All we had to do was stand around Madame X’s grand drawing room sipping ginger ale from plastic champagne glasses and looking lofty as all get-out at the General’s gala ball, while lovely Catalina Ximinez drifted through, flapping her fan, on the arm of Henry Maitland-Grim who, wooden leg and all, had won the Man of Distinction contest hands down. By this time Madame X was so entranced with her own image that she had taken to “improving” her part to no end, and the results were devastating, what with trills and winks and wrinklings of the nose and wrigglings of the shoulders and switchings of the hips. But since we were supposed to be at a party, laughter was permissible, although some say that Bunty went too far. Three takes—one in which Our Star tripped over Henry’s wooden leg, one done the Ximinez way, and a final one done the Starr way—and we were finished for the day.
“Four o’clock and already done,” I said to Starr as I removed the period wig he insisted on my wearing. “Come on to our place and have a drink. You’ve earned it.”
“Thanks, dear boy, but I can’t. Heff has to rush these takes off for processing, and then I have to spend the rest of the afternoon doing shots of Catalina.”
“What shots? She’s done everything she has to except two or three small bits out on location.”
“This is just to keep her happy. Nothing we’ll use. But as long as she thinks that she’s the star of this picture . . .”
“Leander,” I said, “did it ever occur to you that what you’re doing to poor old Madame X isn’t exactly honest?”
“Many times, carissimo; I toss and pitch every night. But she is great—when she does it my way.”
“Starr, when this picture’s released, she’ll be in a frenzy. She’ll kill you. Here she thinks she’s the most beautiful thing since Madeleine Carroll and . . .”
“My dear child, you are talking to a man who may not know much but one who knows actresses backward and forward. When this picture is released and she gets someone to read her notices to her—and Lopez is right, she just might get an Academy Award as best supporting actress—she won’t care if we shot her with x-ray film. By then she’ll think the whole thing was her idea.”
Madame X appeared in a peach maribou negligee, hair piled high, a box of Ivory Flakes under one arm. “Ai om raddy.”
“Ah, yes, querida. Now for that exquisite scene in the bubble bath.”
From the rushes shown that night—first just for Starr, Emily, my wife and me and, as before, a special late show for Madame X and Mamacita—I realized that my future was not as an actor. Perhaps Bruce had been wise to stay out of the picture. It always embarrasses me to see people I know performing unless they are very, very good. Dr. and Miz Priddy, Mr. Guber, Henry Maitland-Grim, my wife and I were not. Mrs. Pomeroy, as the Marie Antoinette of Guerrero province, came off more like Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Then I realized that that was exactly what Starr had intended—but it hardly seemed the way to begin a marriage made in heaven. Indeed, it struck me as a foolproof way to end an engagement, and maybe that’s what he intended, too. But whether I was embarrassed, whether Starr was married or single, engaged or jilted, the rushes were great. Leander had the knack of making you think that you weren’t seeing black and white and gray people projected on a screen but that you were really there. Even knowing exactly who and what and how, I found the scenes of the day so thrilling that for a weird moment I almost felt that we were seeing real life.
THURSDAY. Location. Lunch basket. Gin. Cigarettes. Sun location. Take book. Starr—rushes.
As I said before, the main advantages of using the Carretera del Desierto de los Leones were that it was nearby and encompassed every kind of scenery we would need to portray three centuries of rise, decline, and fall. To get there one bowls out the Insurgentes, past the Estudios San Angel on the Antiguo Camino de Acapulco; there one hits the Carretera, which leads past a variety of countryside—deep ravines and a miserable settlement of squatters who have no water; thus the highway is lined with tin containers, each marked with the name, number, or sign of the owner, waiting to be filled each day by the Departmento Central. If that wasn’t grim enough for Starr, I didn’t know what would be. The road goes on and gradually passes through fine trees and flossy houses, past the Colegio Militar, and eventually through fine forest to a convent that is erroneously named Desierto de los Leones.
