I have been trying to reconcile these two discrete versions. If you take Yost for a clever fraud, which I’m perfectly willing to do, they can be made to coincide at most important points, but for an exact fit, you have to include a few of M.’s own personal quirks. One, his attitude toward cats. He has great feeling for most animals—he’s almost Elizabeth-Taylorish about them—but for some reason, not cats. “Cats,” he once told me, “are really fur-covered snakes. They do not curl up in your lap. They coil. And they do not purr. If you will listen carefully, you will find they rattle.” Significant, I suggest, that M. set these girls up as Les Huit Chats. Can’t have really had all that much respect for them as women.

The other point is this business of voyeurism. M., frankly, tends to see voyeurs everywhere. I suppose it comes from being in showbiz for so long, but even then, he carries it to extremes sometimes. M. disapproves, for instance, of things like microscopes, practices like bird-watching, or one-way glass, especially in nursery schools. “If you have to watch something, at least watch something that knows it’s being watched.” This may very well have colored his view of Yost’s experimentation. I suggested as much, circumspectly. “Let me tell you something,” he snapped back at me. “I never lost a staring contest in my life. Because I always catch the other guy looking at me … Blue-eyes.”

Now about Quincy Adams. Yes, and how about Quincy Adams? Just when you’d think his career had finally collapsed, all that ham, all that very thin, pink, damn near transparent prosciutto turned trichinoid, he comes through in a low-budget blockbuster like The Flea Man (1966). The gross, according to Variety, was absurd enough, but the net, and this I have only from Quincy, was “fiscally obscene.” He wouldn’t tell me if he had a percentage, probably didn’t, but I know from Terry they had to give him a small piece of Raven, while M. was working—one more reason why these two were never really going to get along—for a flat fee. What Quincy mostly wanted to tell me, re: Flea Man, was all about his Portrayal. Silly word. “I derived my portrayal”—possible caption for Quincy: The actor as a derivative—“from one of Blake’s visions. Do you know he once drew the ghost of a flea? Marvelous thick-set, muscle-bound, very Blakean chap.” I’ve seen a print since. Looks like Charles Atlas with an overshot bite. In no way does it look like Quincy Adams in The Flea Man. “For its size, a flea has great strength. Immense. At my height and build he becomes almost Superman.” Quincy is about five foot seven, when his pompadour is at crest, a hundred-and-eight-some pounds, and has very long, very pronounced wrists. “We worked everything out proportionally. Those titanic leaps, the hopping over walls. All well within my extrapolated capabilities. And, of course, appetitious. Supernally appetitious.” You’ll find The Flea Man listed sometimes as a vampire picture, but with the gamma-ray bit, the accident-in-the-lab gambit, I put it as Mad Scientist, or sci-fi horror. M.’s opinion: “Yes, I went to see it when I heard they wanted me for this part. I was shocked. To ask a man to play a flea when he is so obviously only a midge …”

Quincy claims he is the one who got M. hired for Raven. Professes great reverence for the early Moro. “I’ve never gotten over seeing him in my early youth. Gave me the willies then, still does now.” He did “the willies” for me, about a three-second spasm of free-form frissons. As for his “early youth,” if he wants to believe he first went to see Moro in knee pants at half price, who am I to say he had to be at least twenty-nine years old at the time? Maybe he scrunched down in front of the ticket window, the same way the rest of us Saturday-matinee sneaks used to.

Shouldn’t make him out to be all that much of a fraud. He was forthright enough, crack-off-the-bat about getting some things straight. I think about the first words he said to me when I met him, out at La Guardia for our flight to L.A., were: “Now tell me, Mr. Warner, are you a family man?”

That unctuous tone of concerned citizenship. I looked at him, too directly, right dead into that languid, rippling gaze, entirely backed with red flocking.

Did I ever answer for a family man.

“I see,” he sighed, commiseratively. “But I must say you’re fortunate in having only daughters. I think it’s very hard to know quite what to do with a boy these days.”

He was about to pat me on the near knee, to show the matter was, gentle squeeze, settled, but I stood up too fast for him. He even passed that off. “Are we ready to board?”

We weren’t, but I made him stand for ten minutes.

“I’d as soon stand as sit in an air terminal,” he went on suavely. “I’m certain those plastic seats cause piles.” Then he got off on the subject of his decorating business, which, the reason he’d come East, he was hoping to sell. Big. To Sears, no less. The idea was to computerize several interiors he’d done out in Hollywood for the stars, Tuesday Weld, Mrs. Jack Benny, then feed in any Sears customer’s room dimensions, choice of color, furniture requirements, et cetera, whether they wanted “Mod” or “Period.” Quincy is the master of both epochs. “Period is more or less what used to be called Traditional, but people tend to want Period now as something they feel is even a little out front of Mod.” Anyhow, in a matter of micro-seconds, out would come your living room, done by Quincy Adams Associates, Hollywood, Calif., right down to the last curtain rod. “I don’t know if it will really work. They say they can construct a mathematical model of my taste. To tell the truth, I never thought it really added up to anything specific. Far too eclectic. But now I gather certain do-dads will always turn up with certain other geegaws, even if I do over a pagoda. I’m still not totally convinced. You have to be a bit of a psychologist to do up a room to a woman’s real satisfaction. Even a bit of a proctologist.”

But he’d gotten pretty far along in his negotiations with Sears, was going back out to think things over, do the picture, then decide. “We’re so lucky to be working. I hope Simon realizes that. It may not be art, but it’s jolly well not a few blue movies I’ve done in a dim light in my time. I’ve been through so many lives out there. I don’t mind saying I’m grateful for horror. I even like horror. I enjoyed being scared as a little boy. I suppose I really miss being frightened. Of course, I’m scared to death of flying, aren’t you? Partly why I adore air travel.”

We were told to board then. One of the stewardesses recognized Quincy, but didn’t flame up about him much. “Nice to have you aboard, Mr. Adams” was the total ego-boost he got from her. Later I overheard her talking to the others, back in the rear of the plane. “Josie told me she went to see him in that flea picture? Just for laughs? She didn’t laugh once.”

“Now we’ll wait around for an hour. You’ll see,” Quincy brooded. “Just like getting stuck in the Lexington Avenue. Here, you wanted to read the script. I’ll read your Esquire. I’ve lacked lately for Mr. Wilfrid Sheed’s assured disapproval.”

Correctness of Quincy’s simile: after maybe ten minutes on the ground, air traffic completely stacked up, the Boeing 707 did begin to feel like a stalled subway car. Everybody was irritably waiting for power to be restored. Two seats ahead of me, a busy executive had an old Holiday open to a piece of mine about the Jersey Shore. I could tell he was speed-reading it, and when he got to the “Continued” line, he didn’t, the son of a bitch, obviously thought he already had the gist of the thing. Then again, I must confess I never read the whole script of Raven, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s Original Poem, by Beau Fletcher. Nervous waiting, easier to skim, because, sure, it was awful, dreary, midnight-dreary, but also, just like that Holiday reader, I quickly got the gist, could see the drift, only needed the feel of Fletcher’s damnable seribblings.

In fact, I much prefer, even admire, the five-page treatment that got Beau Fletcher his original fifteen thou up front against seventy-five for the completed script. It will serve here as an action memo against which to judge the havoc—no, consider: the art that Moro eventually wreaked upon the film. Clear enough that the picture, as originally conceived, was supposed to be a lot more Quincy’s than Moro’s, a fact that Quincy wanted to drum into me, I found once we were airborne and I couldn’t escape. Anyhow, for comparison:

RAVEN

Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

by

Beau Fletcher

Fletcher thought “the simpler title” would have more horror impact, though Terry worries a lot; about the loss of the definite article. “Sure, it frees you a little more from the original,” he says, “but a straight Poe title really helps that Family rating.”

Baron Scaperelli, bereaving his lost wife, Lenore, in a gloomy castle, high up in the Transylvanian hills, is visited by the Raven. In reality, the Raven is a vampire, one of Dracula’s seed, but the Baron construes the bird as a friendly harbinger, come on darkling wings to lead Scaperelli to Lenore’s unknown resting place. They travel through the long and stormy night, to an icy cave deep in a glacial fault. The Raven cannot enter—until the Baron invites him to follow—and there within, a vast crystal crypt is revealed. Lenore lies on a bier of snow, seemingly lifeless, but perfectly preserved. The Baron takes her from this strange place, rushes out through the opening just as the ice cave crumbles into the start of a freak avalanche, passing just to the side of him.

Re: M.’s initial objection that vampires are bats, not ravens. “If we show a bat, the audience knows we’re going to show a vampire,” Terry argued. “They’re hip now. But if we show a raven—which the audience tends to think is more a friendly than an unfriendly—then we got them peeing when we show a vampire. I consider it a big advance.” One other small question, from me: what kind of a name is Lenore Scaperelli?

The Baron returns to his castle with Lenore, lays her sacredly in a rich coffin, surrounded by tapers, while he searches through incunabula for potions to revive her. The coffin is kept under heavy guard in the Great Hall, but the guards grow nervous in the hovering shadow of the Raven’s wings. Suddenly the shadow elongates, turns into the gaunt figure of a man not quite a man, yet more. Horrible screams. The Baron rushes into the hall to find all the guards hideously mutilated, Lenore vanished. Only one man is alive. “Raven,” he utters, then dies.

Ravenus, the vampire, has abducted the lifeless Lenore. He has only befriended the Baron in order to get at his victim, who was protected by the ice which contained some frozen holy water. He carries her down, down into the secret dungeon deeps of the Scaperelli Castle. There he secretes her in a cobwebbed boudoir,

“With the Phantom of the Opera’s old, out-of-tune organ, right?” I put it to Quincy, but he came right back at me. “No, I’m afraid not. Ruined … all that sewer damp …”

and begins an unseemly, almost erotic ritual that ends with him bending over her full, pulsing throat. But the Baron has come in pursuit, armed with a silver-tipped, hawthorn-shafted arrow, notched into a crossbow. He surprises Ravenus, who instantly transmogrifies back into the Raven and tries to escape. But in mid-flight, the Baron’s arrow plunges into his heart.

As Quincy explained to me, somewhere over Ohio, full of iron determination: “That will have to be changed. The crossbow is a graceless weapon. It should be simple bow and arrow, not even a quiver. Did you know that I played with Errol Flynn in Robin Hood? A bit part. One of his numerous band of, if you’ll pardon the expression, merry men. But I saw what Flynn could do just by pulling a bow string taut across his clear, white cheek.” And in this, and in such things as being robed in lawn and pancaked fair, not swarthy, Quincy did get his way.

Then the Baron turns, runs back to Lenore. To his astonishment, he finds her standing before him, beautiful and statuesque. Whatever the curse was, it has apparently lifted. They return to the Raven, who has corrupted back into Ravenus on the dungeon steps. In horror, the Baron recognizes the vampire as his own prodigal brother, who years ago fell into occult ways.

With mixed feelings, torn by sorrow and revulsion, the Baron prepares to bury his brother at the crossroads. It is almost too much for him, and Lenore, a little eerily, insists on helping. It is she who closes down the coffin lid. Then, as the procession winds down from the castle, a close-up reveals that Lenore, her hands hidden in her medieval sleeves, is breaking to bits and pieces the extracted shaft of Scaperelli’s arrow.

A plague settles strangely over the area, and Lenore wanders through castle, town, and countryside in a disconsolate reverie. People shun her, hurl accusations of witchcraft, but the Baron, despite crumblings within his castle, the sudden insanity of his game keeper, still cleaves to her.

Late one night, Lenore lies sleeping in her canopied chamber, far too deeply. The wind outside seems to call her name, trailing off into a rustle of wings. The Baron enters with a chalice of wine for her, but sets it aside, bends down lovingly over her breast. He catches sight of some sort of amulet tucked into her bosom. He pulls it forth. It is the silver arrowhead. In dismay, he sweeps back a long ringlet of hair from her throat and finds the two tiny punctures cicatricing the blue vein.

All is turmoil now, the time being almost midnight. The Baron runs to his armory, seizes a jousting lance, and leaps on his horse. He rides through the howling night, as the church bells toll. To make it to the crossroads in time, he must cut across a graveyard. The dead seem to seep up from the misty ground, entwining him in their fearsome miasma. At the crossroads, the earth begins, to tremble, stir, rise up. The hooves of the Baron’s horse are heard. A skeletal hand reaches up out of the earth, as if pushing back a heavy door. Or lid. Then, just as the earth begins to crack open altogether, at exactly the last stroke of midnight, the Baron’s lance, also hawthorn, strikes home. It breaks off halfway up. The earth quakes, heaves, then subsides.

“Up to this point,” Quincy explained, heatedly analyzing the script for me, somewhere over Utah, “it could almost be a love story. But now we give them the kind of picture they paid their money to see.”

The Baron returns, full of apprehension, to his castle. Hungering, unearthly cries echo in the great hall. His own retainers, blood-mad, try to set upon him, but he turns them away by raising the hilt of his sword, cruciform. They cringe back, set upon each other. He rushes up the stairway, into Lenore’s chamber. The curtains on her canopied bed have been drawn. He throws them back. In the bed lies only a skeleton in sere bedclothes, the arrowhead amulet actually hanging down into its rib cage. The Baron covers his eyes and falls back in grief, terror. “Nevermore,” he moans, over and over.

The Baron’s cries of “Nevermore” whirl into the sounds of the storm, once again howling over the crossroads. Dead souls keen and moan. Thunder answers them, raging. Then lightning strikes deep into the earth at the exact right spot. The grave at the crossroads is torn open. Ravenus is revealed, with the Baron’s lance sunk deep in his bleeding breast, but grinning, grinning, grinning …

“But pray, at whom?” Quincy asked me, coming down into the brown bathtub ring of smog around L.A. “And with what? Relief? Pain? Glee? Why leave any ambiguity? I realize we have the famous Moro grin to get in here somewhere. We must have it, I quite agree. But why not earlier? So that we can end where we logically should. I don’t want you to misunderstand—I realize I might appear to be serving my own interests—but we really ought to end on my last cry of ‘Nevermore!’ Don’t you think? You can at least see that by ending that way—which, after all, is Poe’s way—we avoid the charge of straying too far from the original.”

“But ‘Nevermore!’” I blurted out, “is the Raven’s line.”

He shot me a low, enervating glance of real fag hate. Easy to see how it must have sounded to him, like the final, flippant betrayal: I was trying to give his one good line to Moro. He’d been getting more and more edgy, defensive the whole trip, inflating the Baron’s role, sniping away at M. through the effusive admiration for “mature talent.” “Simon has not stood still. So many people try to say that he simply annealed to a particular style in the Thirties. Mr. Sheed, for one. I can’t go along with that. I’ve never worked with Simon before, of course, but I couldn’t think of any living actor that way. He is always my contemporary.” When he saw I wasn’t prepared to join in this sly bitchery, that I was already partisan, he got unutterably prickly. Though I guess that really started way back at La Guardia, after about twenty minutes of quivering on the ground, when he gave up on Esquire and tried another approach to me.

“You work for an excellent magazine. Don’t see it as often as I should.” He filed it down the seat crack between us. “Now, tell me if I’m correct.” That same gaze, only with a harsher sheen on the red flocking. “You consider yourself more a writer than a journalist.”

“In a way.” I didn’t like him hovering that near.

“I can sympathize.”

“Can, can you?”

“Yes. I’ve always considered myself more an actor than a …”

He dropped away into an epicene, begging smile, without saying a what. Various possibilities: Than an afternoon TV celebrity? You rarely see Quincy on any nighttime show. Than a Rodeo Boulevard interior decorator? Than a spot endorsement for a Javanese men’s cologne? Than an Adams? Which, indeed, he is, if only a tiny sprig, or small fungoid knarl, on that blasted genealogical oak. Than a three-dimensional wax monster? See Hall of Howls, with special glasses (1957). Than Mr. Viper, Your Host of Horrors? A TV series he briefly announced, or rather his head alone did, superimposed on the hood of a coiled king cobra. Than an insect? Than a fainéant, a flâneur, a farceur? He is, has been, or will be all these things, far more than he’ll ever come near being an actor. Oh yes, always the choked inward cry of a strangled talent, but try to think of one role, no matter how farfetched or deviant, that Quincy could really master: Salome? Goneril, Regan? The Sphinx opposite Oedipus? Cunegonde? Marguerite? Richard I? Edward II? Hadrian VII? Pope Joan? They all lie within his propensities, but hopelessly beyond his range. That was demarcated very early on check date with Miss Clio, at the Princeton Triangle Club Show, ca. 1928. Quincy played the lead flapper in a chorus of truly wistful-kneed beauties, and there is still something petite, cloche-hatted, rope-beaded, even small-breasted about him. Only it don’t make much whoopee any more.

Ah, but you see, mustn’t, mustn’t. Not allowed such thoughts under the venal, creepy exchange of counterfeit confidences Quincy was offering me prior to take-off. In sum, if I would be willing to consider him more an actor than a … what shall we settle for? Than a flit, he would, in turn, be happy to regard me more as a writer than a hack. Mutual admiration plus elevation. We would understand that both our lights were hidden under a bushel, and how cozy. Blame faulty fate. “I never change,” Quincy trilled, “except in my afflictions.”

