THE DELAHAYE’S GEARS sounded like broken china, and this city had a steely, glossy look tonight—a mix of sea fog, smog and smoke from the fire at Soundstage 1A. It snagged in the palms and hazed the intersections and swirled around the streetlights, turning everyone and everything—the zigzag modern buildings, the women walking their diamond necklaced pooches, the shoeless bums trying to sell screenplays—into mist, plasm, dream.
The area around the Biltmore was almost as bright as the MGM lot had been. So many searchlights pillared the sky that it looked like one of those newsreels of London. All that was missing were the bombs and screaming planes. He parked at back of South Broadway and walked, weary and wary, toward the waiting bonfire of fame.
It was like the biggest kind of premier, with the three-tiered bleachers set up on either side of Olive and West 5th swept by sea-waves of excited commotion as each new limousine rolled in. All of Senserama’s stars were there, and so were most of this city’s other players. Harmensworth Fowley, with his trademark cravat and pipe. Mark Crave and Peyton Jones, still arm in arm despite the rumors about that dead Puerto Rican boy in their pool. Then came Monumenta Loolie, who made a far better performance out of squeezing herself out of the back of a Cadillac than any of her wooden efforts in the feelies. But tonight Herbert Kisberg was the biggest star. As he stepped from his limousine and pulled his cuffs and glanced around him with that who me? little boy smile he had, he seemed too real to be real, the way people did when they were on the verge of being great. No need for a Bechmeir field tonight—the crowd was already a rebounding collision of sweat and breath and need. Beneath the reek of underarms and cheap cigarettes and even cheaper perfume, you could smell the natural plasm of all those thought waves like churned seawrack on a beach.
Clark remembered how there was a knack to facing the glare. The flick of the hair, the flash of a smile, the eternal challenge of dealing with the same shouted question like it was something new. Anacondas of electricity powered a forest of lights, camera lenses and microphones. KFI were there, and KJH, as well as the Pathe and Movietone cameras, and NBC had gone one better and would be broadcasting the entirety of their flagship show Star Talk across the entire country tonight on a live feed.
Despite how he must look, Clark found that Daniel Lamotte’s name got him a tick on a clipboard and entry past the security goons. With his blackened clothes and face, they probably imagined that he was already in character for one of those nigger acts from which white performers made so much money. Not that he was allowed to walk up the red carpet itself, but, as the final rope was lifted and he was let into the Biltmore’s lobby through a plateglass sidedoor, he got an echo of what the old days had been like.
But this was bigger. This wasn’t just the movies or even the feelies, this was politics as well—assuming there was still any difference left. People talked with loud, breathless voices as they headed toward the Biltmore’s famous Bowl, pausing only briefly to take a flute of Champagne and glance smilingly at the seating plan as if it didn’t matter at all.
“Dan, Daniel…”
He was slow to react to Timmy Townsend’s voice.
“Dan, where have you been? Well, thank God you’re here—but what the fuck are you wearing? What happened… ?”
“My car broke down.”
“Take my advice, ol’ Danny-o, and never have shit to do with anything that’s mechanical and French. Your average Pierre might know about putting something tasty on a plate, but anything else… ?” Beaming as ever, his eyes and cheeks aglow, the tip of his nose a drippy red, Timmy Townsend shook his head. “Just not in their blood. Like asking a coon to play chess. At least, that is, until the Germans get them good and sorted. Then things’ll be different. Then, the frogs’ll be like a whore who’ll fuck oyou all night and clean the sheets up in the morning. Neat and funky at the same time if you get my meaning. Speaking of which, I think we need to get you sorted…”
The Biltmore accommodated for most things. In a long basement room, there were enough evening dresses, suits, shirts, ties and every other kind of apparel to kit out a largish department store. Timmy Townsend stayed around as Clark stripped and wiped himself down with steamed towels and then began to get changed. He was still talking about all the marvels the European nations would accomplish once the Germans had knocked the bastards into proper shape. Just like Barbara Eshel, although for different reasons, the sight of Clark’s bare ass didn’t even cause him to blink. It was strange to think how accustomed powerful men were to seeing each other naked: at the Turkish bath, in the shower after playing polo, or sharing a few broads for an afternoon in a hotel suite. It was like they always had an extra layer of gloss which nakedness alone couldn’t remove.