Early in the morning we left Casa Ximinez in a most exotic sort of convoy. González led off in the Mercedes-Benz lolling voluptuously in the back while Heff drove. Starr followed with Mrs. Pomeroy, the omnipresent Mr. Guber, and several bottles of champagne in the lavender Cadillac. Next came Bruce’s Continental, Emily in the front, St. Regis in his vulture costume, my wife, and I in the rear. We were followed by the Maitland-Grim Rolls; then Our Star with Mamacita and Guadalupe, doubling as lady’s maid, in the Hispano-Suiza; Lopez and the sound man with all of their equipment in a Volkswagen bus; a Fiat truck piled high with stagehands, lights, reflectors, costume trunks, props, and two tents for dressing; a three-wheeled Isetta, containing the wardrobe man and his languid assistant; and finally an old Fifth Avenue double-decker bus, overflowing with extras from Casa Ximinez and, on the upper deck, Miz Priddy and her band of children in gaudy native costume. One almost longed to see a plain old Ford or Chevrolet, and from the array of bottles, hampers, and suntan lotions, the whole procession had more the air of a very eccentric picnic than grim business.
For the location work, Starr had economically decided to start working at the middle of the picture, when the oppressed peonage rises against the indifferent landlords and burns down the hacienda (the actual conflagration to be accomplished by destroying a small cardboard model) and mean Doña Isabel, on her knees in the ashes, swears vengeance. In this way Madame X, the more expensive actors, and most of the extras could be dispensed with first, saving a lot of trouble and money.
In his reconnoitering, Mr. Lopez had found a burnt-out structure of indeterminate original purpose and vintage standing out in the middle of a barren wilderness. A corner of it would do splendidly for Madame X’s final spiel and for some starving farmhands to be seen scavenging around. A grimmer site could hardly have existed even in the real Valley of the Vultures.
A few of the principals had arrived before the convoy, and, in the heat of the sun, had already removed as many clothes as the law would allow.
“How do you like it?” I asked Starr.
“My dear boy, if Mexico needed an enema, here is where they’d plug it in. Now, be a pearl and try to get everyone organized.”
It was easier said than done. Miz Priddy’s urchins had gone suddenly wild, chasing lizards and each other all over the landscape. The women’s dressing tent suddenly collapsed, leaving a thrashing, throbbing lump of something under its many folds and some muffled curses in Spanish. It was Catalina Ximinez who emerged disheveled and begrimed and furious. It was also an unexpected stroke of luck; Madame X had originally planned to go through fire, sacking, and looting, and still end up in spotless white. As it turned out, she did the first take her way and for the second—or Starr—take, a sudden fitful breeze came up, covering her with more dust and ashes than the city of Pompeii.
We finished at five o’clock, and those extras who had completed their work were clamoring to be paid. By a strange coincidence, Mexico’s Number-one Producer, Aristido González had been called back to town on a mission of the utmost urgency, and all that the extras saw of him was the roll of fat over his collar through the rear window of the Mercedes-Benz as it sped back to Mexico City. Starr assured them all that they would be paid, and, more or less satisfied, everyone called it a day.
FRIDAY. Location. More suntan lotion. Cucumber sandwiches? Extra Thermos. Rushes.
A considerably diminished company. Emily was being used, along with Felipe, the young Indian who played her sweetheart. That meant that we would have Bruce’s company, as well as Clarice’s. Neither of them seemed willing to allow the object of his or her affection out of arm’s reach for very long. Lady J
oyce and Bunty had short scenes. Catalina Ximinez had been given the day off and had accepted Henry Maitland-Grim’s invitation to spend it in and around his swimming pool. The Gonzálezes, father and son, were also on hand. All of us had grown fonder and fonder of Heff as we had become less fond of Aristido. He and Starr were barely speaking. He and I were not. Lopez used him only to scream at and to blame whenever anything went wrong. That day he made the fatal error of pinching Bunty, Emily, and Lady Joyce within the space of five minutes and incurring everybody’s fury—even Starr’s. It was hot and dusty and we were all in vile moods.
We were down to half a dozen extras, all recruited from Guadalupe’s family of full-time eaters. As the vigilante worked all night, he was perfectly content to sleep most of the day on location and collect his fifty pesos. The lottery-ticket salesman, whose cadaverous face had made him invaluable to Starr, was less willing.
