“We’re Catholics,”
she peeped.
“I was raised
Catholic, Mrs. Pears,” I said, “so I know all about Catholics like you who can’t
take a shit without consulting a priest.”
Suddenly, Walter
Pears jumped up, sending his chair skidding across the floor with a metallic
shriek. I got up slowly until we faced each other.
Pears said, “If you
were a man I’d kill you.”
“If you were a man,”
I replied, “your son wouldn’t be a goddamn vegetable in the jail ward of a
charity hospital.”
The door opened
behind me. Judge Ryan’s bailiff stuck his head into the room. “Everything okay
here, folks?”
Mrs. Pears got to
her feet. “Yes, officer. We were just leaving. Let’s go, Walter.” She tugged at
his sleeve.
Pears seethed and
stalked out of the room ahead of his wife. She stopped at the door and said to
me, “There’s a special place in hell for people like you.”
After she left, the
bailiff looked at me. “What was that all about?”
“Theology,” I
replied.
“In here,” he
shouted back.
I followed his
voice to the study where I found him in his bathrobe, sitting on the sofa,
watching a cassette on the tv. The cassette was frozen on the image of a man in
a cop’s uniform holding a gun.
“That sounded like
the real thing.”
“Stereo,” Larry
replied. He reached for a glass containing about a half-inch of brown fluid.
Brandy. It disturbed me that he had taken up drinking again. He looked much the
same as he had in October and insisted that his disease was still in remission.
But he went into his office less and less often. My impression was that he now
seldom left his house. It was even more difficult to talk to him about being
sick, because he seemed to have reached a stage more of indifference than
denial.
He had asked me to
spend a few days with him. Since we were entering the holiday season and
prosecutors were unwilling to face Christmas juries, it was a good time for me
to get away.
“How did it go in
court?” he asked.
I sat down beside
him. “The charges were dismissed.”
“Free at last,” he
muttered bitterly.
“When are you going
to forgive Jim, Larry?”
He lifted his bony
shoulders, dropped them and stared blankly at the frozen action on the screen.
“His parents asked
me to sue the county,” I said.
Larry made a
disgusted noise. “Why?”
“For not preventing
their little boy from trying to kill himself.”
“Vultures,” he said
without heat.
“I thought so, too.
Jim’s dad and I got into a little scuffle.”
“You draw blood?”
I shook my head.
“Too bad.” He pushed
a button on the remote control and the action on the screen began again.
“What are you
watching?”
“Do you remember
Sandy Blenheim?”
I nodded. “The
agent.”
“There’s an actor
he wants me to represent. Tom Zane. He’s one of the stars of this show.”
The cop on the
screen raced down a dark alley in pursuit of a shadowy figure ahead of him. He
commanded the figure to stop, then fired his gun. He came to the prone body,
knelt and flipped it over. He saw the face of a boy and said, “Oh my God,
Jerry.” “Who’s the corpse?” I asked.
“The cop’s son,”
Larry replied. “I’ve seen this one before.”
On the screen the
cop was sobbing. Then there was an aerial view of Los Angeles and the words “Smith
& Wesson” appeared as music began playing. The screen split and displayed the
faces of two men, one on each side. The man on the left was a white- haired,
elegantly wrinkled old party who smiled benignly into the camera. On the right
was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. At first it was like looking at
two different men. His slightly battered nose — it looked like it had been
broken, then inexpertly set — and firmly molded jaw gave his face a toughness
that kept him from being a pretty boy. But there was prettiness, too, in the
shape of his mouth, the long-lashed eyes. At second glance, though, the parts
fit together with a kind of masculine elegance that reminded me of dim images
from my childhood of an earlier period of male stars, Tyrone Power or John
Garfield. Only his dark hair seemed wrong, somehow.
Larry stopped the
picture. “The fellow on the right is Zane.”
“Who’s the other?”
“Paul Houston. He’s
been on the tube for twenty years in one series after another. This was
supposed to be his show but Tom Zane’s edged him out.”
“Why? His looks?”
Larry sipped his
brandy. “Watch.”
He fast-forwarded
the tape until he reached a scene in which Tom Zane was standing in the doorway
of Paul Houston’s office. Larry turned off the sound. Even with the sound off,
Paul Houston was clearly an actor at work. His face was full of tics and pauses
meant to convey, by turn, cranky good humor, concern, exasperation, and wisdom.
It wasn’t that his acting was obvious but merely that it was unmistakable. He
was trying to reach the audience beyond the camera.
Tom Zane, on the
other hand, hadn’t the slightest interest in anything but the camera. He opened
his face to it and the camera did all the work. It amounted to photography, not
acting, and yet the effect was to intimate that, next to Tom Zane, Paul Houston
looked like a wind-up toy. Larry shut off the tape and turned to me.
“See?” he said.
“He has a lot of
charisma,” I observed. “But can he act?”
Larry said, “He
couldn’t act his way out of the proverbial paper sack, but the camera loves his
face.”
