This cry from the heart recalled my own brief hour as a glass of fashion and a mold of form. And my fascinating fall.
It must have been about the time that Carol Channing was doing her unforgettable Mehitabel on Broadway. Who could then have foreseen the same actress, stripped to panties and bra, making love to Frankie Avalon in Skidoo? Or that Mr. Preminger’s own star, then ascending, would peak with Hurry Sundown?
“I can’t afford the rent,” I told the studio agent who’d conducted me into a spacious and well-appointed apartment.
“Otto is taking care of it,” he informed me in a whisper.
A fellow toting a case of scotch walked in. He had SUNSET LIQUORS stitched in gold across white coveralls.
“I didn’t order that,” I told him.
“Otto’s taking care of it,” the agent whispered again.
The SUNSET LIQUORS man returned with a case of beer and a bag of ice.
“I didn’t order that either,” I insisted.
“Otto will take care of it,” the agent reassured me softly.
“What’s the name of this place?” I asked him.
“Chateau-Marmont,” he told me in the same hush-hush tone. I couldn’t tell whether he had a speech impediment or was just naturally secretive.
Two more strangers came in, carrying a floor-model television set. I looked at the agent.
“Set it down over there,” I instructed them.
The following morning I answered a knock. Someone wearing a white jacket and carrying a medic’s bag entered.
“Your barber,” he announced himself.
“I cut my own hair,” I told him.
“I was sent for,” he explained.
“I didn’t send for you,” I decided, turned him about and eased him out.
“Somebody just sent someone to shave me,” I later complained to the Whispering One.
“I don’t know,” he told me softly as ever, “but Otto would have paid for it.”
“Why?”
“He likes you.”
“Can’t he even wait till me meets me?”
“He’s going to pick you up at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
I was waiting at the curb ten minutes before the hour. When you’re making a movie there’s not a moment to lose. Otto drove up in a Caddy so long he’d have to back up to turn the corner. I got in.
“Good morning,” I greeted him.
Otto didn’t bother with that.
“You like donn?” he asked instead—and the windows opened of their own volition!
“Or you like better opp?”—the windows closed automatically.
I be dog. I’d never in my whole life till now had one button do three things—up, down or stand still. By the way Otto was beaming, I judged he’d patented all three. Would he ever like me enough to let me blow the horn?
We wheeled past a golf course. Above the greens two large birds kept hovering.
“How you like apartment?”
“Comfortable,” I acknowledged.
“Is Frankie’s.”
“Frankie?”
“Sinatra.”
Then waited for me to cry, “Spit on me! I’m in the very front row!”
“Oh, I thought it was Bogie’s,” was all I could think to say. I judged the birds to be buzzards looking for dead golfers.
We began picking up helpers. One had two cameras slung around his neck. He plumped for opp. The next was carrying a makeup kit. He came out for donn. The third was a middle-aged fellow who lit up a pipe as much as to say he actually didn’t give a damn, one way or another, opp, donn or sidewise. Otto caught his eye in the rearview mirror and you should have seen that fellow emptying the bowl of that pipe into the ashtray. He was still scanning the upholstery for traces of ashes when we reached the studio. Nobody was helping him to find them, either. If you want to make a movie you have to break the tobacco-habit first.
While the make-up man was pitty-pattying Otto’s cheeks, I followed the camera-fellow around, plugging in extensions for him. I was happy to be on hand where history was in the making.
No sooner had the makeup man given Otto a fresh complexion than the photographer told him to smile pleasantly—then tripped the flash without delaying. He was working against time and he knew it.
The phone rang. Otto answered it without changing position.
“No no,” he informed the caller, “for that we import entire cast,” and hung up. “Everybody wants to be Mahatma Gandhi,” he explained. I was learning something every minute.
After the makeup man and the photographer had completed their chores, Otto beckoned me to his desk. He gave something a nudge and its top rolled back, revealing an illuminated panel of push-buttons. He invited me to press one he indicated. I did. There was a low, whirring sound. An instant later a secretary entered.
“That’s alright, dear,” Otto excused her, “I was just demonstrating.” I felt I should have gotten some credit.
He pressed another. The fellow who didn’t care one way or another came in; with the bowl of his pipe still visible in his lapel pocket. This was more fun than making windows go up and down.
“You and pipe bot’ oudt!” Otto gave him a direct order. The fellow wheeled back out of the door before it had closed behind him. When you’re making a movie you have to stay on your toes every minute.
“See?” Otto asked me, “If you can turn on TV by remote control, why not send for people like so also?”
I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. Provided they’d come.
“Why you write about such people you write about?” he wanted to know.
“They live around where I live.”
“Why you live around such people?”
“Because when I live around other people they turn out to be such people, that I go back and live around just such people.”
“What a lousy excuse,” seemed to be Otto’s thought.
“You like underdogs?”
“I like some people who are under, but not because they’re under. Under is just where they happen to be. You like people just for happening to be on top?”
Being on top or being underneath wasn’t just a happening to Otto, I judged. For he seemed to think I was putting him on: being on top was self-sufficing, it appeared: as being under spoke for itself. Opp. Donn.
