Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  I saw a hand whip away a vacant chair next to mine and a splendidly formed chap with ginger hair take a position over One.

  “I heard that, Mac,” he said, “and I’ll thank you to take it back.”

  I got to my feet. “You don’t understand,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to understand,” he said. “He’ll take it back or I’ll help him.”

  I could not imagine anything more certain to dissolve at the touch of analysis than what One had said (any more than I could remember ever having heard anyone being asked to take back anything that tenuous), but, eager to avoid a scene, I struck out hurriedly, “He means Swedes keep a steady level—none of the stock crotchets that make caricatures out of other nationalities.” I laughed. “But maybe there are Swedes as well as Swedes, eh? In which case,” I said, reaching the nadir of inanity, “I’m sure you’d be one of the Swedes.”

  “I’m Scotch-American,” he said, compounding the confusion.

  “Then what—” I began, and he waved to the table behind me.

  At it was a dainty girl with cornflower eyes and hair like plaited gold. Her head down and her hands folded in her lap, she smiled deferentially at us. One rose with airy good nature and went over to her. The Scotch-American stood watchfully by, looking as though he might bring One’s career to the anachronistic close that would have seemed so apt—ceremonial notice of offense, in the form of a card, and a rendezvous in the woods at dawn. But, with a bow that put us back still another hundred years, One said to the girl, “I have seen bottled honey, but I have never held it up to the sun. Now I know what it must look like, and it is with pride—not humility, by any means—that I embrace the opportunity of apologizing to such a vision.”

  “We’ll let it go at that,” the Scotch-American said.

  “Honey—” One resumed.

  “Never mind the ‘honey’ stuff. I’ll call her that,” the Scotch-American said as I caught hold of One’s coattail to pull him back to our table before he would have to apologize for the way he was apologizing.

  “This …” I said, helpless against the current bearing me on into an idiom where I had no business. “This,” I said, with a wave at the poor Saugatuck, “is not nearly the Danube.”

  I NEVER saw One again after that. He took an apartment in New York that autumn, and finally disappeared from the orbit of my friends. I heard of him only once more. About a year ago, I ran across somebody who said he’d had word that One was living in London, managing a private art gallery. I hope his quest fares better there than here—for it’s as an endless quest that I see his life. I see him venturing, groomed and gloved, each evening through the British fog, looking for the one door, the bright door beyond which blooms at last that indoor paradise of bandied conceits and oral arabesques he never found in Fairfield County.

  If there’s anything to the maxim that once hotboxed our conversation, then the reverse of it must also be true, namely that canes are like epigrams, swaggered with in youth, leaned on in old age. What, then, about middle life? Because it occurs to me now that One is in his forties and that he always carried a stick. I’ve racked my brain trying to complete the apothegm he left unfinished, but the number of things that you can do with a stick in your prime that have symbolic value are few. There’s hailing cabs, swiping at bothersome dogs, and clacking it along picket fences, but none of these have symbolic value. Hailing cabs comes closest, but it’s too thin. There’s only one other thing I can think of that you might do with a cane. Push doorbells.

  One wouldn’t buy it, I don’t suppose, but then I’m not trying to sell it, either.

  1951

  S. J. PERELMAN

  DISQUIET, PLEASE, WE’RE TURNING!

  OF all the fantasies cherished by the public about the craft of fiction, perhaps the most venerated concerns the moment of creativity—the instant at which, presumably, the divine spark infuses a writer and sets him frenziedly wooing his muse. The popular conception of an author, in fact, is almost total fantasy. The average reader imagines him as a rather Byronic, darkly brooding individual, an amalgam of Baudelaire, Robinson Jeffers, and MacKinlay Kantor, who sits in his study garbed in a smoking jacket and velvet tam-o’-shanter, his brow furrowed in thought as he puffs on a meerschaum, awaiting the flash of inspiration essential to the work of genius. Suddenly a lightning zigzag cleaves the gloom, narrowly missing the bust of Homer on the bookshelf: the Idea has been born. With a stifled cry—sometimes there is not even time for a stifled cry—the author seizes his quill and begins covering page after page of foolscap. Useless for wife and family to plead with him to take rest or nourishment; the all-consuming urge to create, the furor scribendi, is upon him and will not be stilled. E’en if it destroys him, he must press forward till he writes “Finis” to his masterpiece.

