by Michael Nava
Larry stopped the picture. “The fellow on the right is Zane.”
“Who’s the other?”
“Paul Houston. He’s been on the tube for twenty years in one series after another. This was supposed to be his show but Tom Zane’s edged him out.”
“Why? His looks?”
Larry sipped his brandy. “Watch.”
He fast-forwarded the tape until he reached a scene in which Tom Zane was standing in the doorway of Paul Houston’s office. Larry turned off the sound. Even with the sound off, Paul Houston was clearly an actor at work. His face was full of tics and pauses meant to convey, by turn, cranky good humor, concern, exasperation, and wisdom. It wasn’t that his acting was obvious but merely that it was unmistakable. He was trying to reach the audience beyond the camera.
Tom Zane, on the other hand, hadn’t the slightest interest in anything but the camera. He opened his face to it and the camera did all the work. It amounted to photography, not acting, and yet the effect was to intimate that, next to Tom Zane, Paul Houston looked like a wind-up toy. Larry shut off the tape and turned to me.
“See?” he said.
“He has a lot of charisma,” I observed. “But can he act?”
Larry said, “He couldn’t act his way out of the proverbial paper sack, but the camera loves his face.”
“Well, it’s some face. I’ve never heard of Tom Zane before.”
“He came out of nowhere about a year ago and got a bit part in the pilot of this show. The response to him was so overwhelming that they killed off the actor who was originally supposed to play Houston’s partner and replaced him with Zane.”
“What’s he want with you?”
“He’s putting together a production company.”
“I thought you weren’t taking new business.”
“Sandy’s persistent,” Larry said. “In fact, he was just here a while ago to drop off the cassette and,” he picked up a paperback, “this.”
I looked at the cover. “Edward the Second by Bertolt Brecht. Why?”
“Zane’s performing the title role in a little theater on Santa Monica. Sandy wants me to come tonight.”
“Are you?” I asked. We’d planned to have dinner out and take in a movie.
“If you’ll come, too,” he said, setting the book down.
“Sure,” I said. “Did Sandy say anything about Jim Pears?”
Larry shook his head. “That was last week’s sensation.”
“Tough town you got here,” I said. I picked up the book. “Isn’t Brecht sort of ambitious for an actor who can’t act?”
“I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Larry said. “It’s kind of a vanity production.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, flipping the pages of the play. It was in verse.
“Zane’s producing it himself. It’s not to make money but to show people in the industry what he can do as an actor. I suspect his wife’s behind it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Irene Gentry.”
“Irene Gentry?” I put the book down. “I saw her in Long Day’s Journey Into Night three years ago. She’s wonderful.”
“Yeah,” Larry said dubiously.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not about her acting. She really is a fine stage actress but in this town she has-” he smiled “-a reputation.”
“What sort?”
“Nothing specific, just that she’s difficult to work with. Not that she ever got much work here. She’s always had too much going against her.”
“For instance?”
“She’s plain, she’s now past forty, she’s New York, and she’s too damned good an actress.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
He lit a cigarette. “The days when movies could tolerate a Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis as a leading lady are over. The public wants candy for the eyes. Irene Gentry is a five-course meal.”
“I wrote her a fan letter once,” I said.
“Henry, you surprise me.”
I shrugged. “I was a lot younger, then,” I offered, by way of explanation. “She was doing Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.”
“Yes,” Larry said, exhaling a stream of smoke, “I saw her in that, too.”
We were both silent.
“Well, you may get to meet her tonight,” he said, finishing his drink. “I’m going to take a nap, Henry. Wake me in an hour or so, all right?”
“All right.” After he left I turned the tape back on, with the sound, and listened to Tom Zane deliver excruciatingly bad lines with all the animation of a robot. He was such a bad actor that it was almost possible to overlook his face. Almost. After a minute or two, I shut the tape off and picked up the Brecht.
Edward the Second was an English king who ruled from 1307 to 1324. His calamitous reign culminated in a thirteen-year civil war that ended with his abdication. Two years later he was murdered by order of his wife’s lover, a nobleman named Mortimer. Much of Edward’s misfortune resulted from a love affair he conducted with a man named Piers Gaveston in an age when sodomy was a capital offense. Edward’s homosexuality was less disturbing to his vassals than his insistence on carrying on openly with Gaveston. Parliament twice exiled Edward’s lover only to have Edward recall him. Eventually, the nobility split between those who were loyal to the king and those who were repelled by him. This led to the civil war.
The notes in the Brecht book said that Edward’s life had been the subject of an earlier play by Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who was himself homosexual. Marlowe’s work was the source of much of Brecht’s play. In Brecht’s version, Edward — vain, frivolous, proud, willful, and incompetent — was more like the degenerate scion of the Krupp family than a fourteenth-century monarch. This characterization was emphasized by the way Brecht portrayed Gaveston, the object of Edward’s passion. Gaveston was essentially a whore; a butcher’s son who, for reasons inexplicable even to himself, was plucked from his low station by the whim of an infatuated king.
