“Well, that’s colorful.”
“Even the vultures are ashamed of it. Now, I suggest that you get into the shade and into this handy little book, McHenry’s A Short History of Mexico. There’s a germ of truth in some of the things you’ve said, but I think you ought to have the facts. The history of Mexico is so turbulent and so terrible and so tragic that it’s almost comical. But I think you should have a better grasp . . .”
“Oh, so now you want me to do a slapstick comedy! Custard pies and . . .”
“Just take this book, sit in the shade, and I’ll try to pull some of your elements and all of your leading ladies into a story.”
“I’ll sit where I damned well please and I please to lie in the sun.”
“You’re gettingue awfully red, Mr. Starr. No pun intended.”
“Shut up, Irving!” With that Starr threw himself down onto a hot tile bench and began reading A Short History of Mexico with a prodigious rustling of pages. I got down to work. Mr. Guber simply sat—waiting.
It was almost three o’clock when I’d finished the barest sort of outline. Mr. Guber was nodding in his chair, and Starr, lying supine in the blazing hot sun, had dozed off at around the constitutional presidency of Benito Juárez (1858-61). “Hey, Starr. Leander,” I called. My answer was a dulcet snore. Playfully I picked up a small, flat pebble and tossed it. It landed neatly on Starr’s bare stomach. With a roar of agony Starr shot up into the air. “Ouch! Dear God! I’m on fire! I’m burning up!”
“Anythingue wrongue?” Mr. Guber said, snapping back to consciousness.
“Oh good Lord, look at me! I’m burnt to the bone! Absolutely barbecued!”
“Hmm, front and back. That’s not good. This friend of mine, Melvyn, he’s stayingue at the Fountain-blew in Miami. So he goes up to this beautyful solarium—very modrun—on a day the sun isn’t even shiningue. . . .”
“To hell with Melvyn! What about me? By God, Dennis, you’re to blame. I’ll sue you for every last . . .”
“Come on now, Leander. I’ll fix you up.” I took him by the arm, and he screamed with pain. “Ooops, sorry. Come with me now, Daddy fix.”
I filled our big pink bathtub with tepid water, a box of baking soda, and—moaning and groaning—Leander Starr. “Now just sit there and soak,” I said. “It won’t cure you, but it will help. And so would a drink. What would you like?”
“Prussic acid, if you’ve got any.”
“You’ll really be better off with gin. Mr. Guber?”
“Rye and ginger ale? Scotch and Seven-Up?” He finally settled for rum and Pepsi-Cola. “Very refreshingue,” he said.
“Now that we’re all here and you’re feeling better, Leander, I’ll read the very rough outline I ran up while you two were sleeping.”
Starr lolled back in the tub with a gasp of pain, Mr. Guber settled himself on the morris chair, while I, perched delicately on the pink toilet, read aloud the framework of Valley of the Vultures.
Given an impossible story and an improbable cast of characters, it hadn’t been easy to turn Starr’s material into much of a story. But I had seen enough of Starr’s work to realize that the less plot the great man was encumbered with, the better the picture would be as a result of his diabolical tricks—mad camera angles; wild zoomings upward or downward of the lens; mystifying close-ups of such unexpected and mystifying things as a slice of bread, a human navel, an animal’s eye, an insect; odd lighting effects. Starr was essentially a “trimmings” man and such a gifted one that audiences were perfectly satisfied with the trimmings, never minding—or even noticing—that the basic fabric was cheesecloth. Instead of one story, which Starr had never had to begin with, I gave him three intermingled stories. The first is set in the sixteenth century, when a wealthy Spanish grandee migrates to the valley with his lovely English bride, Doña Ana-Rosa (Lady Joyce), and her silly maidservant (Bunty Maitland-Grim), builds a great hacienda and promptly dies leaving his widow and baby as sole heirs to the fertile acres. (I was by no means certain that the Valley of the Vultures had ever been anything more than a wasteland, but I felt sure that there would be very few moviegoers who could remember back to the fifteen hundreds and call me a liar.) Doña A-R builds up the village, the church, cares for the Indians, etc., etc., etc., and also gives her descendants a good excuse for being able to