I. From a Self-Addressed Envelope

A clown isn’t funny in the moonlight.

—LON CHANEY

Initial self-imposition: put down everything I failed to tell them at the Breadloaf Writers Conference this past August about writing my piece for Esquire on Simon Moro. The slipshod omissions, the more practiced lacunae, the big, deliberate gaps, everything. That far down on my knees for starters. However: even in contrition, small credit where credit is due. Yes. My talk—no, it was higher rhetoric than that—my lecture at Breadloaf didn’t go so badly. Obviously curious, most of them, about Moro. Comfortable chair creaks, i.e., stirrings of a deep, dogged nostalgia. Could remember him from as far back as, say, a triple-feature Halloween horrow show in the late thirties. Or, slightly later, from some gothically patriotic, anti-Nazi, Defense-Bond-rally chiller they might have thought had Karloff in it too. (Not so. Karloff and Moro never did a picture together, and if you think about it, they really are incompatible evils.) Or maybe from right after the war, a bad, really awful Abbott and Costello, one of those abortions where Bud and Lou “meet” the enfeebled wraith of this or that bygone creature. But, even that bad, still a subject of intriguing, if ephemeral, interest. Or is it that any subject that intrigues nowadays also self-destructs, ephemerates? Anyhow, most to my credit: even that death row of lady English teachers who come every year to Breadloaf—a slough of slumped corduroy from one rump end to the other—perked up a little during my remarks, bless them. Though they must believe—must have to believe—that Moro is some kind of depredation. A foul smirch on the literary purity of their most beloved teaching aid, Edgar Allan Poe. Sensed that when I began talking about Moro’s work on Raven, could see the disapproval in their faces, like trowel marks in sad, old stucco. And it goes a long way back, that disapproval. If only they’d been around when that spindly Poe boy, the one well-read, sensitive lad in a classroom full of upstart Virginia farm girls, reached for his first, fatal glass of cooking sherry …

Also: the gist of what I had to say was straight cold turkey, a good Puritan sermon for would-be writers on a drizzly, devil-damp Vermont evening. “Why There Is Only a How to Article Writing.” Final self-appraisal of lecture: semi-enlightening, damn near close to candid, wittily self-deprecatory, but, in the end—since this manila envelope has got to be some kind of four-cornered hell, nor am I out of it—in the end, diligently self-preserving. Yes, a large cut of self kept in reserve, or if that self isn’t always too sure a thing these days, maybe only a large cut of reserve kept in reserve. Single biggest fudge: gave audience distinct impression that I was letting them in on a sure thing, a lead article that would Soon Appear in a leading national magazine. Chances not too good of that happening, right now. Legitimate excuse: didn’t quite know that then, hadn’t really even finished writing the article yet, but, on the other hand, how was this stark truth recently ascertained? By breaking the very first rule I laid down for them at Breadloaf. Never call an editor. I gave them that one, chiseled in porphyry. Such restraint, I elaborated, (1) allows editor to make up his sluggish mind more leisurely, hence, more favorably, and (2) allows writer to maintain his ineffable dignity, hence, his top price. So, this morning, I didn’t call. No. After four long weeks of not hearing, I got on the 9:10 A.M. bus to New York City, arrived at Port Authority Bus Terminal around 10:25 A.M., walked over to Forty-second Street. Noticed that none of his old movies were showing along there any more—bad sign—then checked the pop poster in the first dirty-books-store window, a big, scaly one of Moro as Gila Man. A true believer had scrawled “Gila Man Lives!” across the window in some new blood type of murderous lipstick, but inside, the poster’s edges were starting to curl, rolling up under the streaked glass, tight, like a creeping shroud. Another bad sign. Got a taxi over to 488 Madison, driver still for Wallace, took elevator to fourth floor, slipped in side door, Staff Only—“After all,” told myself, “I used to work here”—and since Connie wasn’t at her desk, walked right in on Harold.

“Hel-lo there, Warner.” Cheery, no surprise. “Glad you came by. I was just going to call you.”

“Got a lunch date?”

He even bothered to swivel up a0nd frown at his desk calendar. “Sorry. Can’t break it. Sit down, sit down.”

I sat. We sat. And we talked, or I talked. I talked about how far along I was on my novel, I wanted him to see it first when I had enough to show, then in a tight, familiar way about the Names I have to admit are bigger than mine—Tom (Wolfe) and Jimmy (Breslin) and Joan (Didion) and Dan (Wakefield)—and in a friendly, distant way about the ones that are still smaller, that you have to give in full. All the time establishing my own size, of course. But the anxiety-brewing thing was I couldn’t tell if Harold was really agreeing with me on size. He wasn’t saying much, making me feel almost like a full name myself. Finally I had to say, “When are you going to run my piece?”

“Well now, Warner, we’ve got a little problem here.”

Howmany times have I heard Harold say that, with the same little pebble-and-rill, good-old-So’thern-boy chuckle. But never to me, never to me. How do I dump thee? Let me count the ways. Nota bene: chuckle runs much swifter, a lot more Rebel, coming at you.

“You’re late on this already,” I got right back at him. “You wait any longer, with your lead time, it’s all going to be over. These things peak, then they plummet.”

All Harold did was nod.

So I reversed wisdom.

“Look. Everything Moro’s doing—I don’t care how bad it looks—it’s all working for him.”

“He’s gone too far.”

“You can’t go too far any more, Harold. There’s no such place.”

“You don’t think so?”

“If there is, we’ve been there and back.”

“You’ve heard the word on the picture?”

“You seen a screening?”

“Wouldn’t bother.”

“He’s great, Harold. I’m not saying anything about the picture, but if you want to see a performance.”

“I’ve seen his performance. How can you miss it?”

“They’re trying to calm him down.”

“Who is?”

“Terry’s here. I’m seeing him for cocktails.”

“Who he?”

“The director. Read my piece.”

I got a blink of credit for that twist, but then he swung around on me with that hard, black-eyed-pea stare of his. “You saw what he did on the Tonight Show.”

“I heard about it.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“No.”

“Susan and I saw it.”

“We were out that night.”

“You know how he got that thing into his mouth? With his foot. Took off his damn sock and picked it up between his toes.”

“That’s an old trick of his.”

“Oh come on, Warner!”

“No. Truth. From The Unholy Circus. Did it first with a spoon, then with a cigarette. He played this armless clown. Kind of a Pagliacci story.” Can see now I was talking too much. “Clown used to be a trapeze artist but had both his arms amputated after he let this other acrobat fall. Remorse. But his wife is this high-wire artist, still the star, and she puts him down. Betrays him with the strong man, and Moro strangles her. Lil Dagover, I think.”

“How?”

“What’d you mean?”

“How?”

“Oh. Between his knees.”

We both started sort of shrugging at each-other. “It was a silent,” I tried to explain. “A very early German silent.”

“What about the cawing?”

“He cawed?”

“Whatever the hell ravens do.”

“His animal thing. I’ve got it in the piece.”

“I guess ravens rave. He was raving, Warner.”

“When he came to this country, he didn’t have that much English, had to play it kind of Harpo Marx-y for a while, but he had all these gutturals. So he used them. Rolled them over into a lot of midnight-zoo sounds.”

“He also flies, right?”

“Right.”

“Straight at you, with this dried-up … thing still in his teeth.”

“Did he?”

Could see it: exactly how Mora would go and do the Raven on T.V. Live. Same way he did the Moth in 1935. Up close on camera, with a lot of wild, undulating motion, but always with something to deflect, rivet your attention, so you don’t notice he isn’t really off his feet. Could see the whole bit, could admire his moves, even smile, sorry I’d missed it.

Wrong facial gesture, at that particular moment.

“Wasn’t funny. It was plain sick-grisly.”

“Guess it depends on your sense of humor.”

“Come on, Warner, he’s a damn ghoul.” Harold went after something in his manuscript pile. “Now where in here do you tell us that significant personal fact?”

He had my piece slap-down in front of him, with the green bucksheet paper-clipped on top of it. I couldn’t read the comments, but I could see there were too many, all too long, to be favorable.

“You said you wanted a funny piece,” I said.

“Not if he’s not funny! Not if he’s plain damn morbid!” Harold has this kind of low-key, rational, almost enumerative way of screaming at you. “You know he was fired out of Shakespeare in the Park. You know he’s just damn lucky they didn’t cut him off on TV. You know what he’s been pulling over all this damn city. If you don’t know, read the papers. The damn New York Post even had an editorial on what he pulled in Gramercy Park … or do you only see the Times out where you are?”

“You hold a piece this long, it’s bound to date.”

He laughed. “You know as well as I do.” Not chuckled, laughed. “It’s a whole different piece now.”

I mentioned this type of situation to them at Breadloaf. I quoted, quote, “A friend of mine who writes a lot for Life once wrote: ‘Such is the precipitancy of present-day events, denying that sparest consistency to human affairs upon which even the most ephemeral reporting must depend.’” Ponderous, but I wanted to sound respectable. The truth: I wanted to be asked back to Breadloaf. The truth behind that truth: you have to hedge your woes and master a knowing, rock-ribbed tone if you’re going to hold your own with the would-be’s for two solid weeks up there in the Green Mountains. They listen, do they ever listen, for the ring of self-fulfillment and proper remuneration and tacit immortality. Have to sound simpatico but always deeply laureate. Can’t let any would-be know you might be a would-have-been. But, in sum, apropos that unmanageable quote: what he’s saying, I’m facing.

“Harold,” I try, “Moro used to be part of all our bad dreams. The good part. Maybe even the best part. Why else this craze? He’s only trying to stay in there as a going figment of the public imagination. These days it’s terribly hard to be a horror.”

“Why didn’t you write it that way?”

“That wasn’t supposed to be the idea.”

History of an Idea: Warner Williams, a middle-class indigent, given, during times of nervous stress, to referring to himself in the destitute third person—like a failed CIA agent, babbling under a blown cover—quits his job at Esquire to take a contract with the SatEvePost. A move down in the maso-fadistic careerism of the New York literary scene, but what good is reputation if it can’t buy you money, what with four children and a superior wife. Far superior. Above American letters, a Francophile; above antibiotics and chemical fertilizers and the Pill, a naturalist; above money, perhaps even above marriage, a housewife. During 1966–67, Williams manages to slip enough pieces by Otto Friedrich to gain a little extra money, i.e., time, to work on his novel—though he does not use that time to work on his novel—and even survives one of those French-Revolutionary editorial changes at the Sat-EvePost. From the Committee of Public Safety to the Directorate. All the close-in powers-that-were are trying, but it would really take Thomas Carlyle to write the company history of Curtis Publishing. But this past spring, he is given a crack at Richard M. Nixon during the primary campaign. The assignment is the first one he has liked, not having been passionately either for or against such as the Country’s Leading Tree Surgeon or the New, Rough-and-Tumble Patty Duke, Teen Turned Trollop. He is, as an objective reporter, fanatic against Nixon.

After following the candidate around for several weeks, from White Plains, N.Y., to the Disneyland Hilton, and watching Nixon slowly inch out of his shell to start slavishly impersonating his own crowds. Williams begins to see a possible approach to the story. He is fascinated by the candidate’s victory gesture, a borrowing from Eisenhower. Both Nixon arms shoot upward, and then the big Nixon hands hang limp from the Nixon wrists, index and middle fingers forming two loose, pudgy V’s. Like waggling claws, and has nobody but Williams ever noticed that a lobster goes through exactly the same motions when you pick one up by its back and drop it into the pot? Williams’ conception is now that Nixon is still in his shell, but has evolved into one of those shellfish that assume a more mobile life form. The Old Nixon was possibly a mollusk. The New Nixon is perhaps more like an Alaskan King Crab.

He is told by the SatEvePost that it’s an Esquire idea, and besides, the staff is being cut again. Williams did not last into the Empire. Then again, nobody there turned out to be Napoleon either.

He and his wife then have a long, many-whiskeys talk and agree that freelancing is no kind of life for them, that he hasn’t gotten that much done on his novel anyhow, that he’d better ask for his old job back at Esquire.

Harold tells him his old job is gone, but would he like an assignment? In fact, a free trip to Hollywood. “Some schlock outfit is shooting The Raven again. Why don’t you do Simon Moro for us?”

“Simon Moro? I thought he was Undead.”

“That’s what I mean. Could be a very funny piece.”

Williams calls his wife to say he’ll be home on the 6:00 P.M. to tell her all the news, meet him at the Junction, but she wants to know now.

“No,” Williams finally admits, “but he has a great assignment for me.”

Nothing.

“Simon Moro.”

Nothing.

“I can do a fast job on it. It’ll only take a couple of weeks, and then I can start looking around for a—”

“A couple of weeks where?”

“In Hollywood.”

Nothing.

“He’s paying me a thousand this time, and I can pick up a little on expenses by staying with the Dunnes.”

“So you’re still free.”

“That’s not it, honey.”

“I wish I were free.”

“Look. Alice Glaser has my old job.”

“What’s it feel like to be free, Warner?”

“I can finish it during July, and then we can both go up to Breadloaf together.”

“I’m not going to Breadloaf. You’re free to go if you want. Come and go, just as you please.”

“It’s not as I please. But we need—”

“Only it isn’t really freedom. You know that, Warner? It’s just absenteeism.”

“You know we need the money.”

“You’re being marked absent, Warner. Get your mother to write you an excuse.”

Williams also calls his agent, to tell her that Harold will call, to tell her … no, to have her tell him that it’s all fine and grand and dandy. But she surprises him.

“Why are you doing this?”

Nothing.

“Why are you doing this, Warner?”

“The money, Candida.”

“You know it’s not the money.”

Nothing.

“It’s going to be the Post all over again, only for even less money.”

“I learn from these trips, Candida. I’m using a kind of cinematic technique in my novel. These guys won’t be D. W. Griffith out there, but that’s just the point. I want this novel to have a sort of hand-held quality. It’s going along nice and trashy now, and—”

“Then why would you want to do this instead of it?”

“I can’t just starve.”

“You’ve never starved, Warner. Except for things I guess you don’t really have that much appetite for, do you?”

Addenda to History of an Idea: I was often asked two questions at Breadloaf. 1. Do you think up the ideas, or do they? “We sort of agree on them together.” 2. Does an agent do any good? “Funny thing, but, it’s not so much the money, though an agent can obviously be very helpful, there. It’s much more the comfort, the relief.”

Then there was a third question. What happens if a magazine doesn’t take an article? “You mean, one they’ve assigned?” Yes. “Well, there’s always a guarantee …”

“We’ve already paid you the two-fifty, haven’t we?” Harold began to wind up on me. “We’ll forget about that. It’s still a thousand, clear, if you want to do the rewrite. Keep the anecdotes. They’re great. Same with the bio, but better check your facts. The researcher couldn’t find half the stuff you’ve got in here.”

“It’s all from personal interview. Nobody ever asked him about his Vienna days before.”

“Okay, okay. That’s not the real problem anyhow. What you’ve got to tell us is why this new weird scene. Is he just playing to his own craze, like you say, or has he gone megalomaniac, like I say, or maybe back on drugs again?”

“That’s out.”

“You be sure.”

“I am sure.”

“All right. For all I know, he’s seeing a Mad Scientist, but something’s freaky. That’s where this piece falls down. You’ve got to tell us why this zombie walks. There’s a title for you.”

Maybe I should’ve said no, but Harold is another one of those people in my life who goes down on my Gunga Din List.

So I’ll meet ’im later on

At the place where ‘e is gone—

Where it’s always Dull-Won’t-Do and Please-Revise—

’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals

Givin’ leads to poor damn souls,

An’ I’ll write a piece in hell for Gunga Hayes!

Yes, Hayes! Hayes! Hayes!

You hickish, hacky, hambone Gunga Hayes!

Though I’ve ’sulted you and ’trayed you,

By the fashion mag that made you,

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Hayes!

So, that’s three in a row that have bounced on me. The Nixon piece. Then a commentary on the New Journalism I tried for The American Scholar. Admittedly a rewrite of “Why There Is Only a How to Article Writing,” but since they didn’t take it after Mary Moore Molony heard me up at Breadloaf and asked for it, I have to count it against me. And now this run-in with Harold. Maybe not quite strike three, but a barely audible foul tip.

