by Rick Lenz
She doesn’t say anything, but watches me for a longer moment than I ever noticed before, and it’s making me edgy, like I’m about to be found out. I’m afraid she might cry out “Trespasser” and call the police or the FBI or … whoever.
“Maybe what you say about me is true,” she says. “Maybe we found each other for a reason. I’d like to go back in time and change a few things, but I think it’s too late for that. I think we’ve waited too many years.”
“Things will change, Margaret. Things will change.”
“Yes, they will, Richard. I’m sure of it.”
It crosses my mind to wonder if that’s a threat.
My nightmare wakes me up at four a.m. I put on my robe, unlock the door, go out into the hall and move cautiously to the top of the staircase. I look down at the foyer.
It’s exactly the same as in the nightmare I’d been having before I ever saw this place, except that now there is no light coming through the passageway from the living room.
A feeling of dread passes through me, compounded by the overtones of the dream I’m now living. I feel like a hostage, manacled and gagged—the ghost in somebody else’s machine. As I stand, looking down, wanting to descend the stairs but afraid to, I wish I could wake up.
But I’m already awake.
6
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1956
When I open my eyes, it’s nine in the morning. I shower, shave, and brush my teeth with a brush I’ve evidently used many times. I get out a clean shirt and start to put on the seersucker suit from the day before, then stop myself and decide instead on a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved blue-green madras shirt.
When I get downstairs, Lily is working on a jigsaw puzzle at the dining room table. It’s a surprisingly difficult-looking puzzle.
Margaret says, “Your eggs are almost ready.” She always starts Richard’s breakfast when she hears the water from the shower being turned off.
I eat toast, bacon, and two poached eggs. I have cholesterol misgivings but think, Why not? I’m only subletting.
The rodent-faced neighbor from next door comes by after breakfast to collect on a pledge Margaret has made to Easter Seals.
Her name is Amy Jaekel. Richard doesn’t like her. Yesterday wasn’t the first time he’s caught her in the act of what looks to him like spying.
A Richard memory kicks in of Amy Jaekel peeking at him through a window. When he looked up and saw her eyeing him, she immediately rapped on the window and told him she’d knocked at the door but nobody had answered.
I answer it now. “Good morning, Mrs. Jaekel.”
“Hello, Richard,” she says with a toothy smile. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” She speaks with an Irish lilt that sounds like it’s out of a bad road-company production of something by Sean O’Casey.
“Yes, very nice.”
“I’m collectin’ for the Easter Seals. Your lovely Margaret made a pledge for two dollars, but she said I’d have to collect it from you. So here I am just as brazen as you please to ask you to fork it right over.” She pronounces fork “farrrk,” with a trilled “r.”
I reach into my back pocket for my wallet.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be keepin’ my wallet there if I were you, Richard, the world being so full of deceitful people. I read that a man should never carry his wallet on his hip for fear of pickpockets.”
“Well, mine’s still here after a lot of years.”
I “farrrk” over the two dollars and put the wallet back in my hip pocket.
“I know I’m right, young sir. Thank you for this.” She puts the money in an Easter Seals envelope, then cocks her head like an attentive golden retriever. “How’s poor Lily doin’?” She always calls her “poor Lily.”
“Just fine, Mrs. Jaekel. Lily’s doing very well, thank you.” I hope I sound testy.
“Well, if there’s ever anything I can be doin’ farr you, you let me know, won’t you?”
“I will. Thanks for coming by.” I put my hand on the door to close it.
“You won’t be farrrgettin’?”
“No, I won’t be farrrgettin.’”
“Bye-bye, then.” She turns and strides down the front steps and back toward her house.
I watch her until she’s disappeared into her own yard, remembering the dirty look she gave me the day before. Under my breath, I say, “I hope you trip and break your neck.” Then, also under my breath, “That was unnecessary.”
“What are you doing, Richard?”
I turn and see Margaret watching me, giving me the same look medical doctors give you when you tell them about the Chinese herbs you’re taking.
“I was just … getting ready to go look for the obsidian I need.”
