Violencia!

by Bruce Jay Friedman

Gurney could see clearly that Hartog was going to be the strength and guiding force of the team.

  “Look,” said Welles, brows bunched together, eyes on fire, “I’m crazy about this material. I’m the one who brought it to you and kept it alive for five years and don’t you ever forget it. I’ll fight like a tiger for this show if I see there’s a chance. But I just can’t afford a flop, that’s all. Just one of them and I’m out of the business and no one will ever work with me again. This is it for me, fellas. You, Paul, can go back to Homicide, and Clement here will have a million offers. Who’d ever collaborate with me if Violencia went down the drain?”

  “Well, shall we just get on with it?” said Hartog patiently. “What’s the beginning?”

  They sat in silence again, Gurney thinking only of the deep, grave, almost Olympian concentration of Clement Hartog.

  “Look, fellas,” said Welles after a minute or so. “I can’t work this way. I’m a composer, you guys are writers. I’m going back to my town house to work. I’ll try some stuff on my own. As soon as you fellows have something, shoot it over to me and I’ll put songs to it. That’s the only way I can function. I did that on my last show, Finally, Love, and it worked beautifully, even though the show got killed for being ahead of its time. I knew how to fix it, but the writer was the world’s worst sonofabitch and wouldn’t give an inch. I sued his ass off, but don’t worry, Paul, I’m not going to go after you in court. It was not that bad an experience, because at least the critics singled me out for praise on my score. When I saw that, I said fuck the show, at least I made out.”

  “Maybe it’s not a bad idea for you to go off by yourself,” said Hartog. “Paul and I will work alone for a while and see what happens. If we break through, we’ll call you.”

  Gurney was touched each time the great director called him by his first name; also, he thought it was remarkable that he was able to be so patient with Welles, who, to use the kindest description, was behaving like a spoiled child.

  “Good luck, fellas,” said Welles, grinning with delight as though he had been let out of school early. “And I still say we’ve got a helluva chance.”

  “Paul,” he said, his arm around Gurney “you’re brilliant, and from what I’ve seen you can fart ideas.”

  When Welles had left, Gurney felt a little jittery, as though it might be up to him to concoct a wonderful notion on the spot. But Hartog’s gentle, thoughtful, easygoing style calmed him down—and in some mysterious way, the two began, haltingly, to block out a plan for the show. Quite naturally, it would be located in the interior of a big-city homicide bureau, one known to have an outrageously high crime rate, and, as a consequence, an atmosphere more violent than virtually any other department in the country. The main character (to be played by Essie Hartog— although this was not stated but more or less implied by the two collaborators) would be the Chief of Homicide, a man wedded to the old, tough, head-cracking approach to criminal injustice. The key relationship would be that between the Chief and his son, also a homicide dick attached to the Bureau, but convinced there was another, more humane style of dealing with hoods. The basic machinery of the story would involve the war between them, the young detective’s inevitable victory, and the tragedy of the Homicide Chief’s Lear-like decline.

  A key story line would involve a murderer on the loose in the city, one whose victims were all dry-cleaning personnel. He would turn out to be an attractive young black dick in the department. The decision on how to deal with him would bring into focus the schism between the Chief and his son, the former insisting on harsh punitive measures, the detective son favoring a search for understanding: What were the societal forces that turned a nice young dick into a killer who took out his wrath on pants-pressers?

  A subplot would involve an adulterous situation in which one homicide dick violates another’s wife, rubbing salt on the wound by using a police riot baton during sex, and the wife’s eventual admission (ideally in song and dance) that it was the first time she had been able to achieve satisfaction in bed, and that if only her pigheaded husband had understood this, there would never have been a marital infidelity.

  The collaborators agreed that it was all terribly touchy and might be horrendous on stage if not handled with extreme delicacy. Still, the material was worthwhile and deserved to be shown. It was their hope as well that the proper use of singing and dancing would take some of the edge off the content. Gurney knew that Hartog, for all of his international reputation, had hitherto been associated only with light comedy. Why then would the director want to enter such a tough and gamy arena?