speak English. She dies leaving a fertile valley of peace and prosperity as her own monument. Episode Two takes place during the bloody revolutions of the nineteenth century. The family is richer than ever but somehow gone to seed, having grown decadent, lazy, proud, and arrogant. French and Mexican marriages have largely removed the English strain—except, happily, for the dialogue. The current owner, soft and sybaritic, spends most of his time lolling in smart clubs in Mexico City or whoring with the village girls. His vulgar mestizo wife (Catalina Ximinez—but a part to be written in such a way that she could play it straight and be twice as terrible) is the real power, grasping and ruthless. Comes one of the many revolutions—with both sides treated dispassionately as neither all right nor all wrong—and the owner is killed, the fine old colonial mansion all but burned to the ground, leaving the mean mistress of the house swearing vengeance. Episode Three, time the present. The family grandeur is all but vanished, the current generation little more than scavengers on the depleted land. The beautiful daughter (played by whom, Clarice Pomeroy?) wants to marry a fine young Indian boy who is an engineer, but the stiff-necked, tradition-ridden elders won’t hear of it. Trouble and strife. Picture ends with girl and Indian hoofing it toward the big town and a better future, leaving the wasted acres to rot behind them. I’m afraid I can’t tell you the moral, but if Starr wanted a saga of pure despair, I’d certainly given him one.
“Brilliant, dear boy, brilliant. Ouch!” Starr said from the tub.
“But kinda depressingue. I always like a happy endingue myself,” Mr. Guber ventured.
“You fool, don’t you see that it is a happy ending? Young love, new blood deserting a dead past to find a new way of life.”
“That’s pretty radical stuff. But I guess it isn’t actually subversive.”
“And you see, Starr, the whole thing is tied together with these vultures wheeling around in the air and . . .”
“Yes, yes, I see it. And watching and waiting to pounce. And then we could tie up each segment with an enormous vulture that actually comes down and enfolds the characters in his black wings.”
“That would have to be one smart bird, Mr. Starr, and a very large one, too,” Mr. Guber volunteered.
“We’ll find a big one, shoot him, have him stuffed and rigged on wires.”
“It’s against the law to shoot vultures in Mexico, Leander. They act as a sort of free-lance sanitation department.”
“Well, in that case . . . Wait! I’ve got the perfect one. St. Regis! I’ve always promised him a part. We can trick him up in black tights and a feather boa—he’d love that—and this way no one will be able to see his face or hear his Marjorie voice. He could be symbolic.”
“And maybe instead of wastingue all kinds of money on settings you could maybe use parts of the Casa Zzzziminez. It sure looks fancy.”
“That’s a very good idea, Mr. Guber,” I said.
As the afternoon went on, all three of us grew more and more enthusiastic. Although Starr was hopeless when it came to creating a story from scratch, he was marvelously inventive when it came to adding dramatic highlights, subtle twists, and nuances. Even Mr. Guber was helpful in the role of Irving Average Audience. Perhaps he had never heard of Yucatán Girl or The Euphrates or any of Starr’s immortal triumphs, maybe his favorite performers were Debbie Reynolds and Lassie, but whenever Starr’s flights of fancy—and extravagance—took him too far afield, Mr. Guber could always be counted on to make the flat-footed statement that would bring our director right back to home base. We talked on and on, scribbling down notes, making suggestions and countersuggestions. We might have been talking still, except that toward dinnertime my wife rapp
ed impatiently on the door and announced that she’d like to go to the bathroom. It was then that we helped Starr out of the tub, wrapped him tenderly in a towel, and sent him groaning home to the tender ministrations of our star vulture, Alistair St. Regis.
I was so busy banging out a rough shooting script that I saw very little of Starr for the rest of the week. Others saw quite a lot of him, because about all he could wear was Noxzema. But from my vantage point in the patio I saw almost all of Mexico coming and going.
