The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  This Christmas everything was endangered. Long after she had come off the picture, long after he should have gone back to work himself, he had lingered on the Coast, seeing Charity and causing newspaper gossip. Rose set no store by columnists, but she knew that this time it was serious. She was in grave trouble.

  One of the things she had loved about Seth was his stability. He would wobble emotionally once in a while—who doesn’t?—but he had always come right back to his level balance. Talking together alone at night, they could voice each other’s professional problems in perfect harmony, of one mind. She had thought they were perfectly united, and forever. She had meant to let him be perfectly free, to trust him, in the wise hope that Charity would prove an incident like the others.

  “We’ll both get a lot of pleasure from it,” she said, turning to take her coat off.

  Then he gave it to her. “No we won’t.”

  She went right on taking her coat off because there was no point in turning round, and she felt her knees tremble and almost buckle under her. She had never felt anything like this in her life. She could predict everything that was coming, the reasonings, the wish to remain friends, she could see it all, and it didn’t begin with numb shock; it began with awful pain before the first speech was out of his mouth, and it was going to get worse.

  “Seth, look Seth, don’t say anything right now, please don’t. Take some more time, all you want.”

  He looked at her, she felt (and her perceptions seemed to her to have become terribly acute), as though she were a heavy chair to be pushed aside, some blocking piece of Victoriana. “It would be better quick,” he said, moving as though he meant to embrace her, and then restraining himself. “I can’t help it,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve been married fifteen years. I don’t mean to wave it at you like a club, but we’ve been very happy together, really happy, even at a distance, even when we were apart for months.”

  “I’m still happy with you, Rose, but it isn’t the same. It just isn’t the same. It’s got something to do with passion . . .”

  The injustice of her situation washed over her like breaking surf, all foam and confusion. Their chances weren’t equal. It was a widespread popular misconception that modern young women like herself, on the pill, free from the obligation to bear children, could pick up and go from one affair to the next with the lightheartedness of the male. It wasn’t so. She knew no woman who had done so, and would never be able to do it herself. She’d be left alone with the best of her adult life ripped out of her. All that time, all that expense of mutual confidence gone. What was worst was that she was sure he couldn’t see clearly what he was doing. So they hadn’t had children. That had been their mutual decision because of the demands of their work. But they had had some sort of real union, which she had never had to think about and couldn’t name.

  “Haven’t we anything to show for it?” she said. It was going to hurt plenty, all right.

  He said, “It’s over. It’s over.”

  She could read hunger, not just sexual, more a moral desperation, in his face, and still couldn’t feel anger. She wanted idiotically to set him straight, save him from a disastrous error. “But you can buy girls like that.”

  “That’s enough, let’s drop it. I want you to promise me that you’ll file as soon as you can establish residence. Would you do that, please?” He paused and then made a terrible thrust. “It would make a nice Christmas present for Charity.”

  This last remark made it clear that he was unable to be rational on the subject. How can people go around saying such things to each other, calmly, without the words blistering their lips? She would have put the question, but saw from his fixed stare that he had no sense of how he sounded.

  “How much was the picture?” she asked, throwing him off balance.

  “The picture? Oh, you mean this?”

  “Forty-five hundred.”

  “And you’re giving it to me.”

  “If you want it, yes.”

  “That’s about three hundred a year. I didn’t come high, did I?”

  “That’s a bad line.”

  “I’m not reading dialogue. I’m trying to say what I feel.”

  They had lived together, on the average, about six scattered months of every year, and as no single stretch of cohabitation had been longer than a shooting schedule, she wasn’t sure just what it was she’d lost.

  8

  Horler normally spent a lot of time on his boat, but it wasn’t adequately heated. That year, when December arrived, he shivered through sleepless nights under extra blankets in an already cramped berth, and finally decided to have her crewed around to his Baja California hideaway, where it would be warm. Meanwhile, missing his boat, he was sleeping around in the homes of his associates. They kept telling him to buy; he kept saying no, a house in California was a contradiction in terms and against nature. He and Lenehan had about closed out their local operations for the winter. There was a final conference to hold, a last decision to make, and then they would base themselves in New York and London, and really go to work on the promotion for Goody.

  Today, a couple of weeks before Christmas, with no place to hold a conference; unwilling to spend time in sparsely furnished and depressing rented office space, he had simply hired a limousine and a driver for the day, picked up his associates, and driven around and around L.A. for a couple of hundred miles; it was a peculiarly rootless and sharply distressing meeting with the four of them huddled in the rear of the car and the freeway signs and direction arrows whizzing anonymously past. It was like a conference in an alien new world, much like hell. Mile after mile on the elevated highways they sped along, over endless rows of stucco apartment houses built in 1947, of four-room bungalows which seemed as much of the distant past as the Spanish coastal missions, reminding the producers of certain skirt lengths and hair styles seen briefly and forgotten on the late late show, the trim and execution of these little houses survivals of a system of manners infinitely remote.

