Authors: True Believers
Maybe that’s true. It certainly makes for a good Alex Macallister backstory. However, I have no memory of the event or its allegedly transformative effect on Alex, and thanks to Google, I know that Oldenburg’s 1963 Happening happened at the U of C on Saturday, February 8, the same date my journals tell me that Alex and Chuck and I performed a Bond mission all day in Wilmette.
Alex also told
Vanity Fair
the following: “The funny bit is, before I’d even
heard
of Happenings, I’d sort of invented Happenings on my own. I’d staged a whole series of them—these absurdist, surreal, Living Theatre–type pieces, at the age of
thirteen,
if you can imagine! I was a little Outsider Performance Artist! They were all done around a theme, sort of the dark side of JFK and Camelot and globe-trotty glamour. With props and costumes, all performed in public spaces, unannounced, site-specific. And intertextual. It was bonkers. It was
fabulous.
So when I saw the Oldenburg, I thought,
Crikey, maybe
I’m
an artist!
”
Alex insists he told the writer that Chuck and I were his coequal collaborators but that she’d left it all out. “You know
journalists,
” he emailed me. Yes, I do: would a
Vanity Fair
journalist in the fall of 2012 really omit best-selling author and former Supreme Court candidate Karen Hollander from such a cute backstory? Also, for the record, our Bond theatricals weren’t a bit “absurdist” or “surreal,” except for the fact that we were children playing the parts of spies and saboteurs and assassins and criminal masterminds.
For our first mission, I wore my sleeveless purple knit (Orlon? Dacron? rayon?) party dress covered in big black dots. I’d told my parents the boys were taking me out for a belated birthday celebration—a movie, maybe ice cream at Peacock’s, maybe a game of pool at the Macallisters’ country club. Spies give cover stories. It was more exciting to lie a little, more real.
“Oh, ‘at the club,’ huh?” my mother said. “Lah-de-
dah
!”
“I disapprove,” said my father, smiling.
“The eye shadow looks pretty, honey. You used my good perfume?”
“Just a tiny bit.” Balmain’s Vent Vert, which the Bond girl Solitaire wears.
As Dad kissed my forehead, he said, “You smell fantastic.”
My father often used the phrase “in the cold light of day,” which he said was the first cliché he’d learned in English, “before it became a cliché,” from reading Orwell as a boy. He told us he never got drunk because “afterward, in the cold light of day, I always feel like a fool and a weakling.” He hadn’t stayed in Denmark to start a jazz radio station with his brother because “after the war, in the cold light of day, it seemed preposterous.” He moved to the Midwest because it seemed the most Danish part of America, “a place where it’s
always
the cold light of day.”
As I stepped out into the soft, buttery summer Saturday dusk in June 1962, I wondered how if I’d feel about our adventure tomorrow in the cold light of day.
During the two-mile ride to the lake, we coasted as much as possible, because that allowed us to imagine that our Schwinns were actually motorcycles, that we were riding from, say, NATO central command in Versailles into Paris. My dress also made pedaling tricky. The boys wore neckties and sport jackets, and Alex and I had on sunglasses. The mission equipment was in Chuck’s bike basket.
“People must think we’re weird,” I said after exchanging a glance with a fascinated little boy in the back of a passing car.
“Maybe they think we’re going to Shabbat services,” Chuck said, “or Mass, or whatever.”
A Corvair packed with laughing, shouting high schoolers zoomed past, and a kid in the backseat aimed an “L for losers” hand sign at us.
When we’d plotted that inaugural mission, choosing which characters to play had been easy, except when Alex said that Chuck should be Sol Horowitz, one of the hoods who tries to rape Vivienne in
The Spy Who Loved Me.
Since we were inventing our own narratives, we were free to pick characters from different novels and stories who never appeared together. But choosing the venue had required a long debate.
No Man’s Land, a few blocks at the north tip of town along Lake Michigan, seemed to me the perfectly obvious place. When my mom was young, No Man’s Land actually had been a lawless no man’s land, part of neither Wilmette to the south nor Kenilworth to the north.
“It’s just like Monte Carlo,” I’d said to Alex and Chuck. “The lake is the Mediterranean Sea, like in
Casino Royale.
And Spanish Court”—an old (that is, thirty-five-year-old) shopping mall with red tile roofs and a bell tower—”is sort of Monaco-an.”
