Hollis said, “And you rehearsed all summer, and half the fall. And played the sticks half the winter while that poor hapless devil of a playwright tried to fix up the play you were killing, Mark.”
Jenner sucked in his breath sharply. He began to say something, then throttled it. He shook his head slowly like a bull at bay. “Go on, Holly. I have this coming to me. Don’t pull the punches.”
The small man said thinly, “You weren’t putting that play across the footlights, Mark. So when it finally got to New York it opened in March and closed in March. Okay. You had all the rope you needed, and you sure hanged yourself! Where do you go from here?”
“Nowhere. I’m at the bottom of the heap now.”
“You still have a chance,” Hollis said. He leaned forward and seemed to be hanging on Jenner’s words like an anxious chickenhawk. “I can help you. I’ve been telling you that for a year.”
“I don’t want my mind tinkered with.”
“You could have your name up in lights again, live in a Fifth Avenue penthouse. You could get back all the things you used to have, before—before you started to slide.”
Jenner stared at the little man’s pale, unlined face as if Hollis were nothing but a pane of glass, and as if all the secrets of the universe were inscribed on the back of the booth behind him. In a low voice Jenner said, “I won’t get everything back. Fame, maybe. Money, maybe. But not everything.”
“You didn’t need to make your wife run away from you,” Hollis said with deliberate cruelty. “But maybe you could make her want to come back.”
“Would I want her back?”
“That’s up to you. I can’t answer all your questions for you. What time is it?”
“One-fifteen a.m. The morning papers will be out soon. Maybe they’ll mention the closing of Misty Isle. Maybe there’ll be a sticky little paragraph about how Mark Jenner has helped to kill another good play.”
“Forget all that,” Hollis said sharply. “Stop brooding about the past. You’re going to start everything over tonight.”
Jenner looked up, surprised. “When did I agree to let you monkey with me, Holly?”
“You didn’t. But what else can you do, now?”
The surprise widened on Jenner’s face. He looked down and stared at the formica tabletop until the pattern blurred before his eyes. Hollis was right, Jenner realized numbly. There was nothing else to do now, no place else to go, no more ships to come in.
“Okay,” Jenner said in a harsh, throaty voice. “You win. Let’s get out of here.”
They took the Bronx undertube to Hollis’ Riverdale home. Jenner kept a car stored in a Fifty-ninth Street garage, but four martinis in little more than an hour and a half had left him too wobbly to drive, and Hollis did not have a license. At half past one in the morning, the tube was crowded; Jenner and Hollis sat in one of the middle cars, and Jenner was bitterly amused to note that nobody seemed to recognize him, or at least no one cared to come over and say, “Pardon me, but are you really…”
In the old days, Jenner recalled, his agents had forbade him strictly to enter the subways. They didn’t even have the undertubes then. But if the Mark Jenner of 1977 had entered a subway, he would have been ripped apart, Orpheus-like, by the autograph hunters. Now, he was just another big man with a martini-glaze on his face.
Hollis remained silent all through the twenty-minute trip, and that forced Jenner back on his own inner resources. It was not pleasant for him to have to listen to the output of his own mind for twenty minutes. There were too many memories rising to confront him.
He could remember the tall, gawky teen-age Ohio boy who had overnight turned into the tall, confident New Yorker of twenty-one, back in ’70. The School of Dramatic Arts; the wide-eyed hours of discovering Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello; the big break, the lead in Right You Are at a small off-Broadway house, with a big-name Broadway mogul happening to come to the dingy little second-story theater to see young Jenner’s mordant, incisive Laudisi.
The following autumn, a bit part in a short-lived comedy, thanks to that lucky break. Then some television work; after that, a longer part in a serious drama. Finally, in the spring of 1973, an offer to play the juvenile lead in a bit of froth called Lovely to Look At. Jenner was twenty-four and obscure when the show opened, that fall; when it closed, two years later, he was famous. He owned two Cadillacs, lived in a penthouse apartment, gave away vintage champagne the way other men handed out cigarettes. In 1976, while out in Hollywood doing the film version of Lovely, he unexpectedly married dazzling, bosomy, much-publicized, twenty-year-old Helene Bryan, current queen of the movie colony. Experts predicted that the fabulous Jenner would weary of the pneumatic blonde within months; but Helene turned out to have unexpected depth, wearing a real personality behind her sleek personality mask. In the end it was she who wearied of a down-slipping, bitterly irascible, and incipiently alcoholic Jenner, eleven years later. Eleven years, Jenner thought! They seemed like a week, and the two years of separation a lifetime.
Jenner thought back on the successes. Two years of Lorelei; a year and nine months of Girl of the Dawn; then the ill-starred turkey, Hullaballoo; and finally his last big hit, Bachelor Lady, which ran a year—October 1982 to September 1983. After that, almost overnight, people stopped coming to see Mark Jenner act; he had lost his hold. In the season of 1986-87 he appeared in no less than three plays, the longest-lived of which held the boards for five weeks. Somewhere along the line, he had lost his magic. He had also lost Helene, in that dreadful spring of 1987 when she returned to California to stay.
And somewhere along the line, Jenner realized he had lost the eager young man who loved Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello. As a professional, he had specialized almost exclusively in frothy romantic confections. That was unintentional; it was simply that he could never resist a producer waving a fat contract. It wouldn’t have mattered, much, except that he kept up contact with Walt Hollis, one of the first people he had met when he came to New York, and Hollis served to remind Jenner of the Pirandello days.
Hollis had never been an actor. He was a lighting technician in the old days, and a lighting technician he still was, the best of his craft—a slim, mousy little man who looked no older at fifty than he had at thirty. Hollis had been more than a mere electrician, though. He was a theoretician, a student of the acting technique, a graduate engineer as well. He tinkered with gadgets, and sometimes he told Jenner about them. Jenner listened with open ears, never retaining a thing.
Two years ago, Hollis had told him of something new he was developing—a technique that might be able to turn any man with a bit of acting skill into a Barrymore, into an Olivier. Jenner had laughed. In that year, ’87, his main concern had been to show the world how self-sufficient he was in the face of adversity. He was not going to grasp at any electronic straws, oh no! That would be admitting he was in trouble!
Well, he was in trouble. And as Misty Isle sank rapidly into limbo under a fierce critical barrage, Jenner bleakly realized he could sink no lower himself. Now was the time at last to listen to Hollis. Now was the time to clutch at any offer of salvation. Now.
“We’re here,” Hollis said, breaking a twenty-minute silence. “Watch your step getting out. You don’t want to trip and mash up your pretty profile.”
In the twenty years he had known Walt Hollis, Jenner had been inside the little man’s home no more than a dozen times, and not at all in the last decade. It was a tidy little place, four small rooms, overfastidiously neat. Bookshelves lined the walls—an odd assortment of books, half literary, half technical. Hollis lived by himself; he had never married. That had made it hard for Jenner to see him socially very often; Helene had hated to visit bachelors.