by Ben Greenman
“ ‘Your brother reminds me of Ernst Deutsch. You know him? He was a famous German actor who played Baron Kurtz in The Third Man.’
“That interested her, and she began telling him that she had never seen an old movie when they were growing up, only watched television, and that since then she had started watching everything she could. She said she loved old movies from the early seventies.”
Jack Nicholson lowered his cigarette and raised his eyebrows. “Old movies from the early seventies? Are you kidding me?”
Adam Sandler held up his hand. “Wait. The rest of us watched this conversation and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us all. ‘It would be a good thing to make a match of it,’ Lorne Michaels’s wife, Alice, said to me softly. She remarked that not only was Jon Lovitz unmarried, but that he hadn’t even had a serious girlfriend since she had known him. What was his attitude to women? How had he settled this question for himself? This had not interested us in the least till then; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a man who went out in all weathers in rain boots and slept under curtains could be in love. ‘He seems set in his ways, but she seems strong enough to handle it,’ Alice went on, developing her idea. ‘I believe she would marry him.’ The idea took hold. All sorts of things are done through boredom.”
“You’re telling me,” said Jack Nicholson. “And most of them come in on two legs.”
“Right,” said Adam Sandler. “Alice was on it, and soon the other wives and girlfriends were, too, and they grew livelier and even better-looking, as though they had suddenly found a new object in life. Alice would arrange for a movie screening or a concert, and make sure the two of them—Polly and Jon Lovitz—were sitting together. Or we would throw a party and see to it that the two of them came early to help set up, or that they stayed late. She was always beaming and energetic, and he looked like he had been extracted from his house by pincers, but the machine was set in motion. We got the feeling soon enough that our efforts might not be in vain. Polly wasn’t against getting herself a boyfriend or even a husband. She lived with her brother and didn’t like it much; they squabbled all the time. Here’s the kind of thing that happened: Chris Kattan might be coming down the street, holding a magazine. Polly would be following him, holding what seemed to be a copy of the same magazine.
“ ‘Why would you say that you want to go to one museum and get me interested and then switch at the last second to another?’ she’d be saying. ‘I’m telling you, you’re impossible.’
“ ‘You’re the impossible one,’ Chris would say, thumping his stick on the pavement. ‘I asked you a hundred times where you wanted to go and you said you didn’t care.’
“ ‘Because I thought you had made up your mind.’
“ ‘Manipulative!’ Chris would shout, more loudly than ever.
“At home, if there was an outsider present, there was sure to be a skirmish. Such a life must have been wearisome, and of course she must have longed for a home of her own. Besides, she wasn’t a kid; as it turned out, she was four years older than Chris, and once at a party she told me that she had been to six weddings of childhood friends in the previous year. Whatever the reasons, Polly began to show an unmistakable interest in Jon Lovitz.
“And Jon Lovitz? He used to visit the Kattans just like he visited the rest of us. He would arrive, sit down, and remain silent. Polly would sing one of her made-up songs, or invent some crazy dance, or go off into a peal of laughter, but he would just sit, never speaking.
“Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs. Everybody—both his colleagues and the ladies—began telling Jon Lovitz that he ought to make a play for Polly, that there was nothing left for him in life but to get married; we all shoved him gently in that direction, usually with platitudes like, ‘Marriage is a serious step,’ that we knew would appeal to his joyless nature. Besides, Polly was good-looking and interesting; she was closer to him in age than we had first thought; and what was more, she was the first woman who had been warm and friendly in her manner to him. His head was turned, and he decided that he really ought to try for her.”
“Well, at that point you ought to have taken away his rain boots and umbrella,” said Jack Nicholson. “Give the poor guy a chance, at least.” He laughed and lit another cigarette.
“He was already too far gone for that,” said Adam Sandler. “He put a picture of Polly up in his dressing room, kept coming to see me and talking about her and home life. He parroted the platitudes back at us. ‘Marriage is a serious step,’ he liked to say. He was frequently at the Kattans’, but he didn’t alter his manner of life in the least. Indeed, his determination to consider Polly seriously seemed to have a depressing effect on him. He grew paler and quieter, and seemed to retreat further and further into his case.
“ ‘I like Polly Kattan,’ he used to say to me, with a faint and wry smile, ‘and I know that everyone ought to get married, but all this has happened so suddenly. I need to weigh the duties, the risks and responsibilities. If I do this, it has to be perfect, with no loose ends, with nothing wrong. It worries me so much that I don’t sleep at night. And I must confess I am afraid: her brother and she have a strange way of thinking; they look at things strangely, you know, and she’s impetuous, at least. What if we get involved and we get married and then I find myself in an unpleasant position?’
“And he did not officially ask her out; he kept putting it off, to the great vexation of Alice and all our girlfriends; he went on weighing his future duties and responsibilities, and meanwhile he went for a walk with Polly almost every day—possibly he thought that this was necessary in his position—and came to see me to talk about how it might work if he had a girlfriend or a wife. And in all probability in the end he would have gone for her, and proposed, and she would have said yes, and the earth would have welcomed yet another unnecessary, stupid marriage that exists only as a barrier against boredom, if it had not been for a huge scandal. Oh, I should mention that Chris Kattan detested Jon Lovitz from the first day they met. He could not endure him.
