Dutton, suddenly, was standing in front of me. “The letter from Chapman,” he said. “May I see it?”
“My mother has it,” I told him. “And it’s not from Chapman, but from his attorney.”
“No,” Dutton corrected me. “The one you got from him, that he wrote before he died.”
I gave him my best innocent look. “Why, Chief,” I said, “you know I gave that to Detective Kowalski.”
“You made a copy,” Dutton answered. “May I see it?”
My head tilted a bit. Something was odd. “Sure. It’s in the office. Why?”
“It’s what I was coming to tell you,” Dutton said as we started to walk to the office. “We think we know who Chapman’s ‘inside man’ was at the morgue when he faked his suicide. It seems that today a registered letter also arrived for an assistant ME named Irwin S. Taubman, Jr., better known as Doc. He got a million dollars, too. And must have known it was coming, because two days ago he got on a plane for the Cayman Islands.”
“I’ll bet it’s going to be a long vacation,” I said.
“Chapman’s lawyer says his estate clearly accounts for forty-seven million dollars, including the million to you and the million to Doc, and a little more here and there to charities Chapman supported.”
“What about his daughters?” Sharon asked.
“He left them twenty thousand dollars apiece,” Dutton said, and the amusement in his voice was more than even he could conceal.
LATER that night, after the audience (such as it was) left and the theatre was cleaned up, Sophie and Jonathan went home. They were the last remaining from the Great Office Pileup, as Dutton and Meg had gone out to catch up over dinner, and Mom and Dad had decided to go home, although they threatened to call me in the morning with baby names. Mom probably would have gone out and bought a crib that night, but Jewish superstition doesn’t allow for any baby accoutrements to be set up until the child is present and breathing.
Nobody could remember when Gregory left. We were just happy to revel in his absence.
Sharon and I took our seats in the center of the auditorium, and I waved up to the projection booth. The lights went out, and the screen came to life.
And there we were, our younger selves looking nervously at each other. She wore a white gown with a large bow in the back that made her look like the best present a man could possibly receive. I wore a blue pinstriped suit with lapels that were now no longer in fashion, and eleven pounds less than I wear today.
The “us” on the screen gave each other a tense glance, then exhaled, and walked outside to a lovely lawn, set up with rows of chairs on either side. My college roommate, a guy named Dave, played “Here Comes the Sun” on an acoustic guitar until we reached the altar, which was really a spot on the grass we’d designated. Four of our tallest friends (okay, Sharon’s tallest friends) held up a prayer shawl over our heads, to serve as a chuppah, or a roof. You need that.
Sharon leaned over in her theatre seat. Row K, seat 18. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”
“You’re welcome. But it’s just a DVD.”
“I didn’t mean the DVD,” she said.
EPILOGUE
THREE MONTHS LATER
If the things you wanted to happen did not happen, think
instead of the things you did not want to happen that did
not happen.
—CONFUCIUS
WEDNESDAY
THE Wrong Box (1966) and Dead Tired (this week)
SOPHIE told me to take the night off.
Taking her position as manager seriously, Sophie decided that I looked tired, and should relax for an evening. And she was right.
The repairs had, naturally, blossomed into more repairs, and were just now being completed. In addition to a new paint job for the entire theatre, except the auditorium, we now had completely new plumbing fixtures in the ladies’ room, a new electrical service, three newly plastered walls, new wallpaper, and a new neon sign that read REFRESHMENTS over the snack bar.
Russell Chapman’s money was being put to good use, even though I hadn’t actually received it yet.
We were showing The Wrong Box, a brilliant black comedy very loosely adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson short story by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, fresh off A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But I could catch it another night. Black comedy being the crowd-pleaser it is, we could expect a relatively small crowd for the classic, and Dead Tired, the touching story of a vampire with insomnia, probably wasn’t going to help. Sophie, having received her acceptance to Princeton University two days before, had taken the previous night off, so she decided it was my turn tonight. No doubt the staff would have a celebration after the showings, and I was better off not knowing what direction that might take.
So now, having had a sumptuous dinner of takeout Chinese food, Sharon and I were on the new sofa in my living room, ostensibly watching His Girl Friday (in a remake of The Front Page that makes you wonder why they ever did this with two men) on the flat-screen. But in reality, she was fast asleep, head on my lap, and snoring. Her growing belly rose and fell with each gorillalike emanation from her throat. I couldn’t hear the movie’s dialogue, but then, I pretty much have it memorized, anyway.
