Next morning the item headed his column as a scoop. Coombs wasn’t as well known to West Coast fans as Stein, O’Sullivan wrote, but he was a strong, experienced heavyweight who had fought the best in the East. This no one could deny. The only detail O’Sullivan had omitted was that he had invariably been on the catching end of all these fights with the best in the East. He had had plenty of experience in the ring, all right, mostly discouraging.
Stein or Coombs, Coombs or Stein. The sports writers kicked that one around for a week or so. When we had pushed this as far as it would go, we got a nice fat two-column for the announcement that Toro Molina, the Giant of the Andes, undefeated champion of South America, would have as his first American opponent none other than Cowboy Coombs, that formidable campaigner who was such a favourite with the fans along the Atlantic Seaboard, a great crowd-pleaser who had been forced to come west because no ranking New York heavyweight would risk his reputation against him.
‘Among his many fistic achievements,’ the article drooled, ‘Coombs can boast of fighting a draw with the great Gus Lennert.’ The Lennert fight had been a draw but it was nine years ago, back in the days when Coombs at least had the vigour of youth, when he had caught Lennert on one of those off nights that every fighter has. But fortunately the people who read the stuff had neither record books nor long memories, and the guys who wrote the stuff liked the colour of our Scotch and our chips. All except Al Leavitt, who had a crack in that column of his about how apt Molina’s first name was, since it meant bull in English. ‘It is interesting to note,’ wrote Leavitt, ‘that throwing this kind of bull is not the same sport practised so enthusiastically in Latin countries. Mr Eddie Lewis, on tour with Bull – sorry, Toro Molina, is a skilful exponent of the Northern variety.’ Well, the hell with Leavitt. He was only one voice in this wilderness. He was the sort of fellow who comes to your cocktail party, drinks up all your liquor and then goes away and writes as he pleases. No loyalty. No principles.
I devoted the rest of the day to making the people of California Molina-conscious. I dusted off some old gags, pinned Toro’s name to them, and phoned them in to some of the boys who had come to our cocktail party. I picked out the most imposing photograph of Toro to use on the posters. I had mimeographed sheets made of Toro’s life story, with a tabulation of his physical measurements from the size of his skull to the circumference of his little toe. I had a girl come in and start a scrapbook of all the Molina items from the newspapers I had begun saving the day we hit town. And the funny thing is, as I glanced through the first few pages of this book, with the big picture of Toro lifting Acosta off the train, and the Sunday feature on how Luis discovered Toro lifting barrels in Santa Maria, I had a real sense of achievement. Whether what I had done was true or not, or whether it would ever do anybody any good was no longer my concern. Filling up that scrapbook had become an end in itself, like stamp collecting. That’s what made it so easy to do, what almost sucked me into believing that so good a job was good in itself.
CHAPTER TEN
When the sun began to sink down behind the squat, ugly architecture of downtown Los Angeles, I began to think of some way to spare myself another social session with Vince. I had sat out the previous evening with him in the Biltmore cocktail lounge, and though the hunting was as effortless as he had said, I wasn’t ready for indiscriminate mating yet. Beth’s bitter words were still in my head. Damn it, I was making a living. I wasn’t robbing anybody; the lies I told were just ordinary American business lies like everybody else’s lies. They didn’t do too much harm. What did she want of me? What was she being so goddam righteous about? If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a righteous woman. Of the hundreds and thousands of eligible and relatively willing females in the city of New York why did I have to pick on a dame who wanted to elevate me? Because you wanted to elevate yourself, a small voice hiding in one of the creases of my mind answered. It wasn’t just her body that made me go for that New England stray. I liked to think so because it gave me less to worry about. But the first time I talked to her I had a hunch that she wanted to elevate me, make me amount to something. It put me on my guard right away. I remember thinking there was something physically exciting about a girl who could be that pleasant to look at and still make so much sense. But I wanted her on my terms.