The phone rang again. This time it was for me. The Whispering One.
“Be nice to Otto,” he cooed; and hung up.
“That was my agent,” I told Otto. “He coos.”
“What he coo?”
“I should be nice to you.”
“You find that difficult?”
“Why force matters?”
“Don’t you want people to like you?”
“Very few.”
“I see you’re not success-oriented. I’m very success-oriented myself,” he assured me as if I could never have guessed. “I would like to be less success-oriented; but my standard of living prevented. Why can DeSica do on two hundred thousand what it takes us a million to make? Because DeSica wasn’t born in a success-oriented society, that’s why. I’ve made pictures myself that lost money! I’ve also made pictures that gave people enjoyment! What if it wasn’t art? They lost money anyhow! Do you remember the camera work in Great Expectations? That wasn’t mine either!”
He began wiping his makeup off with Kleenex.
“Why did L. B. Mayer object to making the Red Badge of Courage and it turned out he was right? He could pick up a phone and say ‘Send me ten creative artists! I want ten creative artists!’—and he got them! There was a man who knew how to set people against each other! People say if he were alive today he wouldn’t be as great as he was—I say he’d be even greater! One day to the next, nobody working under L. B. Mayer knew if he was going to get a raise or get fired. Today actors become producers because of tax problems. So everything costs too much.”
I wanted to push another button.
“That’s why this is the free world—
if everything didn’t cost too much we’d stop being free! So what do reviewers expect of me? To go against society? Every time I make a movie I pay the price for being born into a success-oriented society as though it were my fault!”
I didn’t know what society could do about it either. Unless there was a button somewhere somebody hadn’t yet pushed.
“I don’t even read reviews about myself,” Otto went on, “if someone don’t like me I take it to heart.”
I began to see that society had a responsibility, too. Come to think of it, if Otto hadn’t been a really nice person to begin with he would be even rottener now than he already was. You have to see both sides of a question when you’re making a movie.
“Now,” he seemed to be coming in for a landing or at least to touch his wheels on the airstrip—“Now I begin doing things for others. How did you begin?”
“How did I begin what?”
“Doing things for others. So people like you.”
I tried to remember back to how I’d gotten my start in this field. “I’m not sure,” I had to admit, “but I do remember running a little game we called ‘peek’ outside of Camp Twenty Grand near Rouen. We called it that so the fellows wouldn’t think they were playing blackjack. Actually it was blackjack but with revised rules. Such as the house taking all ties and keeping the deck. But we still paid off double when a player hit twenty-one. It gave me a good warm feeling, like doing something for others, when one of the fellows got lucky like that. The good warm feeling I got was because I knew that the money he’d won would come back to the house automatically; because of the rule about taking all ties. Still, it was doing something for the other fellow all the same; even though only temporarily.”
Otto was looking at me as if he hadn’t seen me until now. And was just beginning to make up his mind. It took him a couple minutes to put it all together.
“In my films,” he decided aloud, “director directs all. I hire the writers. They work for me. I take the blame, I get the credit. But I am pleased to have met such interesting person.”
His congratulations were offered but not his hand.
The phone was ringing when I got back to the Chateau. You know who it was.
“Otto is upset. We told you not to discuss salary with him.”
“We didn’t get around to that. He told me about his personality, that was all. He’s having trouble with it.”
“He’s upset about something.”
A long pause followed, as though the man were just sitting there trying to figure something out all by himself. I held on until he’d figured it.
“You must have made him feel insecure,” he finally decided.
“Not intentionally,” I reassured him, “I just couldn’t take him seriously.”
“He felt it was the movie you didn’t take seriously.”
“Come to think of it,” I had to admit, “I’m not sure that I do.”
A curious change began transpiring at the Chateau. I noticed it first when the same two fellows who’d brought me a TV came in and took it away.
Then the fellow with SUNSET LIQUORS stitched in gold on his coveralls handed me a bill for the liquor he’d delivered.
“Mr. Preminger is taking care of this,” I tried to argue.
“He must have had a change of plan,” was SUNSET LIQUORS’ guess. And waited until SUNSET was paid.
The next morning a rental notice was pushed under the door. I phoned the rental office.
“Mr. Preminger is taking care of this rental,” I told the woman who answered.
“Mr. Preminger isn’t exactly crazy,” she informed me, “we can give you forty-eight hours and not an hour longer.” And she hung up with that ultimatum.
Well I be dawg. Could it be that Otto didn’t like me after all? Would my Hollywood career wither before it had blossomed? Would I be stigmatized with the spendthrift gentry? Would I have to admit to my friends in Indiana that I’d never even met Frank Sinatra? With only forty-seven rent-free hours remaining and the clock ticking away, I would have to do something. I phoned Otto’s office. His secretary answered.
“May I have an appointment to see Mr. Preminger at 2:30 this afternoon?” I asked her humbly. Then waited while she checked that out with the illuminated panel.
“That will be satisfactory, Mr. Algren,” she congratulated me.
