Jim Carney who works for us at times kept me company while the newly arrived team from 911 hurled him onto the wood floor time and again. If he’d had a spark of life, all that pummeling would have extinguished it. When they finally finished, I thought they were going to take him to whatever hospital they had come from, so I said, “Could you take him instead to Cedars-Sinai, that’s his regular hospital.” One of the medics said, “He’s not going to a hospital, he’s going to the mortuary.”
Then Jim and I were left with Howard on the floor between us covered by a sheet, black socks on his feet. Leto wept. I envied him—the WASP glacier had closed over my head. It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away. During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks. I would not see him in any corporal form again until the ashes at Rock Creek Cemetery.
But, curiously, last night I finally saw him clearly in a dream—a frustration dream. We were in a side street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been but was nowhere to be found. Yet everything else was as it should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?
SEVENTEEN
Just as I decided that I was done with obituaries the Pope and Saul Bellow die. The mourning for the Pope seems weirdly irreal. Much is made of the conversions that he is given credit for on the African continent where his stern prohibition of contraceptives has crowded the Catholic heaven with African angels. Meanwhile the media in the United States, as always off the mark, treats him rather the way they did Marlon Brando, another superstar who was also never, as they say, not on.
If Thomas Jefferson had found nothing at all useful in grief, I found it weirdly energizing. Certainly, the aftermath of a death in today’s United States brings one into contact with all sorts of strangers: lawyers, accountants, morticians, insurance claimants, not to mention old friends in their thinning ranks and new acquaintances in their thickening ones.
Although I have played parts in a number of films I was never an actual actor and so, except for a school performance of The Comedy of Errors, I had never acted on a stage anywhere until some New York producers offered me the lead in Trumbo, a play based on the letters of the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The producers were rotating the part of Trumbo among a number of actors ranging from Richard Dreyfuss to Nathan Lane. After the storm of bureaucratic activity in the wake of Howard’s death, all I could think of was flight, in every sense. Work of any kind had always been my best refuge. Why not appear onstage for a week or two at the Westside Theater? I could never memorize in youth but Trumbo is a series of letters that he wrote, often to his son played onstage by Gordon MacDonald. There was, happily, no director by then, only an excellent stage manager and a workable set where I would make my entrance in near-fatal darkness back of screens showing film footage of the various disturbances of the 1940s when Dalton Trumbo fell afoul of congressional Red hunters with his sharp responses to their deeply un-American catechisms. For a long time while Trumbo was officially blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment, he wrote scripts under pseudonyms as well as many letters which I enjoyed performing. I had known Trumbo slightly in Rome where he had invited me to his splendid apartment overlooking the Tiber: he wanted to talk to me about the Byzantine Empire: the background to a movie he was writing for an Italian producer. He was obviously being well paid and I thought of the pluses of not having one’s name on a script particularly in an era like today’s when “focus groups” examine one’s every line for inadvertent lack of political correctness or its somber incubator unwanted originality. In the end I had the impression that Trumbo was enjoying his well-paid martyrdom not to mention special status since, as he liked to point out, nearly every distinguished film covertly made abroad was credited to him while the disasters—some of his own making—remained parentless. Finally, he was white-listed again and the Oscar awarded to one of his pseudonyms was finally presented to him. All in all a curious time. Whatever his talents as a dramatist he was a marvelous letter writer as I discovered reading them to appreciative audiences: he was witty, often wise, and sometimes moving. I played him seated at center stage. To my left were, always for some reason, the heavy laughers, to my right the more subdued listeners. Performance after performance the laughers found their preordained seats and the others theirs. Early on I had problems with one speech: a letter to the mother of a young man who dies in the war: Trumbo had been in the Pacific theater with him. He writes the mother a letter which, invariably, brought me to tears whenever I read it. Since the first law of acting is let the audience not the actor do the weeping, what to do? I finally got a pin so that whenever my voice quavered during the reading of the letter, I would stick it in my thigh and thus, distracted, betrayed nothing until the night when the audience to my right, always so reliably attentive, was silent: Had I lost them? A large woman on the front row started up the aisle. Were they leaving? Mild panic. Afterward, I asked the stage manager, “What went wrong?” He told me that the lady who had gone up the aisle was one of the producers who had seen half a dozen actors play Trumbo and she was sobbing. So was much of the right-hand side of the audience. As a hardened public speaker I knew how to make an audience laugh. But never before or since had I made one weep.
On the night when many of the actors in town come to see a play, I saw most of the cast of the recent revival of The Best Man as well as Elaine May and her gentleman friend Stanley Donen whom I knew from our days at MGM. Afterward, Elaine at her most Mayish, said: “I didn’t know you could do this.” “You never asked,” I was modestly precise. Stanley who had been making musicals at MGM for years before, during, and after the blacklist summed it up: “What you’ve done is prove that you can act, but the big surprise is that Trumbo could write.” There we were, freezing backstage, marooned in 2003 and it was like the great studio was still functioning and all was right with the world and, presently, Arthur Freed will find a musical for Donen to do and Elaine is still doing comic impressions with Mike Nichols while I…There are these strange slips in time, away from bleak present to a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live.
EIGHTEEN
In Rome I usually found the Jesuits not only congenial but often wise. Not long after Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraców, was raised by the Holy Spirit to the See of Peter as John Paul II, the Jesuits were ready with a joke. The new Pope addresses God: “Almighty, will there be a married clergy in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be women priests in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be another Polish Pope?” And God bellows: “Not in my time!” The Jesuits had done their homework. All the potential reforms that had come out of Vatican II were sternly undone by a fourteenth-century Prince-Bishop from Poland primarily interested, like Pius IX before him, in papal authority based on the most literal illiberal readings of Scripture. The result has been a serious shortage of priests in the United States with ever fewer would-be priests on the horizon while the parishioners pick and choose which of the Pope’s commands to obey and which to ignore; meanwhile, Brazil’s huge Catholic majority is splintering off into strange protestant evangelical groupings.