Gaveston was canny and fatalistic: the real hero of the Brecht play.
Though Edward was no hero he did have a certain grandeur which was mostly evident at the end of the play when he is held in captivity. In defeat and squalor, he repented nothing, becoming more of a king than when he actually governed.
The cost to Edward of his homosexuality was a gruesome death. While Brecht’s stage directions indicated death by suffocation, the accompanying notes discussed the actual circumstances of Edward’s murder. A red-hot poker was thrust into his anus. His last lover, who according to the historical record was not Gaveston, was castrated; his genitals were burned in public and then the man was decapitated.
*****
The play was being performed in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Since I planned to see Josh Mandel after the play, Larry and I took separate cars. The rain had stopped at dusk and the skies had cleared. They were flooded with the lights of the city but, for all that, Santa Monica seemed dark and uninhabited as I waited at a traffic light just east of the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.
Behind towering walls only the palm trees were visible. As I passed the gates I saw the domes and turrets of the necropolis. On the other side of the street, young boys — hustlers — stood in doorways or sat at bus stops watching cars with violent intensity. As I drove between the whores and the cemetery I thought of Jim Pears for whom death and sex had been in even closer proximity. When I came to Highland, brightly lit and busy, I felt like one awakening from the beginnings of a bad dream.
The theater was surprisingly small, a dozen rows of folding wooden chairs broken into three sections in a semi-circle ascending from the stage. Larry and I sat third row center, arriving just as the lights began to dim. There were few other people around us. One of them was a woman with a familiar face. She glanced at me and then turned away.
“That’s Irene
Gentry,” I said, more to myself than to Larry.
He looked over at her and nodded.
The house lights went out around us and I looked at the stage. A remarkably handsome man stood in the lights holding a piece of paper — it was Edward’s lover, Gaveston. He lifted it toward his eyes and said:
My father, old Edward, is dead. Come quickly
Gaveston, and share the kingdom with your dearest friend, King Edward the Second.
There followed a scene in which Gaveston was approached by two itinerant soldiers who offered him their service. He mockingly refused and one of them cursed him to die at the hands of a soldier. The three of them then stepped into the shadows. Five other men emerged. One was Edward.
“Where’s Zane?” I whispered to Larry.
“The blond.”
I looked. “His hair-” I began, remembering that on the tv show he had had black hair.
“This is natural color,” Larry said. “They made him dye it for the series because Houston is also blond. Or was, rather, twenty years ago.”
“He’s short,” I said. Zane looked no taller than five-seven.
“He wears lifts in front of the camera,” Larry explained. He looked at me and smiled. “Poor Henry, this must be terribly disillusioning.”
Someone shushed us and I returned my attention to the stage. Beneath the glare of the stage lights, Zane’s face lost the magic that the camera conjured up. He was still handsome but his face was oddly immobile; I diagnosed a case of the jitters. He delivered his first line, “I will have Gaveston,” as if requesting his coffee black.
Midway through the play two things were apparent. First, as Larry had warned me, Tom Zane could not act. Second, the cast that surrounded him had been carefully directed to disguise Zane’s disability as much as humanly possible. All except Gaveston. I glanced at my program. The actor playing Gaveston was named Antony Good. While the other actors covered Zane’s fluffed lines, Good stared at Zane in open amazement as he raced through yet another speech, spitting it out like sour milk. The other actors underacted assiduously when playing a scene with Zane, but Good threw himself into the role of Gaveston in open competition with the star. It was a one-sided contest. Good was superb, bringing to the character of Gaveston the pathos of the street outside the theater.
Zane, by contrast, lumbered through these scenes like a wounded animal dragging itself to a burial ground. Sweat soaked his underarms and he sprayed spittle across the stage. Once or twice he simply stopped mid-speech and gasped for air. Then, frowning with concentration, he would begin again, devastating Brecht’s elegant lines. I looked around to Irene Gentry. She sat, motionless, eyes facing the stage.
When the house lights went on at intermission, she was already gone.
Larry looked at me and said, almost irritably, “Whatever possessed him to do this play?”
“It is terrible, isn’t it?”
“No,” Larry replied. “He’s terrible.”
We got up to stretch.
“Gaveston is excellent, though,” I said.
“Mm. It’s a role Tony Good’s played in his life.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes,” he said in a curious voice.
“Meaning?”
“Tony sometimes offers his services as an escort to men of a certain age.”
“Have you ever taken him up on it?”
Larry shook his head. “No. I’m going outside to get some air. You coming?”
We went out.
In the first scene of the second half of the play Gaveston was killed. Tom Zane’s performance began to improve at once. In the final scenes, where Edward is dragged from castle to castle alone except for his jailers, Zane was transformed. His delivery was still awkward but the suffering he conveyed was authentic. Not just Zane’s expressions, but the contours of his face and his body changed so that he seemed a different man from the one who first stepped upon the stage. I began to believe that he was Edward the Second.