  “What the hell, Paul,” he said. “I want to do something I can be proud of. Sure I’m nervous—it’s an entirely different ball game for me. But by Christ, I think this show has something to say, and I want to help say it.”

  “What we have to do,” said Hartog after an exhilarating but exhausting day, “is to get Norman involved. Can we take another minute and decide on a number we’d like him to get started on?”

  The two thought a while and decided that a good beginning would be an atmospheric “umbrella” piece, to be sung—and danced—by the dicks. They agreed to use “Homicide” as a working title. The number would convey the dicks’ feelings about the work they did, their fears, what they enjoyed about it, what it was that attracted them to their grisly occupation. As a model, Hartog said, it would be a good idea to keep in mind the wonderful “Tradition” number that got Fiddler on the Roof off to such a rousing start.

  “I’ll call Norman tonight and have him come down tomorrow morning,” said Hartog. “I think we’ve made significant progress today.”

  He seemed terribly weary, as though the day’s effort had aged him. Gurney, aware of being a much younger man, feared for a moment that the director might have a heart attack. Nontheless, he asked Hartog if he would like to go out and have a drink.

  “I’d love to, but I’ll have to call Mother and tell her to hold dinner.”

  Gurney was surprised that Hartog actually lived with his mother, but guessed that it was simply a temporary arrangement that would last only for the duration of the show.

  Over drinks, Hartog corrected this notion and said that, as a matter of fact, he had always lived with his mother. At one period of his life, he’d had grave doubts about this arrangement, wondering if perhaps it it was an indicator of homosexual leanings. But some psychoanalytic sessions—several of which were attended by Essie— had cured him of that line of thinking.

  “We just happen to have a very good thing going,” he said, “and I don’t think I could ever leave her side.”

  He said that in each show he directed, invariably there was one woman in the cast or crew who appealed to him.

  “It’s usually a middle-aged one with a terrific ass. At one point or another, generally on the road, I fuck her brains out, get it out of my system, and that tides me over until the next show. As far as I know, Essie knows about none of this, and I see no reason to throw it in her face.

  “Unless you do,” he added, with a sharp look at Gurney.

  “I don’t either,” Gurney said.

  From the first time he’d met the director, Gurney had wanted to tell him about his divorce, feeling somehow that the older man would be deeply understanding about it. Sensing that the moment was right, he described his ex-wife and said that although they had had a stormy marriage, he was afraid that in some curious way he was still a little bit in love with her.

  “She has some qualities—theatrical ones, I guess you could call them—that I don’t ever expect to find in another woman.”

  “How old is she?” asked Hartog.

  It was a touchy question. Gilda Gurney had always been reluctant to reveal her true age, and Gurney, to his surprise, found himself loyally trimming off a few years and saying that she was thirty-two. Hartog, whose eyes watered at the drop of a hat, took in this information and then went over the brink into actual tears, saying: “Oh, you poor, poor bastard.”

/>   It was the first time Gurney had ever resented anything the man said or did.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said, and then fell back on his coarse, detectivey style. “I get a lot of pussy.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Hartog, drying his eyes and reacting sharply. “Where?”

  “Around town, here and there,” said Gurney. “There are nests of them all over the city if you look hard enough.”

  He had been offended by Hartog’s sympathy for him, which must have accounted for the sudden burst of feigned virility on his part. It took a while to get over Hartog’s annoyingly tearful reaction to his marital breakup, but he did. He also knew that he would probably end up discussing his personal difficulties with Hartog again, thereby walking into the same trap.

  The director was a fine and modest man, although it was probably his look of sympathy that was so effective. Was it possible that he wasn’t particularly sympathetic, but was merely a great actor, able to convey sympathy without feeling a trace of it? Whatever the case, Gurney felt he had a valuable friend in his new life. Hartog’s involvement was the main reason Gurney was willing to go ahead with Violencia.

