Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

But as a thing of custom: ’tis no other,

  Only it spoils the pleasure of the time.

  As the lords stare at her uncovered breasts, Macbeth sends the Ghost hence and says, “I am a man again.”

  In the private scenes in their bedroom, the Macbeths conclude their colloquies on criminal ambition with Lady Macbeth. as dominatrix, tying her husband to the bedstead and flogging his bare behind with a cat-o’-nine-tails as the curtain falls. (Unpredictably, Doug Bigelow did not balk at exposing his bum; the whip was made of velvet.)

  With a greater attendance for the Saturday performance than any other of his productions had enjoyed for the entire season, Kidd certainly did not close Macbeth at the end of its normal run. Rather, he raised ticket prices and next petitioned the school board to permit him to move the play to the capacious auditorium of the public high school. The granting of such permission was delayed only by a dickering over the percentage of the gate that would go to the educational institution. The principal discounted Kidd’s argument that the cultural gain to the community should not be assessed in dollars and cents.

  Kidd’s pleasure in his first real hit was also diminished by the demand of the hitherto unpaid actors to participate in it monetarily. In this they were abetted by Phyllis, who frustrated Kidd’s effort to drive a wedge between her and the rest of the cast.

  “No, Howard, you and the school board cannot keep the entire income for yourselves. There would be no production without the actors.”

  “These no-talent amateurs can easily be replaced. The audiences come to see you, Phyl. And you’re being paid.”

  “A hundred dollars per week is not very much.” As she had been assured by Doug Bigelow. Phyllis still did not quite understand money, and she determined to do research into the subject when she could spare a moment from Shakespearean matters; the Scottish Play, despite Kidd’s theory to the contrary, was unlikely to draw crowds forever, according to what she had observed of human fickleness, and she was already planning for its successor, probably The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  “I’m doubling it on the spot,” said Kidd.

  “I believe you are an unscrupulous man, Howard,” Phyllis told him. “Now that you’ve increased the performances to six per week, and the ticket price is twenty-five dollars, between seventy-five and a hundred thousand comes into the box office. Unless half this sum is split amongst the actors, I will walk out and stage a rival production at Our Lady of Mercy Academy. I’ve already got an okay from the Mother Superior.”

  Kidd was bitter, saying that Catholics would do anything for a buck, but he had no choice except to agree to Phyllis’s terms.

  The cast members were initially pleased to hear of the new deal Phyllis had negotiated, but their acceptance proved brief. Doug Bigelow believed he should, in the title role, get half the take, whereas the actors who played the other principal parts maintained that the first dozen names on the traditional dramatis personae should get equal amounts, at which the women protested vigorously, for even the leading female characters, including Lady Macbeth, were not listed until the roster of males was exhausted. Those who played the Witches were especially vocal. They were certain, based on fan mail, stage-door Johnnies, and obscene phone calls (they had previously been moonlighting from fast-food jobs), that a significant proportion of the audiences was attracted to the theater by their topless performances.

  When Phyllis suggested that counting the number of lines spoken by the respective characters (an easy job for her) and basing the payments thereupon, several persons, beginning with old Ned Stilling, who played both Banquo and Banquo’s silent Ghost, made vociferous objection: words were never the sole medium of the actor’s art, else radio drama would still reign supreme.

  The issue was resolved by a deus ex machina. Word of mouth had quickly made Phyllis’s production of Macbeth locally famous. A week or so more was required before the news reached the city and caught the attention of that drama critic who was ever alert to new trends and voices, as well as representatives of Actors’ Equity, who promptly came out and signed up the whole cast, thereby taking on the matter of salaries, a favorable development to everybody except Howard Kidd.

  But the critic returned to town and wrote a scathingly negative review that dismayed everyone but Phyllis, who predicted that with such a conspicuous advertisement the production would acquire national fame, the reviewer having labeled it as sheer pornography, indeed the most egregious kind that poses as art.

