‘And boy do they get offended,’ sighed Miss Hansen. ‘We’re still getting the letters.’
‘How would it sound?’ asked PZ. ‘We got someone?’
‘Vi estas malsupera raso.’
PZ frowned in Evelyn’s direction. The whole table frowned.
‘Who is that?’
‘Mrs Murdoch,’ said Kiss. ‘She’s cultural consultant on the project. She’s from England’ (more an apology than an introduction).
‘I thought they spoke English there. What’s she doing talking Esperanto?’ demanded PZ suspiciously.
‘It’s an international language,’ murmured Evelyn.
‘So?’ said Ted Monroe. ‘English is pretty goddammed international. Yiddish is international.’
He took up one of his colour pencils and did a rapid doodle on his blotter: a little green Martian with a speech bubble reading ‘Oy gewalt!’
Kiss carried on with his potted scenario. It was not one that Mr Wells would recognise.
‘Dissolve. We zoom in on an English village – signpost, roses, cobblestones, the whole shebang – and next thing you know there’s a thatched cottage on fire and the old church spire’s been knocked down and a little girl in a sailor dress is running after her dog. Our hero – clean-cut, Leslie Howard type – gets off his bicycle and takes the child by the shoulders. “What’s the matter, young lady?”’
PZ produced a roll of adding-machine paper from his pocket and began making notes on it.
‘He puts the child on the crossbar of the bicyle and they ride off through what the Martians have left of old London town – cue hordes of Cockney refugees and comic types – and then they make their way back out into the countryside dodging the Martian death ray until they get to the school where her big sister teaches.’
‘So far, so good. Rindy McGee’s a cinch for the kid if she can do the accent.’
‘Mrs Murdoch here is taking care of that.’ He turned to Miss Cavendish and told her to make a date for some voice coaching.
‘OK, who you got for the male lead?’
‘We’re testing Fox Meredith,’ said one of the nameless men. ‘Plays Galahad in Knights of Love.’
‘His limey accent is pretty good,’ interjected Felix. ‘He was in legit for two years back east … He played Bert in Violets Below Stairs.’
The room looked blank, waiting to see how it played with the boss.
‘That thing at the Broadhurst? I saw that. I think the butler did it.’
It seemed safe to laugh and they all did so.
Mr Kiss pressed on, speaking faster now, sensing that he was losing them.
‘Meanwhile – and ziss is the luff interest – they find the schoolteacher sister trapped inside the old chapel.’
‘Anyone in mind?’
‘Von Blick’s trying to sell us this little blonde he’s been building up,’ said another of the men. ‘Cute.’
Kiss ignored the interruption. ‘And the schoolteacher is hiding from the Martians in the chapel with all the girls in her class and she’s reading them a story so they won’t panic.’
‘Reading what?’ PZ got up from his chair and began orbiting the table.
Suddenly everyone was an expert. Kiss himself was all for a Bible story – ‘Somevone smoting somevone’ – but PZ said nuts to that, bring in the Bible and you’d kill any picture stone dead. Someone else thought a classic would be better – like when Olivia de Havilland does it in Gone With the Wind? Henry V, maybe? Or Tom Brown’s Schooldays? – and PZ said that Tom Brown’s Schooldays was an RKO picture and was he out of his goddamned mind and then Evelyn heard herself suggesting that the schoolteacher might find a forbidden book under a hassock.
‘Under a what?’
No sense getting flustered.
‘A hassock, a knee cushion. One of the girls could have hidden a romance or something to read during prayers and she could read to them from that.’
PZ scratched his chin.
‘A ro-mance … that’s not bad. And one of the schoolkids can say how she always wanted orchids or orange blossoms or persimmons or some such and another one says how she always dreamed of white lace and six bridesmaids and all the time we’re hearing the death rays going off and then we get a close-up of the sister and a look that says maybe they none of them live to get married. Maybe there could be light falling on her face from a stained-glass window. You know like in that Hunchback movie?’
Ted Monroe was unconvinced and wasn’t afraid to say so.
‘You’re slowing the whole thing down to a crawl,’ he continued, scratching more doodles on his blotter (the water jug blocked Evelyn’s view). ‘What happens to the Martians while we’re having all this boy-meets-girl baloney? They gonna be bridesmaids?’