  The series of events that climaxed in the present narrative had a somewhat different origin. They began on the sweltering summer morning in 1955 when Avrom Goldbogen—better known to the world of entertainment and various referees in bankruptcy as Michael Todd—first swam into my ken. I was seated in the dingy office on lower Sixth Avenue where I daily immured myself with an intractable typewriter, staring despondently at the rear wall of the adjacent apartment house. Three weeks before, the venetian blind veiling one of the windows had magically risen and I beheld, standing there in pearly nakedness, a lady of such flawless proportions that I was transfixed. She had obviously just emerged from the bath, to judge from the droplets of moisture that clung to her marble limbs, and the innocence of her pose, her sheer Eve-like rosy perfection as she stretched forth her arms and luxuriated in the morning sunshine, wrung my withers. Unhappily, as I was craning forward for a better view my head struck the windowpane. The impact startled her out of her reverie, and a second later the blind crashed downward, abruptly terminating my idyll. For weeks afterward, I kept expecting the vision to recur, but all I ever saw was an unshaven citizen in his undershirt, clearly an enforcer for the Mafia, glaring at me suspiciously through the blind, and I desisted.

  I was sitting there, as I say, stirring the dead ashes of desire when the phone rang and a crisp female voice came over the wire. “This is Candide Yam, Michael Todd’s beautiful Chinese secretary,” it declared. “Mr. Todd just called me from the Coast. He wants to know if you ever read a work authored by Jules Verne entitled Around the World in Eighty Days.”

  “When I was eleven years old, lambie,” I said patiently. “I also read Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus, Phil the Fiddler, by Horatio Alger, Sink or Swim, by Oliver Optic—”

  “My, you really are a well-read person,” she said. “I don’t get much chance to talk to people like you in this job.”

  “Then why don’t we have lunch?” I proposed. “I know a quiet little drop here in the Village—a droplet, so to speak—where we can relax over a vodka Martini and chat about books and stuff.”

  “Slow down, brother,” she said. “There’ll be plenty of time for that when we’re filmy.”

  “Filmy?” I repeated. My mood, instinct with romance, conjured up a vision of this exciting person, clad in filmy black negligee, forcing kumquats into my mouth and pleading for love, and I was suddenly on the qui vive. “Look, where are you? I can be there in ten minutes. The Plaza bar, the Drake—”

  “No, no—-filming, dear,” she corrected, in a voice that rivaled little silver bells. “Like in a movie.”

  “What movie?” I asked, bewildered. “I’m not involved in any flick I know of.”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” she said. “The Michael Todd production of Around the World in Eighty Days—that’s why he wants you to reread the book. I’m sending down a copy by messenger in twenty minutes. Be there.”

  I hung up and, after a quick peek at the apartment window opposite to make sure my Lorelei had not reappeared, tried to recall what I could about Mike Todd. Having written for the theater sporadically in the past, I knew he had produced several shows of passing consequence, like Star and Garter, The Hot Mi
kado, and Up in Central Park, but his reputation, even by Broadway standards, was not fragrant with frankincense and myrrh. Playwrights who had dealt with the man showed a tendency to empurple; they castigated him as a cheap chiseler reluctant to disgorge royalties, a carnival grifter with the ethics of a stoat. My association with showmen of the type, notably Billy Rose, had taught me that, in Joyce’s felicitous phrase—James Joyce, that is, not Joyce Matthews—they were as full of wind and water as a barber’s cat. Still, I remembered the enjoyment Verne’s novel had given me in youth, and if, in my present becalmed state, the project looked as though it might yield up enough to keep the pot boiling there was no harm in discussing it with Todd.

