The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Bacon pointed to the deserted promenade outside the windows. Along its railings, a bright blue liquid, viscous and turbulent, seemed to flow. Sammy opened the door and reached out into the ozone-sharp darkness, and then Bacon came beside him again and put out his hand, too, and they stood there, for a moment, watching as sparks two inches long forked from the tips of their outstretched fingers.

  AMONG THE MAGICIANS who haunted Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop was a group of amateurs known as the Warlocks, men with more or less literary careers who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle one another with drink, tall stories, and novel deceptions. The definition of “literary” had been stretched, in Joe’s case, to include work in the comic book line, and it was through his membership in the Warlocks, another of whom was the great Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles’s radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Between Joe and Bacon, they had managed to get four tickets to the premiere of Welles’s first film.

  “So what’s he like?” Sammy wanted to know.

  “He’s quite a guy,” Rosa said. She had briefly met the tall, baby-faced actor one afternoon when she dropped by the Edison bar to meet Joe, and thought she had sensed in him a kindred spirit, a romantic, someone whose efforts to shock other people were, more than anything else, the expression of a kind of hopefulness about himself, of a desire to escape the confines of a decent respectable home. In high school, she and a friend had gone uptown to see the booming, voodooistic Macbeth, and she had loved it. “I really think he’s a genius.”

  “You think everyone’s a genius. You think this guy’s a genius,” Sammy said, jabbing Joe in the knee with a stubby forefinger.

  “I don’t think you are,” she said sweetly.

  “True genius is never recognized in its own time.”

  “Except by the one who has it,” Bacon said. “Orson has no doubts on that score.”

  They were all headed uptown together, crammed into the back of a taxicab. Sammy and Rosa had taken the jump seats, and Rosa had a good grip on Sammy’s arm. She had come from the offices of the T.R.A. and was dressed, with a dowdiness that pained her considerably, in a square-shouldered, belted brown tweed suit, of a vaguely military cut. She had been dressed like a schoolteacher the last time Orson Welles had seen her, too—the man was going to think that Joe Kavalier’s girlfriend was about as fascinating as a sack of onions. Sammy had on one of his big, pinstriped leftovers from a George Raft film, Bacon the usual penguin suit—he took the part of man-about-town a bit too seriously for Rosa’s taste, though, to his credit, that seemed to be just about the only thing he did take seriously. And Joe, of course, looked as if he had just fallen out of a hedge. There was white paint in his hair. It looked as though he had used the end of his necktie to blot an ink spill.

  “He is a clever fellow,” Joe said. “But not so good a magician.”

  “Is he really dating Dolores Del Rio?” Bacon said. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “I wonder,” Joe said, though he seemed completely uninterested in the question. He was feeling blue tonight, Rosa knew. Hoffman’s ship, having finally reached Lisbon a few weeks previously, was to have reembarked for New York by now. But two days ago, a telegram had come from Mrs. Kurtzweil, the agent of the T.R.A. in Portugal. Three of the children had come down with measles; one of them was dead. Today they had received word that the entire convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmelo had been put on an “absolute but indefinite quarantine” by the Portuguese authorities.

  “I thought you were dating Dolores Del Rio, Bake,” Sammy said. “That’s what it said in Ed Sullivan.”

  “It was Lupe Velez.”

  “I mix those two up.”

  “Anyway, you know better than to believe what you read in the papers.”

  “Like, for instance, that Parnassus Pictures plans to bring funny-book strong man the Escapist to the silver screen in the person of noted radio star Mr. Tracy Bacon?”

  “Are they?” Rosa said.

  “It’s only going to be one of those serials,” Bacon said. “Parnassus. They’re from hunger.”

  “Joe,” Rosa said, “you didn’t tell me.”

  “It doesn’t make no difference to me,” Joe said, still looking out at the neon-and-steam spectacle of Broadway scrolling past the windows of the cab. A woman walked by with what looked like the tails of at least nine little dead weasels dangling from her shoulders. “For Sammy and me we don’t get a penny.”

  Sammy looked at Rosa and lifted a shoulder—What’s eating him? Rosa gave Sammy’s arm a squeeze. She hadn’t had a chance to tell Sammy about the latest telegram from Lisbon.

  “Maybe not on this end, Joe,” Sammy continued, “but listen. Tracy here said that if he does get the role, he’s going to put in a word for us with the studio. Tell them they ought to hire us to write the thing.”

  “It’s only natural,” Bacon said. “ ’Course that probably damns the idea right there.”

  “We could move to Hollywood, Joe. That could lead to something. It could be the start of something really legit.”

  “Something legit.” Joe nodded his head in a ponderous way, as if, upon reflection, Sammy had settled the question that had been troubling Joe all day. Then he went back to his window. “I know that’s important to you.”

  “There it is,” Bacon said. “The Palace.”

  “The Palace,” Sammy said, an odd crease in his voice.

