HE’S LOOKING DOWN ON the crowd, astride what seem the longest stilts he’s ever mastered. He gazes upon the heads of his fellow men, who likewise look up at him in awe. The people beneath him part as he passes. Some of them reach up to try to touch his hand.

But he’s too tall to meet their outstretched fingers. Even bending as far as he can, he cannot make that basic contact, as much as he tries to, and wants to. He smiles instead, and waves, and amazes them with a deep bow that is a picture of perfect balance. It is a show he loves to give, to amuse and to surprise. He is, after all, a showman. He walks the streets, soaking up the attention. And when he looks up from the people, he is closer to the sky; his vistas are spread farther than anyone down below could imagine seeing.

But at day’s end he is ready to dismount his stilts; when he reaches to unstrap them, he feels nothing but flesh and bone. There is no wood and leather. These are his legs, as if the stilts have grafted themselves to him. He can’t remove them. And he’s not sure he wants to. It’s a thrill to loom so far above the masses, to be seen and to be admired. He is set apart. To leave his lofty perch is to return to the anonymity that most people occupy below.

And when the days end, and he finds his way back to a home as grand as his stature, the aloneness sets in, as much as he fights it. In his chair, looking at his endless legs reaching out before him, the towering man fights that sense that he has separated himself from the very simple pleasures the small people revel in. He imagines a group of them, gathered in some cozy place, one of them sharing the story of having seen this glorious man and having marveled at what a sight it was.

He thinks of Gulliver on his travels, frightening and mighty. He imagines the Lilliputians as swarms and not as discrete beings, as we all are. But as with Lemuel Gulliver, the towering man understands not only the awe at him but also the fear of him, the suspicion, and the stories told that may be as fantastical as their worries. But he recalls that first step onto a low pair of stilts, and then the struggle to the next-highest, and upward until it is natural that his growth has ascended to a height from which he cannot any longer step down.

1924

THE AFTER-SHOW GATHERINGS always began deep in the night, after the stages had been cleared, the theater makeup scoured from sweated faces, wardrobes reracked, and the excitement let to dissipate. Sleep was always still far away. The exit from a dark theater into the quiet streets could still not calm enlivened minds, and in many predawns, as this one, word was general as to where one should go to find kindred souls. On this early-spring evening everyone was restless; too much winter and now the prospect of a summer with the shows closed.

The party was at a garden apartment somewhere in the Village, in a narrow building that seemed mostly peopled by performers. Arch arrived with two boys with whom he’d been cast in a short-run slapstick, in a tiny theater; he knew them as Russ and Leo, and doubted he’d know them after the show ended. But here they all were, plunging into body heat and noise. The room was a chamber of peeling wallpaper and weak-bulbed lamps and a mantel lined with burned-down candles. Chairs and two worn-out sofas were pushed up against the walls. A Victrola in the corner was clearly the only expensive piece of furniture in the place. The record that was playing was “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home,” by Ukulele Ike. Some girls were dancing with each other. They were all flappers this year; not Arch’s style, but times were changing, even when you were twenty. The girls were loud and opinionated and usually drunk, and that made things lively.

“I’m getting a drink,” Russ said, and Arch followed to the bottles lined up on a wide windowsill. The liquor had been pre-diluted by the hosts so that the brown was lightened into a winelike amber. Prohibition had turned the city into a landscape of speakeasies and secret parties that weren’t very secret; here, the whiskey had come down from Canada and needed to be rationed.

Mostly, the drinking glasses were old jars, and Arch took a less-filthy one and tried to wipe it down with his shirttail.

“The booze will sterilize it,” Russ shouted over the noise. “Don’t be such a ninny.”

Russ had effectively just ended their friendship, but Arch said nothing. His attentions were elsewhere now, in this instance an attractive girl staring frankly at him from her place in the corner with her girlfriends. All the girls in the room were attractive, being culled for their work by the casting offices of Manhattan, but there was something slyly striking about this one.

Drink in hand, he walked straight to her.

“Aren’t you the bold one,” she said when he got to her. She was having to nearly shout over the noise.

“Show people are that way,” he shouted. “Especially low-class show people.”

“Is that what you are?”

“Look around. I thought that’s what we all are.”

She smiled.

“Well, you are in a show, aren’t you?”

“No,” she said. “I take tickets. I came with these girls. They’re in the show. You want to meet them?”

“Not especially.”

“I like that, actually.”

“Tell me about yourself,” he shouted.

“Here? Really?”

“Anyplace you’d like.”

She led him out of the apartment and they sat themselves on the low granite blocks that fronted the building. She had cigarettes so they smoked, and she said, “What were you asking me?”

“Where you came from.”

“The West Village.”

“I mean originally.”

“Ever heard of Pennsylvania?”

“Of course I have.”

“Not that far away, but far enough away. I grew up in Easton.”

“What brought you to New York?”

“The opportunity to take tickets at all the best theaters.”

“Are you usually a performer, though?”

“I used to think I was a dancer.”

“What made you think differently?”

“The auditions.”

“But you’re here to stay?”

“I can’t go back to Easton,” she said. “There’s nothing there for me.”

She took a drink from her jar and said, “Are you from Boston?”

“I was, once. Now I’m here.”

“What do you do?”