  And she was right, as usual. The area TV channels sent reporters, most of whose stories were picked up by the national networks the next evening, and the print media soon followed. Phyllis was interviewed many times, but her reluctance to provide much personal information frustrated the news weeklies and celebrity mags, for neither could they track her through other sources. She was therefore portrayed as a mysterious personage who had come from nowhere. Added to the allure of this were professional notoriety, physical beauty, and, except as concerned her personal life, a refreshing candor in interviews. (For example, Q: “Are you using sex to sell Shakespeare?” A: “Of course.” Q: “Do you feel that cheapens Shakespeare?” A: “Being real, the art of William Shakespeare cannot be cheapened by sex that is simulated.” Q: “Do you yourself have a sex life?” A: “I’m not sure I have a life.”)

  The last response was taken to be modesty, whether actual or phony; columnists differed. Appearing on a TV talk show, the host of which asked questions only to interrupt every answer with a quip or another question as soon as she began to speak, Phyllis said, “My function here is to provide you with straight lines.”

  “Well,” said the host, mugging at the camera, “I’m notoriously straight.”

  “Then play with yourself,” said Phyllis, who unhooked her lapel mike and left the set. This sequence was replayed endlessly on the entertainment-news shows of rival networks.

  In short order, and without further effort, Phyllis acquired an agent, a personal manager, a public-relations director, and a contract for the leading female role in a big-budget motion picture.

  A fortnight after her departure from the cast, the audiences for Macbeth had diminished to the degree that the production was asked to leave the school auditorium. Having returned to the little theater from which it had come, the play closed within the month. When the scales fell from their eyes, its former local promoters agreed with the resuscitated prudes that the show was filth and admitted they had been blinded, though perhaps justifiably, by the superb artistry of Phyllis Pierce.

  Meanwhile, Ellery Pierce, her onlie begetter, had fallen into such a state of degradation as to be totally unaware of the success of his creation.

  9

  Before long Pierce had exhausted his severance payment, and having spent every cent over the years on the development of Phyllis, he had no savings. He was forced to sell his apartment at a low price in a depressed market, and most of the money was claimed by the bank that held the loan. His credit cards were canceled when the respective balances reached their limits.

  He exiled himself for a time at his country hideaway, which he owned outright, but he was haunted by memories of Phyllis, whom he had assembled there in the garage workshop. He was almost relieved when a sudden rise in the real-estate taxes forced him to sell that, too, for a song.

  Eventually he found himself obliged to make a nightly choice between the streets and a homeless shelter. His clothes were tattered; in daylight his skin was swarthy with dirt but it looked ghostly pale under streetlights after dark. He started to beg. His manner was whinily importunate, but if refused a handout he could turn surly with passersby. After too many such incidents he was picked up by the cops and not arrested but worked over and dropped off in the next precinct, where after some losing encounters with other derelicts jealous of their turf, he finally acquired enough street wisdom not merely to survive but to prosper relative to his fellows in that mean milieu, having learned to disregard rather than compete with them. His early mistake had been
to boast about who he used to be, for they all had their own stories, according to which he had fallen amidst ex-generals, former tycoons, and at least one defrocked cardinal.

  Ever in need of a female connection, Pierce befriended a runaway teen, who responded to the genteel ways he still had, even down here, with womenfolk. The pair lived in a crawl space under a viaduct and washed, when they could, in public facilities. They were hustled by do-gooders even more than by the police, and eventually the girl, Ali, was persuaded—mostly by Ellery, who degraded though he was had not lost all values—to climb into a van that took her away to a rehabilitation program, and he was alone again.

  One thing Ellery could say for himself, even at this stage, was that he never considered suicide. Until now he had nursed a modicum of hope that somehow, in some magical way rather than by volitional effort, things would turn around for him. Now the loss of all hope took with it the ability even to think about doing away with himself. He had barely enough energy to crawl out from under the viaduct and panhandle the price of a wine cooler or search for edibles in the dumpsters outside fast-food restaurants. He would also pick up discarded newspapers, the all-purpose accessory to life on the streets, used for almost anything but reading: clothing-insulator, sole-padder, tinder, ass-wipe.