‘Screw the Martians.’
But Ted Monroe wasn’t letting go.
‘Mr Wells happy about all this?’
One of the nameless executives said that Mr Wells would be very happy with his percentage and that the great man would be AOK with any treatment they saw fit to use.
‘Wait a minute: you’re turning a modern masterpiece into A Million Martians and a Girl and you’re trying to tell me that Wells is AOK about that?’ barked Monroe. ‘And the dog? Is he AOK about the fucking dog?’
A collective shimmy of excitement. Only the PZs of this world used that kind of language. Even the big man himself looked impressed.
‘No little dog in the book?’
‘No little dog in the book. The kid I can just about stand, but a dog? I bet you just love the dog –’ he turned on Evelyn ‘– veddy English. Martians wiping out a whole civilisation and we got to worry about a stupid little thing like a dog. If the Martians really were coming the guy would wring its neck.’
‘Only a Nazi would wring its neck.’ Evelyn spoke more loudly than she had intended. ‘We have to care about little things. We have to. That’s what makes us civilised.’
There was a heavy silence while the rest of the room waited to know if they liked the dog.
PZ liked the dog. He continued circling the table.
‘You bet your life it is. It’s exactly what makes us civilised. Which reminds me: where are we dogwise? We got a name yet?’
‘They’ve pretty much settled on Randy,’ said Miss Hansen.
‘We already talked about that: the Brits won’t wear it,’ said Kiss (more sniggers from mid-table).
‘Dandy?’ wondered Evelyn.
‘Dandy? Dan-dy … I like that.’ PZ paused mid-prowl then nodded towards Miss Hansen. ‘Get a memo to the dog people. See if he’ll sit up and beg for “Dandy”.’ He gave Evelyn’s back an approving smack. ‘Good work. Nobody ever lost money on a dog picture. Martians?’ He rocked his head from side to side. ‘Maybe not so good.’
Evelyn felt a little taller.
PZ reached across for a printed scenario and the whole room rustled as everyone joined him on page fifteen.
‘We got any art on all this?’ he said, resuming his seat.
The art director produced a folder of rough sketches which PZ examined one by one before throwing them into the centre of the table. There were several of the Martians (little green chimpanzees) and their three-legged death-ray machines (the resemblance to the Miracle water tower was unmistakable: ‘Boilers on stilts, I tell you, striding along like men’).
England itself was a selection of tuppence-coloured views – St Paul’s, Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Anne Hathaway’s cottage – all in various states of destruction, all strafed with the beams of searchlights. Oh dear. PZ was back on his feet to have another look at the sketches. He rescanned the artwork and looked along the table. Kramer was shaking his head.
‘You all thinking what I’m thinking?’ PZ leaned across to Zandor Kiss and poked his club tie with an angry forefinger. ‘You’re going to need to be very, very careful here. We gotta keep a close eye on you, Zandy, baby. You think we don’t read the papers? Saint Paul’s Cathedral? Not in my studio you don’t.’
K
iss, an expert back-pedaller, lost no time in blaming the art department and their lousy clichés. One of the executives, marginally braver than the rest, said that Chaplin’s Hitler film had got some great press in New York. PZ, only partially reassured, closed down the discussion.
‘We’ll talk some more in my office tomorrow. Miss Hansen will tell you when.’ He nodded to Felix. ‘Carry on with the treatment but I don’t want any jackboots, you follow me?’
He gathered the sketches into their portfolio and handed them back to the man in the diamond-patterned sweater.
‘You do good work.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Without further ceremony PZ walked to the far end of the room, sat down at his desk and began dictating a stream of memos into his recording apparatus. The others rose from the table and filed out into the corridor. As they trooped past the wall of pictures Mr Kiss turned to Miss Cavendish.
‘We should get Mrs Murdoch’s picture taken. One of the studio chaps will do it for you. Miss Cavendish will arrange it. It’ll make her a nice souvenir.’
A souvenir. Not especially encouraging.
She walked with Felix to the commissary.