“Anything I can. I’m just finishing a short run in a show, but I don’t know what’s next.”

“You’re an actor?”

“Somewhat. More of an acrobat. But I hope for stage roles.”

“I prefer the moving pictures.”

“Well, I’m on the stage.”

“The pictures will make the stage obsolete.”

“Not unless they find a way you can talk in the pictures. People still want to hear voices. It’s human nature.”

“Well, you do have a pleasant voice.”

“They still don’t even let me talk on the stage.”

“Why, do you want to talk on the stage?”

“Of course I want to talk on the stage!”

“Maybe you’re not so good at it. Talking on the stage, I mean.”

“My experiences so far make me worry about that.”

“Be in the movies. Then you don’t have to talk. You just move your mouth, and you smile a lot.”

“Yes, we’ve established that, haven’t we?”

She nodded.

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled!”

“Would you like to come to my room?” she said.

“Well, I suppose so,” he said.

They walked up Sixth Avenue to the West Village, and then down a side street. At a rather large brick building squatting incongruously among the townhouses, she stopped.

“This is it,” she said. “Thank you for escorting me.”

The small sign in front of the building: Ladies Christian Union.

“You live here?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s a women’s residence.”

“And I, sir, am a woman.”

“And you want me to come up to your room?”

“Of course I do.”

“They just let men walk right in?”

“Of course they don’t.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“I have no idea.”

“If you’d just wanted me to escort you home, you might have just said so. I would have, you know.”

“I know, because you’re a gentleman.”

“Well, shall I come up?”

“I’d like you to.”

“How do you propose we accomplish this?”

She pointed up at the third-floor row of windows.

“I’m right up there,” she said. “If you can find your way in, I’d be happy to entertain you.”

“Explain that one!”

“Wait five minutes and you’ll see a window open. And if you can get through that window without being found out, I’d be happy for your company.”

“That’s a clever trick. You think I can fly through a third-floor window?”

“You said you’re an acrobat.”

“Well, touché to that!”

“Well, watch for the window. The least I can do is blow you a kiss.”

“At this point, I’ll take that.”

She smiled and climbed the steps and went through the front door. He stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and watched the windows, shadowed from the streetlight by the sidewalk trees.

Then a window at the far right of the row rumbled open. She eased her head out the window. She said in a hoarse whisper, “You never told me your name.”

“Archie. So I’ll see you around, then.”

“No, really, come on up,” she whispered, smiling, and with that withdrew her head into the darkness.

Arch stood for a while waiting for the window to close, but it did not. He looked around and began to imagine how one could find his way to said portal. Impossible would be the first instinct, unless she let her hair down. But he now looked at the challenge as the skilled professional, trained by Bob Pender. And he began to piece it together.

Next door, there was a three-story town house with a roofline not far from the open window. Its brick façade was nearly blank, and so without foothold. But he walked down the street and found that there was, next, a town house with a series of faux wrought-iron balconies and prominent lintels set like shelves at the window tops. This, then, would be his first challenge.

He crouched deeply and then exploded into a leap. In the air, then. At full extension, he stretched even more, and just got his hands on the iron bars, swinging so that he banged his knees hard against the bricks. But he seemed not to be hurt. Onward, then.

Climbing from balcony to balcony was not effortless; each succeeding handhold was nearly out of reach. But he was afire with the urge to get through that window. Making it to the rain gutter at the top was the truest gamble. He would need to jump slightly downward to get his hands on it, with no idea if the gutter was attached solidly enough to bear his weight. He’d only find out when he got there. But he was feeling no fear at all now.

He jumped again, seizing the gutter on his way by. And despite a hefty cracking sound, it somehow held. He pulled himself up onto the roof now, and then stepped along the roof of the next building until that open window was only three feet away.

He spread himself like an X to dangle over and get his hand on her windowsill. He knew this was the payoff moment. He could have asked himself then if he really wanted her that badly; he realized that what he wanted now, more than anything else, was to succeed at the trick. Thirty feet below him was pavement, and that girded him. And with a deep breath and a mighty push of his foot, he was hanging on to her windowsill, pulling himself through the opening, spent.

“Shhhh,” she intoned. He got up on his knees. He couldn’t see anything in the dark. But there was a small candle lighted; his eyes adjusted. There she was, on the bed, naked.

Afterward, she cried, at some length. Low and huffing sobs. He lay next to her, quiet, with no idea what he could say to console her.

When her tears began to abate, she said, “I’m sorry . . .”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t really done this before . . .”

“You haven’t ever climbed through a third-floor window?”

“That, either.”

She turned and looked at him. “Really? Your first time?”

“More or less.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize.”

“Why? Did that spoil it for you?”

“Not at all. But I can’t help but imagine I’m not your first.”

“Sorry to disappoint. Is this how you think a Christian lady loses her virginity?”

“No, not at all.”

“You want an explanation for my reaction, then.”

“No, it all seems clear. But perhaps some . . . critiquing?”

“Oh! No, no! It wasn’t that at all. You were just fine for a beginner.”

“Faint praise, indeed.”

She took a breath and said, “There was a reason I chose you.”

“You chose me?”

“As soon as you walked in the room.”

“That happens.”

“Yes, you’re a very pretty boy. And in truth, you reminded me of a very pretty boy I used to know. A long time ago.”