  Ellery rarely spared a glance for the photographs in such papers, and the textual matters could have been printed in Mandarin for all he cared. Why read of what happened the day before in a world in which he did not participate? As to the pictures, they were of people whose utility for him was nil unless he could harass them in the flesh.

  But one day as, in anticipation of an unseasonably chilly night, he lined with newsprint the formerly navy but now green jacket of an ancient suit, he caught sight, by the flicker of a little illegal campfire, of features poignantly familiar in a universe to which he was otherwise all but blind.

  It was a picture of Phyllis, his Phyllis! Any doubt that it was the very woman he had constructed from scratch could not be entertained. Display type trumpeted: PHYLLIS IS BACK, MORE BEAUTIFUL, MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER. It was a full-page advertisement for a movie, depicting her in a two-piece suit of body armor, seemingly of polished brass but brief as the parts of a bikini. On her head was an elaborate helmet that sprouted steel horns or spikes, and her shins were encased in chromium-plated greaves.

  Beneath the metallic bra, her breasts in this artist’s rendering seemed to have grown several cup sizes from the bosom molded so delicately by Pierce. Brandishing a triumphant sword, she stood with one stiletto-heeled boot on the chest of a fallen warrior, a gargantuan mass of naked muscle in fur habiliments, hairy-faced, grimacing. Phyllis’s own countenance was cold and insensate, much less human-looking than when she had been with Ellery. In fact, she looked like a robot, for the first time.

  This was a transforming moment for Pierce. His recovery was not instantaneous—he had fallen too far—but at least a corner had been turned.

  10

  A problem Phyllis sometimes had in her movie career was in finding sufficient private time in which to charge her batteries. Once you become a star, you are seldom alone, especially if you appear in one box-office smash after another. You are surrounded by aides and servitors, cultivated by a range of those who hope to profit by your proximity, adored by multitudes, and menaced by more than a few of the deranged. Human performers who enjoy great success often complain of its deleterious effect on one’s personal existence. Phyllis did not suffer from such a disadvantage. She did not seek love or to be accepted as an individual with a mind of her own. She was innocent of the urge to voice social concerns or political sentiments, for she had none to make known. Publicity tours could not exhaust her. She did not use alcohol or drugs, let alone abuse them, and she literally ate nothing, which abstention attracted no notice from a media voracious for the particulars of her private life, for it went without saying that female movie luminaries normally starved themselves.

  Throughout the making of her first two pictures, Phyllis was a director’s dream, doing exactly what she was told in every scene, but on reading an influential critic’s review of the second, she learned that she had been misguided to appear nude in so many shots: “Her body, however shapely, is becoming a cliché.” From that point on, she was no longer compliant and soon earned the reputation of being difficult to work with. She questioned the director at every juncture, argued about interpretations, camera angles, lighting, the timing of dialogue, even the competency of her co-stars, who, as of her third film, found their names billed below hers irrespective of their former renown, for Phyllis had no near rival, male or female, in box-office appeal. She would still appear in the nude, but only once during the picture and for a limited time, thus making this scene that which audiences awaited most eagerly. College students were even said to make bets on just when her breasts would be revealed, and also on whether she would show anything below the waist.

  Phyllis’s early movies were of the action genre. In the first she played a peasant girl during some bygone age of barbarism when her sort served as spoils of war for brutal invaders. But Phyllis’s character will not submit to a would-be rapist. She not only resists, she does him in with his own battle-ax. For this deed she is exalted by the oppressed villagers and becomes their leader against the common foe, and her cause prevails. Reviewers generally saw it as a Joan of Arc rip-off, without religion and with sex (she undresses frequently and beds the prince of a neighboring land) and, of course, a happy ending. Moviegoers made it No. 1 in the week of its opening, and it stayed there for a month.

