health. Naturally, the boy was disconsolate. At his interview he would not touch the Lego or the Lite Brite. When the teacher asked him how old he was, he said sharply, “Who wants to know, lard bucket?” He was passed over once again.
Boris Ivanovich and Anna, now destitute, went to live in a shelter for the homeless. There they met many other families whose children had been turned down by elite schools. They sometimes shared food with these people and traded nostalgic stories of private planes and winters at Mar-A-Lago. Boris Ivanovich discovered souls even less fortunate than himself, simple folk who had been turned down by co-op boards for not having sufficient net worth. These people all had a great religious beauty behind their suffering faces.
“I now believe in something,” he told his wife one day. “I believe there is meaning in life and that all people, rich and poor, will eventually dwell in the City of God, because Manhattan is definitely getting unlivable.”
SING, YOU SACHER TORTES
NOT SINCE THE evanescence of Hubert, whose flea museum enchanted the naïfs on Forty-second Street, has the Broadway area seen a shyster to rival that peerless purveyor of schlock Fabian Wunch. Balding, cheroot-sucking, and as phlegmatic as the Wall of China, Wunch is a producer of the old school, resembling physically not so much David Belasco as “Kid Twist” Reles. Given the consistency and dimensions of his exaltation of flops, it has remained a puzzle on a par with string theory how he manages to raise money for each fresh theatrical holocaust.
Hence, when a beefy arm in a Sy Syms suit curled itself around my shoulder blades the other day as I perused some Rusty Warren at the Colony record shop, and the heady conflation of lilac Pinaud and stale White Owls subverted my hypothalamus, I could feel the wallet in my pocket instinctively clenching like an endangered abalone.
“Well, well,” a familiar raspy voice said, “just the man I want to see.”
I was among the legally insane who had put money in several of Wunch’s sure things over the years, the last being The Henbane Affair, a West End import that chronicled the invention and manufacture of the adjustable showerhead.
“Fabian!” I squealed with affected congeniality. “We haven’t spoken since your rather nasty brouhaha with the opening-night critics. I’ve often wondered if spraying them with Mace didn’t actually make matters worse.”
“I can’t talk here,” the simian impresario said furtively, “lest some nudnik get wind of a concept that is positively guaranteed to transmogrify our net worths to a number only astronomers could make sense of. I know a little bistro on the Upper East Side. Buy me lunch and I may be able to bless you with partnership in a diversion the mere road companies of which will keep your children’s children in rubies the size of breadfruit.”
Were I a squid, this preamble alone would have been more than enough to trigger the ejaculation of black ink, and yet before I could scream for the riot police I found myself sucked up and flip-screened crosstown to a modest French restaurant, where, for as little as two hundred and fifty dollars per person, one could eat like Ivan Denisovich.
“I’ve analyzed all the great musicals,” Wunch said to me as he ordered a ’51 Mouton and the tasting menu. “And what do they have in common? Let’s see if you know.”
“Great music and lyrics,” I ventured.
“Well, naturally, boob. That’s the easy part. I got an undiscovered genius mints hit songs like the Japs roll off Toyotas. Right now the kid walks dogs for a living, but I’ve been privy to his oeuvre, and it’s everything Irving Berlin would have liked to have been if things had broken differently for him. No, the key is a great book. That’s where I come in.”
“I never knew you to put pen to paper,” I said as Wunch vacuumed a concatenation of escargots from their shells.
“So our show,” he continued. “Fun de Siècle—and notez bien the mischievous wordplay in the title, on account of it transpires totally in Vienna.”
“Contemporary Vienna?” I asked.
“No, dum-dum—a hoarier epoch, with all the broads in carriages and gowns à la My Fair or Gi
gi. Not to mention the myriad freaky bohemians who wax Looney Tunes all over the Ringstrasse. Only Klimt, only Schiele, only Stefan Zweig, plus a pretty fair country doodler who answers to Oskar Kokoschka.”
“Illustrious figures all,” I chimed in, as Wunch’s cheeks flushed crimson in homage to the Bordeaux region of France.
“And which fox do all these name brands go ape over?” he went on. “The love interest? A local sex bomb named Alma Mahler. You must’ve heard of her. She bounced ’em all—Mahler, Gropius, Werfel. You name ’em, they rifled her thong.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
“Well, I know. I mean, sure, I’m taking subtle license with the narrative. Otherwise, kid, we midwife a soporific. I’m modernizing the language too. Like when Bruno Walter runs into Wilhelm Furtwängler and says, ‘Hey, Furtwängler, will you be at Rilke’s barbecue Saturday night?’ And Furtwängler says, ‘Barbecue?,’ like it’s clear he wasn’t invited, and Walter says, ‘Oops, sorry—I guess I shouldn’t have opened my big yap.’ See, the talk’s got a today urban rhythm.”
As Wunch bore down on his hot foie gras, I could feel the onset of a growing numbness in several of my key vertebrae, and I loosened my tie in an effort to breathe.
“So,” he waxed on, “first comes the overture, which I see as light and catchy but in the twelve-tone scale—as a nod to Schoenberg.”
“But, surely, with all those lovely Strauss waltzes—” I cut in.
“Don’t be an Ignatz,” Wunch said with a dismissive wave. “Those we save for the finale, when the audience is panting for relief from two hours of atonality.”
“Yes, but—”
“Then the curtain goes up and the sets are in the style of the Bauhaus.”
“The Bauhaus?”
“Like form follows function. In fact, the opening song is Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Adolf Loos singing ‘Form Follows Function,’ like ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’ begins Guys and Dolls. It finishes and who enters but Alma Mahler herself, in a frock Jennifer Lopez would wave off as skimpy. With Alma is her composer husband, Gustav. ‘Let’s go, gloom puss,’ she says. ‘Move it.’