Is there a ghost of a smile hovering around my ghost of an interviewer’s lips? Have I reached him on a human-to-human level yet again, man-to-man, soul-to-soul? Christ, what a thought. “Here’s the thing of it,” I say. “I had my reviews, I had my comparisons with Booth and Burton, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Jack Schullmann was not a man to forgive and forget — well, few agents are — so every time my career seemed to come to life in some place like Minneapolis or Miami, he made sure to piss on it all over again back in New York. And theater is New York, it just is, no matter how much anybody else tries, anywhere at all. They build these theaters, flies that could fly a battleship, lightboards God would envy, and it doesn’t matter. They could hire me and love me, weep when I wept, laugh when I laughed, die when I died, but it didn’t matter, because the provinces never hear about each other, except through New York. And back in New York, there was Jack Schullmann, sitting on me, farting in my face.”
“That’s terrible,” my interviewer says, whether at the fact or the image I do not know.
“I suppose I should have been able to outwait it,” I say, “or walk away from it, but how could I? Acting was the only thing I had, the only thing that used me. I’d sell my soul to act,” I say, and hear myself saying it, and laugh: “Well, I did, didn’t I? But not to Jack Schullmann. He wasn’t buying, not then.”
“Does he still feel that way?” my interviewer asks, thereby disclosing not the depths of his research, but its shallowness. This guy doesn’t know diddly about showbiz.
“Jack Schullmann died a few years ago,” I say, smiling at the memory. “I sent a pizza to the funeral.”
He stares at me. “You didn’t.”
“I did. SO LONG, PAL, was spelled out on it, in provolone. By then, of course, we loved each other; I was too big for him to hate. He had to love me for the sake of clients I might want to work with. But back in the early days, it was a different story. And it wasn’t just Jack, either. It was his friends, too, and Miriam’s old friends — thee-ah-tah friends, you know. They wouldn’t walk down the block past a theater I was working in. So it was LA or nothing.”
“The usual story about fine actors, the way I’ve always heard it,” my interviewer says, rather disconcertingly suggesting that his boringly round little head might contain ideas of its own after all, “is that the movies seduce them away from what might have been great stage careers.”
“There are no great stage careers, not anymore,” I tell him. “And nobody seduced me into the movies. In fact, at first, nobody wanted me in the movies. It wasn’t a blacklist out here, it was just indifference. My own, too. I was worn out, I was losing faith in my talent, I didn’t know what to do or how to start all over.” I smile reminiscently. “I owe my stardom to Marcia, really,” I say, demonstrating my world-renowned generosity. “She encouraged me in those darkest hours.”
Flashback 9A
On her way home from the studio, Marcia picked up her and Jack’s dry cleaning, then continued on up and over Beverly Glen Boulevard out of the Valley and into Westwood to the furnished rental she now shared with her husband. She thumbed the garage-opener button as she made the turn into her driveway, and the broad blank door folded up and back, accepting its daily diet of Porsche.
Marcia collected the plastic dry-cleaner bag, which had been draped over the back of the passenger seat, then climbed from the car, and went through the connecting door and through the kitchen and the corner of the living room and down the hall, the dry-cleaner bag held over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra’s jacket. Walking down the hall, Marcia glanced leftward and saw, in profile, Jack.
Still there. In the same old cowboy hat and fringed jacket and high decorated boots, he sat in his favorite canvas chair at the deep end of the pool, seated well down and back so his head and knees were at the same height, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes to shade them from the afternoon sun, booted legs stretched far out in front of him over the redwood deck with ankles crossed, hands folded casually in lap. From a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a slender pale tendril of smoke wavered upward past his ear and the brim of his hat.
Marcia did not break stride. Her eyes narrowed slightly, she gazed steadily at that self-absorbed profile out there, and she kept walking, on down to the end of the hall, where she faced front again at last, moving through the doorway into the master bedroom.
Clean laundry stood in neat folded piles on the bed. Nodding as though to say her expectations had been fulfilled, she walked around the bed to the wall of closets and hung the dry-cleaning bag on the rod. Then she turned, looked again at the laundry on the bed, took a long, slow breath, and glanced across the room at her reflection in the dresser mirror there. No expression showed in the face looking back at her.
Marcia stepped through the sliding glass door to the outside, slid it shut behind her, and stood at the shallow end of the pool, looking down across the water at Jack, who hadn’t moved. An almost inaudible sigh parted her lips, which then pressed shut again. Deliberately she strode around the pool; he finally — as she was halfway to him — lifted his head and lifted his hand to lift his cowboy hat away from his eyes to watch her. Nothing else on him moved.
Marcia stopped in front of him. They looked at each other for a long silent moment, and then, with a kind of grim fatalism, she said, “Get off your dead ass.”
“Hi, honey,” he said mildly, a happy smile playing at the corners of his lips. “How’d things go today at the studio?”
She shook her head, pushing that aside, saying, “What did you do today?”
He considered. “Well,” he said, “the laundry.”
“Jack,” she said, “you’ve got to get out of this house, you’ve got to get moving, you’ve got to get your life going again. Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a kept man?”
He considered that question, giving it careful thought, and then a sunny smile glowed all over his face and he looked up at her and said, “Yes!”
“No!” she told him, and pointed a rigid finger at his nose. “You,” she said, “are going to get a job.”
Mildly, the smile still faintly lighting his features, he gazed up at her, blinking.
So Marcia got me an appointment with her agent, Irwin Sandstone, a man who had guided lots of fellas just like me to movie stardom.
Flashback 10
The views were magnificent, or would have been, if Los Angeles had anything magnificent to look at. From this corner office high in one of the silvery godless megaliths of Century City, one view was northward across the smog and over the boxy little houses in peach and coral toward the low but steep hills serving as the only redan against the proles of the Valley, while the other view was westward over flatter and peachier but less smoggy Santa Monica toward the eternal Pacific. Just down that way to the left lurked Venice, waiting for a far-sighted developer.
The office had been decorated with an eye to the exudation of casual power: relaxed, but potent, the spider’s parlor as a philosophical statement through the art of interior design. In this light, well-cleaned space, Jack Pine sat transfixed on a beautiful but uncomfortable chair in the middle of the room while Irwin Sandstone paced slowly around him. Irwin Sandstone, a pear-shaped man with a bald-headed toad’s face and a scalloped wrinkling of the ears, held a small slender bronze art deco figure of a naked, nubile girl in the short, stuffed fingers of his hands. As he walked, and as he talked, he fondled this statue, the light gleaming from his rings and from the clear nail polish his manicurist had assured him no one would notice. He said: