O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “The reels are on a mail plane to California.”

  “Why would you ship the film away from your investors?”

  “I’m due in L.A. next week.”

  “You have a very smooth face for someone so accomplished,” St. Clair observes. “No imperfections, no marks. It always amazes me when successful people have faces with no scars. But then, things have come very easily to you, haven’t they, Mr. Grand? Now, tell me again please: Where is my investment?”

  “Like I said, the footage shipped out yesterday.”

  Although the weapon is a small one, Troy appears instantly bigger with a gun in his hand, an inflated hot-air balloon crowding the room.

  “Repeat that,” says the clock puncher with a pistol.

  “The reels are on their way to California,” Micah says in a rush. “Even if I wanted to, it’d be days before I could call them back.” The moviemaker remains fixated on one of Troy’s gold-filled teeth even as the fist-wrapped weapon rears up, comes down, and ricochets off the side of his head. Though he appreciates the restraint exercised by the muscleman—the proportion of the blow containing more knuckle than steel—the pain is apocalyptic. Colors vibrate, patterns pulse, a ringing rises in his inner ear, and everything turns noxious as Micah recalibrates and attempts to steady himself in his chair. Troy puts the gun back in its holster as quickly as a housewife clearing away the good china and resumes his position with hands folded in front of him. A comforting warmth spreads across Micah’s lap. “You pee yourself, Jew-man?” Troy asks.

  Micah covers his lap with the same handkerchief he’s using to stanch his bleeding temple.

  “Banana-peel dick?”

  “Beg pardon?” Micah asks the strongman.

  “You a son of Abraham?”

  “I’m Jewish if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Banana-peel dick.”

  “If I understand your meaning, you’re referring to circumcision and the Hebrew people’s covenant with God.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “What?”

  “Banana-peel dick.”

  “Madam Queen?!” Micah, a schoolchild begging a teacher to acknowledge some playground injustice. “They shipped the cans out this morning. I’m due in California in three days’ time to review the footage with the studio head. As soon as the scenes are edited into a reasonable assembly to show you, I will. And when the picture’s ready we have every intention of giving you your share of profits. This is where things are. This is the way things are done. This is what I’m trying to explain to you. Things take time.”

  “Madam Queen?”

  “Yes, Troy.”

  “I shoot this Jew?”

  “No, not today,” St. Clair says, taking another squirrel’s bite of a cookie. “Mr. Grand, you are a charming conversationalist, and it was a pleasure making your acquaintance. I do hope you appreciate that the only thing keeping your obituary from the evening’s paper was your presence here this afternoon. I am known to be a patient woman. That virtue is the leash restraining the hounds of hell. Were I in your shoes, I’d make every effort to screen that footage for your good investors at your earliest convenience. Otherwise my patience has been known to slacken.”

  ONE

  A chocolate replica of the award sits at the center of the table, wrapped in gold foil glinting light. Every table has a candy trophy, so that even if you didn’t win one, at least you could eat one. The award recipients had been announced weeks earlier, and the papers published the winners’ names the day before, but still the white hall hums, a collective agreement to preserve anticipation.

  In the moments before Douglas Fairbanks and William C. DeMille take the podium, the primary question is one of tonality. How would the evening play? Would this be the real thing? Or was this self-congratulatory business simply more silliness, gold stars passed out to millionaire schoolchildren? In a propped-up town lacking tradition, a kingdom of stucco, would the awards ceremony take?

  Apart from the awards themselves, so far the evening had been not dissimilar from other industry gatherings, dinners, premieres, and schmoozefests—thick with sycophancy and bad blood, heavy with amorous humidity, sex suspended in the air like pollen in a field before a good rain. It was true about most any kind of gathering: One person, you have an opinion. Two people, there’s politics. Plant six at a table, you can start calculating crosscurrents and rivalries with a slide rule. A roomful of guests will collect insults, offenses, and slights like cashmere picking up lint. This room held three hundred, the entire industry pretty much accounted for in the hall, inflated personalities floating big as parade balloons.