Missing, later found mutilated: one more epigram from Oscar Wilde. Quincy loves this sort of dastardly deed. A little sadistic twist, and somebody else’s old, worn-out witticism is newly yours. Quincy, curiously, seems to attack only other dandies for these cleverisms, e.g., Noel Coward. One day, on set, he’d had enough of Hazel Rio. “Some women should be struck regularly,” he hissed, “like tents.” Not bad, not bad. But at this particular moment, while he was trying to reach his hand up my mind, I had one for him: The poove is in the pudding. If I’d been lucky enough to become a goddamn queer, I would’ve done something with my life.

The envy bit, typical me: homosexuals are the only ones in our society who have the freedom to pursue the highest arts. They don’t have wives, well, maybe, sort of, but not families, mortgages, insurance, school bills, responsibilities, et cetera. Okay, we are all ambivalent. But, therefore, why should I be penalized because I’m a heterosexual? Buggery should be legalized, certainly. But taxed. On a progressive scale. Old men working the Pennsylvania Station Men’s Room pay least, are exempt after sixty-five. Russian ballet dancers pay most. And this would work no hardship because the money is already going down the drain in blackmail.

Usually, I’m pretty good at covering up this anti-Socratic bias of mine, but I assume I said something to Quincy, must have. Can’t think what, maybe some quiff-pro-quo remark about M.’s cat show in Vienna that tipped him off, or a weak crack about my being a reporter in order to remain a provider. But anyhow, he caught me out, an anti-queer, another William F. Buckley, Jr., and handled my latent feelings with consummate poove tact.

He pulled forth a red-leather wallet, exquisitely Florentine, with a Medici crest like a gold thumbprint. “I’d like to show you something, dear boy, if I may.”

A rather direct remark, and he had that gaze again, much deepened, diabolically mauve, velvet drapes now drawn, tassels hanging from the eyelashes. He opened the wallet to its picture window, in a flourish that came all the way from his elbow. I was sure it would be some Polaroid shocker, maybe himself going down on Roddy McDowall, but the photo was really a bigger surprise than that. Two or three blond ringlets, tiny, fat, little legs, standing up in her stroller, trundling along on baby shoes and two-inch wheels.

“How old?” I asked.

“A toddler two.”

“Granddaughter?”

“Daughter.”

And damned if she didn’t have his thin chin, that same juicy mouth like a bubble in a blueberry pie.

“She looks a lot more like my wife than she does me,” he lied. “My wife’s French, as I suppose you know.”

He knew I didn’t know.

“I’m a bit old to be starting a family perhaps,” he glowed, “but isn’t she darling? My wife is devoted to her, and a man should, if he can, live a whole life. Don’t you think?”

“Do you want more?”

Our 707 was rolling out onto the runway now, at last, and Quincy began adjusting his seat belt, like a silk sash. “Depends upon my wife, really. She’s much younger than I am, of course, many things still ahead of her. But I don’t really think she wants to go back to acting. What with me, and now Alma, though, much as I hate to be away, I’m not home that often. Don’t you think Alma Adams is a lovely name?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “I really should tell you what Basil Rath-bone wired me when he heard.” The motors on the 707 went into their gunning whine, a sound that Quincy distastefully waited to shush. Then we rumbled toward the sky. “Just three little words. ‘YOU OLD DOG.’”

By way of contrast, the point about M., a simple enough point, but the real point: he is just such a dominating performer on set. I don’t mean on film. That’s another point, already made; ne plus ultra, q.e.d., some of his movies are classics. But there’s a larger … what to call it? … spill performance—over the edges, more than creative: procreative, and work, work, work—that never reaches the screen. And I don’t mean, left on the cutting room floor, bad directing, purblind editing, any of that elegiac, Peter-Bogdanovich crap. What he does can’t be got on film. Too extraordinary, too elsewhere. Or if it gets on film at all, only through its blink-blink impact on other actors. What you don’t see, what you’ll never see, except maybe in reaction shots, aren’t intended to see is the self-immolation, the way he allows himself to be … no other way to put it: gradually annihilated by a part that it was My Unique Privilege to witness, et cetera, et cetera, horseshit, the week I was out there watching them shoot Raven. In a way, a paradox: in order to get things exactly right, he overacts. (Overlives?) Doesn’t come up to a performance, drops down into one.

One immediate example: Friday morning, the arrow scene. Terry, moving along prestissimo, neck and neck with the budget, was up to where Quincy—right profile: index, middle, and fourth fingers evenly curved around drawn bow string, jaw tensed to remove unsightly hollow from cheek—wonks the Raven right smack through the breastbone, pinning bird to convenient oak timber above landing on steep, wet dungeon staircase. Wild, backlighted, feathery terror, and unearthly ululations. Then, slowly, the blackness of the bird “transmogrifies” into Moro’s black-caftaned corpse, which drops to the landing, head hung grotesquely down over first stone step. Most of this was a lab job. All Terry needed was this quick shot of M., flaked out and corrupting, arrow-up, on the stones. Had a first thought to do it as an aerial shot, with zoom, plus spin; effect of throwing the horror right into the viewer’s eye, splat, but turned out it would take too much time, i.e., money, to set up. Terry’s sometime esthetic salvation: his economic censor.

M., on the other hand, wanted to do a dead fall down the dungeon staircase, but by now Terry was trying to cut him back. He nixed the idea, too much Moro. “We’ll let you rest on this one, Simon.” So M. lay down in the fresh seepage, pretended to be tired, mumbled away, willing himself to Beelzebub, over-incanting, you might say, until Terry, who was really pissed at him, yelled, “Knock it off, Simon. Die.” M. went instantly into a tremor—a long and, I’d have to say, lifelike … death-rattle—then froze so dead that there was almost a jinxy sense of odor on set. Terry was using the dolly, up along the rising steps, quick into M.’s face, then twist, and out. Nothing complicated, nothing costly, rush, rush, so what M. evoked doesn’t amount to much more than a moment, a one-two beat of shock, maybe half a second of underlying pathos, on film.

But when the take was over, he didn’t get up. That’s what has to be understood. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t get up. He just plain didn’t. It felt that straight, that ghastly awful, even though we all knew it was an act, deliberate as hell. In a way, of course, it was okay: Ravenus’s corpse was supposed to be somewhere in the next scene. But not really: M. wasn’t supposed to stay a corpse, not take a break, worry a lot of people. Terry didn’t say anything for a while. He has this sly move; he puts the toe of one sneaker against the instep of the other and squeaks. Irritating enough to grate people into doing what they ought to be doing. Earwiggy. But it wasn’t getting to M., and nobody else was moving much either. So Terry had to give an order. To the grips. “Let’s get set up. Chop chop.”

Immediate activity. One of the grips hustled up the dungeon steps, hesitated at what lay in his way, looked back at Terry for guidance. Terry said nothing, only pinched another squeak out of his sneakers. The grip shrugged, stooped, took gingery hold of M.’s stiff, bare feet, started to lift them aside. Instead, all of M. came up like a plank, resting on the crown of his head. I mean, right on the crown, against the edge of that step, even if it was only wood, not really stone. The grip was so surprised he dropped M. again, and M. hit the wooden stones, flat slap, without a hint of vital signs.

Terry couldn’t see straight. “Goddammit, Simon, get the fuck up, or I’ll throw a drag chain on you!” Then: “No. Hell. You. And you. Stand him up.” Two more grips got up there, got hold of his shoulders, got him up, more or less butted on his feet. Not that new, this rigor mortis stunt—the Living Theater makes a whole big scene out of it—but the way M. was pulling it off, he had his eyes rolled up, pure whites, and somehow he’d drained his face, mummy blank. Even his lips had disappeared, sucked up under his gums. He didn’t look just dead. He looked morbific, rotted. The grips had him pretty well balanced, teetering back and forth, but they really didn’t like touching him. “Now. Back off,” Terry ordered. “Chop chop.”

They’d had their underhanded go-rounds before this, Terry and M., but this was the first time it was right out in the open. The set went quiet as a take. M. tottered a little but didn’t fall when the grips let him go, and I thought maybe Terry had him, but then I caught on. M. was tottering just enough to get himself faced directly around toward Terry, so he could stare at him with the up-turned whites of his eyes, if that’s possible. Still paralytic, with that grotesque twist in his neck from the step. Twitchings in the face, mesmeric; who knows how he does it, but somehow he was forcing his own toothy skull to show through the sagging flesh. Terry still wasn’t budging. “Forget it, Simon. We don’t need it.”

But M. had already begun his next moves. Corpse shivers, pulling him up taller, nearer danger. Then a kind of cadaverous rocking that teased him forward, threatened any moment to take him that long dead fall right down the staircase. Ars pro artis: M. was still going to do the scene his way, by damn.

Terry did scramble up then, took a few springy steps to the bottom dungeon riser, set himself. “I said no before. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself. I still don’t.” M, twitched several dirt-blackened toes blindly over the edge of the landing, claw-like, but too far out to hook and hold. “But now I’m not going to stop you. You’ll bust yourself up like old chicken-bones. But you want to try it, go ahead. We’ll have the funeral on set. We’ll have lilies. Big, fat, wax ones. Promise.” Terry put both fists on his very low, serpentine hips. Hardly crooked his elbows. “Only go if you’re going. You’re fucking up my schedule.”

Terry sounded pretty confident, for Terry. M. slackened his jaw, did some eerie, unhinged chattering with his back teeth, but didn’t make any other move. “Yeah.” Terry smirked at him, thinking he’d won. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And M. came down. He could have buckled a little, legitimately, the way he was playing it, but then he couldn’t have reached Terry. So he went straight out and dead down, nothing to save him, falling right off his own bones. Hazel screamed at the top of her lungs. Maybe that’s what really puckered Terry. Anyhow, he went for it, plunged up the steps, got his shoulder under M. just in time, half an embrace, half a tackle. “You bastard,” he snarled. “You know I need you.” M. went totally limp. He could have been nothing but feathers, from the easy way Terry hefted him down the steps. In fact, what he looked like—his long neck hung head-bobbling over Terry’s back, his fluttery arms lost in his billowy black sleeves, his feet curled up, even more pitifully clawlike now—what he looked like was a big, damn, dead raven.

Control: that’s what these risks got him. For example, over the very next scene. M. knew, foresight, how Terry was hoping to shoot Hazel’s reaction to his rotting corpse on the wet dungeon step. Terry wanted a coldly indifferent Lenore, still withdrawn into high, demonic trance-hauteur. It was going to be Quincy’s scene, his impassioned discovery of the long-lost, occult brother. But M. had fixed that, irreparably. Hazel may have her troubles getting hold of an emotion, but once she’s got a grip on one, whether it’s the right one or the wrong one, stranglehold! Try to shake her loose, she only squeezes tighter. And she was horrified by what she’d seen M. just go through, even more horrified to see him lying there, on the step, a crumple of flesh and bones and, goodness gracious, maybe lice. Quincy never had a chance. She was relating to M. like a Pietà.

Terry tried to work her out of it, naturally.

“Think bad birdie. Nasty sparrow. Ugly buzzard. Sick canary. Dead robin.”

“I dig, I dig. Dig, diggity-do,” she chirruped, but her face remained set in unbroken horror.

Terry stared down at his sneakers, then piped out, “Say ‘Blue jay!’”

“Blue jay!”

“Say ‘Jaybird!’”

“Jaybird!”

“It’s a loud, big-mouth jaybird. You hate it. You’re glad it’s dead, but now that it’s dead, what you’re thinking is, when will somebody come and pick it up and put it in the trash?”

Hazel suddenly looked like she was going to cry. Horror and grief.

“Hazel,” Stanislavski sighed, “what’s a bird you really don’t like?”

“Crow.”

“Okay. It’s a crow. A lousy crow. The farmer shot it.” That gave him a devilish idea. “Kick it to see if it’s alive.”

Instead she drew back in utter, straightforward horror again. “Couldn’t touch him, sweetie-poo. Crows are too … horrible!”

It was no use, and to stay on schedule—M. always knew he had the budget on his side—Terry had to shoot it, probably her strongest close-up in the whole picture. Her chill-pointed, shocked blue eyes and that trembling, buttery lower lip: a sensual thriving of the Raven’s menace in Lenore’s madluminous brain, hence, that much more a Moro picture. “Dear God,” I remember Quincy pouting during the rushes, “she looks worse than Leda after the swan.”

Control. Underground artistic control. That’s what M. wanted, and he turned himself inside out, upside down to wheedle it away from Terry. “You must watch what they do to you in a picture like this. A straight commercial picture is never straight. Always a crooked artistic vision in it somewhere. I know. I’ve made them that way. You hide it. Let me tell you about Gila Man. I was on about five different pills then. How many did I say before?”

I found “eight” back in my notes. “But that was when you were a Nazi.”

“Correct. Five to be a lizard, three more to turn Nazi. I can find out what they were later, if you’re interested. But the point is, they were beginning to be me, and on screen, I was secretly saying, ‘This is what I’m really like, inside. I crawl. I inhabit slime. I leave a wet trail that never breaks off.’ Not so secret either. Don’t think the audience didn’t know what they were seeing. They paid to watch me go down on my belly, instead of going down on their Own.”

Speculation: another ride on his favorite hobbyhorse, voyeurism?

“Not this time, though. I get my own back this picture. I’m serious. I’ve seen how this little rat works. This town needs rat guards. Would you like to know what his little rat vision is? All of us rotting in our graves, and him gnawing through to us. I’m very serious. Read the script. What are you left with in the end? My blood reek, Lenore’s stenches. You can smell them through Quincy’ s little perfumes. Terry wants to show the grown-up world as dead and buried, but with its grave broken open. The flesh of adults visibly corrupting. That’s Terry—that’s youth for you. I won’t have it. Quincy he can do with what he wants. Quincy’s nothing but a special effect. But not me. I have my own hidden vision. You watch. In this picture, the dirty, old Raven is going to get the sweet, young thing.”

He was too old to stunt much, try to get his own that way, as per example above. That was rare. Mostly he worked on the mind, any mind, like a sapper. He went after Quincy early on, very cleverly. He’d begun working up a voice for Ravenus that was different from his past horror voices, a strange, twittery, disembodied falsetto. Not so much undead as unreal, sometimes barely intelligible. Took me a while to figure out its source: Pol the parrot. He was speaking in the mock voice of a bird that has been trained to talk. Quick, rote bursts of cackle and caw, resembling human utterance, but, of course, meaningless to the bird itself. In other words, throughout, M. favored the Raven over Ravenus, to quite startling effect on film, especially when he slips into pure ravenese in his passion for Lenore. On set, however, the one who was most startled by that voice was Quincy. M. had little enough to say to him, but whatever he did say, he trilled at Quincy in this bird-like gurgle. Excuse: working up his role, but I noticed he didn’t “rehearse” that voice with anybody else except Quincy. And I could tell it gave Quincy the real “willies” this time, infuriated him, but also left him cowed. Because what none of us knew immediately—only M. had it spotted: Quincy is an ornithophobe, just plain shit scared of birds.

With Hazel, he was—true significance to be gone into, below—kind of the Raven of the Lord. Victorian father figure. Crazy. Full of little preachments, vicarish and finicky. “Tuck up your skirt a little more. Under you. That’s the girl,” he’d cluck at her while she was lying, déshabillé, in her coffin, under swirls of gangrenous green candlelight. This was the abduction scene, from the Great Hall. Her “skirt,” of course, was the lower windings of a dimity shroud. And what does he do after she tries to make herself modest, settles demurely into chaste corpsehood, ready for take? He lunges into the coffin, rips at her grave clothes, his digits like scythes, lofts her out of there with one long boob flying, naked as a goat’s udder. But high enough: angled just right, so that the boob whips past camera, the same dead-green lighting, with the nipple just over the other side of the rise, so to speak. You know it’s there, but can’t actually see it. Just like in King Kong, so Terry still has his family picture. On that same swing round, M. also grabbed a taper. Terrific lighting effect, blue-blue, but also a complete surprise to Hazel, keeps her gaze fixed as M. rushes her out of the hall, down the dungeon steps. “Gracefully now, gracefully,” he whispered to her. Still that boob. It’s going like a churn. M. has that action hidden from camera, but she can’t be sure, and she’s concentrating on the candle, on trying to stay decent, keep pectoral control, gives her this perfect tranced-out expression. Young too, virginal even, because M. is muttering at her like a prelate. “The body is the soul’s raiment. Let us wear it righteously that it may show the humility of the inner spirit.” I don’t mean she believed a word he was saying, but it kept her wide-eyed, hence, innocent-seeming. Terry was furious. “Simon,” he yelled, since, again for economy, there was no audio, “shut your goddamn dirty mouth!” But M. had still another touch to add. As he came around the last turning into his dungeon boudoir, he lowered Hazel’s head, swept her face past camera, and she looked zong, wow, beatific: agony and ecstasy and eros, a vision of Lenore loveliness. Until, right at the cut, she began yelling absolute bloody murder.

