by Anthology
“Normalcy?”
“A word that should not deceive us,” Funck said.
“And what would you regard as a normal human being?” Cary asked.
“A normal North American in the United States?”
Cary nodded.
“Simple,” Funck said, “In my definition normalcy is that state of mind and being that finds abstract ideas both nonsensical and revolting—and this is what my nostrum should bring about in you. For instance, if it works, you will feel a revulsion for those aspirations and aesthetics that the world’s philosophers and artists have deemed most admirable in the character of man.”
“And what supplants these aspirations?”
“All that you have heretofore regarded as vulgar and banal,” Funck said, smiling.
“Such as murder, embezzlement, adultery?” Cary’s tone was sarcastic.
“Not at all,” Funck said calmly. “Such things are committed by men of imagination—psychopaths, misfits, rebels.”
“Then what will I be?”
Funck’s smile was broad and sunny. “A regular guy,” he said. “A bundle of the most approved clichés, fair and square, who minds his p’s and q’s and earns his bread and board by the sweat of his brow—especially when things are at sixes and sevens you’ll keep the world safe and sound for democracy.”
“How enviable,” Cary murmured. “The comic strips, the sports pages, the straight Republican ticket. What a dream!”
“A reality,” Funck said eagerly, “to which I am able to transport you. Not only will you unravel the knots of your soul, but you will be making a contribution to science. You will be Exhibit A for what may be the panacea for all humanity’s ills, or at least its profoundest—imagination. Remember this: imagination is all that separates the pig from the poet, the ape from the artist, the great hanging sloth from the tycoon.”
Cary rose and strode to the window. He gazed out across the boulevard to the low blue hills of the Sierra Madre. “Contract bridge, Arthur Godfrey—perhaps even love,” he murmured. Then he turned resolutely and faced Funck with an ironical smile. “I am your man,” he said. “I am your human guinea pig.”
For days it seemed that the pills were not working. Funck had advised him not to fight against any inclination toward a tolerance for mediocrity after taking them. And he had not done so. In fact, in a complete effort toward cooperation, he had gone to the other extreme. He had attended a baseball game between Hollywood and Seattle and had eaten two hot dogs—his first in years—during the seventh inning. Then, the same evening he had gone to a movie, after which he had bought a beer at the Cock and Bull saloon and bet fifteen to ten against the PCC in the Rose Bowl with a bookmaker named Maurice.
He had begun to suspect Davison Funck of playing a practical joke on him—or having committed a scientific blunder— when a curious thing happened. He was sitting in his studio apartment reading Liddell’s history of the fall of Carthage when he felt a powerful impulse to put this tale into a scenario. There and then he put the book down, went to the typewriter, and wrote furiously, deep into the night. As he wrote he visualized his scenes in Technicolor on huge, wide screens. Cato crying “Delenda est Carthago!” And Rome’s treachery. He saw his hero as young Scipio the peacemaker, falling in love with a Carthaginian princess. He saw the desperate women of Carthage cutting their long hair and twisting it into strings for the catapults that defended the city. He saw the fierce and ancient Masinissa leading the Numidian horse against the walls. He saw the city burnt at last and salt strewn on the earth so that it would never rise again. He saw his Roman hero and his Carthaginian princess joined in death, with love triumphant —an eternal poem rising from the ashes of conquest. He saw and wrote it all, and at dawn he was finished. He went to bed with a kind of exultation, and as he lay there he visualized Arod Summer in the role of the princess. He saw her as magnificent in the part and a tremendous asset at the box office, and then dimly, for the first time, he knew that Funck’s chemistry had begun its work.
The following day his transition was in full blossom. He found himself displeased with the usual disarray of his room and so he rearranged and cleaned it neatly. He took down the “Beast of Alamogordo” from the wall and put it in a closet. He could no longer bear to look at it. Then, instead of his usual coffee and orange juice, he went down the street to the Scandia and breakfasted on wheat cakes and bacon, gorging himself.
