The Alexandrite

by Rick Lenz

  I grin at him. “Listen, I …” I reach into my pocket for change. “How much is the coffee?” As I ask, I realize I already know.

  Jesse looks at me oddly. “A dime.”

  I turn away and look at the coins in my hand. I have two dimes, three quarters, a nickel, and a few pennies. I check the dates, thinking I don’t want to leave any coins from the nineties. But of course, Richard’s coins are all from 1956 or before.

  I put the nickel and one of the quarters on the counter to cover our coffees, plus a ten-cent tip. Jesse wishes me luck, tells me he’s usually in Schwab’s on weekday mornings, and that I should stop in and tell him how it went.

  I would have liked to stay longer. I would have liked to speak to some of the actors here in their younger years, but I don’t want to hurt Jesse Littman’s feelings.

  I know there’s no such character as Lawrence in the movie of Bus Stop. When I was twenty-two, I tried out for the role of the cowboy, Bo, for a summer stock production. I didn’t get cast, but I worked hard on the audition and got to know the play pretty well. I remember the movie. There is no Lawrence to “provide conflict” before Cherie (Marilyn Monroe) ends up with Bo (Don Murray). But if there had been, Richard would have been perfect. Jesse said so. Damn it!

  I get into the Olds, look up at the Chateau Marmont hotel and wonder if Harriet Brown is staying there now, then give some thought to how much fun it might have been if Jesse Littman had been able to give me a real lead.

  I drive west on Sunset Boulevard. It doesn’t look a whole lot different. Some of the names have changed—the Saint James Club is back to being the Sunset Towers Apartments, the Comedy Store is Ciro’s again, the Rainbow Bar and Grill is the Villa Nova once more. A few of the high-rise office buildings are yet to be built, but to Jack’s eye, things look very much the same. I pass the Garden of Allah, due to close its doors for the last time in August 1959, Scandia, and the Cock and Bull, which will survive until the late eighties, and the Roxy will still be there on the day I meet Dr. Partridge. But the Trocadero, Mocambo, and the Sunset Strip of the rowdy early Hollywood days are all long gone in 1956.

  As I pass the Cock and Bull, I pull convulsively into the left lane and, fighting a fit of giggles, turn onto Doheny and roll down to the address Jesse Littman gave me.

  Jerry Kennents’ office is on the second floor of a modest white adobe house. The office door is on the side at the top of a flight of white wooden stairs that could use a paint job. A mousy-haired young woman with braces and wire-frame glasses sits at a dull yellow Formica-topped table that serves as a reception desk just inside the screen door. She is reading a copy of Photoplay. Mitzi Gaynor smiles out from the cover.

  I rap on the door. “Hey. How are ya? I’m Richard Blake.”

  She thwacks her Photoplay down on the desk and smiles nervously up at me. “Hi there.” Then, recovering, “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Jesse Littman told Mr. Kennents about me. I’m expected.”

  “Oh. Okay then.” She picks up the phone and after a moment, says, “Mr. Kennents? Richard Blake’s here to see you … All right.” She hangs up, giving me a friendly smile along with a tiny shrug that says she isn’t really part of this world, just an unintentional witness to it. “You can go right in.”

  Jerry Kennents looks about fifty years old but, because he carries excess weight, could be younger. He looks up from some papers on his desk.

  “Whaddayasay, Dick. Jesse tells me you’re a helluvan actor.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So let me see your picture and résumé.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have one.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No. I’m sorry. All my things were shipped out from New York, and they haven’t arrived yet.”

  “I see. You’re from New York.” That interests him. “Broadway?” he says hopefully.

  “I understudied Gooper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  “Did you ever play it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Thirty … forty times.”

  Kennents’ lips and eyebrows arch up, a sign of grudging respect that makes him look like Mussolini. “Uh-huh. What else? What other shows you done?”

  Jack, not to mention Richard, is drawing a blank on pre-1956 plays. “Shakespeare. I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare … Hamlet. I played Hamlet.”

  “Where?”

