“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do,” Hollis said. His thumbs squeezed against his aching eyeballs for a moment. He had had this conversation with Jenner too often, in the past five years. Jenner simply did not listen. “Acting isn’t the easiest profession in the world, Mark. Lord knows I don’t have to tell you that. But what you’ve never grasped is that acting has toughened up tremendously since the days you broke in. And you’ve remained right at the same level you hit at the start of your career.”
Jenner tightened his lips. He felt cold and curiously alone even in this crowded midtown bar.
“I used to be a star,” he said.
“Used to be. Look, Mark, these days you need something colossal to drag people out of their warm homes and into a Broadway theater. Homes are too comfortable; the streets are too risky. You never can tell when you’ll get mugged if you step out after dark. So you don’t step out. You stay home.”
“People come out to see that British play, the one with what’s-his-name in it,” Jenner pointed out.
“With Bert Tylor? Of course they do. Tylor has what it takes to get people into a theater.”
“And I don’t, is that it?” Jenner fought to keep the crispness out of his voice.
Hollis nodded slowly. “You don’t have it, Mark. Not any more.”
“And what is this—this magic something-or-other that I lack?”
“It’s empathy,” Hollis said. “The power to get yourself across the footlights, to set up a two-way flow, to get those people in the audience so damned involved in what you’re saying that it turns into part of themselves.”
Jenner glowered at the small man. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you did just now was to define what any actor has to do.”
Hollis shook his head. “It’s more than that, now. Now you need special help—techniques for reaching the soul of the fellow in the six-buck seat. I’ve been offering you these techniques for almost a year, but you’ve been too damned stubborn to listen to me—too proud to admit a gadget could help you.”
“I had a part lined up,” Jenner said in a weak voice. “Last May Dan Hall came to me, said he was doing a play that looked good for me, and was I interested? Hell, sure I was interested. I hadn’t worked for two years; I was supposed to be box-office poison. But Dan signed me.”
Hollis said, “And you rehearsed all summer, and half the fall. And played the sticks half the winter while that poor hapless devil of a playwright tried to fix up the play you were killing, Mark.”
Jenner sucked in his breath sharply. He began to say something, then throttled it. He shook his head slowly like a bull at bay. “Go on, Holly. I have this coming to me. Don’t pull the punches.”
The small man said thinly, “You weren’t putting that play across the footlights, Mark. So when it finally got to New York it opened in March and closed in March. Okay. You had all the rope you needed, and you sure hanged yourself! Where do you go from here?”
“Nowhere. I’m at the bottom of the heap now.”
“You still have a chance,” Hollis said. He leaned forward and seemed to be hanging on Jenner’s words like an anxious chickenhawk. “I can help you. I’ve been telling you that for a year.”
“I don’t want my mind tinkered with.”
“You could have your name up in lights again, live in a Fifth Avenue penthouse. You could get back all the things you used to have, before—before you started to slide.”
Jenner stared at the little man’s pale, unlined face as if Hollis were nothing but a pane of glass, and as if all the secrets of the universe were inscribed on the back of the booth behind him. In a low voice Jenner said, “I won’t get everything back. Fame, maybe. Money, maybe. But not everything.”
“You didn’t need to make your wife run away from you,” Hollis said with deliberate cruelty. “But maybe you could make her want to come back.”
“Would I want her back?”
“That’s up to you. I can’t answer all your questions for you. What time is it?”
“One-fifteen a.m. The morning papers will be out soon. Maybe they’ll mention the closing of Misty Isle. Maybe there’ll be a sticky little paragraph about how Mark Jenner has helped to kill another good play.”
“Forget all that,” Hollis said sharply. “Stop brooding about the past. You’re going to start everything over tonight.”
Jenner looked up, surprised. “When did I agree to let you monkey with me, Holly?”
“You didn’t. But what else can you do, now?”