‘I don’t think there’s any point you and me knocking ourselves out over this Martian treatment,’ said Felix. ‘Looks to me like PZ and Kramer have had the Senate Committee on their backs again. Last thing they need is Kiss and his little green Nazis. Kiss thinks Miracle is his personal propaganda unit but he picked the wrong guys.’
‘You’d think they’d be glad to do their bit,’ mused Evelyn as they took their seats in the cafeteria, ‘rather than tiptoe round the war like that, being Jews and everything.’
She could have bitten her tongue but Felix didn’t seem to be offended.
‘Sure, they tiptoe. They’re keeping their heads down. Nobody likes a whining Jew and FDR isn’t going to let a few bleeding hearts make a mess of foreign trade. Sure, they go to schul and eat herring, but they don’t want to rock the boat. This isn’t Warner Brothers. PZ and Kramer are playing a long game: business is business.’
‘Yes, but you’d think they would want to show some sort of solidarity. I mean, would Negroes do that?’
‘Would Negroes do what?’
‘I mean if the movie business were run by rags-to-riches coloured people, would they avoid making films about Negro things?’
‘Ne-groes? Are you crazy?’ It seemed that she had, finally, offended him.
‘It’s just a hypothesis. Martians then. If the Martians ran Hollywood. Would Martians do that?’
He relaxed, ready to make concessions now they were back in the realm of the possible. ‘Martians, maybe.’
Chapter 9
She mustn’t forget to look English, said Miss Cavendish, when she telephoned Evelyn in Bel Air on Thursday morning to remind her about Dorinda McGee’s elocution lessons. Mr Kiss had rung from the airport and was very specific: ‘sumsing in tweed’. Publicity would be sending a photographer to capture the new voice coach at work.
Evelyn’s reflection looked very English indeed in the glass front door of the McGee mansion, and she did a tiny double take at the sight of herself back in her dismal grey suit.
A swarthy man in a butler costume answered the door. Behind him a woman’s voice drifted down the wide oak stairs.
‘Craven? Is that the masseuse?’
The butler raised an eyebrow and Evelyn shook her head and gave him one of the cards with ‘Voice Culture’ on it.
‘I have an appointment with Miss McGee.’
‘Miss McGee is in the rose garden, madam.’
The house, mildly medieval in style with mullioned windows and a heavy beard of ivy, was set in a large formal garden ringed by a moat-like rill. Twelve identical child-sized canoes were secured to the landing stage with twelve identical mooring hitches.
To the rear of the house beyond the swimming pool (heart-shaped) were a series of flower beds, neatly arrayed like the hospital kind and all planted with a pale-pink hybrid tea called ‘Pussycat’ which had been named in honour of the star by the American Rose Society. It was all as tidy as a park but the pattern had been wrecked by a newly-dug bed drilled with fully grown, shop-bought vegetables. A ten-foot section of white picket fencing had been leaned against the stately yew hedge. Behind it, neat rolls of turf waited to be relaid once Miss McGee had finished playing at self-sufficiency in her own little Potemkin pumpkin patch.
America’s Pussycat wore blue denim dungarees, a red gingham blouse and two dozen large freckles which had been drawn across her nose with a brown pencil. There was a crudely sewn patch on one knee of the overalls and a three-cornered tear on the other. The child was poking implausibly at the wet red soil between the rows of pumpkins with a very shiny new trowel while a photographer adjusted his lights and a youngish man in a sherbet-coloured jacket made suggestions from the touchline. There was a wide-brimmed Panama on the grass next to him and a moat-like ring around his brilliantined hair where the natty hat had sat.
‘Give her the worm,’ he ordered as the photographer screwed in a fresh bulb. One of the McGees’ Japanese gardeners reached down for a teacup and tipped an earthworm into Rindy’s waiting palm.
‘Try to look scared, disgusted.’
But the veteran of Dolly Daydream needed more specific direction. Did he want scared or did he want disgusted? Or did he actually want both at the same time? Could she do both? Sure she could do both.
‘Now give me grumpy-but-cute. And you look too clean. Rough it up a little.’
The child slipped a small mirror from her bib pocket, reached down for a clod of mud which she smeared across her cheek like a grown-up powdering her nose then turned to the lens as her face slotted back into the agreed expression: biting her lower lip, curling her upper lip and scowling at the task before her. The bulb flashed and Evelyn stepped into shot. The man in the sherbet jacket held out his hand.
