by Glenn Grant
See also: GUNSLINGERS; HOLLYWOOD EXISTENTIALISM; LAW AND ORDER; WESTERNS.
MACCOBY, VANCE (1938?– ). Actor. Born Henry Mulvin in Salt Lake City, Utah. Frequent guest spots in WAGON TRAIN, RIVER-BOAT, CAPTAIN CHRONOS, THE ZONE BEYOND, etc. 1957–59. Lead in the 1960 oater STRANGER IN TOWN and the short-lived 1961 private eye show MAX PARADISE, canceled after 6 episodes. Subsequent activities unknown. One of dozens of nearly interchangeable identikit male stars of the first period of episodic TV drama, Maccoby had a certain brooding quality, particularly in b/w, that carried him far, but apparently lacked the resources for the long haul. See also STARS AND STARDOM.
—From The Complete TV Encyclopedia, Chuck Gingle, editor.
There was something distinctly odd about the young man in the white loafers and pompadour hair-style, the young man who had been haunting the ante-room of his office all day.
Had the Kookie look come back? Feldman wondered.
“Look, kid,” he said, not unkindly, “as my secretary told you. I’m not taking on any more clients. I have a full roster right now. You’d really be much better off going to Talentmart, or one of those places. They specialize in, you know, unknowns.”
“And as I told your secretary,” the young man said, “I don’t want to be an actor, I want to hire one. One of your clients. This is strictly a business proposition.”
Business proposition my ass, Feldman thought. Autograph hunter, more like. But he said wearily, “Which one would that be? Lola Banks? Dirk Raymond?”
“Vance Maccoby.”
“Vance Maccoby?” For a moment he had to struggle to place the name. “Vance Maccoby?” he said again. “That bum? What the hell do you want with Vance Maccoby?”
“Mr. Feldman, I represent a group of overseas investors interested in independently producing a TV series for syndicated sale. We want Mr. Maccoby to star. However, we have so far been unable to locate him.”
“I haven’t represented him in years. No one has. He hasn’t worked in years. Not since … what was that piece of crap called? Max Paradise? I don’t like to speak ill of former clients, but the man was impossible, you know. A drunk. Quite impossible. No one could work with him.”
“We’re aware of that,” the young man said. “We’ve taken all that into consideration, and we are still interested in talking to Mr. Maccoby. We think he is the only man for the part. And we believe that if anyone can find him, you can.”
The young man opened his briefcase and fumbled inside it. “We would like,” he continued, “to retain your services toward that end. And we are prepared to make suitable remuneration whether or not a contract should be signed with Mr. Maccoby and whether or not you choose to represent him as agent of record in that transaction.”
“Kid,” Feldman began, “what you need is a private detective—” He stopped and stared at the bar-shaped object in the young man’s hand. “Is that gold?”
“It certainly is, Mr. Feldman. It certainly is.”
The young man laid the bar on the desk between them.
“An ounce of gold?”
“One point three four ounces,” said the young man. “We apologize for the unusual denomination.”
He held open the briefcase. “I have twenty-four more such bars here. At the New York spot price this morning, this represents a value of approximately fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars to find Vance Maccoby?” Feldman said.
He got up and paced around the desk.
“Is this stuff hot?” he asked, pointing to the briefcase, feeling like a character in one of the more banal TV shows into which he booked his clients.
“Hot?” echoed the young man. He reached out and touched the gold bar on the desk. “A few degrees below room temperature, I would say.”
“Cute,” Feldman said. “Don’t be cute. Just tell me, is this on the level?”
“Oh, I see,” said the young man. “Yes, absolutely. We have a property which we wish to develop, to which we have recently purchased the rights from the estate of the late Mr. Kenneth Odell. There is only one man who can star in this show, and that is Vance Maccoby.”
“What property?”
“Stranger in Town,” said the young man.
“I KNEW IT,” SHE SAID. “I KNEW YOU WOULD COME BACK.”
“YOU KNEW MORE THAN I DID,” COOPER SAID. “I WAS FIVE MILES OUT OF TOWN AND HEADING WEST. BUT SOMETHING … SOMETHING MADE ME TURN AROUND AND COME BACK HERE AND FACE THE KERRAWAY BROTHERS.”
