Forward to Glory

by Brian Paul Bach

  ‘Ev’nin’, Popp!’ Alun called out to the backstage doorman.

  ‘Kid with you, Mr. Parsnip?’

  ‘Yoe! Get used to his visage, sir! It is about to be exposed!’

  ‘Well, by golly then. Welcome, young feller!’

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Popp. Uh. I… I thanks you.’

  Alun drew Butterbugs aside.

  ‘Never add bewilderment to your wonder, my boy. Only confidence. Observe, but do not gawk. Respond, but be intelligent.’

  How intriguing was the Metropolitan’s backstage world! Staircases up, staircases down, a lift, crew yakking, cast rushing this way and that – similar to the Shrine show, but more regimented – all following the routines of the biz.

  The crew were prepping the Minimalist-Populuxe set (by Rolf Gerard) for the ‘Merchant’ show in the depths of the very deep stage. The fancy Prologue set (by Bacon McGuire) occupied the main show acreage, which could be lowered for the orchestra’s presence, and it was so lowered now.

  There would be a bit of incongruity in the transition from act to act, as a result of Sonny’s Special booking. But so what. Variety is the spice of showbiz.

  The Prologue was staged in keeping with the picture, ‘Emil Boulderground’, and as both were concerned with the opening up of the Rhodesian frontier in the 1910s, the interjection of the Bard’s Venice between them was perhaps a bit of a jolt. But Sid himself had approved. (‘Audiences need not be treated with delicacy,’ he’d told Sonny over the phone; ‘But with the dignity of new discoveries and new ideas.’) With such approbation, the show would joyfully, and with determination, go on.

  The orchestra itself could be heard, out in the pit, tuning under Vuzhovnik’s baton, and the Mighty Wurlitzer (with Dennison Kent on the bench) was harmonizing out front. The house opened in fourteen measly minutes!

  80% of the seats had been pre-sold. Scalpers were pounding the pavement at all three entrances: on Sixth, on Hill, and on Broadway!

  ‘Tix are going for top dollar at the Broadway gate, a little less at Hill,’ an assistant manager was heard telling Popp, the Backstage Doorman. This Pop – (of many Butterbugs had seen of late) – why, Chester Conklin could have been he! Or Al Shean! Or even Allan Jones!

  ‘Come, Butterbugs, up here. Your dressing room’s on top!’ directed Alun. ‘I’ve got a few minutes. I’ll show you the way. Pleasure.’

  Some of the Grauman Gals were heading rapidly up the stairs just ahead, so Butterbugs and his producer attained prospects that few in the audience ever got to view, of about twenty cute butts, seen through flimsy lingerie passing as costumes. (Sid avoided burlesque tendencies, but wanted his Gals to be shown-off in respectable but razzle-dazzle form; ‘Every Gal has a PhD – in Entertainment!’ was the ballyhoo line.)

  Safely ensconced in one of the many tuckaway dressing rooms for third-string performers – he had it all to himself, though the loo was down the hall – Alun got Butterbugs prepped for the show. Before the application of makeup, which the actor himself was fully capable of doing, Alun regarded him.

  ‘You are depleted somehow?’

  ‘I have not eaten in almost seventeen hours. Eighteen, I think.’

  Alun smiled. He felt great warmth towards this novice and his curious approaches to the awful truths of performance artistry. It was why he felt so fulfilled at being a small-time producer who occasionally gets chances to do Specials like this, not to mention those he could meet and help along the way. ‘One of the truly great gentlemen in showbiz,’ he had been called by countless associates, though Butterbugs knew nothing about him.

  Except that he was a rescuer, and Butterbugs was famished.

  ‘I’ll fix you up in just a jiffy,’ said Alun. ‘Better get going on your kit. I’ll just urge my production assistant to procure you some grubulations.’

  ‘Oh, Alun, I can run down and get something…’

  ‘Now you looka here. You tend to your role-playing and we’ll handle the ‘something’. Great God, man, stick to your duty! There’s going to be pretty near a full house out there – over seven grand of them!’

  Butterbugs, upon seeing Alun’s infinite and numerical wisdom, almost passed out.

  ‘Yoondah? Go over to Gold’s deli on Olive and get Butterbugs some sustenance. Not much time. A knish, if you please! That OK, Butterbugs?’

