The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  He picked up the elephantine horn and blew long, caramel bass notes to warm up. "You know, I have to go out of town for a few days," he said, and I couldn't even muster a question about where he was going, since I was prepared for an eviction notice. "Would you mind if I hang out here and watch the place?" I said casually, nosing back into the play I was reading. Would he mind if I hung out? If he wasn't going to let me stay there, I was ready to push the key he loaned me into a bar of soap, make a bootleg copy and join the ranks of illegal Brooklyn squatters.

  "Sure, stay here," he said, more generously than I deserved, "the place is yours," leaving me with a roof over my head, a toilet, a sink, and the only edible thing in the cupboard, a large bag of pop corn kernels, which I popped and ate exclusively for the next three days.

  I won't describe the effects of eating only exploded kernels of large grain on the intestines other than to say I found it profoundly cleansing, and it led me to the same floor that Dave used to lay on my back, breathe deeply and visualize pizza the way Dave visualized tuba concertos. At the end of the third day of corn and water, I called my friend Barbara and begged her to call her grandmother who lived on the east side, across the park. Ask her for help, I pleaded. And I take it as evidence that there is a God, because when I was as hungry and beaten down as I've ever been in my life, I prayed for food and God answered my prayer, sending me out to an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant in glittering New York City with my friend Barb's grandmother, Ethel Merman.

  The first lady of the American musical theatre lived in a swanky hotel, where Dior-sweatered micro dogs chipped along beside their blue haired owners, wrapped in chinchilla, and I walked all the way across the park and uptown, hungrily staring into the twinkling cafes and boulangeries filled with croissants and those Italian places with windows full of cookie tins. Even the peep shows in Times Square seemed to be displaying ham sandwiches that night.

  The elevator in Ethel Merman's building didn't have mirrors, but the polished wood reflected Barb and I headed upstairs to grandma's floor as I reconsidered my outfit; blue jeans and an army surplus jacket with a broken zipper and "No Nukes" button holding it closed to go to dinner with Ethel Merman, who swept open the door to her apartment looking amazingly just like Ethel Merman. She was wearing a glittery dress with a working zipper, and lots of that old lady clackety-clack jewelry. It was like hugging a large, shiny maraca, but before she had the chance to invite me in and introduce me to a few friends and show-biz people, my hands were filled with giant shrimp that were waiting for me at the lip of a crystal bowl, sparkling with ice and cocktail sauce. Shoving jumbo shrimp into my famished mouth, I forgot that I don't even like shrimp, though it didn't really matter since I wasn't chewing them, so flavor was beside the point. I ate as if I were raised in a barn, spilling sauce on my ragged coat, taking everything Ethel Merman held out with a clackety bracelet and shoving it into my mouth, ready to eat until she might be forced to announce that she's going out to an all night supermarket for some Trisquits, because the kid with ketchup on his chin ate all the shrimp.

  Most paintings I'd seen before then were either in a museum or had pushpins in their corners, since they were displayed on corkboards, but Ethel's silken walls held original paintings, the kind with real paint on them. Original Renoirs and Manets rested next to autographed photos of George Gershwin and John F. Kennedy, and the museum of her career hanging all over the place. I stumbled through "OO's" and "Ah's" but couldn't stop thinking "Do you know how much food we could buy if we sold this stuff?" The guys on the sofa, Ethel's show-biz friends, were holding small plates of shrimp tails and talking about the memorable thing that Moss Hart said on the closing night of "Kismet." I smoothed the stained creases of my army jacket and tried to say something that made sense in the middle of their conversation about Stephen Sondheim and Fire Island, until it became so quiet that we headed out for Chinese food.

  "Oh! Harro! Harro Missah Melman!" the Chinese waiters swooned, buzzing around and flapping napkins, smiling huge smiles. I hadn't digested the partially chewed appetizers, and was still praying that Ethel would order for all of us, preferably the biggest food that came fastest to the table. Something with beef in it, beef so big it comes to the table hanging upside down from a hook. She ordered a big bottle of cheap wine with a bucket of ice - chablis on the rocks, her signature drink, and just as she opened her mouth, ready to belt through her historic pipes an order of food the size of Staten Island, a lady from a few tables away weaved her whiskey addled legs in our direction, waving drunken arms over her head. "Ethlllll Mermmmllll!" she said.