  It was of greater importance than the promise of millions.

  At Undertag’s office the next morning, the director told Gurney that he had phoned Welles at home only to find that the composer had gone off to Puerto Vallarta. But he had tracked him down at the pricey vacation spot and gotten Welles’ guarantee that he would plane in immediately for the meeting.

  “He certainly does take good care of himself,” said Hartog.

  Gurney had been led to believe that the three of them would have a tight and intensive collaboration and was surprised that Welles had taken himself off to a tropical paradise just as the project was getting under way.

  Welles arrived before long, lean, suntanned, and fit. After a moment or so, he had Gurney feeling guilty about having interrupted his Mexican hiatus.

  “I’ve been working my ass off down there,” he said, his forehead creased with anger. “The trick is to get up very early in the morning, compose until noon, and then you’ve got almost the entire day for waterskiing and attending to your health.

  “My dad is in his nineties, which is a great factor on my side along the lines of longevity. I’m scared to death of dying and want to live as long as I possibly can.”

  Gurney sensed that Clement Hartog, too, felt a little sheepish about summoning Welles back. The director sketched in some of the progress they had made and then told Welles their idea for an opening homicide number.

  “Cute,” said Welles, but then he chuckled and shook his head with amused disbelief as though a child had made some outrageous error in basic logic.

  “You fellows don’t seem to understand. You can knock off a scene just like that, but a song is an entirely different kettle of fish. It takes a week of playing with it, then it has to be scored, orchestrated. … It’s a thousand times more difficult than a scene. You expect me to come up with it, bam, one, two, three, just like that. I have to be alone, sometimes for days at a time. It might come to me in the middle of the night. I sweat and scrimp for every note and sometimes throw the whole thing out and begin again. I just don’t understand you guys, and I don’t think you’re playing fair with me.”

  “Then take your time,” said Hartog. “No one’s rushing you.”

  “All right,” said Welles. “I just can’t permit anyone to break my balls, that’s all.”

  On his way out, he patted Gurney’s knee and flashed a genuinely delightful grin.

  “It’s not you, Paul,” he said. “You’re terrific.”

  The composer seemed to be a little frightened of Gurney, perhaps because of his background at the Bureau, plus Welles’ extreme concern for his own physical well-being.

  Gurney congratulated Hartog on his extraordinary patience with the composer.

  “I’ll bet that’s the trick to being a great director,” said Gurney. “I don’t mean to offend, but that quality is probably every bit as important as talent.”

  “I’m not generally that patient,” said Hartog. “I just hope it doesn’t turn out that I’m behaving this way because my mother has the lead in the show.”

  Gurney told the director not to be so hard on himself.

  “From all I’ve heard, your mom is a gifted actress and would have landed the police chief role even if the cards weren’t heavily stacked in her favor.”

  “I hope so,” said Hartog. “But I’ve got to keep the issue in mind continually.”

  Twenty minutes later, Welles called and said: “It was a bitch, but I cracked it. Can you fellows stop everything you’re doing and come right uptown to hear it? It’s the single greatest piece of work I’ve ever done. When I think that every once in a while I’ve looked upon myself as a washed-up guy …”

  Gurney could imagine Welles shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Well, the mind plays funny tricks sometimes,” said Welles.

  “I thought it would take him at least a week,” said Gurney when the composer had hung up.

  “He’s full of shit,” said Hartog. “You can write a song in five minutes.”

  He said it would probably set a bad precedent for them to stop everything and run right up to Welles’ place just because the composer had called.

  “Why the hell doesn’t he come down here?”

  But as Hartog spoke, Gurney noticed that the director was putting on his hat and coat.

