Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

S. P. Q. R.

Sam Epman was a short man with a bald head and a mustache that looked as if it were experimental and impermanent. The transitory appearance of the mustache was perhaps caused by two coinciding phenomena, one completely natural, the other induced by the fine hand of Epman himself.

On nature’s side the otherwise black mustache was liberally sprinkled with gray which, rather than giving it that highly touted “distinguished” look, simply created an impression of sparseness, of unhairy patches scattered throughout the black. Left to its own devices, nature might have triumphed over the odd coloration, but it was here that Epman entered the picture. Unaware of the optical illusion, Epman unwittingly added to the natural effect by keeping the broad mustache trimmed very close to his lip. The total effect was something less than rewarding. You could assume that Epman had rubbed a grimy finger under his nose, or you could in equal error assume he’d begun growing the unsightly lip piece only the day before yesterday.

To make matters worse, Epman constantly called the mustache to the attention of anyone who happened to be in its vicinity. In the middle of a conversation his fingers would reach up suddenly and spasmodically to smooth a mustache that needed no smoothing whatever. Thumb would stroke one end of the short-bristled smear, forefinger frantically working on the other end. Sam Epman became a colonel of Indian cavalry, briskly stroking, smoothing, caressing a nonexistent handle-bar mustache. The hand would move fitfully in a downward motion as if desperately trying to control this wild hairy growth, as if anxious to merge mustache with mouth.

At four o’clock that afternoon, with the rain having dwindled to a slow, steady drizzle, with the Roman sun feebly attempting to poke its way through the persistent overhang, Sam Epman stood before the long window in his suite and briskly stroked his mustache as he introduced me to Peter Wainwright. A sunless glare limned Epman’s body so that his face remained a blur from which radiated only the blinking reflection of the pinky diamond on his left hand.

“I’m always surprised when two top writers don’t know each other,” he said, smiling, the stroking hand suddenly dropping to his vest where one thumb automatically hooked itself into a pocket. “Any other business, the top people in it usually know each other, if not intimately at least to say hello to. You manufacture cap pistols — don’t it stand to reason you should know the competition? Even Gimbels knows Macy’s. So what is it with writing and writers?”

Epman’s blue eyes twinkled as if he were about to reveal the secret of birth to a pair of atheistic obstetricians. The eyes were overhung with thick, unruly black eyebrows that seemed determined to compensate for the lack of hair on his head and the sparse look of his mustache. The brows would have been menacing were it not for the warmth of the blue eyes. It was, perhaps, the eyes that had first convinced me there might be some worth in a project which seemed patently ridiculous on the surface.

“With writers there’s no real competition,” Epman explained, pleased with his analysis. “Writing is the one business — profession, excuse me — where it don’t matter how many best sellers there are. Does it hurt David Cohen the people should also be buying a book by Peter Wainwright? This ain’t like a cap pistol where you got one you don’t need another. Books you always need. In fact, you read one good one, it makes you want to run out and buy another one. So there’s no real competition. Oh, yes, maybe it burns you up a little some other writer’s book is number three when your book is only number four, but there’s no real competition; you write the best book you know how and then you leave it to God. You don’t have to get out there and fight with your teeth and your nails to hang onto whatever little piece of the earth you finally managed to get.”

Epman’s hand leaped from the vest pocket, violently stroked the end of the mustache, and then fluttered down again.

“So with no competition, it ain’t necessary you should know other writers. In fact, it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass. What do writers want to talk about? Writing, what else? So it’s supposed to be fun to listen to another writer tell you all about his new plot? This is fun?” He shook his head. “Writers avoid other writers. Oh, they know a few, yes. This is only to keep up appearances, people shouldn’t say they’re anti-social. But how many dentists do you think have friends who ain’t in the dental profession? Maybe three or four, and they’re already old cockuhs who are ready to drop dead. Dentists stick with dentists, doctors stick with doctors, pimps even they stick with other pimps. Writers, their best friends are their typewriters.”

Sam Epman smiled. He had a wide mouth which, when possessed by a smile, seemed to claim his entire face. “So,” he said, “David Cohen, meet Peter Wainwright.” He smiled again. “You’re both so talented, when you shake hands short stories should come popping out of your ears.”

Wainwright and I, prompted by Epman’s cue, shook hands, but nothing popped out of our ears. Wainwright was wearing a black suit and a black tie, and he gave a tailored impression of a man honed to knife-edge perfection. Dark suit, dark hair, dark eyes, I thought, a cautious smile and a firm handclasp, first impressions of Peter Wainwright.

