Authors: Kim Newman
I
t was the original Broadway production, with most of the cast that had gone on to be in the film. She had walked on somewhere in the third act, after Sam’s stroke. Lee J. Cobb would be sitting the rest of the play out in his dressing room while the other characters revolved around the void left in their lives, in the centre of the play, behind the bar. His passing out of the drama on the graveyard shift was so complete that Cobb never even came back to take a curtain call.
Anne slipped into a booth, and sat as far away from the action as possible. A waitress brought her a cup of coffee. She was practically an extra, having already chipped in with her five lines, and was just trying to create an illusion of a real Bar-B-Q and Grill by looking busy in the background. She was young, and pretty in a lipsticky ’50s way, but made up to look sluttish and bedraggled. Up close, Anne could see the panstick make-up and exaggerated black patches under her eyes. The coffee was cold tea, tart and nasty, but Anne sipped it anyway. She wanted to remain inconspicuous.
Downstage, Sam’s World War Two buddy and sidekick, played by Eli Wallach, was trying and failing to dispense Sam-style worldly wisdom and advice to the bar-owner’s son-in-law. He, played by a young Martin Landau, was a shell-shocked, psychologically impotent Korean War veteran who had just discovered that his wife (Kim Hunter) had been shacked up with Maish (Marlon Brando) while he was in a prisoner-of-war camp. In an earlier scene, he had shown off the automatic he had brought home with him from the army, lovingly unwrapping it from its oily cloth, caressing it like the woman who was lost, seeking a response from its cold metal that he could never get from his flesh. Without Sam to calm him down, the Landau character was going to shoot someone. He was already working himself up to the boil.
Landau had his back to the black space that replaced the fourth wall of the bar, and was taking a rest. His face had gone blank, while Wallach did the acting for both of them. Anne wondered whether Stella Adler would have approved.
‘It ain’t so bad, Johnny,’ said Wallach. ‘Broads. Who can figure ’em? Maish ain’t such a bad guy.’
‘He wuz draft-exempted. Me an’ my brudder goes to Korea, an’ get tortured by the slants, an’ good ol’ Maish sits on his ass in a gas station.’
In the movie, Maish had sat on his ‘setter’ in a gas station.
‘Only ’cause of his leg, Johnny,’ said Wallach. ‘Maish got a bum leg from when he was a kid. You don’t notice it so much ’cause he got a special kind of way of walking that covers up, but he couldn’t pass no army physical. You want a shot?’
‘Yeah. A shot.’
Anne’s father had written several different endings. She had seen the manuscripts. Landau could shoot Maish, his wife Angie, Wallach by mistake or himself. In the out-of-town try-outs, he shot Maish; on Broadway, he shot Angie; and in the movie, he shot Wallach and himself. The movie ending was a compromise. The Breen Office and the Catholic Legion of Decency had not really wanted Landau to shoot anyone: they liked Bing Crosby films about singing priests, not modern American tragedies. Warner Brothers had stood up to the censors, forcing them to back down by waving a fistful of Broadway reviews in their faces, and then told Dad he could not shoot the girl at the end. Therese Colt, the politically acceptable substitute for Kim Hunter, had to be alive to go off with Brando at the fade-out.
A stage manager put a cool jazz record on the jukebox, and everyone settled down to wait for Brando to come on again. Maish had good news; he had just sold his first story to
Atlantic Monthly
and quit his grease monkey job. Everyone else had bad news; Sam, Maish’s surrogate father and everybody’s favourite wailing post, was in the hospital with his third heart attack. He had not bothered to mention the first two to anyone; he had been too busy serving up advice and worldly wisdom between his steak specials and famous salads. This was the big scene, Brando’s big scene, the one she had heard about all her life.
The jazz was a slow, sexy trumpet solo, high and piercing. Betty, the waitress with higher billing, began to dance alone, trying to distract everyone from their worries in her own way. She had been hired by Sam in the first act, even though he knew all about her backstreet abortion (jailbird ex-husband, in the film). Betty was played with a wobbly New York accent, from Rottingdean to the Bronx via Beverly Hills, by Victoria Page.
