Then I read an article about how some Nazi leaders had accumulated great fortunes by knocking the teeth out of their prisoners and melting the gold down, or taking jewels from their colons, where desperate men and women had been hiding their valuables for centuries. It all fell in. The name, Szell, I chose from the great conductor—just saying it made me feel sadistic. The reason for visiting—to get his diamonds. (The only man he trusted—his father—the man who had been in charge of the fortune in America, is killed in a car crash in the opening.)
So Szell has to come. A doctor, a monster, a Nazi, but I wanted worse, I wanted more—so bless you Melvin P. Klein (not his real name), my childhood dentist who did not believe in novocaine, because one afternoon Szell became, suddenly and forever, a dentist. I had my villain. And I knew he had to torture someone because I remembered the pressure from my childhood, of being helpless in Klein’s chair with his knee forcing me down to keep me from squirming, unmindful of my pain.
Babe, the hero (Dustin Hoffman in the flick, Olivier played the dentist), appeared because I had become fascinated with this notion: what if someone close to you was something totally different from what you thought? In the story, Hoffman thinks his brother (Roy Scheider) is a businessman where the reality is that the man is a spy. Who has been involved with the Nazi, Szell.
Once I had that, the rest was essentially mixing and matching, figuring out the surprises, hoping they would work. (You never know. I don’t, anyway. Same is true of screenplay writing. Each time out is just as scary. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.) So now I had my torturer, my method, and my victim, and early on in the novel I gave Babe a toothache. At the time I was building this into a book, I went to see my gum guy, a wonderful periodontist, a joy. He never hurts people, plays Bach on the radio, is fascinated with restaurants, as am I.
We are talking of a genuinely kind and decent human being.
He asks what I am writing and when I am about to leave I tell him and mention that Babe has a cavity and what I am about to do to him—
—and—
—and—
—and I will never forget the look that dropped onto his face. “Oh no,” he said, quietly, his eyes all dreamy. “No, Bill. Forget the cavity. You want pain. You want genuine unforgettable pain. You want pain that would make you want to die. Bill, listen to me—have him drill into a healthy tooth.”
On and on this sweet man went, talking to me of the glory of anguish, of how it would be impossible to keep any secrets if someone were drilling into a fine, strapping tooth. I have rarely been more frightened. Here this sweet fellow I’d known for twenty years was Jekyll-Hyde-ing as I watched. He wouldn’t stop. The level of agony would be unsurpassable. Death would be preferable. The memory of being destroyed in the chair would never leave you ... bliss. ...
He’s still my gum guy. But now I get nervous when we’re alone.
I wrote the novel over the summer of ’73. In my pit in the fashionable Upper East Side of New York City. Few ever saw my office. Somehow George Hill got in one day, looked around, and termed the place “scrofulous” and though I wasn’t quite sure of all the meanings, the sound matched the chaos.
I worked in a place that was scrofulous.
Late one afternoon (I always worked regular hours; it was important to me to pretend to have a real job) as I was waiting for the elevator, a neighbor left her place, moved alongside. She had the contiguous apartment, was reputed to be a shrink, and we had disliked each other for a very long time, owing to a swimming accident (there was a pool in the basement of the building) when she felt I had been unruly and cut off her lane.
So we are standing there.
And she turns to me.
Glares.
Speaks thusly: I CHUST VANT YOU TO KNOW (she was from Europe) ZAT I KNOW EFFERY-SING ZAT IS GOING ON IN ZERE.
I don’t know that I was ever more surprised.
Because NUSSING was going on IN ZERE. NUSS-ING ever went on IN ZERE. Just me and my pit trying to make it through another day. The elevator came and we rode down in silence. And I still remember her total contempt for me.
I get home, tell my then wife and we instantly agree the woman is mad.
Later that summer we rented a house in Massachusetts, a nightmare of a place with a murky pond owned by an architect/ builder who must have hated children. He built his dream palazzo with staircases but without banisters. Coming down from breakfast was an adventure. But we survived and one day I am tippy-toeing to lunch with my kiddoes, Jenny and Susanna, then ages ten and seven.
