Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  The executive asked the ironic question, “But where’s your Cary Grant?”

  Literal as always, Phyllis said, “We’ll have to look hard, no doubt about it.”

  “Phyllis, your sources are awfully obvious.”

  “I chose the best of the best.”

  “I don’t think we can get away with that.”

  Phyllis pointed out that remakes were being done all the time.

  “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Phyllis said. “I’ve brought the presentation up to date.”

  “You mean, with the sex.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When the walls of Jericho fall, Clark and Claudette are shown doing the nasty. When the back of Hepburn’s dress is torn away, we see, instead of lace underpants, your bare ass.”

  “But most of the nudity occurs when they are stranded on the island.”

  “Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott, My Favorite Wife, right? With all respect, I don’t think it will fly, Phyllis.” And the male executives all agreed. But Phyllis strong-armed them into making the film, to everyone’s dismay—including even that of the director who was her handpicked rubber stamp.

  The Cary Grant substitute, who was Phyllis’s choice to play her love interest, came from one of the soap operas she canvassed, taping them to view during the wee hours, for since she had become famous she could not roam her old all-night haunts. Only Phyllis believed Wayne Upshaw had more than superficial talent, and all others were appalled when they watched the dailies and saw the youngster’s awkward attempts to simulate Grant’s signature moves and unique Bristol-cum-California accent. But Phyllis was vociferously pleased with his performance, and to the universal objections replied, consistently plagiaristic, “The kid stays in the picture.”

  Preview audiences throughout Orange County went wild, inscribing their cards, “The funniest ever!” “Pants-wetting comedy!” “I’m going to keep laughing all week.” “Who knew somebody so beautiful and sexy could be side-splittingly comical? Who knew?” Upshaw, too, got kudos. “The hunky Englishman is a find!” “Wayne is a dream!” “Sophisticated but cute.”

  When Screwball Comedy opened to the general public, however, the reviews were mixed. Some of the critics thought it pathetic; the remainder, outrageous. The latter took it as a satire so heavy-handed as to be simply insulting to the beloved genre. The others thought the picture was sincerely made by naïve, inept practitioners who were beyond their depth when trying to make the transition from shallow action flicks to the subtleties of social comedy.

  But the box-office figures went through the roof, and the beauty was that the film cost so little to make, with the exception of Phyllis’s large fee plus her cut of the gross. Upshaw, however, and a supporting cast of unknowns were paid peanuts.

  Notwithstanding Phyllis’s resounding success, earned against the will of the studio executives, the same gentry was opposed to her next project, which would be still another departure. She wanted to do Camille, the tragic story of the courtesan who dies of consumption and for love, previously brought to the screen many times, most notably by Greta Garbo, but quite another thing than Phyllis had demonstrated a talent for. True, she had gotten away with what was really farce, but tragedy was a much further cry. Could she pass for tubercular, whatever the magic of makeup? Could she show the depth of feeling that the role called for? Throughout the action pictures and the comedy as well, she had been restrained as to emotional display, but the character of Camille cried out for an intensity without extravagance, the kind of thing that had been Garbo’s great strength, to which her ethereal face and marked but soft accent contributed so profoundly. Phyllis was so American for a role that was European to the hilt, unless she was thinking of changing its fictional milieu to the contemporary United States, which would hardly fly. Nobody died for love nowadays.

  “I intend to go back to the novel written by Alexandre Dumas fils,” said Phyllis, “and follow the text to the letter, beginning with the real title, The Lady of the Camellias, and the heroine’s name is Marguerite Gauthier.”

  Having learned French in her spare time, Phyllis had read La Dame aux camélias, and she was a stickler for authenticity.

  There was even worse news: This was to be the first of Phyllis’s pictures without any nudity whatsoever, and in fact, with no sex scenes.

  “Jesus!” cried one of the executives. “Camille’s supposed to be a courtesan, isn’t she? No sex in a movie about a whore?”

  “That’s the point,” Phyllis explained. “We play against type. We’ll give ’em what they don’t expect. I started that with my little-theater Scottish Play, which is why I am here today. I know how the taste of the public works. Look at my box-office figures.”

  That was always the clincher: what made money must prevail, else things would go out of order.

  The Lady of the Camellias was Phyllis’s first success with the critics, to the degree that several of the influential ones began to revise their negative assessments of her earlier work, seeing it now as a series of campy send-ups, done over the top so as to make a joke of the joke. The Lady was simply too good, too sensitive, too finely conceived and crafted to have been preceded by infantile action pictures and a humorless comedy. Something deeper must have been in play all along.

  More than one reviewer, familiar with the 1937 Camille from film-festival screenings or videotape, saw a credible hommage to Garbo in Phyllis’s performance. Some even found Phyllis’s face to have acquired a Garbo-like luminescence, an internal glow beyond the art of the most ingenious director of lighting. Her voice also found special praise. It was lower-pitched than before and, though Phyllis spoke Standard American, employed slight hesitation here and there that seemed to hover on the brink of an unspecified accent. And she was universally praised for having gone beyond the cruder forms of sexual display.