“I sometimes wonder why Herbert even bothers with America,” he was saying as he offered Clark a red-lined silk dinner jacket, “when California’s more than powerful enough to be a country on its own. I mean, who needs fucking Iowa, or hillbilly dumps like Arkansas? We could fucking invade Mexico any time we wanted, just on our own…”
Clark finished dressing in his hundred dollar penguin suit, put back on his Daniel Lamotte glasses for what he was sure would be the last ever time, then followed Timmy into the Biltmore’s main halls. He remembered that story in the Bible Jenny had once told him as they walked through long suites of differently-themed rooms. The one about the guy—Samson, wasn’t it?—who’d had his hair cut and had been tied up to some pillars in a gilded palace much like this one, and had dragged the whole fucking thing down, low divans, leather Chesterfields and all. “The way it’s going to work is this, Dan baby. There’s the first half of the show which is just good old entertainment, then comes the break, when you’ll get to be live-interviewed by Wallis Beekins, and then after the re-start Herbert comes up on stage, and he’ll get the spotlight to point at wherever it is that Lars Bechmeir’s sitting. The crowd’ll go apeshit, of course, and after that he’ll announce—”
“What are you expecting me to say?”
“Expecting?” Timmy Townsend looked puzzled. “You just say whatever you want to say, Dan. About Wake Up and Dream. Why you wanted to write it, and what a journey of fucking discovery the whole thing’s been. All that usual crap. You’re okay with that, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Hey.” Timmy clapped an arm around Clark’s shoulder. “There’s no need to worry. Whatever you say, the listeners’ll gobble it up. I mean, what the hell do they know that the likes of us don’t know already?”
They’d reached the edge of the Biltmore Bowl’s murmuring sea of glass, table linen and faces, and Timmy Townsend’s attention was starting to drift. A quick check like everyone else at the seating plan, and they were working their way toward their separate tables just as the Fred Waring Orchestra struck up with Devil Got My Woman and the lights began to dim.
Things settled. Food was served. Clark noticed that his hands were shaking as he raised his first forkful of salmon mousse. Rope bruises were starting to show on his wrists. He shot his cuffs to cover them and smiled at the other people on his table. He wasn’t with the big names here, and his announcement that he was merely a screenwriter had got disappointed looks. Here were guys who manufactured grape candy, room deodorizers and rods for shower curtains, who’d all come here tonight with their second wives to soak up a bit of vicarious glamour. After all the money they’d donated to the Liberty League, they’d obviously been hoping for someone who was proper Hollywood—a star, or at the very least a character player, instead of some friggin’ guy who wrote the stuff—to share their table. Still, they brightened up once the entertainment started, and were happy to chat between turns about how the average working man wasn’t worth jackshit, how it had now been scientifically proven that niggers didn’t have proper souls (I’ve seen the photos—believe, me your average Jimmy Crack Corn’s got less aura than a bar of soap), and how they were thinking of setting up a new factory in TJ because costs over the border were so much cheaper.
More of the Fred Waring Orchestra, then that woman who was famous for being able to sing and swim at the same time, and some beloved old comedian Clark had been certain was dead, and whole squadrons of dancers in not much more than sequins and smiles. Nothing that spectacular, really, although he knew it was an old enough trick. If you want to make an impact in the second act, bore your audience ’til their asses ache in the first … And now the lights were coming up, and the Biltmore Bowl was erupting into yet more applause, and an averagely drop-dead beautiful blonde in a lowcut black evening dress was tapping his shoulder and saying something about Star Talk in a fragrant murmur, and asking him if he’d mind coming this way…?