Have to try to salvage this one. I’m at a point now where something, no matter how trivial, has got to go right for me. As far as Jane’s concerned: the piece is sold, for some reason the check is late, I’ve told her Candida is seeing about that, and I’m back working on my novel again. We’ve got a few other matters to settle, e.g., the Hazel Rio Business—Incident? Affair? What was it, what short title covers it?—but I’m beginning to think the same rules hold for marriage that hold for fiction. Point of view. Don’t state, indicate. Less is more. Et cetera. Maybe marriage is fiction. But what I’m really doing is working back over my notes, putting down here every last nuance and gesture and movement of eyelash I can remember from my brief but still festering association with Simon Moro. I’ve got to do this before I start rewriting because (1) Harold is right, I missed on him somehow, and (2) that’s all I have to work with. Moro won’t see me again.

Met Terry for cocktails today at the Ground Floor. Hard to recognize him without his tennis shoes, but I guess he was dressing for the East. Underneath, still the same incorrigible M-G-M cheerleader-type: “All right now, evvvry-body, let’s give a great big lion’s roar for the mooo-vies!” He ordered a Gibson with four onions, which he nibbled off the toothpick like shashlik. Stagy implication: sorry, can’t stay and drink, must eat and run.

“I don’t want you to talk to him again. I don’t mind telling you that because I happen to know he’s not going to talk to you.”

“Has he flipped out, or what?”

“Beats me. The trouble I had with him during shooting—you know, you saw it—was subtle trouble. A lot of scene-stealing, real cutie-pie and devious, like a pickpocket. You don’t know your wallet’s gone until you see the rushes. Fouled me up a little, but I edited most of it out. If you’ve seen the picture, you probably can tell, but the audience can’t.”

He was fishing, but I wasn’t going to say I’d seen the picture because I didn’t want to tell him what I thought of the picture—because I don’t really know what I think. It’s lousy, but not true-lousy Ersatz-lousy, with Moro great. True-great, not phony-great. Nobody can cut into a Moro performance. They found that out in 1937 when they tried to butcher Ghoulgantua. And I happen to know Terry isn’t allowed to edit his own pictures anyhow. “I’m waiting to see it with an audience,” I said.

“You’ll love it.” (Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame, let’s hear it for the Hunchback….) “It’s a real coronary.” He stopped to fight down the heat of an onion. “But this act he’s pulling now. I don’t dig. Plain fucking blatant. Like a mugging. That I can handle too. He’s not gonna kill this picture, hard as he’s trying. Too good a picture, and I’m gonna cut his balls off in broad daylight.”

“Where?”

“At the premiere.”

“Which is?”

“Wednesday, midnight. The Pentagonal.”

“You’re going into the Pentagonal?”

“You don’t like the Pentagonal?”

“It’s a good Broadway flophouse.”

That, or the onions, got him finally to take a sip of his drink. “Okay. You get a few bug bites from the Times second-stringer, who reads? You still got your New York showing, and the driveins could care less.” He sipped yet again. “But it just so happens I like, I want the Pentagonal. Big stage. For this personal appearance I’m gonna have him make.”

“Can you trust him?”

“Got it fixed so I don’t have to.”

“What’s up?”

“Stay close.”

“I need to know for my story.”

“All I can say now is that Wednesday will not be for those who are weak of heart. I’ll leave you a freebie at the box office.”

We talked about the Hazel Rio … File, I guess, and he said she was somewhere around New York, didn’t know where to get hold of her, figured she’d show up Wednesday midnight. “Never gonna be in another picture of mine,” he finished her. “Had to edit her as much as him. Too much titty-titty-bang-bang.” A lot of help. He finished his skewer of onions and left the rest of his drink, bounced all the way out of there on nothing but the balls of his feet. Captain Ked. I stayed behind to pay the bill, then walked over to the Warwick and tried to call Moro on the house phone. He answered with what I thought was a hello, but when I said who I was, he began doing his animal sounds. The cougar scream, then the raven, the rabid dog, the hyena, and then that long, low hiss he once told me was a lizard lying in the hot desert sun with its throat cut. Vide Gila Man. I think it was all a deliberate act, but couldn’t swear to that in open court.

Where I stand now: waiting for Wednesday. Meanwhile, shoving manuscript into this envelope, which is going to go to only one person for consideration. He alone will decide whether it’s right or not, whether it contains the “makings of an article.” I’ve had enough of outside rejections. This is really an intricate, highly ulterior, who knows, maybe even counterproductive assignment: write a piece on Warner Williams doing a piece on Simon Moro. Write it for Warner Williams. Forget style. Just show whether Warner Williams, during this short disease, his career, still has a fighting chance, or has he finally fallen fatally nil, incurably slick?

The researcher is a pain. I know her. A melancholiac about opinion, a paranoiac about facts. Considers Homer unreliable oral history and crosschecks dates like July 4, 1776, or the Ides of March, or December 25. “You research a piece until you meet yourself coming back the other way,” I told them at Bread-loaf. I failed to mention you might still have to meet up with her. Miss Clio, Vassar ’62. “Unable to verify Moro’s appearance as a robot in Manmade Man, 1927. Not included in any cast list.”

Okay, okay, he was using a different name then. Maybe his own. Check cast list for Rudolph Eckmann. The film, of course, is lost. So, for that matter, is The Unholy Circus. Actually, we know them both only in synopsis, and then only in rather suspect translation, from their American publicity releases. (Cf. above, what I pitched to Harold yesterday could be pure potato pie.) All very dubious, Miss Clio, highly questionable sources, but it just so happens there also yet survive a few grainy stills from these Weimar epics, prominently featuring a gaunt, crook-necked, hump-beaked figure who is unmistakably, under all that metal casing, irrefutably, under all that clown paint, the early Simon Moro. Armored, then armless. Solid evidence, Miss Clio, right there before our very eyes, those matched and paired sensory orbs that so often team up to give us full retinal validation of the cinematographic experience whenever we drop round to the local nabe.

I guess I’ve seen all the rest of them. Wasn’t that hard, what with the craze kicking up. I caught Zeppelin at the Strand in Lambertville, N.J., an arty nickelodeon, but very comfortable; owner yanked out every other row of seats so his patrons could stretch and slump, and when you drop a candy wrapper, it doesn’t go into the dark, dark, dark, but lies right out there in the noon blaze of the EXIT signs.

However, to be serious, à la Sarris: few people apparently realize that Zeppelin was his first talkie. Berlin, Fritz Lang, 1930. Also significant that Moro played the part of Hans, the Westphalian infanticide, so close to his own physical characteristics. For the first time in his film career—and he was already a legend among cosmeticians—suddenly no disguise, and none of the contortionist. Only the ungarnished actor, the potentially great, remarkably pure actor who’d begun to work with Brecht. And even on the primitive sound track, you can hear ab ovo that reedy, alienating, Moro rasp that is actually as natural to him as it seems to be preternatural to others. I don’t know German, but in voice quality, it’s exactly how he sounds later on in English. As much off screen as on, though his ordinary voice tends to grate much more, insidiously. All the modulations of predation, and also the gestures. He doesn’t even really need that voice. He can indicate corruption with just the back of his neck. There is that famous sequence in Zeppelin, right after he’s committed one of his atrocities, no, right before, when the camera focuses on nothing but his shaggy hairline, his seedy collar, two bony knobs of his spinal column. All he does is shift his shoulders, but the knobs swell, engorge. You never see his face, don’t have to.

Much more chilling, convincing, for my money, than what’s supposed to be the big scene, up in the zeppelin itself. Too Expressionistic, or maybe just too Germanic. Captain Kleist (Conrad Veidt) spots him running from the bushes in the band park where he’s dragged the dead Heidi, swoops down, captures him on the fly, then carries him out over the North Sea. Just too goddamn God-like, and at this late date, it’s hard to understand how come people got so hysterically frightened of zeppelins, vide William Butler Yeats. But Moro still lends it considerable realism. You almost believe he’s maybe innocent—just stumbled onto the dead girl—after his long protestation to Captain Kleist. Then the breakdown. Kleist puts him in a bottomless cage out over the bomb bay and lets all these frolicsome Kinder run loose around the bars. Shot so that Moro looks like this big furry pet in a pen, right in the middle of a nursery school. He plays it that way too, romping, wagging, gamboling, the big St. Bernard, anything to fight down his impulses, pretend he doesn’t have this Reichian compulsion. Then he sees this little blonde girl, younger than the rest, another Heidi, and that cracks him open. Close-ups of swirls of Viking-white hair, and then every cut back to him shows another part of his mind crumbling. Obsessive lava leaking through the thin crust of normality. The lunge at the bars, and then the high, scratchy scream as Kleist, having proven the psychiatric case, opens the bomb bay, drops him down, down, down to the ice floes, and that last great touch, the little girl crying, Captain Kleist promising her another puppy.