“Señor,” he said, “ees necessary for Ai to work.” (It was the first I had heard of it.) “Three days now Ai do only the cine but no sell lottery tickets. Ees not possible do peecture more an’ no sell lotería.”
“Damn it!” Starr snarled. “Tell him he’s making more by being an extra than he ever did selling lottery tickets. Everybody in Mexico who doesn’t sell silver jewelry sells lottery tickets.”
“Yes, but he hasn’t been paid,” I said.
“Tell him I like his face, and we’ll give him double—a hundred pesos—for one more day’s work.”
I told him. “He wants the hundred pesos, but he also wants to sell tickets for the Monday lottery. It’s for two million pesos.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll buy a ticket. How much?”
“Ten pesos.”
“How much is that?”
“Eighty cents.”
“Sold. Now tell him to take off his shoes and look miserable.”
“He wants to sell a whole cachito.”
“What’s that, his sister?”
“No. He wants to sell a whole block of tickets—twenty of them. He says if you buy twenty, you can win the whole two million.”
“He’s nothing but a blackmailer. That’s—let me see—fifteen or sixteen American dollars. He’s holding us up. If I hadn’t started using him in Emily’s scene yesterday, I’d kick him out of the whole picture. He’s got us over a barrel and he knows it.”
“I really don’t think he’s quite that cagey or quite that hep when it comes to film making. He just wants to get on with his regular work—as do I.”
“Is there no gratitude to be found in this benighted land? Very well. Tell him I’ll take all twenty. They’re probably counterfeit at that.”
The lottery-ticket saleman burst into great smiles, exposing the rotting teeth that Starr found so photogenic. “Gracias, Señor. Doscientos pesos. You pay now pliz.”
“Can’t the idiot see that this suit has no pockets?” Starr exploded. True, he was wearing a bikini and a lot of suntan lotion and had become the color of mahogany. “Dennis, be a dear and give him the money. Here, St. Regis, take these useless tickets and don’t use them to pad your dance belt. Places everyone!”
The day did not go well. A terrible duststorm blew up, which was photographically satisfying to Starr and Lopez but put everyone else into even viler tempers. Old Miss Herrera suffered a touch of the sun and had to be taken home—after her last scene, fortunately—in the air-conditioned Cadillac, moaning deliriously. Clarice was so cloying and so omnipresent that I thought that Starr was going to belt her. And Bruce, in his self-appointed role as peacemaker, got in between Starr and Mrs. Pomeroy with all the charm and tact of a rather dimwitted nursery governess trying to keep peace between two naughty precocious children. So Starr turned on Bruce, and then Emily turned on Starr. Lady Joyce, who had been saintly up to then, sided with Starr, while Bunty took up the cudgels for Bruce. St. Regis got into a fearful quarrel with the wardrobe man’s lissome assistant and later suffered a heat stroke in his vulture suit. The vigilante and the lottery-ticket salesman took drunk at the luncheon break. Lopez and González got into their most heated quarrel, which was interrupted only by the arrival of two very tough-looking specimens who claimed to represent some sort of Mexican film-making union. The questions they asked embarrassed González no end. Naturally I couldn’t follow the conversation, but Lopez could. It ended—or was at least postponed—with González reaching into his pocket and handing each of them a wad of banknotes, which marked the first time I had ever seen him pay out money to anyone. They went away, but not with what you’d call smiles of joy on their faces. Then Lopez blew up. “I knew it! I knew it! Dat fat crook ain’t done a t’ing. Not one mudder-lovin’ t’ing about unions or nutt’n’ else. He ain’t fixed nobody, ain’t made no arrangements. Dis is a scab show an’ yer never gonna get it past da Direccíon-General de Cinematografía. T’ousands of dollars an’ hours wasted wid dat crook.” Then he let fly at González in Spanish and eventually had to be physically restrained by Bruce and me from flying at that fat throat.
Somehow we got through the day. But seeing the rushes in Starr’s cool living room that night cheered everyone up. Showers, dinner, and drinks had helped, of course; even so, any fool could see that it was going to be an excellent picture.