That taper: M. had dripped wax on her, one plash smack on the nipple. He was too honest to pretend it hadn’t been deliberate. Instead, he hurried to help her peel the dripping free before it hardened. Regrets: “I’m sorry, my dear, afraid it may leave a blister.” She was howling tears, everybody else was glowering at him, Terry swearing blue fumes, but real truth: all in awe of him. He had them that wrung-out already, and it was only Wednesday.

They’d been through Monday’s shooting, of course, which helped. A boon day, that one, for M., nothing he could have counted on, just happened, fortuitous. Worth going into in some detail, since it was the poor showing by the real ravens, not their fault, that put M. back in the film. Up to that point, Terry wanted the genuine bird, with M.’s voice-over, as much as possible, among other reasons, I’m certain, so he could keep M. contained. M. didn’t object, biding his time. Besides he was fascinated with the ravens, huddled with them, studied them, imitated them, told them funny stories, one about a fag bald eagle, in their own dialect. There were two ravens. Rupert, who did the trick stuff, and a stand-in, nameless, for the rough stuff. This was the first “Nevermore!” scene, where the Raven flies into Scaperelli Castle, has words with the Baron. Quincy in a long, silver-on-black brocade tunic, just a tuck or two short of complete Helena-Rubinstein drag.

The ravenkeeper was a guy named Tarkas, a funny, little, fuzzy, whispering Greek with dirty nails and a big lick of glossy black hair. The two ravens would sit, each on a shoulder, and shine their beaks in his tarry curls. Beautiful birds. Dark, iridescent feathers, coal turning to diamond, and round, wigwag eyes, blinky-red, railroad signals. And size, real size. Also an angular, dignified bearing to the head and neck, sacerdotal. Easy to see how they get into legend, literature: strong minor roles. Cf. Dickens: the wandering Barnaby Rudge with a raven on his shoulder, his only companion in his haunted loneliness. Cf. the Tower of London: ravens perched in the crumbling Norman stonework, three shillings’ keep per day, and if they ever leave, the Tower, the Empire, night will fall. Night birds. Machiavels. Power, policy, menace. Sleek lines. High, tapered heads, with those great thrust beaks. Not just aves. Aircraft.

Part of the trouble, Monday. The first quick take Terry wanted was a shot of the Raven landing on the bust, straight E. A. Poe, nothing interpretive. It was a pretty standard Caesar-looking bust, bald, a little flatter above the laurels than most of the imperial line, cf. Suetonius, but still not much of a landing strip. Tarkas brought Rupert in as low as he could, tried to put him down right between the ears, but every time, Rupert would either overshoot or stall out. “He’s gotta have room,” Tarkas finally admitted. “He’s not a robin.” So Terry said okay, the hell with it, fuck him, just let him perch. Tarkas set Rupert up there—that name is all wrong, from some cutesy TV commercial for birdseed, where the parakeet is Pauline, and the canary is Casanova—walked him right off his elbow onto the cranium, stroked his feathers, cooed him down all calm. The shot looked good. But Rupert couldn’t hold it the nine or ten seconds that M. was taking, maybe deliberately, to deliver his line. Can’t remember the exact words: shtick, shtick, shtick, “… never …” then several seconds of pregnant silence, “mmmm …” M. never got to “… ooore!” Not Rupert’s fault, just couldn’t keep his footing on that badly sloped Roman forehead. He finally worked it out his own way—very clever birds, ravens—hooked one talon over Caesar’s nose, the other around his ear. But Terry wasn’t having it. “He looks like an eyepatch. We’ll take it from where he goes to Quincy’s sleeve.”

That’s when we found out how bad Quincy is about birds. He kept a stiff, caked smile as Rupert came skimming over the chair-tops toward him, but the minute those fine talons hooked into the brocade, tweaked at Quincy’s flesh, the beads of sweat started. Rupert cocked a smart eye at him, stayed put until the first one damply fell. Zoom, right into camera—Terry used a clip of that as part of the arrow scenes—and back home to Tarkas. Tarkas sent him winging back to Quincy, but Rupert took a very wide circle round, buzzed over Quincy’s shoulder, down his sleeve, and home again to Tarkas. “He’s wise to you,” Tarkas whispered. “He’s wise to you.” Quincy, by now, was fighting total Alfred Hitchcock breakdown.

Elapsed time going nowhere: an invaluable hour, so Terry decided, spur of the one remaining moment, to have the stand-in raven tied to Quincy’s wrist, so that there’d be a real raven at least somewhere in the picture. Tarkas got above a whisper, warned Terry. But the prop girl turned up six feet of packing twine, and Terry rashly ordered the bird and Quincy manacled together, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. And it was just as bad as Tarkas said it would be. The stand-in had an even more immediate nativist response to Quincy’s clammy smile. He flapped off, squawking like a crow, snap to the end of the twine. A vicious yank. Then into a mad, trapped, tumbling gyre, zooming around Quincy like a one-cylinder model airplane. “Keep him off the ground!” Tarkas pleaded. “Off the ground!” Maybe that was just what Quincy wanted to hear. In any case, he raised his arm, hiked the roaring bird way up, whoop, over his head, and then hauled straight down, bash. Looked damned diabolical to me. Quincy Adams, bird-murderer. Only a couple of feathers, actually, luckily, but when a raven breaks a live feather, it bleeds like the bejeezus.

“Break,” Terry made himself say. “We’ll break.” He had to, but how he hated to. Some first-aid folk came in to attend the injured bird, cut Quincy loose, and everybody started making stupid suggestions about rewrites. M. seemed the only unflappable one, off behind a stack of leaning flats, sitting bird-like in a busted wingback chair, chatting to Rupert. Terry was all over the set, pacing that vast, jerry-built expanse of initial expense. Out to the styrofoam crystal crypt, back to the Great Hall with its balsam timbers, down to slats-and-canvas dungeon walls. He prowled in agony, trying to think of some way to use precious studio time: dust settling on his clipboard, money turning to chaff in this empty, useless Hollywood barn. It is maybe the only time I could say I’ve ever seen him suffer.

He stopped himself in the dungeon boudoir. “Cobwebs!” he shouted, just to get something moving, I’m sure. “People are supposed to be dead in here. More cobwebs.”

Silly: the place was already thick with them, but an old grip, looked like Charles Coburn, hurried forward with the cobweb-maker, looked like a hand-mixer with a big motorboat propeller on it. Terry jostling him over to the sagging, canopied bed, back under the dungeon’s low vault. “Do those pillows.” They already looked tented, but so what? “Do them again.” The propeller turned over, whirred to a zinging pitch, and spewed out these great flumes of gossamer, getting on Terry he was standing so close. He kept nudging the grip along, pushing him where he wanted the torrent of cobweb to fall. Like a spider with all its spinnets gone berserk, burying coign and crevice in a riot of dirty, silken dribblings. Disturbing: noisome. He kept bumping the grip, shoving him around, until I guess it’s what they call a freak industrial accident.

The grip staggered back, that old Coburn hang-dog look still heavy in his face. The cobweb-maker was grinding around on the dungeon floor, taking crazy kicks, splinters, throwing more web, but reddened web. The grip had his hand up in front of his face, almost like he was trying to count on it.

“First aid!” Terry shouted. “Over here! Chop chop!”

The emergency folk came hustling through, their second call. Terry was trying to get something, his neck scarf, over the grip’s hand, and the grip had this terrible look of curiosity, kept asking, “Where is it? Look, will you? Where is it? You gotta find it for me.”

That was the awful thing. Didn’t seem to be around anywhere. People started searching, hard, but that was the nutty thing: not high enough. It was up in the webbing. Way up, caught. I didn’t see it. Nobody else spotted it either, except Rupert. They’re meat-eaters, ravens.

Just nobody noticed. Tarkas was still so busy with the stand-in, cooing him down, trying to keep him from having a heart attack—another problem with ravens—that even he must’ve forgotten about Rupert. Then all that confusion: rushing the grip off the set, to the hospital, yank the plug on the cobweb-maker, laying a fünf-hundred down on its side to light the floor, still trying to find it in the blaze … another grip even swept under the bed for it once or twice. So right over our heads: flew in, picked it out of the webbing, got shooed off. I’m sure somebody said, “Get that goddamn crow out of here!” But did anybody really look? Not me. I still wouldn’t know, except I happened to peek over at M., always keeping tabs, and saw he had his eye on Rupert.

That’s when I really started keeping tabs, on that zoo scene M. played back there behind those flats, away from the confusion. The Return to the Aviary: Rupert came hovering in, this thing in his beak, still with strings of webbing on it, and perched. M. tucked himself deeper into the wingback, blinked up at Rupert, warbled. The raven birdlegged across the bow of the wingback, I moved closer, M. blinked and warbled. That’s what I mean by a performance. M. had his eyes going, blink-red, blink-red, and his head bobbing … no, not bobbing: nicking up and down, bird-style, and his bird-boned body, under that caftan, preening for Rupert. Then he let his head drop back, way far back, so that he was only staring up out of one eye. A real con eye, a single fleck of bird-intelligence flicking on and off, on and off, like a ticking sliver of broken reflector glass. Then, very quietly, M. said something. Way back in his throat, a little bead of grackle sound, deep, like a seed crumbling in his gizzard.

The raven cocked his head to meet M.’s con eye. Then he dipped down with his beak, and dropped that damn finger right into M.’s lap. It was the little finger. M. instantly popped it into his Mike Todd purse, cried something low in ravenese, and as far as I can find out, didn’t let a soul know he had the damn thing until he went on the Tonight Show.

So far, so good, but suspect I’m too fiction-minded. Things just don’t happen that artful, climactic, Lights-Out! way. Am living to regret more and more all the yammer I spooned out at Breadloaf, like potted cheese: “Yes, I use fictional techniques sometimes. In order to revivify dead facts.” Looking back over carbon of article on M., am appalled at how far beyond (or how short of?) the facts I reached to Delineate My Central Character, a figmentary creature-hero dubbed, in the zippy words of my tentative title, “Moro Man!” Lord, lord. And besides, what exactly did I mean, up there at the lectern, by a dead fact brought back to life? Some kind of necromancy? There’s a thought. Develop further: pray, what is journalism, sirrah, but tampering daily with the Unknown? Argal, beware thy immortal flame. Let the facts speak for themselves, aye, but Do Not Dig Them Up. To traffick in information that lies buried in closed files, sealed letters, locked hearts, faulty memories, the Congressional Record, other mortuaria is to risk unhallowed commerce with the Newsworthy One himself … Anyhow, nowhere in the article does that finger appear, even though I had that bit way ahead of TV. Admission: too ghoulish to fit my preconceptions, therefore withheld; Harold has me cold. But even in the above reconstruction of events, utterly honest-Injun, am I trying now to make too much of the incident, too telling, too garish a scene? Who is going to believe that Simon Moro is Dr. Dolittle? Do even I? The raven dropped meat in his lap, period. From here on out, only what’s down in my notebooks. (Even apropos H.R.? Any notes there?) Immediately hereafter, the remaining facts, and opinions—“The fact of somebody else’s opinion is still a fact,” as I told them at Breadloaf, “whether the opinion has merit or not.”—gathered during long afternoon interview at Portuguese Bend, California, M. on M.

First, the locale: far down along the coast, another slide area, affluent cliffs slipping from time to time sumptuously into the Pacific Ocean. But M.’s house still well back, safely tucked among citrus and cypress, a Tuscan hacienda. Dark Spanish interior to fit somebody’s idea of early California, sparkling palazzo exterior to suit somebody’s memory of sunny Italy: now a rental. “He was a banker,” M. explained. “Milanese, not Sicilian.” Until the Crash, Signore loaned large sums to the studios, and after, still kept some penurious ties by letting out bits and pieces of the property for location shots. Old Europe: Iberia inside, Italia outside. And more. Up that cliff ran the earliest rickety version of the Thirty-nine Steps. You want the foggy John-Buchan English seacoast, we got the foggy John-Buchan English seacoast. And out along its verges rolled the downs that lay beyond both Wuthering Heights and Manderley, their windswept, heathery sod long since gone slump into the sea. And back in the formal French garden, now brown of yew, blasted of bloom, some Napoleon or other nearly brushed shoulders with a figure not unlike the Scarlet Pimpernel. M. took me over all the points of interest—Home and Gardens plus Photoplay—then out along the cliff’s marge to where a few thin Ionian columns lay on their fluted sides, a half cord of marble stacked and left to rot. I asked him what movie they were from.

“No movie. He was planning a gazebo out here for himself. A little Greek temple. But he never got it put up. So, you understand, instant archaeology. The glory that was never Greece, the grandeur that was RKO. Your Mr. Poe again. I very much like this spot. Sounion, only purer. These pillars never stood. Therefore they never fell. They lie here in a pristine state of ruin.”

That was his mood. He sat down on the butt end of a column, brooded out to sea, like a lank old man on a log, whittling something down to a fine point: maybe failure.

“I suppose we all fizzled, my—what shall I call us?—my generation of monsters. Even those who were never too serious. Lugosi, for one. He had the best role. Something very priestly, eucharistic about a straight, out-and-out vampire. Bela had the mannerisms, the Transylvanian suavity, the cape work, all that, but I don’t think he ever really felt the urges. I worked with him once. Gila Man Meets Dracula. You won’t have seen it. Even you. Never released. That bad. Bela never did know much English, always learned his lines phonetically. Gave him the right voice, like an echo in a crypt, and that queer emphasis, but I knew somewhere in the back of his drugged Hungarian brain, he was always asking, ‘Vot does in hell dis mean?’ In the eighth reel, we have this terrific fight. My venom, his canines. But it was really two losers losing. The Opium-Eater versus the Pill-Head. You know what he did, really, when he went for my throat? Kissed me. Something very maternal about Bela. At heart he was more a witch than a vampire. I always thought the part for him was Medea, carving up the kiddies, weeping away, dropping tears and little toes into the wine-dark sea.

“Oh, we frightened people, my generation, but it was only a scare and a giggle, nothing lasting. Terry knows that, wants that pop-top horror. Maybe I should too. I know it works, but that is not enough for me now. If it ever was. You understand what I mean by the bus effect?”

Sure I did: Val Lewton, The Cat People (1942). Simone Simon is maybe a black panther stalking Jane Randolph through Central Park. Suddenly this loud screech-hiss, terrifyingly animalistic, but it’s only the bus pulling up to the curb, springing open its doors to offer public refuge. Wow, wow: famous bit of film-editing by Mark Robson.

“Sure I do.”

“No you don’t. You just think you do,” M. snapped. “Not Lewton. Exactly what I don’t mean. That was empty trickery. This is years before. Before even the real silents. A Frenchman, back in the Nineties. George Méliès, his name was. Look him up sometime. He was shooting a crowd scene, the traffic in front of the Paris Opera. Horse-drawn, but bad even then. What they once called an omnibus goes by. Full of people. His camera jams for a few seconds. Starts up again, more horse-drawn traffic. Nothing, a slight interruption, but when he screens his film, he is astonished to see the bus go by, and then, jerk, suddenly turn into a hearse. That’s what I mean by the bus effect. The shock is not a relief, a sleazy bit of business for the audience’s nervous sake. The shock is a shock. Even a moral, always the greatest shock. That they don’t do any more. But it is still there to be done. Even in this film. Or don’t you see what’s really wrong with this film yet?”

“Terry’s rat work, you said.”

“It’s more than that.”

“You tell me.”

“His direction is amoral.”

“So?”

“There’s a rule you better learn. Perversion abhors a moral vacuum.”

“So, still?”

“That’s how Quincy’s able to move in. He’s turning the picture queer.”

“I don’t see that at all.”

“Wait a while. These things are very subtle, and very long drawn out. It’s all in how he plays to Hazel. He’s trying to turn her into an ice sculpture. And the script’s helping there. All that arctic-fartic business. I’d like to meet this Beau Fletcher sometime. If Quincy can freeze her out, he can suck himself in. Then the whole film comes out a fag vision of society’s mad, inquisitional persecution of male purity. Homo-medievalism. Remember, he ends up lancing me.”

“Simon, this is supposed to be a family picture.”

“That’s what I’m trying to make it. Hazel’s the key. She’s got to be pulled in erotically. Give her a snowy exterior, all right, but internally she’s got to boil with real witch passion. She can’t just be back and forth, a cunt on the shuttle. Underneath she’s got to be ready to roll over in the fires of hell for me.”

Actually I was impressed, one better than Rosemary’s Baby, but I only said, “Hazel Rio?”

“You are not kind to that poor girl.”

“Viveca Lindfors, maybe. A younger Judith Anderson, okay. But Hazel Rio?”

M. sniffed, off to sea. “At least you see how it could be played.”

“If she had everything, including your grin.”

Then he digressed into a long, involved explanation of the psycho-mechanics of his famous Ghoulgantuan grin: wasn’t the denture alone, depended upon the surrounding facial composition, adapted in part from Edvard Munch’s The Shriek (1895), trenchant acting also needed to make grin “a visual sound,” but only possible to “hear it” in black-and-white, inaudible in Technicolor. Can’t reconstruct the whole argument—this wasn’t Truffaut talking to Alf Hitchcock—but it gave me an opening for a moot question. What did he really think was truly horrible?

