But you said I was terrific! Why no contract?
THE ASSISTANT:
(CLOSE-UP OF MOUTH) You ain’t “The Type”!
(SLOW FADE)
I left the Paramount lot with my face twitching at about fifty-five TPM as I pondered what Monk Lewis could have meant by “The Type.” Perhaps you think that the promise of a part in a motion picture should have made me as happy as Larry, and if you do, well, lots of luck. Actually, I had merely been type-cast for a one-shot part. Moreover, I was to play a rather minor role, and have you ever stopped to consider what it means to have a rather minor role in a De Mille extravaganza with a cast of trillions? Eh?
It was a contract I craved, and it came to me in a revelation—on the Hollywood Freeway, as it were—that no less than a bona fide talent agent could clear the myrrh-dipped cobwebs from my brooding dome.
iii
After being quietly but firmly ejected from the offices of about thirty Hollywood agents, I couldn’t help ruefully reflecting that things would have been different had my mother been with me. As it was, however, my approach and its results proved hopeless if not alarming. Whenever I managed to ooze past the agents’ secretaries and get to see the power behind the drone, the interview always followed a set and disturbing pattern. Scrutinizing me from behind mile-high desks, the agents would invariably not even bother to get my name before asking me one burning question:
“Are you on film?”
They might just as well have asked me if I were Caligula’s maiden aunt and there’s a good chance that the answer would still have been “no.”
“Biblical!” said one agent, as I sat cross-legged and fidgety in his Sunset Boulevard office. “I think you’d photograph Biblical!” I had a fleeting vision of myself standing on Mt. Sinai, but he rudely brushed the image aside with a cineramic sweep of his hand, explaining at the same time that “People don’t look on the screen like they look actual. On screen a drab can look like a princess, or a Yokum can look like a Scragg,” he confided hugely. “You can’t get an agent unless we see what you look like on film.”
“How do you get on film?”
“You gotta have an agent.”
The Euclidian symmetry of this flawless thesis leaped out and hit me smack between my unfilmed eyes, leaving me gasping and agentless in Disneyland. But I munched greedily on my one crumb of knowledge: I was Biblical. Or was it apocryphal? I couldn’t remember. But was this “The Type”? Once again my face began twitching uncontrollably.
iv
In a deus ex martini, three Fates and a cocktail party soon intervened on my behalf to introduce me to one of Hollywood’s top character actors, a kindly and compassionate type who found my problems intriguing. He invited me to his home for a reading, pronounced my “Hairy Ape” a sensation, and, days later, telephoned me with the news that his good friend Loretta Young was willing to consider me for the male lead on the last of that season’s televised “Letter to Loretta” series!
“Dress conservatively,” he cautioned.
“Why not?” I answered warily.
“Why not what?”
“Dress conservatively.”
“That’s what I said!”
“I know.”
There was a long pause. “Dress conservatively when you go to see Loretta; she’s a little older than you are, and if you’re going to play opposite her you’ve got to look mature—got it?”
I got it. And I approached Lewislor Studios wearing a somber blue suit, a grim-looking gray tie, and shoes that verged on senility. Upon arriving at the main gate, my walk slowed to a careful, deliberate pace, and I allowed my shoulders to slump despondently.
I found Loretta on set in the middle of filming one of her her shows. The script had something to do with a Korean war orphan, a little girl. Once, when an adoring look was required from the waif, Loretta coaxed it out of her by cooing, as the cameras ground away for a close-up of the orphan’s face: “I love you honey—I love you, little sweet-heart—honey, I love you—” over and over again.
“She’s somethin’, really, really somethin’,” grunted a camera man standing alongside of me as we watched the orphan’s facial metamorphosis. “Real different, too,” he continued. “Real religious. No cussin’ on set with her around, understand me? On set, all of us crewmen wear holy medals.” He reached under his shirt, possibly to show me his holy medal, but then Loretta was coming toward me, and in a desperate attempt to look mature and concerned, I began brooding feverishly upon the problem of evil. Loretta offered me a warm hand, and up close I could see that even off screen she had the most haunting eyes I’d ever seen. But I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want her to get a swelled head.