“So why don’t you go sleep with him?”

“That’s not nice.”

“I’m sorry. I take it back.”

“Are you cross with me?”

“I suppose not. Just feel second-best. I do wonder why you’re not with him, though.”

“That’s no longer possible, if you see what I mean.”

“I’m just the understudy, then.”

“Did you even like me, or was it just the challenge of getting what you wanted?”

He was quiet to that, and said, “Did this boy disappoint you?”

“In a way. He turned my life in a different direction. This was before the war. He was going away, to fight. And I became, well . . . as they say, pregnant.”

“You have a child?”

“I had a child. The baby went away, too. I had to give it up.”

“Why?”

“The plan had been that when he came back we’d get married. I was sent away, so no one would know about my condition. But then he was killed. Three weeks after he got there. Somewhere in Belgium. And so the baby went, too. And I couldn’t go home. The shame and all. That’s why I’m here.”

Arch sat up in the bed.

“So you just abandoned your own child? Why, that’s a terrible thing to do!”

She looked, in the weak light, as if he had just struck her.

“Don’t be cruel to me. You’d only understand if you were in the situation.”

He thought better of what he wanted to say.

“And I reminded you of that boy.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind so much,” she said.

“I suppose I didn’t, not so very much.”

She had gone blank now in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He snapped on the lamp next to the bed and said, “I should go.”

She said nothing.

He stood to get dressed. On the night table was a movie magazine, open to a photo page. In one photo, Fairbanks and Pickford were at a beach with friends, all with their arms raised in what the caption said was the fascist salute, which they learned from their friend Mussolini.

“I met them once,” he said. “Fairbanks and Pickford.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“On a ship. Just for a brief moment.”

“Still, though. I’m envious.”

“So you really do like the movies.”

“I adore the movies. Maybe you can take me some time.”

“I will, if you like.”

“Come back here at three today, and meet me on the front steps.”

“Yes. But I don’t know your name.”

“Celia,” she said.

He was dressed now, and went to the door to let himself out.

“No,” she said. “You mustn’t. They’ll see you.”

“It’s almost dawn. No one will see me.”

“The woman at the front desk will see you.”

“She won’t know I’m coming from this specific room, will she?”

“If they catch me, they’ll make me leave. I can’t afford anyplace else.”

“Then how do I get out?”

“The same way you came in, obviously.”

He shook his head and said, “Well, I think not.” She was staring him down. He went to the window and sat on the sill. The sidewalk was three stories down.

He could barely remember how he’d gotten in. With the predawn light in the sky, he clambered out. Gone now was the fueled determination he’d had on the way up. He was feeling scared, and tried to put it out of his mind. The leap back to the townhouse’s rain gutter would be the crucial move, and he knew it would be harder, as he was trying to launch upward. He breathed in and out, then realized he’d been doing this for a long time. He was frightened, but he had to make his move. The ache of his knees felt keener. There was no line of retreat now.

A pause, a deep breath, and the leap. He was untethered now, hung in a dark sky. Then he caught the gutter like a trapeze. A fraction of a second had passed but it had felt like half his life. He hung there on the creaking gutter until he regathered his strength, maybe a few more seconds but like another half-life, wondering if the handhold would break free before he had the strength to pull himself up.

And then he was on the roof. Everything from here was easy. He realized he was shaking.

The rain was coming down lightly when he got to her building, but Celia was outside quickly with an umbrella. She opened it and pulled him underneath with her and said, “What shall we see?”

“Let’s check what’s at the Capitol.”

The walk was mostly quiet. She asked him who his favorite stars were and he named them as a list. Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Barrymore.

“All the leading men,” she said. “Don’t you like any women?”

“Certainly, I like women! Lillian Gish rather does it, doesn’t she?”

Celia said she adored Valentino, of course. Then there was Pickford and Swanson and Marion Davies. She related stories she’d read in her movie magazines.

“Valentino and Davies made the most money last year,” she said. “Valentino made seventy-five hundred a week. How much do you make a week?”

“About thirteen fifty,” he said. “But now the show is closing.”

“Well, I get paid fourteen, so there. Can you imagine seventy-five hundred? In a week?”

“I can’t. But I’d very much like to.”

“Is money important to you?”

“As important as it is to anybody, I suppose.”

“Is there anything that’s especially important to you, more than to anybody else?”

He thought about that as they walked.

“Feeling as if there’s someplace I really belong, I suppose.”

“That’s refreshingly honest. Don’t you feel you do now?”

“I’m always on my way someplace else.”

The rain was beginning to pick up so she pressed in closer to him, but he didn’t think it meant anything. He knew that at the end of the movie they’d part, last names unknown to each other, unlikely to cross paths again in a very large city.

And in the darkness of the theater, up in the balcony with its fifteen-cent tickets, they settled in. The first picture was The Luck o’ the Foolish, starring Harry Langdon and Marcelline Day. He liked the Mack Sennett comedies but hadn’t really truly noticed Langdon, until now. Harry, the doe-eyed innocent, traveling by train with his new bride, and within the close confines of the Pullman car, finding himself in all manner of problem. The first roar that came up in the theater was an acclamation of the actor’s subtle art. Langdon wasn’t doing the broad and death-defying Harold Lloyd tricks, nor was he Chaplin’s clownish Tramp. He was the kind of man people didn’t notice as he stumbled through his life. Only the camera saw him, and now the audience as well. Langdon’s gestures were nearly invisible but the audience roared again. Archie knew he was watching a genius. A scene in which Langdon was shaving in the jostling train’s lavatory but was accidentally nicking another man’s neck—only obvious by the man’s reaction—was totally believable. The laughter in the theater was unabated now. The girl, laughing as well, slapped his arm, and hard. He realized he’d almost forgotten she was even there.