Every morning a great ape of a woman, folding massage table tucked under one hairy arm, would skulk ominously across the patio, and from the open windows of Madame X’s rose-colored bower there issued a two-hour concert of slappings, moans, curses, wails, and loud supplications to Our Lady. Every afternoon two minions from the Vog Salón de Belleza arrived with mysterious reticules, wheeling a great glistening hairdryer, and the same slapping and cursing and screaming would carry on until five o’clock, when all the lights blew out and the general uproar from every apartment in Casa Ximinez would inform me that our landlady had been sufficiently beautified and was being set out to bake to a fine glaze. A week earlier, Señorita Ximinez had been quite willing to cross the street on the rare occasions when she felt that her hair, face, and nails wanted attention. But now that she was once again the movie queen, beauty came to her. Whatever the results, they remained a closely kept secret, even to the amazing extent of entrusting Abelardo (under Mamacita’s surveillance) to collect the rents on Saturday.
Emily Starr gave the impression of being apart from Bruce van Damm only when she was asleep. The great glossy Continental Phaeton pulled majestically up to Casa Ximinez every morning at about ten to spirit Emily away, and she never got back until well past midnight.
“Nevah did see such a comin’ and goin’ in all mah bawn days?” Miz Priddy would remark two or three times each hour. To compound the congestion in the patio, she had also taken it into her head to rehearse a couple of dozen local urchins in a song, dance, and chant said to be indigenous to the area around Oaxaca. It didn’t make working any easier, and the routine was even more unpopular with the children themselves than it was with me.
But the person who reviewed the longest and steadiest parade of visitors was, of course, Leander Starr. Sitting gingerly on the edge of a chair girded with a Hermès scarf (his skin was so tender that he could not lie down, and the soles of his feet so burned that standing was extremely painful), he held court all day long. A constant procession of actors, technicians, designers, model makers, wig makers, came and went from eight in the morning until eight at night. Miserable as he felt, Starr was a glutton for work. He sat at a table covered with sheets of figures and seemed to know the answers to everything before he even asked questions of his steady stream of visitors. Whenever I finished a scene and Starr was not closeted with some segments of the Mexican film industry (over the atonal bleating of Miz Priddy’s urchins, the screeching of the parrot, the agonies of Madame X, and the clatter of my own typewriter, I could hear Starr’s confident, knowledgeable questions and answers through the open window), I would rush it in to Starr, wait for him to read it and comment upon it. Wild as his sense of narrative was, whenever he made a criticism or suggested a change, he was invariably correct. When it came to a sense of dramatic values, no one could match him.
Among the callers I was summoned to meet were Lady Joyce and Bunty Maitland-Grim. Even they, with an eye to facing the camera, looked slightly enameled and mysteriously constricted from thigh to bosom. Lady Joyce did what I considered a flawless reading of the role of Doña Ana-Rosa. Then Starr gave her a violent chewing-out and, holding both her temper and her tears, she gave a far better one. As all I had given Bunty to do was to squeal and giggle from time to time, she was born letter-perfect in her part.
The contraband cameraman, a Mr. Lopez, was an American of Spanish extraction. Black-listed in the States as a former Communist and unable to get working papers in Mexico, he was the soul of co-operation; and now the most militant of ex-Communists, Lopez planned to shoot the whole picture under the pseudonym of “Joseph R. McCarthy.” Desperate for work, he was willing to supply the camera and his own superb services for a flat one thousand dollars instead of the one and twenty per day that is the official rate for Mexican cameramen. I quite liked him in spite of his misinterpreting every faintly liberal statement as coming straight from Das Kapital. Where Lopez had once worshiped from afar Eugene Dennis, Earl Browder, Joseph Stalin, and Mother Bloor, he was now so far to the right as to be almost in outer space. “Ya don’t t’ink dat’s a li’l pinko, dat scene where Doña Ana-Rosa won’t allow the overseer to lash da farm hands? . . . Dis is pretty commie, here in de uprising.” While he spoke elegant and fluent Spanish, I can only think that Mr. Lopez learned his English while organizing the waterfront. However, he was so desperate for the job that he was willing to overlook my dangerous Marxist tendencies when I implied disapproval of such conservative old institutions as slavery, share cropping, illiteracy, and droit du seigneur.
A daily visitor was my great favorite, Aristido González, accompanied always by his pitiful son, Heff, to serve as interpreter, secretary, and body servant. González was the sort whom you may dislike on first meeting, but once you got to know him you really despised him. I had thought that clothes might make the man, but I was dead wrong. On his first visit González oozed and flowed like lava from a very small taxicab, wearing a shiny old black suit that must have been made for him at least fifty pounds ago. There was a heated discussion over the fare, and Heff was dispatched to borrow ten pesos from St. Regis.