  The gloomy German actor Emil Jannings, who had performed acrobatic eyebrow maneuvers in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, was in Europe and unable to accept the evening’s inaugural award. But after the first few trophies had been handed out, the first earnest speeches delivered, the first invocations made to God and country and the newly dead, Marblestone knew. These were amulets. Magic feathers plucked from mountaintops. Peas pressed under princess mattresses. The industry’s self-love transmuted into tribal art. Within a year everyone would be greedy for one. All Marblestone wanted to do was grab one of the chocolate-candy doubles, peel away the gold foil like the wrapping on Hanukkah gelt, and swallow its decapitated head in one wolfish gulp—but the therapy had neutered his appetite.

  “It’s spreading,” came the doctor’s tombstone diagnosis weeks before. Of course it’s spreading. One doesn’t need a fancy degree to know about manifest destiny. Spreading, driving, conquering, dividing—this is what great and terrible things do. The doctor might well have said, “Go west,” the national prescription and America’s moral imperative that Marblestone had followed over a lifetime. The land, the light, was heartstoppingly beautiful in those days. Limitless. Light buttering everything it touched, giving birth to the land as it spread. Sunshine an expression of God’s love. At night you couldn’t see where the horizon ended and the sky began. The ocean, the Pacific, not the pale, puke-green frozen sea they’d labored to cross but the waters of sunshine. Let there be light, the first exhortation. Then chase it, go west, an eleventh commandment. A purity begging to be defiled. The first tracts bought up in Laurel Canyon and Casaba Field and Antelope and Coyote Hills and Buttonwillow. Little more than frontier towns. Eucalyptus smells. Clapboard houses. Tin lizzies. Endlessly seesawing derricks. Rigs close together as peppercorns in a mill. Sawdust-covered soundstages. The whole thing a novelty, an adventure, a mass improvisation. No different from the bootstrappers, prospectors, wildcatters, and speculators, the crouching American primitives of a generation before, scooping gold out of the ground with saucepans, hands literally dirty with money, hands callused and covered in grime and black. Now, thirty years later, soft hands to cradle awards. Progress.

  Onstage, Douglas Fairbanks—as quick-witted and effortless a master of ceremonies as could be, comfortable in his skin as a cheetah—has just presented a special award to Warner Bros. for The Jazz Singer. The corners of Fairbanks’s mouth crinkle as he reads off a card praising the breakthrough talking picture that’s revolutionized the industry.

  This award makes the room’s mood uneasy, The Jazz Singer being a picture the town loves, hates, and fears in equal measure. Apart from the film’s bringing down the gavel in favor of sound pictures once and for all, there’s this: It cuts too close to the moguls’ nightmare image of themselves. There’s just too much of the sweaty striver about Jolson for everyone to feel comfortable. I want! I want! I want! the performance screams, and, though it’s a kind of triumph, it’s a strenuous one.

  “What do you think?” Marblestone asks the profligate, surrogate son.

  “Picture’s okay,” Micah says. “Jolson’s not my favorite.”

  “Me either. But they don’t get it, why the picture’s such a sensation,” Marblestone says, recalling seeing the picture at a private industry screening and blubbering through it like a thorn-stricken lion. “A Jew, in blackface, marrie
d to a girl named Mary, singing colored music on Yom Kippur. We’re telling stories to each other we don’t even see what they mean.”

  “You’re overthinking it, Arthur. It’s just a cheap melodrama with music.”

  “Sure, kid. And how’d the Jews make it to America?” Marblestone asks. “Yiddle by yiddle.”

  Marblestone’s dinner jacket, now several sizes too big, hung on his mastodon frame like a sheet draped over a fossil at the Museum of Natural History. This night would be the last of these for him. Looking out over the banquet hall of the Roosevelt Hotel, the mogul decided to take the evening for a memorial service, the funeral of his choosing, the shiva he had lived to see.

  He’d been out to the hotel the week before. The air in the hall was expectant. Good ballrooms always quiver a little when no one’s around. Outside, a spiral staircase was being loaded off a truck—how surreal, how apt a symbol, a staircase spinning around, connecting nothing to nothing, wheeling about under the California sky. Inside the hall a pair of carpenters worked on some chairs in need of refurbishment. What’s lonelier than peeling white paint? Marblestone thought at the sight of one chair in particular—a leg suffering from a fracture, custard-colored stuffing spilling out from its ripped-open seat, gilt peeled away at the arms—that had brought him close to tears. But tonight everything gleamed.

