by Jack Finney
On the screen the man with the slate for Take Seven was walking forward to hold it to the camera, but Hugo Dahl was on his feet saying, “I knew it! I knew it! I said so! Jerry, did you splice a lead-in and lead-out to a print of that? I asked you to!”
“Yeah! It’s set up on the second projector,” a muffled voice called from the projection booth.
“Then show it for crysake! That’s it! That’s the one!” On the screen the band had begun once more, but the screen abruptly went black, the sound cutting off. The little audience murmured, and in the darkness Dahl called out, “Marion, Baby, grandma never did better! You got a future in this lousy business, that I can promise you!”
Marion’s hand had gripped my forearm, lying on the arm of the seat, squeezing so hard I could feel each separate finger. The screen lighted up, a numbered countdown began flashing past, and in its light I looked at Marion. Her one hand gripping my arm, the other lay spread on her chest as she stared up at the screen, her mouth slightly open in stunned, incredulous, glorious relief, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3I thought we’d see Marion again, but a giant squatly shaped bottle suddenly filled the screen, and its label, though plainly visible, was read aloud by a man’s deep voice: “Huntley’s Old-fashioned Tomato Catsup!” The wide bottle top revolved itself loose, flew off the screen, and the bottle tilted forward, the voice continuing, “In the smart new bottle with the great big mouth!” On the word “mouth” a comic-strip speech balloon appeared over the bottle’s mouth, and as the words popped into being inside the balloon, a high, nasal comic voicethe voice of the catsup bottlespoke the same words: “But I’ve still got all my old-fashioned flavor … with all its Huntley old-time zing!” And now Take Six, Marion’s dance, began on the screen once more, but this time as the pianist’s hands dropped to the keyboard the high funny voice was saying, “Yessir! All the fine old-fashioned flavor…”the blaring jazz began simultaneously with “flavor,” and smiling out at us again, Marion was walking on stage in her tomato-red dress”…with all its Huntley old-time zing!” the voice continued as she walked, and precisely on “zing” she began to dance.
During the twenty seconds of that spectacular dance, the funny voice was saying, “Yep! Still that fine old-fashioned flavor … that famous Huntley old-style taste.” And again, the dance ending, the voice was saying, “With all its old-time Huntley”precisely as Marion winked“zing!”
Marion off stage, the final banjo-string fillip dying, the giant bottle again filled the screen, tilting forward to reveal its open mouth, another speech balloon appearing above it. Simultaneously the printed word and comic voice both said “Wow!” and the screen went white.
“Great! Oh, great!” Hugo Dahl was shouting. “That’s it, that’s it! That’s all we need to see. Marion, love, have your agent phone me in the morning. Fred, your stuff ready?”
In the moment before the projection beam cut off, I saw Marion’s face. It was pale; it was stunned and astonished, as though someone she loved had slapped her. Then in the darkness I felt the breath of her voice on my cheek as she whispered, “Nick, what is that? What is it?”
Up ahead Fred was talking, and I leaned toward Marion and whispered miserably, “A commercial.”
“A what?”
“It’s … like an ad. An advertisement. It’s … not for the movies, Marion. It’s for television.”
“That … thing we saw my movie on? That’s what this was for? Not a movie, butThat’s all my dance was for, to advertise catsup?” I nodded in the darkness, and reached over to take her hand.
Fred was saying, “We tried a pool-table sequence with a professional; trick shots. And the guy was great. Interesting but no excitement, no zing; I eliminated it. We tried some comic stuff; villain tying the girl to railroad track; you know. It doesn’t work, Hugo. But we filmed one thing that did; a damn good day’s work. We spliced on a lead-in and lead-out; wait’ll you see it. Jerry, you ready? Roll it.”
I knew. As the giant catsup bottle tilted forward, the comic voice booming “In the smart new bottle with the great big mouth!,” I knew what was going to appear on the screen, and closed my eyes. But when the catsup stuff stopped, and the drone of an ancient biplane motor abruptly filled the tiny theater, I clapped a hand over my eyes just as they popped open. Then I spread my fingers and sat helplessly watching.