He felt curiously well. As he carried the manuscript down the street to his agent’s office he carried his hat in his hand so that the warm sun could shine on his face. Passing an alley he suddenly glanced at the hat and threw it away. Passing a haberdasher, he stopped in and bought two flowered sport shirts, wearing one and leaving his old shirt behind. A breeze blew mildly down the boulevard and brought the slight tang of the sea. He looked at the white and yellow stucco houses that clustered on the brown and green hillsides and thought what a lovely land California was. Wonderful and beautiful —the land of Portola and Crespi. Perhaps Hollywood was to America what Athens had been to ancient Greece. Perhaps it would make another Golden Age for America, particularly with the wide screens and the inevitable fusion with TV.
He wondered where Arod was this day, and felt a happy yearning for her. In spite of her magnificent beauty, she was a simple soul and therein, he thought, lay her charm. She was unspoiled, in spite of a tremendous press. She was still the girl next door beneath the surface of her indescribable loveliness. What an idiot he had been not to perceive this and to regard her as a common boob!
He laughed and went on. He noted the pallor of the skin of his hands and told himself he needed to get in the open more, go swimming or perhaps take up golf, get out in the sun and God’s fresh air that was so plentiful and available in this summery land.
When he greeted Sam Feilman, his agent, with a cheery hello, the dark little man gave him a startled look.
“What’s the matter?” Cary asked.
“Your shirt.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” Feilman said hastily. “It’s colorful. It’s magnificent.”
Cary laid the script on the desk. “So is this,” he said. “Read it and call me at Arod Summer’s.” He waved to Feilman and walked out.
He drove west on Sunset Boulevard into Beverly Hills. He found Arod sunning herself beside her swimming pool, having orange juice and coffee. She was almost as startled as Feilman had been to see him, but incalculably more delighted.
“I thought I’d take a dip,” he said.
She was stunned. “There’s suits in the locker,” she said.
He went to the bath house and put one on. Then he returned to the swimming pool and plunged into the water. She watched him with amazement, thinking, despite her love, that he swam like a drowning spider. He had never been in the pool before. His skin was white and the muscles of his long body were soft and flabby. When at last he crawled panting out of the pool, she poured him some coffee and he drank it gratefully.
“I’ve got to do more of this,” he said, rubbing his hair with a huge green towel.
“Do you have a hang-over?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I worked all night on a movie,” he said. “I was inspired.”
“Would it be right for me?”
“I wrote it for you,” he said quietly.
She stared at him blankly. One strange thing had succeeded another too swiftly for her. The flowered shirt, the plunge into the pool, the writing of a movie for her, to say nothing of his pleasant, smiling manner. It was an overwhelming combination of the incredible. She poured some coffee and drank it black. He lay back in the canvas chair to bathe in the sun and closed his eyes. She watched him and her heart pounded wildly. For the first time he had come to her, and joy sang through her blood. She wanted to kneel beside him and kiss his limp wet hand. But she restrained herself and was contented to gaze at him with tears forming in her eyes. In repose he looked at once absurd and splendid. His body was lean
and angular, his black hair long and awry. He did not remotely resemble any of the tanned and bemuscled young actors or the brown and potbellied producers who usually were her guests at this pool-side. She saw how tired he was and how the sun and water had relaxed him. She knew the moment he fell asleep and a great motherly pity and happiness pervaded her. He was asleep and the dark and bitter poetry of his soul was now mute. She had never seen him sleeping before and she found it delightful. She sat and stared at his face that was the face of a poet and an artist, an eternal outcast. He belonged to the black sheep that God, if He did not love them more, wanted most. Hollywood was filled with vain idiots who made or inherited fortunes, Texas Midases whose touch had turned everything to oil, nepots in cashmere and jaguars, soda-jerks who had been ballooned to fame by a publicity as ceaseless as it was banal, just as she herself had been. Only she knew it. She had not worked seven years in an Ohio brewery not to have learned something of life and truth—and now, an immense success in this world capital of boobs and posturers, she still had not lost her ancient values. She knew that the gaunt, pale man sleeping beside her was different. He despised the entire kingdom in which she was now a princess, and if only for this reason, she thought that he was great. Great not as a performance or a picture is called great, but as a work of art is great. And as she pondered this, the phone rang. She picked it up quickly so that it would not awaken him.
