Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “Certainly break with convention. And who would be my antagonist if the creature now fondles our heartstrings?”

  “The idea is the villain,” I said calmly.

  “That tone does seem to lurk beneath the prose of the book.”

  Why was he keeping up this ruse of the book? All my instincts screamed he had no intention of doing anything remotely recognizable as someone else’s work.

  “I never read the book,” I said.

  “Well, you have unnerving insight for such an illiterate. Bite of lunch?”

  We had stopped at his apartment. A simple walk-up, small but elegant with one large window facing the Broadway Holiday Building. Tasteful trappings. Framed originals. Small bronzes. And on the wall was a watercolor portrait of a young girl curled under scrutiny, nude, in garish oranges and greens, a whitewash over her stomach. I recognized it immediately. It was me. Painted by my artist a lifetime ago. The last view of myself alive.

  “Herr Schiele,” I said under my breath.

  Whale gave a small start.

  “Do you know Egon Schiele’s work?”

  “Quite well,” I said.

  “Few do. But I must say there is an uncanny resemblance between you and the subject.”

  “There should be,” I said evenly. “I sat for it.”

  The director paused. And then a smile filled his face as he assessed my obviously impossible claim.

  “You know, child,” he said. “You are far more interesting than you initially appeared. David?” He called into the kitchen and there appeared a man, shirtless, with an apron around his waist. He kissed the director fully on the mouth.

  “Lunch won’t be much, last night’s tagine and a green salad,” David said.

  “Set another place,” Whale whispered, looking to me.

  “Oh my,” David moaned. “I hope it doesn’t drink milk. I used the last in our coffees this morning.”

  “I won’t be eating,” I said, stepping forward. “But I do appreciate the gesture.” I bowed. I had learned never to shake hands.

  “Formal, isn’t it,” David said, curtsying. “What’s it called?”

  “Maddy something. But really, David, you should try to be more civil. She is frightfully clever and we will be working together.”

  “Madeline or Magdalene?” David asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Mädchen, actually,” I answered. “My mother was nothing if not literal.”

  “Oh, my favorite kind of mother. You can stay.” And he flitted off into the kitchen and moved bowls and opened drawers while Whale moved me to the sofa.

  “My guess is we’ll get stuck with an adaptation of the Webling for a text, but I’ll want more comic relief. I like the idea of a mute. Limits our casting choices, but it makes sense. I’ve already worked out the look of the thing.”

  He fumbled through a portfolio before removing a sketch that he handed me. Mutter’s face gazed back at me.

  “Where is the original?” I asked.

  “Pardon?” Whale exhaled a stream of smoke.

  “Lon made the original drawing of this makeup years ago. Where is it? Or is plagiary another of your hidden talents?”

  “My, you have done your homework.”

  He stood and reached behind a chair and there it was, faded a bit but still Mutter. Serious, slightly afraid, trying to concentrate, trying to earn his box of chocolate. Heartbreaking.

  “I know the man who sat for this.”

  “You are full of jests, aren’t you?”

  “We came from Germany together. He fought in the war.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Deathly. Would you like to meet him?”

  “I do so hope your precociousness will eventually strike me as charming.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Whale did not like the outdoors, nor the rough or wild places. His idea of roughing it was a poolside sherry at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In those days, the backlot, the Indian village, would qualify as wild. He did like the shirtless half-breeds and stuntmen parading around in tight dungarees and sweaty deltoids, however. And a smile never left his face as I took him deeper into the circle of teepees and hollowed-out car bodies that now doubled as domiciles.

  Mutter stopped when he saw me. It had been several months. From his hand fell the fist of his son, who was walking now, his head as round and furred and normal as any human child’s. Mutter stared at me and I could see his mind working, remembering, checking for sweetness, for fondness, before he smiled and approached me. I leaped into his arms and he held me tightly, embracing me off the ground.