  "Order," I thought, "Order Staten Island beef, Ethel. Come on, baby. Beef. Yell it out. Start cooking the beef, my Asian pals, 'cause Ethel brought a starving refugee with her.""

  "Mizzz Mermallll…big fan," the lady blubbed, turning up the heat at the table at least ten degrees.

  "Thank you," Ethel said briskly, scanning the menu without looking up. "ssmy brthday!"

  Ethel kept reading, cool as a clackety, big haired cucumber.

  "Sing happy birthday for me!!!" The lady shouted, the booze pushing it too close to a demand.

  "I'm having dinner right now, dear," Ethel said, gesturing to her friends with ascots, her granddaughter, and the kid eating sugar packets and drinking soy sauce out of the bottle.

  "Oh come on!" the lady pressed, taking another step toward the edge of our table. Then there was silence. Perfect silence as we sat there, unsure of what to do, a Chinese waiter poised and still, frozen in an uncomfortable smile.

  Ethel Merman bowed her head, and clasped her hands and began to pray. Really. She prayed right there, for patience maybe, or fortitude, or maybe for the quick opening of the kitchen door and a flaming platter of Peking duck to crack the woman in the head and send her to the hospital.

  No duck. She kept standing there with the drunken assumption that if she made everybody uncomfortable enough, she would get Happy Birthday sung to her, though she might not remember it. And it worked, because in the nervous lull, when I thought our party was about to stand up and go to another restaurant, delaying my food for another half hour, I myself threw my napkin on the table and stood up and belted:

  "Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you,

  Happy Birthday annoying drunk lady…

  Happy Birthday to you,

  …I'm up and coming!!!!!!"

  Our table now ringed with the gaping mouths of Ethel Merman's sophisticated New York friends, I picked up my glossy, red menu with gilt, golden dragons on the cover and hid behind it, clasping my own hand and praying for food. And that prayer, like Ethel's was answered, because as the defeated lush weaved back to her table, beef and chicken and pork and shrimp and egg rolls flew out of the kitchen. Wine poured and ice clinked and I happily slurped, jabbing sticky chopsticks into anything covered in sweet and sour sauce.

  It was the best half of a meal I've ever eaten, because at the halfway point, A fog of cold sweat surrounded me and I froze, chopstick poised over some exotic sauce encrusted vegetable. I had eaten only popcorn for the previous three days and my stomach was the size of a shrunken lentil. In a gastronomic holocaust I'd stuffed it with shrimp, Cheez-its, beef, chicken and glazed pork. The meal that I began afraid that I might not get enough to eat was ending as I became truly afraid I was going to throw up on Ethel Merman. Gently placing my chopsticks back on the table, I stopped talking and sat there listening to dusty old show biz stories from George M. Cohan's golf buddies while my stomach slowly turned into a lava lamp. Hot, red globs blurped and globbed around my distended middle, and I prayed for the third time "Lord, thank you for the food. Now please, please don't let me throw up on Ethel Merman in front of Irving Berlin's podiatrist. Okay, maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but don't even let me throw up around Ethel Merman. George Gershwin wrote songs for the lady, I doubt he ever threw up on her, although he probably could have made it into quite a song."

  We hunched out into the cold winter air, closing
mink jackets against the wind and ripped army coats with political buttons, our breath forming acrid sweet and sour clouds around our faces as we walked Ethel the two blocks back to her apartment. "Hey!" she trumpeted, "Let's go get some ice cream!" she said, not wanting the night to end.

  "hhhnrr" I softly groaned, waving her off and pointing across the park, "gotta go…"

  I hugged her, soft with mink and perfume and wine, and thanked her, my brassy guardian angel bearing shrimp and appetizers and credit cards, and she disappeared past her doorman and into the building.