  “At the … Hayes Theatre Festival.”

  “Helen?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Helen Hayes?”

  “Yes. It’s in Connecticut—her festival.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It just started up a couple of years ago.”

  Kennents narrows his eyes. “How did you come to the business so late? Were you in the service?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “That’s right.”

  “Where were you? I was in the Pacific. Navy.”

  “I was in Europe. Army. Just after Normandy.”

  Kennents looks out the window, remembering. “It was hell, huh?”

  “Hell,” I say. I look out the window too.

  The agent tells me a few stories about his time in the Pacific. A tear comes to his eye as he remembers friends who were killed at Guadalcanal.

  I try to remember any of my father’s stories from the war as they were passed on to me by my mother, but my father had never really gotten close to any action. I say, “I remember crawling toward a German bunker during the Battle of the Bulge. We’d been driven almost back to the Meuse River. It was Christmas Eve, 1944. I couldn’t feel my feet it was so cold. Then the sergeant raised his hand and all that was left of our company began to charge the bunker. I hadn’t taken two steps when I felt something hit me in the gut, and I fell. I remember lying there with my face in the snow and mud, wondering if my mom was thinking about me on Christmas Eve and whether we’d win the war or not.”

  “My God,” said Kennents. “What happened?”

  I’d done the piece as well as I had for the acting class I’d learned it for in the late eighties. Now, I begin to improvise, encouraged. “I was flown back stateside. By the time I was fully recovered, the war was over.” Concentrating as hard as I can, I manage to come up with an actor’s tear. Or maybe the tear comes from Richard, who’s never heard that story before. “I lost a lot of my buddies too,” I say.

  Kennents nods and wipes at his cheek again.

  Now I remember the names of a few plays. I tell him I was in Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie and All My Sons by Arthur Miller, and Beyond the Horizon, the first Pulitzer Prize winner by Eugene O’Neill.

  Kennents smiles warmly, then seems to take me in all over again. “You know, Jesse’s right. You’re perfect for that role.” He picks up the phone and dials. “Hey, Peggy. Jerry Kennents. Let me talk to Joyce, will ya? Yeah, I’ll hang on.” He covers the mouthpiece. “The secret of Hollywood is not being too proud to wait on the line while somebody plays their furshlugginer power game with you.”

  He speaks into the receiver again. “Hi, Joyce. Yeah. I know. I know. Brutal. You’re right … Yeah, vermin, all of them. Listen, I’ve got an actor here with fantastic New York experience who’s right on the money for the role of Lawrence … Dick Blake … Oh Christ, he was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway last season. Incredible reviews … Well, if you’ve got to make a decision today, you’d better see him today …” He grins appealingly. “Perfect … Fan-damn-tabulous. He’s on his way over.”

  He hangs up the phone. “You’re going to Twentieth. Do you know how to get there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going directly to the Bus Stop production office. Ask for Joyce Faberman. Don’t waste any time. They’re casting this role today.”

  I stare dumbly at him.

  He grins at me and winks. “We gotta look out for each other.” He gets up and puts his arm around his potential new client’s shoulder. “I just hope to hell you can act.”

  The lot at Twentieth Century Fox is bu
zzing with activity, the television and movie industries working side by side, although I know movie veterans still view television with no more enthusiasm than reluctant cattlemen beholding the sorry reality of sheep.

  The first thing I notice about it on this April 11th is the penetrating, fusty smells of the place, like the ones I remember from when I was a child and first visited movie studios with my mother. (She would say to me “Break a leg, baby” as we entered each one. Rita is more than averagely superstitious and she imagined such things might one day influence the fates into making her little boy a star.) Now I’m reminded of old Hollywood—the way it must have been when it was bristling new, before all the crazy myth-making and the celebrity mania became so totally deranged.

  But old Hollywood still does exist in 1956. Bogart is still here, Edward G. Robinson, Gable, Cooper, Rita Hayworth. Paul Newman is just a kid from Broadway. Brad Pitt won’t be born until the mid sixties.