“Bill Bladry, I take it?” she said over the noise of studio activity.
“No, Blatty,” I corrected. “I suppose if you use me in this show you’ll want me to change my name.”
“No,” she drawled, dwelling on it in her mind, I take it. “No, it’s interesting. Yes—Bill Bladder, that’s a very interesting name. But look, right now I want you to see my husband. He’s the producer and he’ll have to make the decision; he’s upstairs waiting for you.” She smiled encouragingly and it produced the required effect: an adoring look transfigured my face.
After sizing me up in the quiet of his office, the producer decided that no amount of makeup was going to make me look a convincing forty, unless I waited ten years before applying it, a suggestion that I immediately discarded as frivolous. But he was hoping to help me out in the fall.
“First, maybe we’ll write in a bit part for you in next season’s opener,” he said hopefully.
“For what purpose?” I asked.
“We’d like to see what you look like on film. Maybe you’re not ‘The Type.’” He held out a hand in farewell, and as he scratched his chest with the other I heard a thin “snap.” He stood up and something tinkled to the floor. It was a holy medal.
v
By this time, the character actor had lined up an agent for me, a lien-surfeited ex-banker who talked like muffled Vesuvius:
“Now what’s all this crap about an ape?”
“Sir?”
“I said what’s all this crap about an ape?”
“Ape?”
“Ape.”
“Ape. Oh—The Hairy Ape. I read that at Paramount. Its the very dramatic curtain scene that—”
“DRAMATIC? No, no, no, no, no, no, NO! NOT right, NOT right! Now look here, sonny—I’ve lined up an audition for you at U-I and you’re not gonna read about no goddam ape! You’re gonna read somethin’ with a babe in it, with a clinch! Now get on over to U-I and get yourself fixed up with a script. And straighten up. What are your shoulders hunched over like that for? You look like an old man!”
The U-I talent people offered me a choice of excerpts from several U-I films for my audition, but I was unaccustomed to handling Elvis Presley in prose, and we finally settled—without the agent’s knowledge—on The Hairy Ape. The day before my final audition before the Board of Directors and unit casting moguls, I was asked to read for U-I’s newly hired talent coach, Jess Kimmel, a New York import who was supposed to polish me up for my final go-around.
“Why did you choose this reading?” asked the talent coach when I had completed my delivery. This sort question was a pretty poor substitute for applause, I thought, but I didn’t mention this to him at the time, and he continued: “You’ve chosen to portray a negative character in a negative play by a negative author. Now suppose you do this reading tomorrow before the Board—what could they say about you? Merely that you’re a wonderful actor with great sensitivity, depth of feeling, and acute dramatic presence. But beyond that, what could they say?”
I waited for him to give me the cue to laugh, but he just sat there stony-faced. There was an extended silence and I didn’t exactly know whether I was supposed to applaud or wind my wristwatch, so I cautiously ventured: “You mean they’ll say I’m—not ‘The Type’?”
&nb
sp; “Exactly!” pounced the coach. Then his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How did you know about—‘The Type’?”
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “Look, I picked this Hairy Ape bit because you’ve got to be a pretty fair actor to make it come off. But every place I go, people tell me I’m not ‘The Type.’ How do you know when a person is ‘The Type’?”
“It’s in the glands,” said the coach, and I clutched instinctively at my pancreas.
“You mean—not Biblical?”
“Def-initely not Biblical. Biblical is out! Biblical is—well, Biblical.” And it certainly was. The coach forthwith canceled my Board audition as a hopeless waste of time, and “Biblicus non disputandum est,” I babbled to myself as I slouched out the U-I main gate, forgetting in my abstraction to return the guard’s forlorn salute.
vi
I wandered through Hollywood in a daze until I came at last to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and when I looked down and awoke to find myself standing in the cement-enshrined footprints of Mickey Rooney, the meaning of “Biblical” suddenly thundered home to me. It meant, Old Oz, that I didn’t have a pug nose and freckles and failed remarkably to resemble the Hollywood stereotype of the All-American Boy—which was “The Type.” I ruefully tweaked my aquiline nose and quickly hid in a doorway while I checked the color of my trousers. They were still gray, all right, but my thoughts were red velvet, and I’d have given my right arm, right then, for ten rounds in the ring with the President of Lebanon. Any President of Lebanon!