“Glad to meet you, Dave,” Wainwright said, and I added to the impression a deep, well-modulated voice and a person who immediately placed a total stranger on a first-name basis. “I read your book. It’s an excellent job.”

“Thank you,” I answered. I could not say I had read or enjoyed any of his books because I’d never been tempted to crack a single one of them. Nor could I bring myself to call this dark, lean stranger Peter or Pete or Petey or, in the face of his earlier familiarity, even Mr. Wainwright. Feeling completely inadequate, I settled for the two words “Thank you” and a manly handclasp and hoped I appeared neither foolish nor aloof.

“I got the title for the picture,” Epman said suddenly, interrupting a handshaking scene that was becoming awkwardly incessant. “You remember when I talked to you at the Waldorf in New York, I didn’t have a title. Then I only knew I wanted to do Julius Caesar, but I also knew Julius Caesar we couldn’t call it. If you bring Julius Caesar up to date, you don’t still call it Julius Caesar, do you? You also don’t call it Big Julie or something like that. This is the one thing you don’t call it. This picture has got to have class, so you don’t start with Hollywood craperoo. I know Hollywood craperoo from the time I was eighteen years old and running inter-office memos for Irving Thalberg.”

“Did you work with Thalberg?” Wainwright asked in his deep, well-modulated voice. He leaned forward in expectant interest, his brown eyes alert in his narrow face, his brows raised in anticipation.

“I worked with all of them. You name them, I worked with them. All the big producers, the directors, the stars, you name them and I worked with them. You talk about competition — the picture business got competition like the World Series.” His hand came up to stroke the mustache. “But I’m still alive and kicking, thank God, and I got enough dough to be an independent and to pay the talent I need to make a class movie. Gentlemen, this picture ain’t going to be a Metro musical or a Warner Brothers gangster epic, and it ain’t going to be either a thing where some smart jerk buys a best seller and then hires a screen hack for fifteen hundred bucks a week he should louse up the story by sticking in it original ideas he never had in his life. This is going to be class, which is why I hired talents, not hacks, talents who are capable of thinking original, who can take a play like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which has withstood the test of time for what — three centuries? — take this play and translate it into English which the average moviegoer, Mr. and Mrs. America, can understand without we have to put titles on the bottom of the picture to translate from the blank verse.”

I glanced at Wainwright, but he seemed completely absorbed by what Epman was saying. I felt again the twinge I’d first felt at the Waldorf last month when Epman initially outlined the project.

“Did Shakespeare write in Latin?” Epman asked now, as he had asked that day last month in his Waldorf suite. “No, he wrote in Elizabethan blank verse, and the people who watched his plays were used to listening to this blank verse and to understanding it. This was a language that was immediately understood by the crowd that had come to the Globe Theatre to be entertained. So Shakespeare entertained them. He stole these solid plots from sources God knows where he found them, from Plutarch, from Thomas Lodge, from Fiorentino — anybody who ever put a good story on paper, Shakespeare swiped it. In those days there were no copyright laws, gentlemen, he saw something he liked, he grabbed it. The son of a bitch never had an original plot all the time he was living. And he took these plots and wrote this glorious poetry around them, but is it the blank verse that plays today, or is it the construction of the plays, the fire they’ve got underneath all that poetry? I’ll tell you what it is.”

Sam Epman lighted a cigar and passed the box around. Both Wainwright and I refused. Sucking on the cigar, Epman said, “It’s the story. Story, that’s the secret. Poetry is great for English literature courses; am I trying to take away from this glorious poetry the man wrote? But poetry don’t sell tickets. In Elizabethan times, yes, it sold tickets because it was the language they understood. Today the people don’t understand it. It detracts from the play; it detracts from the psychological penetration this man Shakespeare had. It detracts, to put it in terms you writers understand, it detracts from the universality.”

“What the hell is Julius Caesar if not universal? What is this, the story of a dictator? The story of a band of patriots? Baloney! This is the story of a power grab, that’s what this is the story of. You can set this story in a New England factory town, and it will still play. Why? Because man has been concerned with power from the minute he discovered he could hit another man on the head with a club and take away his woman and the saber-toothed rug from his cave. Power and success, what the hell is Julius Caesar all about if not that? And what is life today all about if not power and success? Today there’s no cavemen to kill. Today you got to kill some son-of-a-bitch account executive. Today, when you make your grab, you don’t get Gaul; you get maybe the right to tell people how mild Chesterfield cigarettes are, but this is a piece of the world, this is what buys you that Cadillac or that Mercedes, this is what puts that luscious blonde on your arm, this is what pays for those hand-tailored suits. Don’t kid yourselves, it’s the same today as it was then. Today you don’t use daggers; you use words and smiles, but you’re bucking for the same thing: power! And you can equate that with success, and that’s where we grab Mr. and Mrs. America by the genitals, because success or failure, power or lack of power is something they live with every day of their lives.”