1959

HIS SESSIONS HAVE MADE him understand things so differently. Inner revelation has again left him feeling entrapped in his rather well-wrought self.

It bears recollection, the Acrobat thinks, that even young Arch had been filled with a desperation of his own. He wasn’t above using deceit to move himself forward, though at the time he had congratulated himself on having taken a far more elegant solution, that of the entertainer’s art. The codified and socially acceptable lies of the stage were a transference that could have gone elsewhere. Could he see himself as having become a confidence man or, God forbid, a politician? Regrettably, yes. Pressing trousers all day would never have cut it.

But has he gotten away that easy? A lie is a lie, after all, and he’s piled them up, ever since. He wasn’t actually Roger Thornhill, or John Robie, or Nickie Ferrante; as the years have gone by, he’s not even sure he’s Archie anymore. But lying, be it crude or be it artful, had become his nature and his tradecraft.

To wit: today’s sudden inspiration. Sometimes this carefully curated persona feels just a bit tight-fitting. It’s good to be the king, most of the time. But not all of the time.

He phones the best makeup artist he knows.

“Bob, my friend, how would you like a new challenge?”

“Why not? What should I bring?”

“Well, bring everything,” the Acrobat says. “I’ll send my car.”

Bob Schiffer, an old hand at the studio and highly regarded for his cosmetic illusions, arrives lugging a silver aluminum suitcase weighted with its paraphernalia, and he’s smiling at the oddness of this all.

“The man who invented Rita Hayworth,” the Acrobat says.

“That was actually your friend Howard Hughes,” Bob says. “But I helped a little with the look, I suppose.”

Bob has been around a long time, his own story not far different than the Acrobat’s. He shipped out at fifteen on an ocean liner, lying about his age to become an apprentice seaman. He began his truer career making up female passengers for shipboard balls. Someone noticed. He was at MGM by the time he was sixteen. He’s fortyish now, a man at the top of his game.

“I have a challenge for you, Bob. I want you to erase me. Make me someone people don’t even notice as he walks by.”

“What picture is all this is for?” Bob says.

“Not a specific one, yet. Think of this as an artist’s study. But it has to look good in the world. It needs to look real up close.”

Bob seems intrigued but asks no details.

“Yeah, I can do that. What I can probably do is make you look like a man who sort of looks like you, but isn’t you. A man who’s missing your essence. An ‘almost-but-not-really’ kind of guy.”

“Oh, I’d love that!”

They sit facing each other on dining-room chairs, the makeup kit open on the table. Bob begins by carefully filling in the chin cleft with a thin putty, the first step to muting the Acrobat’s essence. What an odd sensation—no one has ever denied him that.

Bob sits back at that, considering.

“Just that makes a huge difference,” he says. “My God, I feel like I’ve stolen a bit of your soul.”

“You know, in my early days on contract the studio airbrushed my chin. They said it was suggestive.”

“Suggestive of what?”

“If you must know, they likened my chin to genitalia. But when they stopped doing it, my career began to take off.”

“The studio is prone to airbrushing away one’s character,” Bob says. Then, “No hints for me at all on what this is for?”

“None at all, Bob. Let’s see what you can do. Make it enough to pass a very tight close-up.”

“All right, then, let’s give you a bit of a beard.”

In his case he has a box of peltlike prosthetic facial hair. The one he selects is gray, a kind of low-slung goatee. Bob applies some rubber cement and flattens it just south of the now-nonexistent chin cleft.

Two hours with the work, the Acrobat never looking toward a mirror. Bob talks mostly about baseball, the Dodgers, Koufax, Duke Snider. Each of them has been in the pictures long enough not to be wanting to talk about the pictures. The work begins on his hair, then proceeds to his skin, then to the smallest contours of his features.

“Let’s see your teeth,” Bob says.

The Acrobat opens his mouth and retracts his lips to make a grimacing smile. Bob seems to be caught in himself.

“Wait a minute . . .”

“That’s right. I have an odd smile in an even-numbered world.”

“I’ll be damned,” Bob says, and then, “So let me tone down all this dazzling whiteness.”

He has a brush to which he applies a brackish liquid. “This will discolor them, at least until you give them a good brushing.”

Bob is looking at him as if at a canvas, the artist considering his work.

“Want some glasses? They’re all nonprescription.” He finds a plain-looking pair with a clear-acetate frame.

Finally, Bob steps back and nods at his work.

“That ought to do it,” he says.

The Acrobat rises from the chair and walks to the mirror by the buffet. He’s stunned.

“Who is this poor fellow?” he says, feeling the tightness of the work as he smiles.

“So? Yes?” Bob says.

“Yes, indeed. Me, but not me at all. Do you think people could tell, if I went out this way?”