  The next picture, derided by the critics as a remake of the first with only minor dissimilarities (more ambitious special effects: castles with celestial battlements, swords that produced thunder and lightning, nuclear pyrotechnics), were even greater commercial successes. For the third, Phyllis’s representatives hammered out a history-making deal: multimillions up front, with a hefty share of the gross. Her face appeared on three national magazine covers, and in the same week she was the sole subject of Cirella Fleming’s top-rated celebrity interview. Cirella got a television exclusive and considered it a coup.

  But Cirella got no more from Phyllis then than before, for there was no more to be had.

  On the advice of her manager, Hal Wintergreen, whose sister was a realtor, Phyllis had indeed purchased a mansion in Beverly Hills, equipped with a home gym that it would have been pointless for her to use, and a swimming pool in which she could not immerse any part of herself lest she short out a circuit. (Ellery had not gone beyond making her rainproof.)

  A half-dozen other persons and two Dobermans were always on the premises or roaming the grounds; some were servants, one was a live-in personal assistant, and others worked for the security service, as did the Dobies, who initially sniffed Phyllis’s feet and subsequently ignored her utterly.

  So far Phyllis would go, but when, having got her the house, Wintergreen urged her to entertain influential figures in the Industry as well as selected members of the elite media, she declined.

  “I’m where I am only because of the public,” said she. “I’ll stay on top, without currying anyone’s favor, only if they keep buying tickets. If they stop, no social connections or favorable publicity will save my career.”

  Wintergreen told his intimates and a series of expensive hookers that he bet Phyllis was the coldest piece of ass anyone ever tried to shtup, but he had picked up no suggestion that she was a dyke or swung both ways. Fact was, she had never been seen with anyone of either sex who could be called a date. “We got straight, we got gay, we got bi, but she must be some fourth persuasion,” he speculated. “A non- or nun.”

  Phyllis’s concern was that after her third action film she was typecast, and the studio executives agreed wholeheartedly, for that’s what made the big bucks; exit polls proved that many patrons, especially the youthful, were repeat customers. She was a woman with whom girls, straight or Lesbian, could identify, but as it turned out, also one whom heterose
xual young men would most like to be beaten up by (in fantasy), and gays thought of her as a protector (in her second movie, Phyllis makes short work of a crude warrior who bullies a zither-strumming bard).

  “Be that as it may,” said she, “I am a unique commodity. No one else has had my kind of success with such pictures, though they’ve certainly tried. The difference obviously is me. I am one of a kind. The public will come to see me in any kind of story. Females love to see me win. Males all want to fuck me.” Ordinarily Phyllis avoided the use of foul language, but this was the sort of people with whom it was advisable to talk turkey, as they listened in their designer suits and three-hundred-dollar haircuts.

  “They’ll all come to see me in serious drama—did I not start out with Shakespeare?—and in love stories, too! And you know what I’m looking forward to most? A classic screwball comedy, with sparkling dialogue and absurd situations involving animals and goofy sidekicks, mistaken identities, the whole shmeer. The girl and the guy kick it off by hating each other on sight—they get trapped in the country in a storm and have to take cover in a stable…. I might even write the script!”

  Afterward, in her absence, the suits agreed that Phyllis herself had become the classic cunt all female superstars are by their third box-office smash, whereas a male turns prick after just the first, but then, come on, he’s a guy. They would dread dealing with her from now on, but if she played hardball they really had no option except to submit, at least once.

  As good as her word, Phyllis wrote a screenplay and furthermore did so in a matter of days, entitling it, literally, Screwball Comedy. A female studio executive with a taste for the classic genre recognized it immediately as a blatant plagiarism, with scene after scene lifted from the 1930s-40s pictures of Capra, Hawks, Sturges, and others, and with a female lead for Phyllis that amalgamated roles played originally by the likes of Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, and Irene Dunne.