Sam Epman began pacing the rug-covered floor of his suite, a short bald man wearing a gray tropical suit and bright green slipper socks. He sucked interminably on his cigar, leaving a trail of agitated smoke behind him.

“So what’s our movie all about? Our movie is all about power. And we are going to tell our story of power in modern, everyday, American English. We are going to tell this story of a political assassination in terms every citizen of the United States will be able to understand. We are going to keep the old Roman setting, and the same situation, but we are going to relate this tale of a power grab so that there will be no mistake about it. We are going to tell it so that everybody seeing this first-rate motion picture will understand that it applies to their lives today, now, this minute, we are still assassinating people in our grabs for power, does that make sense?”

“It seems to make a lot of sense,” Wainwright said quietly.

Epman turned to face me, and I nodded quickly.

“You want to know the title?” Epman said. “This is the title — hold your hats. The title is S.P.Q.R.” He paused for effect. Wainwright and I stared at him blankly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Is it a cryptogram?” Wainwright asked.

“No, it ain’t a cryptogram, but it has mystery, you got to admit that. It also has six-foot-high letters we can spread across a Cinemascope screen one letter at a time, S...” He wrote the letter in the air with his cigar. “... P... Q... R... can you see those letters materializing on the screen? S.P.Q.R., with the triumphal music of ancient Rome in the background, starring Burt Lancaster or whoever, superimposed over a reconstruction of old Rome, a Roman street teeming with life, jumping right into those opening lines of—”

“Do you think you can get Lancaster?” Wainwright interrupted.

Epman waved the interruption aside impatiently. “Lancaster, Shmancaster,” he said, “who cares what star we get, a star we’ll get, a whole bunch of stars we’ll get, don’t worry. What the hell are actors but instruments a director blows on them and he gets from them the music you wrote? You got money, you get stars. Only in astronomy are stars life-giving suns. In real life stars are only a fiction we made up to keep the people happy. These are the Roman gods and goddesses of today, only we don’t erect statues of them, we make celluloid pictures instead. Don’t bother me with stars, stars we’ll get by the bushelful. How do you like the title?”

“It sounds impressive,” Wainwright said, “but I don’t know what it means.”

“Your first day in Rome, you ain’t supposed to know what it means yet. That’s why you’re here, to dig around, to get the feel. How you going to write about Rome if you ain’t got the feel of it? Wouldn’t it be cheaper if I kept you in New York instead of shlepping you all the way over here? But this is what’s going to give the picture class, ancient Rome right down to the last detail, but the actors speaking English we can all understand.” He turned to me. “You know what S.P.Q.R. means?”

“No,” I admitted.

“It means Senatus Populusque Romanus. And in English that means ‘The Senate and People of Rome,’ and it was stamped on government property all over the city in ancient Roman times, and you can still see it all over Rome today. S.P.Q.R.”

“Was it used during Caesar’s time?” I asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn. I guess it was. If it wasn’t, we’ll stretch a point, because I ain’t going to throw away an excellent title just because Julius Caesar didn’t happen to think of it.” He paused. “So? How do you like it?”

“I’m not sure,” Wainwright said cautiously. “It may be a little too esoteric for the common man.”

“Those are two words I don’t know the meaning of,” Epman said. “Esoteric and common man. The common man knows only what you throw at him in the advertisements. We take a full-page ad in the New York Times, and the ad on one side has these big black letters S.P.Q.R. and on the other side running down the full length of the page, this babe in a Roman toga — she’s supposed to be Calpurnia. The toga is cut down to her navel in the front, and you can see her whole leg right up past her thigh where the toga is slit on the side. The common man he don’t wonder any more what S.P.Q.R. spells. The common man takes one look at this half-naked babe, and he knows right away that S.P.Q.R. spells SEX.”

“You take out the same ad the next day, only on the right-hand side, instead of the babe, you got a guy stabbing another guy in a toga, and the common man figures out that S.P.Q.R. spells VIOLENCE. There ain’t nothing common about the common man except his reactions. The only thing that scares him is class, because he ain’t sure what it is. So to give him class, you got to make believe it’s crap. After a while, when he begins to think class is really crap — which he understands — he feels comfortable. S.P.Q.R. is a classy title, believe me.”

