There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  Big Al invited me to dinner. He had a nice Tudor house in the poor section of Beverly Hills, southeast of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Two kids came with the house. One of them was a boy. The other was up for grabs. It was nice seeing Laura, and I thanked her for having put in a good word for me. She said, “You’re welcome.” It was some enchanted evening.

  I drove home properly depressed. I could see right away that Big Al had outgrown his spouse. Old adage: “Marry in haste; repent in Beverly Hills.”

  I funneled all of my emotion into my script. What I had left was hardly worth taking out of the house, especially in a Porsche. I had the highs and lows of a turtle. I wasn’t eating, could not abide the phone—and if that idiot dog came around once more, I’d piss on it, just as it had been pissing on the artificial plants in my ersatz garden.

  Redwood came around again, fifth time, and I threw a large rock at him, hoping to miss him but to scare him. It hit him and he was not seen on my doorstep again for a week.

  “You shouldn’t do that.” It was Fred Horner’s wife.

  “He comes around again and I’ll tie a tourniquet on his pecker.”

  “He’s only a dog.”

  “I meant your husband. You are Mrs. Horner, yes?”

  “Yes.” Harriet Horner was an ex-Follies tomato in a pink satin slack suit who looked as though she had remained on stage and rotted there following the final performance of George White’s Scandals of 1931. She was about fifty trying to look twenty—so she looked ninety. She was tall and bulging, like a pinched balloon. She had carrot hair, eyelashes so long that when it rained, her nose never got wet. And she had ruby lips so greasy that she had to give up smoking, as the cigarette would keep slipping out and into her cleavage, where it did nothing to brighten her day. All of her stood on plastic wedgies so high that her nose had to bleed the moment she climbed up onto them. “I came to fetch Redwood.” Her voice was an amalgam of Betty Boop and Zasu Pitts, and she seemed the ideal wife for her booze-bellied husband. She didn’t walk—she wobbled and swayed. It was supposed to be sexy, but to me she looked like a ride at an amusement park.

  As my concentration was already broken, and, as I hadn’t been to a circus in years, I became uncharacteristically gracious. “What would you like to drink? I have orange juice and beer.”

  “That would be fine.”

  Maybe she was being funny but I didn’t think so. In any case, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to see if she’d drink it. She did. Orange juice and beer. I silently dubbed it a “schmuckdriver.”

  “Where’s old Fred?”

  “San Diego.”

  “He can throw his shoe that far?”

  “He went on business.”

  “Would you like another drink, Mrs. Horner?”

  “No, thanks. And my name is Harriet.”

  “Mine’s Ben.”

  She looked at my typewriter. “You a writer?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “What’re you writing?”

  “A suicide note.”

  “Ever take a break?”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “I got a couple errands. But I should be back at four.”

  “Where do I find you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Your place or mine?”

  “Let’s make it yours. Mine’s a mess.”

  “Six o’clock. I’d like to freshen up.” She turned, took off one of her wedgies—and threw it. “Fetch, Redwood!” Redwood ran off to fetch it, and she limped away, a decaying rainbow.

  I don’t know why I made the appointment. I certainly wasn’t panting to bang that barrage balloon. I think that after being locked away as I had been, almost a month, I was ready for any kind of diversion. It would be interesting. Like screwing some kind of sideshow act. Actually, it would be like fucking a pink couch. The idea became more fascinating as the day wore on, and I couldn’t work. I had a date with Harriet Horner, wowee, gang. And before I left my wee house, I clipped some flowers from my garden to bring to Harriet, the girl of my nightmares.

  I walked down the winding road whistling “Here Comes the Showboat.” I knew the house because it was, indeed, directly below mine, but also because there were five motorcycles chained up out front. Redwood chained up out front, too, so apparently Harriet meant business—she didn’t care to have to throw her dog a wedgie while in the middle of a sex act with a gentleman caller.

  I went into the house. It was still light, but the sun was quitting, already on the Valley side of the hill. The hi-fi was playing mood music—“Music to hump Harriet by.” It was a small house, not unlike mine, but done in chartreuse and mauve. It was good that the sun was setting, very wise of it.