“Nah. They’d think something was a little off about you, but nobody will be looking for makeup.”

“Good.”

“Want me to take it off now?”

“Oh, no, we’re done for now. I’m going to do a little walking around, in someone else’s shoes.”

“Getting in character? Are you adopting the Method?”

“No, my methods are my own, and have always been. You must be thinking of Brando.”

“I try to think of him as little as possible,” Bob says as he packs up and takes the cash. “He’s going to ruin acting.”

1924

ON THE NINTH OF February the snows blew into Manhattan. By that night, ten inches or more had topped off the snow that had fallen heavily a week before. The storm showed no sign of abating. Arch trudged crosstown with his bag in one hand and his stilts over his shoulder, looking for someone to take him in. He’d run out of money and the rooming house was hearing no more about IOUs from a would-be actor. The storm had brought a stream of people looking for refuge, shut out with the hotels suddenly full, and who would pay what it took. Arch, ten days late with his rent and two weeks past his twenty-second birthday, was summarily out. The snow stung his face as he imagined who might help him. In truth, a list did not form quickly. Everybody was in the same fix as he was; it all seemed easy in the summer but he wasn’t getting hired now and he needed to do what he had to.

As the city darkened again and snow raged on, Arch found the building off Seventh Avenue, on Commerce Street. The front door swung heavily. Up the narrow stairs, he stomped the snow off. Down the dimly lit hallway and to the apartment door, from behind which he could hear the tinny whine of the phonograph playing “I’ve Found a New Baby” and the murmur of voices.

Three knocks, and the voices stopped. The volume on the machine dropped. Silence.

Three more quick raps. No answer.

“It’s Archie,” he called.

Footsteps, and the door opened a few inches. There was the Australian.

“Archie? We thought it might be the police.”

“Police? On what charge?”

“Any bloody one of them!” the Aussie said. “And we’d be guilty!”

“Can I come in?”

The Aussie looked suspicious.

“For what?”

Arch had first come across the Aussie at one of the endless afterparties. Like Arch, he was embroidering his own illusory persona—artist, designer, sage. These were aspirations, not lies: As for the truth of it, he never denied who he was at the core. The Aussie was seven years older than Arch, an age at which one might abandon such larks. He didn’t seem exceedingly bright, but he had an undeniable and intuitive charm. At one particular party, Arch found himself enthralled. The magnetic attraction to the energy, and the confidence, as he’d had to Fairbanks for that instant. And as with Fairbanks, he studied the Aussie, looking to pick out of him one true thread he could make into his own.

Now, he stood at the door of this man, aware that in fact they hardly knew each other. The Aussie was in a silk dressing gown, and holding a drink, and was unshaven.

“What do you want?” he said. Another man stood back in the shadows.

“Well, the thing is . . .”

“We only have enough liquor for Charlie and myself,” the Aussie said, as if settling the matter.

“It’s more complicated than that. I need a place to stay.”

“Well, so long as you get your own liquor.”

“That’s fine.”

“And you’ll need to sleep on the floor.”

“It’s the best offer I’ve had in some time.”

“You look absolutely awful, boy.”

“I feel awful,” Arch said.

“Have you been skiing out there?”

“Oh. No, these are my stilts.”

“Tools of the jester’s trade.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And how very sad that is.”

The Aussie’s name was Jack Kelly, which he hated for its plainness. Jack also had once mocked Archie’s name as hopelessly arriviste for a boy from the lower classes. Archibald, my God! Arch had no idea.

“This is Charlie Phelps,” Jack said, nodding toward the figure sitting in a chair by the phonograph, deciding which records to play. “But onstage, Charlie goes by the name Spangles.”

Charlie nodded at Arch as he entered, but said nothing. Charlie was in a kimono, but with a heavy sweater over it to battle the drafts from the rattling windows.

Arch could see Jack observing Charlie observing Arch observing Jack. And Jack loved it, clearly.

“What in God’s name happened in your life that you’re showing up at our door?” Jack said, an amused edge to the question.

“I couldn’t pay my rent. I don’t have any jobs, and I’m not making enough money with the stilt-walking.”

“I thought you were an actor.”

“I haven’t been cast enough yet.”

“What have you done? As far as acting?”

“I’ve been working on a magic act with another fellow. I go by Know-All Leach.”

“That’s rather tragic, isn’t it?”

“As I say, I haven’t landed any good roles yet.”

“Ah, yes, the eternal ‘Yet.’”

“I’ll make it.”

“I know you’re a tumbler, but what does that have to do with being an actor? You’re a beautiful boy, to be sure, but lots of beautiful boys are roaming these streets, aren’t they?”

“I suppose.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“A couple of suits, three shirts, six neckties, and underwear.”

“All the worldly possessions, then? Your entire act a sad little satchel?”

“It’s everything I need,” Arch said. “It’s a simple life.”

Jack pointed at an open spot on the bare floor. “There’s your bed, fellow.”

Arch knew what Jack was, and what Charlie was as well. No one had ever explained people like that to him, but they were all around in show business and it made no difference to him. And why would he care? People taking him in off the street were inherently good people. Simple as that. His own pangs and infatuations were rather liberal as well. He rang it up to his general enthusiasm for life.