That’s his best role until Ghoulgantua. Some people think a lot of The Moth, but I still didn’t care much for it when I saw it again at the Thalia. Too many cheap tricks. Moro told me they were originally going to end up with the Moth caught in a giant, electrified wire web, face to face with a sort of Spider Lady (Fay Wray) who finally zaps him with the current. But some Southern power company objected, and besides they were way over budget, so they wrote in that chintzy ring of medieval torches instead. Doesn’t work. He goes up much too fast, like a leaf pile. M. only went through with the picture on a promise from the studio that he could do his own version of The Idiot next. But The Moth did lousy box office, deserved to, the studio backed off a little on Moro, and he never got to play Prince Myshkin, a shame because, stretching a point, but not that much, it’s like Dostoevski wrote it for him. The film’s only interest now lies in M.’s personal gymnastics: the terrific, fluttery leaps he takes, made them look like flights, up against the outsides of lit windows; his dark flapping over his smothered victims with powdery, umbrageous wings; and his last desperate efforts to keep away from the flambeaux even as he snaps and flits nearer and nearer their blazing allure. Also, his twittery hum, and the way, during close-ups, he curls his tongue around on itself, so that the tip becomes almost a scroll. True to nature, that bit, but more for butterflies than moths, and it didn’t really carry much of the idea of bloodlust.

No, Ghoulgantua is his masterpiece, 1937, and the fact that it’s been unavailable for so long, amounting almost to a suppression, has got to be one of the all-time low points in film-distribution practices. A real pandering to public taste.

Americans could take Frankenstein, but not this much more involuted and honest evocation of monstrosity. Some critics, even Pauline Kael, I think, tend to put Moro down for stealing so much from Frankenstein, but they miss the point. M. never thought of his borrowings as a theft. He was simply out to pillory the bourgeois decadence of Frankenstein.

“That’s a good example of Brecht’s influence on me, if you’re still looking for one,” I have M. down here saying in my notes. Then some jottings: All art is public. No property rights in culture. Artist’s duty to correct, revise, re-do previous artists. “I went along with that nonsense, if it is nonsense. Very un-American of me.” Then that toothsome grin, somehow as twinkly as it is skeletal. “But also very American of me. What the majors did for years.”

Actually, odd bits of Brecht run all through the film, right from the opening scene with Dr. Dollfuss and Bruno out collecting the dead bodies. “Grave-robbing. What kind of a crime is that? What real social harm?” (Still quoting M., but these don’t sound like his own ideas.) “Some poor beggar we see picking through trash—do we arrest him? But if the refuse is human, was human, picking through for a few bones and a brain is supposed to be an outrage. Stupid. No, I wanted to make the—let’s give the religious their due—the resurrection of the bodies, I wanted that to have social import.” Hence, the montage. The two caped figures skulk among the broached graves, Dr. Dollfuss with his hooded lamp held high, its slit of light swinging from time to time directly into the camera, blinding us with sudden, burnt-out vignettes, all reverse-negative. A Negro corpse twisting on a lynch rope, but the Negro white, the rope black. A striker falling under a murderous, but ghostly, charge of mounted policemen, on spectral steeds, wielding silvery nightsticks. A banker jumping from a high ledge on a building as pale as a pillar of salt. A wino slumped into frozen death on the cold steps of the New York Public Library, turned black as an Aztec altar. A trapped miner, his face dirty—but the dirt like lime, not soot—agonizing in silent throes. Even a shrouded, girlish body, presumably, from the few bleak instruments glowing, like obsidian on the ashy sheet, an abortionist’s victim. “What kind of bodies? What nature of death? That was the point.” (Still M., but more like himself.) “They gave Frankenstein’s monster—what? A madman’s brain. Carte blanche. Freedom Now. To kill and maim, and still be loved. Sentimental slop. Truly. I didn’t want sympathy for Ghoulgantua. I wanted justification. The dead rising in vengeance. For what has been done to them.” This kind of thing is what eventually got M. called before HUAC, but I don’t think people really caught much of the propaganda when they first saw the film. Certainly that wasn’t why it disappeared. It was much more people’s shock at how M. had realized the monster visually.

He’s very good on that himself. “Talk to Boris sometime. I love Boris. A dear, sweet, old man.” (F.Y.I., there is maybe thirteen years’ difference in age between them.) “But ask him how they arrived at his make-up. He’ll tell you. They spent days. ‘A fortnight,’ Boris will say, always the limey. The expanded forehead, the sutures, the contact points, putter, putter, putter. Then, what happens? When Jack Pierce is all done, Boris takes one look in the mirror and sees—what else?—the two bright eyes of an intelligent Englishman—who else?—staring out at him from this subhuman face. ‘The thing you always had to bear in mind’—I’ve heard him say this—‘was that the monster was only five minutes old.’ So Boris takes two little bits of putty and puts them on his eyelids, weights them down, the right even more than the left. For him I suppose it was right, but what did that produce? A squinter. A staggerer. A somnambulist. Mr. Mona Lisa.

“No. I didn’t want a pitiful brain. I wanted an intellect. A vampire’s keenness. The story has my brain being stolen bit by bit out of the crypt of a university chapel, and I used rubber bands. Tight. Back over my eyelids, you see, popping the eyes, squeezing them out. I was in tears, all the time, but since I couldn’t blink them back, the tears bathed the eyes. Laved them, made them shine all the more. Like specimens. Boris loves to complain. The heat, the hours, the boredom. But mine. Mine was pure torture. That’s what made it work. I really was in pain.”

That comes through clearly on film, often overwhelmingly, but at the same time Moro was very careful not to trail off into mere masochism. He balanced his portrayal by adding that terroristic grin, which we first see through the clouds of steam as Dr. Dollfuss and Bruno together winch the fully-formed Ghoulgantua up out of the bubbling vat. N.B.: another triumph over Frankenstein, that vat—G. slowly steeping in the reeky elixirs of the moribund, until ripe—as opposed to Dr. F.’s rather sterile electrification process. Initially we take this grin at, so to speak, face value—as simply another ghastly sign of awakening life in the monster—but then we soon discover it signifies G.’s vampire lust. Long, splayed fangs in parched, bloodless lips almost rake open the bottom half of that skull-like face: unquenchable sanguivorousness. Better than Nosferatu, in my opinion. Actually, it was a gigantic denture that Moro had made for him, deliberately too large. “An Iron Maiden, taken orally,” he used to joke about it, and that also heightened the look of excruciating blood-thirst. The only difficulty was that he couldn’t talk with it in his mouth, and since he was really directing the film, despite a nominal credit to Tod Browning, this hampered him on set. When I saw G. recently at the Modern Museum—the uncut version, finally—I was struck with how much more woodenly the grin scenes come off than G.’s other rampages. But it was still an inspired guise. Nobody argues that. What controversy there is centers on the nudity. M. really did starve himself down to almost skin and bone, and then wore only this sort of mummy wrapping of a loin cloth. Watching very closely this time, I did catch several moments when it does definitely bulge, but it does not, as Louella Parsons kept writing in her column, ever slip. Like so many others, she missed Moro’s intent, which wasn’t at all exhibitionistic, and saw what she wanted to see. What was bothering M., what he strongly opposed, was “putting the dead in civilian clothing,” as he accused James Whale of having done in F., “making the fruit of the grave dress just like you and I.” He wanted to show the skin graftings, the putrefications all over G.’s white-horrid body, and not alone for their shock value either. “Perhaps I was thinking of your Herman Melville.” M. is full of American literature. “There are variations in the skin tones. Pronounced variations. You can see them even in black and white, and they represent—if you don’t mind a literary borrowing—they show that Ghoulgantua contains as much of humanity as the Pequod.”

My own guess is that he probably could still have gotten away with all this egregious horror, for whatever intellectual purpose, if he hadn’t done the scene with the little girl. Zeppelin automatically comes to mind, but he was really still picking up from Frankenstein here, though perversely, since Universal had already cut that episode from F. after loud public outcry. Yet he went right ahead, and even made it worse. “Not worse,” he insists when you get him on this. “More realistic. Psychologically.” He gets really adamant, now that I remember. “They misunderstood at Universal. Completely. It isn’t the little girl who gives the flower to the monster. That’s daughter-father. It’s the monster who gives the flower to the little girl. That’s boy-girl.”

