Sacred Monster

Flashback 9

On her way home from the studio, Marcia picked up her dry cleaning, then continued on up and over Beverly Glen Boulevard out of the Valley and into Westwood to the furnished rental she’d taken while shooting Tupelo. The house was modified mission-style, one story high, with red tiled roof and beige stucco walls, the structure sprawling over most of the available property, with neat lawn and shrubbery in front and a large swimming pool filling the space in back.

Hooked to the visor of the rented Porsche was the box that controlled the door of the attached garage; Marcia thumbed the button on that box as she made the turn into her driveway, and the broad blank door folded up and back, receding into the open mouth of the garage like a piece of stage magician’s equipment. Marcia drove from the sunny exterior to the dark oily-smelling interior of the garage, unnaturally bare and neat inside (this being a short-term rental), and behind her the door slid out and swept down, as though the house had just ingested another victim.

Marcia collected the plastic dry-cleaner bag, which had been draped over the back of the passenger seat, then climbed from the car and went through the connecting door into the kitchen. She passed through the kitchen and out the other side, then moved diagonally across one corner of the long, low living room with its low beige furniture and broad, chrome-faced fireplace. A long hall led from there, with more rooms to the right and a wall of glass on the left overlooking the swimming pool and its redwood surround. Walking down this hall, the dry-cleaner bag held over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra’s jacket, Marcia glanced leftward and saw, in profile, Jack Pine.

It was him, all right. In cowboy hat and fringed jacket and high decorated boots, he sat in a very low canvas chair at the deep end of the pool, seated well down and back so his head and knees were at the same height, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes to shade them from the afternoon sun, booted legs stretched far out in front of him over the redwood deck with ankles crossed, hands folded casually in lap. From a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a slender pale tendril of smoke wavered upward past his ear and the brim of his hat.

Marcia did not break stride. Her eyes narrowed slightly, she gazed steadily at that self-absorbed profile out there, and she kept walking, on down to the end of the hall, where she faced front again at last, moving through the doorway into the master bedroom.

A battered round, soft traveling bag and an equally well-worn soft suit-carrier lay on the bed. Nodding as though to say her expectations had been fulfilled, she walked around the bed to the wall of closets and hung the dry-cleaning bag on the rod. Then she turned, looked again at the luggage on the bed, took a long, slow breath, and glanced across the room at her reflection in the dressing mirror there. No expression showed in the face looking back at her.

A sliding glass door led from the bedroom to the pool, near its shallow end. Marcia stepped through, slid the door shut behind her, and looked down across the water at Jack, who hadn’t moved. An almost inaudible sigh parted her lips, which then pressed shut again. Deliberately she strode around the pool. He finally — as she was halfway to him — lifted his head and lifted his hand to lift his cowboy hat away from his eyes to watch her. Nothing else on him moved.

Marcia stopped in front of him. They looked at each other for a long silent moment, and Marcia did not ask him anything about Buddy Pal. Then, with a kind of grim fatalism, she said, “I knew this all along, of course.”

“Your heart told you,” he said.

“Or some organ,” she said. She turned and walked back to the bedroom, and a little later he arced his cigarette butt into the pool and followed.

“It was a wonderful wedding,” I say.

I sit and smile in the sunlight, remembering. It was a lovely white chapel in Santa Monica; it had been used in the movies more than once to suggest firm, small-town American values. It had that traditional shape, the narrow front with the arched doors, the clapboard wall angling inward on both sides above the doors, then straightening again to reach upward, forming the steeple. In front of this setting, the gray cement walk came out straight and true from the front steps, flanked by gleaming green grass, mowed as tightly as a golf course. Two dozen clean and presentable well-wishers waited on this walk and this grass for Marcia and me to emerge from the chapel, hitched. On the fringes, a few reporters and photographers hovered, waiting to record the event.

I smile upon the dour interviewer; even upon him I smile. “I really believe,” I tell him, “that first weddings are very important. They set the whole tone for your marriages to come. Buddy flew out from New York, of course, to be best man, and Marcia’s public-relations man set up the whole thing with a great deal of care and taste. The media were there, and the whole scene played just terrific.”

I can still see it, in fact. Out of the chapel we came at the end of the ceremony, Jack Pine and Marcia “The First Mrs. Pine” Callahan. The gathered well-wishers crowded around us, wishing us well. Buddy came grinning out behind us, along with Marcia’s PR man’s secretary, the matron of honor. Rice was thrown. The driver got out of the white stretch limo waiting at the curb and opened the rear door. Photographers took pictures. We made our way, laughing and happy, through the laughing and happy throng. At the limo, Marcia turned and threw her bouquet. One of the female well-wishers caught it and squealed, and the other female well-wishers congratulated her with happy envy. Marcia and I waved and turned and entered the limo. It was swell!

I say to the interviewer, “We didn’t know anybody on the Coast then, of course, so we hired a crowd from Central Casting, and those kids just did a super job. Later, some of them became personal friends.”

The interviewer stares at me. “You mean, the whole scene was a fake?”

“Certainly not,” I tell him. These little nobodies never understand a thing, you ever notice that? “The emotions expressed that day,” I assure this little nobody, “were absolutely real. And if some real nice kids, swell young talents struggling to make it, could earn a dollar wishing us well as we launched ourselves onto the sea of matrimony, what’s wrong with that? Good for their income, good for our image, good for the press, good for the people who read that kind of thing — well, you know that — good for everybody.”