Anne had not seen her mother in three years; and she had only seen her as she was here in old movies and photographs. She was the Hollywood Star going legitimate on Broadway, with a terminated contract back at Paramount and an egghead boyfriend. She was married to the Mayor of some Californian retirement colony these days, and still occasionally did guest appearances on television shows about geriatric detectives. She always played the private eye’s old flame who was in trouble, and she still paused for applause every time she made an entrance.
But here was Vicky, her mother, younger than she was. She looked a lot like Judi. Under the arc lights, she was even made up like Judi. She moved sensuously, showing off her dance training, carried away by the music, caressing herself in a way that would have to be toned down for the movie. She started to hum – the critics had been ready to pounce, but Dad had not written a song in for his then-fiancée – muttering under the tune. Anne was close enough to realize that she was just counting time, ‘one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four’, but to someone in the auditorium, she seemed to be expressing the inexpressible, summing up the hopeless yearnings of all the night people…
Then Brando came on.
He had worked himself up in the wings. One night, he had got himself into such a state while thinking through the offstage bit where he quit his dead-end job that he had laid out a stagehand who had spoken to him. It was just the sort of thing Maish Johnson would have done. He shouldered his way through the door, and almost danced across the stage, giving the impression of a limp but also covering it up. Every part of his body was in motion. He never just stood still on the stage. He was a pinball, bouncing off the fixed actors, lighting up the beacons in Dad’s text. Anne was astonished. She forgot herself, and felt, for the first time, the full power of her father at the height of his talent. She wished she could talk to him again, tell him that he had not lived pointlessly, that he had set down something which would last…
Brando grabbed Anne’s mother by the waist from behind, and waltzed with her as the solo peaked and died. Then, she was dismissed from centre stage and the star was left to his scene. From the elation of his entrance he segued into puzzlement, as Maish was unable to believe that Sam was not at his usual spot behind the bar. Wallach tried to tell him about Sam, but Brando would not listen. He had to tell his news to someone. He hopped from stool to stool (Anne could see the legendary sweat pouring off him) and finally settled next to Landau.
‘I guess old Sam meant a lot to all of us,’ said Wallach deliberately, aware that no one was watching him. ‘More than we ever counted on.’
‘Yeah,’ said Landau, back still to the darkness, ‘I hope he pulls through.’
‘Oh sure he’ll pull through, Johnny. Whaddya say, Maish? Sam, he’s indestructible. Like Superman. Back there at Anzio…’
‘Can it,’ snapped Brando, slipping into his big speech like Glenn Miller going into a trombone solo. ‘Sam was just a guy like the rest of us. He hadda take a shit…’ (it had been a ‘crap’ in the movie, and that had been a Hollywood first) ‘…he hadda wash his face. He drank cups of coffee like Brazil was goin’ outta business. He was…’
…and so it went on. One critic had compared the speech to Mark Antony’s eulogy, but even Dad thought that was too strong. The extra waitress, unnoticed, broke into tears as she did every night. She lost her part completely, but everyone was focused on Brando. He was talking about Sam, but he was also talking about God. Her father was talking about gods and leaders and heroes and politicians, sermonizing on their greatness but saying that he did not need them any more. Brooks Atkinson, the
New York Times
drama critic, wrote that it was about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Arthur Miller said it was about Eugene O’Neill, whose bar was just down the street from Sam’s. The Farnham Commission had called it the ‘throw away your crutches’ speech, and suggested that it was about Lenin or Trotsky (they were not sure which). Anne found it easy to forget the missing wall, the cold tea, the painted faces. This was reality. More real than anything that had happened to her since Nina fell asleep on her shoulder in the taxi on the way to St John’s Wood.
A jangle cut through Brando’s tirade, and he left off. There was a pause. Audiences were too awed even to applaud. The ringing was not at all like a real telephone. It was just a sound effect. Wallach, also in tears but concealing them like a professional, scooped up the receiver from behind the bar.
‘Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill,’ he said. Then, he nodded and ‘uh-huhed’ for thirty seconds. Brando stepped back into a shadow, forcibly diverting audience attention to the other actor.
Wallach put the phone down. He looked at everybody. It could have been the longest pause in American theatrical history. People who saw the play on its first run remembered it as lasting for a full minute. No one ever managed to wrest enough attention off the stage to time it. No one breathed.
‘It’s Sam,’ said Wallach. ‘He just bought the farm.’