  The subway pole was cool against my face as I hugged it on the way home. I staggered off the train at my darkened, dangerous stop, walked briskly away from the station to a spot near a storm drain, and somewhere in Brooklyn I churgled and spit, returning to the gaseous bowels of New York City the entire meal I'd been given by its First Lady. Groaning and close to death, I moaned and hurled, until a lone Brooklyn Samaritan slowed while passing by to say "Hey man, you okay?" "Are you kidding?" I grimaced, "I'm in show business! I just had dinner with Ethel Merman!!"

  Ethel Merman's son, Barb's uncle Bob lived in New York City also, only a few blocks from Ethel's place. He was a bearded, wild shaman who lived in the core of the big apple, sleeping under the giant, bronze mushroom at the Alice In Wonderland statue near the boat pond in Central Park. Bob was voluntarily homeless, showering in the basement of Ethel's posh building by day, and after sunset, when joggers pick up the pace to get out of the park before they get robbed, he unfurled a nylon sleeping bag under the giant monument to Lewis Carroll's story. He didn't seem to mind sleeping under a bronze mushroom in a dangerous city park, and used his free time to hang out with young actors, improvise long-form experimental theatre, and plan for the future, a homeless, nomadic prophet.

  "Bob," I said, sitting at the Central Park Boathouse a few feet from his bed, "I think I'm leaving the Academy."

  "Why is that?"

  "The teachers hate me."

  "They hate you?"

  "They do. They hate me because I ask questions."

  "They don't want you to ask questions?" he said, shoving hands into the pockets of his down vest, "A student unable to ask questions? Leave, man. I would leave."

  "They make you lay on the floor and--"

  "They don't let you ask questions…"

  "And they don't. Seriously, they don't. They make you act like a color and you're supposed to just shut up and do it."

  He leaned in closer. "Do you know who you are, Tom?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you know who you are?"

  "Who?"

  He didn't blink for three seconds, and then said "You are the warrior artist."

  "I'm the what?"

  "You are …the warrior artist."

  I didn't know what he meant at all, but it sounded sort of artsy and macho, so I went with it.

  "Okay," I said, "Okay. Warrior artist. What is that?"

  Bob leaned closer. "I got an idea under the mushroom of my friend and protector Alice. I have an idea for the warrior artist."

  "What's that?"

  "That's you."

  "I'm what?"

  "The warrior artist!"

  "I mean what's the idea?"

  "Teatro Mare. Theatre of the sea. We'll be based on a ship, writing and performing multilingual theatre, clowning, and mime to audiences in every port around the world!"

  His head was covered in a sailor's bandana, his eyes blazing with the thrill of inspiration and a lack of sleep under the mushroom, and he filled my head with multicultural visions of peace through art. I was listening hard, tired of laying on the floor and doing useless exercises, nodding gravely after somebody did a terrible scene from a terrible play, the expensive tuition making it impossible to tell somebody "That was very bad. You are bad at acting. You should go home." Suddenly, over coffee in Central Park, it occurred to me that maybe mime to the people of Zimbabwe might be the way to go. Climb aboard a ship of happy fools, yell things like "Ahoy!" and sail to far off lands to perform for the poor and ignorant, because they'll probably love my "Guy trapped in a glass box" mime, since that's the only one I had really worked on. They can't get all that much mime on Zimbabwe, so it would probably go very well.

  "That sounds cool, Bob," I said, in the darkened coffee house, "and you want me to be in it?

  "We need the warrior artist."

  "As an actor? Cool!"

  "Yes, but more than that. We're going to be sailing around the world," he said.

  "Absolutely," I answered.

  "And in lots of places there are pirates."

  "There are what?"

  "Pirates. Pirates on the open sea," he said, his eyes blazing.

  It was looking very much like Alice's mushroom was psychedelic.

  "Bob, there aren't pirates--"

  "Seriously, Tom," he said, "Get into an ocean you don't know, there are pirates who will sail up, take the ship, take the women and kill you. It still goes on."

  The smoky air hung between us as I pictured eye patches and peg legs, plundering every dollar, actress, and juggling club before taking out a sword and making me walk the plank.

  "We need a guy like you," he said, "A warrior artist to stand at the helm and carry a rifle. When a boat comes too close to us in open water, take a few shots at them to scare them off."