The first time I talked to Beth, all those numbers in the little phone books turned into dogs. They were nice dogs, pretty dogs, from Pomeranians to Russian wolfhounds, but I didn’t want them any more. I wanted Beth in a way I had never wanted any woman before. I wanted to enter not only into her body but into her mind, and the satisfaction of one seemed to intensify the satisfaction of the other. Beth gave me a sense of where I was and where I stood in time, and if my job with Nick was like a jail, a comfortable, cushy jail, but still a place of confinement, Beth was my contact with the outside world, who brought some of that world to me each visiting day. It was her world and, out here, it seemed as if it ought to be mine. Beth was my safety valve. And now the valve was shut. I was left to sweat in my own steam.
Vince came out of the bedroom, still in his pyjamas. He had slept until one o’clock and then had his breakfast sent up. Now that the match was set, there wasn’t much for Vince to do until Miniff arrived and they got together to work out the fight. He had really caught the gravy train this time.
‘You know I’ve been thinking …’ he said.
‘An obvious exaggeration,’ I said.
‘All right, wise guy,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t get where I am with my beautiful body.’
‘Where are you?’ I said.
‘In the Hotel Biltmore,’ he said. ‘Room eight-o-one and two. Where the hell are you?’
‘In limbo,’ I said. ‘The Hotel Limbo. And I don’t even know the number of the room.’
‘You’re working too hard,’ Vince said.
‘Well, between us I guess we do a day’s work,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about this party.’ Vince pointed to himself indignantly. ‘If I don’t take care of my end, all them fancy words of yours add up to double-o.’ He took his pyjama top off and bent his soft belly as he tried to touch his toes in a half-hearted gesture of calisthenics. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’m slipping. Can’t even touch my toes any more.’ He straightened up slowly and put his hands lewdly under his breasts, which were heavy with fat. ‘Stop staring at me, you naughty boy,’ he camped in a falsetto and laughed.
‘Go get some clothes on, goddam it,’ I said. ‘This is an office. Anybody’s liable to come in.’
‘I know what’s the matter with you, lover. You wanna keep me all to yourself.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I want to keep you all to yourself.’
‘All to myself,’ Vince said. ‘My old man told me never to do that.’
‘Go get your clothes on,’ I said.
Vince hesitated and then decided to be friends. For the first time in his life he had a first-class ticket on a fast express and it might pay to get along with the other passengers. ‘Okay, chummo. I was only kiddin’.’
Vince retired to the bathroom. I had to get away from him. I thought of Stempel. I hadn’t bothered to get in touch with him yet because I didn’t know where he was any more. He had come out for MGM; I remembered that. So I called there and the girl who said ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’ had never heard of him, but she passed me on to the one who said ‘writers’ who told me that Stempel hadn’t worked there for several years. Then I thought I remembered having seen his name on a Warners’ picture and I called there. Yes, Mr Stempel had worked there but not in the last six months. Why didn’t I call the Screen Writers’ Guild? The Guild secretary had a record of every writer employed in Hollywood. I could reach Stempel at National, she said. National, it didn’t seem possible. The author of The Locomotive Dream, one of the bright young hopes of my generation, was employed by the studio that specialised in blood-and-thunder Westerns. For me it was almost like discovering that the writing cred
it on The Lone Ranger was Thomas Mann. But anyway I made the call. Yes, Mr Stempel had been on the lot. ‘He was checked out this afternoon,’ I was told. No, the Studio was not allowed to give out any personal numbers.
By this time I had to see Stempel. I had to find out what had happened to Stempel. In desperation I picked up the phone book, on the improbable chance that he might be listed. And there it was, easy as falling off the wagon, David H. Stempel, 1439 Stone Canyon Rd Crestview 6-1101. One minute later I was talking to Stempel himself, his voice sounding exactly as high and boyish and enthusiastic as when I had seen him last.
‘For God’s sake, Eddie Lewis! From what cloud bank have you descended? Hop in a cab and come on out here.’
As I taxied up through the streets of Los Angeles, which resembled small Middle-Western cities laid down side by side for miles and miles, I thought of Dave Stempel, David Heming Stempel, and what a demigod he had seemed back in the days when he was first reading his work in progress to us. David Heming Stempel could not have been better cast for a young epic poet if he had been picked out of the actors’ directory by an experienced casting director. He was a big man, well over six feet, with that rare combination of size and delicacy. His eyes were light blue, quick to smile and yet intense, and he had a long, slender profile.