Anne’s mother started sobbing uncontrollably, and had to be comforted by Jed (Howard Da Silva), the stammering vacuum cleaner salesman. It was a fine display of histrionic hysteria, but Brando topped it, stepped on it, destroyed it, by knocking back the shot Wallach had poured for Landau and pulling apart a stale doughnut.
Anne realized that she had misheard Wallach’s line. He had not said that Sam had just bought the farm, he had said that
Cam
had just bought the farm.
Cam? He would have been only two years old. In the ’50s, Cam had been her father’s name.
‘He made this place, I guess,’ said Wallach. ‘It won’t seem the same going on without him. I guess I’ll sell up. I could move to Florida.’
‘No,’ shouted Brando, hitting the bar so hard that all the props on it shook. ‘No. When a guy gets a Nobel Prize, it means something. There ain’t no committee that can take that away from him.’
Landau got up. Everybody had forgotten him. He had been working himself back into his part. His eyes gleamed with Satanic fury, his slicked hair was mussed into horn shapes. Cuckold’s horns, Devil’s horns. It was a neat trick. He had his gun out.
Mother screamed again – the Betty role really was a drag, Anne realized – and Da Silva hugged her.
‘Yeah,’ sneered Landau, ‘and nobody’s takin’ Angie away from me. Specially not you, Mr Draft-Exempt-Gas-Jockey Hemingway!’
Wallach leaned over the bar, trying to dampen Landau’s anger, but it was no good. He was spitting his lines out, his still-sharp Brooklyn accent cutting into Brando’s tortured presence. He waved the gun wildly.
‘You and Angie thought you were God-damned smart, huh? Poor old Johnny Boy was havin’ his toenails pulled by the slants, an’ you had it real easy. You gotta way with words, Maish, but you don’t know what dyin’ is like. You seen it in the movies, you read it in books. Well, here it is happenin’ to you. Dyin’. Cam died. He was a fink and a squealer, and he died. Now, you…’
It was time for Kim Hunter’s spectacularly unfortunate entrance. Landau’s safety catch was off. The door Anne had come through opened. She leaned out of her booth to see Angie come in. There was no one.
‘Angie!’
She turned back to the action. Landau was talking to her.
‘Get outta here, Angie,’ shouted Brando, ‘he’s drunk.’
She was standing up, alone in her part of the stage. She did not have any lines. Everyone else had got out of the way. She looked at Landau’s gun – it was not a prop – and then at his face. He had turned into Skinner.
‘Angie,’ he said in Landau’s voice. ‘This is what dyin’ is like.’
Then he fired.
I
t had been a long night for Maish. A lifetime ago, he had shambled into Sam’s for a cup of mocha java and a cruller. He had been newly-born then, but with a set of memories as deceitful as Eve’s belly button. He had talked, many times, about a previous life, but he had no pictures in his head to go with the words in his mouth. His stories about Angie and the gas station owner and his ambitions as a writer could have been second-hand, alibis learned by rote to cover up someone else’s crimes. He thought he might have lived before, he kept being haunted by that queer sensation Sam called
déjà vu
, but he was aware that his previous lives were identical, or almost identical, to his current experiences. It was a whole lot weirder than flying saucers or the search for Bridey Murphy.
He was supposed to be a gas station attendant, but he could not imagine what a gas pump or even an automobile looked like. He was a writer, but his vocabulary was limited to the comparatively few words he had been given to speak. In his mind, he felt uncomfortable even using the phrases he could pick up from the others in the bar. He knew that he was supposed to have badly broken his leg when he was a kid, to have made love to Angie and Betty and many other nameless girls, to have written an as-yet unpublished autobiographical novel about his time with a streetgang. He knew these things, but only as simple facts. The mass of tiny details he could recall about the bar and the people he met there accounted for the only rounded, complete, satisfying experiences he had ever had.
It was just like Jed’s speech. Sam’s was the only real place in the world, the only place where anything counted. Everything else was a shadowland where life was dreamed not lived. ‘Th-th-this is where you puh-pay for your sins,’ Jed always said, ‘not in church, in Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill.’
A minute or so ago he had said that even Sam had to take a shit. So how come he had eaten doughnuts and drank coffee all evening without having to use the Men’s Room? Deep down, Maish knew there was something wrong with his life.