“I’ve said, I’ve said. You should know if you don’t already how much thought I gave to that when I first came here,” he answered slyly, resourcefully. “After all, this was America, not Nazi Germany. At the time. A different horror. I studied all that was being done in Hollywood. I concluded that the most terrifying was the giant rodent.”

“Giant what?”

“Mickey. And his evil dam, Minerva. I know, I know. You probably think, ha ha, not so frightening, but how would you really like to confront a living, five-foot-eight-or-nine-inch mouse, with every normal human drive?”

The hell with it, I told myself, let him ramble.

“You can say that Walt Disney’s creatures were very primitive. Like cave drawings. But then what about the Chase and Sanborn talking boy sarcophagus?”

“The what?”

“Mostly on radio, Sunday evening, but it also made some movies. You must have seen it. A small wooden coffin, crudely shaped like a little man with a monocle, nothing inside, hollow. A Swedish sorcerer named Edvard Bergen put the sarcophagus on his knee, made it talk. It had a succubus inside.”

I suggested to him I was serious.

“So am I. Finally what I concluded, that the most horrible of all was the three-hundred-pound flesh-and-blood female werewolf.”

I refused to ask.

“In broad daylight, at high noon every day, she would begin to bay across the land. ‘When the Mooonnn Comes Over the Mountain …’ Her human name was Kate Smith.”

There was more of this deliberate malarkey—pensées toward Ghoulgantua, M. claimed—none of which I included in the article, settled instead for his one serious answer. “All right. Once again I go along with your Mr. Poe. What’s the most horrible thing, at least for an American, is premature burial. Think yourself what it would be like, up there under the green hillside, to wake up smelling moist earth, or your own lead seal. Terrifying. But for you Americans, the fear is not just below ground. It is also above ground. ‘Let me out, please, oh please, I can hear your footsteps across my heart, please let me out!’ Your Mr. Poe does not exaggerate. Everybody goes around afraid that somebody near and dear wants secretly to inter him alive. Every split-level in the country is as cracked as the House of Usher.” Only used part of that quote, dropped everything after “… your own lead seal. Terrifying.” Restore it altogether? Maybe, if I also include, as balanced reporting, what M. had to say about the Viennese, to scotch any charge of anti-American bias, i.e., so as not to be caught out, buried too soon myself by somebody—Harold?—“corpsed,” as St. Samuel à Beckett would say.

How did we get onto the “Mayerling drama”? I guess because M. mentioned there had once been talk of some studio’s turning his hacienda into Crown Prince Rudolf’s little hunting lodge out in the Wienerwald. But it would be hard to Biedermier that place. Anyhow, M. on the Crown Prince’s shooting of his seventeen-year-old mistress, Mary Vetsera, then himself: “Ponder this tragedy. Think of yourself as echt-Viennese, as the Emperor Franz Josef himself. What do you privately wonder in the depths of your Hapsburgian soul? I will tell you. You wonder, as does all Wein, did he screw her before, during, or after he shot her? And that is what I mean by a baroque question.”

Other “baroque questions” M. and I pondered that afternoon, and later over dinner: were the Invisible Man’s excreta—Claude Rains, 1933—also invisible? I said yes, but M. argued for opalescence, rainbow hues. Or, what is the exact degree of a man’s guilt who has a fiasco during an assay at incest with a consenting daughter?

“That may have happened to me once,” M. said, very seriously.

“May have?”

“My paternity was highly questionable.”

“Oh.”

“Largely her mother’s claim. Or delusion. I have my doubts.”

“I asked you before if you had any children.”

“Please. Entirely a private matter.”

“But this …”

“This only happened once.”

“Isn’t once enough?”

He grinned. “Perhaps you misconstrue me. The fiasco only happened once. Our relationship has since flourished.”

“What relationship? Who?”

But he was off on another baroque foray, this one a consideration of Bert Brecht’s parable for his own political quandary: if you have only one dose of penicillin for two people horribly afflicted with V.D., one an old lecher (the West), the other a pregnant prostitute (East Germany), to whom do you give the shot? “Brecht felt he had to dose Walter Ulbricht’s pregnant prostitute, in hopes of the child, you see. What he didn’t realize then was how allergic she was to penicillin. But don’t think he chose that easily either. He liked a little lechery himself. Peter and I—Peter Lorre—a shame he isn’t still alive to talk to you about Brecht—we almost had to push B.B. to go one way or the other. Brecht went down to Washington to testify, told them ‘No, no, no, no, no, never!’ had he tried to join the Party, came right back to New York, told us he would have to flee, but would go by boat. Escaping with all his manuscripts on microfilm, but still there is time for a European cruise! We put him on a plane for Paris that night. That is really what the Committee had against me. If you like baroque questions, theirs were rococo. Was I now, or had I ever been, involved in black-market operations with Bertolt Brecht, smuggling penicillin into East Berlin?”

Must confess I’m fascinated by baroque questions, especially this one, which M. put to me over Cognac later that evening: what would be the proper Christian attitude to take toward a Bible bound in human skin?

“I used one in that picture I did in Germany,” he went on.

“After the war?”

“Yes.”

“Will you talk about that film?”

“I’ll say this much. It had a religious dimension.”

“Did it?”

“My atrocities paralleled the sufferings of the saints. That Bible was a tribute to St. Bartholomew.”

“Go on.”

“I think that’s enough for you.”

Tantalizing. Sufficient to indicate a turn of mind, yet reveal no inner thoughts. Mind admittedly not quite that of my forthright, fad-famous “Moro Man,” but still integral, seized of the macabre as a value system: a cue to integrity. “We judge the weird by the normal—normally—yes, I am twisting that word—because I want us, instead, to judge weirdly. That is really why I play monsters. I believe we can only tell if we are ‘normal,’ that is, actually human, by whether we are really any better than monsters. My armless strangler-clown, my robot, my poor Hans, my Ghoulgantua—my favorites, I admit—they were all of them soundings of this proposition. Reified. Take Gonfried, my robot. What did we do in its fabrication? Gave it artificial hungers without any biological function. So what happens? Very quickly my tin manhood becomes uncontrollable. A sex-crazed, flesh-tearing, bloody marauder. All that stops me is a chance jolt that loosens my thirst screw. I sluice down gallons of water, but gag, rust out inside. Flake apart, crumple. While still ravaged by these purposeless appetites. Horrible, but now, understand, are you and I—in these prophylactic times—are we really in any better shape? Or are we Gonfried? That is the point. I remember when the decency people began attacking horror films for causing public paranoia. I used to tell reporters, ‘You think we have Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman for our nightmares, delusions? You are wrong. It is they who have us.’”

Made me wish I could see Manmade Man, but by now that film, fallen down some dark studio crevice, has surely turned into a jelly of silver nitrate.

M., another variation on this theme: “I am sorry to keep harping on your Mr. Poe, but he understood so well how the weird underpins the normal. Do you know his story ‘Berenice’? The madman who falls in love with his mistress’s teeth, rips them all out of her corpse’s mouth to keep in a small box on his desk? A ludicrous situation—think how … who is that man?—Terry Southern—would treat it, ruin it. But your Mr. Poe has written a masterpiece. He knows he is dealing with a true passion. He endows his madman with reason, knowledge of his circumstances, sorrow, but nothing can save him. I have always wanted to play that madman. Because it is truly, horribly, a love story. Love is never normal. It is always aberrant. In our hearts, we do not embrace. We mutilate. We fall in love with a pair of pretty eyes, or sparkling teeth or twinkling toes, or perhaps a delicate little finger …”

It hung there a moment, that phantom hint, secretly crooking at me for more attention. Should I have made my own baroque inquiries then? Failed to. Because—or at least I say now—M. rushed off into far more distracting observations.

“That, as I say, is what I must work up with Hazel. The Raven’s love for Lenore has to be romantic as well as horrific. And she must respond. Or what is it but a bite in the neck?”

“Been pretty … indelicate so far.”

“You think so?”

“Pedophilia bordering on religious mania, with a little sadism—that trick with the candle—thrown in.”

“That has all gone to assist Hazel.”

“Of course.”

“She is a dear, sweet girl, but there are, as you hint, difficulties. For one thing, she is almost forty.”

“Kid me not.”

“She is also a thoroughly experienced, even jaded sexual being. Quincy just makes her laugh. To keep from laughing, she turns cold. And that helps Quincy all the more. I have to bring her youth back.”

“How do you do that?”

“Not even her youth. Almost her childhood.”

“What do you know about her childhood?”

But he would say no more then, except “an old family friend, hope we will be working together as much in the future as we have in the past” crap.

Earlier, I had tried to ask him about somebody else’s childhood, with even less success. Rudolph Eckmann’s.

He’d run his right thumb down a few feet of fluted column groove, picking up the rotted-out marble dust, like lime. “You know about Rudi, do you?”

“No great secret.”

“From Horst?”

“From old cast lists.”

“Ah so.” He brushed his thumb once across each cheek, chalking blotches that hollowed out his beaky face even more. “I hardly remember Rudi myself. Except as hungry.” And he did look a startlingly sallow famine figure. “I suppose he was once a child.”

“Where?”

“Shall we say Vienna?”

“That would fit,” I nudged him along.

“I seem to remember him …”—all very Maeterlinck-y and Bluebird-ish now—“to remember him spitting.”

“At what?”

“A gas lamp. High above his head. Lighting a yellow corner of Sievering. He must spit straight up, and through a narrow opening in the rim. He jumps to give himself more power, a closer target. After a peak effort, the flame sizzles. Smacks out. Dark.”

“Rudi sounds very determined.”

“His father is the lamplighter.”

“Of course.”

“But Rudi keeps his mother’s street always dark.”

“He loves his mother?”

“As much as he loves anyone. She is a waitress at Demel’s. It must have all been very nice, once. Every Sunday she marched to mass at St. Stephen’s with the other waitresses, in her high black boots. Rudi remembers when she tucked him in at night, there was always a little sugar in the bed afterwards.”

“Then what was the problem?”

“Rudi did not, I think, care to be a piccolo. Rudi could not see himself working up from breadsticks to a white napkin over his sleeve.”

This Rudi business was getting silly. “Okay, but what made him want to be an actor?”

“I’m not sure Rudi ever did. That was more Simon. Though Rudi may have had a small part, one time, in a local Oberammergau.”

“King Herod?”

“That would suit him.”

“Then what? The eight pussycats?”

“No. Before that, I think Rudi would have gone off to war. He was wounded perhaps, by his own grenade, suffered partial loss of memory. Or perhaps at Verdun, seeing the French troops march into the German machine-gun fire, deliberately bleating like lambs, he deserted. Best not to say which way it was. Either way, he came back Simon Moro.” In article, used grenade version: hedging?

“You were still calling yourself Eckmann from time to time.”

“I have no such memory.”

“Gonfried the Robot was played by Rudolph Eckmann. Nineteen twenty-seven.”

“You make an understandable mistake. The American credits are confused. Perhaps you can now clear them up. Only Simon Moro, of course, could have played Gonfried.”

Saw his point, but still insisted, “Horst knew you as Rudi.”

M. winked. “A name I probably gave him. You don’t think I wanted him to know who I really was? I can only regret he ever found out.”

I could have brought up his HUAC listing—“Rudolph Eckmann, alias ‘Simon Moro’”—but by now, the charade has its own momentum. “So you have buried Rudi that deep?”

“He is very dim in my mind. A little street urchin in dirty Lederhosen … suddenly huddling in a German trench. Perhaps the shrapnel.”

“Perhaps.”

“Rudi has utterly disappeared. I much prefer my old studio biography.”

“I don’t need that from you.”

“But I need it for myself. You’re not interested in the Moro genealogy?”

“Come off it.”

“We go way back.”

“As far back as some Hollywood hack could take you.”

“I gave the facts to Robert Benchley, and he—”

“You’re wasting my time, and yours.”

“Actually, we Moros come of an ancient line of cemetery-keepers.”

“So you knew death from birth, right?” Maybe a little disdain, 1 figured, would turn him off.

“I was the one who grazed the sheep.”

“What sheep?”

“The ones that kept the grass down on the graves.”

“Moro ingenuity.”

“Though my mother objected, said it was like letting them eat the dead. She used to go through the cemetery herself with a scythe. Clanging against the tombstones. Injuring the sheep. She was a little mad.”

None of this, nor any of what follows—what sly, familial comic was M. trying to imitate, Jean Shepherd?—did I include in the article. Obviously. But I think it’s informative to see how M.’s tale-spinning builds on itself here, culminating in an emotional coda that does, I suspect, express certain psychological truths. A useful fantasy, a self-mocking memory print.

“And Simon’s father?” I asked superciliously.

A longish, saddish face. “Simon’s father was born a deaf-mute.”

“It happens.”

“So, in fact, was his younger brother. Also, very nearly a dwarf. Simon learned much of his art very early by having to act out whatever he wanted to say to the two of them. All the mother would do is yell louder. She favored his older brother, in any case.”

“Who was born normal?”

“But money-mad. Even when he was a tyke, he was out after his own corpses to embalm. Down in the storm cellar.”

“And how was it that Simon Moro managed to escape this deadening existence?”

“Let’s see.” Imaginatively stymied, or pretending to struggle to remember? “Simon’s father died when he was fifteen, his mother a little over a year later. They lie side by side in the cemetery. His older brother took over the family. His cruelty brought Simon and his younger brother closer together. The younger brother’s name—curiously enough—was Rudy.”

“Better keep your stories straight.”

“I am. This Rudy was with a ‘y.’ The other Rudi is Rudi with an ‘i.’”

“Crapola.”

“Rudy was the only one Simon felt he would really be leaving behind. Recruiters for a sort of circus came through town. During Oktoberfest.”

“Oktoberfest.”

“Every year. For this one, Simon taught his brother to play a simple patriotic Vaterland tune on the piano. Their father used to play the piano despite his handicaps, and Simon’s mother used to sing and dance under the pines around all the wrong notes. Simon did the same for Rudy, stomping out the martial beat, drowning out the discords. The recruiters for the circus heard them, and made an approach to the older brother. He put it up to Rudy and Simon. There wasn’t enough in the cemetery, he said, to support them all. So either Rudy went as a freak, or Simon went as a clown. I couldn’t let that happen to my little brother. So I went. Simon Moro was first seen in public as a clown, dancing among firecrackers, and snapping off long strings of his own.”

“What circus?”

“It played all of Europe from 1914 until 1918.”

Very clever. Very, very clever.

“So everything dovetails,” I said.

He nodded. “But lately I feel a great desire to return home.”

“To Vienna?”

But he wasn’t going to be caught out. “To my roots. Vampires show a certain wisdom, carrying a little of their own earth with them wherever they go. We all need that.”

“Of course.”

“I’m sixty-eight. I guess you know. As old as the century.” He snickered. “My companion for life, sure to outlive me. I’m losing my powers.”

“Nonsense.”

“No. It’s the sad truth. I should have no trouble twisting this schlock picture to my own uses. But I find the twists come very hard. I need a rest, a trip home.”

“What would you do?”

He sighed, greatly, off to sea. “I’d go see Rudy. If he’s still alive …” Uncanny schizoid memory ties. “He never considered himself strange. No speech, no hearing, but that was like our father. All that ever really worried him was being shorter than other people. He hoped he would someday grow. I want to go back, look him slowly up and down, and then say, as straight as I can, how much he has grown in the last fifty years. Really grown. Even if he has shrunk some.”

Simple insight: M. was talking about himself. In a very complicated way. Rudi who’d created Simon who’d recreated Rudy. Who was the decrepit little unhappy monster-child soul still skulking down there inside him somewhere. Stunted, deformed, locked both ways into silence, its feet forever unable to reach the pedals. Un-Moro-Man. Must talk more about him when I revise article. Personal mythology is psychic truth, even when facts lie elsewhere, and M. unwilling, as he said, “even to mention the hemisphere” from which the Moros originally come.

For as he also said, “You can then …” hesitating a sad smile, dropping his eyes, as if much in the face of the Humble Truth, “… believe what I say?”

And as I said, “I believe you. Absolutely.” Making, of course, as per above, allowances.

Maybe M. hadn’t searched out all his twists yet, but during the next day’s rushes, I saw scenes that were pretty damn contortionistic. Takes from the dungeon-boudoir seduction sequence, that “unseemly, almost erotic ritual that ends with his bending over her full, pulsing throat.” Doubt if Beau Fletcher ever had his words made quite such searing flesh before. No, wait; not words made flesh; words made carrion. That’s how M. played it. Erotic-horrific, but butcher-block and funky. Ambiguous whether he is biting into a live Lenore or a dead Lenore. Long time before he bit into her at all. First he twitted at her in ravenese. Obscenely this time, I’m certain, has that lubricious timbre, though no intelligible utterance passes his charred lips. Fantastic make-up for this scene: total blackface, even his tongue, the snaggled teeth like burnt stumps in a mouthful of wet soot. Then he edges—struts, really—along her curd-white body, blinking a redder and redder eye, that single bird eye again, until it fixes on her columnar—but cold or warm?—throat. M. goes for the obsession here. Clear enough from the rushes, still half-clear even after Terry’s hack editing—or rather his producer’s—that Ravenus has fallen stark in love with Lenore’s throat. Cf. above, M. on Romantic Aberrancy. But still the Raven has all the horror action. A shock twist because Lugosi, Christopher Lee et al. always do a Valentino on the vampire kiss: bloody, but never really gory, only gooey. Not M. He hovers over that throat, fixated, then, in a quick, gawky shock move, pecks at it. Viciously. His black tongue comes away stiff, flecked with a gout of blood. He pecks again, harder, jarring Lenore’s head violently aside. More blood on the tongue. A taste in the sooty mouth. Two, three more vicious pecks, and then M. rips at the throat, not like Cary Grant, but like a real raven, tearing out a feast.