  Seeing Mutter was not a revelation for Whale. I believe he saw the real-time resemblance of his creation as a usurpation of his creativity, an affront to what he needed to protect and project as his originality. I wish I knew then how far he would go to defend it. I remember him standing in the cow shit and crumpled hay, his outline darkening in the fading sun, the raw real life all around him, the sloppy families and happy, naked children with sooted noses, the supper fires just beginning to smoke, and he, in his elegant high boots, his face inflamed with a slight disgust, looking as out of place as a Limoges figurine on a bomb range. It was the only time I would see Jimmy Whale at a loss for words.

  Whale was an artistic aristocrat, a man burdened with an almost regal responsibility to distinguish himself. He was aware of Hollywood’s unspoken code of candor and insisted each worker in his sphere refer to him as Jimmy, but this seemed more an invitation to complicity than a genuine gesture of warmth. People were treated civilly only as long as they did his bidding. I, alone, was solicited for my opinions, an act he found so circumspect it took place only in private.

  “The ending’s no good,” Whale said one day over a lunch of shrimp salad and a glass of Montrachet. “This business with the ice floes will appear . . . What is the American slang?”

  “Hokey?”

  “Precisely. Primarily because their breath won’t fog and believability is most essential with the fantastic. It needs a touch of Revelation, an almost biblical undoing.”

  “Locusts? Frogs?”

  “Too much sugar on your Wheaties, dear?”

  “Fire?”

  “Perhaps, but something literate.”

  “Hanging? A Tale of Two Cities?” I offered. (To work with Whale without at least a cursory knowledge of world literature was to risk a tedious tongue-lashing that always ended with an elbow crook stuffed with some dingy leather tome.)

  “I see where you’re going, the flesh rounding full circle.” Some of the corpse had been taken from a hanged man in Shelley’s story. Or was it my original he was pilfering? “I like the symmetry, but it’s too prosaic. It has to be a metaphor for quelled audacity, a failed dream.”

  “A windmill?” My last reading assignment had been the heft of Cervantes.

  “Quixote’s giants. I think you have something. Trapped in one’s ambition, one’s affront to the natural order, immolated in the dream, destroyed in desire. Marvelous. Can’t you see those massive sails streaking sun-bright in the night?”

  He would always remember the inspiration as his own. Just as he would my suggestion of modern dress. He would later tell the press the idea had been his unrealized desire to do Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in the guise of American bootleggers.

  One idea that was his own was the casting of the titular doctor. For the part of Henry, Whale gave very little thought to casting a friend and colleague of his, an actor he had directed in his hit Journey’s End. The studio at this point had reduced the budget by a hundred thousand and had very little leverage in convincing Whale to hire a name.

  Colin Clive’s alcoholism was legend, as were his nervous excesses, his shell-shocked magnetism, his early demise while still beautiful. What was not so well reported was that he was a kind, chivalrous, preternaturally sensitive man who spoke three languages and insisted on calling me ma petite tant pis (my little too bad) because he was convinced my pallor and thin frame were the result of
some wasting disease. He was constantly slipping me cold shingles of toast dripping with great yeasty smears of Marmite, convinced of the yeast derivative’s restorative powers.

  Whale had still not cast the role of the creature. He believed that the right actor would simply materialize, like some hideous Venus from a mechanical clamshell. He would go on to claim authorship for every aspect of the picture, including Freund’s chiseled shadows and Pierce’s iconic makeup. So I knew he would never accept an actor who had not blossomed under his strict curatorship. Seeing Mutter and not considering him for the role confirmed as much. We had not discussed the essential of a sympathetic creature, not past our initial meetings. And I think Whale thought a monster picture required a fairly requisite monster. I felt differently. I knew the monster was the paternal maker, the creature the child victim. How, in my present state, with my strained maternal relationship, could I have felt differently? So I was actively looking. In the basements at the janitors taking their sullen cigarette breaks. Among the burly carpenters in the set shop. Unusual office boys and the chauffeurs of certain stars. I was looking for eyes. Sympathetic eyes, loving, yearning, ill-begotten but caring eyes. With the part irrefutably mute, these would be the actor’s only arsenal.