“ ‘I don’t understand,’ he used to say to us, shrugging his shoulders—‘I don’t understand how you can put up with that guy, that killjoy. How can you deal with him? He’s more of a drag than a bag of sand tied behind a bicycle. I will be here for a few seasons, and then I’ll be off making movies, and you can stay here with Jon Lovitz. It’ll be so much fun for you.’
“Or Chris Kattan would laugh a shrill, thin laugh, and ask me, waving his hands, ‘What does he sit here for? What does he want? He sits and stares.’
“He even gave Jon Lovitz a nickname, ‘the Snail’ We didn’t talk much to him about the possibility that his sister might get involved with the Snail. Once, at a party, Alice said something about how she thought that Polly and Jon Lovitz would make a good couple. He frowned and muttered, ‘It’s not my business. Let her marry that if she likes. I can’t be bothered with other people’s affairs.’ ”
“Other people’s affairs is all there is,” Jack Nicholson said.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” Adam Sandler said. “Listen to what happened next. Someone drew a caricature of a tiny Jon Lovitz, bearing a shell on his back, moving slowly across a landscape that turned out, upon inspection, to be a close-up of Polly’s bare belly. He was going downward from her navel, and there was a caption beneath the picture: ‘The Snail Trail.’ ”
“I like that,” Jack Nicholson said. “Classy. Though when I go down from the navel I like to go faster than a snail.”
Adam Sandler ignored him and went on. “The face of the snail was a perfect likeness of Jon Lovitz’s face. The artist must have worked on it for hours. Copies got put in all our mailboxes, even Jon Lovitz’s. It made a very painful impression on him.
“The group went out together. It was spring, and Lorne Michaels had arranged for us to take a hike just outside of the city.”
“A group hike?” Jack Nicholson said. “Count me out.”
“It wasn’t s
o bad,” Adam Sandler said. “Well, not for most of us. Jon Lovitz was gloomier than a storm cloud. ‘People are horrible!’ he said, and his lips quivered. I felt sorry for him. We drove out to the beginning of the hiking trail, and we were piling out of the car and all of a sudden—would you believe it?—Chris Kattan drove up, dressed in tiny brown shorts and an undersized red vest and a green Tirolean hat with a yellow feather. With him was Polly, dressed the same way, though much sexier; the shirt was unbuttoned low enough to show that she wasn’t wearing a bra, the shorts hardly covered anything, and she wore a long blond wig over her hair. Each of them carried a giant alphorn. ‘Ready for some mountain climbing, meine schwester?’ Chris said.
“ ‘I love to blow the horn!’ Polly said.
“We all laughed. Jon Lovitz now turned white and seemed petrified. He let the rest of the group start off on the hike, and when they were a few paces ahead of us, he came and tugged at the sleeve of my jacket.
“ ‘What just happened? Tell me!’ he asked. ‘Is it proper for a young woman to dress that way, and to make those kinds of comments?’
“ ‘Hey, look,’ I said. ‘We’re taking a weekend hike. She can do anything she wants.’
“ ‘But how can that be?’ he cried, amazed at my calm. ‘What are you saying?’ He was so shocked that he was unwilling to go on, and made me drive him home.
“The next day he was continually twitching and nervously rubbing his hands, and I could tell from his face that he was unwell. And he left before rehearsal was over, for the first time in his life. In the evening, he came by my house, sat silently for a few minutes, and then announced that he was going over to the Kattans. He was wrapped warmly, even though the weather was warm. Polly was out but Chris was there.
“ ‘Come in,’ Chris said with a frown.
“Jon Lovitz sat in silence for five minutes, and then began: ‘I have come to see you to relieve my mind. I am very, very much upset. First of all, someone drew a rude caricature of me and another person, someone we both care about. I regard it as my responsibility to assure you that I have had no hand in it, not just the drawings but the implication behind it. I have done nothing that would warrant that. On the contrary, I have always behaved in every way like a gentleman.’ Chris Kattan sat sulking, saying nothing. Jon Lovitz waited a little, and went on slowly in a mournful voice: ‘And I have something else to say to you. I have been on the show for ten years, while you have only come recently, and I consider it my duty as an older colleague to give you a warning. What happened in today’s hike was shameful.’
“ ‘Shameful?’ said Chris Kattan.
“ ‘The whole show is about getting attention, and there are times that it’s just not appropriate. Especially for Polly. That shirt and those shorts—it’s awful.’
“ ‘What is it you want exactly?’
“ ‘All I want is to warn you. You are a young man, you have a future before you, you must be very, very careful in your behavior, and you are so careless! You come late to rehearsal. There are whispers about drinking and drugs. And now this costume stunt. I’m just happy Lorne didn’t see it.’
“ ‘It’s no business of Lorne’s if I want to dress that way on a Saturday!’ said Chris Kattan, and he turned crimson. ‘And trust me, he doesn’t care. He’s not the kind of dummy who goes around meddling in people’s private affairs.’
“Jon Lovitz turned pale and got up.