After dropping out of school I didn’t see Dave again until I ran into him several years later, in Tim’s on Third Avenue. He was only a year or two out of college then and The Locomotive Dream had made him the most talked-of young poet in America. This had been the first volume of a trilogy he had planned on ‘Man’s inexorable struggle to conquer the Machine’, as the dust jacket had put it, and the second volume, The Seven-Jewel Heart, had already been announced for ‘early publication’. That night, when I asked him what was new with him, he threw back that magnificent head of his and said, ‘You know I’ve always been curious to see what a real mythical kingdom looks like, so I’m going out to Hollywood for a couple of months. See if I can’t smuggle out a little of their mythical money. My projects have become an awful strain on those Guggenheims. So I thought it might be an amusing idea to let Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer provide me with a fellowship.’
That had been fifteen years ago. For half that time at least, Stempel’s publishers had continued to announce the ‘imminent publication’ of The Seven-Jewel Heart. I know because I kept watching for it after having practically memorised The Locomotive Dream.
My cab turned in at a large medieval-looking stone house. A maid led me through the cold, high-ceilinged living room to a cosy panelled little bar which had nothing to do with the style of the house.
‘Eddie Lewis,’ Stempel said, as if our meeting had a real significance. ‘My Lord, you’ve changed, Eddie.’
My first impression of Dave was that he hadn’t changed at all. The face was still handsomely boyish, the figure tall and slender. The chequered tweed jacket and the polka-dot bow tie accentuated his youthfulness. It was only when I looked at him more closely, while he shook the cocktails, that I began to see the little alterations time had made. His blonde hair was going prematurely grey and thin and something had gone out of his eyes. As a young man he had been full of a bubbling, imaginative gaiety, but it seemed to me as he talked that this had been replaced by a nervous animation. We were reminiscing over the first drink, when Dave’s wife entered. I was ready to say hello again, for I had expected the highstrung little mental one with the boyish figure who had published a couple of thin books of verse herself and who had treated Dave with the respectful admiration one only accords to the dead. But this one was a very young woman with bangs, shoulder-length hair, exotic eyebrows, an abundance of Mexican handicraft silver jewellery, fleshy breasts with which she was obviously pleased and a manner that was more like a performance. She could have been a Hollywood stock-girl passing as an intellectual or an intellectual posing as a stock-girl.
‘Miki, Eddie’s come out here with that giant prizefighter we read about,’ Dave said.
‘I think that’s fascinating,’ Miki said.
‘Miki and I go to the fights every Friday night,’ Dave said. ‘I love the rhythm of a good fight. I’ve seen them when they’re pure ballet.’
‘What kind of a character is this giant?’ Miki said, stealing a quick, approving glance at herself in the bar mirror as she talked. ‘It must be madly fascinating to study a person like that.’
‘Madly,’ I said.
The maid came in, looked at Mrs Stempel significantly and went out again without a word. ‘Duck,’ Mrs Stempel said, ‘let’s go in to dinner.’
Duck and Mrs Duck sat at either end of a long Spanish colonial table in the large, formal dining room. After the avocado salad, the maid brought out a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin and set it down in front of Dave with an air of formality. ‘Thank God I had the foresight to buy up all the Graves I could find,’ he said as he uncorked the bottle expertly.
He poured a little into a wine glass and asked the maid to bring it down to Mrs Stempel. He looked down the table at her, waiting for the verdict as she tasted the wine carefully.
‘How is it?’ he said.
‘Not bad,’ she decided. ‘Is this the thirty-three?’
When he said it was, she nodded wisely. ‘I thought so. The thirty-three has an extra little …’ She paused as if reaching for exactly the right shade of meaning and I wondered if it would be nuance, or even bonne bouche, but she ended with ‘something’.
‘It’s really the funniest thing,’ Dave said. ‘I’ve been studying wines for, well, twenty years and this little minx of mine whose favourite drink when I met her was a lemon coke can tell one wine from another as if she’s been at it all her life.’
