I said: ‘Don’t give up so easily,’ and he glared at me in the mirror; and after that, we rode in welcome silence, and I was free to enjoy – and did enjoy – the descent into the grand canyon of this city.
After a season in London, we had lived in New York for the past five years; we had liked it from the moment we first went there, for the publication of
Ex Afrika
, and clinched the liking when we came back for the opening of the film. (I still recalled the trio of charming, watchful, look-alike Jews who went everywhere with us on that occasion, on a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock, escort basis. I had been much impressed by the film company’s thoughtfulness until Kate said: ‘It’s only to make sure we don’t get drunk before the première.’) After that visit, we had made the move a permanent one, leased the duplex apartment, and settled in to relish all that our bouncing hometown could offer.
It was a lot, even on an anonymous basis; and riding the crest of a book which stayed on the best-seller list for one hundred and four weeks, followed by another which lasted a full year, we had a wild and wonderful time. New York, we found, had open arms; and if sometimes they needed to be pried open first, that didn’t affect the ultimate welcome. Oysters were just the same, and just as wild and wonderful.
There was an endless amount of things for me to do in fact, too much for a writer who wanted only to write; I had to compromise, or rather I had to accept the fact, which was no hardship, that a book every three or four years was the most I could do, if I wanted to be a recognisable, available, quotable man as well. It happened that I did want that … I had made, and still did, a lot of television appearances – all the old shows and all the new, from Dave Garroway down to Johnny Carson, via Sullivan, Parr, John Daly and David Susskind. I did a lecture tour which, at the cost of staring down upon assorted seas of millinery, from Boston to San Francisco, four times a week for three months, netted me fifty thousand dollars, and a permanent distaste for Chicken Pot Pie and pineapple salad.
I made a trip to the Congo for
Life
Magazine, and another to London to sniff and then distil the fragrance of the Ward-Profumo-Keeler circus. I went to Hollywood to do
Wrap-Around’s
screenplay, and then to Cuba for one of those sober assessments of the Castro regime and swiftly out again as a suspected CIA saboteur. That didn’t do me any harm, either.
It was part of a self-projection, consistent, long-term, and highly effective. Kate didn’t like it, I did. As its result,
Ex Afrika
earned a swift quarter-of-a-million dollars before it started to ease off; its successor,
Wrap-Around
, bolstered by a monumental film deal, had already made half a million more. As far as I was concerned, there weren’t any other kinds of book, and there weren’t going to be.
$900,000 in six years was the current score, and it would top the million mark before this year was out. We still never seemed to have any money, but it was an acceptable kind of poverty; and here, as if to point the fact, was the gilded entrance to The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, home (so the ads declared) of the Gourmet Who Looks East.
A man dressed in a jewelled turban, scarlet leather jerkin, and golden-hued Turkish trousers, and flourishing a colossal two-handed scimitar (for which, I happened to know, he needed a police permit) stood sentinel outside, waiting to open the cab doors; and he was still only a minor clue to what lay in wait within.
The Sixteen Satraps, which was very much the ‘in’ restaurant that year, was predominantly Persian, with overtones from other vanished empires nearby; the bar was a copy of the Blue Mosque of Isfahan, the main dining room shaped like a Persian walled garden, complete with latticework and a control system of falling rose-petals; the checkroom and cigarette girls wore transparent veils, cut-out velvet hearts in strategic places, and were known as Persian Lambs.
Vast tapestries covered the walls; vast punkah fans waved to and fro overhead; on the tables (shaped and coloured like shining half-moons) the place mats were small Persian rugs, the plates inverted bronze shields, the knives miniature scimitars, the spoons miniature slippers, the wine-coolers miniature war-chariots. The waiters wore Turkish trousers, silk sashes, white turbans and gold slave-bangles; all the men behind the bar sported false yet formal beards of curly gold thread, copied from the tapestried warriors above. The man in charge of them was called Xerxes.
