by D. W. Buffa
The scotch felt good as it burned at the back of my throat. I took another drink.
“Maybe your friend Stanley better find himself another lawyer.”
She was used to soothing the injured feelings of people Stanley Roth had offended.
“He didn’t have any choice,” she insisted.
Her shiny silk hair settled gently on her shoulder as she moved her head to the side. She peered at me through blue eyes that looked softer now than the day before when we had first met.
“He really didn’t,” she repeated. “They’re all meeting tonight: Stanley—some of the people you met last night: Wirthlin, Griffin, Walker Bradley, Pomeroy—to decide what to do.”
I still had no idea what she was talking about.
“What to do about Mary Margaret’s last movie,” explained Julie. “What to keep, what to cut; exactly how it should end. There are a thousand things they have to decide.”
“I thought—someone said last night—that the writers had already written a new ending, that it would all be done in a few weeks?”
“You really don’t know anything about this business, do you? The writers may have written a new ending, but Stanley watches the rushes every night while they’re shooting, and more often than not decides to rewrite every scene. It may be done in a few weeks, or it may be done months from now. The point is, it isn’t done until Stanley says it’s done. You have to understand: He works all the time. If he hadn’t gotten out of jail, I don’t think he could have survived it, not being able to work, not being able to do what he does. It’s what he lives for.”
“All the more reason he better start taking this a little more seriously,” I retorted. “I can’t help him if he isn’t willing to help himself.”
“Oh, he’s willing. He’ll do anything you want,” she said with confidence. “He said to tell you he could either meet you later tonight, midnight or a little later, after he’s finished, or sometime tomorrow morning. Whenever you want.”
“Midnight or a little later, whenever I want,” I muttered to myself, half amused, as I tossed down more of the scotch and soda.
“Yes,” she said, as if I had repeated it to make sure I had it right. “He said he would come here, to the Chateau Marmont, if you like. He doesn’t know if he can get away from the reporters and the television people, however. They’ve staked out his home.”
“The Palms?”
“Yes, and the studio.”
She was about to tell me something more about the difficulties with which Stanley Roth had to deal when I stopped her.
“What did you mean when you made that remark— when you asked was I sure that’s what happened when I said I had gotten him out of jail?”
There was a look in her eyes that told me she knew something I did not.
“Did someone do something? Did someone—Louis Griffin—get to the judge?”
“You mean—bribe?
“You know damn well that’s what I mean.”
“No, of course not.”
I bent closer, so close I could feel her breath, searching her eyes. “Then what ... ?”
“I don’t know. That’s the truth.”
“But you think something happened, don’t you? What?”
“Louis contributes to a lot of things, and not just civic or charitable causes. He makes a lot of political contributions; and when Louis backs someone, a lot of other people do the same thing. Honigman wants to run for attorney general.”
“You think he promised to help? That’s still bribery.”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head in protest. “That’s not how it works. Louis wouldn’t have said anything. Louis is too honest for anything that crude. He didn’t have to say anything. I was in court, standing at the back. I saw what happened. Why do you think Louis was there, sitting in the front row like that? To show moral support for Stanley? Yes, of course; but not to show Stanley—to show Honigman, to show him that this was something that meant a lot, not just to Blue Zephyr, but to Louis personally. God, do you think Louis Griffin makes it a point to wander around the county courthouse just to see what’s going on?
“There’s something else,” said Julie rather tentatively. “Honigman has a daughter, an actress.”
“And?”
“Do you think he wanted to jeopardize her career by keeping Stanley Roth in jail? Especially when, as you argued so passionately, he might be an innocent man?”
There was something insidious about it, something worse than bribery. It was the kind of influence that could never be traced; the kind that the people on whom it worked most effectively, the people it corrupted, were not always consciously aware it had worked at all.
Rudolph Honigman would insist that his decision to release Stanley Roth had been based purely and entirely on the facts of the case, on the defendant’s close ties to the community, on the absence of any criminal record, on the willingness of so many prominent people, including perhaps especially Louis Griffin, to vouch for Roth’s promise to show up for trial. More than that, Honigman would believe that the lie he told himself was, underneath all the calculations of his own advantage, the truth; because he would believe—he had to believe— that he would have done the same thing for a man he had never heard of who could not possibly do anything of benefit for him.
We finished our drink and Julie began to make suggestions about dinner.
“Tell me something,” I said as she began to run down a list of restaurants nearby where we might get in without too much of a wait. “What was she really like—Mary Margaret Flanders? There had to have been more to her than a woman who cared only about herself and fought all the time with her husband. I need to know everything I can about her. Why did she marry Stanley Roth if all she cared about was herself? And if the marriage wasn’t any good, whom would she have brought home with her that night? Who would have wanted to kill her?”
Julie tossed her head and smiled.