  The critics’ first was soon followed by one on the part of the public. For the first time ever, audiences hated a movie starring Phyllis Pierce. People walked out during the picture, in theaters from coast to coast. Billboards advertising the film were defaced, often obscenely. The movie and its star were derided nightly on the TV comedy shows. After two weeks of this, the distributors pulled The Lady from screens all over the country, though they waited awhile overseas, where it was not doing all that badly even if falling far behind Phyllis’s previous pictures (except, perhaps because of cultural chauvinism, in France, for of all the versions done by foreigners, including Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, this was the most faithful to the original; and Phyllis herself had, with a bon accent, dubbed the soundtrack). Still, the foreign grosses could not save the movie from being a big-time bomb.

  When the dust had settled, Phyllis readily admitted she had been wrong (which the people who account for such matters said was yet another difference between her and any other star of her magnitude) and agreed that the best move would be hastily to shoot another of her surefire action pictures. This was quickly done, with the old nudity back and then some—severe cuts had to be made to claim its “R”—but the public, once betrayed, did not return, seemingly agreeing at last with the critics, who returned to shit-jobbing Phyllis but with a new venom. She was said to have lost the few virtues she had displayed as an action star. Her old spark was gone, she was showing her age, she had put on weight. All of which was literally impossible so long as her batteries were charged, and she considered revealing her nonhumanity to expose the lies for what they were, but decided against doing so because revealing she was not of flesh and blood might lead to a discrediting of her work in general. By now she knew something about human responses, which, defying reason, were usually evoked rather by fancy than fact, by what is preferred rather than what is.

  It was at this point, the lowest in possibilities since Phyllis’s career began, that Ellery Pierce came back into what, for lack of a more precise term, must be called her life.

  11

  The newspaper dis
play seen by the derelict Pierce had been an advertisement for Fur and Steel, which was intended to be Phyllis’s comeback film after the box-office disaster. Until that moment he had been altogether ignorant of any part of her existence after she left him, and he knew nothing of the highs and lows of her years in show business. When he panhandled enough money for a ticket to see Fur and Steel, he sat in awe. She was magnificent! What had he wrought?

  But he had to admit that Phyllis had gone far beyond that with which he had supplied her. For one, she had somehow grown more beautiful, and it was more than makeup. Her voice was richer than the capabilities of his original sound system would allow. Had she since been altered by a superior technician? Though, after much effort, he had developed for her a stride that was regular enough to meet human standards, with arm and body movements that were inconspicuously normal, Phyllis would never have been taken for an athlete. Now here she was, whirling, leaping, wielding two swords windmill-style, simultaneously; somersaulting in thin air, backflipping from heights, all with extraordinary ease, even grace, and it was she, in shot after shot, and not a stuntwoman—Pierce looked at movies with the eye of a pro. There were few camera tricks in Phyllis’s scenes and little computer enhancement. How had she learned to do these things and from whom? She was persistently exceeding her capacity.

  Phyllis as she existed today was inexplicable to him. She represented an impossibility. Her handlers must know, by now, that she was an artificial woman. They had to know. They had updated or replaced her major systems and reprogrammed her completely. She was no longer the Phyllis that Pierce had created and, in retrospect, loved so profoundly. Given the nature of her being, it could not even be said that she had grown, human-style, from what she once had been to what she was today, as a girl becomes a woman. She had rather evolved, like successive models of an automobile, from Model T to Lincoln Town Car, or like the telephone, from Bell’s crude experiment to today’s miniature portable instrument. She had not matured; she had undergone a series of modifications.

  Phyllis was no longer a feasible substitute for a real woman. She had become, in the truest sense of a word that has no necessary moral connotation, a monster.

  Nevertheless Pierce was more intrigued with her than ever. His aim now was to reestablish contact at any cost. He realized the risks inherent in this endeavor. It was likely that the creature he had built from scratch would not even recognize him.

  And were that to happen, he would be devastated. Yet he approached that possibility, perhaps even likelihood, not as a moth to the flame (moths do so through naïvety, not a taste for immolation) but as a man besotted by love.

  12

  Phyllis could have been as good at finance as she was at everything else, but while she had been distracted by creative pursuits her business manager embezzled an amount of money that would take a while to calculate exactly but was in the millions and constituted most of what she owned aside from her mansion, which she was forced to sell at a loss, paying the proceeds to creditors.

  As it turned out, her other employees had incurred large expenses in her name, and she, whose personal tastes were frugal, had to pay for vintage beverages and luxurious provender consumed by her staff, their upscale transportation, and even the clothes and jewelry they wore.

  The pictures she was offered now were of the straight-to-cable type and paid what her current manager (the previous one had jumped ship when he detected shoals ahead) called “short money,” by accepting which she would set foot on a descent from which, given the law of career inertia, few had ever returned. His advice was to seek second-female lead parts in big-budget films, say best friend to the star, or even character roles now that she was maturing.

  Phyllis of course had not aged a month since her first picture, nor would she get older in a human sense if she lived forever. She might become outmoded by new technological developments, though she had not as yet seen evidence of any such. So far as she knew, she was the only animatronic actor to have come so far. It was possible that others had tried, but unlike members of some ethnic groups, they did not make common cause. Assemblages of plastic and metal tend not to identify with one another.