The culmination of his performance came in the assassination sequence. In the play, Edward has been locked in a cell in London, into which the city’s sewage drops upon him. Drums are pounded to keep him from sleeping. The assassin, Light- born, is let into Edward’s cell.
The scene began in darkness. Slowly, a blue light glimmered from a corner of the stage where a man stood, arms loose at his sides, face tilted upward toward the light. His hair was matted and his body covered with filth. This was Zane. In the flickering blue light it took me a moment to see that, other than a soiled rag that cupped his genitals, he was naked. Zane had a first-class body. He said:
This hole they’ve put me in is a cesspit.
For seven hours the dung of London
Has dropped on me.
A ladder of rope dropped from above the stage and an immense, powerfully muscled black man climbed down. Light- born. At once, Zane accused him of being his murderer. Light- born denied it.
Zane answered, “Your look says death and nothing else.”
The drums that had been heard from the beginning of the scene were suddenly still. Lightborn went to a brazier where he lit a coal fire. Zane watched impassively. An amber light was added to the stage. Then, approaching the king as he would a lover, Lightborn coaxed him to lie down on his cot and sleep. Zane resisted.
Pulling away, Zane turned to face Lightborn and again accused him of being sent as his murderer.
Lightborn touched his fingers to Zane’s filthy hair, picked out a bit of straw and repeated, “You have not slept. You’re tired, Sire. Lie down on the bed and rest a while.”
Zane turned to face the audience. Lightborn quietly approached him from behind and lifted his powerful arms which he wrapped around Zane’s chest as if intending to squeeze the life from him. Zane did not resist. Lightborn released his arms and once again urged the king to sleep.
Zane replied:
The rain was good. Not eating made me full. But
The darkness was the best…
Therefore let
The dark be dark and the unclean unclean.
Praise hunger, praise mistreatment, praise
The darkness.
Lightborn led Zane by the hand to a cot and Zane lay down. Looking at Lightborn he said, “There’s something buzzing in my ears. It whispers: If I sleep now, I’ll never wake. It’s anticipation that makes me tremble so.” He delivered these lines softly, as if speaking in a dream. I thought of Jim Pears. I glanced at Larry and wondered what he was thinking.
Lightborn kissed Zane on the lips. Then there was silence. Zane’s breath grew light and rapid as he slipped into sleep. The cot creaked as he turned on his stomach. Lightborn raised his hand into the air and caught a metal poker tossed down from where the ladder had come. He placed the tip of the poker in the brazier. The blue light flickered out, leaving only the amber which slowly changed to deep red.
Lightborn stood above Zane holding the poker a foot or two above Zane and aimed it directly between his legs, upward toward his anus. He flexed his powerful arms. The light went out.
Zane’s shriek rent the darkness.
It was only then that I remembered that the poker scene was not in Brecht’s play.
14
The actors took their bows and filed off the stage. Larry and I got up and made our way to the aisle. Sandy Blenheim, wearing pleated black leather pants and a voluminous white shirt, stopped us. He grabbed Larry’s hand and said, “You made it.”
“Hello, Sandy,” Larry replied, disengaging his hand. “You remember Henry Rios.”
“Hello,” I said.
Blenheim took me in with a reptilian flick of his eyes.
“You were that kid’s lawyer,” he said. “Too bad about him. It would have been a great movie.” To Larry he said, “Wasn’t T. Z. fabulous?”
“He got better toward the end,” Larry replied.
“The last scene,” Blenheim went on. “Perfect. You know it was his idea to do it with just the jock strap.”
“That last scene wasn’t in Brecht,” I said. “Brecht has Lightborn suffocate Edward.”
“T. Z., again,” Blenheim replied. “Someone told him that’s how the guy really died, so he wanted to do it that way.” He looked at me. “It’s kinda sexy, huh?”
“Yes,” I allowed. “It was.”
Blenheim smiled again as if confirming something about me. I could imagine what it was. I knew a tribesman when I saw one. So, it seemed, did he. He wagged a finger between Larry and me. “You two dating?”
Larry cut him off. “We’re friends, Sandy.”
“Well, why don’t you and your friend come over to Monet’s. Tom and Rennie are having a little party.”
“Henry?”
“Sure,” I replied, thinking that I might meet Irene Gentry there.
“That’s great,” Blenheim said. “Maybe you and me and Tom can get together about that contract, Larry.”
“Okay,” Larry replied without enthusiasm.
“See you there,” Blenheim said. He favored me with another narrow smile, and bounced off shouting the name of his next victim.
“Who’s Rennie?” I asked.
“Irene Gentry. The name Irene doesn’t really lend itself to abbreviation, but everyone calls her Rennie.”
“Rennie,” I repeated.
“Let’s go meet her.”
The sky was clear but starless. Only a trickle of water in the gutters gave any clue of the day’s rain. Santa Monica Boulevard was clogged with traffic — brake lights flared in the darkness, wheels squeaked to a halt — and the air was choked with exhaust fumes. Larry cadged a cigarette from a passerby and lit it.
“Monet’s isn’t far,” he said. “Let’s walk it.”