“The trouble with you is you want to act!” my agent told me later, but the real trouble with me was that I still didn’t know who I was or where I fit in. Was I a “Biblical” Arab who couldn’t get a Hollywood contract because Arabs are not “The Type,” or was I an aspiring Mickey Rooney who couldn’t act in a Biblical picture because I didn’t look enough like an Arab? I mean, where did blue-eyed Arabs who went to Georgetown go to register?
The answer certainly wasn’t Hollywood. I distributed the last of my reefers amongst some needy people at the Aged Actors’ Home and took the next cattle car eastward.
7. Go Back, Shane!
“DO you know where blue-eyed Arabs go to register?”
By this time I had given up talking to myself and was instead talking to ghosts, specifically, the ghost of Fr. Thaddeus Charr, a former (1811-1882) Prefect of Discipline at Georgetown University, upon whose grave I now hunched despondently at two o’clock in the morning.
As an undergraduate, I’d never been able to think quite so clearly as when I was pondering tombstone inscriptions in the Jesuit Cemetery, and I had gone there now to change the dressings on my Hollywood wounds and rethink my career plans.
“Are you there, Thad?”
Silence. Silence and the moon, which was slyly edging out now from behind the Senior Class Privy, its rays weakly illuminating the tired old brick walls of the Healy Building, headquarters of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service …
Foreign Service. Slowly—tediously, in fact—an idea began pawing at the nerve endings in my brain until fially I leaped up in a frenzy of self-realization: Foreign Service! Transfixed, I raced homeward, and in the excitement of my departure, I almost fell into an open grave, thus narrowly avoiding the grotesque distinction of becoming the only layman to be buried alive in the Jesuit Cemetery. I guess I’m just lucky.
The following day, I pushed my luck and tested my burning idea. I consulted the vocational counselor at Georgetown. “What am I qualified for?” I dared him.
The answer he roared back proved identical to my cemetery plot. There I was with a fluency in spoken Arabic, said the counselor, and there was Uncle Sam striving desperately to woo the Arab World and maintain security and stability in the Middle East. Furthermore, he shouted in my willing ear, Uncle Sam needed Foreign Service Officers who could cope with the Arab mind.
It was Kismet: I had been coping with Mama’s mind for years!
“But mightn’t they send me overseas?” I hedged.
“Naturally,” he answered.
“Like to Lebanon?”
“No—never Lebanon. It’s a policy now never to send personnel to their foreign homelands.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Caramba!”
Here at last was a job where I fit, a job that promised to transmute my Turkish-coffee-stained soul into the spirit of a modern Holy Land Crusader for the FBI, the State Department and Ezra Taft Benson. Think of it—working as an official of the U.S. Government! Why, it was almost as good as a freckle!
ii
But there were problems. I mean, the original Crusaders were demon organizers and one of the things they organized was a Sack-the-Saracens Club with secret de-coder shields and everything, but in order to get into the Club they had to endure ordeal by combat. Like me. Except in my case, it was ordeal by run-around, a run-around that began in the personnel office of State Department headquarters in northwest Washington, D.C., where the receptionist greeted my entrance with a brief look of disinterest and then returned to her casual but apparently abortive attempt to clip her fingernails with a stapler.
“Hello,” I said, “I’d like to join the State Department.” There was an annoyed hiatus in her fingernail clipping as she looked up and fixed contemptuous eyes upon my person. “And what are your qualifications?” she rasped.
“My wit’s diseased,” I blurted impulsively, but under the sudden warning of her gaze I sobered up. “Just kidding,” I said. “Actually, I speak Arabic quite fluently.”
The stapler fell thumping. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Arabic?”
“Arabic.”
“My Gawd!” she uttered. Her brow was a wrinkled book in which one might read matters deep, and for one giddy moment I thought I heard bongo drums beating expectantly in the background, but then perhaps I didn’t. Suddenly her eyes narrowed to appleseeds. “Are you on the Civil Service Register?”