  They pulled up in front of what was now known as the RKO Palace, once the summit and capital of American vaudeville, at the end of a line of cabs and hired cars. A colossal cutout of Orson Welles, looking wild-eyed and tousle-haired, loomed from the marquee. The whole front of the theater was riotous with flashbulbs and shouting, and there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick. Sammy had gone white as a sheet.

  “Sam?” Rosa said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “He’s just worried we’re going to make him pay the fare,” said Bacon, reaching for his wallet.

  Joe climbed out of the cab, settled his hat on his head, and held the door for Rosa. As she got out of the cab, she threw her arms around his neck. He lifted her from the ground, squeezing her tight, and took a long deep breath of her. She could feel the people around them staring, wondering who these two were, or thought they were. Joe’s gray hat started to tumble off the back of his head, but he caught it with one hand, then set Rosa back down on the ground.

  “He’s going to be fine,” she told him. “He already had measles. It’s just a little delay, that’s all.”

  She knew from bitter experience that Joe hated to be consoled, but to her surprise, when he set her down again, he was smiling. He looked around at the photographers, the crowd, the dazzling kliegs, the long black limousines at the curb, and she could see that it excited him. It was exciting, she thought.

  “I know,” he said. “He’s going to be fine.”

  “We could end up in Hollywood ourselves one of these days,” she said, urged to recklessness by his unexpected change of mood. “You, me, and Thomas. In a little bungalow in the Hollywood Hills.”

  “Thomas would love that,” Joe said.

  “The Palace.” Sammy had joined them, and was gazing up at the six giant letters atop the brilliant marquee. He took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. “Here you go, buddy boy,” he said, handing it to Bacon. “The cab’s on me.”

  GREAT STUFF, THE ESCAPIST,” Orson Welles told Sammy. He seemed vastly tall and surprisingly young, and he smelled like Dolores Del Rio. In 1941 it was fashionable among certain smart people to confess to a more than passing knowledge of Batman, or Captain Marvel, or the Blue Beetle. “I don’t like to miss a word.”

  “Thank yo
u,” said Sam.

  This, though he never forgot and in later years embellished it, was the extent of his interaction with Orson Welles, on that night or any other. At the party afterward, at the Pennsylvania Roof, Joe danced with Dolores Del Rio, and Rosa danced with handsome Joseph Cotten and with Edward Everett Horton, the latter by far the better dancer of the two. Tommy Dorsey’s band was playing. Sammy sat and watched and listened, eyes half-closed, aware, as were all devotees of big-band swing in 1941, that it was his privilege to be alive at the very moment when the practitioners of his favorite music were at the absolute peak of their artistry and craft, a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish, and a droll, tidy variety of soul. Joe and Dolores Del Rio danced a fox-trot and then, naturally, a rumba. That was the extent of Joe’s interaction with Dolores Del Rio, though he and Orson Welles continued to see each other from time to time at the bar of the Edison Hotel.

  More significant by far than anything else that happened to the cousins on that first day of May 1941 was the movie they had come to see.

  In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots had been pretty well exhausted. Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero. The Escapist’s chin grew larger and more emphatically dimpled, and his muscles hypertrophied until he bulged, as his postwar arch-foe Dr. Magma memorably expressed it, “like a sack full of cats.” Miss Plum Blossom’s ever-ready needle was pressed into providing the Escapist with a Liberacean array of specialized crime-fighting togs, and Omar and Big Al began to grumble openly about the bills their boss piled up by his extravagant expenditures on supervehicles, superplanes, and even a “hand-carved ivory crutch” for Tom Mayflower to use on big date nights. The Escapist was quite vain; readers sometimes caught him stopping, on his way to fight evil, to check his reflection and comb his hair in a window or the mirror of a drugstore scale. In between acts of saving the earth from the evil Omnivores, in one of the late issues, #130 (March 1953), the Escapist works himself into quite a little lather as he attempts, with the help of a lisping decorator, to renovate the Keyhole, the secret sanctum under the boards of the Empire Palace. While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. He took vacations in Cuba, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where he shared a stage at the Sands Hotel with none other than Wladziu Liberace himself. Sometimes, if he was in no particular hurry to get anywhere, he let Big Al take over the controls of the Keyjet and picked up a movie magazine that had his picture on its cover. The so-called Rube Goldberg plots—in which the Escapist, as bored as anyone by the dull routine of crime-busting, deliberately introduced obstacles and handicaps into his own efforts to thwart the large but finite variety of megalomaniacs, fiends, and rank hoodlums he fought in the years after the war, in order to make things more interesting for himself—became a trademark of the character: he would agree with himself beforehand, say, to dispatch some particular gang of criminals “barehanded,” and to use his by now vastly augmented physical strength only if one of them uttered some random phrase like “ice water,” and then, just after he was almost licked and the weather too cold for anyone ever to ask for a glass of ice water, the Escapist would hit on a way to arrange things so that inexorably the gang ended up in the back of a truck full of onions. He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.

