“Tim!”
He ducked, but it wasn’t the lion she was looking at. It was his face, where she could see it, in the light. “You’re all scratched up! You’re all blood! You can’t work!”
He felt his face, and looked at the blood on his hands. “Well, then?” he says. “I told you to blow, didn’t I? The key’s in the car. Tell Silbro I’m sorry.”
She stooped down over Happy. “Come on,” she says. “We’ve got to get him in the house.”
He went to help her, and then all hell broke loose. You see a lion, when things get too hot for him, he does just what any other cat does. He goes and crawls under something, and he starts to think. So that’s what this lion had done. He went and crawled under the filter-tank beside the pool, but when he started to think, he didn’t think about butterflies, or “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” or any of the stuff you might think about if you crawled under something. He thought about horse. That was what he’d started out to get when Happy left the door open, and that was what he was stalking before all this mess started. And pretty soon he saw it, not five feet from his nose.
Because count on a bunch of cow actors. They never got a cue right yet, and when Happy came out there, and grabbed a gun, and told them to come on quick, they figured the show was about to start again, and began jamming the horses back in the stagecoach and throwing on saddles. When they heard the shots, and then saw the lights go on, they were sure of it; so in a minute here they came, prancing up under the lights in magnificent array. They didn’t stay magnificent long. The lion came out from under that filter-tank like he was shot out of a cannon, sank his teeth in the back of the wheeler of the stagecoach.
But there were four horses on the coach, and when the wheeler plunged, the leaders and the off-wheeler jumped, and went right into the pool, with coach, men and lion. Nobody ever did know just what happened right after that. The lion was out of the pool almost as soon as he was in, and he must have gone after more horses, because a couple of them were ripped. But those horses had riders on them, and the riders seemed to wake up that water was a pretty good thing to be in about that time; so they put their horses right in the pool, and in a couple of seconds there they all were, men, horses and stagecoach, in the middle of the pool, the horses trying to keep their feet on the slippery tile bottom, and squealing as loud as they could; the men cussing and trying to handle them, and in between shooting blanks at the lion; the mob on the roof yelling in a regular panic now, and the lion charging up and down beside the pool, raising holy hell.
Kennelly was trying to get Happy up, working like mad, and soon as the lion was balked on the horses, he went for him. But he still had the rope hanging to him, and Polly grabbed it. He wheeled, and bit at the rope, but that was enough for Kennelly to grab it away from her, and run off to one side with it. He snubbed it around a tree, and the lion wheeled again. Kennelly pulled on the rope, and that brought him face to face with the lion. That cat just murdered him. He ripped every stitch of clothes off him, and slashed him on the shoulders and chest, until Kennelly looked more like something in a slaughterhouse than a man.
But he kept heaving on the rope, and at last he got the lion up tight against the tree, and wound the rope around him. He was just finishing up when the State police and a carload of newspaper reporters came around the bend, all sirens going and both feet on the gas. And then Happy got in it again. He had staggered up, from where he had been coughing water out of his lungs, and now he pointed at Kennelly.
“Tozzan!” he yells at the newspaper guys. “Y’ got the gag, boys? Tozzan o’ th’ Apes! Tozzan th’ ape man? Tozz—”
Kennelly sat down beside the lion then and began to bawl like a kid. “Tarzan,” he says. “Tarzan the Ape Man, a great gag! Yeah, a great gag two years ago when they thought it up for Weissmuller. Yeah, I’ll say it’s great.”
They got him to bed after a while, and the doctors plastered him up, and they finally got a couple of guys from Goebels to come and get the lion, and take him back where he belonged; and even the rest of it was what you call a wild night. But next day Kennelly was smeared over every front page in town, with pictures of him weeping there beside the lion, and all the studios were ringing the telephone; and after a while they fixed it up that Hornison was to get it, on account that way Kennelly could fix it so Silbro could finish the picture. Hornison was pretty sore at Silbro, but he stood for it. And the new Kennelly picture was to be called “Mowgli,” and come to find out, that was Polly’s gag.
“How did you come to think of that one?” Kennelly says to her, where they were holding hands over the side of the bed.
“Oh, I read a book once,” she says.
“You hear that, Happy?”
“But Timmy,” says Happy, where he was cutting out clippings, stamping them “Management the Hapgood Agency, Inc.” and putting them in an envelope for a secretary to file. “But Timmy, I said it all along. Out of the black. I been trying to make you see it.”
“Well, Polly,” says Kennelly, “I don’t know what the love-interest is, but it’s you, or they can strike the set.”
She held onto his hand, and Hapgood began to walk around the room. “Timmy,” he says, “you got to hand it to me on that one. Out of the black. You can’t beat it.”
(Redbook, June 1934)
Hip, Hip, The Hippo
This stuff the papers had about what happened up to Lake Sherwood, they didn’t get the half of it; then what they did get, they balled it all up. So here is the low-down on it, once and for alclass="underline"
I think I told you how Kennelly came to be Kowgli, the Wolf Man. He used to be the Singing Cowboy, but thanks to some smart work by Hapgood — that’s his agent, — he hit the skids for a wipe-off, and Hollywood couldn’t seem to remember who he was any more. He tried a come-back, and it went sour when a lion chased him into a swimming-pool; but he roped the lion, and that made him Kowgli. He was to be Kowgli the Untamed, but they changed it to Kowgli the Wolf Man, and maybe it’s Kowgli the Sweet Singer of Bagdad by now; you couldn’t prove it by me. Bagdad — it’s not in India; but none of the rest of it was either, so they can’t go by what they put in it.
Anyway, they started work on it after a while, and at last Kennelly could eat. He figured on five hundred dollars a week, eight weeks guaranteed, on account it takes plenty of time to shoot an animal picture, and full time for retakes. That is, he and this Polly Dukas figured on that between them. She was the girl that helped him rope the lion, and they had gone for each other pretty heavy, so they made it a team. But trust Hapgood to put the spot on it.
“Listen,” he says to Hornison, when they met to close the deal. “I’m telling you what you’ve got to pay.”
“O. K.,” says Hornison. “Anything you say.”
“What?”
“I don’t even want to talk about it. I got a sick polo-pony home, Hap, and it’s got me so I can’t even think. I love that mare, and you know how I am when I really take something to heart.”
“Which one? Sugar?”
“Sugar.”
“Say, that’s tough.”
“Write your own contracts, Hap. Send them over, and if it’s anything in reason, there won’t be any trouble over it. In the meantime have that pair on the lot tomorrow morning nine o’clock, ready for work and packed for location.”
“They’ll be there.”
“O. K., then.”
Hapgood, just to show he really meant it about Sugar, made the contracts out for one thousand dollars a week, ’stead of five hundred dollars, and all Kennelly had to do for that was ride a hippopotamus down the Ganges River. They never found out there’s no hip’s on the Ganges, but they did find out some things about hip’s they never knew before. Like when you try to work one in a warm lake, that’s where you’re going to have trouble. When you push him in, the first thing he does is go down under and stay down under till he feels like coming up, and maybe that’s in five minutes, and maybe it’s ten, and time going by all the time. And another thing they found out was, even when he does come up, a hip’ is so slippery you can’t ride him. That, and a lot of dirty tricks he knows, because he don’t want to be rode, and he’s not going to be, if he can help it.