Left intact, it would have been a real shocker. Even Hazel, sitting next to me in the tiny, wooden balcony, stopped giggling at herself on screen. She’d been relief-giggling—that insipid reaction Terry always plays for—but this dried up with M.’s first peck, became a tremble I could feel through the loose arm rest.

“What’s he trying to do to me?”

“We’ll fix,” Terry assured her, from two rows back.

“Sure, sweetie-poo, you fix-fix. But what’s he trying to do to me?”

“Your friend. Not mine.”

“I’m all throat.”

“We’ll take out the wrinkles.”

Touché: her age did show in her throat, badly, signs of an incipient wattle. Odd because nothing else had slackened. (As I well know?) Her body youthful, bloomful, if a trifle ripely overstrained from surgical salvage. She reached one hand behind her neck, pinched the skin tight, began massaging her stretched gorge with an open palm.

“He was supposed to hide my throat.”

“Worry not. Look at yourself next.”

The rushes had gone on ahead, telescoping the story, into the last bed-chamber scene. On screen, Quincy bustled across to the canopied bed, whipped aside the double curtains—far too evenly for the tension of the moment—and stared down … no, pas avec angoisse, mais at least with avid curiosity. Cut to standard medical-school skeleton, lying on rumpled bed. A few yards of old mosquito netting girdled around pelvis and femurs, and a little facial putty for femininity on the frontal skull. The effect was very stale Psycho, without even that bare bulb winking the hollow eye-sockets. Terry’s trite camera then zoomed down into the rib cage to pick up the pendant silver arrowhead, hanging, right from Woolworth’s, where Lenore’s heart had once thumpily pumped. We could all go back to giggling again.

“Just imagine being that old,” Hazel said in wonderment.

“No wrinkles.”

“No fuckles either.” She stopped strumming her neck. “I’m really very angry with Simon, Terry.”

“So solly to hear.”

“A girl’s bristol is one thing, but her throat is another.”

“Tell the press.”

A little bit of the old Talloolah: that’s what she was trying to pull off here. But pretty hard to do Tallooolah on Penny Singleton’s brain power. That’s who she really reminded me of: a bitchy Blondie, divorced long ago from Dagwood, whom she’d probably married when she was fourteen. “Only woman I ever knew,” Quincy got off another good one about her, “who baby-talks dirty.”

“You haven’t interviewed me yet,” she accused me.

“No.”

“When?”

“And in depth,” Terry winked.

“I want you to know,” she said, absolutely flat, “I love Simon.”

“Let me get that down.”

“A dear, sweet man.”

“Anything else?”

She thought hard. “It’s work-work to keep up with him. He can be very driving sometimes, but also very feeling. He’s been like a father to me.”

“Helps take years off your age.”

Terry laughed knowingly, and she cooed at me, without the slightest change in tone, “Prick.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t give it another thought.” She waved her fingers in a coy fan: bye-bye. “Must run-run. He’s expecting me.”

“To do what?” said Terry.

“Outside the studio, my life is my own. Prick.” She called him that as indifferently, as sweetly as she had me.

“Well, give him our best. While doing yours.”

“As ever-ever.”

Instead of going out on her own side, she crawled across me. Before I could get up, she whispered, “Hands off my bod.”

I tried to give her room, but she stayed teasingly straddled there.

“You’re on my bod,” I insisted.

“Sorry, prick.” She smiled, and slipped away in the dark. It was like an endearment.

“Loverly talk,” I mumbled.

“Loverly,” Terry laughed.

“Anything between them?”

“Hard to say. I thought I introduced them.”

“Not so?”

“Simon was down in my office on Sunset. Hazel barges in about something, I forget what, maybe just because she knew Simon was there.”

“She call him prick too?”

“Doesn’t say a word, just hangs. Nor does Simon. Funny vibes. So I start to introduce them. Simon gets up, stiff, all Austrian, gentleman of the old school.”

“Like he treats her on set.”

“Exactly. Takes her hand, starts to bend down over it. Only halfway there, he lunges and bites her right in the tit.”

“Charmant.”

“Well, in a way, it was. He didn’t bite her that hard. Playful.”

“What did she do?”

“Wriggled.”

“Away?”

“No. Just wriggled.” Terry considered. “Like she wanted to please.”

“What did Simon do?”

“Showed distaste.” Terry considered again. “But familiar distaste. Like, how many times had he told her not to do that? Tell you. I know she blows. She does indeed love to blow.”

“I see.”

“But in this case, him three times a night or only his nose for him when it’s runny, I honestly couldn’t tell you.”

“No way to find out.”

“Ask.”

“Sure.”

Terry shouted a few instructions back to the projection room, mainly cuts to mark in M.’s performance, got the lights turned up. He looked tired, cranky, like a kid who’d been kept indoors all afternoon.

“Still too damn nude.”

“Really?”

“Horror’s not that far along yet. I ask you. You seen any Danish horror films?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“My point. Someday maybe we let the vampire go right for the old snatch, but that is not where we’re at now.”

“Simon is.”

“Spare me Simon.”

“And leave you Quincy?”

“The real trouble is fifteen days is too long.”

“You’re on schedule.”

“Too much time for everybody to screw around, try to act. Especially Simon.”

“You don’t want acting?”

“I want action.”

“I see.”

“There’s a real difference. One stops you dead. The other keeps you humping along. And the American family audience wants to hump along.” He squeaked his sneaker, “Ten days would’ve been better.”

“But not five.”

He nodded at me, appreciatively. “No. My five-day days are over.” Made it sound like he’d lost his wind, or had a bad stitch in his side. “You ever see Sea Beast?”

1962. Giant sponge ravages Malibu coast. Old skindiver (Tab Hunter?) turned coward after “a revery of the deep,” regains courage, kills beast with underwater acetylene torch, finds treasure, rescues admiral’s daughter (?).

“Can’t remember who the girl was,” I said.

“Hazel Rio.”

“Of course.”

“We were out on location only two days. Mostly underwater, so no lighting problems. Another day in the studio. One more day in the lab, shooting the sponge. Make it four. Four days, sixty thousand dollars, everything right there in the can.” One thing to be said for Terry: even though he may not be right up there with the more talked-about cinéastes, but cf. Clouzot’s recent tribute in Cahiers du Cinéma, he still has most of the back-lot dollar records, certainly one kind of cinéma vérité. In, to date, some sixty-odd films, he has never gone a penny over budget, never run a day behind schedule, never been an alpha wave off on any audience profile. Judith Crist can carp that his pictures “go in one eye and right out the other,” but there is at least some argument that while you’re waiting around for Stanley Kubrick to finish 2001, somebody’s got to keep the drive-ins open. That is what was worrying, even infuriating Terry about M., that M. was going to go and do something memorable that couldn’t be repaired, ruin “what little there is left of what we used to call Hollywood.”

I sound sympathetic.

“So why did you sign him?” I asked.

“You get bigger out here, you take people as-big. On my way up, his way down, we hit.”

Just damned, dirty luck.

“You getting any kind of a story?” he muttered.

“Some kind.”

“Tell you. There is a hell of a story to be done about Moro. Only you couldn’t print it.”

At Breadloaf, I referred to this kind of statement as “the prelude to disclosure,” and listed various motivations: vengeance, envy, insideritis, p.r. guilt, an appetite for large bites of back, et cetera. But with Terry, while it was certainly all these to some degree, it was basically still promotion. More build-up for the villain in his picture, even at this lowest level of scurrilous whisper. However, I’m the one who asked, “How come?”

“Too incriminating.”

“How so?”

“That film he did right after the war? In East Germany?”

“West Berlin.”

“Who knows? But it’s about the Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps.”

“He won’t say what it was about.”

“This isn’t from him. I got it on excellent authority that it’s about stuff like how long it takes to freeze a man to death. In a control tank. All that William-F.-Shirer-Third-Reich nasty shit.”

“All right.”

“Not all right. The point is, he’s for it.”

“What d’you mean, for it?”

“Pro, not con. He plays the chief Nazi vivisectionist. The fucking hero.”

“Crapola.”

“True.”

“How can anybody say for sure? He never finished the film, and he’s intensely anti-Nazi.”

“You ever seen Simon play for anything but the hero? That’s what it is with his monster bit.”

Had a point there.

“It’s a complicated plot. My opinion, too complicated. This Nazi doctor is really a Red. He sees a chance—since everybody thinks he’s a foul Hitlerite—a big chance to do all the doggy work on the New Soviet Man. He sacrifices himself—becomes a pariah in the scientific community—in order to pursue the necessary vivisectionist research. Also throws shit on the German reputation at the same time. But he gets caught sneaking out his secret data to the Russians—”

“Those experiments were worthless!”

“Don’t tell me, tell Simon. He gets caught, and the Nazis put him in line for vivisecting too. The last bit is, he’s being laid open by this other doctor—ribs, lungs, just about bleeding to death—his tongue already cut out, so he can’t scream—when the doctor leans down and whispers to him. ‘Do not worry, comrade. The work goes on.’ A real double switcheroo.”

“So he dies happy.”

“I’m told. And I got good sources. Face it. When Simon did that film, he was a convinced Stalinist.”

“Blacklist crap.”

“Don’t look at me, I didn’t put his name down. Think about history. Think of all the pain and shit Stalin put the Russians through. Simon was trying to justify him. But it was n.g. My sources say Ulbricht didn’t dig it.”

“The film was locked up by the West Germans.”

“Think they’d dig it any better? If he wasn’t naming names, he was showing some pretty familiar faces. It was part documentary. Tell you. Doesn’t sound too right to me for any German audience.”

“Or Russian. Maybe that was the point.”

Terry scowled. “Maybe it was. And if it was, that’s Simon’s whole trouble. Like I’m having with him now.”

“Or genius.”

“That’s no excuse.” Could see the very thought of genius bugged him. “You don’t go and hang your audience. Whatever you have happen in a picture, they didn’t do it. Also. Must have been one hell of an S-M party, that film. Remember that. My opinion, he’s a little over the edge.”

Re-evaluation: is that what I’ve missed all along, the maybe simple fact that M.’s taste for monstrosity is not an esthetic, or a social norm, but a few crossed wires? Add things up. The baroque questions, the morbid fantasies about variously mad or deformed Moros, the Heidi hang-up, the lost—or jettisoned—childhood, the possible mental deterioration after all those years of pill-popping … and then, really: is a vote for weird a vote for normal? Why on earth, concretely (except for fissures?), would a sane man want to go around with a severed finger tucked away in his handbag? Handbag?

“The picture needs a little of that,” Terry went on. “But only a little. He’s right for the Raven. I never said any different. He was my choice in the first place.”

“Thought he was Quincy’s.”

“Quincy’s idea, my choice. What I’m trying to make clear is, this is not going to be a bird picture.”

“You mean, not a Moro picture.”

A couple of sneaker squeaks: contemplative. “I don’t want to take anything away from Simon. Since what this could be is his last picture. He’s lucky the one before wasn’t.”

“Come on. He was great in The Shoplifter.”

“You know, and I know. Who else saw it?”

“It’s still around on TV.”

“Sure. The Late Late Show. Like all his movies. Never Early, never Late, always Late Late. Face it. Simon’s got a revival on with the insomniacs. The ghost walks for the sleepless.”

“He’s never played a ghost.” A fact: occurred to me just then.

“Too keen an artist, right? I know how you feel about him—all that cine-shit—but I’m telling you, he’s a crazy old man. He’s more of a coot than Adolphe Menjou.”

I never did get a real chance to reply to that last slander.

“He’s used up,” Terry kept plugging, “or almost. And I got to think about use. That’s how everything goes together here. So much out of Quincy, so much out of Hazel, so much out of Simon. And no more. I don’t need more. I’m fighting a bad surplus in one place already. You think Simon’s giving me problems, let me show you.”

He could’ve told me, but he had to show me. So out of the screening room, down the wooden fire escape, across the empty studio street—an abandoned Paramount back lot, where one lonely retainer, shuffle-sad-funny, was still sweeping away at his custodial post (Eddie Rochester, Jr.?), even the bristles on his broom growing gray—and back into the barn again. This was way late in the afternoon, the set long since closed down, except for a few grips mugging coffee around the crossroads grave: an intricacy of traps, hydraulic engines, effigy, topsoil, et cetera, more to come, cf. below. This was what Terry had to show me. The actual, physical, material enormity of an illusion occupying too much real estate.

“This son-of-a-bitch cost forty-seven thousand. And it’s another fifty-five hundred a week to stay here.”

This son-of-a-bitch loomed, a horrendous overhead: the stale Scaperelli apartments, unoccupied oubliettes, unused kitchens, dungeons; the barren Translyvanian mountain fastnesses; untrafficked byways, cemetery paths; or have I written all this before? The plan was tight, clever, space-saving, hideaway, and at the same time, it offered long optical reaches, angles, trackings, openness. But still: “I never put this much into a set before. Never get it all out again. Unless …” A man who’s overspent on raising the Sunken Cathedral just can’t afford to let it sink again. “Unless we can do another picture.” Here. Now.

If I ever have to work out an auteur theory for Terry, it will run something like this: “Every Terence Cowan picture contains elaborative, sometimes exiguous pictorial echoes from his immediately previous filmwork. There is, invariably, a striking scenic continuity. Locales do not change so much as they become exhausted. A shift in style for Cowan is, therefore, primarily a matter of changed art direction, and may indeed occur abruptly midway through a picture. Hang Ten Cylinders (1960), for example, moved suddenly from inside the Speed Shop he had made famous from every conceivable camera angle during his automotive cycle, to the stretch of Malibu beach where he actually now makes his home. Exhaust and sea spume. A strange filmic salad. But Cowan still kept to this mixed cinematic metaphor in Drag Surf (1960), eking out the last of his stock-car footage in order not to draw too heavily on his still-meager bank of surfing shots. He then stayed with the Malibu beach for the next eleven months and five more pictures, up through Surf Monster (1961), the film that convinced him to go underwater for Sea Beast (1962). Sea Beast can be considered the germ of his present horror cycle, though it was still some time before Cowan really brought his camera to the surface again. Many have charged that economy alone has dictated this stylistic seamless-web effect in the director’s work, but much nearer the grain would be an analysis that cuts both ways, allowing the fast-paced Cowan, so oddly static and almost home-movie-ish in his choice of locale, his talent for finding, in Christopher Marlowe’s words, ‘Infinite riches in a little room.’”

“You dig?” he said, waving at the burden that surrounded him.

“I dig.”

But he still seemed to have more on his mind.

“Something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“What?”

“I need a quick script.”

Skip went my heart.

“I can get Beau Fletcher to work this weekend.” Unskip again. “But he needs something to start him off.” He moved close to my elbow. “Know any good Poe stories?”

He said it almost like “Know any good Polack stories?” I swear.

“Let me think,” I said.

“I mean, a really good one.” Not like The Pit and the Pendulum or The Tell-Tale Heart. Everybody’s heard those. A dozen times. One we haven’t heard before, so to speak. With a really socko punch line. Could I come up with one? Wasn’t I in the lit. line? Admit I am.

“You want one that could go with this set.”

“Right.”

“And these same actors?”

“That’d help.”

“Well then,” I said slyly, “do you know the one about Berenice?”

“No. Tell it to me.”

So I told him the one about Berenice. My own way, except for the punch line, which I’d looked up since talking to M. “… so then this servant comes into the library in the morning. The little box is on the desk. The servant points to the spade, still full of mud, leaning against the window seat. Then to the little box. Our hero shrieks, grabs the box, spills it. A few dental instruments. But then what does he see? ‘Thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.’”

Terry’s eyes already had that wide-angle-lens look, “Or we could pick them all up even better with a fish-eye.”

Confession: I thought I was casting M. But the next day, the last day’s shooting, I notice Terry, on the quiet, arguing with Quincy while we’re waiting for them to set up M.’s gravebreak. “Five days. That’s all it is out of your life. I got the lab. I got this set. We repaint the crypt. Red. Make the whole cavern like a big mouth. You got all the billing. You can co-produce.…”

Quincy gave a slight but apocalyptic gasp. “You want me to play …” Yet you knew he would. You knew he’d love to. “… a monster of such vicious orality?”

Skip to that last day, the final shooting: M.’s gravebreak. Lots of frosty Hazel-Quincy footage before that, but nothing to my purposes, only proved M.’s point. Q. saving himself for horseback, to become highly hippodramatic, if a wee bit side-saddle-ish, as lustful lancer, sticking it to Ravenus. But he did at least replicate a passion for Hazel in one scene. Got off his “Nevermore!” line very, very sweetly, though as I caught the subtext: (“Thank God!”) Terry also stuck in a flashback, Beau Fletcher rewrite, dissolve to traumatic childhood of orphaned Scaperelli brothers as wards of the Inquisition. Q.’s voice-over. It shows what a wings-off-flies, blood-guzzling little shit Ravenus was from the age of six on, counters that rapport M. had built up with Hazel as iced corpse in dungeon. But only somewhat. M.’s pernicious artistic influence still prevailed over Q.’s effort to creep ahead of him on a frame-by-frame basis. Especially on that final day. Terry, since he wanted that grin, was forced, unwittingly, into further ravenizing of the film, even if he botched … no, worse, deliberately tried to destroy what M. offered him in the way of a denouement. Terry succeeded, through underhanded lab work, in partially obscuring M.’s true great intent, but despite fog, filter, and phantasmagoria, much is comprehensible, if you have the least clue what you’re really seeing.

Terry took a long time to set up that day, however, and until the shattering moment, I suddenly had Q. back on my hands. Waylaid me into conversation for the first time since we’d come in on that NYC-LA flight. Full of himself, thought he’d finished off M. for good, wanted, naturally, to tell me about his Upcoming Role: the tooth freak I’d already overheard him agree to play for five-day Terry. Who was suddenly “my co-producer,” much as I was suddenly somehow supposedly his secret ally. “We’d like to find something here for Simon,” he said magnanimously, “but it’s a small cast, a very tight schedule, and Simon can be expensive.” Eight thousand they were paying him for Raven. Not even peanuts. Peanut shells. “Of course you’ll keep this quiet.” Because the deal was still a little if-ish, a touch shoe-stringy; in fact, the way I read it, they were planning to embezzle the set. Quincy’s own company, Quinco, was going to lend (worthless?) paper to Terry’s Maliproductions for credit to purchase the set outright—Terry was on the tab to his present producers for it—the said set then to be resold to Quincy Adams Associates, Hollywood, Calif., on a lease-back, so that Quincy could have the tax loss when the set was scrapped, plus all the furniture, curtains, carpets, other curios and bibelots for his decorating business. “Some wonderful paintings. Very Trad. I’m sure Sears will back the loan, maybe put up a bit and a piece for—”

I’d have stopped dead in mid-sentence too, if I’d been talking. Eye-blitz: M. walked on set, straight from make-up, having done most of it himself, three and a half hours, had on his Ghoulgantuan grin. “Had on” is not right. The brutal denture seemed grafted into his face, flesh-welded, and M. had chipped off one of the tusk-like canines, leaving only a nerve-raw, bloodstained root. I mean, convincing: a really nasty mouth injury. Couldn’t talk, of course. Waved at us, a flutter of sleeve. His “Ravenswear” had been soaked down in some wet-look red reek, but I remember noticing particularly how lumpy the caftan was. However, my only thought then: he was affecting some new broken-bodied-ness.

Terry ecstatic. Led M. over to crossroads, helped him into the grave, supervised fitting of hawthorn stake into his ribs. “I want only one take, Simon.” Excited. “Just keep straight to camera.” The shot was complicated technically, an aerial zoom with spin, plus long-angle lens, Terry’s old favorite, but had to be timed just right to the popping open of the coffin lid, done with an Air Force hydraulic braking mechanism. The coffin-popping was to be immediately preceded by lightning leaping to hawthorn spear-stake, wired, above ground, as a positive electrode. So, in the right order, the shot sequence was (1) lightning strikes, (2) grave breaks open, and (3) Ravenus grins. “You’ll have to be down there fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before we’re ready to shoot,” Terry explained. M. nodded. Should say something about that little nod, slight as it was: most actors in that much mask don’t animate the mask, especially when they’re not playing. But not M. Correct to say, Ravenus nodded, and they lowered the coffin lid down over his grin.

“Can you get comfortable?” Terry shouted, nervously.

A nasty scratching came from under the lid, like expletives.

“Trouble? You want out again?”

More scratching, but this time, don’t know how he managed it, the scratching clearly said, shut up and get on with it.

“Okay,” Terry ordered. “Throw on the dirt.”

Two grips set to. But with trowels, not spades, and very delicately. The coffin was only to be buried about four inches down, the long-angle lens adding the depth. The grips smoothed and patted, while M. seemed to do a lot of tossing around inside the coffin. “Keep it still if you can, Simon,” Terry shouted down to him. “You’re disturbing the earth.”

Quincy was still pulling at my elbow.

“This’ll take a while,” he said. “Let’s get ourselves a cup of coffee.”

I figured I’d better find out what skulduggery he was really up to. So we headed for the mobile cafeteria across the set.

“Don’t think I’m not aware how helpful you’ve been,” he gushed immediately. “Plots aren’t that easy to come by.”

So that was it.

“I think you can count on Beau. Feverishly as he’ll have to work, he’ll do right by you.”

By me. By my story idea. After all, if it was really Poe’s, he should have come forward with it himself.

“Personally I think you should stay out here another week with us. Serve as literary consultant. Maybe look into some publicity matters….”

Another question I was asked at Breadloaf: Are you ever, offered money to write something about somebody? “You mean, bribed? Indirectly, yes. But it isn’t worth it. Bribes pay about the same as the New York Times Magazine, and usually only on publication.”

Since he saw he wasn’t sucking me in, Q. quickly slipped into a diversionary Parke-Bernet-high-rollers-pre-auction routine. The set he would soon, through his subsidiary, own. I was asked to admire a quattrocento refectory table—“Italian oak, top and bottom”—a travertine tazza, and a Titian-blue-école landscape of a lute festival on Parnassus. I’d say they were all circa 1949. The canopied beds weren’t bad as Heritage reproductions. But Q.’s real prize was a small, dark, diabolic painting that was hanging in Lenore’s bed chamber. “Shame it doesn’t show up on film. If it’s not a Bosch, it’s very near.”

Maybe: a swinger, in any case, a Norman O. Brownie candid. The surface was filthy from long storage, but underneath there was at least a Hieronymus borscht scene that stopped you, no question. It was An Entrance Into Hell, a long march of scratch-limbed damned souls, padding one after another up the devil’s puckered, hairy, and flaming anus.

The trouble with pederasts like Q., they never give up. “It needs cleaning badly,” he said, “but the composition is excellent.” Then, honest to God, he licked an index finger and started spit-shining a patch of the anus, precious-art-fancier style, to reveal hidden brio. “Perfectly balanced focal point. I’m determined to keep it for myself.” He looked tassels at me again. “Sure you wouldn’t like to stay and help me hang it?”

Never give up, never give up, never give up. So why was I still bothering to be polite?

“Don’t really care for it much, personally,” I countered. “Like you, I’ve got my own Madonna at home.”

He really smirked me down. “How all evasions do inform against us, dear boy.”

Which stands as yet further proof that the Shakespeare of the Sonnets was queer as an Avon sheep dog.

We maneuvered each other toward the cafeteria; sealed sandwiches, coffee from a spigot, and one formica-topped table. It so happened Hazel was already sitting there, and I made us join her. She was out of costume, in shades, hip-huggers, and tit-hangers. Some bod, all right-right, but a feeling, any minute now, it’s all going to go Shelley-Winters on her.

“Here for the burial, sweets?” Quincy asked her coldly.

“How far along are they?”

“He’s all but interred.”

She gulped at her coffee.

“Still time,” he slowed her down. “Let the dead harry the dead.”

I bought the coffee for Quincy and myself, then sat down between them.

“Quince poo,” she said ickily across me, “was that clever-clever you?”

“Was what?”

“What you just said.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m hoping it wasn’t.”

“Why so hopeful?”

“Because I liked it.”

“You’re safe,” I said. “It’s a cliché.”

“Didn’t ask you, prick.”

It turned out I seemed to be the solid distance they wanted to keep apart.

“Don’t abuse the lad, sweets.”

“Does it hurt your feelings when I do?”

“He’s only trying to set your jumbled mind to rights.”

“He’s a love.”

“Yes, isn’t he a dear?”

And the damnedest thing: they both, underneath the table, had a hand on each of my knees, roving independently. I thought about letting them slowly, inevitably meet, but decided I preferred to choose for myself. So I interlaced with the delicate one, then shoved my cup of coffee under the table and spilled on the horny one. For a ridiculous moment, I felt maybe I’d confused them. But then Quincy got up, surreptitiously wiping his scalded knuckles on his pants crease.

“Careful where you pour your libations, lad,” he snarled, and went off.

Hazel pulled both our hands up on top of the formica.

“So you’re not one of the boys?”

“Guess not.”

“Funny. Never known the Quince to be wrong.”

“His word against mine.”

“Need more proof than that.”

We were heading somewhere, if I wasn’t careful.

“You were going to tell me about Simon,” I shifted matters.

She pouted exuberantly. “Does he have to be the only man in my life?”

I said nothing, and she giggled, began coyly hand wrestling with me. I pinned her quickly to the formica.

“I surrender,” she said languidly. “The Quince and I do this sometimes.”

“Do you?”

“Helps build strong wrists.”

I disengaged.

She giggled again. “Sure he isn’t right about you?”

“I have only myself to go by.”

“You just won’t say.”

“Look, Miss Rio …”

“Hazel.”

“This isn’t telling me anything about Simon.”

She grabbed my hand again. “Let’s have another go.”

I kept my hand stubbornly lax.

“No?”

“Now. About Simon.”

“Why Mistah Willyums….” All sympathy and sudden, sweet discernment, fondling my limp hand. “Maybe you don’t do It at all.”

“Try me sometime.”

Out it slipped. Or is that quite the way to put it? No, if I’m talking that way: she reached in and pulled it out.

“Really?” she beamed. “Tonight. Eight o’clock. At Dino’s. Drinks and din-din, and … come what may.” A bitchy wink. “Or come what can.”

“Afraid not.”

“You still haven’t talked to me about Simon.”

“Go ahead about Simon.”

She gulped the last of her coffee. “No time now. Tell you all about him tonight.”

“I’ve lost interest.”

“Come off it, prick. You can be had.”

That simple. Also turns out to be possibly true.

“Let’s go. Don’t want to miss Simon.”

“He’s not going anywhere.”

“Just mustn’t miss Simon.”

So. So, so, so. At least that much is now down on paper. To Be Continued. Meanwhile, in medias res, Hazel and I rushed back to graveside, where there was about to be some action.

A certain broad-daylight eeriness, different from shots of Q. riding up and lancing coffin: everybody, even that Charles Coburn grip with his trussed-up hand, was standing around in a wide semi-circle beside the grave, back out of range of camera, made me think of awed mourners afraid to draw too near. The camera itself hung close over the maybe half-inch-high mound, like a big, black buzzard. Terry was up on the crane with the buzzard, and some intricate adjustments were being made in the buzzard’s mean red eye. I was reminded of Terry’s earlier threat to hold a funeral for M. right there on set, and in a mock—or mocking?—way, this seemed to be it. No lilies, but a hush that seemed deeper than the ordinary quiet for take. The only cue: the Last Trump.

“You ready, Simon?” Terry called down.

Another scratch: affirmative.

“Okay. Chop chop. Let’s go with the lightning.”

A bright, pink-blue-colorless zap of sizeable voltage pitched itself across the gap from the crane and touched the hawthorn shank sulphurously. A tart whiff of ozone. Only a big spark, really, but it would, did, does look mighty and puissant on screen.

Then that hydraulic brake snapped, threw its pressure against the coffin lid, and dirt, pieces of spear, rot, decay, odor of death flung up at the buzzard camera. Worked wildly, smoothly enough to put Raven in line for an Academy Award nomination for special effects, though I doubt film will win any Oscars. Comes at you on screen a bit like an up-draft avalanche, until most of it falls back into coffin, close-up view now of Ravenus, a swerve-spin-swirl down, down, down into that fine and private place where none, I fear, do there em—

Brace yourselves, horror fans, take a good, close look at this shot sequence in Raven, and you will find, as we all did then and there, though admittedly without having to penetrate Terry’s additive mists and movie murk: M. is not alone.

At first I thought it was alive, even attacking him. The bone-white patina of the skull flashed at us, a lunge. But that was really M. pulling it closer to him, nuzzling into its upper vertebrae, then biting, lovingly, into its scapula with his great Ghoulgantuan teeth. Next I guess I realized how it was positioned: mounted on him, femurs extended at straddle, patellae squeezed to his sides, tibiae under his back. Final, great cinematic touch: Lenore’s necklace, with the silver arrowhead glinting right into camera, wrapped round both their necks—or rather, his neck, its upper spinal column—for stark-shock visual image that leaves no question whom M.’s got in there with him between the winding sheets.

Why Terry didn’t yell cut immediately, I still don’t know. Too aghast, I guess, or too fascinated, maybe a little of both, like the rest of us. The hush on set was absolutely sucked away. Sharp, gusty intakes of breath all around. Then a kind of desperate, knowing tension. Same with the audience, or at least the few who caught on, at the screening I saw. No giggles, and underneath, a funky feeling of moral turpitude: shouldn’t be watching, somehow. And M. doesn’t let up, not for a minute. He fondled the breastless, slatted ribs, pulled grubbily at the mosquito-net skirting, and, slowly turning in the debris-filled coffin, started to push himself on top of the skeleton. The skull’s ecstatic grin rose up over his hunched shoulder. Almost the same grin as his, G.’s own. Around me, even shallower breathing, a deeper aversion, but still nobody stopped watching. I saw Q. across from me, wide-eyed, no “willies” this time, frozen, as M. began a sleek, iniquitous body movement that shook the coffin. Focal point: the anklebones. They were crossed over each other, high up his back, as if gripping him hard, seemed to pick up the rattling, bone-slapping rhythm almost on their own. In fact, M. made it look as if he had to catch up, to plunge after some wild, grisly lust that was already way ahead of him, burning in the whited pelvis that ground its flanges fleshlessly against him.

It was Hazel who stopped it, with a simple, clear-cut astonishment: “He’s balling my bones!”

And Quincy hissed. Tried to sneer, but hissed like a skinned viper.

“Cut, cut, cut!” Terry shouted. “Simon, you ghoul!”

M. rose up from the grave. Lenore’s skeleton stayed wrapped around him—tied, we could see now; must’ve sneaked it into the coffin under his caftan: that lumpishness. It clung to him, as if obscenely unsatisfied.

“Get that thing off of him!” Terry yelled at the grips.

But M. broke loose a few bits of string, and the skeleton flopped to the floor. With its femurs still spread wide, hideous to say. That finally did bring a titter, which blew Terry completely. He swore unstintingly at M. for a whole minute. “And quit your goddamn, shit-faced grinning!”

Probably what M. was playing for. He had the denture loose, and out of his mouth, in a trice. His emptied mouth looked raw and sore, almost violated.

Terry realized his mistake. “Wait. Put it back. We’re not through.”

“We are finished.”

“It’s a retake.”

“It was perfect.” He had a towel, was already wiping the raven blacking off his face, working gingerly around his mouth.

“Put it back, and get in that coffin again,” Terry threatened, “or I’ll wipe you out of this film.”

M. smiled, even though it hurt. “You can’t now.”

Terry didn’t say he could: a breaking point.

M. then made as much of a speech as his throbbing gums would allow. “You wanted my grin. I gave you my grin. I gave you something a little more. I gave you a horror. So far, the only one. An inescapable horror. Now you go and make a horror picture.”

A direct challenge, and for once, with everything coming at him so fast, Terry looked just a little scared. “You goddamn good and well know,” he shouted, trying to keep control, “you know we can’t have her in that coffin with you!”

“Why not?”

“The nabes, the drive-ins, the P.T.A’s, the—”

“Why not?”

“How? How would she ever get in there?” Part of what was frightening him: sudden lack of story continuity, a real abyss. “How, how?”

“She came to me. Fled from Quincy, begged, pleaded with me to open my grave to her. Take her in.”

“Where do we have that on film? Where?”

“It’s implicit.” M. ogled Hazel, with raven glance. She smiled back. “In her every look.”

“That’s blue! You’re trying to make me make blue horror!”

M. nodded. “Exactly.”

“You can’t!” Terry yelled for the script girl, tore through the pages. “We already shot it. She is back there dead in her own bed where Quincy finds her!” He found the right page, shook it at M. “Right here! Dead in bed!”

“You cut that.”

Terry blanched. “Who’s directing this film?”

“You cut that.” It was M.’s moment, Terry, Q., Beau Fletcher, even E. A. Poe be damned. “Shoot her bed empty, and everything works.” The blackest of black directorial arts: recutting a leaden drive-in B flick into a Golden-Age art-house horror classic. If only they’d done it M.’s way, all the way: Quelle différence! “Go back to where Quincy finds out Hazel is wearing the arrowhead necklace. Outrage, not just fag surprise. Real sexual fury. He rides off into the night, same shots, beset by your foggy specters. Only they’re not a flit show, but his own terrifying jealousies.”

“You’re being very extreme,” Q. sniggered, but to no effect.