  They flew on, the hired chauffeur grim and inattentive in the front seat, cut off from them by a glass panel, his shoulders hunched and sinister. They never remembered his name; he was simply an inchoate hump of darkness up front. Over expansive parking lots with straggly yellow lines defacing the sheen of blacktop, with rickety supermarkets in the distance, insectlike shoppers darting hither and thither across the immensity of parking lot. Soon now all of Southern California will be blacktopped over.

  They flew on, past flagged and bannered used-car lots, their draperies proclaiming the openhanded, almost lunatic, generosity of the proprietors, past campuses of obscure colleges, past morticians, past airports; on the ground, above the ground, and under it, the limousine bore them on this mad ride. Now and then one of the conferees broke his chain of thought or argument to gaze with mute revulsion out a window, and each time he turned back to the discussion with a horrified shrug. It was an inhuman landscape, too much, too long, too wide, too far. Christmas at the end of the world.

  At last, frightened, Max Mars asked Horler, “Where are we going? Where are you taking us?”

  “Nowhere.” This was a visibly upsetting answer. “I mean we will drive around a little longer, have a meal somewhere, and drive around some more.”

  “That’s no way to live,” said Mars.

  “Soon we’ll all be gone,” said Lenehan, who had a tendency to car sickness. He felt better on a horse, he thought, though he had not been near a horse in thirty-five years. “I’ll be in New York. Bud will be in London for a while.”

  “I’ll still be here,” said Mars, gloomily. “There’s a lot to be done.”

  Lenehan said, “For a rough cut . . .” and stopped. The others stared at the director.

  He said, “It’s money in the bank.”

  “Yes, yes, but we can do better.”

  “Haven’t we done
more than enough?”

  Larry Solomon, who had said nothing for the first hundred miles, finally spoke. “Tell him to stop at a gas station. I would like to urinate.”

  “That’s the worst of these freeways,” said Horler, and there was a chorus of agreement. The limousine sped on for another fifteen minutes and Lenehan demanded, “Are you in pain?”

  “No, not pain. I have a certain amount of foresight, and there are no pissers on freeways.”

  “True enough,” said Lenehan. “I have no prostrate problems myself . . .”

  “Prostate,” said Solomon.

  “What is that?”

  “Prostate, not prostrate. And my case is not prostatic. I have a small bladder, that’s all, and we’ve been driving for hours.”

  “And getting nowhere,” said Max.

  “Oh, we are, we are,” said Horler, “we just went through Buena Park. We’re nearly in Anaheim.”

  They all started to complain. “We’ve been into Anaheim once already this morning,” said Solomon. “I insist we stop.”

  They had said nothing to the driver, but telepathically he now swerved into an exit ramp, and they descended into less futuristic realms. The car halted beside a light traffic flow, and then the driver put it in motion and headed out Commonwealth towards Fullerton. Then he slowed and turned into a gas station, coming to an abrupt stop at the pumps. The imprisoned filmmakers leaped out like four Jack-in-theboxes, and made as one man for the washroom.

  “ . . . while you were lolling on silken cushions,” mumbled Solomon reproachfully, standing up to the urinal. He had been sitting on one of the jump seats.

  “Not lolling,” said Horler indignantly. “I was brought up never to loll.”

  “Like the Royal Family,” said Lenehan.

  “Quite. A small self-discipline but it impresses others, a dignified self-control.”

  “I’ve seen you loll,” said Solomon rebelliously, as Horler eyed him.

  “And this is the fruit of your upbringing,” said Max Mars, peering through a gray and unwashed lavatory window. “A luncheon in Anaheim.”

  “Fullerton.”

  “It’s all the same,” said the director, hungry and out of sorts.

  They left the lavatory and went into the lunchroom adjoining the gas station. There they found their chauffeur, a morose man, sitting at the counter—there were no tables—trying to drink a cup of disgusting bitter coffee. They sat in a row beside him, and the juxtaposition made them all reflect.

  “That’s the thing about life,” said Solomon, “no matter how much money we make, we wind up eating in places like this.” This fell rather chill on his companions’ ears. They placed cautious and rudimentary food orders, and resumed their interrupted discussion.

  “It’s as good a cut as you can expect,” said Max. “I’ve done just about everything I can.” He spoke as one haunted by an oppressive sense of having done wrong.

  “You’ve done just right. You’ve laid the emphasis just where we meant.”

  “I’ll tell that to Kitcheff, he’ll be pleased. In effect, though, I’m my own editor.”

  “It’s the new thing,” said Lenehan, “we might play it up in the promotion.”

  Max wondered if he could be kidding. “The new thing? Every great director has done his own cutting and editing when he was allowed to, from Eisenstein on.”

  Horler winced. He said, “When I hear that name, I think of losses.”