“YOU’RE A GOOD MAN,” SHE SAID. “YOU COULDN’T HELP YOURSELF.”
“I DON’T KNOW IF I’M A GOOD MAN,” COOPER SAID. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF MAN I AM.” HE STARED MOROSELY AT THE CORPSES STREWN OUT ON THE GROUND AROUND THE RANCH HOUSE. “I JUST COULDN’T LET THE KERRAWAYS TAKE YOUR LAND.”
HE MOUNTED HIS HORSE. “TIME TO BE MOVING ON,” HE SAID. “YOU TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF AND LITTLE BILLY NOW.”
“WILL YOU EVER COME BACK?”
“MAYBE,” HE SAID. “MAYBE AFTER I FIND WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR.”
“I THINK YOU FOUND IT ALREADY,” SHE SAID. “YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET. YOU FOUND YOURSELF.”
“THAT MAY BE SO,” COOPER SAID. “BUT I STILL GOTTA PUT A NAME TO IT.”
HE RODE OFF INTO A RAPIDLY SETTING SUN.
The video picture flickered, then resolved itself into an antique Tide commercial. Hurn cut the controls. He turned to the strange young man in the too-tweedy jacket and the heavy horn-rimmed glasses.
“That?” he said, gesturing at the screen. “You want to remake that … garbage?”
“Not remake,” the young man said. “Revive. Continue. Conclude. Tell the remainder of the story of the stranger Cooper, and the re-acquisition of his memory and identity.”
“Who cares?” Hurn asked. “Who the hell cares who Cooper is or what he did? Certainly not the viewers. Do you know how many letters we got after we cancelled the series? Sixteen. Sixteen letters. That’s how many people cared.”
“That is our concern, Mr. Hurn. We believe that we do have a market for this property. That is why we are making this proposition. We are prepared to go ahead with or without you. But certainly we would much rather have you with us. As the main creative force behind the original series—”
“Creative?” Hurn said. “Frankly, that whole show to me was nothing but an embarrassment. And I was glad when they cancelled it, actually. I wrote those scripts for one reason and one reason alone. Money.”
“We can offer you a great deal of money, Mr. Hurn.”
Hurn gestured, as though to indicate the oriental rugs on the floor, the rare books in the shelves on the wall, the sculptures and the paintings, the several-million-dollar Beverly Hills home that contained all this.
“I don’t need money, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”
“Smith.”
“Mr. Smith, I have all the money I could ever want. I have done well in this business, Mr. Smith. Quite well. I am no longer the struggling writer who conceived Stranger in Town. These days I choose my projects on the basis of quality.”
“You disparage yourself unnecessarily, Mr. Hurn. We believe that Stranger in Town was a series of the highest quality. In some ways, in fact, it represented the very peak of televisual art. The existential dilemma of the protagonist, the picaresque nature of his journeyings, the obsessive fascination with the nature of memory … That scene…” The young man’s eyes came alive. “That scene when Cooper bites into a watermelon and says, “I remember a watermelon like this. I remember summer days, summer nights, a cool breeze on the porch, the river rushing by. I remember a woman’s lips, her eyes, her deep blue eyes. But where, damn it? Where?”
Hurn stared, open-mouthed. “You remember that? Word for word? Oh, my God.”
“Art, Mr. Hurn. Unabashed art.”
“Adolescent pretension. Fakery. Bullshit,” Hurn said. “Embarrassing. Oh, my God, how embarrassing.”
“In some ways trite,” the young ma
n conceded. “Brash. Even clumsy sometimes. But burning with an inner conviction. Mr. Hurn, you must help us. You must help us bring back Stranger in Town.”
“You can’t,” Hurn said. “You can’t bring it back. Even if I agreed it was worth bringing back—and I’ll admit to you that I’ve thought about it on occasion, though not in many years. I’ve always had a sense of it as a piece of unfinished business.… But even if I wanted to help you, it couldn’t be done. Not now. It’s too late, much too late. You can’t repeat the past, Smith. You can’t bring it back. It’s over, finished, a dead mackerel.”