“What was Mary Margaret Flanders really like? I suppose you’d have to find someone who knew her before she was a movie star. Because after that, after someone becomes a movie star ... everything is different then. Everyone sees you in a different way, because however else they know you, they know you on the screen, and they keep trying to put the two things together—this idea they have from what they’ve watched you do in a movie and what you seem like in person. The thing is, almost everyone thinks the one they see on the screen is the real one, and that, off the screen, you’re really pretending to be like everyone else. What was Mary Margaret Flanders really like? I’ll be surprised if you find two people in this town who give you the same answer. She was like most movie stars: She was whatever she wanted someone to think she was. Now, come on,” she said as she slid off the barstool and took my arm, “let’s have dinner, and after dinner we can come back to the hotel and talk some more.”
Then she put her other hand on my arm as well. “Or we can just come back to the hotel
Chapter Seven
I HAD WRITTEN HIM THREE letters and placed at least half a dozen telephone calls; the letters had all gone unanswered, and none of the calls had been returned. When I had first seen him, standing opposite Stanley Roth at the grave of Mary Margaret Flanders, holding the hand of that little girl as she listened to what he whispered in her ear and then let fall that single flower onto the casket that contained the last mortal remains of her mother, I thought him more interesting than any of the more recognizable people there. His was the only face not famous and the only one you found yourself coming back to again and again. Part of it was precisely because you did not know who he was, and part of it was because of the child; but mainly it was because of how different he was from the others in the way he looked, and in the way he stood at the edge of that grave as if he were there all alone, as if none of the others had for him any more tangible existence than the unremarkable faces of an anonymous crowd. Instinctively, the mourners closest to him edged away, creating what space they could, afraid that because he had no ce
lebrity to share he might diminish their own. They treated him like the stranger he was; all, that is, except Stanley Roth, who after the had finally taken their leave shook his hand and patted the little girl on her head.
For weeks I had tried to learn everything I could about Mary Margaret Flanders and the people around her who had known her best. The more I learned, the more intrigued I became with the man she had married first. If they said it in different ways, and in different tones, everyone I talked to who had known Mary Margaret Flanders when she was still called Marian Walsh all said the same thing: Paul Erlich had fallen in love with her the way you only fall in love once, if you ever really fall in love that way at all. It was curious the way they described it, sometimes almost with a touch of envy, and sometimes, for some of them, a touch of nostalgia. There was a sense that what Paul Erlich had felt was something more intense, more passionate, than what they themselves had ever experienced.
Everyone knew, or thought they knew, what happened to Marian Walsh after she became Mary Margaret Flanders; hardly anyone knew what happened to Paul Erlich after he was divorced from his wife. There was no reason to know. Erlich had the curious fate of belonging to what was tantamount to the prehistory of a famous woman; one of those names mentioned in passing in the early chapters of a thick film-star biography; relegated to the status of an early mistake in someone else’s life, the kind of misjudgment that only in retrospect made possible her later triumphant success.
It is doubtful that Paul Erlich had read any of the biographies or any of the other things written about Hollywood life. He had left Los Angeles for Europe when his daughter was still an infant and did not come back until she was old enough to start school. He had been a graduate student at UCLA when he met and married Marian Walsh. After their divorce, after he left America, he studied first at Oxford and then at Rome.
Though he could have taught anywhere he wanted, he came back to UCLA. I found him on the first day of fall term, in a lecture hall so crowded with students they were standing, packed together, in both the doorways that led inside. I pushed my way forward just in time to see him walk toward the lectern on the stage below.
Though it had passed out of fashion in most college classrooms, Paul Erlich dressed with a certain formality: a dark blue suit and a dark maroon tie. There must have been close to two hundred students crowded into a room built for perhaps a hundred and a half, all of them talking at once, laughing as they jostled against each other, settling into whatever place they could find. For a moment, Erlich stood still, slowly surveying his young audience. The noise dwindled down, began to subside; and then, when he opened his mouth to speak, stopped completely.
Soft as silk, his voice floated through the air and then, somehow, held you fast. You could barely hear him at first, his voice was that quiet; but the longer you listened, the more it seemed like a voice that was coming from somewhere inside your own mind, an echo of something that though you had not realized it, you must have thought before. What he said, at least at the beginning, seemed simple enough. Perhaps too simple.
“Let us begin at the beginning,” said the young professor with gleaming eyes. “This is a course on twentiethcentury European intellectual history. That means it is a course on nineteenth-century European intellectual history. More specifically,” he continued with a quick decisive nod, followed by a quick emphatic smile, “all twentieth-century intellectual history—that is, all of it worth talking about—is dependent on Friedrich Nietzsche, who died, conveniently enough, in l900; a date so perfect for the purpose of connecting the intellectual history—and perhaps more than just the intellectual history—of the two centuries together that it might make some among us wonder whether, despite what Nietzsche insisted, God is dead after all.”
Erlich never waved his arms, never paced back and forth; there were none of those abrupt movements meant to show an audience how profoundly felt were the thoughts the speaker labored with such effort to put into words. When the words left his mouth they took on an independence, a life of their own.
“But if all of the most serious intellectual thought— including the most serious twentieth-century literature— is in one way or the other dependent on Nietzsche; all of the nineteenth century, including Nietzsche at the end of it and Hegel at the beginning, is in some sense a reaction to the eighteenth century, in part to Kant, but especially to Rousseau.”