“I see. All right, Richard. You go on then. You go right ahead.”
She gives me a grocery list, and I go out to an old-fashioned market called Harry’s Stockroom. I buy milk in a bottle and Bab-O sink cleanser and a bar of Lava soap and a sack full of Mary Jane and Necco candies that are one of Lily’s weaknesses and a lot of other products that, except for the packaging, are the same things I always buy. I think about buying a pack of cigarettes that promise “Smooth smoking, mild tobacco pleasure.” Another brand’s advertising features a genial-looking Ronald-Reagan type saying, “We’re tobacco men, not medicine men.”
Oh, what the hell? Even though I’ve given up smoking, this has to qualify as an occasion. Who knows what a surgeon general is in 1956, anyway?
I stop by Dean’s Drugstore on the way home. I’m not sure if they sell drugs. They have everything else: cosmetics, gifts, various grocery and hardware items, greeting cards, stationery, school supplies, and almost every kind of candy there is. It’s like a tiny Walmart but with charm, and there is no doubt that the smiles I get from Mr. and Mrs. Dean are genuine and not company-authorized policy.
I sit at a soda fountain with a beautiful old green marble counter. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sit at it too, separately sipping their drinks. The girl, who is only one stool away from me—a skinny, pimply fourteen-year-old with suspiciously large, rigid breasts and too much makeup—is reading a dog-eared EC horror comic, on the cover of which is a frightened-looking woman peering into a mirror. You can see the woman’s reflection in the mirror. It’s a skeleton.
As I wait for Mr. Dean to come take my order, I see that the voice bubble coming out of the mouth of the skeleton in the mirror is saying, “This is the way you really are and will eventually look—unless you …” The girl studies the story, knitting her brow in uneasy concentration, trying, I assume, to come up with a tactic to avoid ending up like the woman on the cover.
There is a paperback book rack near my end of the soda fountain. Some of the titles are Peyton Place, Kiss Me Deadly, The Power of Positive Thinking, and ’Twixt Twelve and Twenty by Pat Boone. Among the publications displayed on the magazine stand are twenty-five or thirty comic books, several newspapers, TV Guide, US News & World Report, Time, and Newsweek, as well as McCall’s, Look, True, Life, Collier’s, Boys’ Life, and Confidential. On the cover of that is a picture of a smiling Marilyn Monroe and the playwright Arthur Miller, who is gazing fondly at her.
Being so close to her in time, I feel a confusing jealousy. I imagine her in Beverly Hills on the other side of the Santa Monicas, relaxing in a bubble bath, looking dreamily off into space.
Disgusted with myself, I pick up that day’s Los Angeles Times and am sitting back down on my stool when Mr. Dean appears to take my order.
He is small, with dyed-brown hair, and smells of bad cigars and Listerine. “What can I do you for, Dick?”
“Oh, just the usual, I guess, Phil. How’s the missus?”
“Pretty much the same, thanks. We’re both just grateful to be alert and vertical.”
“I know what you mean.”
Phil Dean goes off to get me the usual, leaving me to wonder what that might be.
It’s a cup of the best coffee I’ve ever had. The one I had with breakfast wasn’t
much. I imagine doing a commercial for Phil’s rich brew: “Brisk. Old-fashioned. Delightfully un-Starbucks-y.”
I fire up a cigarette and look at the Los Angeles Times.
I shake my head, staring bug-eyed, then look around to see if anyone has seen me. I look at the date again—April 11, 1956. My eyes are no doubt wobbling with disbelief despite having seen yesterday’s paper. I’m humming under my breath, “Happy birthday-hmmm-hmmm. Happy birthday-hmmm-hmmm.”
The next day, the twelfth of April, is Jack Cade’s birthday, my actual birth day, as in the natal kind, not an anniversary. I blink my eyes, again feeling marooned. If anything could, something as unhinged as this ought to have snapped me out of this dream.