“What’s the Civil Service Register?” I asked, and if you’re thinking this was the wrong thing to say, you’re probably right because within moments I found myself alone and in the outer corridor. Perplexed, I touched my head to the floor preliminary to seeking refuge in a few simple Yoga exercises, but then along came the man. A portly gentleman, he had a look of some learning about him that was marred only by the fraternity pin in his lapel, and so “What’s the Civil Service Register?” I thrust.
“Oh ho ho!” he began cryptically, but then proved himself a willing oracle by prophesying unto me that trotting over to Civil Service headquarters and establishing my qualifications would result in having my name pricked down upon a list of eligible civil servants, a list referred to as “The Register.” Grateful, I pressed a nickel into his perspiring palm and raced to the Civil Service Building. My interview there, in a fan-blown, paper-strewn office, was simple but sublime.
“I want to get on the Register,” I wedged.
Middle-aged and wary, the interviewer toyed with a paper clip, plunging it now and again into his ear.
“Got any executive experience?” he probed gingerly.
“No.”
“Ever work for the Government before?”
“No.”
“Bad.” He swiveled sideways and stared solemn-faced out a window. “Bad, bad, bad.”
“Bad?”
“Bad. You don’t qualify to take our Junior Executive Exam. Only three types of people qualify—people with executive experience and them that’s worked for the Government before.”
“But that’s only two kinds.”
He swiveled around furiously and glared up at me. “One of those wise————ing college boys, eh?” He drew the paper clip out of his ear and jiggled it didactically. “That wise-guy attitude ain’t gonna get you on any Register, sonny!”
“Well, how do I get on the Register?”
“You’ve got to take a test.”
“An intelligence test?”
&nb
sp; The idea apparently struck him as being about as novel as Dracula in a sari, for he fell helpless with laughter, and that’s when I decided to reword my question.
“What kind of test?” I revised.
His laugh wrinkles smoothed into sobriety. “Specialized tests for specialized job slots. Right now and for the next six months we’ve got only one type test open.”
“What is it?”
“Rodent Control Specialist.”
The notion of becoming the only Arabic-speaking Rodent Control Specialist in the entire U.S. Government Service was seductive in the extreme and I hugged the vision to my bosom like Gabby Hayes hugging Marlene Dietrich. But after bathing my fevered brow in the fluoridated gushings of a corridor drunking fountain, I decided to think it over again in the pulse-steadying light of dawn.
iii
The next day, after helping Hyperion to his smoggy horse, I tried my last hope—the United States Information Agency. They had recently become independent of the State Department, and there was a chance that their need was mightier than the Register.
I presented my Arabic-speaking body at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue, USIA’s Washington headquarters, and bejabbers, the recruitment staff fairly leaped all over me! They shod my feet in iron, girded my breast in plate, stuck a Little League pennant in my visor and dubbed me NOVUM CRUSADERUM! There was no niggling talk of Rodent Control tests.
But a security check was required, and for seven months a group of nondescript men in crepe-soled shoes were reported by friends to have been snooping around every one of the thirty or forty neighborhoods I had ever lived in, clutching former landladies by the throat and demanding to know if I had ever been visited clandestinely by Harpo Marx. In May, however, I was declared free of deleterious acids, and was permitted to sign the register of employees in the ground floor lobby of USIA headquarters. Then began a period of grooming for an overseas assignment.
The Agency’s overseas personnel, I soon discovered, were generally lumped into two categories: cultural experts and press experts. Because of my hefty experience in propaganda writing with the Air Force, I was tentatively sorted into the press pool, and I entered into a six-week training period that was to prepare me for a writing or editing assignment “somewhere outside the continental limits of the United States.” It would be “somewhere” in the Arab World, undoubtedly, but my Georgetown advisor was right: there was a policy against sending second-generation personnel to their specific foreign homelands. Lebanon was out. And I was out of my mind with relief. I settled into my Scotch-plaid knickers and enjoyed the training.
Which Way to Mecca, Jack? Page 5