The menus were enormous, printed in Persian (small italics) translated into English (18-point Roman); at the head of each was the Omar Khayyám quotation,
‘A Loaf of Bread
,
a Jug of Wine
,
and Thou
,’ and underneath: ‘
You bring the Thou
,
we do the rest
.’ The
maître d’hôtel
, a remote personage, was known as the Head Shah. The food, leaning towards shish-kebabs on flaming daggers, stuffed vine leaves and melons foaming sherbet at every pore, was atrociously expensive, and very good indeed.
I gave my coat to one of the Persian Lambs, a forward-looking girl of large and lavish build; indeed, her configuration, whether true or false, always seemed an architectural impossibility. If this was a lamb, it was no wonder about support prices. Accepting the coat, she said: ‘Hi, Mr Steele! Saw you on TV last night.’
‘So late? You should have been in bed.’
‘Oh, I was!’
The look in her eye would have stunned a statue. I backed away prudently towards the bar, elevated nonetheless. Somebody loved me, after all.
‘Hi, Mr Steele!’ said Xerxes the head barman, a small foxy man whose fake yellow beard made him look like a starving actor which he may well have been, after office hours. ‘Saw you on TV last night.’
‘Good for you.’ One day, someone was going to tell me they had read one of my books, and I would break down altogether. ‘Did you like the show?’
‘I liked it when he was on every night.’
I wrestled with this
non sequitur
for a moment, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Now I’m feeling thirsty.’
‘Farah Dibah?’
‘Farah Dibah.’
A Farah Dibah was a martini with a stuffed date instead of an olive.
Sipping it, I looked round the Blue Mosque bar, and through its entrance to the walled-garden restaurant, and wondered not for the first time, what strange tribal signal brought certain kinds of people to certain kinds of places at certain times of the year. The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, being the current ‘in’ eating-place, was naturally the current expense-account haven, particularly at lunchtime; it was as if someone had sounded a moose-horn in the heart of New York, and commanded: ‘All right, boys. Four Seasons, out! Twelve Caesars, out! Sixteen Satraps, in! Get going!’ And here they all were, the March of the Charcoal Greys in person.
Ad men, TV men, film men in from the coast; producers and directors from the Broadway musicals; agents from all over – they had all suddenly arrived at the Satraps, brandishing their meal tickets from the Diners’, Hilton Carte Blanche and American Express; and you couldn’t tell one open-handed freeloader from another. It was a curious and grisly fact that whether a man sold Chanel or Chryslers, soap or cheese, women or men, he shared this uniform look – spearheaded by the Madison Avenue brigade, all with the same cropped haircuts, the same never-still eyes, the same contempt for the customer, the same oldest young faces in the world.
Even their clothes had become a uniform. This season it was narrow-shouldered suits, cuffed sleeves, cream shirts, pointed black shoes, and those awful little hats with no brims. Next season it would be something quite different. But unless you wore the whole outfit, you were improperly dressed, like a soldier with a missing epaulette, and you suffered the same fate – the big black mark which defaced your conduct sheet forever. I was improperly dressed myself, and it was a pleasure. But I was not shamed before my own clan. At these prices, there weren’t any other writers.
A hand fell on my shoulder, a gritty voice said: ‘Hi, Tolstoy!’, and I turned to face the man I was waiting for, Jack Taggart, my agent.
He was a large, not too talkative, somewhat unfathomable man who, in the jungle world of agency, sometimes seemed more like a game warden than anything else. Agents could not afford to have split personalities; Jack Taggart came as near to it as any other man at the top of his heap. He was a born ten-per-center, a driving salesman who took whatever I sent him, judged it, categorised it, and then sold it in the precise market which suited it best, to the nearest five dollars. Yet he managed to remain curiously uncommitted; accepting without praising, acting without involvement, selling without ever declaring his critical hand.
He had loved
Ex Afrika
, and done his formidable best for it; he had not liked
Wrap-Around
at all, and never said so, and never pretended that it was anything more than the hottest piece of merchandise that had ever come into his office. But he had gone in to bat for it with the same tough skill, and come out of the game with $500,000 for me – and still no pretence of admiration.
He did not flatter me, he did not bolster me; he did not play either God or Uriah Heep. He was my agent; not my mentor, not my fool. For all sorts of reasons, some of them stemming from conscience, some not, I was very fond of Jack; and one day I would recapture his regard. But that day was not yet, and we both knew it, and we never said a word on the subject, because neither of us was going to yield, nor change our rules, nor relent.