  Feeling scared but excited, like a ten-year-old set loose in Disneyland without his mommy, I walk toward the Bus Stop production office.

  7

  Joyce Faberman, the casting director, tells me she’s agreed to meet me because she likes Jerry Kennents and because Mr. Logan is having trouble making up his mind on who to go with for the role. She says Logan is a lovely man, “and a perfectionist,” and she knows he won’t mind seeing one more actor before he makes up his mind.

  She gives me the scene and tells me to look it over as quickly as I can, that Mr. Logan is in his office at the moment, but that he has a meeting with the movie’s screenwriter, George Axelrod, in less than half an hour.

  I am going to meet Joshua Logan, one of the biggest names in American theatre and film. By the end of his career, Logan will have directed or cowritten Knickerbocker Holiday, Charley’s Aunt, Sayonara, Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky, Camelot, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Happy Birthday by Anita Loos, Mister Roberts, and Picnic. It’s an awe-inspiring list that goes on and on. For any actor, just a meeting with Josh Logan is something he will never forget.

  To calm myself, I think back to my actor’s anthology of mind-control techniques. Unfortunately, that slim volume has been out of circulation for a while. Anyway, by now, it’s no more than a muddled compilation of superstitions and the mixed-bag wisdom of old actors who teach and write about what they—most of them—would give a kidney to still be hired to do.

  I try to lose myself in the task at hand.

  It’s a three-page scene. Lawrence works for the Department of the Interior. He’s been at a weather station about a mile away from the bus stop where the passengers have gotten snowed in when the blizzard hits. I am to walk over shortly before the final scene between Cherie and Bo to see if everybody is all right. In his scene with Cherie, she tells him her troubles and starts to get a crush on him.

  I go out onto a balcony that overlooks several soundstages and a big chunk of Los Angeles—borderless suburb masquerading as a city. I look toward the east, the vista limited only by the haze of millions of cars and trucks and by industry and the inversion layer that pushes the whole repugnant miasma down to the level where everybody is driving around, or God forbid walking, trying to grab enough lungfuls of air to sustain life.

  At first, the scene looks easy. I read it over a couple of times to get the feel of it, then go back to Lawrence’s longest speech and work on that.

  Cherie: “You’re a real good listener.”

  Lawrence: “You’re nice to listen to, miss. I’ve been out here for quite a while now, and I’ve felt all alone every minute of that time. But, in about two minutes, you’ve made me feel like we’re kindred souls. I think it’s your eyes. You have more love and kindness in your eyes than I’ve found in this whole damned state.”

  Then she is to start to kiss him, and he says, “I wish I wasn’t married.”

  It occurs to me why—if the scene was shot at all—it ended up on the cutting room floor.

  I have other problems. My timing feels off, and along with that I can’t seem to judge how much emphasis to give each word. Whatever Jack Cade has as an actor doesn’t want to come out of Richard Blake.

  “Mr. Logan will see you now.”

  As Joyce and I come into his office, Joshua Logan is seated behind his desk, taking a bite from a sandwich. He puts it into his left hand, brushes the right one off on a crumpled napkin, shakes the actor’s hand and says, “Excuse me.” He indicates his lunch, then points to a leather Queen Anne chair in front of his desk. I sit down where I’m directed to and Joyce sits nearby while Logan finishes chewing his mouthful of food. He looks like a frazzled elder out of something by F. Scott Fitzgerald, his hairline on its way from high to receding, his intelligent eyes seemingly gazing in several directions at once, apparently distracted by competing directorial dilemmas.

  Finally, he looks up and scrutinizes me. “What do you think of the movie business so far?”

  “It looks pretty hectic.”

  Logan smiles. “It makes the biggest Broadway production look like a stroll in the park. Joyce tells me you’re from New York.”

  “That’s right.” I pray I won’t be asked anything specific.

  “I love stage actors,” he says. “People tell you that stage acting and film acting are very different things. They’re not. The big difference is that for film, you don’t have to worry about anyone beyond the first row.”