In the newspaper, Ike has had a scare with heart disease but is still going to run for a second term. France is being severely tested in Algeria, and there is discussion as to what de Gaulle should do about it. There are rumors that Britain is going to try to land troops along with the French on the Suez Canal, but President Nasser says, “Egypt has always been a grave for invaders.” Martin Luther King is lobbying for the first federal civil rights legislation since the Civil War. The Cold War is hot, and according to an Orange County mayor, “The red menace has not diminished, is in fact growing, and there are still communists lurking in every corner of hometown America.”
James Dean has been sighted in a public place, even though he was killed in a car accident last October. The Giants are still playing at the Polo Grounds. The Dodgers are still “Dem Bums” from Brooklyn. The baseball season is just starting, and Ted Williams and Stan Musial are expected to have good seasons—which they do.
Richard Blake disagrees with Madison Avenue about “smooth smoking” and “tobacco pleasure.” After a coughing fit, I stub out the cigarette.
At one point, the teenage boy gets up from the counter and leaves. As he does, he brushes against the girl reading the comic book and says “Sorry” in a way that has nothing to do with apology. The girl says, “Gah-aieee” in a sliding nasal tone of disdain, then looks wistfully after him as he saunters away.
Richard needs to gather some fine-grain obsidian and knows of a field near the Mount Wilson Observatory where he can find it. (My knowledge of Richard’s day-to-day life seems to wax and wane. I don’t know why—it continues to feel as if he’s more interested in what I know than what he does. I feel him listen with fascination as my mind jumps around.) James Dean filmed Rebel Without a Cause at the observatory the previous year, a few months before he took off in his new Porsche 550 Spyder on his way to Central California’s Cholame Valley and a head-on collision with a Plymouth—and destiny.
I take the groceries home, promise Margaret I’ll be back by six, then drive south and east toward Pasadena.
On Riverside Drive in Studio City (the Hollywood Freeway has not yet been constructed to that point), I burst out of my manacles.
We’ll find the obsidian tomorrow. I’m too excited. I guess it’s okey-doke with Richard; he’s letting me do this. I don’t think this guy has a lot in his life he really cares about.
I turn onto Laurel Canyon and set off south over the Santa Monica Mountains. When I get to Sunset, a few blocks past Hollywood Boulevard on the other side, I take a quick jog to the left and park on the street, east of Schwab’s Pharmacy.
I sit at the counter, order a cup of coffee I don’t want, and eavesdrop on two longtime character actors, Charles Lane and Phil Leeds, talking together at a nearby table. Charlie is in the middle of a decades-long career playing judges, accountants, the IRS man in It’s a Wonderful Life, and various other functionaries. Phil has played a fascinating collection of Peter Lorre kinds of characters, including Dr. Shand in Rosemary’s Baby about thirteen years from now.
Charlie is saying, “If you keep your left arm stiff as a board, I mean you don’t bend it even the tiniest bit, and you keep your right elbow tight into your waist, then you’ll never hook a drive.”
Phil looks at him from under his hooded eyelids and says dryly, “But Charlie, I don’t play golf.”
With his characteristic bark, Charlie says, “There. I rest my case.”
I remember a moment in my past (actually, forty years into the future), realizing—despite the fact that I’d never wanted it in the first place—how much I’d absorbed my mother’s love of show business: Life with the dull parts left out. And for a short time when I was still a kid, I thought I might become one of the lucky few and had the exhilarating sensation of the whole world belonging to me—no, revolving around me.
Sophie apparently thinks I still feel that way.
Not today.
I once did A Man for All Seasons in Buffalo. The man staying in the room next to me at the Lafayette Hotel was a fat character actor named Ralph Groaman. He played Cardinal Wolsey in the show. I once asked him, “When do you get over being in love with yourself as an actor?” Ralph glowered at me—not meanly—and said, “As soon as you grow up, kiddo.” I cherished him like a grandfather. I hung onto an image I’d conjured of Ralph riding the elevator to the eighth floor late Saturday night after a performance, turning on the radio in his room, undressing, pouring himself a large Scotch, hoisting himself into a hot bath and sitting there listening to Guy Lombardo, his drink held loosely in the fleshy hand that hung over the edge of the tub, a weary nobody to most of the world who an hour earlier had been Cardinal Wolsey.