  Welles lived in a handsomely appointed brownstone in Greenwich Village, one that was immaculately kept but clearly had the touch of a decorator. On the walls were beautifully framed notices of the traveling tent shows Welles had done many years back, with passages related to his work blown up and underlined. This seemed in questionable taste to Gurney, but it was done on such a bold and unashamed scale that somehow it was acceptable. And there was no denying that the notices were awfully good, although for the most part he had gotten them in shows that were otherwise unsuccessful.

  “Norman Welles’ songs provide the single cheerful note in an otherwise dreary panorama of tedium,” read a representative one, which Welles had posted prominently over a bricked fireplace. “Would that the poor man had surrounded himself with some decent collaborators.”

  The composer greeted them in a flowered silk kimono. He seemed in good spirits, although perhaps a bit more nervous than usual. He poured them drinks, sat them in comfortable chairs around a piano, and introduced a tiny, immaculately groomed and slightly humpbacked man named Tito Passionato as his piano-playing assistant—available to him day and night on an exclusive basis.

  “Many of my ideas come to me at four in the morning,” said Welles. “No matter how tired I am, I phone them in to Tito here, who is on constant round-the-clock call. I hum the section over the phone and he takes it down and commits it to paper. I pay him four-fifty a week for this, and believe me, it hurts. But I feel it’s worth it when you consider what I eventually make on the songs—sometimes hundreds of thousands. Tito has no other life. If he were to let me down and not be around when I needed him I would see to it that he never got another job in the music business.”

  Tito smiled, but a bit unevenly, as though he were not entirely convinced it was the best of all possible arrangements for him. Still, he seemed determined to make the most of it.

  Welles became increasingly jittery, steering the conversation around to economic policy during the Truman administration. Predictably, the exchange of comments was forced and somewhat clumsy.

  “Are we going to hear the song?” Hartog asked after a while.

  “Don’t rush me,” Welles shouted. “I can’t be pushed around the way other composers can. I’ve had hits, big ones, too, and don’t you forget it. So don’t pull that on me.”

  Gurney was not happy to hear Welles take that tone with the great director, a man he now considered his friend.

  “We’d both like to hear it,” he said, supportively.

  Welles prod
uced a sound that came across as a combination of a chuckle and a snicker.

  “Since when did you become an expert, Paul? Someone would think you’d done fourteen musicals.”

  The remark hit Gurney in a sensitive place: his total lack of experience. He felt his face heat up with anger. Welles must have sensed this and did an about-face.

  “I’m kidding, Paul. And I can see you’ve taken my comment the wrong way. All I’m saying is that you’ve got remarkable instincts. It’s as though you’ve been working on shows since you were a pup.”

  “Now, I called you guys up to hear a song,” he said, smoothly shifting gears, “and you want to hear it. That’s excellent thinking.”

  Tito played some background chords on the piano that seemed designed to lighten the atmosphere. When the chords unaccountably turned somewhat harsh and abrasive, Welles wheeled around in his chair.

  “Easy, Tito, easy … much softer. Do you want them to hate what’s coming up?”

  Tito smiled blandly and made a correction, segueing into a gentler musical theme. As tough as Welles was with his assistant, Gurney sensed that he was also capable of being quite nice to him. Why else would the obviously talented man have stuck it out with the moody composer?

  “Now look, fellas,” said Welles, “what you’re going to hear is so rough, such a preposterously early dummy of a song, that I ought to have myself shot for doing it for you. It’s practically spitballing— and all it’s designed to do is give you a taste, a hint of what it can be. I want you also to consider my voice, which is pathetic and thin and under constant strain. Try to imagine the song, Paul—especially you, since you have zero background in the field—try to imagine it with either Essie herself singing it, or a full chorus of men, backed up with heavy orchestration, woodwinds, flutes coming up at the right time, solid brass. And don’t forget lights, makeup, the comforts of a modern, acoustically sound theatre, which Undertag better come up with, if he knows what’s good for him. And Christ, I almost forgot. I’m no actor. This is a song that has to be directed. and I think we can all agree that we’ve got one of the all-time greats in that department, Mr. Clement Hartog.”