Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  “Not my first lover or my last,” I say, “But the only one who woke me in the middle of the night to wonder how gay the Frog Footman was.”

  I don’t describe Scott’s telling me how trust funds worked and my awe at such things’ existence.

  At the Annex I don’t dwell on his downfall. “Maybe Scott Holman wasn’t meant for the long haul. He gave everything he had to one dream and you’ll see it wasn’t in vain.”

  There is some applause as the lights go down and I step aside. Just before the opening credits, the curators have inserted a tiny clip from the film. The Cheshire Cat (me in mask and costume) all lunatic smiles, pounces upon an invisible mouse.

  This gets laughs but I hear a woman murmur in the dark, “The cat must have been on Bonibo.” And I freeze. Right about the time the movie was made, an anonymous chemist achieved the dark marriage of junk and speed. Bonibo was the street name.

  Scott Holman interspersed the opening credits between shots of Alice waking from a nap on a wicker couch in the living room of our apartment.

  He told me early on what caught him about Lucinda. “She was at the center of this chaos of models, photographers, art directors on a fashion shoot. She wasn’t twenty but had this expression of amused disbelief. Just the way a modern Alice should react.

  Scott came from a well-to-do family that didn’t know what to make of a boy who read and reread Wonderland and Looking Glass. In his heart of hearts, this thin guy with thick glasses wanted to be Alice. Instead he tried to live through Lucinda.

  At moments early in the shooting, with her long blond hair and wide-open eyes, Lucinda combined Tenniel’s drawings of a self-assured Alice with her persona as a bright young woman in New York almost one hundred years later.

  On screen, Alice arose and parted the curtains. The first thing that caught her eye was a human sized rabbit played by an elegant kid in a waiter’s outfit with a white rabbit’s tail on the seat of his pants. He murmured to himself about being late.

  Alice took one look and slipped on her sandals. She wore a dancer’s cream-colored leotard and a long, flowing, embroidered blouse over it. Lucinda had designed what would be her costume throughout the film.

  The audience saw Alice go out the door, then saw her on the street. She followed the rabbit along that old block, hurried to keep up with him.

  Watching this on screen, I remember being across the street with Scott and Jackstone, his cameraman. They caught some good footage of the Rabbit and Alice. But gawkers and passers-by did double takes and ruined a lot of shots. This was street photography without red tape or licenses.

  What the viewer saw next was the rabbit running down a flight of stairs and through a door with Down the Rabbit Hole painted above it.

  Jackstone rarely spoke and never smiled. But he caught Alice following the rabbit through the door really nicely.

  Scott had been told about a legendary bar in the Village called Down the Rabbit Hole. Rich kids are used to getting what they want, but nobody could find him such a place.

  Over my last couple of years in the city I had learned more than he could imagine about how the Village worked. I knew, for instance, of a beat-to-hell bar located in a cellar on a back street. The owner was always broke.

  When I told Scott what I was going to do, he didn’t have total confidence in me. But I did get the hundred dollars I said it would take. With that I bribed the owner into painting Down the Rabbit Hole over his door. Scott was impressed.

  A bit later he said, “The Cheshire Cat’s a small part. Alex quit today and I’m giving it to you.” I was terrified. “All you need is that wild smile. I’ll coach you.”

  He then rented the place, which was a dark semi-hellhole with low lights and old, scarred furniture, for a shoot. Much of the newly assembled cast and extras of Some Kind of Wonderland were there in costume. Human-size birds and turtles, Mad Hatters and Dodos leaned on the bar. Men dressed as playing cards and women in crowns sat at tables. There’s no scene like it in the book. The camera caught me in my Cheshire cat suit. Gilda as the Duchess had a small guy in bonnet and gown who played her child, sitting on her knee.

  On screen the rabbit passed through the room and out a rear door with Alice following. Next we saw them go down a long, dimly lit corridor where she found a small table with a bottle and the note. “Drink me.” After debating the idea for a moment she popped the cork and took a belt.

  Back when I stood next to Scott watching her do this, I found it amusing. The bottle was full of tea.