The surprise widened on Jenner’s face. He looked down and stared at the formica tabletop until the pattern blurred before his eyes. Hollis was right, Jenner realized numbly. There was nothing else to do now, no place else to go, no more ships to come in.
“Okay,” Jenner said in a harsh, throaty voice. “You win. Let’s get out of here.”
They took the Bronx undertube to Hollis’ Riverdale home. Jenner kept a car stored in a Fifty-ninth Street garage, but four martinis in little more than an hour and a half had left him too wobbly to drive, and Hollis did not have a license. At half past one in the morning, the tube was crowded; Jenner and Hollis sat in one of the middle cars, and Jenner was bitterly amused to note that nobody seemed to recognize him, or at least no one cared to come over and say, “Pardon me, but are you really…”
In the old days, Jenner recalled, his agents had forbade him strictly to enter the subways. They didn’t even have the undertubes then. But if the Mark Jenner of 1977 had entered a subway, he would have been ripped apart, Orpheus-like, by the autograph hunters. Now, he was just another big man with a martini-glaze on his face.
Hollis remained silent all through the twenty-minute trip, and that forced Jenner back on his own inner resources. It was not pleasant for him to have to listen to the output of his own mind for twenty minutes. There were too many memories rising to confront him.
He could remember the tall, gawky teen-age Ohio boy who had overnight turned into the tall, confident New Yorker of twenty-one, back in ’70. The School of Dramatic Arts; the wide-eyed hours of discovering Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello; the big break, the lead in Right You Are at a small off-Broadway house, with a big-name Broadway mogul happening to come to the dingy little second-story theater to see young Jenner’s mordant, incisive Laudisi.
The following autumn, a bit part in a short-lived comedy, thanks to that lucky break. Then some television work; after that, a longer part in a serious drama. Finally, in the spring of 1973, an offer to play the juvenile lead in a bit of froth called Lovely to Look At. Jenner was twenty-four and obscure when the show opened, that fall; when it closed, two years later, he was famous. He owned two Cadillacs, lived in a penthouse apartment, gave away vintage champagne the way other men handed out cigarettes. In 1976, while out in Hollywood doing the film version of Lovely, he unexpectedly married dazzling, bosomy, much-publicized, twenty-year-old Helene Bryan, current queen of the movie colony. Experts predicted that the fabulous Jenner would weary of the pneumatic blonde within months; but Helene turned out to have unexpected depth, wearing a real personality behind her sleek personality mask. In the end it was she who wearied of a down-slipping, bitterly irascible, and incipiently alcoholic Jenner, eleven years later. Eleven years, Jenner thought! They seemed like a week, and the two years of separation a lifetime.
Jenner thought back on the successes. Two years of Lorelei; a year and nine months of Girl of the Dawn; then the ill-starred turkey, Hullaballoo; and finally his last big hit, Bachelor Lady, which ran a year—October 1982 to September 1983. After that, almost overnight, people stopped coming to see Mark Jenner act; he had lost his hold. In the season of 1986-87 he appeared in no less than three plays, the longest-lived of which held the boards for five weeks. Somewhere along the line, he had lost his magic. He had also lost Helene, in that dreadful spring of 1987 when she returned to California to stay.
And somewhere along the line, Jenner realized he had lost the e
ager young man who loved Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello. As a professional, he had specialized almost exclusively in frothy romantic confections. That was unintentional; it was simply that he could never resist a producer waving a fat contract. It wouldn’t have mattered, much, except that he kept up contact with Walt Hollis, one of the first people he had met when he came to New York, and Hollis served to remind Jenner of the Pirandello days.
Hollis had never been an actor. He was a lighting technician in the old days, and a lighting technician he still was, the best of his craft—a slim, mousy little man who looked no older at fifty than he had at thirty. Hollis had been more than a mere electrician, though. He was a theoretician, a student of the acting technique, a graduate engineer as well. He tinkered with gadgets, and sometimes he told Jenner about them. Jenner listened with open ears, never retaining a thing.