And they cannot stop giggling.
I ask why and finally they manage to ask me this question: did I know that I talked when I wrote? I was reworking a screenplay, The Great Waldo Pepper, and I said that I absolutely did not talk when I wrote. They said I did. I, being mature, replied “did not.” Did. Not. Did. And then, in triumph, they started quoting back some of the morning’s dialog. (Until that moment I had no idea that I did that.)
But all I thought of at that moment was the woman who knew EFFERY-SING ZAT WAS GOING ON IN ZERE. Because, you see, she was just on the other side of a very thin wall.
And I had been writing the dental scene that day.
Is it safe?
Huh?
Is it safe?
What?
Is it safe?
Is what safe?
Is it safe?
Is it safe?
Is it safe?
And later, Szell going, “You seem a bright young man, able to distinguish light from darkness, heat from freezing cold. Surely, you must prefer anything to my brand of torment, so I ask you, and please take your time before answering: Is it safe?”
And then Babe screaming and the top of his head coming off and ...
... and at last I realized why she looked at me in that terrible way ...
We were anxious that Olivier play Szell but when director John Schlesinger went to see him, he was dying again, and could barely move one side of his face. The part was his if he could play it, but who knew? I was working in London with Schlesinger one day when the phone rang. It was Richard Widmark asking if he could read for the part. Yes, he knew about Olivier, didn’t care. (Widmark had made one of the memorable film debuts in Kiss of Death playing the madman Tommy Udo, who pushed a crippled woman down a flight of stairs. In today’s bloodbath era of violence, that would probably be a comedy scene. But back then, no one who saw it forgot it.)
Widmark came to Schlesinger’s home. Tall, educated, a perfect gent, he had pretty much memorized the role and when he read the dental scene with a slight German accent, he was sensational. We took a cab back to his hotel together afterwards and talked of Sandy Koufax, who his daughter had married.
I never saw him before that afternoon and have never seen him since. But no one who was almost in a movie I’ve been involved with has been as fine.
The only two moments from the novel that wrote easily for the movie were the ones near the end with Szell in the diamond district, finally being spotted by the Jews, and the dental scene. I’ve written about the rehearsals with Hoffman and Olivier in Adventures in the Screen Trade. But this happened, too. We had hired a dentist to be there to assist Olivier and we all sat around this large table for the first script reading. A big moment for me. An Oscar-winning director, Schlesinger. Wonderful actors like Hoffman and Scheider and Bill Devane and of course Olivier (one of my heroes, along with Willie Mays and Bronko Nagurski and Irwin Shaw).
And I am, as I always am at such moments, tired and scared.
I’d written several drafts of the novel and a lot of versions of the movie and I was whipped and I hoped, at last, I’d gotten it down okay. Because I didn’t have much more to give the project. That happens to a screenwriter, at least to this one. You’ve thought about it so long, done it so often, in your head or on paper, that you start to get punchy, silly, dry. I wanted the reading to work so I could leave it behind, begin to rebuild my head.
The reading more
than worked, it went wonderfully. There was a pause after the ending. A treasured pause. A sense of contentment in the air—
—and then, from some dimwitted blue, the dentist starts talking. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but frankly, I have a lot of problems with the screenplay ...
Nightmare.
If you write movies, you never know who the enemy is. Someone is going to fuck you, that’s a given. I knew Hoffman was the enemy—he felt he was too old for the role and he was right, of course. I knew Schlesinger could be an enemy; he only took such a commercial piece of work for the same reason that all the good ones do—the fear that their careers are in trouble. But those two were momentarily happy. I was free, I was home and dry. Until this dentist turns into Brooks Atkinson.
I screamed at him. “You’re here for teeth! Leave the goddam script alone!” He did not know how crazy writers can be. The fact is truly this: if I’d had a gun and thought I could get away with it, the guy was dead.
I was out of the loop during shooting and postproduction, I was out of the country when the film opened, working in Holland on A Bridge Too Far. But the first Saturday night after I landed, I went to a big Times Square theatre and sat in the back on the right, my preferred spot when I am involved with a flick, easy for fleeing.