Even at the Modern Museum, a pretty hip audience, I noticed a few people walked out when that came on screen. It really is pretty hard to take, and I think I now know why. Not because of the enticement. That’s almost gentle, though maybe precursively stomach-turning since you begin to suspect what’s coming next. Then the walk off into the woods together is an extreme long shot, can’t really tell who’s leading, who’s following. All there is, actually in the way of action consists of a twig snapping under G.’s hard, skeletal heel, extra loud, then a couple of shots of crushed wildflowers on the forest floor, small, look like violets, and then, suddenly, the violent swaying of branches, crashing, together loud enough on the sound track so as to drown out any (implied) plaints or moans or maybe ecstasies. It gets to you, that scene, no question, cornball as it is, but not, I’m suggesting, through anything Ghoulgantua does. It’s somehow much more the girl. There’s something about her, for all her Shirley Temple ringlets, that’s vaguely illicit. I get a slight Baby Le Roy vibration from her …

But that’s material I prefer to handle all in due course. And in fine detail, since I never did get M. to admit absolutely outright, total truth about her. Back to cinematographic history. My own critical judgment of G., having now seen it five times: still a masterpiece, one of those rare instances where the imitation is better than the original, much the way Hamlet outdistances Hieronymo. (Good way to put it, as a matter of fact, because, at bottom, Ghoulgantua is a Revenge Tragedy. Maybe a line to follow in revising article?) M. improved not only upon the Universal film but also, I think, upon Mary Shelley’s original tale, which, despite its arctic denouement, has aspects that are too lakeside and summery, straight Lac Como. He kept all the gothicism, but enlarged upon the depredations, broadened them out into the modern world as we know it, and fear it. The startling disclosure, for instance, twenty minutes into the picture, that Dr. Dollfuss’s medieval laboratory is really located in the sub-basement of a huge department store, i.e., symbolically, a level-of alchemy that lies beneath all the bargain floors above where dross is truly turned to gold. This also allows G., following his feast upon his creator and the unfortunate Bruno, the use of an elevator.

From then on—and I think this is Moro’s greatest achievement—the monster turns, into an urban terror, a conception that was at least thirty years ahead of its time. G. strikes quickly, everywhere, with randomness and anomie. On the empty subway car, in the vacant hotel lobby, up the fire escape, more than once from a public comfort station. Even the little girl is one of those attacks in broad daylight that we so often read now in the park news. G. kills, consumes, at the febrile pace of the city itself. I have down here from M.: “I wanted to see the last of the monster as rural plodder.”

The ending has sometimes been questioned, cf. Richard Schickel in Commentary, “Three Films That Go on Past ‘Now’”: is it perhaps too urban, insufficiently gothic? But once a cinematic rhythm has been established, it has to be kept up. Besides, M. didn’t want what he called “the excuse of garlic and crosses.” “That’s paraphernalia. What really destroys Ghoulgantua,” he explained, “is Christmas. The way I sometimes feel it destroys us all.” More than a lighthearted comment; M.’s scripting here amounts to a subtle philippic against commercialization of the Yuletide; says he himself is a Zoroastrian, i.e., belief in the Three Wisemen, the dignity of their mission, but not all the claims made by the Parent for the Child. At the height of the season, the store is open late hours, and G., caught unawares by the bright lights, is spotted skulking down toward the sub-basement. By a drunken Santa Claus, whom the manager has sent back to his locker. G. kills the Santa Claus, but Santa’s cries have been heard. This gives M. his chance for a wild mob scene inside the department store that drives G. out of hiding—much as the townspeople drive Frankenstein’s monster through the castle before their civil wrath—only G. upward, toward the roof. There he is forced over the edge by the outraged, frazzled holiday crowd and falls twelve stories to the plaza below. But that’s not all, in the uncut version. M.: “I still wanted that stake through the heart.” The final frames are deliberately phantasmagoric, but there is no doubt how the monster finally lies impaled. Light zings and loops from ropes of tinsel, pine boughs rock under the great, sprawled weight, and G.’s dying fish eye is last seen reflected in the close-up curvature of a jiggling ornament. All I can say is that the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has not looked all that festive to me since.

From my notes: “Studio objected that ending was too final. Left no margin for revival of G. in case of sequel.” Fantastic to realize that hopes for the picture originally ran that high. They cut it drastically, of course, right after it opened. Left G. falling from roof, no Xmas tree bulb, eliminated most of the city violence, butchered the film even to the point of confusing the story line at times. But there was really no way to sanitize the Ghoulgantuan horror. What few audiences saw G. before it was completely withdrawn understood perfectly and fled. The plain truth is that, in 1937, you just couldn’t molest the likes of Shirley Temple or demonize Christmas. Moro had gone too far, in real ignorance of American prejudices, I feel, and after this debacle, most critics feel he sinks immed iately and uncompromisingly into studio commercialism.

To an extent, that’s true. After all, how else was he going to survive? But trite as the Gila Man pictures seem now, were even then, it’s a mistake not to recognize M.’s considerable artistry in creating the slithery being that did finally make him big box office in America. Gila Man is no Ghoulgantua—”about as terrifying as my son’s pet newt,” one reviewer wrote, though wrong-headedly, I feel—but he still far outdistances Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolfman or Spencer Tracy’s Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde, to mention two other mutants that have been much, and I happen to think, overly, praised. I suppose you really have to see several Gila Man pictures together to gain the full impact of M.’s reptilianism. Last June, I happened to catch Gila Man and Gila Man Returns on a double bill, and then The House of Gila Man at another theater, all in one afternoon on Forty-second Street. Over and over again, the thin, almost Eliotesque bank teller yielded to the pull of the planet Pluto upon him, dropping helplessly onto all fours, then belly-down against the cold marble floor. The delicate skin of his face rippled over itself into imbricated coarseness—some use of dissolves, but mostly M.’s personal make-up job, applied in stop-motion sequence—the long tongue began to flick, then the hiss, and finally the crawl, the scuttle, up and out through the narrow space beneath the teller’s window bars. Human evolution runs backward through the camera. Absolutely eerie. The plots, of course, were nothing. Comic strips. But there are still individual scenes. The opening of House, for example, where Gila Man is discovered lying out on the desert flats, covered with sand, his eyes seemingly cataracted, completely lifeless. Ingeniously, M. revives Gila Man in the very way Nature herself might have chosen: by simply shedding his entire skin.

Then there are all the Nazis he played during the war. Either the bad Nazi who dies horribly, justly, or the good Nazi who turns against Hitler and dies bravely, sacrificially. “The bad Nazis I didn’t mind,” M. says here in my notes. “I could do them as an objective reality, Brechtian, if not as a real character. Build up a loathing in the audience that was healthy. But the good Nazis. They were migraines, maybe eight different pills I had to take to sleep at nights. Such lies. The studio was trying to bank some sympathy for me, for after the war, that was the idea. My de-Nazification. But all I wanted to do was see that the public didn’t forget.” I mentioned I’d seen Hitler’s Camps as a kid, and remembered him as being quite convincing as the commandant who suddenly walked out and began cutting open his own barbed wire. But he shook his head. “The only good Nazi is a dead Argentinian.”

He did, in fact, do very few pictures after the war. Perhaps the drug thing, though that never stopped Bela Lugosi. In any case, he left the studio and began working hit and; miss, mostly miss. He returned to Germany briefly to produce, direct, and act in a film (which he also apparently wrote) that is, for some reason having to do with the Bonn government, unobtainable. Nor will he talk about it, even the title. “Didn’t have a title. Never got that far. It was a conscience picture. What really happened inside the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Asked Miss Clio to track it down, since she supposedly knows German, but all she could come up with was: “Prints are under court seal in Frankfurt. Certain officials threatened action for defamation, but there’d been no public release. Moro signed an agreement to do no more movies in Germany, and returned to U.S. Some rumors that financing was East Berlin deal, but unable to verify.” There are several cameo appearances, including one for Mike Todd, though most people miss his bit in Around the World in Eighty Days—some very funny business with a Pernod glass on top of a barrelhouse piano—because the main gag is Frank Sinatra is playing. Then in a musical, Slippers and Shoes, where he sang for the first time. “Like a cracked Jew’s harp,” he says himself. And he was hired to do the voice of Toad for Disney’s Wind in the Willows, but apparently became “indisposed” and had to be replaced. “I flubbed the dub,” he told me. His puns in English can sometimes be woefully Teutonic.