  ‘That item would be satisfactory, I guess…’

  The assistant rushed out, and Alun helped Butterbugs into costume.

  When Yoondah da Zlava the PA returned, she feared for her job: ‘Mr. Parsnip, all Gold’s had in stock was this here Rueben, slathered with, I think it must be horseradish, which might be too much for our disadvantaged role player here. And he might fume-out his fellow actors. I’ll contact the understudy, presently!’

  ‘Stop right there, underling! I’ll make the decisions here! Come on, Butterbugs, this poor fare is just what the doctor ordered! Good kosher never hurt anybody. Right, Shylock? Heck, there’s probably a full pound of beef in there. (Pretty corny, eh?) Your fellow actors will jolly well flourish under your fumes! Now sup. Time burns.’

  Prologue prosecuted; there was an eighteen-minute interval before ‘Merchant’ began.

  Contemplating his lines and their worth, Butterbugs had taken to exploring the otherworldly tracts of the theatre, and had somehow gotten lost. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. He turned up in the palatial foyer leading to the mezzanine, and there, in the tradition of their past miraculous meetings, was Sonny himself, jawing with some culture-dog friends.

  Butterbugs, naturally in full costume and makeup, shunned the populace as it milled within the moody hall. He lurked behind one of the monumental urns next to a settee. Makeup en exaggerato, costume of the robéd kind, he lent a positively gothic air to the depth of the occasion. Absently, his hand traced the relief designs of the urn in their unknown stylistic wanderings. Half in the shadows, half-exposed to the moody lighting plots in play, the patrons, as they promenaded to and fro with conspicuous unease, weren’t sure whether to acknowledge his presence as a thematically-legitimate uniformed ashtray emptier, or as an entity genuinely capable of high and dark balefulness – right out of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe…

  ‘He is the Jew, you see…,’ whispered one hip fan to his wife.

  ‘Mr. Grauman comes up with such great ideas!’

  ‘He’s known to hire outa-luck street people for a gig like this. You know, to help ’em out, and all.’

  ‘Yeah! Living props!’

  ‘Sweet guy, that Sid!’

  Appreciation was discreet.

  ‘Pardon, just,’ Sonny spake to the socially super-empowered couple he was schmoozing with, all available charm employed. ‘Pray, a bit of business yonder. My mega-apologies. Your optimum seats at the brink of the mezzanine await. Usherette? Please guide Mr. and Mrs. Bilk Stanstons to their loges. Enjoy our further show! It’s going to be unforgettable!’

  He added, upon retreat from any earshot, ‘Maybe…’

  He then approached Butterbugs in a kind of self-contained, dynamic, even industrial fury. The hiss of his voice was like steam barely escaping through the blow-out valve of a Bessemer converter.

  ‘Butterbugs! Are you out of your mindless obscenity-deleted mind?? Are you??? Well, are you?? Do you notice my restraint as I ask you? This is a public place! I am obliged to acknowledge parties of in-ter-rest! Those, that is, whose bankrolls make lives such as yours absurd! And here I am, talking with some retreating, on-the-fringe, forbidding, and unsavory character! Here, amongst the florid and overheated air!! I am beside myself! Do you know? Now, why?? Why???’

  ‘I came to this place out of need…’

  ‘Need?? What are you about then, eh? Don’t you know that every element in the Industry, that has made far more reserves out of real estate than strolling-playing in front of any goo-goo-gaa-gaa audience or funny box with a glass eye, is here, on this, the best level, tonight? And all because of mine own hard-wrought invitations-cum-persuasions! That’s the ONL
Y reason! I created this event! Utterly! Do you have any idea that Sid Grauman’s reputation could be called into question? You have no idea! The stakes, man! Realism is required, concerning the stakes! Is that not a comprehensible concept to you? I’ll sack that Parsnip’s ass, until hell won’t have it again! And what the hell have you been eating, a pickup truck’s cushion?’

  Butterbugs looked like a squashed puppy. In Shylockian makeup.

  Sonny was pretty worked up, but then he softened inside. He hadn’t really brought Butterbugs up to speed yet, as far as the caliber of power politics within the motion picture world. Or what’s more, showbiz in general. Indeed, he’d left him in an arid arcadia of ignorant bliss all this time.