Now I gave him a greeting of equal and agreed falsity – ‘Good morning, Svengali,’ – and we settled down at the bar. No Farah Dibah for him; plain whisky, plain water, plain ice, plain glass. It was all he needed to say, or would ever say, about stuffed dates and sawdust people.
Jack Taggart wasn’t wasting any other kind of time, either.
‘Before he comes,’ he said, as soon as his drink was poured, ‘I’d better bring you up to date. I think we have a deal, if you want one.’
‘I want one.’
‘OK. Like I said the other day, it involves you as well.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Write the book. Give the cues for songs, and what they should be about. You might have some ideas of your own for lyrics, but it’s not necessary – and of course no music from you.’
‘Who does that part of it?’
‘I don’t know yet. He’s probably got a team lined up already – maybe the best – but he won’t say until he’s sure of you and
Ex Afrika
.’
‘Sounds all right. I know how much of the story I want to use. What about the money side?’
Jack Taggart sipped his drink, as I did; the small pause before the vital statistics.
‘It’ll be a percentage deal,’ he said after a moment. ‘A cut of the box office gross, after some of the production costs have been taken care of. It’s complicated, but I’ll work all that out with the lawyers. Will you want something now, on account?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This afternoon.’
He grinned. ‘I don’t know what you do with your money. All right. How about this? Fifteen thousand for saying yes to the idea. Fifteen thousand and expenses for writing all the non-musical side of it. That’ll make a thirty thousand advance, against your percentage of the box office. If it works out properly, and the show goes, that will mean a four or five year income.’
‘Tell me again,’ I said, mock dreamily, ‘about
My Fair Lady
.’
‘I doubt if there’ll be any sort of parallel. But you never know.’
‘How about an outright sale?’
Jack looked at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want an outright sale.’
‘I might.’
He was dubious. ‘You’ll lose on it. I doubt if he would go to more than fifty or sixty thousand, for all the rights, all your work, everything. You know what it costs, to put on a big show like this. They like to cut down on the authors … My way, you ought to make a couple of hundred thousand, spread over the years. It isn’t worth doing on any other basis. You’ll just be giving it away.’
I did some figuring, and agreed. ‘All right. What you said the first time.’
‘Good.’ Jack Taggart looked over the rim of his glasses towards the door. ‘There he is now,’ he said, and got down off his stool. ‘Just one thing, Johnny.’
‘What?’
‘He’s very keen on this. Try and take him seriously.’
‘“
Follow that Lord
,”’ I declaimed. ‘“
And look you
,
mock him not
.” All right, Jack. I’ll mock him not.’
‘That’s my boy.’
Close to, it needed very little time to see the point of the warning. It was not easy to take Erwin Orwin seriously, unless you were utterly dependent on his grace and favour; if I had wanted to produce a caricature of the world’s idea of a Broadway big wheel, this was the way I would have written him. Vaguely I had known he would be like this, since he was very much in the public eye, and his current musical,
Oh My Darling Josephine
, which Kate called ‘that awful Napoleon thing,’ was just completing its second year on Broadway, and looked all set for a third. But the great man himself, in the flesh, was still a surprise.
To begin with, there was a lot of flesh. Erwin Orwin was an enormously fat man, and he made a cult of it; he positively barrelled into the restaurant, wheezing and snorting, scattering other customers like so much chaff; when he shed his coat, it was like an elephant shouldering its way out of a circus tent lined with astrakhan. He was obviously well known to the Satraps; at his approach, fingers were snapped like castanets, waiters scurried like ants on overtime; even the Head Shah came down into the Persian marketplace to greet this rival potentate.
He boomed out a welcome to me: ‘Mr Steele, it’s
my
pleasure!’ and then he laughed uproariously, for no reason at all, and it was like a thunderclap; his jowls shook, his vast stomach heaved and swayed. I was reminded of an inverted proverb which Kate once made up: ‘Inside every fat man there’s an even fatter man trying to get out.’ Erwin Orwin seemed intent on making this come true.