Most of this, unhappily, was self-parody. Not even imitation. An important distinction to draw, since M. is actually quite a wonderful mimic. He has, for example, a superb imitation he does of the people who go around imitating Simon Moro. He does the overly nasal rasp, the overly squeaky sibilants, the glut of gutturals exactly the way cocktail party hams have been doing them, so badly, ever since this craze began. The catch is that he gives his own fake Simon Moro a cultural twist. Recites Goethe in German, or Roosevelt’s speeches in English. The effect is incredibly schizoid. For instance, he can deliver the line “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” so that it absolutely breaks you up, but at the same time, leaves you feeling distinctly anxious.

That, however, is a private performance. The public self-parody has never been that subtle, despite what Terry implies about a sudden coarsening of M.’s behavior lately. He’s only gotten coarser, almost savage, who knows what? (The crux of the matter, the problem at hand.) There’s some excuse: he has to play himself broadly to fit the crudities of these inhospitable “guest appearances,” which have been his only gainful employment for a long time. The Raven is actually the first solid part he’s had in eight years. Before that, his last decent film was The Shoplifter, 1960, a low-budget, on-the-city-streets gem, expanded from an old Philco Playhouse script. M. went a lot farther with the character than Rod Steiger was ever able to go on TV, emphasizing the sexual pathos of the nervous, crypto-transvestite thief in “booster bloomers.” But, typical Moro luck, he turned in a low-key, almost Chekhovian interpretation a year after the Paddy-Chayefsky thing was as dead as Marty.

Low point, the real nadir of this self-parody, from a film I happened to catch on the Late Late Show one night: his chase scene with Lou Costello. Awful. The studio had loaned him out, against his wishes, and he was forced to play a rickrack version of Ghoulgantua. He looked like a medical school joke, and worse, Lou was shown trying to run away from him in drag. Girlish squeals, lace sleeves, and Mary Janes. A mockery of all the great shock moments he’d created in Z. and G.

I had a brief conversation with him about this in his dressing-room trailer one lunchtime. He was sitting with the skirts of his black caftan—“Ravenswear,” he calls it—tucked up under him, gobbling Ry-Krisps out of this big, black calfskin purse, drawstrings yet, that Mike Todd sent him five thousand untaxable dollars in, under a layer of black excelsior and licorice jellybeans. Try checking that, Miss Clio.

“It was your great theme.”

“Still is.”

“Even after what they did to it?”

“Remember. I left the studio.”

“Over that?”

“Not totally. But right after that.”

“Will you ever go back?”

“To the studio?”

“To the theme.”

He grinned. “How old do you think Lenore is in this film?”

“Scoff.”

“Really?”

“Hazel Rio?”

“She’s ageless.”

“Look. Simon.”

“Yes.”

“Is it personal with you?”

“Is what personal?”

“Little girls.”

“You expect me to answer that?”

“Why not?”

He grinned again. “Actually, it’s very American. Your Edgar Allan Poe. What did he say was the most poetic idea? Sadness at the death and destruction of a beautiful woman.”

“He said ‘woman.’ Not ‘little girl.’”

“But what was his idea of a woman? His thirteen-year-old cousin.”

“Your victims are never over eight.”

“But I think of them as older.”

“You’re trying to put me on.”

“And you’re trying to push me around.”

“You started this in Germany. During a very decadent time.”

“Ja, you think so?”

“Everybody loves children. The whole world. The Italians. The French. The Russians are supposed to, especially. Even you Germans. Here we’ve got a child-centered culture.”

“You have children?”

“Four.”

“Boy? Girl?”

“All girls.”

“Wonderful.”

He thought he had me stopped, but I kept after him. “You have any children?”

“Alas,” he said, with a big sigh, full of fatherly feeling all right, but it didn’t really come out yes or no.

“Do you like children?”

He nodded. “As you say, the whole world. Yes. Ja. Oui. Si.”

“So how could you pick the one thing that everybody, everybody agrees is heinous—I mean, shocking and disgusting and revolting, or whatever—and make that your whole career?”

Said more than I meant to. Or maybe I didn’t say it quite that strong. (“No, I don’t use a tape recorder,” I told them at Bread-loaf, “but I’m accurate in the main.”) Anyhow, I know I’m accurate, dead right on what he answered, with that goddamn amphibian little smirk of his.

“Why not aim high?”

The day before I flew out to the coast, I managed to track down a man here in New York who’d known Moro during his old Vienna days. Dr. Horst Yost. I suppose Miss Clio really deserves the credit for Dr. Yost. She’d somehow unearthed a reference to M. in one of Yost’s early books, among the acknowledgments—“… and especially to the actor Simon Moro, the earliest of my auxiliary egos …”—and passed it along to me, adding a note that Yost met with a group in the city every Tuesday night at an upper Broadway address. I gather she follows the analytic scene fairly closely. Half expected to see her up there, delving into her own depression, but Yost is really too much bombast for anybody with her delicately poised analities. His is the theatrical approach. “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad tales of the dearth of selves …”

I was a little late for the performance, i.e., therapy, coming in just after he’d begun to warm up the crowd, i.e., initiate ego involvement. What made everything seem even more showbiz was the hall. It was really a run-down dance studio. An exercise bar, a dark shimmer of speckled mirrors, and two large standing neon lamps. Pink and yellow. Though maybe he’d brought those with him. They certainly added. At least to my own impression of him. To wit: there is a portrait you often find in books on the Surrealists by a sixteenth-century Italian, Arcimboldo, of a man composed entirely of garden produce. A pear for a nose, grapes for hair, pea pods for eyelids, leeks for mustachios, and a melon for a chest. Under that garish light, almost like a bakeshop window, Dr. Yost could have been done the same way in Viennese pastry. A blintz for a nose, sugar cookies for lips, meringue for hair, macaroons for cheeks, bon-bons for eyes, marzipan for teeth, cinnamon for beard stubble, and, for those overly rich chest tones of his, a huge pot of chocolate, thick enough to stand a spoon.

In other words, an overbearingly sweet man, who was working his sugary way through the crowd, seeking out the gullible, the delectable. And I’d have to admit he was good at his trade. He pushed two bobbed-and-bullish types several giggles beyond any pretense they were just working-girl “roomies,” then got a jawless homosexual, male, to say he wanted to be a therapist himself, dwelling long on the poor man’s insistence on a “non-directional” approach. He even picked on me, of a sudden, an unfamiliar face, and wormed out how much of my novel still lay unfinished before me, something I don’t usually admit to in public.

But these were just the try-outs. He was after the evening’s big act, and finally lined up a cast of two, a husband and wife, in their late thirties, from Bronxville. They were both unattractive enough to dishearten each other thoroughly, and stood up in front of us, side by side, blankly troubled. The first thing Yost did was have them turn and face each other squarely, really look at each other. “As opposites,” he told them. This disconcerted them, him even more than her. “After all these years, my dear,” he said to her, “is he still so shy with you?” She smiled quickly, really to cover her embarrassment, but Yost immediately snapped at him, “Does she consider it such a joke?”

“It’s no joke,” the man let out. He was saying it vaguely—to himself, if anyone—but he was facing her, squarely, so the quarrel was on.

“Who said it was a joke?” she demanded.

“You don’t have to say.”

“I’m not allowed to speak?”

“You want to say, say.”

Then they both stopped, not really wanting to say anything, either of them, not even wanting to be there. Until the little heat they’d worked up began to kindle another snappy, inconclusive argument to keep them momentarily warm and safe: whose big idea was it to come here at all, in the first place, anyhow?

“Yours.”

“Mine? You.”

“Never.”

“You, you, you.”

Yost broke in again. “I’m sure you wanted to come, my dear. Didn’t you? You’ve always wanted to come, but … somehow … difficulties arise …”

It was so saccharine with innuendo that it set my teeth on edge. Hers too, and naturally she knew whom to blame for opening her up to such insults. It was still silent blame at this stage, all in her squinty glare, but he reacted numbly, stymied somewhere back in their cozy quarreling.

“I’m not the one who made you come.”

Titters from the, I guess, audience. Quick cattiness from the wife now. “No indeed.” Mumbles from the husband. But, after some loud prompting from Yost, he picked up his lines again.

“You want to let everybody know all about it?” he challenged her.

“Let her know all about it,” Yost sharply directed.

“Want me to tell them how—?”

“Tell her how.”