  The book, when it arrived, proved to be a children’s version bound in gleaming yellow calf, with my name—misspelled, naturally—so freshly emblazoned in gold on it that a few grains sifted into my palm. In due course, Todd rang up my agent and offered even fewer for my services on the screenplay. There then ensued the usual choleric exchange of insults and recriminations that attends all negotiations in the film industry, and ultimately a figure was arrived at which, in the hallowed phrase, we could both live with. Todd was living with his, I found when I reached Hollywood a week later, in opulence; he occupied a luxurious villa at the Beverly Hills Hotel, subsisting chiefly on champagne and caviar and smoking Flor de Magnificos, which cost a dollar apiece—frequently two at the same time. As he wove a verbal tapestry about the production he envisioned, the wonders of the Todd-AO process, the stars he planned to inveigle into cameo roles, and the réclame that would accrue to everyone concerned, I took stock of this luftmensch to whom I had indentured myself. Squat, muscular, intensely dynamic, he was the very pattern of the modern major moviemaker—voluble, cunning, full of huckster shrewdness, slippery as a silverfish, and yet undeniably magnetic. In short, a con man, a tummler with a bursting Napoleonic complex. Forever in movement, he walked in a fighter’s crouch, as if both to ward off a blow and dodge a summons. The key to his nature, as I was to learn in our association, was his mouth, which bore a marked resemblance to a rattrap. Those thin lips, I sensed, could be merciless, but at the moment they were busy weaving blandishments.

  “We’ll kill ’em, Jack,” he predicted ebulliently. “It’s going to be the picture of the century—we’ll blow those civilians out the back of the theater. Rolls-Royces … town houses … emeralds and rubies the size of your nose. They’ll be naming ships after us!” I was reminded of Walter Burns wooing Hildy Johnson in The Front Page. “Okay, now, get lost, and remember this, you bum—no hanging around the water cooler. We start shooting with a finished script six weeks from today in Spain.”

  TO chronicle with any accuracy the arguments, intrigues, stratagems, and frustrations I was embroiled in over the next several months would be virtually impossible. One factor, however, was constant: Todd’s utter, neurotic refusal to part with money. A compulsive gambler, he would toss away thousands on the turn of a card or the convulsions of dice, but when my stipend or those of my co-workers fell due Todd automatically vanished. Week after week, it took cajolery, pleas, and threats of legal action to collect one’s salary. All the while, of course, our impresario lived like the Medici, running up awesome bills that he waved away airily on presentation. Whether they were ever settled, even after he hit the mother lode, was doubtful. His chutzpah, however, was indisputable, for, as became more and more obvious daily, his million-dollar epic was a classic shoestring operation. In Hollywood, he held endless whispered consultations in corners with squat Neanderthal types who rested on their knuckles, underarms bulging as though harboring shoulder holsters. In Europe, these gave way to foxy-nosed characters in homburgs, reputedly Swiss and Austrian bankers, so suave that marzipan wouldn’t melt in their mouths. The financial ramifications of any movie are cloaked in mystery; those of Around the World in Eighty Days were as impenetrable as the Mato Grosso. To this day, I venture to say, nobody knows where or how Todd promoted the wherewithal to make his chef-d’œuvre, or who got what share of the golden hoard. All I know is that my pittance was extracted only by deep surgery.

  European filming began in a village outside Madrid, inaugurated with a Homeric quarrel between Todd and the director, John Farrow, hat ended in the latter’s dismissal. This stroke of luck raised everyone’s spirits—so much so that the bullfight sequences starring Luis Dominguín and Cantinflas were completed ahead of schedule. The company then descended on London, where Todd installed himself in a pad at the Dorchester of such barbaric tastelessness that it must have been shipped piecemeal from Las Vegas to make him feel at home. As with everywhere he roosted, the premises instantly took on the aspect of Donnybrook Fair: phones rang wildly, coveys of actors, agents, and technicians boiled through the rooms, and the air was blue with cigar smoke and maledictions. Concurrently, shooting went on in Knights-bridge and Belgravia, while interiors—the Reform Club, Lloyd’s, and Phileas Fogg’s residence—were in progress at the studio. One consolation in the uproar was the presence of Candide Yam, Todd’s handmaiden from New York. A fetching Celestial strikingly reminiscent of Anna May Wong, Candide inexplicably possessed a fund of colloquial Yiddish, and whenever the turmoil became overwhelming the two of us used to steal away to Isow’s, on Brewer Street, and share the inscrutable wisdom of the East over a knish.