Incredibly, there I stood in flowing white shirt, jodhpurs, and leather puttees on the lower wing of an antique biplane against a pale-blue sky. The view was from the side and back at a little distance from the plane; I hadn’t noticed the camera plane or heard its engine over the drone of our own. The view was taken from just slightly below. My stomach contracting, I knew that Los Angeles lay a mile under my feet on that cloth-covered wing on the screen, but the camera showed only the man on the wing and the sky above; it might have been only twenty feet above the ground.
Again, and almost physically, just as it had happened in the Olympic theater in San Francisco, I felt the merging, felt my body occupiedfelt the almost irritable attempt to push me aside down into some remote corner of my own being. But this time I resisted angrily. This time I held on, andup on the screen the scene changed, and, our interest caughtwe watched it together.
An old-fashioned touring car, its black canvas top down, was speeding along a dirt road, weaving erratically from side to side; the view had obviously been taken from a helicopter flying just above and behind it and well to one side. The bareheaded driver of the old car, one hand on the steering wheel, was holding a struggling girl beside him. She wore a long white dress, her hands tied behind her back, and was gagged. “Yep!” the comic voice was saying. “All that great old-fashioned flavor…” and now the ancient biplane edged onto the upper corner of the screen from the other side of the speeding car, my own upside-down body, white shirt fluttering, hanging by its jodhpurred knees from the wing skid. Directly over the back seat of the carI actually let out a muffled cry in the theaterthe figure dropped from the plane, revolving in mid-air in a neat somersault to land on its feet in the back seat. Cut to a close-up: standing in the back seat of the racing car, I held the driver around the neck with one arm, reaching past him with the other to turn off the ignition and grab the steering wheel. Cut to another shot: the car stopped beside the road, the driver tied and gagged, the girl in my arms looking over my shoulder at the audience. “With all the old-time zing!” said the funny voice, and precisely on “zing” the girl in my arms winked, and I felt the sudden disengagement from my muscles, nerves, senses and mind.
Up front, filling the screen, the great catsup bottle tilted forward, the funny voice speaking. But I had turned in my seat to stare toward the rear of the theater, and I saw him. Walking slowly across the back cross aisle just under the white beam of the projector light, clear but transparent, the wall of the theater visible behind him, I saw the eagle profile, narrowed brown eyes, and slicked-down black hairutterly familiar to me from a hundred old-movie books and a dozen picturesof Rudolph Valentino. He was wearing what may have been the costume he had chosen for eternity: long, dark baggy pants almost to the ankles; boots; a ten-inch-wide studded leather belt; a coarse striped shawl thrown over one shoulder of his shirt. But now the once proud shoulders under that shirt and shawl were slumped. And upside down in his hand, he carried the rest of that costume by its chin strap: the broad-brimmed, flat-topped hat of a gaucho, dangling in rejection and defeat. His face averted from the screen, cringing from the voice of the Huntley catsup bottle, he walked toward but never visibly reached the exit. As the funny voice from the screen said “Wow!” Rodolpho Guglielmi disappeared like a light snapped off.
We left, Marion and I, slipping into the aisle and hurrying up it just before the lights came on. Outside we walked along the narrow asphalt street, badly lighted by widely separated old-style lampposts, possibly left over, I thought, from a forgotten picture. There was a high moon, almost full, the street bright and luminous in the soft wash of light. The old wood and brick buildi
ngs we passed stood unlighted and silent, their windows ink-black or shiny yellow from the light of the moon. At the corner we turned toward a studio gate and the lighted hut of the guard inside it reading a newspaper. There Marion put a hand on my arm and we stopped.
She looked back down the length of that empty moon-bright street, motionless as a ghost town. She stared up at the dark still building beside us. Then she turned to me. “Put your arms around me, Nickie.” I did, and she leaned back to study my face. “You look just like him, almost. Almost exactly, but … you’re not. You’re not. Kiss me, though, Nickie, kiss me good-bye! Because I’ll never be back.”