It was Feilman. He had read the script and his voice was hushed as with awe. “You can tell him when he wakes up,” Feilman said. “I have finished it and it’s great. It is the greatest story I have ever read. It is the love story of all time. It is history, spectacle, passion, humanity, and tragedy. I laughed and I cried. It will cost four million to make. If you will play it, I will now go out and sell it for fifty thousand dollars rock bottom cash—and a percentage of the gross.”
“I will, I will,” Arod said breathlessly.
“If he sleeps six hours, he will wake up a rich man,” Feilman said. “God bless you both.”
Arod put the phone down and gazed at Cary. He was snoring softly. Her eyes filled again with tears, but so great was the delight in her heart that she could not sit still but longed to embrace him. Instead, because he was weary and exhausted by his masterpiece, she ran to the diving board and for the first time actually entered the waters of her pool. It was a great day for first things.
The rise of Francis Cary began with The Fall of Carthage. Cary himself wrote the screenplay and he wove into the drama an irreproachable moral, by inference likening ancient Rome to the modern Soviet Russia, inasmuch as both yearned to conquer and enslave the world. He showed how, by offerings of peace, Carthage was tricked into unpreparedness and then destroyed. The young Roman consul and the lovely Carthaginian princess died in each other’s arms, somehow proving that love eternally dissolves the antipathies of great nations.
It became an epic. It cost the studio four million dollars. It was shown on a huge wide screen and it took New York by storm. It was a smash in Boston, socko in Chicago, terrific in Philadelphia, mighty in Minneapolis. It stormed the Bastille of television, freed the half-blinded prisoners, and led them back to the movie theaters. It satisfied everybody except the highbrow critics—and these curious creatures lambasted it unmercifully. They called it banal, uninspired, a distortion of historical fact. They called it trite, dull, maudlin, and inept. But their small dissenting voices were drowned in the vast public roar of approval.
As Francis Cary sat in a small neighborhood theater and gazed at the thing he had wrought, a strange doubt began to fill his mind; but even as it did so, he reached in his pocket and took out one of the precious pills that Davison Funck had supplied, and devoured it. In a moment or two his qualms disappeared and he bought a bag of popcorn and returned to his seat to view the remainder of the film with infinite relish.
And as the days passed, he realized, also with infinite relish, that he had become a man of great importance—what the columnists called a YIP, a very important person. It was, indeed, a splendid importance, as warm and relaxing as a sunbath. Wherever he went, he felt like a man walking in a spotlight. He could almost hear people turning to each other and whispering, “There is the author of The Fall of Carthage.”
He felt that his appearance should be commensurate with this importance, and so he bought a half-dozen suits from an important tailor named Arnold Cohn, who catered only to the most distinguished people. And in these suits he appeared at the most expensive and celebrated restaurants to loll and drink and dine, and chat with other celebrities.
He hired a publicity agent named Resner, a huge fat man of incredible cunning and duplicity. It was this Resner who persuaded him to buy a dark and conservative Cadillac rather than a Jaguar. It was Resner who counseled him to be serious and earnest in his behavior and manner.
“You’re a writer,” he said wisely, “and you’re selling dignity and knowledge and serious talent. You look like a solid, capable man and you should wind up a big producer. I have made ambassadors out of bigger boobs than you!”