Lights down, picture starts. Certain things are immediately clear: you don’t get people of that talent to work on a genre film very often. The actors were superb. I wanted to marry Sir Laurence. I kind of relaxed, sitting there in the dark with my popcorn. It was an absolutely decent film. I kind of liked it.
But a little over halfway, I realized something awful: the audience hated it. The aisles were crammed with people leaving. I was stunned. “Wait,” I wanted to shout out to them. “It’s not so terrible. There’s good stuff coming up. Please. Don’t go.” (This is a screenwriter’s worst fear—that you have misconceived so badly, they hate you so much that they cannot even survive waiting another hour to resume their normal lives.)
“Wait,” I almost cried to them, “I’ve got surprises for you!”
Nothing would stop them.
I slumped in my seat. I had never missed my target by so much before. The aisles were emptying now with the dental scene hard on the horizon.
Hmmm.
I was caught up in it. Delighted by the way Schlesinger had done it, all of it indirection, no bloodbath moments. Just shots of eyes and faces filled with fear. Very classy. The audience would have liked it if they had stayed around.
The fact is, they had stayed around. They didn’t hate the movie, it was just they had heard about the dental scene and decided not to risk it, had gone for popcorn. Back they trooped when it was done, sitting happily, as did I, till the movie ended.
Final dental scene memory.
I was Out There (the only way I can think of L.A.) in ’92 when I got a twinge of pain that I knew meant this: root canal. I chose to ignore it, hoped it would stay bearable until the end of the week when I could get back to New York.
It didn’t. I asked around, got a specialist, went to see him. The fellow worked in an office of specialists, a long railroad car of root canal guys. I sit in the chair, he starts to work.
And to chat. “What brings you to Los Angeles?” he starts and I already know, you should pardon the expression, the drill. I either lie and say I sell corn futures or tell the truth. Which is no fun because I am waaay too old to be giving my credits, and that is how this scenario frequently ends. I decide to buy time.
“Business.”
“And what kind of business might that be?”
The crossroads question. I go for it. “I’m a writer.”
“What kind of writing is it that you do?”
Pause. “Books and movies.”
“Hmmm. Interesting.” And now the most hated question of all. “What movies have you written that I might have seen?” (Often they haven’t seen any.)
I am totally in his power, understand. Tilted way back. He is a big man and seems bigger, looming over me. To hell with it, I decide. Go for the gold.
“Marathon Man. Both the book and the movie.”
Pause.
The information registers. Every dentist on both sides of the Iron Curtain knows Marathon Man. Excuse me, he says. He is gone, but after awhile he comes back, gently works at my mouth till he is done. I thank him. Get up to go.
And as I walk into the hallway I see this whole corridor of dentists, all of them staring at me from their cubicles. He had told them all who he was punishing. I was not used to the attention. All these men, staring at me. I was, within the confines of that suite, famous.
Everyone in the movie business is a star fucker. Never happened like that to me before, never since. But right then, at last, I was twinkling. ...
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
EVERY TIME HE DROVE through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles. The East 86th Street area was the last holdout of the krauts in Manhattan, and the sooner they got the beer halls replaced by new apartment buildings, the better off he’d be. Not that he had suffered personally during the war—his entire family had been in America since the twenties—but just driving along streets peopled with Teutonic mentalities was enough to set anyone’s teeth on edge.
Especially Rosenbaum’s.
Everything set his teeth on edge. If an injustice ever dared to creep into his vicinity, he grabbed it and squeezed it with all the bile left in his seventy-eight-year-old body. The Giants moving to Jersey set his teeth on edge; the jigaboos set his teeth on edge, now more than ever, with their notion they were as good as the next guy; the Kennedys set his teeth on edge, the commies, dirty movies, dirty magazines, the spiraling price of pastrami—you name it, Rosenbaum started gnashing.