  A team of colored waiters in natty white dinner jackets begin plating appetizers: pink shrimp, puffed up with pride, lined up like high-kicking Ziegfeld Follies girls. The waiters are wearing red, white, and blue striped bow ties that echo the patriotic bunting decorating the hall and lend the place the look of a political convention. As he completes his round, one of the servers hovers over Micah and Rose longer than over the other guests, and a weird moment of recognition passes between them.

  Micah’s eyes follow the server as he departs, pupils paranoia-ing to pinpricks. “I think I know that one.”

  “Just because they all look alike …,” Rose jokes.

  She’s elegant in full makeup, all dressed up—and she’d obviously gone to some trouble having her hair done that afternoon, the swarm of spirals now straightened, chemically treated, frozen stiff as a Hasidic woman’s wig. Marblestone allows himself to be moved for a moment by his protégé’s ability to discern and tease out beauty in people and places others might overlook. But still, why did he bring her here? More pressing, if Marblestone was correctly reading the rationale behind Rose’s choice of Empire-cut dress and the careful arrangement of her shawl and handbag, what the hell could Micah be thinking? A colored kid? Mayer kept a doctor on the payroll to take care of that kind of thing, and Marblestone’d rather pass a cactus through his prick than ask a favor of that fucking monster. Still, he’d asked if Micah wanted his help taking care of the problem, only to have the boy wonder insist that the baby wasn’t his.

  “You think this menu is an accident, boychick?” Marblestone asks, nudging across his plate a prawn the size, color, and curl of an embryo.

  “The whole place is an accident,” answers Micah. “Hollywoodland is a brilliant goof.”

  “That’s where we disagree,” Marblestone says, scanning the room for the shrunken-apple faces of Cohn, Mayer, Schenck, and Lasky, terrorizing dealings with each of them flash-carding through his memory. “You think Jews gravitated out here by mistake? To the desert—the biblical desert—with nothing but sunshine to recommend it? Read your history, boychick, there’s a little number in there called manifest destiny.”

  “Right. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land.”

  “Sure, there’s that,” says Marblestone, who’s seconded by a chandelier jingle. “But heading west is an instinct, too. It has to do with mortality, catching the last of the light before it slips behind the horizon.”

  “I never took you for a poet, Arthur.”

  “Well, human beings are complex, kid. You’re an artist, you should appreciate these things.”

  “Tonight’s festivities notwithstanding,” Micah says, “I’ve never made claims for myself as an artist.”

  “That,” Rose says, publicly billed for the evening as Micah’s personal assistant, on a special trip out west while Margaret stayed back in New York taking care of the boys, “lets you off the hook too easily, Mr. Grand.”

  “Mr. Grand’s the name of my father,” Micah says, his prick happily hopping a beat, a needle skipping across a record, each time she addresses him by that salutation. “Call me Micah.”

  “Well then, Micah,” pipes in Merian C. Cooper, clearing his throat from the other end of the table, “leaving aside the terribly sad business with Mr. Spiro, rumor has it that some of the footage you captured during your African excursion is really quite something.”

  Cooper, one half of a producing-directing team with Ernest B. Schoedsack, has a reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading crackpot exotics and on-location loonies, and he’s got the résumé to back it up, including a nine-month stint in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp as a volunteer member of the Polish army.

  “Well, Africa was grand, but we never did get close to an elephant,” Micah offers, referring to the wild stampede climax of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, the picture shot on location in the jungles of Siam that’s been nominated tonight for Best Production.

  “Oh, you must make it a point to shoot an elephant sometime,” Cooper says. “There’s something about them that’s very humbling. They carry history in their wrinkles.”

  “Well, next time we’re in the bush,” Micah says, hoping to switch the subject. “Before we decamped from Congo, though, we saw a nightclub act I highly recommend about a blonde falling in love with a giant ape.”

  “A girl and a gorilla, did you say?” Cooper asks, eyes widening at the news, a lost dream having found its correspondent, Skull Island beginning to map its coordinates.