Quite against my will—and quite against González’s—I was dragged away from my work and into the first production meeting, where “Mexico’s Number-One Producer” was able, in his subtle little ways, to make it quite clear that I hadn’t exactly grown on him either.
While he wallowed on Starr’s sofa, pensively scratching and picking at his mountainous flesh, he spoke with great authority and Heff obliged with the simultaneous translation in his precise Britishese. “My father will undertake the function of producer for one thousand American dollars per diem.”
“Splendid, splendid,” Starr said.
“I happen to have ascertained,” Mr. Guber, who was never far from Starr, interjected, “that the goingue rate in Mexico is seven-fifty a day.”
This was translated back to González and brought on a fit of histrionics that made me think of a bull elephant with a mouse up his trunk. After a lot of translation back and forth, Starr said, “That is the going rate for just any producer. Mr. González is, however, exceptional.”
“But that includes a sound stage, lightingue, and a crew for the interiors?” Mr. Guber asked with a surprising suavity. I felt a sort of warm kinship with him. For a human adding machine whose only interests in life were back taxes, Teaneck, and Shirley, Mr. Guber had not only proven to be a very sensible—although uninvited—script analyst, but he had also learned, somehow, the financial ins and outs of Mexican film making.
There was another outburst from the sofa and some more translating. “It has been agreed, Irving,” Starr said haughtily, “that in the interests of realism we will not employ a studio. You yourself suggested that Casa Ximinez would do admirably for the few interior shots.”
“All right already, but why pay for a studio you won’t even be usingue?”
After some more polylingual pyrotechnics it developed that González would furnish whatever lights were needed, but that he was too influential to be bullied by a lot of corrupt technicians’ unions and would supply whatever unseen personnel was needed out of his own bottomless generosity and purse.
González was annoyed to discover that Starr had already engaged the magic camera of Mr. Lopez, but Starr held his ground firmly. Cans of film would be supplied by González at one hundred dollars per thousand feet. But they only cost fifty, so how come, Guber inquired, when it wasn’t even in color? This was very special film. Another scene and finall
y a compromise at seventy-five because Starr was González’s brother. Laboratory fees and rushes could be arranged through González’s all-reaching influence at two pesos per foot of film each. But, Mr. Guber said, consulting a very thorough set of notes, the usual rate was one peso—or ten cents a foot at the most. But this was very special artistic work. Surely the great Leander Starr wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but the best. Another tantrum and another compromise at one peso, fifty centavos the foot. Extras—and we would need hundreds of them, according to González—would cost one hundred pesos a day. Here I got into the act and said that the script had been written so that we would not need hundreds of extras, but twenty or thirty at the most and only for a few days. González glared at me and then at Mr. Guber, who announced that extras hired through S.T.P.C., the official syndicate, cost only fifty. Another tirade. Did Starr want a lot of stupid, syphilitic Indians? Yes, dear boy, as a matter of fact that was exactly what Starr did want. A new tack: Did Starr think he could get decent performances out of such clods? It was the wrong tack. Yes, by God, Starr could get a performance out of anything alive! While Starr was trying to be careful about costs, such picayune topics as the salaries of extras, the cost to the penny of processing a foot of film bored him. He was growing impatient, and González took Starr’s restlessness as a cue to heave his bulk up from the sofa, throw a paw around Starr’s bare, anointed shoulder—a gesture that brought forth a roar of pain—and announce, through Heff, that he and not a judio from America—an epithet which Heff did not translate—knew about making movies in Mexico, and that his old friend, his brother, should leave everything to him. End of first meeting.
But not quite the end. Mr. Guber excused himself to write up a report to the Internal Revenue folks back home. I said that I had to get back to work. We said good-by to Heff. González snubbed us petulantly by turning his fat back to us and breaking wind, whether intentionally or not I shall never know. Five minutes later he strutted through the patio on his built-up heels, wreathed in smiles and puffed up like a turkey cock.
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