I looked at the cover. “Edward the Second by Bertolt Brecht. Why?”
“Zane’s performing the title role in a little theater on Santa Monica. Sandy wants me to come tonight.”
“Are you?” I asked. We’d planned to have dinner out and take in a movie.
“If you’ll come, too,” he said, setting the book down.
“Sure,” I said. “Did Sandy say anything about Jim Pears?”
Larry shook his head. “That was last week’s sensation.”
“Tough town you got here,” I said. I picked up the book. “Isn’t Brecht sort of ambitious for an actor who can’t act?”
“I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Larry said. “It’s kind of a vanity production.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, flipping the pages of the play. It was in verse.
“Zane’s producing it himself. It’s not to make money but to show people in the industry what he can do as an actor. I suspect his wife’s behind it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Irene Gentry.”
“Irene Gentry?” I put the book down. “I saw her in Long Day’s Journey Into Night three years ago. She’s wonderful.”
“Yeah,” Larry said dubiously.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not about her acting. She really is a fine stage actress but in this town she has-” he smiled “-a reputation.”
“What sort?”
“Nothing specific, just that she’s difficult to work with. Not that she ever got much work here. She’s always had too much going against her.”
“For instance?”
“She’s plain, she’s now past forty, she’s New York, and she’s too damned good an actress.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
He lit a cigarette. “The days when movies could tolerate a Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis as a leading lady are over. The public wants candy for the eyes. Irene Gentry is a five-course meal.”
“I wrote her a fan letter once,” I said.
“Henry, you surprise me.”
I shrugged. “I was a lot younger, then,” I offered, by way of explanation. “She was doing Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.”
“Yes,” Larry said, exhaling a stream of smoke, “I saw her in that, too.”
We were both silent.
“Well, you may get to meet her tonight,” he said, finishing his drink. “I’m going to take a nap, Henry. Wake me in an hour or so, all right?”
“All right.” After he left I turned the tape back on, with the sound, and listened to Tom Zane deliver excruciatingly bad lines with all the animation of a robot. He was such a bad actor that it was almost possible to overlook his face. Almost. After a minute or two, I shut the tape off and picked up the Brecht.
Edward the Second was an English king who ruled from 1307 to 1324. His calamitous reign culminated in a thirteen-year civil war that ended with his abdication. Two years later he was murdered by order of his wife’s lover, a nobleman named Mortimer. Much of Edward’s misfortune resulted from a love affair he conducted with a man named Piers Gaveston in an age when sodomy was a capital offense. Edward’s homosexuality was less disturbing to his vassals than his insistence on carrying on openly with Gaveston. Parliament twice exiled Edward’s lover only to have Edward recall him. Eventually, the nobility split between those who were loyal to the king and those who were repelled by him. This led to the civil war.
The notes in the Brecht book said that Edward’s life had been the subject of an earlier play by Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who was himself homosexual. Marlowe’s work was the source of much of Brecht’s play. In Brecht’s version, Edward — vain, frivolous, proud, willful, and incompetent — was more like the degenerate scion of the Krupp family than a fourteenth-century monarch. This characterization was emphasized by the way Brecht portrayed Gaveston, the object of Edward’s passion. Gaveston was essentially a whore; a butcher’s son who, for reasons inexplicable even to himself, was plucked from his low station by the whim of an infatuated king.
Gaveston was canny and fatalistic: the real hero of the Brecht play.
Though Edward was no hero he did have a certain grandeur which was mostly evident at the end of the play when he is held in captivity. In defeat and squalor, he repented nothing, becoming more of a king than when he actually governed.
The cost to Edward of his homosexuality was a gruesome death. While Brecht’s stage directions indicated death by suffocation, the accompanying notes discussed the actual circumstances of Edward’s murder. A red-hot poker was thrust into his anus. His last lover, who according to the historical record was not Gaveston, was castrated; his genitals were burned in public and then the man was decapitated.
The play was being performed in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Since I planned to see Josh Mandel after the play, Larry and I took separate cars. The rain had stopped at dusk and the skies had cleared. They were flooded with the lights of the city but, for all that, Santa Monica seemed dark and uninhabited as I waited at a traffic light just east of the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.
Behind towering walls only the palm trees were visible. As I passed the gates I saw the domes and turrets of the necropolis. On the other side of the street, young boys — hustlers — stood in doorways or sat at bus stops watching cars with violent intensity. As I drove between the whores and the cemetery I thought of Jim Pears for whom death and sex had been in even closer proximity. When I came to Highland, brightly lit and busy, I felt like one awakening from the beginnings of a bad dream.
The theater was surprisingly small, a dozen rows of folding wooden chairs broken into three sections in a semi-circle ascending from the stage. Larry and I sat third row center, arriving just as the lights began to dim. There were few other people around us. One of them was a woman with a familiar face. She glanced at me and then turned away.
“That’s Irene Gentry,” I said, more to myself than to Larry.
He looked over at her and nodded.
The house lights went out around us and I looked at the stage. A remarkably handsome man stood in the lights holding a piece of paper — it was Edward’s lover, Gaveston. He lifted it toward his eyes and said:
My father, old Edward, is dead. Come quickly
Gaveston, and share the kingdom with your dearest friend, King Edward the Second.
There followed a scene in which Gaveston was approached by two itinerant soldiers who offered him their service. He mockingly refused and one of them cursed him to die at the hands of a soldier. The three of them then stepped into the shadows. Five other men emerged. One was Edward.
“Where’s Zane?” I whispered to Larry.
“The blond.”
I looked. “His hair-” I began, remembering that on the tv show he had had black hair.
“This is natural color,” Larry said. “They made him dye it for the series because Houston is also blond. Or was, rather, twenty years ago.”
“He’s short,” I said. Zane looked no taller than five-seven.
“He wears lifts in front of the camera,” Larry explained. He looked at me and smiled. “Poor Henry, this must be terribly disillusioning.”
Someone shushed us and I returned my attention to the stage. Beneath the glare of the stage lights, Zane’s face lost the magic that the camera conjured up. He was still handsome but his face was oddly immobile; I diagnosed a case of the jitters. He delivered his first line, “I will have Gaveston,” as if requesting his coffee black.
Midway through the play two things were apparent. First, as Larry had warned me, Tom Zane could not act. Second, the cast that surrounded him had been carefully directed to disguise Zane’s disability as much as humanly possible. All except Gaveston. I glanced at my program. The actor playing Gaveston was named Antony Good. While the other actors covered Zane’s fluffed lines, Good stared at Zane in open amazement as he raced through yet another speech, spitting it out like sour milk. The other actors underacted assiduously when playing a scene with Zane, but Good threw himself into the role of Gaveston in open competition with the star. It was a one-sided contest. Good was superb, bringing to the character of Gaveston the pathos of the street outside the theater.