  That was his own problem: always being in the top of the Hollywood lighthouse, battling out stratospheric issues with the empowered and the aspiringly empowered! He was sorry that some sap in a droopy robe didn’t quite get it. Still, a flake-out/weird-out on the part of the talent he represented was bloody outrageous. The ignited bulldozer that was his instinct tonight was compelled to move forward. Forward.

  Sonny’s steaming almost digressed into a stage whisper.

  ‘I hear tell that tonight, even under the walls of this great house, you’ve gone a bit wobbly! Now, what, dare I ask, was that all about?’

  Butterbugs was silent, looking out of the urn-shadow with a kind of sullen terror, his face appearing, for all the world, like Nikolai Cherkasov’s in Eisenstein’s ‘Ivan The Terrible, Part I’ (Mosfilm, 1944).

  Then, just as the waiting for someone to say or do something between them was becoming excruciating, it seemed the time-ticking factor’s tension would surely blow their tops, any second now.

  ‘S-Sonny – I tell you, I was under review. M-my own review. My emotions came down from the heights.’

  ‘Yeah??’

  ‘I knew not what to do.’

  ‘You didn’t even rely on Alun?’

  ‘He helped all he could. Then he had things to do. Backstage.’

  ‘Well I should bloody-Ben hope so! You think you’re the only cog in this huge production? I tell you, it may be the bare bones trappings you’re used to, but these are serious people slaving around you, Mumpkin-Boy!’

  ‘I-I guess I never really knew…’

  ‘No, you didn’t, cupcake.’

  Sonny, in an instant of private contrition, knew full well that the outback Butterbugs didn’t know about any of this rubbish. But that was all the more reason why there was no reason for wobbliness to stake its claim over his big night. All this kid had to do was show up and act. Everyone else had to do the heavy lifting, for Jesu’s sake! Best to keep a hardass line right now. Too many nerves on the line.

  ‘Sonny, I –’

  ‘Now you get the hell down there and grab your pound of flesh, before it melts! You may memorize the many lines, but what the hell does it matter, if your own tissue turns to junket mix in the glassed enclosure of the public’s withering gaze? I ask you that! Do you know how dissipation can destroy entities far greater and more bolstered and barricaded than you can ever be? Do you realize the life and death of this whole acting thing? Do you accept its weight, its gravity? Do you know that you generate the stuff by which an audience discusses and debates, no matter how banal or how worthless, including the merits or demerits of your performance? By Jupiter, small-ling, what am I doing here anyway, trying to animate such a puppet as you at this ultra-late and fatal hour? There you are, perhaps a mad monk, or a defrocked priest, or a chicken-wielding fringe-rabbi, bent on sacrificing one pathetic life for another, out of fear and derailment!’

  ‘I canna say more, Sonny… I have failed you, it is my guess…’

  ‘You didn’t hear me a second ago, my Mumpkin-Boy! All right, then. Guess what? I’m not going to call you any more mocking names or epithets to distract you. So, you didn’t really hear me? I told you to get on down there and perform!’

  ‘You told me to grab my pound –’

  ‘Shaddap! No games!’

  There was an awkward pause. In it, Sonny took a fiercely-close look at his key player tonight. The key player’s eyes were bottomless pools of hound-like sincerity. Never had he seen such a plaintive, genuine soul in search of grounding.

  Sonny’s heart surged up and pressed against his tonsils. His voice was reduced to a normal, hushed tone. Deeper, relaxed, even.

  ‘How the hell’d you apply your makeup, with a surgical trowel? That’s really something. Hmm. Might be just the thing. Maybe it’d really work, and not just if you’re lucky enough to sit in the mezzanine…’

  Butterbugs perked.

  ‘Isn’t that where all the people that matter sit, when they come to the Metropolitan?’

  ‘’S right, son! You’re catching on! But don’t forget about the balcony. It goes way up there. Emphasize the satire, the characterization within modern approaches. You know, Shakespeare’s uncertainty about this member of the ‘Very Lost Tribe of Izzreel’. Pardon my sneering! But don’t make it a parody!’

  ‘I won’t. I will look to the Bard.’