‘Mrs Murdoch? Clinton Parker, I’m Miss McGee’s press agent. Sorry to hold you up but we’re snatching shots between showers – we want to get the exterior stuff in the can.’
Once the cameraman was satisfied, Mr Parker shepherded his client across to the front gate where she played a short scene with a movie extra in a mailman’s uniform who was pretending to take delivery of a parcel labelled ‘Bundles for Britain’ while the press agent told the photographer which interiors he wanted.
‘Make sure you get all the baby pictures on the piano but be sure and keep the cocktail cabinet out of shot.’
Evelyn was not particularly fond of children. She just couldn’t speak their language. It didn’t seem especially hard, but, try as she might, she could never quite catch the right tone of voice – you are a clever girl! What smart shoes!
Silas had wanted children very much – and very soon. Other people – people in songs and films, anyway – made love (or, just possibly, ‘whoopee’) but Silas made babies which did rather make one want to stay downstairs by the fire and read another chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. War had put an end to the nightly fumbles but his attentions were almost constant when he came home on leave during training and his letters always ended by asking if she had any good news to tell him.
As soon as they had returned from their Torquay honeymoon, people she hardly knew began listening for pattering feet, watching the colours she chose in the wool shop and assuming that she would be keen to practise her maternal skills on surplus infants. Even Silas’s death hadn’t put an end to it. A near neighbour in Woking had a little girl of five and fondly supposed that poor childless Mrs Murdoch would like nothing better than to have it left for collection like so much luggage while its mother went shopping on Saturday mornings. She was no trouble, said her mother, who must, Evelyn decided, have understood something quite different by the word.
The child, Wendy, a short tubby blonde that burst into tears on the slightest pretext, had been told to call the nice lady at No. 9 ‘Auntie’ Evelyn. Did Auntie Evelyn have a jewellery box? Mrs Bucki
ngham (Auntie Betty) next door had a jewellery box, a musical one with a ballet dancer inside. Mrs Buckingham had given Wendy a brooch. Mummy was looking after it until Wendy was grown up enough to wear it. If she was Mrs Murdoch, was there a Mr Murdoch? Did he buy brooches? Mrs Buckingham always saved up her rations so that they could make biscuits. Could Auntie Evelyn make biscuits? wondered Wendy. ‘Why is that child crying?’, demanded old Mrs Murdoch. No jam in her rice pudding after that nonsense.
Happily, Dorinda McGee, born 1928 but aged seven for professional purposes, was not and never had been a child.
The pressman introduced Evelyn and explained that this was the nice lady who was going to make sure she sounded like the real deal when she played the English kid in the Martian movie. Manners were not the child’s strong suit.
‘What do I want a dumb old dialogue coach for? I can do accents,’ protested Dorinda. ‘I did French in Mamzelle Mischief.’
‘Mrs Murdoch here is from London, England.’
‘How eppsolutely ghaaaastly,’ said Rindy, perfectly mimicking Baines ‘Binky’ Frobisher (who had played the crap-shooting butler in The Littlest Lady’s Maid).
‘Ah well,’ shrugged Rindy, ‘I suppose it’s this or the clarinet. As long as she don’t make me practise. The clarinet guy made me practise.’
‘She picked it up real fast when we made Little Girl Blues,’ conceded the press agent, sotto voce, ‘but Artie Shaw she’s not.’
Back at the house, the masseuse had finally arrived and was being led to my lady’s chamber while a second young woman, tricked out in a pink nurse’s uniform and white lace-up shoes, was shown to a chair in the hall. The white leatherette suitcase by her side said ‘Myrtle’s Beauty Boudoir: Bringing Beauty to You’. And she was using the unforgiving minutes to rub at her fingernails with a chamois-covered wand.
‘Manicurist,’ explained Rindy. ‘Mother always has the full service on Thursdays, ready for the weekend. The foot woman was just here, the face man’s coming at three, then the girls from the hairdresser’s. My contract says I have to have twenty hours of school classes a week but I can do pretty much what I want on Thursdays.’
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