He also could not say this was bliss, as Jack was ambitious and complicated. Jack had a way about him, both soft and rough, and his professed goal was to be an actor, just like everybody else. Charlie Spangles had even more of a way, and winningly so. Spangles was a pastiche of gender, and performed around the Village as exactly that. One of the bits was as a person divided down the middle: on one side a woman in a dress, on the other a man in a tuxedo. Jack had painstakingly stitched the outfit together. Spangles played both sides convincingly. Jack called Spangles “they,” in tribute to the twinned identities. Jack once mumbled the word Hermaphroditus, which Arch inferred might mean something but lacked the schooling to know. The word was said with the unmistakable tone that Arch understood, which he did in the larger sense while ignorant of details. Arch was grateful for shelter and whatever friendship that entailed. Spangles had a warmer affect than Jack but also saved most energy for the stage.

The domesticity was jarring, after a silent childhood in a silent home. Arch was not quite the ward, but Jack still took on a patronizing air. Jack had arching eyebrows that curved down to a nose and pursed mouth set in a heavy face; it was a deadpan countenance with a gush of wildness beneath it. One of those people you meet in the business and its endless competitions. Arch was likewise embraced and embedded, part of a cacophony that was like bringing the ruckus of the stage home. Noise as a warm garment, in which he happily wrapped himself.

Life was a looping hustle. Onto the stilts by day, navigating streets with lofty regard and pining for the true boards, to stand on a legitimate stage in the thrall of these same people who brushed by him on the wide (and these days, icy) city sidewalks. The Aussie brought some melodrama to the proceedings, always with a scheme.

By night they made neckties, Arch cutting the dies and Jack with his tiny paintbrushes, applying his adornments.

“The real money comes when you add your own design,” Jack said. “It’s all about putting down your own mark. Which I always do. Everywhere.”

Jack had a confidence Arch studied, deeply. Jack, in turn, began to assay Arch’s raw mettle. Arch, in his rumpled Bristol wardrobe, thinking that a shining face and clever feet would ever get him through.

That little studio at 21 Commerce Street: Arch had a home to go to, rather than to escape from. And as he sought less refuge at the theater, the theater grudgingly found a home for him. Bit parts in vaudeville began to materialize, mostly, as he was now old enough to play a man. His face was annealing into something, less soft than before, an angularity made of one part hormones and two parts starvation. When the cold weather blew through Lower Manhattan and the shows were hothouses of spotlights and cavernous laughter, Arch walked home through the teeth of winds blowing down narrow streets, finally to the unheated apartment. One frigid night, Jack urged him to join him in bed under his heavy comforter, premising the double duty of two generators fueling light and power. Arch climbed in, nearly disoriented by the softness of the bed. Spangles often came thumping in with the first light and closed the blinds to the first shafts of sunshine, keeping night blissfully alive. It was a time of lumpy mattresses set on floors, and the heady smell of Jack’s paint cans, and clothing hung over chairs, and scarce food wrapped in pilfered hotel napkins.

Ambition was what it was, but the moment was what it was, too. Arch was bringing in enough money to eat, had a place to stay and some friends. He wondered if that was what made people stop their climb, that satisfaction with the moment they occupied. He felt that, but he knew he was hopelessly hoping for things bigger, shinier, and more rewarding. Almost as suddenly as he thought it, he had the creeping sensation Jack had suddenly deciphered him, and the tension set in with immediacy.

Then illness. Wracked with fevers, making it through shows in a blank sweat and fighting the winds as if they had pierced his skin. Coughing in the night, he opened his eyes to see Jack.

“You need to be seen by a doctor, Archie.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Then I’ll have to pay for it.”

The doctor came up that next morning and diagnosed pneumonia. Fluids and rest and hope. Jack handed the doctor a five-dollar bill, the equal of a week’s food.

Even after Arch began to feel better, he kept pretending he was sick. In those days, everything seemed like “acting practice,” and that became a form of gentle evasion from Jack. And the equation turned once more. Arch was beholden, yet again. As he came out of the illness and things became more normal, the gratitude had begun to weigh heavy. Even Spangles was picking up on the shift in the air, saying one night when Arch and Jack sat not speaking to each other, “Why is no one being amusing?”

But he needed money and it was Jack who got him into an unexpected gig.

He began to socialize in service of a clientele of middle-aged women for whom he acted as a paid escort. Jack had put him on to this, intimating it was a way of paying past debts, and assuring him it was on the level. The task, of course, necessitated formal attire, with the destination typically being the theater. He was hired to look good, be quick with a cigarette lighter, and remain judicious with any chatter. He was well aware he was serving as background. He served as a seat filler at formal dinners, to ensure the boy-girl-boy-girl arrangement. At those dinners, he mostly listened. At least at first. This was his higher education. To hear these people was to glean not only their knowledge but also their preoccupations, their manners, their tribal rites, their fears and their perceptions. When he began to return volley, he surprised people. They looked at him wondering where he fell on the Social Register. Acting practice, he reckoned. Speaking to them in the Fairbanks voice, which he’d made his own. To find Archie Leach in the Waldorf-Astoria, involved in a discussion of the migratory patterns of Humboldt penguins, might have been surprising to Elias Leach, or Bob Pender for that matter. When Arch was the one who was holding forth on the penguins, even more so. He’d picked it all up at a previous dinner, thought it a lark to repeat it, and found that people bought his act.