And so, by the shrewd manipulations of Resner, his public career began. He appeared at luncheons and spoke with grave wit to Rotarians, Kiwanians, Optimists, and Legionnaires, and they were all impressed by his appearance and his manner of speech. He seemed to achieve, almost exactly, a delicate balance of rigid conservatism and yet humane philosophy. He became a dedicated man, in the great Roosevelt tradition. He appealed to all the little people, or, appealing to their needs, he lifted them up by his bootstraps. Fattened somewhat by the savory viands of Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, the Stork Club, and Twenty-One, Cary was now no longer Lincolnesque but seemed only the more solid and successful because of the added flesh that bulked his body. But what gave him his greatest influence was the gravity and solid common sense behind his sometimes seemingly light and humorous comments. And this too could be credited to Resner, who knew only too well that no man could become a Great American who could not tell a joke.
Perhaps achieving fame is like planning a chess game properly. And if this is so, Resner was a master strategist. For in a relatively short time Francis Cary was a name—a man who the least script girl knew was destined for high places. Even as the gross of The Fall of Carthage reached ten million, Cary’s second picture was in production and promised to be another hit. At its preview the audience stood up and cheered and there could no longer be doubt in anyone’s mind that Francis Cary knew what the public wanted. Perhaps no man since Cecil B. De Mille had shown such promise. Any head waiter could have predicted that soon he would be head of a major studio. It was no secret. It was hinted at elegant cocktail parties. It was muttered at meetings of boards of directors. It was a blind item in a dozen movie gossip columns. And in the steam room at the Hillcrest Country Club, where all the powers that be relax after playing good gin rummy and bad golf, it was an absolute cinch.
It was also part of the dream of Francis Cary, and it would all have made him gloriously happy but for one strange and unaccountable thing—A rod Summers had cooled toward him.
As soon as he realized this, he redoubled his efforts to please her. He sat under the stars with her at the Hollywood Bowl and smiled as he realized that the music of Debussy, which he had once admired, now bored him immeasurably. And it was strange to him that Arod, who knew nothing whatever about music, seemed to love it. But he made no comment, being delighted just to sit close to her, knowing that tomorrow there would be friendly items about them in all the Hollywood columns.
He took her to Palm Springs for the tennis matches and to Mexico for the bullfights. He escorted her to the most exclusive parties. Because she thought it was good, he arranged to buy the latest Book-of-the-Month Club selection as a starring vehicle for her. But her coolness persisted. He found her, frequently, gazing at him, curiously, aloofly, as though trying to analyze something about him that was odd and distasteful.
At last, in a remote corner of Chasen’s, over a bottle of vintage champagne, he said blun
tly, “Something has happened to us, Arod.”
“Something has happened to you,” she said calmly, and sipped the wine with an exasperating detachment.
“A lot has happened to me,” he said, “I’ve come a long way in a short year.”
“A short way in a long year,” she murmured. He matched her aloofness, desperately.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you,” he said.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” she said.
“God dammit!” he shouted, and then was silent as curious stares were fixed on him.
She laughed in his face and swept the mink stole into her arms and marched out of the restaurant. For a moment he sat there, stunned, and then ordered another bottle of champagne for himself. He sat there for a long time, drinking the wine and thinking. He could not figure it out. He knew there was no other man in her life at the moment. He remembered how wild her infatuation had once been and how definite, though gradual, had been its decline. She was bored with him and he could not understand why.
Then it struck him, deep in the second bottle of champagne, that he had paid her too much attention, too much homage. So he made a shrewd, if drunken, decision. He would play at her own game. He would be aloof himself, fight fire with fire. He would not see her for a while. He would get somebody else for that part she wanted—Gardner, Hayward, Jennifer Jones, Audrey Hepburn. He would teach her a lesson.
Being very drunk now, but delighted with his cleverness, he decided to go home, and asked the head waiter to call him a cab. He rode home, slumped in the seat, and gazing amiably at the star-lighted sky of Hollywood. He decided that one day soon he would make a great picture about a cab driver—a real study of the common man, of the strange, troubled lives of all the little people who made the world go round. For Francis Cary, right now, the world was indeed going around. As he gradually passed out, he was smiling at the thought of Arod coming back to him on her knees, figuratively speaking, of course. But what white, lovely, elegantly proportioned knees . . .