Pausing to flash a gentle smile, as if he shared the confusion they must have felt, he glanced from one side of the crowded hall to the other.
“We are beginning to see the problem. The twentieth century is dependent on the nineteenth; the nineteenth on the eighteenth; and, as I know you’ve guessed, it does not stop there. If we were really going to begin at the beginning, we would have to begin the study of twentieth century intellectual history by taking up the study first of Plato, then of Aristotle. This would of course take us years, so we will simply skip over the beginning, which, I ask you to remember, Aristotle always insisted was ‘more than half,’ and do what we can. However,” added Erlich, his eyes shining with mischief, “because he did not die until the year 1900, we are permitted, I think, to say just a word or two about the influence of Nietzsche on the rest. It is important, after all, to remember, especially as we read some of the things written in the twentieth century, that it is helpful to know not just what those authors wrote, but what they read themselves. For at least the first third of the twentieth century, anyone who wanted to think seriously, anyone who wanted to write something other people would take seriously, read Nietzsche.
“Let me give you three examples of his influence, three examples of the way the twentieth century was shaped by what he wrote. The most profound thinker of the twentieth century was Martin Heidegger. The best book he wrote is not the famous and unfinished Being and Time; it is rather the lectures that form his commentary on Nietzsche himself. The most profound novel of the twentieth century, Dr. Faustus—a novel its author, Thomas Mann, considered the novel of the twentieth century—a novel about genius and madness, takes as its central character a man who is unmistakably based on Nietzsche. It is perhaps one of the strange ironies of history that this novel, this great German novel, written by this great German author, was written not in Germany, but right here, in Los Angeles, after Thomas Mann was driven out of Germany by the Nazis.
“The third, and of course best-known, if perhaps least-understood, influence exerted by Nietzsche on the twentieth century is the way in which Hitler found in him a justification for what he wanted to do. Nietzsche was himself quite aware that nearly everyone who read him would fail to understand him, and that some who read him—or read what others wrote about him—would distort out of all recognition what he meant. But it is doubtful that even that astonishing intelligence could have anticipated that the will to power, by which he sought to understand the driving force in every form of animate and inanimate existence alike, would become the rationale for the mindless slaughter of tens of millions of human beings.
“It may be worth mentioning, that if there is a certain irony in the fact that the great German novel of the twentieth century was written in Los Angeles, it is hard to know quite what to think of the fact that perhaps the single most powerful and influential motion picture ever made was made in Germany, by a German, Leni Riefenstahl, with a title meant most emphatically to connect Hitler, whose coming to power was being celebrated in the film, to Nietzsche: Triumph of the Will.”
Erlich stopped, glanced around the silent hall, then raised his chin and flashed a self-deprecating smile.
“I know this is UCLA, and I know this will disappoint many of you; but I’m afraid that was the last time we will mention film in any form for the rest of the term. Are there any questions?”
Before the end of the hour, I slipped out of the lecture hall to wait for Paul Erlich at his office. On both sides of a long corridor with painted white cinder-block walls and a gray linoleum floor, at regular intervals that could not have been more tha
n ten feet and were probably closer to eight, dozens of yellow oak doors were closed shut. A clear plastic frame, open at the top so a three-by-five card could be inserted, was fastened to each of them, just below a narrow vertical window not more than three or four inches wide. On each of the cards was typed, sometimes without great care, the name of the professor whose office it was and the hours set aside for students who wished for some reason to see them. The corridor was deserted, the only sound a muffled conversation that drifted through a half-open door at the far end, next to the fire escape.
The elevator jolted open and the voices of two faculty members echoed ahead, exchanging a few casual remarks as they walked together to their offices. Just beyond the elevator there were footsteps on the stairs. With a slow, shuffling gait, Paul Erlich was coming toward me, one hand shoved in his pants pocket, while he held in the other a slim tan briefcase. His head was bent, his eyes on a point just in front of his feet; but if he had been looking right at me I do not think he would have noticed me. He was concentrating on something, concentrating so hard that, as he came closer, I could see that his lips were moving, silently, methodically, like someone repeating to himself a thought he did not want to forget. When he got to the door, he pulled out his key chain, and started looking for the one he needed to get in. He greeted me with his eyes as if he had been expecting to find me in that very spot.
“I noticed you in my class,” he remarked affably as he first unlocked the door and then held out his hand. “You must be Joseph Antonelli. You aren’t anything like what I imagined you’d be.”
“How did you know ... ?”
“Who you were?”
He held open the door, waiting until I passed in front of him. The office was more like a cell, barely large enough for the metal desk shoved against the wall and the bookcase on the far side of it. There was a swivel chair at the desk and a straight back metal chair on the side of it closest to the door. There were only two exceptions to the Spartan simplicity of the furnishings: a threadbare hand-knotted Oriental rug on the floor and a gilt-edged picture frame containing a black and- white photograph of the child that was certainly his daughter.