  The next scene was shot from the floor up. Alice didn’t get giraffe-necked or anything. But Scott had Jackstone somehow make it seem that her head was floating on the ceiling like a helium balloon.

  Further down the hall she found a cake on another table. “Eat Me,” was written in frosting. Alice was a sensible but daring girl: so she did. Watching her on screen in The Film Annex fifty years later, knowing how fond of strange potions she became, I shivered.

  On screen, Alice started to cry. Mice and rats and birds, all human sized, watched a puddle of tears form.

  The next moment the audience saw a pool of tears with Alice swimming in it. This was shot a few nights later without too much light in the swimming pool at an old health club. To get us in after hours I’d bribed the night watchman.

  That night Scott was drinking and smoking weed. This evoked my mother and my home and showed me a part of him I didn’t want to see.

  Scott told Lucinda a couple of times; “Alice swam fully dressed in the pool of her tears.” Like this somehow meant she should be able to do that. Scott wanted to film her in semi-darkness swimming in tears. Lucinda couldn’t do much more than hang onto the pool’s ledge and kick her feet

  I saw him have trouble distinguishing the imaginary Alice from Lucinda in the real world.

  Jackstone was uninterested in anything not involving lenses. So I was the only one who actually worried about her drowning in the dark. One way sissy boys fulfilled their high-school gym requirement was the swim team. I stripped to my briefs and played lifeguard. When Lucinda had trouble staying afloat, I jumped in and helped her out of the water.

  Scott wasn’t pleased. But she and I weren’t that different in height and my hair in those days was long and blondish. I wore the Alice outfit and the scene was dimly lighted enough that the viewer saw what could well be Alice swimming in tears with her clothes plastered to her.

  That night I saw Scott divide people into those who could help fulfill his fantasies and those couldn’t. He relied on me and I was in awe of him. But I remembered that night.

  As I thought about it, the audience in the Annex watched the White Rabbit scamper by, talking to himself about his impending execution by the queen. He threw open a door and outside there was sunshine.

  Then he noticed Alice all dry and dressed somehow and said, “Mary Ann, quick now fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan,” before he stepped into the light.

  On screen, Alice in her leotard and blouse, but looking a bit wary followed the Rabbit out the door and onto a street paved with broken cobblestones.

  Scott and Jackstone had complained about their trouble shooting in noisy, crowded Greenwich Village. So I’d taken them on a tour of the lost Washington Market neighborhood that I knew about. He was fascinated, and from then on much of the film was set in a world stranger than anything in the book.

  Empty brick hulks with faded wooden signs like: Collin Brothers: Egg Brokers and Josephson: Grain Wholesaler lined the streets. The windows were full of jagged glass and seemed to stare down on Alice or any trespasser, with expressions of shock and horror. At the end of the street was a rusty elevated highway and beyond that the murky Hudson River.

  In this neighborhood nothing moved and there was little noise. Most of the abandoned buildings had rusted loading docks.

  On screen, Alice and the audience saw something blue move on one of those docks. It was a large caterpillar smoking a hookah. He stared at her and asked disdainfully, “Who are
you?”

  And she answered, “I hardly know, sir, just at present,” and told him she had been several different people since that morning.

  Watching her on screen, I felt exactly as I had when I saw her perform this scene on that wrecked street fifty years before. She had her lines down and delivered them. But her Alice seemed a bit remote and withdrawn—changed by the world into which she’d wandered.

  When Scott whispered to me, “The city’s making our Alice tough,” I got that when he talked about Alice he was talking about himself.

  “Explain yourself,” said the Caterpillar and took another hit from the hookah.

  “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid sir, because I’m not myself, you see.” When Lucinda delivered that line, it sounded like the truth.

  But the contemptuous insect again spoke with disdain, “I don’t see.”

  All this was in the script and the Caterpillar is a satiric creation. But I’d heard the actor playing the part express his contempt for people like Lucinda and me, because he was a professional and we weren’t.

  Scott let the scene play out. The viewer saw Alice appear to break off and eat a piece of the mushroom on which the caterpillar sat.