  ‘And what would the Bard say? New ideas! New approaches! ‘As long as mine own words stay the same’! Think that’s what he’s saying to us? Right now, maybe? Huh? A mask instead of mannerism? Greek amphitheatre rather than the Globe? Or maybe a whole different planet? I like that. Stage, rather than screen. Bigger is needed. I’m a picture man, I confess. But I love this moment, the moment, RIGHT NOW, don’t you??’

  Butterbugs’ look was nothing if not exultant.

  Sonny was downright marshmallow-like now.

  ‘All right!’

  He looked about the monumental room.

  ‘Is this not a great site?’

  There were nearly tears rolling down his cheeks now. In any case, it was sheer emotion. No, something more. Nude, nature-given passion. He gestured to the powerful angles of the very mechanism that held everything above them up: the great balcony trusses themselves, clad in their untamed finery.

  ‘Is this, is this not enough? Look upon what we are allowed to contain ourselves within! This very house! Is it not good enough? Is it not WONDROUS enough?’

  Butterbugs was effusive.

  ‘It is! Oh Sonny, yes, it is, it is!’

  He found Sonny’s observation to be a link with that of the remote flautist out in the wilderland yesterday, and her consciousness of the organic, the holistic, the unexplainable melding with whatever it was that surrounds one at the moment. Which was, just now, undeniably, this marvelous house, placed here either for enjoyment/edification, or as a shrine in which those who demonstrate the realms of the Drama must toil in their best spirits. The savage and rootless nature of the created environment of the theatre, unplumbed by his psyche, nevertheless provided a mold by which he might pour his shakti ichor – (wholly lacking in any toxicity, for the record). A virtual ritual must be performed now, before the public’s scrutiny, to make for its partaking, or else its refusal.

  In any case, there was a mucking leg to be broken.

  ‘Someone cares!’ was all he had to think about concerning his encounter with his agent on that powerful mezzanine lobby’s floor. Then he returned to the role that awaited, down there somewhere.

  Ecstasy was in his heart then, as he proceeded, without any doubt as to the correct route, back to the plane of his work: the wide boards of the awaiting stage – scarcely three minutes before curtain-up.

  It was the first time that the childlike actor had felt the potential of wrath from those who had lately expressed an interest in him. It felt – purposeful. Correct, even. His elation was emboldened accordingly. Children need love, but they need direction, just as much. Sometimes more.

  The night’s verdict: massive success. Tumultuous applause, for starters.

  After the ‘Merchant’ Special, the picture ‘Emil Boulderground’ rolled. Despite its being a monster hit, half the audience decamped. In response to ushers’ attempts to sound out a survey from the retreating masses, the
y fielded statements like, ‘Can’t concentrate on picture due to impact of play beforehand’, or ‘I don’t know, this picture is so anti-climactic after that play…’, or ‘I so wish we had more sustained conviction in our entertainments, such as that delivered by that guy who played the Shylock dude…’

  Not one person asked for a refund, though.

  The front-page headline in ‘Variety’ the next day hit the nail on the head: ‘SID’S SONNY’S PARSNIP’S EDIBLE B.O. GOLD’ followed by the sub-headline: ‘WHAT’S IN IT, THEN?’

  Butterbugs was in it, that’s what.

  23.

  Greetings to Sid

  Sid Grauman had posh offices in his Chinese on Hollywood Blvd, but also retained a control center downtown in the Metropolitan’s building. Witnessing the landmark evening last night from his private box, away-up-past the ‘Folly On Horseback’ pillar, Sid was unusually contemplative this morning, having just read the ‘Variety’ article (by special dispatch) over his kettle of Kalimpong teas. He’d anticipated something like this reception (the press taking an interest, but without judgment – yet), and he had no intention of wasting any opportunities.

  Magnificent showman that he was, he did not often pause for very long in ponderment (that time under the Doily Dome being an exception). His was an unusually agile mind, and the impatience of the Industry required that sound decision-making coexist with, but have mastery over, the knee-jerk addiction to ‘getting it all now’.

  Sid was one of the most seasoned exhibiters in the biz. That status, plus his standing as the most respected force that united creation with talent with production with showmanship, put him on the very top rung of the powerful ones of Hollywood.

  From his vantage point, considering the factors pertaining to Butterbugs, he naturally, and responsibly, formulated an idea.