“And when did you last find yourself in Chile?” a woman across the table asked.

“Oh, not in some time,” he said, in a jocular diversion. “Not in quite some time!”

Jack, meanwhile, started getting work in West Village speakeasies, painting murals. The jobs suited him: his love of secrecy and scandal, of being an insider, of illicit pleasure. And his being away more from the apartment was a relief. Arch was someone used to decamping; he felt an escape drawing nigh. He was saving his dollars until he could pay back the doctor’s fee, and offer some sort of retroactive rent, and get out of the apartment in which he knew he was an interloper.

One night, at another formal dinner with another forgettable woman, Arch sat across the table from a man who couldn’t stop looking at him. Not that he wasn’t used to it. But this was different, more businesslike, a mien of calculation instead of ardor.

“Say there, are you Australian?” the man said. “I can’t place that accent.”

“Actually, I’m not.”

“Well, would you like to be Australian?”

The man introduced himself as Reggie Hammerstein. Brother of Oscar, of whom Arch had most definitely heard. But Reggie, a theatrical producer, had a show coming up, and he had a small part for Arch if he could be an Aussie.

“Sure as hell!” he said in Jack’s best voice, and a few people smiled, at this young uptown gent mimicking some working-class lout. Not a long stretch for the accent, really, because he had already been absorbing Jack’s: Some of the West Village boys had begun calling him “Kangaroo” based on their assumption of who he was, and where he was from. All wrong, as usual.

That quickly, Arch was suddenly no longer the ward, no longer the charity case, no longer the second banana. Arch could see Jack’s slow burn as Arch began to attract the attention of showgirls, ingenues, and singers, all blond and all as ambitious as he was. The show, Golden Dawn, paid seventy-five dollars a week. As rehearsals began in the afternoons, he got himself by at night, escorting more ladies until the first paycheck came. Gone early in the day, and back very late.

“Yet he always comes home to me” was Jack’s nightly punch line.

“Calm yourself,” Arch shot back one night as Jack surveyed him from the bed, in his dressing gown. “It’s not manly.”

“You mean, manly like you?” Jack said, rising with clenched fists.

Arch clenched his fists right back, and after they’d both stood snorting for a bit, the moment passed. Jack said, “Knew you were afraid, you pathetic slag,” and lay back down. Then he said, “Why don’t you listen to anything I say? I’m telling you that the only way to move forward is to keep being who you’re becoming.”

“I agree completely,” Arch said, speaking as someone who would be anything he needed to be in any given moment.

Jack sat up in bed.

“I assume you’ll be vacating the premises.”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ll offer a parting thought for you.”

“Unload at will.”

“You have no class, boy.”

“That’s it? You need to muster a better attack than that, Jack.”

“No, I mean it quite seriously. It’s time. If there’s one thing all these shows and movies try to give people, it’s the idea that class matters. That’s the sign of a person who matters. I don’t mean education or breeding or refinement, either. I mean something you still need to find. You’re a product of the lower classes.”

“My father is a tailor’s presser,” Arch said. “Why, what’s yours?”

“A tailor,” Jack said, with a finality in his tone.

“I also left school early, but that was my own choice.”

“Then you need to compensate.”

“How?”

“You’ve been pretending to be better, but you treat it as a joke. Maybe don’t.”

“How can it not be a joke?”

“You need to act as if you have something people want,” Jack said, and for once sincerely. “Whatever that may be. Looks can’t carry the day. There has to be more. I can tell you about how to wear clothes, and how to have manners. But you need to believe the charade completely if anyone else is going to believe it.”

He found his way to Forty-Second Street and the public library, where he was able to unshelve Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, and study it as if a Sanskrit manuscript, amazed and enthralled by all the arcane rules he’d never known. And in those small admonitions seemed rules of life as important as the Ten Commandments. The joy of joys is the person of light but unmalicious humor. If you know anyone who is gay, beguiling and amusing, you will, if you are wise, do everything you can to make him prefer your house and your table to any other; for where he is, the successful party is also. What he says is of no matter, it is the twist he gives to it, the intonation, the personality he puts into his quip or retort or observation that delights his hearers, and in his case the ordinary rules do not apply.

One late afternoon, his head full of the nuances of place settings (and confounded by the very fact of meat forks and fish forks), Arch was passing the Hotel Astor. A late-winter dusk settled outside. Lights had just begun to flicker in windows and storefronts. Hands in his pockets, head down, he was shuffling along Broadway. And then ahead, a woman. The svelte walk; even by her backside he somehow knew who it was. He’d been to all the movies; that swaybacked gait. He’s just recently seen The Temptress, and that woman was undoubtedly she. Garbo herself.

He was amazed she was alone. A silk scarf was half covering her face. People just walked past her, clinching their own collars against the cold, somehow unaware. That was the funny thing, when someone so big could not be imagined on a common sidewalk. On she went and he fell in a distance behind her, following but without plan or prospect.

It didn’t occur to him he was doing anything wrong. Starstruck and curious in equal measure, he wanted to see where she’d go, whom she was to meet, or what she did when she wasn’t on the big screen. She moved onward, in no hurry, apparently without worry on the streets of the city. Headed north, she seemed uninterested in the taxicabs and trolleys and occasional hansoms that streamed along on the street.