  Max answered him. “Doctor Goebbels said something similar. ‘When somebody mentions culture, I reach for my club.’”

  The partners felt the latest in a series of misgivings. Aren’t you happy with this undertaking? they wanted to ask their director. Have you second thoughts about our approach, what is wrong? They sensed a peculiar masked rebelliousness in his talk, and although it was not a typical employer-employee relationship, which they regretted, they often wished that they could take a club to Max Mars.

  Always with the artistic conscience, they thought, or with conscience pure and simple. Why can’t he drop it and act like everybody else? What’s so special about his conscience? Is it so fine?

  “I feel a certain solidarity with Eisenstein,” said Max, more kindly. “And I learned much, stole much, from his pictures.”

  “But you mostly do comedy,” said Lenehan. Sitting beside him, Larry Solomon put his head in his hands and Lenehan caught him.

  “What the hell,” he said sharply, “have I been stupid again? I know I’m not one of you intellectuals.”

  Max felt glad the production was finished. “We’re all on edge, but the picture is complete, and it isn’t bad.”

  Horler said, “It’s certainly Charity’s picture. You’d hardly remember there was another girl in it.”

  The counterman heard the word “picture” and came alive. “You guys in the industry?” he asked, leaning on the counter and wiping it with a dirty rag.

  “Oh no, no,” said Horler quickly, “we’re salesmen, just out checking the territory, ha ha.” They all got up and moved to the door. Solomon paid the check and they went out and got in the car.

  In a few more minutes their chauffeur arrived, wiping pie crumbs from his lips, got into the front seat, and without asking for directions retraced his route, got back onto the freeway, and headed northwest.

  “The trouble is, anybody can see it isn’t the picture we started to make. Every stinking little reviewer in the country will say it. I mean otherwise why is Rose in it at all? That’s what they’ll say.”

  “That won’t bother audiences, Danny.”

  “It needs another gimmick.”

  “We can’t cut her out of the picture entirely.”

  Solomon said, “If we did, she might have grounds for a suit.”

  “Maybe a little lawsuit would help the picture, maybe that’s what we need.”

  Horler recoiled. “The divorce is enough and a lawsuit helps nobody. First thing somebody hits you with an injunction, and you’re powerless to act. Let us, by all means, avoid litigation. I think she might be able to sue us for violation of contract if we left her completely out of the picture.”

  “And in some states for damage to her professional reputation,” said Solomon. “We have to leave her in the picture, and besides, her name is worth something, especially with the divorce coming up. That isn’t hurting us.”

  “But there’s the artistic question,” said Max, “Danny’s problem. We really have two pictures here, not one, coexisting in strata, like geological formations one on top of the other, like the nine cities on the site of Troy. There’s the clean healthy family picture we started out to make, and there’s the Charity Ryan vehicle we seem to have arrived at, I’m not sure how. These two strata coexist very nervously, and anybody can see it. We want something to ram the sex home, a great big signal that Charity won the battle.”

  Horler said, “If the divorce goes through early in March, don’t you figure it’ll get us a lot of mileage in the press, right before we open?”

  “Yes, but that isn’t in the picture, and won’t keep it running.”

  They drove for a while in silence, and then Lenehan said, in a tiny little voice, “That thug Faiers has a suggestion which is worth considering.”

  “What?”

  “There’s all the promotional material. And there are the titles.”

  Max said, “I thought you were having them done by Animation Associates; those are the ones I’ve seen.”

  “We have those, yes,” said Danny. “But the Faiers proposal . . .” He seemed happy to father it on Faiers. “. . . the Faiers proposal is that we give Charity several minutes of solo footage with the titles over, a whole big new musical number with her alone on the screen, or just with the chorus, something that wasn’t in the stage production. He even has a title.”

  “What?”

 
; “Mini-Goody-Go-Go.”

  They all laughed nervously.

  “Catchy,” said Max. “Have Donat and Reynolds done the words and music already?”

  “No, Faiers has been afraid to go quite that far.”

  “Who can blame him?” said Solomon.

  “Nobody could claim that the titles are legally part of the picture,” said Horler. “They’re simply an announcement appended to it by a polite convention, and are entirely at our disposal as long as we observe the billing clauses. If we want to use a sequence with Charity on the screen by herself, as part of what is essentially an advertising device, that is within our rights. Isn’t that so, Larry?”

  “I think the courts will so rule.”

  “You want me to shoot an entire new number around Charity?”

  “We’re not getting the idea across. It’ll be just Charity, with the chorus purely background; they won’t have to do anything much. Charity appears, sings her song, performs a few simple calisthenics designed to show her off—nobody could manage it better—and then the titles come over. The song lyric relates to the titles perhaps, or to the storyline. After all, she has the title role. And she’ll be twenty-feet tall in a close-up. It’s an unparalleled opportunity.”

  “I’m beginning to read you. You want straight display.”