“Then have Otto meet me at the Club House bar at Santa Anita,” I filled her in. “Post time is 2:30.”
It was my turn to hang up.
* * *
Otto wasn’t at the bar at post time. When you’re making a movie you can’t always get to the track on time. Catching a small winner in the first race helped me to swallow my disappointment. Another winner in the fourth left me with so little to swallow that I rechecked the bar. I began teasing the olive in my martini pretending I was going to gobble her whole and then just taking the tiniest nibble. A jock-sized man loitering in the shadow of the bar’s farthest corner kept watching me. It came to me that I knew him.
Max.
Nothing had changed about Max except that the left lens of his shades had been cracked. He was still in the same two-pairs-of-pants suit he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, two years before, in Chicago. And he still owed me three hundred and fifty-five dollars. I didn’t rap to him because a man who has to follow horses through a cracked lens isn’t about to pay off a two-year-old debt.
He hadn’t been a total stranger to me when he’d hit on me, that afternoon at Sportsman’s. I knew the same people Max knew. Some of them were even permitted on the premises. Letting Max inside had been the oversight of the track security office.
I’d showed him what I’d encircled on my program: Scatterug. I wanted to play the horse because I knew Scatterug had sound judgment. He’d once tried to bite me at Cahokia Downs.
The horse was 9-1 on the board.
“When he gets up to 10-1, I bet him,” I’d assured Max just as the odds flashed to 11-1. I turned to make my bet. Max had followed me.
“If I can’t stop you from playing it, how about giving me your action, Nels?” he’d asked me, “I pay track odds.”
I gave him a fifty to put on the nose. It had saved me the trouble of going upstairs to the window.
Scatterug had come past the stands running fourth on the rail, with the rider having all he could do to keep the horse from moving up too fast. The horse had felt like running. The rider had let him move up to second on the far turn; and had held him to the rail until he’d made the turn for home. Then he’d let him out. When he’d come past me on the stretch, I glanced back to see where the other horses had gone; and they’d looked like they were standing still. $24.40. Max owed me six hundred and ten dollars.
“Nels!” he’d returned with a twitch in his neck and had begun accusing me—“Nels! The first time you give me action you hit!” He’d pocketed the fifty; that much was clear.
That had left me with a pair of alternatives: I could come in on him to the people he was holding out on and have them beat his head in; or I could carry him on the chance he’d get lucky himself. I didn’t mind if people beat his head in: yet it wouldn’t get me my six-hundred-ten.
Max hadn’t taken it on the arfy-darfy, I’ll give him that. He’d paid me off two hundred fifty. In pieces. The last time I’d had to loan him another five to pay off his cab. I’d told him next time take a bus. I hadn’t seen him since. Now, as I finally put an end to the olive’s anguish, he rapped to me to come over and share his shadow.
“Meet Big Bernard,” he invited me.
I hadn’t noticed, until then, that the shadow in which Max was loitering was Big Bernard. He was so big he blocked off the light of half the bar. Bernard was plainly the heavy in this road show.
“This was the guy I was tellin’ you,” Max explained to him, “the first time he give me some action he hit.”
Big Bernard looked down at Max. Neither of his shades was cracked.
“That don’t make him a bad guy,
does it?” he asked Max.
“Where you stayin’, Nels?” Max asked me.
“A place I’m getting thrown out of tomorrow.”
“We got us a pretty good place,” he invited me, “you could sleep on the couch in the front room. Would that be okay, Bernie?”
“You don’t even know you’re alive,” Big Bernard decided with finality.
“It’s alright with Bernie,” Max translated.
Big Bernard removed his shades and looked down at Max for a long moment. He had the biggest, lightest, baby-greyest eyes I’d ever seen. They were the eyes of a man who’s been shortsighted so long that nothing they’d seen had ever given his conscience the faintest twinge. They were the eyes of a man who could do anything.
“How can the man tell if he wants to sleep in our place when he never even seen it?” he finally asked Max, “How do you know he even wants to hang out with us? You better start breathin’ or somebody’s going to come along and bury you.” He turned to me: “We’ll run you out to our place. You can see for yourself.” Everything Big Bernard said was final.
“I’m ready to leave when you fellows are,” I told them.
“Now all you got to do to get heat on us is start jumpin’ the lights,” Big Bernard warned Max as he climbed into the back seat and let me share the front with Max, “I’ll turn state’s evidence on you.”
“You want to drive yourself then?” Max asked him. But received no reply.
The first light Max jumped was a yellow. I thought it was accidental until I saw him smirking into the rearview mirror to watch Big Bernard’s apprehension. The next one he jumped was another yellow—but this time he didn’t smirk when he looked into the rearview. He turned sickly green. “Are you clean?” he had just time to ask—but I had no time to figure what he thought I might be holding. Motorbike Cop One curbed us on the left side and Motorbike Cop Two was leaning into my side.
“Let’s see what you look like in the daylight,” he told me. But as soon as I stepped out he became more interested in seeing what Max looked like. I had a fleeting hope that they wouldn’t look in the back seat. But Cop One was already seeing what Big Bernard looked like.
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