  The bedroom door was open and I saw her spread out on that baseball diamond of a bed. She was all orange and pink in her yellow nightie. And the bedspread was green and the shag rug was violet. The woman was either color-blind or whimsical. She was smoking a cigarette, and when she saw me, she coolly ground it into a nearby ashtray and shifted her weight. The bed creaked, as if it knew that it was in for a rough time.

  I lay my flowers aside, indicating that they were for her, and she blinked her eyes like a geisha. She watched as I removed my clothes, kind of rocking herself from side to side, exposing a fleshy thigh, wiggling a nail-polished toe. All I could think of was the phrase: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” But enter I did—a new low, but not bad.

  If a fella closed his eyes, if he didn’t look and didn’t think and just went along for the ride, Harriet Hot-Hips Horner had to be the greatest game in town. She lobbed me from side to side like a kid unthinkingly playing with a ball, caroming me off thighs that were doing the carioca eighty-eight beats to the minute. Then, with lower legs working like the swatters at the base of a pinball machine, she gathered me up and slapped me in, sealing me in her great beyond with everything she had going. I bounced against the squishy tummy, pushed by the spongy ass—all of it like lifting off and then descending upon a pizza-pie trampoline. Beneath me she was an earthquake, on top of me a volcano. On the side, she was a tidal wave, and from the rear—a roaring spa. She monsooned me, typhooned me, cycloned me, and tornadoed me. And when I was nothing but a drizzle, when all the convulsions had subsided, when the universe had ceased its shaking, and when I lay there like that sole survivor, Crusoe, she patted me on the back and whispered, “Okay, kid, you can go home now. Don’t step in any dog shit.”

  Later, lying in my own bed, feeling to see if all my ribs were still evenly distributed, I realized that everything that old drunken Fred Horner knew about horsepower he had learned from his Percheron wife. I would have at that mare again—as soon as I was well enough to leave the barn. I didn’t much like myself, as a matter of fact, I barely recognized myself. I just couldn’t help myself.

  My first draft was ready and I dropped it off at Mike Abel’s office myself, where Big Al seized it and pressed it to his breast. He would read his copy that night—as Mike Abel would read his. If I came in early the next morning, we could all “get to work on the rewrite.”

  I didn’t care for that remark, but said nothing. Everyone is out to justify his existence, I thought. How dare a writer turn in a shooting script first shot? It reminded me of the old days at 20th, when we saved our first ideas and brought them in last, showing them to Gruber only at the eleventh hour when he had no choice but to accept them. W. Charles Gruber, killed by an unknown black assailant named Pat Jarvas. And where was Pat Jarvas? What had become of her after leaving her job at 20th? Like Lizzie Borden she had given her victim forty whacks—only no one knew it but me. Well, I was a good repository for that knowledge. Your secret is safe with me, Sweet Patricia—but I do miss your scrawny body and your cute little animal ways.

  I drove all around. Out Sunset to the beach at Santa Monica, because I had never seen it and it was supposed to be really something. It was a grey day at first, but the jocks were out on Muscle Beach all the same—pumping up their oiled bodies, building their bice
ps, triceps, and deltoids to garish proportions so that when the predicted earthquake came, all three hundred of those bleached blondes could hold onto California and keep it from falling into the sea while Cecil B. DeMille took all the shots he needed.

  I did the Farmers Market and the Hollywood Bowl, and I went up and down the mountains—over Laurel, Coldwater, and Benedict Canyons—until even after my car was tucked into its garage, I couldn’t walk a straight line without fearing I’d hit a house.

  I dined alone, listening to Sinatra, eating steak, swigging beer, and feeling as mellow as a cheddar. I knew that my script was good but was fearful that they might not like it. I’d find out the next morning at ten.

  I parked in the space marked “B. Webber.” It was an eerie feeling since I knew my name had been painted over another name. How many times had my parking spot had its name legally changed? Who had been there before me who no longer was? T. Edison, D.W. Griffith, T. Mix, F. S. Fitzgerald, W. Faulkner? And who would come after? M. Mouse, D. Duck, H. Doody, J. Stalin?

  Mike and Big Al were ebullient, both of them already there by the time I arrived. We had coffee and doughnuts and shot the breeze for a few minutes before Mike stood up and began the festivities. “Ben—it’s good. Awfully good. Not that we’re surprised. We knew it would be. Al and I discussed it on the phone last night and again this morning. We wanted to coordinate our reactions, so as not to confuse you when you came in.”