I’d been in touch once or twice with Angie Hogencamp. She assured me that the will Russell Chapman had left would be upheld, although it was being challenged by Wally and Lillian Mayer. Susan said their case was flimsy at best, what with Lillian standing by idly while her intensely crazy sister murdered their father, and then staying silent about it, but the money for Comedy Tonight would be delayed while the courts decided. She made a reference to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which I had to look up on SparkNotes.com. It meant the case could take a long time to resolve.
Sharon had been working longer hours at the practice, since they’d just now found a new doctor to replace Lennon Dickinson, so she was especially tired, being five months pregnant. Lennon had managed to cut a deal for a lesser sentence in his case, testifying against the loan shark in exchange for the prosecutor lowering his charges to withholding evidence.
Rosalind Russell, as Hildegaard “Hildy” Johnson, was just taking the corrupt sheriff down in a flying tackle when Sharon shifted a bit, and ended up facing straight up, rather than at the screen. I’d have to wake her soon, so she could get home at a decent hour.
But not yet. Not just yet.
FURTHER FUNNY FILM FACTS FOR FANATICS
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Written and directed by Preston Sturges. Starring Joel Mc-Crea, Veronica Lake, and William Demarest.
Veronica Lake’s character is never referred to by name. She is identified in the cast list simply as “The Girl.”
Preston Sturges was a playwright and inventor (he invented a kiss-proof lipstick, among other things) who moved to Hollywood to make money to finance his plays. He sold a number of screenplays, but became frustrated with the way they were directed, so he sold The Great McGinty to Paramount for one dollar—on the provision that he direct it himself.
Sturges, who was named the twenty-eighth best director of all time by Entertainment Weekly, died of a heart attack in the Algonquin Hotel in 1959, while writing his memoirs, which he entitled The Events Leading up to My Death.
What Elliot was trying to say on page 10 was that the title of John L. Sullivan’s intended project, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, was “borrowed” by Joel and Ethan Coen for their 2000 update of Homer’s Odyssey, starring George Clooney.
At one point in Sullivan’s Travels, someone mentions that the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? was written by “Sinclair Beckstein,” a mishmash of the names Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and Sinclair Lewis, according to Sturges.
The cartoon shown to the inmates that raises their spirits is Playful Pluto (1934). Sturges wanted to use a Charlie Chaplin film, but Chaplin wouldn’t give his permission.
A Night at the Opera (1935)
The most commercially successful film the Marx Brothers ever made, it was also the first they made that did not include the youngest brother, Zeppo, who had left the act to become a talent agent. Which probably bolstered Groucho’s opinion, when asked if the brothers would want as much money for just three, that “without Zeppo, we’re worth twice as much.”
Censors in each state had to decide whether to include the line (when Groucho and Margaret Dumont are walking up the gangplank to the ship and she asks, “Otis, do you have everything?”) “I haven’t had any complaints yet.”
The famous stateroom scene was conceived by Boasberg, who wrote a draft, shredded it, and threw it around his office. When the Marx Brothers and producer Irving Thalberg (the prototype for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon) found the shredded scene, they pieced it back together, and cinema history was made.
If you think the crowd in Elliot’s office is implausible, keep in mind that fifteen people and a huge (open) steamer trunk fit into the minuscule stateroom in Opera.
Director Wood reportedly (according to the Marxes and others) insisted every scene be shot at least twenty times, and instead of saying “action,” would start each take with “Okay, folks, let’s get in there and sell ’em a load of clams.”
The Wrong Box (1966)
Directed by Bryan Forbes. Written by Robert Louis Stevenson (novel), Lloyd Osbourne (story), and Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove. Starring John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, and Nanette Newman.
Plot: A tontine (a sort of morbid trust fund that gives all the money to the last surviving member) among twelve London schoolboys dwindles to the last two, now older men, who try to . . . speed up the inheritance process. On each other.
Richardson was asked to take the part of Joseph Finsbury while he was filming Doctor Zhivago, and agreed on the condition that he be allowed to wear the same jacket he wore in the Russian epic.
Gelbart and Shevelove were in London after a massive success on Broadway with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum when they decided to write the screenplay. Aside from the film adaptation of Forum, this is Shevelove’s only big-screen writing credit.
Gelbart went on to write, develop, and serve as executive producer for the television series M*A*S*H; wrote the screenplays of Oh, God!, Tootsie, and many others; and has produced and directed for the stage and television as well as film.
Cook and Moore performed as a comedy team on stage and television until Moore became a film star with roles in Arthur and 10. Cook appears as the preacher with a speech impediment in The Princess Bride, among many other roles. Together, they wrote and starred in the original Bedazzled (1967) with, among other people, Raquel Welch.
A Night at the Operation Page 28