  The Escapist who reigned among the giants of the earth in 1941 was a different kind of man. He was serious, sometimes to a fault. His face was lean, his mouth set, and his eyes, through the holes in his headscarf, were like cold iron rivets. Though he was strong, he was far from invulnerable. He could be knocked cold, bludgeoned, drowned, burned, beaten, shot. And his missions were just that—his business, fundamentally, was one of salvation. The early stories, for all their anti-fascist fisticuffs and screaming Stukas, are stories of orphans threatened, peasants abused, poor factory workers turned into slavering zombies by their arms-producer bosses. Even after the Escapist went to war, he spent as much time sticking up for the innocent victims of Europe as he did taking divots out of battleships with his fists. He shielded refugees and kept bombs from landing on babies. Whenever he busted a Nazi spy ring at work right here in the U.S.A. (the Saboteur’s, for example), he would deliver the speeches by which Sam Clay tried to help fight his cousin’s war, saying, for example, as he broke open yet another screw-nosed “armored mole” full of lunkish Germans who had been trying to dig under Fort Knox, “I wonder what that head-in-the-sand crowd of war ostriches would say if they could see this!” In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1941, as America went about the rumbling, laborious process of backing itself into a horrible war.

  And yet, in spite of the fact that he sold in the millions, and for a time ascended or sank into the general popular consciousness of America, if Sammy had never written and Joe had never drawn another issue after the spring of 1941, the Escapist no doubt would have faded from the national memory and imagination, as have the Cat-Man and Kitten, the Hangman, and the Black Terror, all of whose magazines sold nearly as well as the Escapist’s at their peaks. The cultists—the collectors and fans—would not have shelled out appalling sums for, or written hundreds of thousands of donnish words devoted to, the early collaborations of Kavalier & Clay. If Sammy had never written another word after Radio Comics #18 (June 1941), he would have been remembered, if at all, by only the most fanatic devotees of comic books as the creator of a number of minor stars of the early forties. If Ebling’s Exploding Trident had killed Joe Kavalier that evening at the Hotel Pierre, he would have been recalled, if at all, as a dazzling cover artist, the creator of energetic and painstaking battle scenes, and the inspired fantasist of Luna Moth, but not, as he is by some today, as one of the greatest innovators in the use of layout, of narrative strategies, in the history of comic book art. But in July 1941, Radio #19 hit the stands, and the nine million unsuspecting twelve-year-olds of America who wanted to grow up to be comic book men nearly fell over dead in amazement.

  The reason was Citizen Kane. The cousins sat, with Rosa and Bacon between them, in the balcony of the dowdy Palace with its fancy-pants chandelier and a fresh poultice of velvet and gilding applied to its venerable old bones. The lights went down. Joe lit a cigarette. Sammy sat back and arranged his legs, which had a tendency to fall asleep at the movies. The picture came on. Joe noted that Orson Welles’s was the only name above the title. The camera hopped that spiky iron fence, soared like a crow up that sinister, broken hillside with its monkeys and its gondolas and its miniature golf course and, knowing just what it was looking for, burst in through the window and zoomed right in on a pair of monstrous lips as they rasped out that ultimate word.

  “This is going to be good,” Joe said.

  He was impressed—demolished—by it. When the lights came up, Sammy leaned forward and looked past Rosa at Joe, eager to see what he had thought of the film. Joe sat looking straight ahead, blinking, working it all out in his mind. All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.

  “I want us to do something like that,” he said.

  This was precisely the thought that had occupied Sammy from the moment he caught on to the film’s structure, when the mock-newsreel about Kane ended and the lights came up on the men who worked for the “March of Time” newsreel company in the film. But for Joe it had been the utterance of his sense of inspiration, of t
aking up a challenge, while for Sammy it had been more the expression of his envy of Welles, and of his despair at ever getting out of this lucrative swindle, with its cheap-novelty roots. After they got home from the Pennsylvania, the four of them sat up well into the night, drinking coffee, feeding records to the Panamuse, recollecting bits, shots, and lines of dialogue to one another. They could not get over the long upward tilt of the camera, through the machinery and shadows of the opera house, to the pair of stagehands holding their noses while Susan Alexander made her debut. They would never forget the way the camera had dived through the skylight of the seedy nightclub to pounce on poor Susie in her ruin. They discussed the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw portrait of Kane, and argued about how anyone knew his dying word when no one appeared to be in the room to hear him whisper it. Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them. It was not just a matter, he told Sammy, of somehow adapting the bag of cinematic tricks so boldly displayed in the movie—extreme close-ups, odd angles, quirky arrangements of foreground and background; Joe and a few others had been dabbling with this sort of thing for some time. It was that Citizen Kane represented, more than any other movie Joe had ever seen, the total blending of narration and image that was—didn’t Sammy see it?—the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership. Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and bold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was more, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard—its inextricable braiding of image and narrative—Citizen Kane was like a comic book.