  After disposing of her mansion, Phyllis moved into an apartment hotel where a number of formerly noted performers lived who were in forced semiretirement. Some were in rehabilitation from an indulgence in harmful substances inhaled, ingested, or injected. Others, like Phyllis, had either gone beyond or fallen behind the tastes of their original audiences and had not as yet been able to acquire replacements. Hasbrook House was unfortunately named for its 1940s builder, a nonentertainer who could not have foreseen that it would inevitably come to be known (by its residents; nobody else cared) as Hasbeen House; excepting the rare ex-addict who had actually cleaned up his or her act, the place was a refuge for negative thinkers behind masks of pseudo-optimism.

  Incapable of discouragement, Phyllis kept her own counsel and went her own way. She starred in a few obscure movies, shown only in the wee hours on major urban television markets, and eventually took the role as madam of a luxury call-girl service in a continuing cable series. One thing she would never stoop to, however, was a subordinate part in any production in which there was a more prominent female of greater intended sexual attraction. She would never allow herself to be typecast as a runner-up, a second banana.

  It was at Hasbeen House that Ellery finally caught up with her after many months of searching. He lacked the sources of old, had too long been away from his show-business past, and in any event would have been embarrassed to try to reconnect in his current situation. But he was no longer in the ranks of society’s castoffs, and now made an honest living as a humble handyman, applying his technical abilities to the likes of replacing a trap under a washbasin or the ball float in a toilet tank, servicing air-conditioner compressors, and various sorts of electrical rewiring.

  Phyllis had no need for plumbing or heating and cooling—people who worked with her on films sometimes noticed she did not sweat even when under the sun on desert locations—but she did require light for reading and using the computer, and when one day the power went off in her apartment, she inter—commed the Hasbeen’s basement maintenance man.

  When he appeared she recognized him immediately though the light was poor on an overcast day.

  “Ellery, is the electricity off just here or throughout the entire building?”

  “God Almighty, Phyllis!” For a few instants Pierce was too overwhelmed to speak coherently. Under the assumption he was choking, Phyllis thumped him between the shoulder blades, but, not aware of her own strength, almost knocked him down.

  He ducked and stepped aside, gaining the strength to cry, “I’ve found you at last!”

  “I haven’t been lost, Ellery. It is true that my career is not what it once was, but you can’t stay on top forever. Maybe some do, but someone like me cannot ignore the law of averages.”

  “Phyllis, may I touch you?”

  “Must you ask? You constructed me, Ellery.”

  He put his arms around her. She was the very same Phyllis he had built years before, as soft and warm, firm but yielding, velvet skin and silken hair. “I’ve always been crazy about you, Phyl. Did you miss me?”

  “Ellery, I am incapable of that kind of feeling.”

  It had been a stupid question, and he apologized for asking it.

  “The apology is no less pointless, Ellery, since it can have no effect on me.”

  “I understand, Phyllis. But I’m human and need to be indulged. I realized it could mean nothing to you, but as it happens I’m in love with you.”

  “Do you want to go to bed?” She was naked under the mauve dressing gown. She usually went about the apartment in the nude, clothes having for her only a social function; she donned some only if answering the door. Recently she had leaned over to point to an out-of-order electrical outlet for Pierce’s predecessor, and her breasts, visible through the gaping bosom of the robe, provoked his lust. In subdu
ing the man, Phyllis had broken his jaw, hence the leave of absence that had resulted in Ellery’s reappearance.

  Pierce was disappointed now, despite himself. “Come on, Phyl. I’m trying to tell you that you were never a mere sex object to me.”

  “Isn’t that why you built me?”

  “I don’t know. It may have been. If so, I have changed.”

  “Why?”

  “Can we sit down?”

  “Of course, Ellery. Anyplace at all.”

  He chose a sofa and patted the cushion alongside him. “Sit here, Phyllis…. I fell on bad times after you left. I hadn’t realized your leaving would have such an effect on me—how much I needed you, how much I loved you. I know, it’s irrational to have such feelings. I’m aware that right now I could open that panel concealed under the hair on your crown and disconnect you. I know that, but I don’t really believe it.”

  “You’re delusional, Ellery, but probably no more so than all human beings are about one thing or another. Your irrationality is why you build machines, the function of which is to be unfailingly rational and compensate for your weakness.”

  “I can take credit for making you beautiful, but what I don’t understand is how you can be more intelligent than I programmed you to be.”

  “Obviously, that’s something I cannot explain,” said Phyllis. “As a human being cannot smell its own breath. But if the matter distresses you, you might forget it for a while anyway by fucking me.”

  A shocked Pierce chided her. “I never taught you to talk like that.”

  “I picked that up in show business, a foul-mouthed venue, Ellery. I won’t say it again.”

  “You cannot be apologized to,” he observed wonderingly. “Yet you can apologize.”

  “That makes sense, Ellery. Think about it. You made me, not vice versa.”

  “Do you suppose, Phyllis, that since you have this extraordinary capacity for developing unlikely powers, that some time you might be able to love me?”