“The word is ‘Monegasque,’” Alex corrected.
Chuck smiled and shook his head and suggested Los Angeles instead. Bond goes there in
Diamonds Are Forever.
“I think Spanish Court is really more Californian.”
Given the lakefront, I proposed, we could also imagine we were in Geneva, where Goldfinger captures Bond. “But Monaco or Los Angeles or Switzerland,” I said, “come on, what’s it really matter? It can be any of them. I mean, it’s not
real.
”
“No, no,
no,
” Alex insisted, “it’s got to be
specific.
Mr. Hendricks says good acting is all about
specificity.
” Jerome Hendricks, the head of the drama department at New Trier High School, also ran a theater program for “gifted” younger children, and Alex had been one of his star pupils since fifth grade. Alex regarded him as a mentor not just in theatrical matters but also in fashion (turtlenecks), music (Bob Dylan), and general demeanor (supercilious). “It’s especially important,” Alex added, undoubtedly quoting him again, “since we’re doing an
improvisation.
”
Alex had his heart set on the mock-Tudor Michigan Shores Club, where his parents were members and which, he said, “might as well
be
Blades,” the fictional Mayfair club to which several Bond characters belong.
I proposed we could be
serially
specific, that our first mission could have two different settings on two different continents. So on that Saturday in June at the golden hour, we were heading to both, one after the other.
I adored No Man’s Land, the twenty-two acres as well as its name and peculiar history. By suburban standards, it was disheveled and disorderly. It had no nice big houses or nice neat yards and very few trees. Instead, there were a few dumpy three-story apartment buildings; no one we knew lived in an apartment. There was a barbecue restaurant where we’d once watched a drunk man stumble out the door and pass out on the sidewalk. And yet it wasn’t a slum. The Spanish Court had a movie theater, the Teatro del Lago. Altogether, No Man’s Land was the most urban, foreign-seeming place we could reach easily by bike, both raffish (a word I’d learned in English class) and louche (a word I’d learned from my father).
Alex handed Chuck the cooler of the two toy cap guns—the machine pistol that fired five times with each trigger squeeze and spat out plastic shell casings. Chuck stuck it in his leather shoulder holster. Alex put one of the two Blinker Code-Lites and the smaller pistol, a Luger, into the metal tackle box. On the lid of the box was a monogram, raised white letters on a shiny little red plastic strip—ESB, short for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SMERSH in
Thunderball
—that he had made with a Dymo LabelWriter.
“Check this out,” Alex said, pointing to a russet-colored splotch the size of a silver dollar inside Chuck’s tackle box.
“Blood.”
Perch or smallmouth bass blood, but a nice touch nonetheless.
I stuck the other Blinker Code-Lite into my pink vinyl handbag, from which I pulled an unopened pack of cigarettes I’d bought a week earlier from a machine—Chesterfields, Bond’s brand whenever he visited America. As I dug around for matches, Alex pulled a Zippo from his pants pocket. No one had ever lit me before. I grinned as I exhaled, but Alex remained absolutely straight-faced.
He lowered his eyelids a millimeter and his voice a half-octave. “Miss Lynd?” For a thirteen-year-old, he did come across as pretty steely.
“Yes, Number One?” I was Vesper Lynd, the Soviet double agent who works for MI6 in
Casino Royale.
“Double-oh-seven and his CIA friend are nearby. I’ll remain to your southwest at all times.” The Blinker Code-Lites had little compasses built in to their pistol grips.
Nodding, I took another drag on the cigarette, then tossed it to the ground with as much world-weary élan as I could muster. Chesterfields were unfiltered, unlike the Winstons I occasionally swiped from my parents, so I was feeling a little dizzy.
And we were off, headed in separate directions, the idea being to spread out but to make sure Alex could see me and Chuck could see Alex. After I found James Bond and the CIA agent Felix Leiter, we would keep them under surveillance and then, in an hour, meet up near the bike rack—that is, as Chuck said, we would “rendezvous at the drop point at nineteen hundred hours.” Then we’d kill them.
I walked away at half-speed, swinging my handbag, toward the Teatro box office. I was modeling myself on the character Tuesday Weld played in
The Many Loves of
Dobie Gillis.
“When does
Hatari!
let out?” I asked the lady in the glass box.