Two years ago, Hollis had told him of something new he was developing—a technique that might be able to turn any man with a bit of acting skill into a Barrymore, into an Olivier. Jenner had laughed. In that year, ’87, his main concern had been to show the world how self-sufficient he was in the face of adversity. He was not going to grasp at any electronic straws, oh no! That would be admitting he was in trouble!
Well, he was in trouble. And as Misty Isle sank rapidly into limbo under a fierce critical barrage, Jenner bleakly realized he could sink no lower himself. Now was the time at last to listen to Hollis. Now was the time to clutch at any offer of salvation. Now.
“We’re here,” Hollis said, breaking a twenty-minute silence. “Watch your step getting out. You don’t want to trip and mash up your pretty profile.”
In the twenty years he had known Walt Hollis, Jenner had been inside the little man’s home no more than a dozen times, and not at all in the last decade. It was a tidy little place, four small rooms, overfastidiously neat. Bookshelves lined the walls—an odd assortment of books, half literary, half technical. Hollis lived by himself; he had never married. That had made it hard for Jenner to see him socially very often; Helene had hated to visit bachelors.
Now Jenner allowed himself to be deposited in a comfortable armchair, while Hollis, ever tense, paced the worn broadloom carpet in front of him. Jenner felt completely helpless. Hollis was his last hope.
Hollis said, “Mark, I’m going to be ruthlessly frank in everything I say to you from tonight on. You aren’t going to like the things I say. If you get annoyed, blow off steam. It’ll do you good.”
“I won’t get annoyed,” Jenner said tonelessly. “There isn’t a thing you could say about me that wouldn’t be true.”
“You will get annoyed—so annoyed that you’ll want to punch me in the face.” Hollis grinned shyly. “I hope you’ll be able to control that. You’ve got me by fifty or sixty pounds.”
He paced back and forth. Jenner watched him. For twenty years, Mark Jenner had felt a sort of pity for Hollis, for the timid and retiring electrician whose only pleasure seemed to be in helping others. Sure, Hollis made good pay, and he was the best in his business. But for all that, he was just a backstage flunky. Now he was much more than that; he was Jenner’s last hope.
Hollis said, “You’re going to have to withdraw from your regular activities completely for six months or so, Mark. Give up your room. Move in here with me until the treatment’s finished. Then we’ll see what we can do about getting you back on Broadway. It may not be easy—but if things work the way I think they’ll work, you’ll be climbing straight for the stratosphere the month I’m done with you.”
“I’ll be satisfied just to work regularly. Suppose you tell me what you’re going to do to me.”
Hollis spun around and jabbed the air with a forefinger. “First let’s talk about your past. You were a big hit once, Mark, then you started slipping. Now you’re nowhere. Okay: Why did it happen?”
“Yeah. You tell me. Why?”
“It happened,” Hollis said, “because you failed to adapt to the changing times. You never developed the kind of emotional charge that an actor needs now, if he’s going to reach his audience. You stayed put, worshiping the good old status quo. You acted in the 1973 way for fifteen years, but by 1987 it wasn’t good enough for the public or for the critics.”
“Especially the critics,” Jenner growled. “They crucified me!”
“The critics are paid to slap down anything that isn’t what the public would consider good entertainment,” Hollis said thinly. “You can’t blame them; you have to blame yourself. You had an early success, and you stuck at that level until you were left behind.”
Jenner nodded gravely. “Okay, Holly. Let’s say I frittered away my talent. I’d rather think that than that I never had any talent in the first place. How can you help me?”
Hollis paused in his nervous march and came to light like a fretful butterfly, on a backless wooden chair. “I once explained my technique to you, and you nodded all through it, but I could see you weren’t listening. You’ll have to listen to me now, Mark, or I can’t help you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I hope so. Briefly, what I’m going to do is put you through a sort of lay analysis…”
“I’ve been analyzed!”
“Keep quiet and listen for a change,” Hollis said with a vigor Jenner had never heard him display before. “You’ll be put through a sort of lay analysis, under deep narcohypnosis. What I want, actually, is a taped autobiography, going as deep into your life as I can dredge.”
“Are you qualified to do this sort of thing?” Jenner asked.
“I’m qualified to build the machine and ask the questions. The psychiatric angle I’ve researched as thoroughly as possible. The rest comes out of you, until we have the tape.”
“Okay,” Jenner said. “So what do you do with this tape biography of me?”
“I put it aside,” Hollis said. “Then I take another tape, put you under hypnosis again, and feed the new tape into you. The new tape will be one that I’ve taken from some other person. It’ll be carefully expurgated to keep you from knowing the other person’s identity, but you’ll get a deep whiff of his personality. Then I take your tape and pipe it into the man who made the other one.”
Jenner frowned, not comprehending. “I don’t get this. Who’s the other person? You?”
“Of course not. He’ll be a man you never met. You won’t ever see him; you won’t ever know who he is. But you’ll know what kind of food he likes and why; what he thinks when he’s in bed with his wife; how he feels on a hot, sweaty summer day; what he felt like the first time he kissed a girl. You’ll remember his getting whopped for stealing cigarettes from his father, and you’ll remember his college graduation day. You’ll have all his memories, hopes, dreams, fears. He’ll have yours.”
Jenner squinted and tried to figure out what the little man was heading toward. “What good will all that do—to peek into each other’s minds?”
Hollis smiled. “When you build up a character on stage, you mine him out of yourself—out of your own perceptions and reactions and experiences. You take the playwright’s bare lines, and you flesh them out by interpreting words as action, words as expression, words as carriers of emotion. If you’re a good actor—which means if you have enough inner resource to swing the trick—you convince the audience that you are the man the program says you are. If not, you get a job selling popcorn in front of the theater.”
“So…”
Hollis swept right on. “So this way you’ll have two sets of emotions and experiences to build on. You can synthesize them into a portrayal that no actor can begin to give.” Hollis locked his thin hands together over one knee and bent forward, his mild face bright with enthusiasm now. “Besides, you’ll have the advantage of being inside another man’s skull, knowing what makes him tick; it’ll give you a perspective you can’t possibly have now. Combining his memories with yours, it’ll be that much easier for you to get inside the audience’s collective skull too, Mark. You see the picture now? You follow w
hat I’m driving at?”
“I think so,” Jenner said heavily. With awkwardly deliberate motions he pulled a cigarette out of Hollis’ pack on the table, and lit it. Jenner did not actually smoke; he valued his throat too highly. But now he needed something to do with his hands, and the cigarette-lighting ritual provided it. “But tell me this—what does this other fellow get out of having my tape pumped into him?”
“He’s a politician,” Hollis said. “By which I mean a man who’s in public life. He wants to run for a high office. He’s a capable man, but with your talent for projection, combined with his own inner drive, he’s sure to win.”
“You mean you have the other man picked out already?”
“He’s been picked out and waiting for nearly a year. I told him I would get a great actor to serve as the counterweight on this little seesaw. He’s been waiting. I had you in mind, but it took this flop tonight to make you come around. You will go along with this, won’t you?”
Jenner shut his eyes for a moment and drew the burning smoke deep into his lungs. He felt like gagging. He was drained of all strength; if Hollis had snapped off the light, he would have fallen asleep on the spot, clothes and all.
He said, after a moment, “So, I’ll be taking another man into my head with me. And that supposedly will make me a star again. Ah—have you ever tried this stunt before?”
“You and he will be the first subjects,” Hollis confessed.
“And you’re confident nothing will go wrong?”
“I’m not confident at all,” Hollis said quietly. “It ought to work; but it might make both of you gibbering lunatics instead.”
“And still you’re ready to try this on me?” Jenner asked.
“I wouldn’t want you going into it without a warning. But the odds are good in favor of a successful outcome; otherwise I wouldn’t dream of asking you to play along with me.”
To Be Continued Page 40