  I grin earnestly, trying to think of a cool response to that, then find myself blaming Richard as he falters, “Uh-huh, right, yes. Oh yes, right, that’s, that’s, that’s … for … absolutely.”

  “Umm-hmm. Okay,” says Logan, his pensive smile dissolving into fey puzzlement. “Shall we have a crack at it?”

  “Yeah, sure. Yes. Okay.” I look at the first page of the scene. The words swim on the paper. “Can I have a … just a second?”

  “Of course.”

  I stand up, walk to the window, and take a long, silent breath, trying to remember something an acting teacher once told me about playing this kind of scene, but I can’t. I can’t remember the acting teacher’s name. I can’t remember my name. Names.

  I move stiffly back to my chair, sit down, and try to focus on Joyce.

  It’s impossible to make her Cherie in my mind. In the corner of my field of vision, Logan sits behind his desk, impassive, waiting.

  The words come out of my mouth like leaden things. When I get to my big speech and say, “I think it’s your eyes. You have more love and kindness in your eyes than I’ve found in this whole damned state,” it flashes through my mind what a crummy thing I’m doing, destroying the good relationship Jerry Kennents has with this casting director. She’ll never see any of his clients again.

  It’s over.

  I put my script down and force myself to look at the director. Logan doesn’t say a word. He blinks two or three times, seems to sniff the air around him, puts an index finger to both sides of his mustache, looks at Joyce, then back at me and says, “That is the most splendid audition I have heard in longer than I can remember.”

  I stare at him.

  “That is the truest, most honest, unactorish reading I’ve heard in a long, long time. You made me believe this was a man who’d never stepped foot on a stage. Who did you study with?”

  “Herbert Berghof.” My throat is completely dry.

  “I’m not always Herbert’s biggest fan, but you made that scene come to life. You weren’t afraid to show me a lost, awkward … ambiguous soul. If it were up to me, I’d offer you the part right now …” He shrugs. “But Marilyn has final approval … I wouldn’t worry, though. She’ll go along with what I want. Can you come in tomorrow morning and meet her?”

  “Yes … Yes … I … I can.”

  “I was hoping she’d be here today, but …” He turns his palms up, as if to say you may as well tell the winds to turn around and blow the other way. “Why don’t we say ten o’clock then, all right? You probably won’t be seeing her much before noon. She has a lit
tle … tardiness problem. But you’d better be here at ten, just in case.”

  “All right.”

  “And be prepared to start rehearsals right afterwards. Is that all right?”

  I nod stupidly. Logan smiles at me. Joyce gets up, and I follow her out of the office.

  After I’ve floated out of the production offices, I find the nearest public telephone, call Jerry Kennents’ office and leave Richard Blake’s home phone number with Virginia, his secretary. She tells me Kennents is on another line but that Joyce Faberman has called to confirm my meeting at ten o’clock the next morning with Joshua Logan and (as Jack shouts in a hoarse whisper after Richard has hung up) “Marilyn fucking Monroe!”

  8

  I drive over Beverly Glen Canyon into the Valley and travel almost a mile east on Ventura Boulevard before I remember that Jack Cade doesn’t currently live in North Hollywood, and that I’m not even going to be born until early the next day. I think briefly about trying to forget Richard Blake and driving to Kingman, Arizona, where Jack Cade will be coming into the world.

  But that would mean I’d miss out on meeting Marilyn. My heart is hammering.

  I turn around and head out to the West Valley and 1833 Shoemaker Drive. I grip the steering wheel of the Oldsmobile with all the strength in my hands, then relax. Then I squeeze it again until Richard’s hands ache.

  I’m halfway to La Vieja when I realize I’m going to be home early. It’s only midafternoon, and I have no obsidian to show for my time. Richard knows Margaret won’t care about what mineral specimens he brings home, but she might wonder at him having none.

  Lily is in the library, watching television. The channel she has on isn’t currently broadcasting. There’s only snow on the screen.

  “What are you watching?”

  “The television.”

  “There’s no program.”

  “Isn’t there?”