“ ‘If you speak to me in that tone I cannot continue,’ he said. ‘And please never speak that way about Lorne in my presence.’
“ ‘What did I say about Lorne?’ asked Chris Kattan, looking at him wrathfully. ‘Leave me alone.’
“Jon Lovitz flew into a nervous flutter, and began hurriedly putting on his coat, with an expression of horror on his face. It was the first time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.
“ ‘You can say what you want,’ he said, as he went out from the entry to the landing on the staircase. ‘I ought only to warn you: someone might have overheard us, and so our conversation isn’t misunderstood, I have to tell Lorne about it so that he does not misunderstand.’
“Chris Kattan went to where Jon Lovitz was standing, just outside his apartment, and shoved him, and Jon Lovitz rolled down a half flight of stairs, his umbrella clattering down alongside him. He landed in a heap on the next landing and his umbrella came to rest right across his face. He was unhurt but lay there a moment, contemplating what had just occurred. Just then Polly came up the stairs with a friend. When she rounded the corner of the stairs, she stopped and took in the scene. She looked at his face, his crumpled coat, and his rain boots. Not understanding what had happened and supposing that he had slipped down by accident, she could not restrain herself, and laughed loud enough to be heard up and down the staircase: ‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“To Jon Lovitz this was more terrible than anything. I believe he would rather have broken his neck or both legs than have been an object of ridicule. This pealing, ringing laugh was the last straw that put an end to everything. He did not hear Polly calling after him. On reaching home, the first thing he did was to remove her portrait from the table; then he went to bed, and he never got up again.
“Three days later Clive came to me and asked if we should not send for the doctor, as there was something wrong with Jon Lovitz. I went in to see him. He lay silent behind the curtain, covered with a quilt. When I asked him a question, he said only ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’
“A month later Jon Lovitz died. Everyone from the show went to his funeral. When he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again. As though in his honor, it was dull, rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore rain boots and took our umbrellas. Polly, too, was at the funeral, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave she burst into tears.”
“You always want a woman to cry over you,” Jack Nicholson said. “Especially a beautiful one.”
“I have to say,” said Adam Sandler, “that to bury a man like Jon Lovitz is a great pleasure. As we were returning from the cemetery we wore hard faces; no one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure—a feeling like that we had experienced long, long ago as children when our parents had gone out and we ran around the house for an hour or so, enjoying complete freedom. We returned from the cemetery in a good humor. But not more than a week had passed before life went on, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless as before. We weren’t prohibited from enjoying it, but we weren’t fully permitted either. It was no better. Though we had buried Jon Lovitz, how many such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will be!”
“That’s just how it is,” said Jack Nicholson, and lit another cigarette. “I was kind of hoping that he’d get together with her. Call me a romantic.”
“How many more of them there will be!” repeated Adam Sandler.
Adam Sandler got up out of bed and went onto the porch. He was a tall man with short, cropped hair, and he was less thin than he had been in the years of the story. “What a moon!” he said, looking upward.
It was midnight. On the right could be seen the ocean, stretching for miles. All was buried in deep silent slumber; one could hardly believe that nature could be so still. When on a moonlight night you see the sea, and you can’t detect its movement, a feeling of calm comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care, protected from sadness by the darkness of night, it seems as though the stars look down upon you with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth. On the left was forest, also stretching to the horizon in the darkness.
“Yes, that is just how it is,” repeated Jack Nicholson; “and isn’t our living in the city, running from project to project, worrying about billing and box office, isn’t that all a sort of case for us? And our spending our whole lives among trivial men and silly women, our talking and our listening to all sorts of nonsense—isn’t that a case for us, too? I think I know the probl
em. I have a story for you.”
“No; it’s time to sleep,” said Adam Sandler. “Tell it tomorrow.”
They went into the house and lay down on their beds. And they were both covered up and beginning to doze when they suddenly heard light footsteps—patter, patter. . . . Someone was walking not far from the lodge, walking a little and stopping, and a minute later, patter, patter again. The footsteps died away.
“I’ll say one thing about people,” said Jack Nicholson, turning over on the other side. “They lie to your face, and they secretly think that you’re a fool for putting up with their lying. You endure insult and humiliation, and can’t say anything honest or true; and all that for the sake of this film or that one, or for a wretched little mention in the papers, or a nice review. It wasn’t always this way. There are times I think it’s not worth going on living like this.”
“Well, you are off on another tack now,” said Adam Sandler. “I’m hitting the hay.”
And ten minutes later Adam Sandler was asleep. But Jack Nicholson kept sighing and turning over from side to side; then he got up, went outside again, and, sitting in the doorway, lit a cigarette.
GOOSEBERRIES
The whole sky had been overcast with rain clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in gray dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler had been fishing and were on their way back for lunch, a trip that seemed endless. Far ahead of them they could just see the outline of the lodge, and beyond it the bank of the river. Beyond that there were meadows, clusters of trees, homes in the woods, and if you went to the top of a hill and looked out over the countryside, you could see a train that in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the next town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed mild and dreamy, Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were filled with love of that countryside, and both thought how great, how beautiful, a land it was.