She pushed her button to speak. “Quarter past. Price goes up to a dollar at six-thirty, y’know.”
“Yup, thanks.” I shouldn’t have said “yup.”
“Real cute dress, honey.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows in that annoying grown-up way. “Expecting somebody?”
“In a way, I suppose, yes.” Now I was attempting British locution—Hayley Mills?—without the accent. “But I’m afraid I don’t know for certain where he is.”
The smiling ticket lady pursed her lips and shook her head. “
Boys,
” she said through the tinny speaker.
I sat down on a bench facing the lake. I took out my compact and started applying lipstick. Rather, I gingerly touched the pink tip to my lips and pretended to apply it, using the compact’s little mirror to look behind me. And it
worked:
I found Alex, thirty yards away, leaning against the opposite corner of the theater. I put away the mirror and lipstick, checked my watch, and took out the newspaper—a month-old copy of the London
Guardian.
Another compromise: Bond reads the
Times,
but through her Hadassah chapter, Chuck’s mom had just bought a special commemorative pack of international front pages with articles on Adolf Eichmann’s execution in Israel, and the London
Times
hadn’t covered it.
I read the Eichmann story and thought of my father. Despite his Danish accent, it was always hard for me to believe, really believe, that my own dad—this chuckling gray-haired suburban man who could juggle tangerines and wore colorful neckties and took the train every day to an office in Chicago—had watched Nazi soldiers shoot people he knew and threaten to shoot him. The war had ended only seventeen years earlier, but it seemed like an event from another epoch.
I put away the newspaper and stared up at the freestanding five-foot-high cursive neon letters that spelled out Teatro del Lago, resisting the urge to trace them in the air the way I did when I was little.
As people started pouring out of the theater, I turned to pay attention, making a clandestine examination of dozens of young and middle-aged men in order to find a suitably single, rugged, handsome one—Bond. I was frustrated in the attempt, since every one of them who looked to be in his late thirties (except for Benny, the Locust Junior High janitor, who didn’t see me, thank God) were accompanied by children or wives.
Giving up, I crossed Sheridan Road and entered a different existential zone. Partly, it was a function of proximity to the lake itself, which you could suddenly hear and smell, and the sandy lakefront soil. But the lake side of Sheridan was also much sketchier than anywhere else on the North Shore.
On the beach were the foundations of a couple of failed private clubs and casinos from the Depression and the charred remains of a Jazz Age roadhouse that we called the Ruins, one-off fast-food places with hand-painted signs, and a penny arcade to which I was explicitly forbidden by my parents to go alone. As I entered the arcade, I found myself smiling and had to force myself to stop. The atmosphere—the racket of shouts and flippers and springs and bells and steel pinballs and wooden skeeballs, the smells of burning popcorn and molten sugar and cigarettes—was sensational. I thought of the first sentence of
Casino Royale:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” I pushed my dark glasses up to the top of my head, as I’d seen women do.
Although I wanted to play a horse-racing machine, in the spirit of the mission, I headed for a gun game that involved shooting a bolt-action rifle at a hopping kangaroo. After each game, as I took another dime from my rubber coin purse, I looked around. I was the only single female in the place. I saw a couple of ninth-grade boys I recognized, which wasn’t good, and a lot of greasers.
The man at the next machine was as old as my dad, but he was too fat and poorly groomed to be Bond or Leiter. And every time he swung his right arm to pound the side of his machine, I got a gust of BO.
“You’re a good shot,” the smelly man said to me as I finished what I decided at that instant was my last game.
“Fair to middling,” I replied. It was a phrase of my mother’s that I’d never spoken. It seemed British-ish.
As I approached the door, I saw Alex, outside, abruptly turn and run back across Sheridan, just barely ahead of a car that sped past, its long fading honk Dopplered into an after-the-fact reprimand. Almost like a European siren! And a moment of actual physical jeopardy!
I kept walking up the road and glanced over at the construction site on the lake where the town’s first high-rise apartment building was going up. I noticed the light in a construction trailer go off, and two men stepped out. The older one, dark-haired and maybe thirty-five, was wearing a tie, and the other, a little older with a crew cut, had on a denim jacket. The one in the necktie carried a briefcase, and the other held a thick tube several feet long under his arm. An attaché, like the ones all 00 agents carry. And the tube? A rifle case, obviously.