  And Big Al moved in. “We like it, Ben. Please understand that we like it. But—it’s not a shooting script.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  And it was Mike’s turn. That’s the way they worked it. First one and then the other until I felt like a tennis ball. “It’s a touch static, Ben. The dialogue is great, all of it, really is. But there may be too much of it. It’s just a question of cutting. No big deal. No big deal at all.”

  “Cutting what?” I asked, directing my question at Big Al because it was his turn next.

  “A lot of it,” said Big Al.

  “How much is a lot?” I asked of Mike.

  “Most of it,” he said, sighing, his disappointment finally pushing through.

  “How much is most of it?” I asked of Big Al.

  “All of it,” he said.

  And I said, “What?”

  “It’s in the wrong idiom,” said Mike, the gloves removed and the white knuckles showing. “Those people wouldn’t talk like that.”

  “They’d think like that,” said Big Al, “but they wouldn’t talk like that.”

  “Listen,” I said, “my head’s gonna unscrew. Why don’t you guys drop the sister act and just one of you do the talking, okay?”

  And Mike Abel chose to do the single. “They’re simple people. They think well but they’re basically simple. You have them sounding like they’re applying for Princeton. We think you should take the edge off that and rely more on the book.”

  “The book was all action and no talk,” I said. “Why don’t you just do it as a silent movie?”

  Mike was striving for patience. “Ben—we didn’t buy the book because it was a great book, but because we thought it would make a great movie. We needed a writer who could fill it out with the right dialogue. The characters are farm people. They raise cabbages and shovel manure. They’re not intellectuals. They’re not intellectuals.”

  “What makes you think farmers are nincompoops?” I challenged. “Farmers talk. They say more than ‘fetch the bucket, Maw—looks like Jodie Lee’s gonna have another calf.’”

  Big Al slumped into the most distant chair in the room, leaving the contest to Mike and me. I could almost feel all the air going out of him. Fuck him, I didn’t care.

  Mike was talking. “Ben, you’re ignoring the camera. Sometimes the camera can say more than any dialogue. You’ve written a fucking radio show! This is supposed to be a movie!”

  “Movies talk. Jolson proved it.”

  “And where is Jolson, now?”

  “Oh, beautiful.” I was losing my control. I could feel it going. I would try to hang onto it, but—

  “Ben. Ben. For Christ’s sake, listen to what I’m saying. If I show this script to the studio, they’ll pass on the whole project.”

  “Be specific. Where is the dialogue too much?”

  “Everywhere! Jesus, ain’t you listening to me?”

  “It’d be hard not to.”

  “You wanna know where? Okay, I’ll tell you where. From page one to fadeout—how’s that? You’ve got these people talking so much they wouldn’t have time to plant weeds!”

  “Okay,”—because he was screaming, I tried not to—“what is it that you want me to do?”

  “Take another whack at it. You’ve still got over two weeks. Take four. There’s no rush.”

  “I’m not interested in making it my life’s work.”

  “Four weeks does not a life make.”

  “You’re not talking a rewrite. You’re talking a whole new script!” My voice was rising.

  “I don’t want a new script. I want the old script that you never wrote.”

  “Well, you know what you can do—” Which is what I was bound to say from the moment I came in the door. Stupid boy. Frightened rabbit.

  His voice dropped. “I can’t submit this script. It’ll kill the project. The only reason the studio ever went along with it was because you were going to be the writer. If you can’t do it—”

  “I did do it, you idiot!”

  He let it go, continuing softly. “If you can’t do it, they won’t even go for another writer. They’ll kill it where it stands.”

  “I said I did do it! If you’re such an asshole that—”

  “None of that, kid. That I don’t need.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s what you got. I don’t believe the studio’s as stupid as you make them out to be.”

  “I will not submit this piece of shit!” He flung it across the room. It hit the far wall like a wounded bird. “It stinks! I’d rather tell ’em you got hit by a truck a month ago and that we didn’t find out about it till now!”

  “Tell ’em whatever you goddamn please. This is as far as I go.”

  Mike Abel was almost smiling. “You don’t know how right you are. If you walk—if you walk, baby—you might as well keep walking until you hit Hawaii.”

