“Shut your face!” The contractor holds the business end of the Browning inches away from the hyperactive mouth of Marvin Zuckerman.
“I have money.” Zuckerman trembles now, his voice crumbling. “Not to be supercilious or presumptuous in any way, but I would like to add at this point that I have a ridiculous amount of—”
“QUIET!”
The bark of the contractor’s sandpaper basso profundo voice turns Zuckerman’s expression to jelly. All the false confidence, the used-car-dealer twinkle, the always-selling alter kocker schtick—all of it transforms into the look of a whipped basset hound. On Zuckerman’s face is now written the end of the universe.
“Aw Christ.” The contractor sighs, the gun wavering slightly. “Enough already.” He pulls the trigger, and a small flag on a tiny pin pops out of the Browning’s muzzle, which says SURPRISE on one side and HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the other.
They come flooding into the office, the entire staff—even Mrs. Merryweather, the former receptionist with the cat’s-eye glasses and gallstones (whom Zuckerman had assumed was dead). Two surviving partners in golf pants and Rolexes, three junior agents, an anorexic secretary, a pair of slacker grad-student readers, an old lady with blue-rinse hair, and a six-figure-a-year accountant with a Percodan habit—this motley group could make an alarming racket.
They whoop and holler and sing “Happy Birthday” and break out the Dom Pérignon, and on a mail cart they roll in a cake in the shape of a tombstone with the inscription HERE LIES HOLLYWOOD’S NUMBER ONE ASSHOLE, and all the while everybody studiously pretends not to notice the evidence of post-traumatic stress on Zuckerman’s face.
Zuckerman considers surprise parties thinly veiled acts of passive-aggressiveness and hostility, and God knows there’s enough animosity around this place to wallpaper Bin Laden’s cave.
After an hour of tippling and off-key crooning and gossipmongering and chortling at bad jokes, Mrs. Merryweather is the one who finally broaches the subject. “You do realize that everyone got a huge kick out of the look on your puss at the end there,” she says to Zuckerman over by the potted ficus.
“Really had me going there,” Zuckerman concurs sourly. “Who’s the Golem, anyway?”
Zuckerman jerks his thumb at the leviathan in the J.C.Penney sport coat skulking all alone in the corner. The contractor stands there like a dime-store Indian, staring into his paper cup. Somewhere in his late sixties, the man has a face no mother could love, a road map of creases circumnavigating a pair of eyes like smoldering craters formed by meteors.
“Poor fella,” Mrs. Merryweather says. “Used to be somebody.”
“As for instance?”
“You’re in the picture business, Marvin, for God’s sake… don’t you recognize the man? They said you wouldn’t recognize him, but I didn’t believe it.”
“You want to give me a hint, or is this twenty questions?”
“1962? New Jersey Nocturne? Alan Ladd and Barbara Stanwyck mean anything to you?”
“Never saw it.”
“That gentleman over there is Haywood Allerton.”
The name rings no bells for Zuckerman. “And so?”
“Once upon a time, that man was the greatest heavy in Hollywood.”
With a shrug, staring at the giant with the ruined face, Zuckerman says, “What makes him a ‘poor fella’? I’m the guy got buffaloed.”
Mrs. Merryweather lowers her voice, as though imparting something unseemly. “Poor guy’s in stage four I’m told, pancreatic cancer, inoperable.”
Zuckerman thinks about this, sips his champagne, thinks about it some more, then decides to investigate further and walks over to the colossus.
“You got me,” Zuckerman says to the giant, with as much conviviality as he can muster. “Not since I read my pre-nup with my third wife have I been that petrified.”
All at once, as though by some stroke of magical alchemy, the giant’s face changes from its natural repose of sinister menace into a warm, open look of empathy—a transformation not unlike Godzilla pausing to help an old lady across the street. “I feel terrible about what I did, Mr. Zuckerman.”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“I will admit to you that I needed the money.”
Zuckerman waves his hand. “No harm done.”
“I wouldn’t harm a flea, Mr. Zuckerman; I have insurance issues is the thing.”
“Completely understandable,” Zuckerman assures the man. “I meant what I said, however, about your… unique style. Turns out, if I may be so bold as to pat myself on the back, I was correct in my assessment of your unique proclivities.”
Allerton looks down shyly, tries to stifle a smile jerking at the corners of his intimidating face. “I made a few pictures a long time ago,” he says, “but nobody wants an old tough guy no more.”
Zuckerman gets an idea. Maybe the idea comes because Zuckerman had found himself staring into the abyss that night. Maybe it comes because he had been thinking about God. But whatever the source, it strikes him right then as all his epiphanies do: in the scrotum, then traveling up the base of his spine to the core of his midbrain. It would not only be a challenge but would also perhaps be an opportunity for Zuckerman to do something outside the realm of lies, exploitation, greed, and deception that customarily govern his daily existence. Perhaps it would be an opportunity to atone, to get himself on track with the Torah, to fulfill a mitzvah, an act of kindness.
After a dramatic pause, Marvin Zuckerman says to the great monolith of an old man, “Maybe, if you will pardon my presumptuousness, you just haven’t had the right representation.”
If you went to the movies between 1960 and 1980, you most likely would have seen, at one point or another, the inimitable, craggy face of Haywood Allerton—still a relatively young man for much of this period, but ageless in his inchoate menace. Sometimes haunting the edges of great films and sometimes providing foils for cardboard heroes in, let us say, less-than-great films, Allerton, for one brief and shining moment, was the go-to heavy for all the studios, both major and minor.
His greatest role, perhaps, was as the redneck racist who roughs up Pam Greer in the blaxploitation classic Honey Child (Avco/Embassy, 1971). He also made his mark as the brain-damaged child murderer in Orson Welles’s little-seen noir Coffin Not Included (RKO, 1974). Allerton also chilled audiences in such diverse cinematic fare as Monster Train (Hammer, 1969), Rumble in the Jungle (New Line, 1976), The Copperheads (Universal, 1979), and As the Eagle Flies (AIP, 1980), the cult World War II actioner with Burt Reynolds and Twiggy.
Alas, in today’s Hollywood—a new frontier of digital downloads and flavors-of-the-millisecond viewed on handheld devices in bathroom stalls—a man of Allerton’s special qualities can barely land a hemorrhoid commercial. Evil is no longer essayed by the human face; it is created in the lab, through CGI and motion capture.
Over the next few weeks, Zuckerman stops counting all the doors slammed in his face. He will not give up, though—after all, this is a mission from God, a holy mitzvah—which leads to an interesting phenomenon: For the first time in his shallow, manipulative, contemptuous life, Marvin Zuckerman actually experiences something like real affection for another human being.
In the tradition of many great Hollywood heavies—Rondo Hatton, William Bendix, Margaret Hamilton, and Richard Widmark among them—Haywood Allerton is secretly a pussycat, a softie, a tender soul with nary a wicked thought in his head, and he begins to grow on Zuckerman. Complicating matters is the fact that the gentle giant is getting weaker and weaker by the day, the malignant cells erasing the man’s remaining time on earth faster than the nitrate fading from the celluloid of his old films.