“Of course you can,” Smith said. “Of course you can repeat the past. We have absolutely no doubt on that question.”
“Boats against the current,” Hurn said. “But no, no, I can’t agree. It’s like when those promoters wanted to reunite the Beatles.”
“Beetles?” Smith asked. “What beetles?”
“The Beatles,” Hurn said, astonished. “‘She Loves You.’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ Like that.”
“Oh, yes,” Smith said vaguely.
Where is this guy from? Hurn wondered. Mongolia?
“What exactly is your proposition, Mr. Smith?”
The young man became business-like. He pulled a sheaf of notes from his briefcase. “One episode of Stranger was completed but not edited when the cancellation notice came from the network. We have acquired that footage, and it would be a simple matter to put it together. We have also acquired five scripts for the second season, commissioned prior to the cancellation. And we have an outline of your proposal for subsequent episodes, including a concluding episode in which the identity of Cooper is finally revealed. We would like you to supervise the preparation of these unwritten scripts and to write the final episode yourself. We are looking at a season of twenty-six fifty-minute episodes. For these services we are prepared to pay you the equivalent of two million dollars.”
“The equivalent, Mr. Smith?”
“In gold, Mr. Hurn.” The young man picked up the large suitcase he had brought with him into the writer’s house. He opened it up. It was packed with yellowish metallic bars.
“My God,” Hurn said. “That suitcase must weigh a hundred pounds.”
“About one hundred and twenty-five pounds,” said Mr. Smith. “Or the equivalent of about one million dollars at this morning’s London gold fixing.”
The young man, Hurn recalled, had carried in this suitcase without the slightest sign of exertion. He hefted it now as though it were full of feathers. Obviously he was not as frail as he looked.
“Tell me, Mr. Smith. Who is going to star in this show?”
“Oh. Vance Maccoby. Of course.”
“Vance Maccoby, if he is even still alive, is a hopeless alcoholic, Mr. Smith. He hasn’t worked in this town in twenty years. I don’t even know where he is. Have you signed up Vance Maccoby, Mr. Smith?”
“Not yet,” the young man said. “But we will. We will.”
* * *
“My name’s Loomis,” said the tall man with the limp, as he stood beside Cooper at the bar. He picked up the shot glass and stared into it thoughtfully.
“First or last?” Cooper asked.
“Just Loomis,” said the man.
“I’m Cooper,” said the other. “Or at least that’s what I call myself. One name’s as good as another. There was a book in my saddle-bag by a man named Cooper.…”
“You forgot your name?”
“I forgot everything,” he said. “Except how to speak and ride and shoot.”
Loomis drained his drink. “Some things a man don’t forget,” he said.
Cooper stared at him intently. “Have I seen you in here before? There’s something familiar.…”
“I don’t think so,” Loomis said. “I’m a stranger here myself.”
The edges of the TV screen grew misty, then blurred. The picture dissolved. Another took shape. A bright, almost hallucinatorily bright summer day. A farm house. Chickens in a coop. The door of the house open, banging in the wind.
The camera moved through the door, into a parlour. Signs of struggle, furniture up-ended, a broken dish on the floor. A man stooped to pick up the fragments.
“Aimee?” he called. “Aimee?”
The camera moved on, into a bedroom. A woman’s body sprawled brokenly across the bed. The window open, the curtain blowing. And then a face, a man’s face, staring into the room. His arm, holding a gun. A gunshot.
Darkness closed in. Outside, the shadow of a man running away. A shadow with a kind of limp.
And back, suddenly, to the bar.
“You all right, Cooper?”
“I’m all right,” he said, gripping the bar tightly. “I’m all right.”
* * *
“Yehh,” said the fat bald man in the armchair. “Let’s hear it for the strong silent ones.”
He picked up his glass from the TV table in front of him, made a mocking toast to the blank screen, then winked to his old agent, Feldman, sitting on the couch next to the young man. There was something a little odd about the young man, but the fat man was too drunk to put his finger on it. Maybe it was the Desi Arnaz hair cut.…
“Vance,” Feldman said. “Vance I—I hate to see you like this.”
“Like what?” said the fat man who had once been Vance Maccoby. “And the name is Henry. Henry Mulvin.”
He raised his bulk from the armchair and waddled into the tiny kitchen of the trailer to refreshen his drink.
Feldman looked helplessly at the young man.
“I told you, Smith. I told you this was pointless. You’re going to have to find yourself another boy. Jesus, there must be hundreds in this town.”
“There’s only one Vance Maccoby,” the young man said firmly. “Mr. Feldman, would you leave us together for a while? I promise you that I’ll be in touch in the morning with regard to contractual arrangements.”
“Contractual arrangements? You’re whistling in the wind.”
“I can be quite persuasive, Mr. Feldman. Believe me.”
I believe you, Feldman thought. Or what would I be doing in this stinking trailer?
When the sound of Feldman’s Mercedes had disappeared into the distance, the young man turned to Vance Maccoby.
“Mr. Maccoby,” he said almost apologetically, “we have to have a serious talk. And in order to do that you will have to be sober.”
“Sober?” The fat man laughed. “Never heard of it.”
“This won’t hurt,” the young man said, producing a flat, box-like device from his pocket and pointing it at the fat man. “It will merely accelerate the metabolization of the alcohol in your bloodstream.” He pushed a button.
“But I don’t want to be sober,” the fat man said. He began to cry.
“When this is all over, Mr. Maccoby,” the young man said soothingly, “you need never be sober nor unhappy ever again.”
* * *
“Guess I should ride on,” Cooper said. “You got a nice little town here and I could easily settle in it. Easily. But a man can’t settle anyplace until he knows who he is.”
“You think he knows?” the girl asked. “You think that limping man knows who you are?”
“Yes, he does,” Cooper said. “He knows, and he’s going to tell me. Fact is, he’s itching to tell me. He thinks he just wants to kill me, but first of all he wants to tell me. Otherwise he would have just finished me off back at Oscar’s barn. Him and me, reckon we got ourselves a piece of unfinished business. But he’s got the better of me, because he knows what it is.”
“He may kill you yet,” the girl said, dabbing at the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes.
“I can take care of myself”
“Will you come back?” she asked. “Afterward?”
“Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”
He rode off into the distance.
* * *
“Print it,” said the director. “And see you all tomorrow.”
Car
efully, Vance Maccoby dismounted from his horse and began to walk back to his dressing room. Bill Hurn fell in step with him.
“That was good stuff, Vance,” he said.
Maccoby smiled, although it was more like a tic. The skin of his face had been stretched tight by the face-lift operations, so that his usual expression was even blanker than it had been in his heyday. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his recently transplanted hair. Under the supervision of the strange young man called Smith, he had lost close to a hundred pounds in the three months prior to shooting.
For all of these changes, Maccoby close up looked every one of his forty-six years. The doctors could do little about the lines around his eyes, and nothing at all about the weariness in them. And yet the camera was still good to him, particularly in black and white. Hurn had argued fiercely on the subject of film stock, but Smith had been adamant. “It must be black and white. Just like the original. Cost is not the question. This is a matter of aesthetics.”
Black and white helped hide the ravages of time. It just made Maccoby look more intense, more haunted. Perhaps that was why Smith had been so insistent. But Hurn doubted that. In many ways Smith was astonishingly ignorant of the mechanics of filmmaking.
“I didn’t know,” Maccoby said, “that he was still in here.” He pointed to his chest.
“Cooper?”
“Maccoby,” he said. “Vance Maccoby. Inside me, Henry Mulvin. Still there, after all these years. I thought I’d finished him off for good. But he was still in there.”
Maccoby had not, to Hurn’s knowledge, touched a drop of alcohol in six months. He was functioning well on the set, with none of the moodiness or tantrums that had marked his final days in Hollywood. But the stripping away of that alcoholic haze had only revealed the deeper sickness beneath: his unbearable discomfort with himself, or rather with the fictional person he had become—Vance Maccoby, TV star. Isolated, cut off, torn away from his roots, existing only on a million TV screens and in the pages of mass-circulation magazines.