My dilemma is that if I let go of my character, Jack Cade, even though, in a sense, he is now fictional too, I might slip down into the water and drown.
I go up to the newsstand, buy a copy of Daily Variety, and sit back down to read it.
The King and I is in preproduction. Deborah Kerr is to headline, and “hot young newcomer” Yul Brynner will repeat his Broadway role. The Threepenny Opera, which opened last season Off-Broadway, is planning a second national tour. The Platters have two songs at the top of the charts: “My Prayer” and “The Great Pretender.” Edward R. Murrow is in trouble at CBS once again for expressing his social conscience, but board chairman William J. Paley is standing behind him. Life Begins at Eighty has been picked up for another season. The studios are shuffling executives as always, but not to the same degree they will after Harry Cohn of Columbia dies in 1958.
A stocky young man with crew-cut sandy hair sits down on the stool next to me, asks the waitress for a cup of coffee, and opens a copy of the Hollywood Reporter.
After a minute or so, he looks over and asks, “Did you do a Dragnet a few months ago?”
“No. I’ve never done a Dragnet.”
“I could have sworn we’ve worked together. My name’s Jesse. Jesse Littman. What have you done?”
Like most actors in that circumstance, I don’t miss a beat. “I’m Richard Blake. I haven’t done any film yet. Only stage.” To give myself some credibility, I add, “I understudied Gooper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway last season.”
“Did you get to go on?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. How’s it going for you?” I have a moment of panic trying to remember if Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was on Broadway last season.
“Not bad. I’ve done a Schlitz Playhouse and a December Bride and a couple of industrials this year.” Then he tells one of my favorite actor jokes: “An actor comes home,” he says, “and finds his best friend, Wally—also an actor—in bed with his wife and says, ‘Wally! What are you doing?’ And Wally says, ‘Well, I just finished an Alfred Hitchcock, and next week I’m starting a Gunsmoke.’”
We both laugh and Jesse says, “Are you up for Bus Stop?”
I have to think for a second. 1956. They’re shooting Bus Stop, with Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t see anything about it in Variety.
“Who’s directing?” I say, although I’m pretty sure I know.
“Josh Logan.”
“Oh, yeah? No, I’m not up for it. There’s nothing in it for me.”
“Yes, there is. There’s a role that wasn’t in the play. They wrote in a scene between Cherie and an East Coa
st urban guy to provide some conflict before she ends up with the cowboy. It’s the role of Lawrence. You should get your agent to send you up for it.”
“I haven’t got an agent … yet.”
“That’s too bad. You’re perfect.” He looks me over appraisingly. “‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ huh?” His thoughtful frown reconfigures itself into the beginnings of a smile. “You know, when I first came out here, somebody gave me a tip that ended up getting me a job.” He taps three fingers on the countertop. “You reap what you plant, right?” He gets up from his seat. “Hmmm. ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ Tell you what. Hang on a couple minutes.”
Less than five minutes later he returns, sits down again, writes out a name and address on a piece of paper, and hands it to me. “Here. Jerry Kennents. He’s my agent. He’s down on Doheny. I told him about you. I told him you were perfect for Lawrence in Bus Stop.”
“How am I perfect?” I can’t imagine why I would ask such a dumb question.
“You give off the feeling of being kind of urban, a little wry, but … pleasant, sincere … straightforward. You’re the right age. Right look.” He shrugs. “Fuck it, you seem like this guy ought to be.”
My eyebrows are locked in the up position. “That’s really … really nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it. What goes around comes around. I told him you’d be right over.”
“I don’t have any pictures and résumés with me.”
“Well, shit. You should always keep some in your car. Where do you live?”
“In the Valley.”
“Well, shit. I told him you’d be right over.” Jesse deliberates for a couple of seconds. “Listen, go give it a shot anyway. You can get him your stuff tomorrow if he’s interested.”