I drew her close and kissed her gently and lovingly. I touched her face then, my fingers brushing her cheek, smoothing her hair back from her temples, and, pale in the moonlight, she smiled at me. Then I kissed her again, and after a moment or so she stepped back. “Well. Was that for me or for Marion?”
“For Marion. That was for Marion. I wanted her to know that someone gave a damn. And would remember.” I reached for Jan. “But this is for you.”
We found a cab to head back to the hotel for an early start home in the morning. I was never going to see whatever lay inside 1101 Keever Street, I understood, but I had to see it, and I asked the cabby to drive past it on the way.
When we turned onto Keever Street and I read the street sign, I glanced around, not sure whether this was Beverly Hills or not: it didn’t look like my idea of Beverly Hills. There were small businesses on both sides of the street: an enormous brilliantly lighted drugstore, the people in it actually pushing shopping carts; a discount record place; a dry cleaner; gas stations; three take-out food places in a row, all busyit was only nine o’clock. And scattered among them, alone and in twos and threes, were the asbestos-shingle-covered remains of the residential area this had once been. They were no longer one-family residencesyou could see eight or ten mail slots on every porchbut rooming houses, with no future now but demolition. The area wasn’t shabby, I don’t think that’s allowed, but it was the Los Angeles equivalent.
We drove slowly through the seven-hundred block, the eight-, the nine-, the ten-, and they were all alike. And so was the eleven-hundred block, on our side of the street. But not on the other.
Motor idling, our cab stood at the curb across from what had to be 1101 because there was no other house, and we stared. Behind us the sidewalk was bright from the lights and signs of a bicycle shop and a liquor store, both open; and a quarter block away on a corner, the brighter-than-day white lighting of a giant Standard station lit up the walks to beyond the curbs. But across the street a vast dark area lighted only by the moon stood silent and motionless in another time.
Under the high white moon lay a great city block surrounded by a chest-high stone wall that was the base for a ten-foot fence of closely spaced pointed iron pickets. The wall was interrupted in only one place, directly across from us, by a pair of twenty-foot magnificent wrought-iron gates across the entrance to a graveled driveway. Behind those gates and the wall extending far down the street in both directions lay acresblack masses washed with pale lightof huge trees, their tips outlined against the luminous sky; great clumps of high shrubbery; silvered stretches of sloping lawn; white paths and glimpses of statuary; and the wide driveway leading back through the black masses of trees and bushes to the house itself, an enormous, four-story Spanish-style mansion.
Not a window of the part we could see was lighted. The great house stood, far off and more hidden than visible, looking as though it had never been lighted and would never be. I had to get out and cross the street to those gates. And there at the curb I looked up at them. In the center of each, suspended in the wrought-iron tracery, hung a great convex metal oval framed in a wreath. On the one at the left stood a raised, ornate art-nouveau V and on the other a B. I gripped the bars and stared in at blackness. All I could hear was the sound of branches in the small nighttime wind, and the fragile sound of a leaf scraping along the graveled driveway. On impulse I tried to shake the bars in my fists but they were as immovable as though set in concrete. I stared in through them for a moment or so longer, then turned away.
Across the street, standing at the cab for a moment before getting in again, I looked back. Somewhere in thereBut I shook my head irritably, trying not to think of what might be somewhere inside that distant house far back in that moon-touched blackness, and got into the cab.
Back at the hotel, I told Jan about the day and about Rodolpho Guglielmi, and she listened, shaking her head, looking at me to smile incredulously and shake her head again. And we talked about Marion, saying what little there was to say. On our way through the lobby I’d bought a Los Angeles Times, and we sat in bed looking through it, but it seemed hard to follow and without any real news, the way an out-of-town paper generally does. I got up and standing at the desk turned through the pages of the little magazine telling what there was to do in town, almost none of it outside this hotel, apparently. There were some postcards in a drawer, already stamped by the management, I discovered, a thoughtful “touch.” And since I knew I was paying for it, I picked onea view of the pooland sat down and wrote a card. “Dear Al: Well, here we are in glamorous, exciting Hollywood, ‘seeing the stars’! Tomorrow, Forest Lawn, to visit the world-famed mausoleum of Felix the Cat. Love, yr. friend, Nick.” There was no one in the hall, and leaving the room door open, I darted out in pajamas, dropped the card in the chute next to the elevator, and got back safe and sound. Around eleven, or a couple minutes past, we turned out the lights, and almost instantly the phone rang.
