At the Oceana Apartments, he wonders still at the obsession with plot.
Louis Burstein, General Manager of the Vim Comedy Company, employer of Fat Comedian Babe Hardy, would, he thinks, have found common ground with Hal Roach, the two producers in accord. Louis Burstein once tells the Sunday Metropolis newspaper of Jacksonville, Florida that Louis Burstein has “studied the problem of how to produce good comedies thoroughly.” Louis Burstein’s conclusion, after long hours of deep reflection, is that “every one of our comedies must have a plot.”
“Must”? Why “must”? Perhaps it is a desire to impose an order, a purpose, upon art because life resolutely refuses to oblige. Reality is random. Reality is chance. Even now, with the slivers of his existence floating before him, Babe’s story ended and his in its final act, he cannot make sense of it all. He sees only wreckage. After all, he has somehow contrived to be married seven times (or is it eight? Yes, eight it is.) to four different women.
To marry the wrong woman once may be regarded as a misfortune.
To marry her twice looks like carelessness.
To marry her three times is madness.
The Santa Monica apartment in which he lives rents for $80 a month. His name is in the phone book. If he was ever a star—and he remembers being a star, so this must have been the case—the light of it has long since faded, and what remains is only a gentle senescence.
A plot requires constancy, a through line. Where is the through line here?
He knows the answer, of course.
Babe. Babe is the through line.
And where is Babe?
Babe is forfeit to the shadows.