This September day, he was particularly choleric. It was hot, and he was late as he headed toward Newark, where his only living cronies held their weekly card game in the nursing home. Three stiffs was what they were, rotten card players and rotten people, but they could all still inhale and exhale whenever they wanted to, and when you got to be seventy-eight, that counted for plenty.
They didn’t like Rosenbaum a whole lot either—the games invariably ended with shouted threats of repercussions—but he always drove over, because it was the best way he had found of getting through Thursday, which, taken as a twenty-four-hour period, set his teeth on edge without half trying. One song said “Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week,” another said “Monday, Monday, how can you do this thing to me?” but Rosenbaum knew that Thursday was the one you had to watch out for. Everything wrong in his life had happened on Thursday. He had gotten married on Thursday; his children had both died on Thursday—years apart, but still both Thursday—and whoever dreamed of outliving your very own? What a terrible thing. Rosenbaum had smoked three packs a day for going on fifty-five years, and his son never once even took a puff, so who do you think got the big C? He shifted uncomfortably in his seat; his truss had been fitted on Thursday.
Eighty-sixth Street was all screwed up.
Gimbels East. Ever since goddamn Gimbels East came to 86th Street, you couldn’t trust it no more. It used to be his favorite cross-town easy, ten times better than 79th Street, and only tourists took 72nd anyway. No, 86th was the place you went if you wanted to really move, and Gimbels East had to come and screw it up. Nobody shopped at Gimbels East except the jigaboos—what Jew would be caught dead shopping at this Gimbels? This wasn’t Gimbels, Gimbels was 34th Street, across from Macy’s, and this pile of nothing could try calling itself Gimbels East all it wanted—to Rosenbaum, it was Gimbels dreck, period.
He did not turn on 86th, but instead went up First to 87th before he took his left. As a number, 87th set his teeth on edge. His wife’s initial breast exploratory had cost him 87 smackers. Just to see a fancy butcher, have a picture taken, get the news. “There is definitely a lump on your wife’s left breast,” the doctor had begun, and Rosenbaum, apoplectic at the man’s stupidity, had tur
ned to his pale spouse, saying, “See how lucky we were to have come to a genius specialist? We tell him there’s a lump on your left breast and, armed with only that speck of information, he can absolutely assure us that the lump is a lump.” He turned on the doctor now, a young cocker, probably married to a blonde shiksa. “Of course there’s a lump on her breast, my God, you’re a tit man, I didn’t come here to ask about the lump on her face—that’s called a nose, by the way, I don’t know if they teach that kind of thing any more in medical school.” “Very funny, your husband,” the doctor said then to his wife, and she answered, wearily, “Not to me.”
Eighty-seventh Street didn’t seem so bad. Rosenbaum tooled straight up to Second without a hitch, caught the green perfectly, got to Third in little time flat. He waited impatiently for the light to change, honked his horn twice at the damn thing before it obeyed him, then jammed on the gas and roared toward Lex. Everyone said he was a terrible driver, his whole family had always been at him about that, but they knew from nothing. Not one traffic ticket in thirty-five years. A few close calls, sure, a couple scrapes here and there, three or four times some near fistfights, but no tickets, let ’em all go to hell, criticizing him, that was all they had ever been good for anyway, giving him grief.
Rosenbaum began to come to grief himself at the corner of 87th and Lexington. The light was red, which was no big deal—anyone could survive a red light. But the car in front of him, the car at the light, was a stupid goddamn Nazi Volkswagen, and, worse, it was waiting smack in the center of 87th Street, so he couldn’t edge by to the light and then leave it behind when things turned green. Rosenbaum honked a couple of times, muttering to himself, but what could you expect from any jerk in a VW? He himself was a Chevy man, and had been since before the war. If you really knew cars, if you wanted your pennies to count for something, you drove a Chevy. Anyone who didn’t was a schlemiel.
The light switched to green, but the VW didn’t move.
Rosenbaum honked again, a lot louder, but the car ahead still blocked him. He could hear the motor coughing, try to catch. “Move to one side!” Rosenbaum shouted. “Quit hawwgggging!”
The Novels of William Goldman Page 94