  Complex as parts of the English production were, they paled beside one exterior, a crowd scene, shot in Paris a fortnight later. The physical action involved was trifling; Phileas Fogg and Passepartout were to arrive in a carriage in the Rue Castiglione and enter the offices of Thomas Cook & Son. Seeking to demonstrate the scope of his AO process, Todd bade his marshals make the scene as lavish as possible. Eight hundred extras were outfitted in the costumes of 1872, and various conveyances of the period—victorias, barouches, berlins, horse-drawn buses—were routed out of warehouses and museums. Since any glimpse of an automobile would have been disastrous, men were employed to clear the area the night before filming; cars were thrust helter-skelter into the streets fringing the Place Vendôme, much to the ire of their owners and the police, who subsequently touched off a lengthy investigation. In any case, by ten the next morning a juggernaut laden with cameras and technicians was positioned against the railing of the Tuileries, seven French assistant directors were rehearsing the crowd with a maximum of hysteria, and our principals had executed so many turns in their vehicle that they were dizzy. Then, just as the whistle blew for the take and the extras started moving, an altogether unforeseen hitch occurred.

  Directly above the arcade at the bottom of the Rue Castiglione was a hotel with a number of heavily shuttered windows. Suddenly one of them opened and a fat man in lurid pajamas stepped forth into the sunshine, yawning and scratching himself. His gaze slowly traveled downward into the Rue de Rivoli and, on the instant, he turned to stone. His stupefaction was pardonable; he had retired in 1955 and awakened into a world populated by folk in crinolines and beaver hats. Todd, already overwrought because of the expense and time consumed in the take, suffered a paroxysm. He snatched up a megaphone and screamed at the interloper. “Get back, you dummy!” he shouted. “Can’t you see you’re on camera, you frog bastard? Close the blind!”

  Though Todd’s words were inaudible over the din of the extras milling about and the street noises, the man did withdraw, but only momentarily. In an augenblick, he popped back with an equally corpulent lady in a peach-colored robe, who reacted as he had. The two of them stood on the balcony gesticulating and chattering nineteen to the dozen while Todd raged up and down, smiting his forehead and inveighing against the French, his subordinates, and destiny. At length, a vassal was dispatched to hale the couple indoors, the multitude was regrouped, and the scene—valueless to the story but quenching Todd’s thirst for spectacle—went into the can.

  What with another costly crowd scene at the Gare du Nord, involving a number of French screen luminaries, the budget was becoming visibly distended, and Todd decided he had sufficient European footage.
In one frantic morning, he organized a second unit to make process shots in India and the Far East, providing its members with tickets to Rangoon, yellow monk’s robes, and begging bowls so they could scrounge enough rice to continue onward. Then, distributing a reckless largesse of smiles and handshakes to the technical crew, he raced off to California to do the Western exteriors, and our paths diverged for a spell.

  Some six weeks later, I received a midnight telephone plea to join Todd in Hollywood, where he was preparing the Barbary Coast episode and a couple of others in the picture. I complied and, as I expected, was immediately plunged into a courtship unsullied by any hint of money. He urgently needed lines and situations, he confessed, for some exceptional stars he had acquired for cameo roles. I confessed, with equal candor, that I urgently needed bread for my dependents. His eyes took on a glassy, hypnotic stare and he began casting my horoscope. In it he saw yachts the size of the Stella Polaris, racing stables, seraglios full of milk-white lovelies surpassing Jane Russell. Impressed though I was by his clairvoyance, I managed to retain my equilibrium and demanded cash on the barrelhead. He vilified me, rent his garments, and howled aloud, but eventually he consented to a deal on a piecework basis. Nightly in the weeks that followed, therefore, we would meet in a Beverly Hills parking lot, I clutching the pages required for the next day’s shooting, he the pro-rata payment. At a concerted signal, we made a lightning exchange, leaped into our respective cars, and drove off.

  Five months after the picture had opened and Todd’s own picture was appearing on postage stamps, David Niven and I lunched at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As we reviewed the vicissitudes we had undergone in its making, he suddenly interrupted his discourse. “Bless my soul, I almost forgot,” he said. “This reunion deserves a special celebration. Waiter—two more Martinis, please!”