Well, that’s not accurate. It’s true that sometimes I have to force myself — but not last night. Last night I was feeling pretty good about things. I wanted to see a motion picture. But in Los Angeles you can’t go to a first-run movie without running the risk of bumping into some damned movie star. They’re crawling all over the lobbies on some crazy busman’s holiday. Do I need that kind of aggravation? I figured it would be best to get out of town, so I bought a paper to see what was playing in the suburbs. In Chilanthica there was a revival of Plenty of Daddies with Edward Arnold and S.G. “Cuddles” Sackell and Eugene Pallette. Carmen Miranda and José Iturbi are in it, too, and Margaret O’Brien and Sabu, the Elephant Boy, in his first non-jungle picture. It introduces little Dickie Dobber, whom I’ve never seen in anything else. I see this film whenever I have the chance. One day I’m going to buy my own print, just to have it around.
I called the theater and asked when the last feature started; then I called the public service people and found out exactly how to get there. (Just like the old days. In certain ways I am still a planner, an arranger. My movements are a series of carefully plotted steps, like the directions on how to assemble a child’s toy. It never rains on my picnics.)
The name of the movie house in Chilanthica is the Orpheum. At first this was very satisfying. Nothing had ever happened to me in an Orpheum. It would be like, being bitten by a dog named Rover. But then I thought, Chilanthica is a very small town, there’s only one movie here. “Orpheum” is always the other movie in a small town, practically a brand name, the manager’s choice after “The Chilanthica” has been spoken for. It was disquieting. (I’m not that sensitive, but as I say, Los Angeles makes me nervous.) There was only the Orpheum, I kept telling myself, only the Orpheum. It was fishy. It was too much like being reduced to primal things. It didn’t make me any easier to note that the movie was on Elm Street. And sure enough there was an ice cream parlor (not a shoppe) across the street. Had the town been called Centerville or Maplewood I might have bolted, but “Chilanthica” was enough like the real world. So, like a jerk I bought my ticket and went in. It was, as I say, primal — like walking out onto a bare stage. I needn’t have called; there was only one showing. At 8:30, of course. I stood in the lobby watching some of the others coming in. It was pleasant at first, like the experience with the name, to see their anonymity, to exult in it as one can sometimes revel in muddy river water. A GP; the man who owned the filling station; the druggist; Mother Hubbard from the restaurant; the couple that ran what must surely have been “The Emporium” (he, vaguely big-time, well-dressed, sporty; she, almost but not quite chic). And people. Respectable, safely unimportant. Had I my wits I would have realized how pat it all was, they all were, these maskers, these phony Republicans.
Indeed, as a stranger, I had their attention. I saw the man from the Emporium eying me. Too big for a traveling salesman, he was thinking. Maybe a lettuce farmer. Has money for a movie. Maybe the talk about drought is premature. It might be a better year than they say. Have to talk to Margot about the fall line.
I walked off and bought some popcorn from the high school girl at the candy counter. She was a thin little thing with no makeup except for some heavily applied Johnson’s Baby Powder over her pimples. She handed me the popcorn and smiled nervously. She lays, I thought triumphantly. I breathed in deeply, smelling the popcorn, the butter, the salt, the waxy paper around the candy, the spilled soda bubbling down the drain of the Coca-Cola machine, the rust around the handle of the water fountain. Filling my lungs with the pleasant mediocrity of the place, I could settle down here, I thought. A nice place to raise children, hey, Herlitz? They would let me play in the band, go to the dances in the community center. (It was all center, this place, for the inner man.) Just forty-five minutes from Broadway, oompa, oompa pa. I actually whistled it and Mrs. Emporium, Margot herself, looked up and smiled at me. Mother Hubbard smiled at me. They don’t whistle songs like that any more, I thought. Who eats real home cooking these days? I winked at her and she blushed. Blushed! Fool, idiot, fall guy, I should have thought. A setup. A shill. The whole town’s a shill. They don’t eat home cooking any more! Main Street’s a novel, not a place. They’ve money in the bank, kids on Fulbrights. In the summer they go to Rome and have audiences with the Pope. Some guy in New York writes copy for Mother Hubbard’s soup. The factory is behind the shoppe (not the parlor). It’s served in Rosenthal bowls in executive suits from here to London. There are no people any more. Everybody’s a personage. Interview them, interview them all!
I went into the auditorium and sat down. (I sit toward the front. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I want to see everything. Everything!) The place was filling up rapidly. I was breathing heavily. At last it was sinking in that I wasn’t safe. But then the house darkened and Pathé News came on. It was safe, after all, I thought. The newsreel was two weeks old; I had seen it ten days before in a town in Nebraska. That’s right, drown me, ye backwaters!
Blissfully I watched for the second time some floods in the Ohio Valley. It was cute the way the narrator described it. (When no one is killed in a disaster the narrator is cute, though he gets serious when there’s a lot of property damage.) I saw a demonstration in Frankfurt, Germany, of a new kind of roller skate. The shoe part of the skate was about two feet off the ground. The wheels were attached by powerful springs to the shoes and every time the skater made a stride he’d bounce up high in the air. Then some girls tried it and of course they couldn’t do it very well and they fell down and you could see their underwear. Then there was a Press Club luncheon in Washington for President Truman. (Some people behind me applauded. A bad sign — in the real small town, in Nebraska, there had been boos.) A reporter asked the President about his plans for November and Truman smiled and was coy. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” he said and everybody laughed. (I could find out. I could.)
There was a Bugs Bunny at which I laughed contentedly. (The only time I am really at ease in a movie is during the cartoon. There is no Bugs Bunny. There is no Mickey Mouse.) And then, the worst time for me, the coming attractions, all those stars to look at. I stuck it out, and actually it didn’t go too badly. Science fiction and second-rate westerns and I hadn’t heard of many of the actors.
Then, at last, the picture came on.
It was just as grand as I remembered. It’s about three old bachelors who own different department stores and have to live together in the same Manhattan apartment because each distrusts the other. It shows how their lives are changed when Sabu, the Elephant Boy, comes to live with them. Sabu is an orphan whose parents have been eaten by tigers back in his native India and Edward Arnold hears about it and brings him to the States for Christmas. He’s got it worked out that this will help his sales figures, and Eugene Pallette and S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell have to go along with him because if they don’t they think it will hurt their sales figures. Of course none of them is really thinking about Sabu, and everything is so strange and new for him that he gets a little nervous and has to run off from time to time to the Bronx Zoo and climb in with the elephants and talk it over. But if it gets out that Sabu isn’t happy it will hurt everybody’s sales figures, so the three old men make up amongst themselves that they’ve got to be better to Sabu. Well, it’s a wonderful movie. Edward Arnold was never suaver, Eugene Pallette was never fatter, nor his voice more husky. They play curmudgeons, even S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell. The three of them are very shrewd, very stuffy — all anybody could want in a father.