“Well, it’s some
face. I’ve never heard of Tom Zane before.”
“He came out of
nowhere about a year ago and got a bit part in the pilot of this show. The
response to him was so overwhelming that they killed off the actor who was
originally supposed to play Houston’s partner and replaced him with Zane.”
“What’s he want
with you?”
“He’s putting
together a production company.”
“I thought you
weren’t taking new business.”
“Sandy’s
persistent,” Larry said. “In fact, he was just here a while ago to drop off the
cassette and,” he picked up a paperback, “this.”
I looked at the
cover. “Edward the Second by Bertolt Brecht. Why?”
“Zane’s performing
the title role in a little theater on Santa Monica. Sandy wants me to come
tonight.”
“Are you?” I asked.
We’d planned to have dinner out and take in a movie.
“If you’ll come,
too,” he said, setting the book down.
“Sure,” I said. “Did
Sandy say anything about Jim Pears?”
Larry shook his
head. “That was last week’s sensation.”
“Tough town you got
here,” I said. I picked up the book. “Isn’t Brecht sort of ambitious for an
actor who can’t act?”
“I guess we’ll find
out tonight,” Larry said. “It’s kind of a vanity production.”
“What does that
mean?” I asked, flipping the pages of the play. It was in verse.
“Zane’s producing
it himself. It’s not to make money but to show people in the industry what he
can do as an actor. I suspect his wife’s behind it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Irene Gentry.”
“Irene Gentry?” I
put the book down. “I saw her in
Long Day’s Journey
Into Night
three years ago. She’s wonderful.”
“Yeah,” Larry said
dubiously.
“What does that
mean?”
“It’s not about her
acting. She really is a fine stage actress but in this town she has—” he smiled
“—a reputation.”
“What sort?”
“Nothing specific,
just that she’s difficult to work with. Not that she ever got much work here.
She’s always had too much going against her.”
“For instance?”
“She’s plain, she’s
now past forty, she’s New York, and she’s too damned good an actress.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
He lit a cigarette.
“The days when movies could tolerate a Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis as a
leading lady are over. The public wants candy for the eyes. Irene Gentry is a
five-course meal.”
“I wrote her a fan
letter once,” I said.
“Henry, you
surprise me.”
I shrugged. “I was
a lot younger, then,” I offered, by way of explanation. “She was doing Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra.”
“Yes,” Larry said,
exhaling a stream of smoke, “I saw her in that, too.”
We were both
silent.
“Well, you may get
to meet her tonight,” he said, finishing his drink. “I’m going to take a nap,
Henry. Wake me in an hour or so, all right?”
“All right.” After
he left I turned the tape back on, with the sound, and listened to Tom Zane
deliver excruciatingly bad lines with all the animation of a robot. He was such
a bad actor that it was almost possible to overlook his face. Almost. After a
minute or two, I shut the tape off and picked up the Brecht.
*****
Edward the Second
was an English king who ruled from 1307 to 1324. His calamitous reign
culminated in a thirteen-year civil war that ended with his abdication. Two
years later he was murdered by order of his wife’s lover, a nobleman named
Mortimer. Much of Edward’s misfortune resulted from a love affair he conducted
with a man named Piers Gaveston in an age when sodomy was a capital offense.
Edward’s homosexuality was less disturbing to his vassals than his insistence
on carrying on openly with Gaveston. Parliament twice exiled Edward’s lover
only to have Edward recall him. Eventually, the nobility split between those
who were loyal to the king and those who were repelled by him. This led to the
civil war.
The notes in the
Brecht book said that Edward’s life had been the subject of an earlier play by
Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who was himself homosexual.
Marlowe’s work was the source of much of Brecht’s play. In Brecht’s version,
Edward — vain, frivolous, proud, willful, and incompetent — was more like the
degenerate scion of the Krupp family than a fourteenth-century monarch. This
characterization was emphasized by the way Brecht portrayed Gaveston, the
object of Edward’s passion. Gaveston was essentially a whore; a butcher’s son
who, for reasons inexplicable even to himself, was plucked from his low station
by the whim of an infatuated king.
Gaveston was canny
and fatalistic: the real hero of the Brecht play.
Though Edward was
no hero he did have a certain grandeur which was mostly evident at the end of
the play when he is held in captivity. In defeat and squalor, he repented
nothing, becoming more of a king than when he actually governed.
The cost to Edward
of his homosexuality was a gruesome death. While Brecht’s stage directions
indicated death by suffocation, the accompanying notes discussed the actual
circumstances of Edward’s murder. A red-hot poker was thrust into his anus. His
last lover, who according to the historical record was not Gaveston, was
castrated; his genitals were burned in public and then the man was decapitated.
*****
The play was being
performed in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Since
I planned to see Josh Mandel after the play, Larry and I took separate cars.
The rain had stopped at dusk and the skies had cleared. They were flooded with
the lights of the city but, for all that, Santa Monica seemed dark and
uninhabited as I waited at a traffic light just east of the Hollywood Memorial
Cemetery.