SATURDAY. Location. How long, oh Lord, how long?
On Saturday the shooting all took place at the edge of a majestic forest filled with shade trees and twittering birds; there were green rolling fields, a babbling brook, and gentle zephyrs. Only our three leading ladies and a dozen actors were needed. There was a holiday air to the whole thing. The only mishap of the morning was when the mike fell from its boom, clunking Catalina Ximinez squarely on the head, but even she claimed to be amused by having been knocked senseless. St. Regis and the costume assistant made up their differences of the day before, and arranged to meet at the Hombre Alegre Bar at ten that evening. Over lunch he confessed that he had perhaps been too influenced by the elegant names of such performers as Carlyle Blackwell, Colin Clive, Clive Brook, Elliott Dexter, and C. Butler Clonebaugh when he had selected his pseudonym. In fact, he confided, he had chosen Alistair because it was so close to Albert, and St. Regis because Starr had been staying in the St. Regis Hotel (still unpaid, I feel sure) when he delivered a bouquet of flowers to the first Mrs. Starr and had never quite got around to leaving. “The ee-nitials was the same as Albert Schmackpfeffer, which was convenient for my monnygrams. And there was such an air of ellygunce about that lovely place. But now with all these new stars, Rock Hudson, Rip Torn, Tab Hunter, and now that I’m reely in a picture, maybe I should try something more up-to-date.” He went into fits of giggles as names such as Tack Hammer, Shad Roe, and Ruff Trade were volunteered. Catalina Ximinez even offered to give Lady Joyce some of her make-up hints. That’s the kind of congenial day it was.
I dozed off under a tree during the afternoon’s shooting, as they weren’t doing much but taking long shots of people flitting through trees or racing across meadows into each other’s arms. At four o’clock I was awakened by Starr’s shouting, “That’s it. We’re all done. Take off your duds and go home, kiddies. I said ten days, and we’ve made it in six, thanks to a troupe of real, old-fashioned pros. There’s nothing to do now but some atmosphere shots, which Mr. Lopez and I can do alone. We can’t even use our vulture, Rock Bottom, né Albert Schmackpfeffer, for those.” St. Regis went off into gales of laughter. “I wish I could give you all a big party—booze and cold cuts and a combo and all the traditional studio fixings. I can’t. But I can say . . .”
“Oh, but I can give a party, Leander,” Clarice cooed. “You and I can give it together. My house, the Casa Ortiz-Robledo tomorrow night—say at ten?” There was general applause.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, you heard what Mrs. Pomeroy said. Tomorrow night at ten. You’ll get your party and your salaries. Until then, thank you and God bless you.”
“Jeest,” Mr. Lopez said with tears in his eyes. “Dat Starr. What a guy. Six mudder-lovin’ days an’ he’s sho
t the whole picture. What a genius!”
XIII
On the seventh day He rested. I did not. Having been threatened with everything from expulsion from the Authors’ League to the Malay boot by my agent if I didn’t turn in the cute story about Salli, Mr. Right, and the broccoli, I finished every last adorable word of it and then read it aloud over the telephone to the pitiable woman in New York who types my manuscripts while she took it all down on her machine. “But I’ve got people coming for dinner,” she kept saying. “But I can’t take it to your agent tomorrow, I promised to . . . ‘Gloriosky?’ What kind of word is that? I’d have said . . . Sally with an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’? You’re kidding!” The telephone bill will probably come to more than the thousands of dollars that sterling household magazine pays for good clean trash like the saga of Salli, but still it was finished. And so was Starr’s movie! My obligations, moral and otherwise, were paid up. I could start the novel I had tentatively promised my publisher for a year hence, I could drive Thos. Cook & Son mad by making and remaking plans for dragging our children through Switzerland in the summer. We could start accepting invitations—and even tender a few ourselves as long as we, and not Guadalupe, did the cooking. But after having appeared in a genuine movie, Guadalupe was too far above cooking even to turn out the usual daily barrels of rice and beans for her family. We could hire a car and take a short jaunt somewhere or we could just sit and loaf. At the moment I was in favor of nothing quite so much as a long nap.
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