“He thunders down on my grave—with a murderous passion now, understand, no giggles—drives his vengeful spear into my buried guts—a little mad, you see—then thunders home again. But what does he find? An empty bed. That’s the only new shot. Lenore gone, vanished. Then Quincy’s ‘Nevermore!’ makes sense. Or much more sense, if we can get him to say it right, dub it back in. He has really lost her, will nevermore know how, where, why, anything. Excruciating. But then we show the audience what is the horrible, ironic truth.” M. had worked himself up to quite a personal pitch. Foamy rave cream. “Quincy has really caught us in our secret trysting place. Worse. Horror of horrors, he has driven his cruel shaft not only through my heart, but through his beloved Lenore’s! Pinning us together, fatefully. So that even in the reeky tomb, in hellish death, her body almost corrupted away, we go right on—”

“Sick,” Quincy broke and wheezed. “Sick, sick, sick.”

Terry could hardly speak. “You get your ass back inside that coffin. You give me five seconds of that shit-eating grin, straight, no shit, then you get off this set so goddamn fast—”

But M. was already walking off the set. And Hazel along with him. Dutifully? Yes, how about: like an obedient paramour?

“Simon!”

Only Hazel turned. “Do like he says, prick.” She spoke with an odd trill of erotic authority. “Simon says make a horror film. Do what Simon says.”

That’s what Terry never forgave her, I’m sure, though he ignored her, shouted again after M. “I’ll scrap the whole picture, Simon! I’ll scrap and sue!”

All M. did was chirrup back at him in pure ravenese. The only inflection I caught was one of feathery glee.

Later, when I had a chance—Our Last Conversation Together—asked M. about this highly original ending. He quoted me sources: “Your Mr. William Shakespeare. I think he sets some thoughts going, does he not, when he lets Hamlet jump into the grave after Ophelia? And don’t forget your M. Victor Hugo. Take a look at the conclusion of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. How do Quasimodo arid Esmeralda really end their days?”

Correct enough, as far as it goes, but, of course, Shakespeare—or even Hugo in that final charnelhouse embrace of skeletons—never went quite so far as M. tried to go here. Just not possible, even in our permissive cine-society. What Terry, his producers eventually did was to compromise. Lenore’s skeleton remains in her own bed, story-wise, but also flits, figures in and around climactic grin sequence. Kept for effect, not plot: bits of Lenore, bony bits, barely distinguishable. Oh they’re there, despite cuts and distortions and the tight-in focus. They’re there all right. I know. Terry knows. Hazel knows. M. knows. The grips know. Some people I know very, very well now know, and a few dinner-party guests I’ve let myself astonish. Yes, we savants know. Question is, as I sit here, broke, the ten-cents-a-line truth-giver, shall the General Reader know too?

I began interviewing Hazel in earnest halfway through my pepper steak at Dino’s.

No, first, since I’m being holistic about the truth: my telephone call from the Hollywood Hills Hotel to Jane before going out that evening. Partial explanation of my … determination … stick-to-it-ivity? … later that night. Sometimes wonder: should I maybe just show her this manuscript, pull a kind of Lev Tolstoi? “Here is my most intimate diary, dearest Anya Jane-ova. I want you to know what kind of a heart-sick, wretched man it is you have married.” Try to force the issue between us that way? Predictable reaction: sincere, stern, unforgiving. “I don’t know what to tell you, Warner. It’s … well, it’s always better if I wait to read your things after they’re in print.”

Anyhow, the gist of our long-distance conversation, across the Rockies, the Great Plains, the Wide Missouri, et cetera, et Shenandoah.

“Be home tomorrow night.”

“Didn’t know you had a home, Warner.”

“I fly out of here at one o’clock, my time.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay where your time is your time?”

“Jane …”

“I’m beginning to like my time being my time.”

“How are the kids?”

“Just fine.”

“How are you?”

“Just dandy.”

“Everything all right?”

“Fine and dandy.”

“Fine.”

Couldn’t think what to ask next.

“Any phone calls for me?”

“No phone calls for you. And very few from you.”

“Any mail?”

“There are several letters here addressed to ‘Occupant.’ Would that still be you?”

“Jane …”

“I wish you’d let your more important correspondents know where you’ve moved to.”

“I’ll be home eight, nine o’clock. Your time.”

Nothing.

“Been a pretty hard push out here, honey. It really has.”

“Has it?”

“I want to begin writing Monday.”

“Good.”

“Not going to be an easy piece to write.”

“Unlike the last one, or the one before that, or—”

“Jane …”

“Tarzan …”

“I’m still interviewing.”

“That why you’re not flying home tonight? Like you said you would?”

Careful. “I have to take the director out to dinner.”

“Have a ball.”

“I wish you could understand. It isn’t really fun.”

“Of course not. Pure pain.”

“Sometimes, almost.”

“What would you ever do, Warner, without pain for an excuse?”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“Must write to Edmund Wilson about you sometime.”

“Look. Tomorrow. I’ll get a taxi home from Newark Airport.”

“All wound, and no bow.”

Very bad interview. She hung up, and the Nation once more hung between us. Yawned, stretched, gaped. I was conjugally smarting, a condition, I find, that leads to loss of appetite at home, though an intense sharpening of hunger when I’m away. I took on that pepper steak. First.

“You eat like Simon,” Hazel told me.

“How does Simon eat?”

She thought. “I guess all men eat the same.”

“Had one, had them all, right?”

A pretty unsubtle nasty, not at all like me, really. The martinis. Expected much nastier back from her, but she’d begun to grow too cozy for snarls. More happily, less bitchily infantile. Had, in fact, stopped calling me prick altogether. Much too formal a term, I guess, now that we were getting to know each other better.

“Tell me something, Hazel,” I urged her on toward greater confidences. “Did you know Simon was going to pull that freak stunt with the skeleton?”

“I knew he was up to something.”

“But were you surprised what?”

“I was surprised that he really did it, but what he did … I can remember … to tell the truth….”

Getting somewhere, getting somewhere. “Yes?”

“He once made love to me that way.” She giggled. “So there.”

“In a coffin?”

“No. In the woods. But with all his scary stuff on.”

“You’re serious?”

“Remember it very well now. It was on my birthday.”

“I see.”

“Simon always remembers.”

“Most girls just get spanked. Not very hard either.”

She giggled again, but not quite at my feeble joke. “You don’t understand. It was my birthday wish.”

“Your birthday wi— … you wanted him to?”

“As I recall, I asked him to, yes.”

“Why?”

She fidgeted. “Better ask him.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I don’t think I can tell you.” Definitely nervous about all this, for some reason. “You better ask Simon.”

“Wait, just a minute. To start with, which ‘scary stuff?’”

“What he had on this afternoon.”

“Exactly?”

“Well, naturally, less clothes. No clothes. But those teeth. And he made his skin all horrid.”

“Ghoulgantua then.”

“Who?”

“Ghoulgantua.”

Didn’t mean a thing to her, honest to God.

“You don’t know Ghoulgantua?”

“I’ve got a terrible memory, especially for names.” Dawned on me that is maybe why she calls so many men just prick.

“Don’t you know his movies?”

“I haven’t seen them all.”

“You haven’t?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t go to the movies that much.”

I shook my head. “Rather do other things?”

“The way I look at it”—very grande vedette—”you’re either a person who goes to the movies, or you’re a person who’s in the movies.”

“But how could you want him to … I mean, if you hadn’t seen …? How clear are you about this incident?”

“A lot of it came back to me today. Don’t get me wrong-wrong. Wasn’t that big a thing in my life. I mean, underneath, it was still just Simon.”

“Okay, okay.” Tried to think: next question. Blunt. “Still just Simon. But just what is Simon?”

“How do you mean?”

“To you.”

She shrugged. “Important.”

“Do you live with him?”

A big laugh. “I don’t live with Simon. I stay with Simon sometimes. I’ve been with Simon. Off and on. That’s only natural.”

“Natural?”

“Even my mother agrees.”

Getting nowhere, getting nowhere. “Put it this way. How long have you known Simon?”

“One way or another?”

“Yes.”

“Ages.”

“Beginning when?”

“Hard to say. Most of my life, it seems like.”

It really was like talking to an amnesiac Baby Snooks.

“Hazel, what I’m trying to pin down, if you don’t mind my asking, is when did he make love to you in his scary stuff?”

“Must’ve been a long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

“You’ll have to ask Simon.”

Decided to play it her way. “You mean … it was that long ago.”

“Has to be. If I still thought I could really have a birthday wish.”

“Which birthday?”

“Don’t remember.”

“But you were maybe … just a kid.”

“Older. Must’ve been. It was a pretty grown-up wish.”

“Unless Simon put it there.”

“What do you mean?”

What did I mean, at that point? Was homing in on a parlous thought-wave, shifting Hazel’s loose words for solid evidence of a certifiable M. kink, long suspected, but found my own self a bit muddled. Undertipped on the exorbitant bill, overtipped the hat-check girl, dropped all my change for the car hop. Largely due to demon drink: gin horns, Burgundy hooves, and a brandy tail. Drink alone, however, wouldn’t have done it without the week’s fatigue suddenly coming down on me—a tired snap—plus inner rankling of repartee with wife Jane. But what was worse, total disorientation. Didn’t know where I was, in our conversation, or anywhere else. She was driving, a green VW with a fumey temper all its own, ripping around Sunset Strip landmarks. Circus Maximus behind Dino’s. She used to work there. Brutal. Ben Franklin’s. She used to hang out there. Funky. The hospital, like a gun turret. She used to have herself redone there. Painful. It all added up to no past in a place that is no place. But then, to me, that’s L.A. I find it, especially at night, a low-lying, depressed area of total uncertainty. The sneaky back way into some other, more real city. Like Port Said, or Trenton, N.J.

So I was a little drunk, or maybe more than a little drunk. Anyhow, drunk without guidelines. Hazel finally got us headed out toward Beverly Hills, while I talked to her “in depth,” a lot about her career. From what I gather I gathered: not so grande a vedette. She’d been in so many movies, too many, from such an early age on, bit parts, nothing roles, couldn’t remember them all, claimed she’d never seen many of them. “My mother’s the one to ask about them.”

“Who’s she?”

“An alcoholic.”

“Rough.”

“Drank up all my juvenile earnings.”

“Did she?”

“You ask her.”

She said the first picture she could remember doing with M. was Hitler’s Camps. Might’ve been in another one with him before that, but I’d have to ask him, she couldn’t recall. “I remember Camps because I had this near-naked torture scene. Nineteen-Forties near-naked. Rip-rip all around the tittyboos. Simon was this terrible Nazi. Cut people up alive to see how they worked.”

“Wait.”

“That’s what he did.”

“I saw Hitler’s Camps.”

“How was it?”

“Don’t remember you in it.”

“Small part. One of the girls he was breeding to Hitler Youth.”

“He didn’t cut people up.”

“He did.”

“You’re confusing Camps with that film he did in West Berlin.”

“Am I?”

“Did you, by any chance, ever see that picture?”

“No.”

“He’s told you about it.”

“Never heard word boo about it before.”

Christ. “Look. Somebody’s put it into your head.”

“I don’t know.” She tried to think while passing once in the middle lane and twice in the inside lane. “I get mixed up about plots. Is this the one where he escapes a lot in an elevator?”

“That’s Ghoulgantua.”

“Damn. Damn-damn.” Worried her, made her driving even worse. “Maybe I did see that one.”

She headed up Coldwater Canyon, managed to find her own driveway. The house was redwood uprights and lashings of thermal glass, not a curtain drawn. She unlocked a section of the utter transparency extending across the front, and walked in. I walked in after her, a little unsteadily, and turned on a light. She turned off that light, and turned on another. I went and turned off that light, and we were in the bedroom.

Partial, somewhat saving explanation: there was, truthfully, nowhere else in that house to go.

It was furnished in functional, adjustable, disposable Danish, the rooms kept right up to good, clean, triple-A motel standards. Check in here anytime, Large Parties Welcome. But not a book, not a magazine or newspaper, not a vase or a picture or a knick-knack, hardly an ashtray, not one personal item anywhere. In Quincy’s terms, it was decorated Nil. Not even the fixings for that one more quick drink. Forced to retreat into the bedroom, where the only signs of human habitation still were hidden back in her closet: a few dresses, nighties, bikinis hanging on hangers, and a vinyl suitcase open on the closet floor, full of toiletries, a hairdrier. She hadn’t even bothered to take her toothbrush across to the spotless bathroom, ten feet away.

“You just moved in?”

“No.” She had her reasons. “I travel a lot, not here that much. Rent the place out. It’s easier if I keep my own things out of the way.”

“What things?”

What things, no things. Except a single prize possession. Her bod-bod. That she was now going to let me have a look at, maybe even pick up and handle some … sure, here, no, don’t mind at all, go ahead, just be careful, go on, try it. Not that I was all that against this idea: was undressing just as fast as she was, in the reflected glow that the amber and blue spotlights were spraying on the plantains outside the glass. (Why does that crazy Hollywood lighting always make me think of somebody with one brown eye, one blue, staring at me?) But I did have this thought before flesh took over entirely: the emptiness of the house, like her own vacuity, might just be psychologically deliberate. What better way to stay young, eternally youthful than to have no memories, even at thirty-nine—thirty-eight—and only a few belongings? Obliviousness: the sexiest vanishing cream of them all. That’s what I have to break through here, I was telling myself, find out a few things. The purely professional reason—how I make my living, support a wife and four children—why I have decided to fuck this dumb broad.

She put a lot of youth into it. And a lot of experience. Also a lot of indifference. I don’t think I impressed her very much at first. It was perfectly straightforward, front-and-center coitus: easy access across a broad spread of fatty thigh and just slightly wrinkled buttocks. A lot of buck and bingo there, whatever I mean by that. My thoughts: her taunts. Yes, I’ve got that kind of real helpful brain, all those sexy stories about M. Tried to hold off, not go bingo myself. But couldn’t get over how quiet she was being. Active, physically, but dead still, emotionally, even vacant. So I started worrying, began pushing, humping, perspiring. Bingo. But kept right on pounding, pushing, hard, so hard that I didn’t even hear.

“Hey,” she stopped me. “It’s all right.”

“Is it?”

“You’re done.”

“I am?”

“Come on. Get off.”

“You sure?”

“I should know.”

“Okay. I mean …”

What I meant, really, was: how did I miss it?

“Not how much noise you make, y’know.”

“Sure. Right.”

She gave me a sweet, slothful kiss, kind of like last prize. “You were … fine.”

Worst part: didn’t feel I’d gotten on any more of a familiar footing with her. At all.

“Listen, Hazel.”

I got up on one elbow. Made me dizzy: demon drink still. She threw her own elbow across her eyes. I kissed its wrinkled point.

“Rest up,” she said.

“Want to ask you something.”

Kept her elbow across her eyes. “I’m all ears.”

“How come you let him treat you the way he does?”

“Who?”

“Is he that good? Still?”

“Who?”

“A sixty-eight-year-old man is not going to …”

“Oh.”

“It’s this hold he has on you. The way he maneuvers you around.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think so?”

“Like he had some power, some extraordinary …”

She giggled, lifted her elbow, grabbed at the sheet. Pulled it off me, onto her. “Are you asking me if Simon is that big a dicking?”

“I suppose so.”

Seemed very important to know: can’t think how I actually planned to include this information in article, but as I said at Breadloaf: “Sometimes you write between the lines. Sometimes you write between the lines even before you write the lines.”

Hazel was eying me, heavily, what was there without any sheet over me. Unnerving. She finally spoke up.

“Tell you who you really ought to ask about that.”

Jesus.

“I’m asking you.”

Shook her shaggy blonde head, her big brown nipples. “The best person to talk to about that, really, is Terry.”

I fell off my elbow.

“You’d be surprised. Terry knows everything about everybody’s sex life around here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Reason I suggest Terry is nobody knows anything about his sex life.”

“Hazel…”

“He’d be neutral.”

“Why should I ask Terry when right now, here, in bed, I can ask you?”

Very solemn she got. “I’d only be giving you my point of view.”

“That’s what I want!”

She rolled away from me, giggling. I rolled right after her, and she scooted down under the sheet I felt around for her here and there, through the sheet, and she seemed to get all ticklishly twisted around. Then she hiked up, a bump in the night, and slowly drew the ghostly folds back from her, yessiree, very real, tucked-together, elevated derrière. Surprise, surprise. Kept her head wrapped in the sheet, still giggling. Déjà vu: looked like the raised nates of that little faun in Fantasia (1940), the one whose ass wistfully fades into a Valentine.

No further word. My move. Trouble was, couldn’t be sure—how does Norman Mailer phrase it?—whether I was wanted in “the fish house” or “the sewer.” Dilemma. Pondered while I hardened, then took an investigatory poke at each portal. Lid tight down on the sewer, thank God, but fish-house door wide open. I slipped in there for—fun images to cover masculine uncertainties—maybe a couple of shrimp, or at most a filet of flounder, but managed to cut myself a great big piece of swordfish steak.

“Better,” she sighed.

“You think so?”

“Much better.” She got herself turned around again and kissed me with liberal lips. Very liberal. Should have noted that.

“Now,” I said.

“Rest up.”

“No, I mean, now we get a few things straight.”

“Like what?”

“To start with, about my being one of the boys.”

She giggled. “I felt you take your sneaky little swipe-swipe at my—”

“That was to check what you wanted.”

“The man’s supposed to—”

“I did choose.”

“Okay. I grant. With a little coaxing, you can be headed straight.”