Epman paused.

“What’s so great about a title like From Here to Eternity, would you mind telling me? It sounds like maybe Norman Vincent Peale wrote it. You flash it across the screen — it’s so long that half the people in the audience they fall asleep before they finish reading it. But all of a sudden it’s a great title because it’s attached to a successful property. Okay. One thing you can bet your life on. S.P.Q.R. is going to be a successful picture. It’ll be the best damn picture I ever made, and believe me I made plenty. We don’t gross forty million bucks on this one, I’ll eat the shooting script.” Epman chuckled and then studied the end of his cigar. “S.P.Q.R.,” he said softly. “It’s a good title. It’ll become a magnificent title when it’s attached to a success.”

“There are many people,” Wainwright said with that same air of caution, “who feel that success is often predetermined by the choice of a title.”

“Well, all I got to say to those people is they’re wrong,” Epman answered, “Look at Anatomy of a Murder. That’s a cockamamie title if ever I heard one, and they stick on the book a dust jacket it could make you puke. So what happens? It’s a best seller for more than a year. You want to talk about titles, I could quote you titles don’t even make sense and they were attached to some of the biggest properties ever came down the pike. What is Gone with the Wind? An inspiration? It makes you cry? It makes you laugh? Me, it makes me want to go out and buy an overcoat. What’s Lolita all about? It sounds like the story of a Mexican flamenco dancer instead of a guy he leches for twelve-year-olds. Titles, don’t start with titles. You want to know the secret of a title? I’ll tell you. The best title in the world, it means absolutely nothing. It means a reader, an audience, they look at it and decide for themselves what it means. That’s a title that says something. To say something it has to say absolutely nothing. And S.P.Q.R. doesn’t say a goddamn thing.” He paused. “Which is exactly why it says everything.”

Epman blew out a wreath of smoke and then asked, “Am I right or am I right?” He seemed to be directing the question at me, but I was spared an answer by the sudden opening of the outer door to the suite. We all turned to face the door. Epman stroked his mustache.

“Sam, darling, would you help me with these packages, please?” a voice said, and I recognized the voice instantly as belonging to Flora Epman, the producer’s wife. The voice emanated from a petite redhead in her fifties who, despite a barely noticeable thickening about the waist, was a living testament to what the slick magazines often called The American Way of Life. Wearing a black corduroy raincoat over a tan linen suit, beige pumps, frilly white blouse showing at the throat of the suit jacket, long red hair carefully rolled into a bun at the nape of the neck, face and throat preserved through the magic of countless applications of queen bee jelly, Flora struggled into the room with her packages, and Epman hurried to unburden her.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, and one meticulously manicured hand reached up to touch the bun at the back of her neck, tidying it, the hand glistening with a diamond the size of Quemoy. “Oh, gentlemen, I didn’t realize you were here. I hope I’m not interrupting anything. Oh, but I am, aren’t I? Forgive me. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”

“We were almost finished, Flora,” Epman said. “You’ve met both Mr. Cohen and Mr. Wainwright, haven’t you?”

“Yes. You must forgive me, gentlemen. I know how Sam is about his conferences. He can’t even stand the telephone intruding.”

“Why, you’ve brought the sunshine with you, Mrs. Epman,” Wainwright said, smiling, and I glanced through the window and noticed that the sun had indeed broken through the clouds at last.

“Only to match your golden tongue,” Flora answered quickly with a look that seemed unconsciously flirtatious, but only in a regal way, the smile a queen allows a sentry. The look was curious because Flora Epman was not beautiful, I realized, and yet she seemed to believe she was beautiful, and her belief was contagious. “I must change out of these wet clothes,” she said.

“I was just telling them about the title, Flora,” Epman said. “S.P.Q.R.”

“Yes, it’s a good title, don’t you think?” She took off the wet black raincoat, pulled a hanger from the closet, and stopped on her way to the bathroom to face me.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “It takes a while for a title to grow on me.”

Flora went into the bathroom, apparently to hang the raincoat over the tub. She returned as Epman said, “It’ll grow on you, don’t worry. Even if it don’t grow, it’s a great title. On the common man, to use Mr. Wainwright’s terminology, the only thing that grows on him is his toenails and his hair.”

“But Mr. Cohen is not the common man,” Flora said, smoothing the short suit jacket over her hips. “If he were, he wouldn’t be working on this picture.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then wondered if I’d been complimented.