  "I have a gun?" I said, "On the ship of peace through theatre?"

  "High powered rifle."

  "Do they have guns too?" I asked, gulping hot chocolate in as macho a way as possible, since, after all, I am the warrior artist.

  "They're pirates," he said.

  "So they have guns, and I'll be expected to shoot at them while they might be shooting at me?"

  "Just to scare them off, not kill them," he said, 'We come in peace. We're actors."

  "I'll be a gun-wielding, international clown of peace?"

  "Are you ready for that?!" he asked, his flushed face quaking next to the table lamp, totally alive and filled with adrenaline, caffeine, and the knowledge that if this nutty idea ever came to be, I'd be the kid taking the first pirate slug in the head.

  "Bob," I said, "I think I'm gonna move to California."

  "Sounds good," he said.

  ELEVEN

  "That Ethel Merman had quite a set of pipes, didn't she?" the Ranger said. "I never heard her sing live, but I can't deny I'm a big fan."

  "And you set your sights on Los Angeles," he said, pronouncing it in Spanish. "Los Ahn-hay-lays!"

  "And here I am, way out on the other side of the country."

  "And here you are, in El Valle de San Fernando!" the Ranger said, as we rolled down Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

  "Yes, Spanish for 'place of the mini-mall, I guess." I said.

  "I think it's named for San Fernando," he said.

  "I was just--"

  "Saint Ferdinand, in our tongue." "Thanks," I said, "Good to know."

  We rolled down the hill and onto the flat valley floor, through the convenience store and stop light grid where most people in Los Angeles live, that is, people who don't have millions of dollars to buy a house, and that's just about everybody.

  "Can I drop you off somewhere?"

  "Nowhere in particular," he said.

  "Do you have somewhere you're going?"

  "I'm as free as a bird, Tom," he said, chuckling and staring up at the dusty palm trees that line Ventura Boulevard.

  "Is Twister tied up somewhere?"

  "Well taken care of. All is well," he said.

  He gently refused my offers to drop him off anywhere, so I pulled into the driveway of my house, a stucco and shingle relic from the fifties with a brown facade and cracked sidewalk so similar to every other house on the block that I had to check for the correct street number for the first three months I lived there.

  "Hey, nice place," he said, as my car bottomed out on a corner of the sidewalk.

  "Come on, it's a house."

  "Still, it looks very nice."<
br />
  "I use the back door," I said, leading him past the wrought iron fence and dusty oleander lining the pool, and into my four bedroom, two and a half bath, one story house. It really only has two baths, but in case any realtors are interested, I call it two and a half, since it has an outdoor hose, which in Southern California real estate terms is considered a half bath.

  "You have a very nice home here," he said, walking through the tiny living room into the kitchen before he had to turn around, embarrassed that he'd seen the whole place already. The kid's drawings and certificates lined the hallway between rooms, and posters of paintings from museum shows, Ansel Adams prints, and a few of my own paintings filled the remaining wall space, surrounding the crown jewel of my art collection, a Martin Mull poster that he autographed for me on the set of a horrible movie we filmed together.

  "Would you like something to drink? Milk or something?" I asked, headed for the kitchen.

  "Do you have anything else?" he asked.

  "I'm having iced tea," I said.

  "If you have enough, an iced tea would be refreshing."

  "Sure thing," I said, "I'm not sure if anybody's home."

  "You're a family man?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said, rummaging for ice, "I talk about it in my act. I do jokes about it, remember?"

  He brought a fist to his forehead. "Yes! Of course."

  I sat down opposite him on the sofa and handed him his iced tea. "You still haven't told me anything," I said.

  "What am I supposed to tell you?" he asked, sipping his drink and reaching it toward the table, where it hovered in a holding pattern as he searched for a coaster.

  "Just put it down anywhere," I said.

  "Alrighty," he said.

  "Listen, there must be a reason you're here, and it can't be because you're curious about the commercials I have to audition for and how similar they are to your experiences with Aqua-Velva."

  "Well," he said, "I just thought we had a lot in common and it would be interesting to talk with you."

  I swigged iced tea and stared at him.