  I found the eyes I was looking for one day on the lot, under a fringe of pomaded bangs, beneath a craggy brow, headed expeditiously to the men’s room. I followed them in. A tinned knight and a clown were just dipping back into the flies of their costumes. And what could I be other than a midget in drag to their distracted eyes? I stood my ground behind the set of eyes and waited. He was of average height, of average build, perhaps on the thin side. From the back, his shoulders were not very broad. And I thought of the challenge to wardrobe. Then he turned around. He had a wedge-shaped head, dark complexion with sunken cheeks.

  “Are you lost, my dear?” his gentle voice cooed, softened further by a sibilant lisp. His eyes were perfect, warm and dark as two mugs of chocolate.

  “No,” I finally answered.

  “Are you looking for the ladies loo?”

  “You’re English?” Somehow I thought this might endear him to Whale.

  “Enfield, yes. Are you sure I can’t help you?”

  “I’m here to help you.”

  He tucked and zipped.

  How that smile of his could ever be considered sinister I’ll never know.

  “Then this must be my lucky day,” he said, moving to the sink to wash his hands.

  I told him about the new production, how I felt he would be perfect for it, and how he simply needed to meet Mr. Whale. He nodded ingratiatingly, indulging the obviously deluded child who rambled beneath him. Whale was deep in preproduction by then and forced to take whatever sustenance he required from the lot. I told him to be in the commissary tomorrow, precisely at lunchtime.

  “But I never take lunch in the commissary.” He smiled. “Too much cutter. I bag it most days or go without.”

  “Well, then here,” I said, giving him a quarter. “Have a roll and coffee tomorrow. But be sure to be there.”

  He fingered the coin, a faint yearning in his eyes, then held it out for me to take back.

  “I’m serious. This could be big,” I said.

  “And by what name goes my generous benefactress?”

  “Maddy,” I said. “Maddy Ulm.”

  “Boris,” he said. “But I think you should call me Billy. Billy Pratt.” His given name was William.

  “Be there, Billy,” I said. And those warm eyes blinked warmly but noncommittally and I watched him join a chorus of other under-fives dressed in pinstripes and spectators.

  Whale refused lunch the next day. And the next. Every day at noon for a week, I would spy Mr. Pratt sitting alone, nursing his tea and roll in his best suit. And every day I would offer my apologies and slip him another quarter for the next day’s ruse.

  It was a Friday when Whale, exhausted and merely wanting a cup of tea, finally stopped in the commissary. I forced him to sit under the pretense of my own hunger. Having never seen me eat, he seemed oddly fascinated by the prospect of actually watching me consume a meal. I searched the tables to no avail. Mr. Pratt was nowhere in sight, probably bored by our little game. But still I piled on heaps of steaming roast beef and potatoes. Panicked, I feigned delight at the culinary delights that awaited me. Sitting down, I had just stuffed my dry throat with a particularly undercooked bit of potato when Whale announced that he had to return to work. The noxious bites of beef simply flew into my mouth. I felt them back up in gelatinous layers in the proximal end of my esophagus. My gusto distracted Whale from his departure and I kept packing in the tasteless food.

  “Easy, child. Save room for your pudding.”

  I felt sure my throat and chest would explode from the pressure when Whale’s eyes narrowed past me.

  “Hello,” he said distractedly. “Won’t be a tick,” and he shot up and raced to a table behind me. I, of course, was splitting. Literally. Thankfully, the damage was behind the buttons of my blouse, and as I recused myself to the ladies’ room to purge the dead flesh from my deader hollows, I spied Whale gleefully lighting a cigar as he invited Mr. Pratt, who must have slipped in during my performance, to join him.

  When I returned, Whale waved me over with an avuncular dip of his hand, the gesture of that odd ever-clean uncle who liked to linger in the clinging steam while the boys took their bath, and said, “I’ve found him.” Mr. Pratt looked distressed. It was clear he thought I deserved the credit for his “discovery.” But I knew differently. I shot a warning glance to Billy. His face reassembled in innocence.

  “Well, Miss Ulm.” Whale exhaled with a tint of boredom. “Meet the creature.”

  “That’s marvelous, Mr. Whale,” I demurred. “He’s perfect.”