Jan was nearest, found the phone, and picked it up. “Hello?” I fumbled for and found the bedside-lamp switch and turned it on. Jan sat wincing at the loudness of the voice in her ear, then moved the phone away from her head, and I slid over to listen.
“What the hell happened to you!” a man’s voice was yelling. “Where were you? I had to”
“Who is this?”
“Hugo Dahl, goddamn it! I been phoning all night every half hour! Now, listen: you saw the guy with me in the projection room? Young; bald; brown suit? Well, that’s Jerry Houk! A producer here. Movies, not television; he’s a big man here, and he likes you. They’re making a picture; finishing it up. But there’s a part in it. Very small. One quick scene. Which they’ve already filmed. But they’re still on the same set; tomorrow’s the last day. Be there at one and they’ll try to get in a couple of takes of you in the part before they wrap up. If they like it, they’ll use it. Okay? Jesus, I been trying to reach you for an hour and a half!”
Jan sat staring at the phone. She looked up at me, and actually made a motion to give me the phone, then drew it back.
“Well!?” said the voice in the phone. “What about it? Do youListen, is this Marion Marsh?”
For an instant longer Jan hesitated. Then, voice firm, she replied. “Yes. Yes, this is Marion Marsh. And I’ll be there. Tomorrow at one. I was stunned for a moment, Mr. Dahl, and couldn’t talk. But I’ll be there. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it, I always was a pushover for Marion Marsh. Good luck, kid, and say hello for me tomy God!your grandmother.”
Jan put the phone on its cradle and sat holding it, staring across the foot of the bed. I said, “How”
But Jan just shook her head.
“She’ll know,” she said. “She’ll know. And she’ll be there.”
8
The same reception copafter the same exchange of mutually admiring smiles and glancesfound Marion’s name on a list of expected visitors. Mine wasn’t on it, but Marion just told him that that was all right, and he explained how to find Stage 2. Then we walked back down the same little studio street, bright with sunlight and busy with people now, that we’d walked up last night in silence and moonlight.
Through a pair of gray-painted steel doors onto Stage 2, another enormous barnlike building; far across the gloom of the vast concrete floor we saw a bri
lliantly lighted set filled with people. The sound of a hammer on wood echoedactually did echothrough the great enclosed space, and a man in white carpenter’s overalls walked in after us and hurried by carrying a two-by-four.
Approaching, we saw that the set represented three sides of a great room almost fantastically modern in its furnishings. Huge unframed paintingssmears and swirls of colorhung on the walls; statuaries on pedestals and in wall niches were intricate assemblages of metal, plastic, wood; the rugs and furniture were white; but everything else, including the actors’ clothes, was aggressively colorful.
They weren’t working, we saw as we walkedmore and more slowly and timidlytoward the set. They stood or sat talking, drinking coffee from plastic-foam cups, as three workmen in white overalls worked to shift the angle of a small metal track spiked onto plywood sheets. The track led to the set, projecting a yard or so onto it. And at the track’s far end stood a wheeled camera, low to the ground and so big there was a seat mounted behind it on which a thin nervous-faced man peering through a viewfinder sat as though mounted on a small tractor.
We stopped at the edge of the set, a few people glancing at us. Across the set from us two men, not in party clothes, stood talking earnestly; they looked to be in their middle twenties, both with sideburns and fairly long hair. They wore sweaters and wash pants; working clothes. Glancing at us, they continued talking, then one of them, a clipboard under his arm, walked across the set toward us. As he approached he lifted his brows questioningly, and Marion smiled at him. “I’m Marion Marsh.”