“—you ride me all the time?” From what I could see, it was Yost who was riding him, but he let fly at her and meant every word he was saying. “Ride, ride, ride!”

“So ride her! That’s what she wants.” Not from Yost. From the audience this time: a catcall. But when the heckler stood up, a tall, black-jawed brute of a guy, it was obvious he was part of the act. He got over behind the husband in about four long strides and leaned into his ear, taking a lot of pink light on his coal jaw. “Saddle up, fella.”

I realized I’d seen him before. On Gunsmoke or one of the others. The lesser coyote, the one who’s always hanging back behind a gallery post outside the saloon, never brave enough to come shouldering through the swinging doors. Always the first to get gunned down in the big shoot-out, usually off the roof where he’s tried to take a dirty advantage. That grizzle along his jaw, a deliberate, almost kempt growth, was how he quickly, rawly indicated deep lack of character. A powerful-enough-looking guy, bulging everywhere, big, brawny hams out the double vents of his suit jacket. But those grubby whiskers, the seedy way he scruffed and scratched them, won out.

“Don’t let her throw you now. She looks mean, but they don’t last long, them mean little ones with the short legs. You see how short she is there in the leg? A damn stool’s got longer, and a damn stool needs three. How’s she gonna stand up to you on just two?”

He even gave the husband a brisk, friendly pat on the butt, which jolted him, made him nearly forget he was a coward with women.

“You ride me,” he snapped at her, “and it’s not even me. It’s some idea you got of me.”

“Some idea. Some idea I got of you,” she lamented, “lemme tell you.”

The heavy actually bent down, cupped his hands into a stirrup, and made exaggerated lifting motions with his arms and shoulders. “Come on, fella. Get up there on her.”

“You never had a decent idea. Of anything or anybody.” Still pretty weak, but he was beginning to eye her up and down now, kind of like a wrangler. Then, all of a sudden, he lit into her. “And not only short legs, but you got a short neck. You got short ankles. You got a short waist. You got a short forehead. And I don’t like your hair short either.”

“Attaway!” muttered the heavy. Then he abruptly turned and stretched over toward the wife, hiding his mouth behind the back of his hand but booming everything so it could clearly be heard. “Anywhere he’s maybe lacking a little, ma’am?”

She took that harder than anything her husband had said to her, but even so, she didn’t hesitate to use it. “Not all that lengthy some places yourself, poopsie.”

“Switch!” Yost commanded.

They both stared at Yost, frozen, but the heavy grabbed them by the elbows and yanked them across each other to opposite sides. This left the heavy talking close into the wife’s ear now, but he pretended, still rough-glowering into the pink glow, that there’d been no exchange.

“What’s she mean? She wants you to drop your pants right here, prove something? You’re not gonna do that. You don’t have to do that, fella.”

She just kind of gawked at him, very stubbornly.

He practically snarled. “Fella, for once in your life, tell her where to get off!” Then he pointed hard, forcing her gawk straight down his arm to the husband.

“Tell her. Yes. Tell her,” Yost intoned, by contrast soft and fulsome as a topping of whipped cream.

It was hard to believe. Her moves were slow, maybe even involuntary, but she actually hitched up on the belt of her wraparound skirt with the insides of her wrists, and rolled her shoulders into a big, swaggering shrug.

“I can get plenty of women,” she drawled at her mate. “I git plenty of women. And no complaints. It’s only tight asses like you give me any trouble.”

It was a gross parody: if hardly of him, then of what she probably thought he might want to be, or if not that, maybe what she really hoped he’d be. Hard to say, hard to say.

“Attaboy,” the heavy applauded her.

The husband went back on his heels, shuffling nervously in the yellow light. Then he rose up on his toes, stiff-legged, almost high-heeled, and began speaking in little, qualmish spurts.

“Can I afford to care? Can I even stop to care? When you’re never home anyhow. Never content when you are home. Gloom, gloom, gloom.”

The heavy sidled across to the husband now, taking a much more gentlemanly approach, showing he knew how to treat a lady like a lady. “Now, ma’am … he only needs to be made to understand.”

“I’ve got the whole house, all the laundry, the children,” the husband kept on, “more than I’can do already. You can’t even keep up with the yard. What do I need with another adolescent, hanging around the house, growing gray?”

The wife fired back, almost rowdy. “None of that. They’re just as much my children as yours.”

“But the way he treats them …” the heavy whispered.

The husband winced a little at that insinuation against himself, but picked it up, twisted it to his use. “Oh yes, and you’re so kind and gentle to them.” Real female sarcasm. “Never known you to raise a hand against them.”

“I love my children!” she boomed back at him, like a Victorian father.

“Switch!” Yost ordered.

This time they crossed over without help, nearly bumping into each other.

“No you don’t love them!” shouted the wife, picking up her own last line as a cue. “You despise them! You call it discipline, and it’s nothing but loathing!”

“It just so happens … I adore my children!” He put a lot of feeling into it. Still, you couldn’t help but compare. She’d said it far better for him, in his place, than he had on his own, and he knew it. He tried to recoup. “Everything I do shows how much I really …” Couldn’t, went into a funk. The heavy moved behind him, talking cow-punch to him again. “She’s gonna use them against you. She’ll use anything, that woman.”

“Let’s keep the children out of this,” he tried to compromise.

“When were they ever in it for you? When?”

“Switch!”

She gave Yost a withering look. Didn’t want to switch, now that she really had hubby on the run. But the husband, that slyboots, eased around her into the yellow light, took right up for her, very heatedly, against himself.

“You come home, you never play with them. You don’t come home, they never ask for you. All they have is each other, and what little I can do to make things up to them, so that I’m with them all the time, day in, day out. Do you know what it’s like, day in, day out, never ever having any adult companionship?” Very clever of him: played out her legitimate complaint until it got to sound like nothing but silly female whining.

She saw what he was doing, tried not to respond, then gave up with an unwilling, male-exasperated sigh. “That’s why I can always count on that big welcome home. Everybody rushing to the door, so glad to see me, you’ve all been so lonely.”

“Half the time it’s the middle of the night!” he said, forced to give her very good excuse.

“So now I’m breaking and entering?”

Small joke: real sorrow. But for whom? Couldn’t really tell. Their identities were beginning to muddle together, turn almost syrupy. They weren’t exactly people any more. They were conditions: what it was like to be her husband, his wife, as either of them saw it. The only thing that stayed straight was the lighting. Those two naked neon tubes that flickered inconstantly but still never changed hue. The one on the left, yellow, for shrewishness, the one on the right, pink, for, I suppose, impotence.

Still, the dramatic tension mounted. The heavy began to fade into the limited scenery, the way I’d seen him do so often on Rawhide whenever real action threatened. Couldn’t remember his name for the life of me. Every now and then, though, he got off a good line. “Sure you married her. Man’s got to take what’s available. That don’t mean he don’t know when he’s riding mule-back.” But they had reached a point, didn’t need any auxiliaries. She said it, husbanding every word: “Back off. We’ll handle this.” Then, obversely, they went at each other, sometimes even anticipating Yost’s switches. Their son: maybe not quite that far gone, yet, but still his mother’s little elf, irremediably, according to him. Their next-down daughter: too old for her age already, damn near matricidal, according to her. Her money, according to her as him. His mother, according to him as her. The goddamn mangy, hermaphrodite cat: still hadn’t been fixed either way, nothing ever seems to get done around here, both to blame, somehow. Then the time he didn’t call and didn’t call from Chicago. No, he couldn’t get through and couldn’t get through from Detroit. Was that, or wasn’t that the same time? “I never know where you are. A gypsy. What do you do for a living? Steal children? Better steal more, it’s not bringing in enough to feed our own.” Her lines, but he was playing them, loud and pushy, and she was being stoical, no, stolid in his place. They were at a point. A sheepishness began to creep into the tight, pink-lit, desperate expression she was holding for him. His eyes, narrowed into her low, unforgiving squint, started to brim with her bitter tears in the jaundiced neon glare.

Yost caught the moment. Au point. A perfect soufflé of anxieties, and before it fell, he unctuously commanded, “One last time, my dears. Switch.” They reached out to help each other cross, then could not let go, hung on. She burst into her own tears. He patted her manfully, kissed her forehead, all for himself. The audience, I hate to say, gave them a quick round of applause, but at least no curtain calls.