  Then he muttered, “The scene doesn’t go anywhere,” and looked at me like he expected a solution. I was in the next scene and was already in the Cheshire mask and costume. Before the second take I said, “I can jazz it.”

  Scott nodded. When he said “Action” I was moving toward the loading dock. The other thing sissy boys did in high school was gymnastics.

  Late in life a sudden glimpse of yourself when young can be like a flash of sunlight in a dark woods.

  Before the Caterpillar even spoke, my Cheshire Cat with his mad grin, grabbed the pipe from the hookah and drew deeply.

  On screen I imitated a cat doing a long, fond inhalation. My eyes crossed and my mad smile seemed to spread all the way to my ears. Later I found out this was called improvisation. On my own inspiration, I crouched down, hissed at something only I could see and pounced on an invisible mouse.

  My shenanigans ended up in the film. Watching in The Annex I was impressed at how catlike and off script I’d managed to be.

  The Caterpillar stared at me, affronted, and I was pleased to see how pissed off I’d made him. He was just an actor with a couple of off-Broadway credits. I was the director’s boyfriend.

  After shooting stopped that day, Scott turned to me and said, “We should drop by Down the Rabbit Hole. The crowd there is amazing.”

  I smiled and reminded him that he had hired that entire crowd. He seemed startled, but I knew he had a lot of things on his mind.

  In the front row of The Film Annex, Gilda sitting beside me says, “Now my big moment is here.”

  On screen the Duchess went into her act. Gilda in the movie wore an enormous, misshapen hat. Flaming ringlets of red hair clashed with a chartreuse lipstick shade never seen before or since. Her dress looked like an orange tablecloth tied around her waist.

  During the filming I’d heard about a tired, old restaurant on the waterfront that had suddenly gone out of business and left everything behind. For a price we shot the Duchess’s house scene in the kitchen.

  On screen a shrill-voiced midget played the cook. She and the Duchess tossed plates and cutlery at each other.

  Then Gilda held “the baby” who actually was the very short actor she’d held in her lap at the Rabbit Hole.

  Gilda smacked his ass while he pretended to sneeze. On the first take Gilda had felt too softhearted to lay into him.

  But when he complained that he wasn’t given enough screen time, she got way more aggressive.

  Scott had paid someone to come up with a raucous tune for the famous song that she sang far off key:

  Speak roughly to your little boy

  And beat him when he sneezes

  He only does it to annoy.

  Because he knows it teases

  The cook, the Duchess, even the “little boy” sang it. Then the Duchess’s Frog Footman and The Queen’s Fish Footmen, the White Rabbit and a lizard, a dodo, a lobster and finally Alice and the Cheshire Cat and a dozen others appeared behind them and we all sang. I think it was the White Rabbit who began doing the Twist. That stupid dance was several years old by then. But we all knew it and did our own versions of it. Lucinda was smiling.

  Scott too was wide-eyed. I never saw such joy on his face before or after. The next day, he had us dancing on a wrecked street in Washington Market. Everyone who saw the movie in its first incarnation agreed this was a great chaotic moment.

  Fifty years later the Annex audience applauds. I turn and watch Lucinda stare up at herself on screen. Gilda whispers something to her and she cracks a tiny smile.

  With almost no preliminaries, the Red Queen (a tall, mad-eyed drag) strode on screen. And she and Gilda as the Duchess had a short but vicious croquet game on a patch of dying grass. They glared at each other with genuine hate and used pink lawn-ornament flamingos to whack balls across the lawn.

  Then I watch Lucinda in her Alice outfit and ringlets walk down a Washington Market alley that looked like Berlin after the bombing. This was from the period in the shooting when she wanted me on screen with her all the time.

  Unless it involved swimming or somersaults I never was much of a performer. I got reminded of this as I watched myself on screen standing in the shadow of a building. Alice walked by and I was supposed to ask her, “What happened to the Duchess’s baby?” Rather than expose the New Jersey accent I was trying desperately to lose, Scott had an actor overdub my lines.