‘I’ve just got a natural taste for it,’ Miki admitted.
While Dave carved the meat, he said, ‘Oh, by the way, Miki, I talked to Mel Steiner today.’
‘Oh,’ Miki said, and stopped to wait for something that was obviously of great importance. ‘Well, what did he say?’
Dave turned to me and politely led me into the conversation. ‘You see, Eddie, there’s a little credit dispute on my last picture. A couple of writers who polished my script are trying to ease me out of screen credit. The way we settle these things now is by a Guild Arbitration committee. Steiner’s head of the committee.’
‘Well, what did he say?’ Miki pressed him.
‘He says the committee hasn’t reached a final decision yet. Though it doesn’t look like I’m going to get screenplay credit. But I may get an adaptation credit.’
‘That’s simply filthy,’ Miki said, and then as a lady at a costume ball might do, she let her little pink mask of culture drop for a moment. ‘I think that stinks,’ she announced.
‘All they did was take my lines and rewrite them,’ Dave said. ‘Making sure to take all the rhythm and the poetry out of them.’
‘Additional dialogue, that’s what they should get,’ Miki said, ‘additional dialogue.’
‘You see, Eddie,’ Dave explained, ‘to get screenplay credit, you’ve got to prove that you wrote at least twenty-five per cent of the shooting script. So these credit-hounds always try to revise your script at least eighty per cent. Writers with the souls of bookkeepers.’
The maid filled our glasses again.
‘I suppose this is probably all Greek to you,’ Dave apologised, ‘but these credits are our bread and butter. I spent nine months at Goldwyn’s last year on a script that got shelved, and had to take a salary cut at National. Now if I lose out on this credit, I’m in trouble.’ A frown creased his high forehead. ‘Dammit, Miki, how many times do you have to tell that stupid wench not to go to sleep in the kitchen after she’s served the main course? You know how I hate to look at dirty dishes.’
‘I know, Duck,’ Miki said. ‘She’s a Jukes on both sides of her family. But it’s so hard to get help to come all the way out here. They’re so independent these days.’
‘What do they think this is, a free country?’ I said, lau
ghing to show I was making a little joke.
When the maid had removed the coffee cups sullenly and Dave was about to pour our second brandy, Miki said, very charmingly, ‘If your friend will excuse me, I’ll leave you boys alone. You probably have a lot to talk about.’
She went over and bit Dave playfully on the ear. ‘Good night, Duck,’ she said. ‘Good night, Mr Lewis. Do come again soon. It’s been fascinating.’
There was pride in Dave’s washed-out blue eyes as her full, confident figure disappeared. ‘God, she’s a great woman,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think she’s a great woman, Eddie?’
‘Mm,’ I said.
‘I can’t take my eyes off her,’ he said. ‘It’s been three years and I still can’t take my eyes off her. She’s given me something, Eddie, something I’ve been searching for all my life. Without Miki and Irving I would have been a schizo for sure.’
‘Who is Irving?’
‘Irving Seidel, my analyst. He’s a great man. He’s treated practically everybody I know.’
From one of the bookcases that completely covered the walls, Dave pulled out a volume and read a paragraph to me. It was a book by Seidel called I Vs Me. Dave’s library contained practically all the English, Russian and French classics, several shelves on psychoanalysis and most of the outstanding poetry and fiction of the past twenty years. And Dave’s mind seemed as curious and as hungry for new literary experiences as it had been fifteen years before. He quoted enthusiastically from a new Yale poet whose work, he said, reminded him ‘of a Marxist Gerard Manley Hopkins’. He described the subtle relationships in a first novel by a young Southern girl whose involuted style fascinated him. And then, pausing to inhale the fumes from his brandy glass, he began to recite a strange, haunting poem about two robots in a mechanised Utopia who are equipped with human hearts and discover the experience of love. At first it seemed to lack rhythm and form, and the sound of it grated on me, but gradually it began to shape itself into a pattern and its melodies were as unmistakable and provocative as the distorted, dissonant themes of Schoenberg.
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