“Thanks.”

“Just how it is these days.”

Decided, by God, it was my turn to castrate. “Understand. I’m only here doing my job.”

“Job?” That got to her. “What job? You calling me a job?”

“Pay attention. I’m trying to find out about a man named Rudi Eckmann.”

“I don’t know any Rudis.”

“Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you just think you don’t. I know enough already about what you think you don’t know. I want to know what you do know.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Somebody started long before I did. Put it this way. A few good words in print from me might help further your flat-assed career.”

“You think I’m flat back there?”

“I’m offering you a simple exchange. What I can do for you, for what you can tell me about Rudolph Simon Eckmann Moro.”

She shook her head, which shook the rest of her.

“You got me all wrong.”

“Do I?”

“Simon’s somebody I don’t … you know … fuck around about.” She seemed to mean that quite literally. “I really have a lot of feeling for Simon.”

“What feeling?”

“It’s confused.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Told you once, you wouldn’t believe me. He’s … well, sort of daddy.”

“You know what they call wanting to sleep with daddy?”

“‘Wanting to go beddy-bye.’”

“Is that what he calls it?”

“That’s what I call it.”

“Or, my God, wanting to sleep with dead daddy? On your birthday?”

“Call it what you want. It’s how you feel that matters.”

“Do you know, Hazel, that you are absolutely crackers?”

“Crackers in bed.”

“Kinky.”

“Kinkyboo.”

“Know what I think? He drove you kinky.”

“Who?” Shocked.

“You know who, and I want an answer.”

She shook her head again, harshly, some kind of deep denial, then lapsed into an almost unhinged baby-faced smile. “Know what you really want?”

And her hand came spidering up my leg on its tippytip fingernails, skittering around into the dark beneath my scrotum. Like—should have thought of this then—like a black widow sitting on her egg sac.

“Lay off. I want an answer.”

“Have to ask Simon.”

Dilemma: couldn’t very well ignore spider, but didn’t dare brush it away. Might get bitten.

“No, not Simon. Or Terry. Not even Quincy. You. Yes, or no. Did you get yourself diddled by … Cut it out now.”

“Feel good?”

Gritted my teeth: wasn’t going to give in. “—get yourself diddled by that monster when—”

“Still feel good?”

“—when, goddammit, you weren’t maybe even half old enough to be jailbait?”

“Didn’t ever think of it that way.”

“How did you think of it?”

Virility paradox: want to, maybe it doesn’t, don’t want to, sure as hell it does. Phallic backlash.

“Oh … kind of make-believe, I guess.”

“Stop.”

“Dress-up, let’s-pretend.”

“Stop it.”

“Really want me to stop?”

“Yes. No.” Stop what? Tried to keep my mind on what I was asking, not so much on what she was doing, but the two things were beginning to get mixed up. Make the best of a difficult situation?

“Is that … is this what you do for Simon? Did, when you were a little—?”

“Depended.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Let me think a minute.”

“Haven’t got a minute!”

“You don’t?” Spider wriggles. “I want to be helpful.”

“Then just answer the question.”

“What question?”

“I’m asking you …”

But I couldn’t phrase it any more. I still knew what it was I had to know, what I desperately, if vaguely, wanted to find out, but couldn’t put the simplest query. I was drunk, tongue-tied, erect, and, yes indeed, about to be really bitten. Preciously. She bent down, lipped right over me, peeled me back with all the force and delicacy of her lolling tongue. Even if I’d been able to ask the damn question, how the hell, in those excruciatingly exquisite circumstances … I resort here to ripping off a stanza from Rake Rochester.

QUERY AND LOVE’S ANSWER

Then talk not of more inquiry,

Sharp quips, and questions sly;

If she, with practised ecstasy,

Kept mind on him while mouth round me,

How could she make reply?

When I boarded my flight around noon next day, when I emplaned for New York City with a light head, a louche heart, and a limp cock, specifically, when I crawled through the First-Class seraglio to the cheap, two-dollar stewardesses back in Tourist—going rapidly downhill, ruined by intemperance and a whoreson, Babylonian blow job—when I lifted myself from the lint and filthy scuff of that horrid TWA aisle and struggled into Seat 13C, there was M. Right next to me, in 13B.

Both of us surprised, in fact, downright dislocated by this juxtaposition, proximity, propinquity, et cetera, et cetera. Lit. mind continued to work even if biz. tongue fixed fast by ichor of liquor. M. didn’t say much either at first. Always awkward, any accidental meeting of interviewer and subject after exploited personality has yielded up its last tailings of good copy, lies exhausted, played out … cuckolded? That’s at least my side of what ensued after takeoff but before dinner and in-flight movie, Mary Poppins (1964), sci-fi psyche-Disnic fam. com. (“Just a cube full of acid makes the musical go down, the musical go down …”), over airline’s rum ration of two bourbons: Our Last Conversation Together.

M.’s general demeanor: relaxed, elegant, Viennois, Old Worldly-Other Worldly. But thoroughly undisplaced person, a preternaturalized American, you might say. Work had done him good. Now travel? Going to see his hallucinatory family?

No, not exactly. “Your Mr. Joseph Papp,” M. explained, “has asked me to come to Central Park, to play Caliban.”

“Perfect.”

“Yes, I think.” Obviously delighted. “Central Park, at night … you expect Caliban.”

“As a mugger.”

“My thoughts tend that way.”

“Keeping the same ending this time?”

M. smiled low, but said nothing.

“I liked what you managed yesterday.”

“Did you? We’ll see.”

Then he launched into that heady discussion of analogues for his ending, H. let, H. back, cf. above, got very technical when I asked him about lighting, lens length—“I had the cameraman with me”—and how exactly he’d smuggled that skeleton into the coffin. “Wore it around my waist. Like a money belt. Simple enough to pull up my skirts, tuck them back down inside the bones.”

“Pretty small bones.”

“Skeletons are smaller than you realize.”

“Brittle.”

“Slight, really.”

“Girlish?”

M. ignored that. “Do you know Mr. Papp?”

“No.”

“I had in mind suggesting Hazel to him for Miranda.” So he could have her near him? Cement their monster-mistress-parent-child decrepit December-matronly May relationship? What ho: a horror Tempest? Not so far-fetched, cf. M-G-M’s Forbidden Planet (1956), Cyril Hume’s rewrite of Prospero’s Island as Altair-4 in the year 2200, why not base play on movie?

“Also considered suggesting Quincy for Prospero,” he went on.

“Or an aging Ariel,” I said.

But generous of M., considering. Too generous, I sensed.

“However,” he added, with a slight edge, “I find now that Quincy will be occupied these coming few weeks. Another Poe film.” Saluted me with a squeeze of his plastic tumbler, since no way to clink it. “To your first screen credit.”

What could I say? “What can I say?”

“You were thinking of me.”

“I was.”

“Next time, ask first.”

“I sure as hell will.” I tried to shrug off some of the blame.

“But what can you do? It’s all in the public domain.”

“Avoid taking known vandals there on visits.”

We both sipped at our plastic bourbons to ease the strain on a thinning camaraderie. But a jollified M. spoke with even more of an edge.

“Now tell me, how did you enjoy your romp with Hazel?”

“My what?”

“Your romp-romp.”

What could I say? “What can I …”

“You were thinking of me.”

“Matter of fact, I was. Most of the time.”

“Next time—”

“Ask first?”

“Won’t be a next time.”

Discomfiture: felt like saying she was also in the public domain, but kept my peace.

“Please understand,” M. went on. “My only real objection is that Hazel gains nothing by it.”

“You so sure?”

“She’s been had.”

I laughed. “Other way around.”

“You are not kind to that girl, as I’ve already said. Trying to trade your tickle for her prattle.” That intimate death’s-head smile again. “Am I right?”

Didn’t like that: at all. “She has some not-so-very-pretty stories to tell, Simon.”

“Yes, sad.”

“Yes it is sad.”

“You’re very right. Very sad.”

But seemed too sly: had a feeling I might finally have him cornered. “Only backs up what I’ve suspected all along.”

“About what?”

“About you.”

“Of course. You have me down as a … pedophiliac?”

“Lately, a necro-pedophiliac.” Not quite right, but tendency carried out to the nearest psychiatric term, rounded off.

“Frightening.”

“She gave me a clear instance.”

“Clear? From Hazel?”

I told him, in lavish detail. Spared him nothing. “Yesterday brought it all back to her. You’ve got a lot to answer for there, Simon.”

M. met my hard look with what I thought was an even harder one of his own, devilish even, but it broke up into roaring laughter. He laughed so hard the stewardess came back to check.

“Can I get you something, Mr. Moro?” she asked.

“Yes.” He snapped his plastic tumbler at her. “More bourbon. For my necro-pedophilia.”

She took mine too, wondered a little at both of us.

“You don’t recognize that story?” M. chortled.

“Should I?”

“Thought you were my meister-fan.”

“I am.”

“Seen all my movies.”

“All that are available.”

“And uncut.”

“Yes.”

“Well then?”

Then I realized. “Oh my God. The whole incident.”

“Exactly.”

“She took it from …but she couldn’t even remember the name!”

“Not surprising. She probably never saw the picture.”

“But …”

“Her mother never let her see any movie that wasn’t recommended by Parents’ Magazine. Even the ones she was in.”

“Ones she was …?” Saw it all. “She was the little …?”

So far have not been able to verify this from cast lists. Still might not be true: another M. fabrication? But here I can recollect my own reaction, cf. long ago, above, and only suggest that we keep Miss Clio checking.

“Exactly,” M. said, with some pride. “It did happen to her, in a way. Hazel may be dim, but never dishonest. And this was a long time ago, remember. We shot that scene just before she turned eight, since you seem so hungry for these garish chronological details. To get the expression I wanted, I told her to make a birthday wish, but not to tell me what it was. Came out perfect. More or less the same psychological way I dealt with her this picture.”

“So you weren’t …”

“Weren’t what?”

“But her wish.”

“I still don’t really know what it was. Maybe she did ask for … that would have been precocious of her, wouldn’t it?”

“But you didn’t—you weren’t …”

“You think me that mad?” He shook his head. “No. Not then. Not with my little Hazelnut. With the mother. A ginned-up gospel singer who would do anything to get her daughter in the movies.”

“Who was her father?”

“When her mother got drunk enough, she used to claim I was.”

“You?”

“Retroactively. She had a strange sense of time. And an even stranger idea of sin. Combined, they made her very formidable.”

“Formidable.”

“Dreadful, really. Sing and drink, and pray and fuck. ‘Rooooock of Aggges, beeennnd to meee!’”

“Why did you?”

“Why did I what?”

“Bend to her.”

M. surprised. “Can’t you see?”

“No.”

“The daughter obviously had talent.”

“Simon.”

“Future talent. If it had ever really been developed, instead of wasted in silly films …”

“Simon, what talent?”

Annihilating skull grin. “Thought you’d just been through quite a display of it.”

“So you have …” I really had had enough. “All right, straight. What is it between you and her?”

“Best ask her.”

Really had had enough. “Come on. Straight.”

“I don’t think I’m at liberty to divulge …”

“You’re both bleeding liars.”

M. blinked: admit it was highly unjournalistic of me to phrase it quite that way.

“Are we?” Then very deliberately. “Or perhaps you just can’t get a few simple facts straight.”

“There isn’t any simple. Isn’t any straight.”

“You give up too easily.”

“I don’t give up, Simon, but if I went looking for you Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, they’d turn around and tell me you were Lost in Space.”

Nice: Voyage to the Center of the Earth, and no Simon Moro. Sorry, he just left for Space-Time. But brings me up a little short here: same approximate mood and feeling in which, with which I began shoving ms. into this ragged envelope Monday. Stark, clear-day-see-forever perception of enfeebled … diminuendo ad infinitum … powers of … perception. What is Truth? And P. T. Barnum replied, “The greatest escape artist of them all!”

M. seemed to take a long extra-close look at me. For once. X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), Ray Milland able to see through walls, clothing, skin and bones, but M.’s cold, gray orbs peered deeper: saw down to what had crawled under the rocks at the murky bottom of my turbulent self-esteem.

“I wonder,” he said.

“Wonder what?”

“What you’ll write about me.”

“I wonder myself.”

“Though I don’t really worry.”

“No?”

“Not at all.” Arrogance: Bourbon? “I can see you have high hopes of some integrity. Always. But you suffer too much from Rogers’ Palsy.”

“Rogers what?”

“Palsy. Very debilitating.”

“What Rogers?”

“Your Mr. Will Rogers. Its first victim. The disease causes the sufferer to be utterly unable, ever, to meet a man he doesn’t like.”

“Just a goddamn minute.”

“Publicly. Even semi-privately. Of course, privately, alone with his own thoughts, that’s another matter.”

First dumb thought that came to my mind: “Will Rogers really did feel that way.”

“Perhaps. But do you?”

Said nothing.

“I know. Very sad. If Esquire assigned you Terry, you’d admire him immediately. You’d have to. Write paeans to his horror-realism, or some such foolishness, explain how he’d developed the cheapie into an art form.”

“Terry’s … okay.”

“So are they all, all okay. If Esquire—no, Playboy gave you Hazel to do, you’d love her on the spot. Make her out to be, let’s see now, the liberated but still passionate female. Say she understood the new sexual freedom because she was … older, wiser, knew a trick or two. Am I right?” Then darkened. “When you know as well as I do, screwing isn’t even really sexual to Hazel. It’s the only way she knows how to ‘communicate.’ Isn’t that what we say? Her way of yelling and screaming at you.”

“Hazel has her points.” Weak, weak.

“The only one I’d worry about you with is Quincy.”

An out: I took it, “Never have cared for queers.”

“I realize. You’d have to put him into context. As part of a more general, and enlightened, argument in favor of the homosexual contribution to our present day culture.”

Stronger: “I hate queer art.”

M. nodded. “But you understand its importance. Of course you do. You could present Quincy respectably to the readers of The Atlantic as a subtle popularizer of ambiguity. Not as intellectual as your Mr. Gore Vidal or your M. Jean Genet, but an advance over the late Nineteen-Fifties mother-centered, piano blanco perversion of your Mr. Liberace.”

Had an idea there: hate to say it.

“So I don’t worry what you’ll say about me.”

“I see.”

“Only sorry you have to say it.”

“Why?”

“Because for you, really …” M.’s most lethal grin. “… it must be horrible.”

Recollected statement from last round of advice delivered at Breadloaf: “There sometimes occur moments of insight that are quite inexpressible. You see into character so suddenly, so penetratingly that no reportorial description is possible. The moment passes, unrecapturably, but never mind, it serves subconsciously to create a kind of mental midden, obscure, full of stench, but fertile, out of which the right words eventually come, grow, proliferate. Even if the right words can never be found for that particular moment itself.” Now. What I would have gone on to say at that time, had I dared: “These moments, understand, are invariably moments of loathing. What you find is that you suddenly can’t stand the guts of the man, or woman, whose guts you have been assiduously probing. Let me give you an example. I was sitting next to Simon Moro on the plane flying back from L.A. to New York. I’d finished interviewing him long ago. He just happened to say something to me, never mind what, nothing really very important, but it showed me in a flash what a mean, nasty, higgling, niggling, petty man he really was, what a drab, dirty inhumanity really lurked behind that high-bloody-mindedness he claimed for himself. Not the dignity of a vampire even, only the cravenness of a leech, & so forth, & so on.”

But now to come round full cycle: even while these thoughts were stinking along down inside me somewhere, never, of course, to be expressed, I hit on a lead for my article. The words did indeed begin to rise from the midden, exfoliated: ironic-laudatory, and goodly, if maybe a little weedy. “Moro Man,” I wrote in my head at 30,000 feet. “It’s a curse, it’s a bane, it’s Moro Man!” Not great, but not bad. Exactly right for nostalgic, pop-love tribute to the anti-hero who rose to greatness in the Age of Classic Comics. Would’ve done fine and dandy if M. hadn’t begun this mad-bad act, ranted and raved all over New York City like a goddamn golem, ruptured the subways, reamed the newspapers. I was home free, if he hadn’t busted loose with his freak speeches, his porno fairy tales, his Halloween whore-mongering, his transvestite banshee wails. Damn him. I wrote him up as the Greatest Thing since Gangrene. I made him a monsterpiece. Damn his x-ray eyes. I bugled him and boosted him and succored him and damn near sainted him. Simon Moro could have been America’s last King of the Creeps, the Man the Martians Come to See, but he crawled into town, spread his shaggy hands.

Tag-line item, since this envelope is supposed to contain all, be my own journal of record: last thing M. said to me as we lowered into Kennedy.

“Now I’d like to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“What is it that you’d really like to write?”

“About you?”

“No. Just write.”

Whoops.

“And be honest.”

Surprised myself. Didn’t say my novel. Instead, I fumbled around. “I don’t know exactly. I’ve got a novel started, but I wonder about novels. A lot of guys figure if you’re going to be autobiographical, go ahead and be autobiographical.”

M. interested. “Really?”

“I might like to write mine.”

“Already?”

“Why not?”

“Then may I say that I sincerely hope—” Grin: right off the iodine bottle. “—that you soon find a halfway decent subject for it?”