  “It turned into a pig,” Alice said and shrugged.

  “I thought it would,” the actor’s voice replied. But his dubbed voice and my lips didn’t coordinate. The Annex audience notices and titters.

  Then a Jackstone shot silenced them. Scott had him catch me in evening light and the camera made me fade until only the mask and my phony smile were there: a nice effect.

  “Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” Alice said. This was said in the voice of an Alice who had seen quite a bit. “But a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing.”

  Just after I’d read the book Scott told me, “Alice, behind her nice upper-class manners, is kind of a remote, survivor.” I’d never met people like Alice or like him. I took in what he said but didn’t much understand.

  Only later did I realize how a kid who never quite fit into his well-to-do family could worship Alice’s independent spirit. In Lucinda he created an Alice with the beauty and confidence he could only dream about.

  Back then I mostly managed not to think of home. And I tried not to notice how Lucinda at times acted secretively like my mother did when she got hold of a new pain killer prescription.

  The morning we were about to shoot the Mad Tea Party scene it was obvious to me. I asked Lucinda what she was on. She just gave me her coldest Alice look ever, turned her back and walked away. I wasn’t in the tea party scene probably at the request of Johnny Breen.

  On the Annex screen, the March Hare and Mad Hatter are at a long table on a cobblestone street. They were played by Breen and Ted Libber, a duo who billed themselves as a “Neo-Vaudeville act.”

  Libber, as I recall, was okay. But Breen had spotted Scott, new to the city and just down from Yale. He’d attached himself to Scott as if they were an item. Johnny Breen was there the night Scott found me at the Village Gate.

  On screen the duo start crying “No room. No room,” as soon as Alice appears. They run through their routine and yank the dormouse out of the teapot with eye rolls and shtick that was older than Alice in Wonderland itself.

  They could carry a tune. The Annex audience, in a friendly mood, applauds their singing:

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

  How I wonder what you’re at!

  Up above the world you fly,

  Like a tea tray in the sky.”

  I rise and walk to the back of the house. Breen was full
of resentment the moment he saw me on the set with Scott. Fifty years after I’d forgotten him, I discovered he hated me still.

  One of my tasks for the revival of Some Kind of Wonderland had been contacting as many surviving veterans of the film as possible. Gilda had lists of everyone who appeared on or off camera. Certain names were crossed off because of death. Libber was deceased. There were question marks next to those whose status and/or location was unknown.

  Tommy Breen was one of the potentially missing and I’ll admit, even after all these years, to not having put a lot of effort into finding him.

  So encountering him in the evening dusk a few days before the Wonderland showing was uncanny and unpleasant. Breen came around a corner near my place as I walked by. Like he’d planned an ambush, he stood in front of me on the sidewalk as ethereal as a puff of smoke and smiling a tight smile. Two old men stared at each other.

  “No room, no room,” he said in a hoarse whisper. Then he said, “I introduced Scott Holman to avant-garde theater in New York. I guided him when he babbled about doing Alice in dirty old New York. Next thing I knew a certain gutter rat was sleeping with him, appearing in Scott’s movie even though he had never acted.

  “Libber and I got a few days work out of that film and nothing more. We’d hoped for a sequel. But the movie flopped. Then Scott was dead. Everyone knew you’d given him an overdose but somehow you didn’t get touched. We wondered who you bribed, how much you stole.”

  I made myself smile and said, “No one killed Scott. He still lives. Come to his show and see for yourself. I stepped around him. Breen tried to block me and it seemed like I walked right through him.

  Standing at the back of the theater, I’m still not sure if that meeting was real or a dream. Breen couldn’t imagine any motives on my part but theft and murder. That was his stupidity. But I think about Scott and how lost and innocent he was. I could have saved him if I hadn’t been so young and in awe.

  When I turn my attention back to the film, Alice with a fixed smile wanders with the Cheshire Cat under a corroded highway and down to a junk-filled beach. A tugboat pulls a bunch of barges up the Hudson and sunlight comes through layers of good, old-fashioned New York smog.