  “Micah’s being modest about spending their time in nightclubs,” Marblestone interjects. “I had the privilege of reviewing the footage this afternoon, and true as I sit before you, I can assure you no one’s ever seen anything like it. It’s a vision of Eden before the fall, and we’re taking offers from all the majors as we speak.”

  Marblestone was lying. While Micah, Rose, Till, and the mogul had indeed convened at Imperial’s dilapidated screening room earlier that afternoon for a viewing of the B-roll footage, what emerged from the projector instead were schlocky soundstage tests for Pot of Trouble.

  Upon their arrival the reunion mood had been ebullient, celebratory. Having spent their first night in a hotel room together following the grueling, days-long journey by train and plane, Micah and Rose had emerged into powdery Los Angeles sunshine bright-eyed and raw from a morning romp (Rose ringlet-haired, three months pregnant but not too obviously showing, Micah excited to be having intercourse with a pregnant woman not his wife). The filmmaker was happy to be reunited with his chalk-faced star for the first time since their Dark Continent adventure and was relieved, too, to be afforded this brief reprieve from oppressive worrying over his brother. He was even looking forward to seeing the boss.

  Though warned by Till in advance about Marblestone’s physical deterioration, Micah was ill prepared for his first sight of the big man. Arriving on twin canes, each step as tentative as a hatchling emerging from an eggshell, Marblestone brought the room to quietude, the kind of hush normally reserved for visiting dignitaries. The wagging gray head with its dark eyes and bushy mustache combined with sticklike legs, angled elbows, and thin canes hanging loose from the bent bow of his back lent the mogul the look of an unhappy tarantula. An old, broken arachnid, but still a spider with some power, some poison, left in its sacks.

  “You owe me sixty dollars,” said Rose, breaking the silence.

  “All business, I like that in a man,” Marblestone said, peeling three twenty-dollar bills off a thick green roll and lowering his frame into a plush chair to the sound of joints cracking.

  “What’s got you, kid?” he asked Micah, who remained standing in the aisle afte
r all the others had taken their seats.

  “Nothing,” Micah answered, recognizing in his mentor’s countenance the death-haunted aspect of his parents near the end. “Just, it looks like you’ve lost a few tons.”

  “Yes, Micah, it’s called dying.” Then, shouting, “Cheech, the bitter herbs!”

  A smiling Mexican emerged from behind the steel projection-booth door, nodded greeting to them all, and began packing a small tobacco pipe with a dry, oregano-looking substance.

  “I’ve a progressive doctor,” Marblestone explained, receiving the bowl as if it were a reliquary. “Says it stimulates the appetite.”

  Holding a lighter to the instrument, he greedily sucked, keeping his mouth closed for a length of time before releasing a dragon’s plume of smoke. A pungent smell filled the room—Christmas pines and urine—an aroma familiar to Rose and Cheech, foreign to Micah and Till, who took up the bowl next.

  “So listen, Arthur,” Micah said, “in addition to the location footage and scenes from Pot of Trouble, we shot some test sequences for another thing, a project we’ve had kicking around for a while, a new kind of picture for us.”

  “As long as you brought me back darkies and voodoo dolls, I’ll be happy,” Marblestone responded to the news, gripping one of the arms of his chair, which came free in his hand. “But your footage better be good, kid,” the boss continued, launching the upholstered piece of wood across the room. “Your livelihood and the future of Imperial depend on it. Then again, any chazerai looks better on this stuff.” Marblestone relaxed into the chair, merging with its fleshy folds, fingers laced across his stomach like a man in a casket, and his features began to lose their fixity. While the drug did little to help him eat, he was grateful for the insight it gave him into the mysteries of time, the calendar having recently become his chief obsession. Obituaries were now the first section of the paper to which he turned in the morning, graveyard arithmetic his new favorite pastime. He compulsively checked his watch and made certain all the clocks in the office kept accurate count. Once the intoxicant began charting its course, he felt able to negotiate his way cross this slipperiest of dimensions, to get on top of it and influence its direction like a man steering a stagecoach. He relished the accordion tricks the drug performed with temporality, amplifying and contracting its parameters, how malleable and accommodating it made appear the linear progression of this terrifyingly rigid-seeming yet mutable governing force.