  CHAPTER 36

  I was sitting with Mr. Pierce, the picture’s makeup artist, midsummer, in the cold white of his home studio amid the rolls of mortician’s wax stacked like toy cigars and smoked bottles of solvent-smelling collodion, watching him eat a spongy cake of feta cheese as he held forth on the morphology of midfacial prognathism and the unique yet purely speculative contention that middle-Pleistocene Neanderthals had no concept of a future tense. They were children in that frozen wilderness, he explained, dim to the need for complex tools. And yet death, which with their cognitive deficiencies must have seemed a rough repeating surprise, still yielded elaborate, even compassionate, burials. They loved. And might have died out because they so loved. Frankenstein’s creature would have their large-boned bodies, their rough gait and brooding suborbital torus, but not because he was a club-wielding brute straight from the Sunday funnies. Rather because the creature was a childlike son of Adam. Simple, hurt, hungry for love, and ultimately hateful when that love was withheld. At least I didn’t have to convince Pierce of the necessity of the creature’s nature.

  “Yes, yes, Jack,” Whale would whisper dismissively after he’d heard Pierce’s reasoning, “but I can’t have an overgrown infant parading around wet-eyed for eighty minutes. He must be terrifying. Unequivocally ghastly. You do understand, old man, don’t you?”

  “I understand this makeup must tell the truth of the character.”

  “When has a tin of lip rouge ever been party to the truth?”

  “Precisely,” Pierce said in his accented English. “Beauty makeup is a lie. But this cannot be.”

  “Just stick to my sketches; there’s a good man.”

  These summer sessions at Pierce’s home studio were the only luxury Whale afforded us. Billy sat patiently in the chair, the great peak of foul-smelling meringue above his eyes outgassing stridently while Pierce left to make coffee. He had suffered through weeks of several failed makeups, each time winning nothing more than Whale’s polite disdain. He never complained. So that afternoon I assumed it was the Elgar on the wireless that was making his doe-like eyes water.

  “Dear me,” he said, trying a reluctant smile. “I do look a fright. I seem to have fallen aslee
p at the Brighton shore and a whole flock of seabirds has had its nasty way with me.” Unpainted, his cotton and collodion brow did look a bit like a carefully molded turd.

  “You’ll look better once you’re painted.”

  “Ah, yes, and such a flattering morgue green. I can just see the offers jostling for supremacy once we wrap.”

  “You’ll be wonderful.”

  “Listen to me. Crying in my tea for cream. I suppose I should be grateful for the chance to eat.”

  “What’s wrong, Billy?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m forty-four years old and for the first time in my oh-so-humble career I have a role I have absolutely no idea how to play. An odd-mannered corpse.”

  “Oh, he’s much more than that.”

  “Is he? Whale doesn’t seem to think so. The pinnacle of his direction to date has been to tell me to cut back on the fags.”

  “Forget what Whale said. Or hasn’t said.”

  “My dear girl, I couldn’t possibly.” I looked in the mirror at Billy’s reflection. There was a gentleman sitting there beneath all that reeking white muck. I would need to soften my approach.

  “I should think having once been dead would give the creature a rather exclusive view on living,” I said quietly.

  He looked at me in the mirror, his eyes wide with a soft curiosity. “And what would such a view be?” Did he know he had solicited my confession? Why did I feel such a sudden sense of pending relief?

  “Off the top of my head,” I said, trying to sound casual, to sound speculative, “I’d imagine there’d be a pervasive sense of not belonging. Not awkwardness, mind you. Or even being some endearing misfit. But having to look at the world as through a piece of shop glass. Everything you see—the sky, the sun, the faces of animals and people, nothing belongs to you. Nothing is yours. You can move through the world, even touch it. But you can never belong to it. And yet that knowledge does nothing to dispel your very real desire for it. It would be to know the world only secondhand. To have to face every false day, every counterfeit night knowing what others only glimpse at their very end: that the world was never really yours to begin with, that everything you held dear, had fought for and loved for had only ever been borrowed.” Billy was silent for a long time. Had he heard? I might have given him the only real direction he would receive during the entire shoot, but I had no idea if he had understood me.