  “And if the natives are as stupid there as they are here, I’ll keep walking until I hit Japan!”

  “Okay. Okay, hotshot. There’s the door. You can start now. Get your canoe and shove off. And pack a lot of limes, sweetheart, because you’re gonna be out there one long fuckin’ time.”

  “Crazy. I’ll discover Australia.” And I walked.

  Big Al caught me as I was getting into my car. He was very direct. “I’m not going to ask you to reconsider because I know you won’t—because you’re the same cocksure sonofabitch I remember from your union-baiting days. All I want to tell you is that Mike Abel is going to survive, and I intend to survive with him. You’re going to be the loser, Ben, because you insist on losing. It’s your style. You’ve got some kind of fucking death wish, and believe me, this is the place where death wishes come true. Go on—get the hell off the lot. Take your fucking ego and your fucking Porsche and go drive off a mountain. You won’t be the first guy to do it and you won’t be the last. Go on. Make a hard right at Forest Lawn. I’ll call ahead and tell ’em to reserve a spot for you—in the writers’ section. You’ll get two lines in Variety and we’ll get another book.”

  He slammed the hood with both his hands and I kicked the car into reverse, backing it out of my parking space. I shifted into forward and hit the accelerator—stopping just short of hitting him. He didn’t budge. Instead he just leered at me. “If you change your mind, let me know. We’ve still got some time.”

  If Big Al Epstein had not delivered that last line of dialogue, I just might have called him within the hour—and come back for a rediscussion. But by saying what he did, when he did—by extending that f
eeble invitation, by keeping that small door open, I knew that he was as unsure as I was about the whole damned calamity. And I therefore drove off, consigning him to hell—producer’s section, third Cadillac from the left.

  Back at my house I phoned Jack Rush and told him what had happened. He wished that I hadn’t gone off so half cocked because, in so doing, I had blown my second twenty-five grand. He asked if he should call them, since they’d be sure to understand and anxious to get on with it. After all, I’d worked so hard and all that. I told him that if he called them, I’d be on the next plane to New York. And he took a moment’s pause before telling me that there was something for me at MGM.

  I called Harriet Horner and asked if I might drop by. She said I could, and I was in her bed within fifteen minutes. She bounced me around good, just what the doctor ordered—but my mind wasn’t on it. It was only on the things that Big Al had spewed at me. If they were true, then I was in deep trouble, and by my own grand, if unconscious, design. But they weren’t true because they couldn’t be true. And I’d prove that to be the case with MGM.

  Harriet Horner and I said good night, each of us trying hard to remember the other’s name. She sent me home because old drunken Fred might be stumbling in at any minute. Lying on my patio, sipping beer and acknowledging my twenty-fifth birthday, I heard his motorcycle pull in. Redwood barked at the sight of his master. Fred Horner would have no idea that I had fucked his wife. Nor would he know that on that fine California day, I had fucked myself as well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ginnie

  1953

  Johnny Farrar was not to be believed. He was handsome, intelligent, thoughtful, and loving. And he took me just about everywhere he went—and he went a lot of places—like Spain. Olé. Spain was a knockout. Under Franco and all those guys, it was stark in spots. And the people wore black and didn’t know how to smile, and all the women were a hundred and five and squat and had chickens, and I never saw any children, none at all. And I never heard any laughter.

  Still, for the most part, blame it on my youth, I felt like Ava Gardner. I felt crimson and orange and flamenco and gypsy—not the Broadway gypsy, but the Castillian kind—wet, parted lips and castanets and tortoise-shell coronets. I felt tempestuous and Latin and seductive. And I wanted to live in a cave, and not bathe, and let the hair grow on my legs, and read tea leaves, and roll sailors. The only reason I didn’t do any of those things was that we stayed at the Palace Hotel, in Madrid, in the Velasquez Suite, and if the management didn’t throw me out, Johnny would have, so I bathed, and shaved, and wore perfume, and smelled like a tourist, and saw the Prado and the bullfights, and bought luggage at Loewe’s that was so “leather” that it mooed. We ate at places like the Jockey Club and Las Lanzas, and we drove out to Toledo (not Ohio) and saw all the old ruins of whatever once was there. We kept the Mercedes limousine and did Cordoba and Cadiz and the Alcazar—and Seville. Ah, Seville. A double olé for Seville.