“I never looked at it like that,” the interviewer confesses. But he still looks dubious.

“You have to see the big picture,” I tell him gently, trying to be kind.

“I guess so,” he says.

Well, how can you explain it? You had to be there. You had to look out the rear window of the limo the way I did as we drove away and see Buddy bring that big wad of bills out of his pocket, and see the happy expressions on all those swell young kids as they lined up on the church lawn to be paid. You don’t think they were sincere?

“Anyway,” I say, nodding, my mind brimful of fuzzy drink and fuzzy memories, “that was the best part of our marriage, the wedding. After that, it was pretty much all downhill, though I didn’t know it at first.”

“You didn’t know you were having trouble in your own marriage?”

“Well,” I say, brushing the back of one hand across my brow, feeling how the fuzzy drink presses against my skull, called to by your friend and mine, Big Sol, old Mister Sun, “well,” I say, “I was pretty much concentrating on my career then. Or lack of career, I should say.”

“Things didn’t go well, at first, in Hollywood?”

“You could put it that way,” I tell him, since he just did put it that way. “I had my New York reviews, my regional reviews, but no movie credits, and I just couldn’t figure out what to do next, careerwise. Ever have one of those years where you just can’t seem to get started?”

“No, sir,” he says — of course, he says! — and looks solemn and wimpish, gazing at me over his notebook (how full that notebook must be getting) as he says, “I don’t believe I ever have had a year like that.”

“Well, I have,” I say, and nod, and decide it’s better not to nod, and stop. “It’s no fun, believe me,” I say, and bring a shimmering hand up to my shimmering forehead.

“I’m sure it is,” he agrees. Being polite, the little bastard.

“If I’d stayed in the theater,” I say, and my hand waves in front of me in a negative way, outward, in a stop-frame sequence, the individual shots overlapping, the hand seeming to stay and to go, my life seeming to stay and to go, the career... “But,” I say, and let it go at that.

Can’t. The interviewer leans toward me, button eyes alight like a minor character in a minor sequel to The Wizard of Oz, Tick-Tock and the Interviewer of Oz. I must perform.

“Oh, well,” I say. “All right. I did some Shakespeare, regional things, some Moliere, Mosca in a ‘Volpone’ in St. Louis they’re still cackling over, but there’s no coherence out there in the provinces, no career. You’re not building anything; you aren’t even making a living. Unemployment insurance — at a certain age, unemployment insurance can begin to seem like a sign of potential failure, you know what I mean?”

Is there a ghost of a smile hovering around my ghost of an interviewer’s lips? Have I reached him on a human-to-human level yet again, man-to-man, soul-to-soul? Christ, what a thought. “Here’s the thing of it,” I say. “I had my reviews, I had my comparisons with Booth and Burton, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Jack Schullmann was not a man to forgive and forget — well, few agents are — so every time my career seemed to come to life in some place like Minneapolis or Miami, he made sure to piss on it all over again back in New York. And theater is New York, it just is, no matter how much anybody else tries, anywhere at all. They build these theaters, flies that could fly a battleship, lightboards God would envy, and it doesn’t matter. They could hire me and love me, weep when I wept, laugh when I laughed, die when I died, but it didn’t matter, because the provinces never hear about each other, except through New York. And back in New York, there was Jack Schullmann, sitting on me, farting in my face.”

“That’s terrible,” my interviewer says, whether at the fact or the image I do not know.

“I suppose I should have been able to outwait it,” I say, “or walk away from it, but how could I? Acting was the only thing I had, the only thing that used me. I’d sell my soul to act,” I say, and hear myself saying it, and laugh: “Well, I did, didn’t I? But not to Jack Schullmann. He wasn’t buying, not then.”

“Does he still feel that way?” my interviewer asks, thereby disclosing not the depths of his research, but its shallowness. This guy doesn’t know diddly about showbiz.

“Jack Schullmann died a few years ago,” I say, smiling at the memory. “I sent a pizza to the funeral.”

He stares at me. “You didn’t.”

“I did. SO LONG, PAL, was spelled out on it, in provolone. By then, of course, we loved each other; I was too big for him to hate. He had to love me for the sake of clients I might want to work with. But back in the early days, it was a different story. And it wasn’t just Jack, either. It was his friends, too, and Miriam’s old friends — thee-ah-tah friends, you know. They wouldn’t walk down the block past a theater I was working in. So it was LA or nothing.”

“The usual story about fine actors, the way I’ve always heard it,” my interviewer says, rather disconcertingly suggesting that his boringly round little head might contain ideas of its own after all, “is that the movies seduce them away from what might have been great stage careers.”

“There are no great stage careers, not anymore,” I tell him. “And nobody seduced me into the movies. In fact, at first, nobody wanted me in the movies. It wasn’t a blacklist out here, it was just indifference. My own, too. I was worn out, I was losing faith in my talent, I didn’t know what to do or how to start all over.” I smile reminiscently. “I owe my stardom to Marcia, really,” I say, demonstrating my world-renowned generosity. “She encouraged me in those darkest hours.”