He thought she might be headed toward Central Park. Or maybe meeting a man, he thought with a curious pang of dejection. He’d read the tabloids and knew she was linked to John Gilbert, “The Great Lover,” as he was called; they’d just starred together in Flesh and the Devil. He heartened, that Gilbert might be ahead, and the terminus of a stealthy assignation.

But at Fifty-Ninth Street, instead of crossing to the edge of the park, she turned right and he realized her destination was the Plaza. At the hotel, she didn’t remove her scarf as she entered. At the front desk, she took her room key from the inscrutable deskman and then moved on to the elevator, where the operator puffed his chest as if a palace guard, and Archie shrank back from the man’s glare.

He left the lobby and stepped back onto the street. That was the difference between being a star and not: that you were recognized and followed even when you didn’t realize it. For stars, there were eyes on you even when you couldn’t see them. He looked around, and as yet saw no one.

Casting calls. Auditions. Trying to get a foot in the door, being judged and trying to glean the small approvals and disapprovals that would shape his success. Of course, they’d never say it right out. He had to watch for the small signs, hear the silences and sense the mood. Thus far, his instincts had utterly failed him.

Today he was reading for a small part in a production in which the chosen actor would play a youthful scion. He sat in a waiting room full of young men in their twenties, and he could only speculate about where they came from. But this was New York City, in the ongoing postwar boom, and many a boy had come to the city seeking an easy life they were realizing wasn’t so easy at all. Golden Dawn had closed, and he was back in the hunt.

Auditions were like courting, prone to overwrought hopes, deep embarrassment, and subsequent despair; trying to guess why one had turned out not to be good enough was an exercise in self-flagellation. But the need to produce a product that buyers wanted was a simple transaction. Archie watched the others carefully, trying to guess what success looked like.

The boy next to him on the long bench looked close to retching. He was natty and pale, clothed in a red-and-navy striped blazer and bow tie that suggested he might soon be off for a round of croquet. The role they were all reading for was innocuous, the rather louche younger brother of the main character. They’d been told little else. The boy in the striped jacket appeared whiter than normal, through Arch had never seen him before.

“Are you all right?” Arch finally said. The boy turned to him with a nearly pleading look. “You look a bit ill.”

“Is it really that apparent?” the boy said, straightening up.

“I may have been mistaken. Disregard that.”

“But I can’t now just disregard it, can I?”

“Well, try breathing more.”

“I feel I’m already breathing quite too much.”

“Then disregard that as well.”

The boy turned and gave him a more considered look.

“What’s your game, friend?”

“Really none. None at all. In fact, disregard me completely.”

“I’ll certainly try!”

The boy crossed his arms over his chest and stared ahead, but Arch could still hear his labored breathing.

The auditions were inside the theater, through double swinging doors that flapped with each ingress and egress of another hopeful actor. One by one, the other boys were called, by a secretary with her clipboard. As the room dwindled, the awkwardness between Arch and the boy next to him was getting heavier. He thought about moving to another spot on the benches but feared that too much might be read into that. But then the secretary came out and called, “Dinwiddie!” The boy sprang up.

There were now six of them left of the original thirty or so. After a while, the double doors swung and out came Dinwiddie, even more pale than before. He glared for a moment at Arch and then staggered out toward the street as if a drunk.

Each boy went in and came out. Arch found himself the last on the bench. He tried to imagine his reputation had preceded him, but it was more obvious this was pure chance. But then the secretary, a woman who was tired-looking enough to suggest a long career in the theater world, came out, looked at him, and said, “Are you Leach?”

He sprang to his feet. “Indeed I am.”

“Well then you’re not needed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not needed.”

“How is that?”

“Well, your name’s been crossed off.”

“Why?”

“That’s not your affair.”

“But I’ve been here four hours.”

“And we appreciate your patience.”

“I’m confused. Does it mean I’ll be sent straight to a callback?”

“No, it certainly doesn’t mean that at all.”

“Then I most assuredly don’t understand.”

“Let us say,” she said, “that we decided we don’t need your type.”

Months later, he went to the theater and slipped into the play during intermission, walking back in with the smokers and following the stream of people climbing the stairs up to the balcony. He stood in the back and waited for the character of the louche younger brother to appear. He had begun to convince himself Dinwiddie would be in that role, but the actor who came on was someone he didn’t remember from the auditions. He felt relieved. He saw a boy a bit more stocky than himself, with blond hair that nearly mirrored the light. Maybe that was the difference. The actress playing the older sister was a blonde; it made some sense this actor had been chosen. The louche brother’s lines were mostly quips, and mostly not funny. Arch left the theater and walked back to the rooming house he was now calling home.

But he found himself keeping an eye out for Dinwiddie. He was burning to know why he hadn’t been called that day. He asked around and no one had heard the name. A girl he knew worked in an agent’s offices, where they kept an actor’s directory one could pay to be entered into. But the name did not come up (his was not there, either; too much money). In time, he gave it up. He imagined that as the boy’s only try at the theater world, a onetime rejection that probably sent him packing, embarrassed, back to the family homestead, wherever that might have been. Most people didn’t have the stomach for the theater. Even when you had a job, when that job ended you were back in purgatory. It required a fortitude of an unexpected kind.