“I must change,” Flora said. “I’m soaked through to my underwear.” She smiled briefly and maternally, as if she hoped this inadvertent reference to her lacy unmentionables would not erect a lust-arousing image of herself. “Will you be long, Sam? I’d like to go downstairs for a cocktail.”

“A few more minutes,” Epman said. “You go ahead and change.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Flora said, and again she smiled and then moved toward the bathroom with a walk that was peculiarly unfeminine even though the hip and leg movements were those usually associated with feminine, if not outright sexy, women. The effect puzzled me. I watched her as she walked across the room. She was, I supposed, about five feet two inches tall. She walked with her shoulders back and her head erect, the bun at the nape of her neck curled with the artistic precision of a conch shell. Her waist, though beginning to record the advance of years, was slender nonetheless, smoothly flowing into the curve of wide hips. She moved with a fluidity that tightened her skirt across an invitingly plump backside, and her legs looked clean and trim, tapering to the flawlessly cut high-heeled pumps. The effect should have been one of desirable, if mellowing, femininity. And yet something was lacking.

She moves like a frightened bird, I thought.

I realized in a rush that Flora Epman had known either Hollywood or Sam Epman for too long a time. The marshmallow exterior she presented might once have been only the coating for a solid steel core, but it was genuine enough now. Whatever strength she’d once possessed had become a banality. For all her smiling agreement, she was a lost and frightened woman. And I wondered if Sam Epman hadn’t made her that way.

Epman waited until the bathroom door had closed behind her.

“I’ll make this short,” he said. “You’re the boys who are going to write this movie. Are you supposed to sit down and work with each other without even knowing what brand cigarettes you smoke? Impossible. I took the liberty,” he went on, moving toward the dropleaf desk near the windows, lowering the front of the desk and reaching into it, “of buying copies of your respective books. Everybody should take such liberties, huh? Not that you need it.” He chuckled. “Mr. Cohen, from you I bought Slum Boy because this is all you wrote so far. From you, Mr. Wainwright, I bought your latest one, Tambourine, on the theory that a man’s latest is always his best.” He picked up the books and carried them across the room. “You only get one book each,” he said, chuckling. “Your own book you don’t have to read.” He extended the books. I took my copy. Wainwright glanced through his and then handed it back.

“I’ve already read this,” he said.

“What?” Epman asked, as though he hadn’t heard Wainwright’s earlier praise of my novel.

“I thought it would be a good idea to research my colleague’s work,” Wainwright explained. He shrugged in embarrassment like a student who, in a class of forty, is the only one who’s prepared his assignment.

“Well, good, good for you,” Epman said. “But if you don’t mind, would you read it again? I want you to get acquainted with each other’s styles. We got to marry these two different styles into one shooting script; it shouldn’t look like the Russian Army wrote it. So learn them. It won’t be boring, believe me. Those are good books. If they weren’t, their authors wouldn’t be working on my picture.”

He pulled a slender pocket watch from his vest pocket, held it on the palm of his hand for an instant, and then put it back into the pocket. “I’ll see you all in the morning,” he said. “In the meantime, I better get dressed or Flora will take a fit. Thanks for coming up.”

“It was a pleasure hearing your ideas, Mr. Epman,” Wainwright said. “It sounds as if we’re going to have a great picture here.”

“I think so,” Epman said reflectively. “I think we’re going to have a great picture here.”

He paused and looked at me.

I cleared my throat. “I think we’re going to have a great picture here,” I said.

Epman smiled. Then, with sudden energy, he said, “Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m kicking you out, because what I’m doing, actually, is kicking you out. Unless you want to see a hairy-legged producer in his undershorts.” He chuckled and smoothed his mustache, as if mention of hair had reminded him of it. With his free hand he opened the door.

“See you in the morning, Mr. Epman,” Wainwright said cheerfully.

“Right,” Epman snapped with a curt nod of his bald head, and then he closed the door behind us. Wainwright and I stood awkwardly in the hallway.

“Feel like joining me for a drink, Dave?” he asked. He grinned. “Or would you rather start reading my novel?”

“The drink now, the novel later,” I said.

We walked down the hallway in silence. I rang for the elevator, and then I turned to Wainwright, a frown on my face, and asked, “What do you think of all this? Do you think it’ll really work?”

Wainwright nodded quickly. There was in his eyes the same fear I had felt emanating from Flora Epman. “I think it’ll be a great picture,” he said, and then as if I hadn’t already done it, rang for the elevator again.