Underlying cause of immediate personal depression as audience filtered into the aisle: it was really pretty tame stuff, old-fashioned, almost vaudeville compared to all the other group-grope therapeutic theatricals around nowadays, but it also just happened to be what we used to call True-to-Life. Too damn true to life. No deep, roiling emotions, no originality, nothing, really, underneath. Jane and I. You have to stick to the surface when the surface is all you’ve got. Maybe marriage isn’t even a good fiction. Maybe it’s only pulp.

Again I think of something Moro said to me during our long interview out at his home in Portuguese Bend. We were talking about teratology. Seems to me we were talking about everything misshapen that day. “You want a monster? A plain, ordinary, everyday monster?” M. demanded. “The beast with two backs. Not so bad in a wild state. But domesticated. Kept in captivity. Caged up in the—what do we say?—the union of husband and wife, to grow shaggy and neurotic and snarly, and begin to pace, pace, pace. Mein Gott.”

But the rest of the assembled were of much greater cheer. In a brief epilogue, Yost encouraged further dramatic endeavor, if not here, once everybody got back home. “Use what you’ve seen here tonight. Learn to understand yourselves”—taking one of the wife’s small, fat fingers in his big, doughy hand, like a sausage inside a puff pastry—“as this woman has understood herself as this man.” Then sweetly to the husband, nipping him by the elbow. “And as this man has glimpsed himself in this woman. If, for only a little while, we can all be each other, we will soon be much more ourselves.”

That seemed to placate them, or at least caramelize their distress, though people were milling around, loudly gossiping in factions that violently favored one side of the marriage or the other. There was even a small divorce element, led by the nondirectional queer. Only the heavy seemed a little out of it, coming forward off the exercise bar to try to bug the wife a little more. Instant replay. “He put the ugly on you, but you never put it back on him. You gotta be more nekkid, get at each other more direct. Or else it’s too homelike.”

But she was having nothing more to do with him. “We seen you on TV,” she said, like she’d caught him crawling through a back window. “Don’t worry. We seen you.”

Since nobody else would talk to him either, I went up and introduced myself, saying I was from Esquire. He cottoned, said he was Lars Syndor, which still didn’t mean anything to me.

“Getting anything out of this?” he asked.

“It looks to me,” I said, nodding toward Yost, “like a director’s medium.”

“Yup,” he smiled. “He’s the man.”

“Tell me something. You enjoy this?”

“Been through it.” He shrugged, lots of beefy, beaten shoulder. “Bad days at Black Rock, baby.”

It occurred to me that the seediness might not be all an act. Maybe he was right down to living the part, and just a touch manic.

“It’s work. You get tired of recording for the blind. Pays about the same.” He drew himself up tall, stretching his nerve more than his body, I felt, trying for a brave front. “I’m going back out soon. Shake this town.” Then he rubbed his chin, almost vainly. “Got a shaving commercial first. Need a week to grow it back, then I’m gone.” He took a whistle at “Cal-i-forn-ya, Here I Come,” went flat on the first six notes, and bone-dry on the last.

Lars Syndor. It was beginning to register with me, but from somewhere else altogether, and a long time ago. “Hell yes, Gillette.” I could see he was waiting for me to catch on, but wasn’t going to be that happy when I did. “Back when it was Blue Blades. You were with the Rams. Cornerback?”

“Defensive half, same thing.”

“You were … good.”

“Some folks say.”

“Then you had some trouble.”

“The knees,” he said quickly. “They go first. Once those ends start getting behind you …”

That wasn’t the trouble I had in mind, but I let it pass, being dim on the details anyhow. Subsequent research: the girl’s name was Fanny Lou Mayberry, the usual business about being “under contract” to Miss Rheingold Enterprises, and she claimed he’d taken her out to some local high school football stadium, told her there was going to be a party for one of his former coaches. One of the great Daily News bits was their report that Miss Mayberry had suffered “minor contusions, bruises, and skin blemishes from lime.” The lime “appeared to be customarily used in marking off yardage on the field of play.”

He began shaking his head, very hard, like he was trying to get some obscure buzz out of the exact middle of it. “Don’t look back, baby. You’ll trip or get tackled.” He stopped. “Used to have me in front of my locker, clean-shaven, with the shoulder pads? Ten, eleven years ago. Now it’s just the hair on my left cheek. They keep coming in closer.”

“It’s money.”

“Yup. And nothing else.”

“When did you turn actor?”

“What d’you mean?”

“When … I mean, you were a Ram.”

“I always been an actor.” He was suddenly almost standing up for himself, a little hot-eyed. “Had to find that out.”

“Sure.”

“Found that out here. It wasn’t easy, but I hacked it. Listen.” He had hold of my arm. “He’s a genius.”

“I don’t doubt.”

“Those two.” He cocked his buzzing head at the couple. “They weren’t trying. My fault. I went at them too lighthearted.”

“I thought you were fine.”

“No. Listen. He kept me alive.”

“I don’t doubt.”

“Come on. You gotta meet him.”

“My pleasure.”

“Wait a minute.” He tightened his grip on my arm, like maybe he was going to switch me. “My first wife. As far as I’m concerned, she walked out on me when she walked out on him. That’s how I feel. That how you feel?”

“I’m open-minded.”

He kneaded my arm, not really satisfied, but yanked me along anyhow, through the folding chairs to where Yost was having last little crumbly chats with his votaries.

“Dr. Yost, Bill Warner.”

“Warner Williams,” I smiled. It’s always happening to me.

We shook hands, and I swear his felt slightly granulated.

“You are joining us?” he asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Wants to do an article,” Lars boomed.

Yost looked me up and down with those bon-bon eyes of his, a very minty stare. “These sessions are private.”

“I understand entirely, Dr. Yost.” I plied away at him. “I don’t want to interfere in any way. This is really about somebody who used to work with you.”

He seemed a tad disappointed. Naturally. But he opened up a little more. “I go a long way back.” He mentioned knowing Adler, that name first, deliberately, then brought up his acquaintance with Freud more casually, “I was usually at the Wednesday meetings, but 1 preferred to see him elsewhere.” Where he didn’t say, and pattered on down through the lesser names, Rank, Abraham, Eitington, Ferenczi, making the most out of Ferenczi, who was “closer to me than he realized.” He also had a long, oven-warm sigh for “poor little Otto, who so needed an auxiliary ego.” He’d even gone to see him once in Philadelphia, after they’d both immigrated. “Hopeless.” None of it quite jibed, at least with what I could remember from reading the Ernest Jones biography a long time ago. But it was probably meant more for the faithful than for me. I let on I was impressed, even a little ignorant. “I don’t know quite when this was. You mentioned him in one of your books. About all I know about it. Simon Moro.”

Yost was surprised. “Rudi?”

“Yes.”

And more than a little disturbed that I knew that other name too. “You’ve seen him lately?”

“I’m about to.”

“Rudi Eckmann.” He pursed the name slyly between his lips, like the last of an old gumdrop, then turned to Lars. “He had your duties, functions. He was the first one. In some ways, the best.”

Lars frowned, began shaking that mid-point buzz out of his head again.

“At the time, Lars, at the time. In other ways, the worst.” But he’d checked himself. He rose, said his savory good-byes to the few who remained, including the Bronxville couple, now avidly converted. Then he asked Lars to please turn out the two neon lights when he left. “Switch them around for next week.” I thought I’d lost him, but then he said, elaborately, “Perhaps you might still have time for a small bite to eat?”

We went around the corner to what you might say was his stage delicatessen. At least he had his own napkin there, richly food-stained. He tucked himself behind it and feasted upon flanks of smoked salmon, about a firkin of cream cheese. I stretched out a cup of coffee in silence while he ate.

“Lars,” he finally said, “Quick on the attack, but very slow to reach any depth. Too slow. Not like Rudi. Rudi plunged. He could be more yourself than you.” He tidied his mouth. “We are talking now only for your own information?”

“Fine by me.”

“Good. You know how I started out?”

“No.”

“Working with prostitutes.” He seemed especially pleased to tell me this. “Professional women. Not opera-goers.” Then he added rather primly, “While I was still in medical school.”

“A clinic?”

“In a way. Research, independent studies.” He fixed me with his first definite, unconfectioned expression, a kind of nostalgic leer. “Do you know Vienna?”

“I’ve been there.”

“When?”

“Nineteen fifty-six.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know Vienna. All that stucco was once very real.”

“Plenty of it around when I was there. Pale yellow.”

He still shook his head. “I want to tell you something you probably won’t approve. It is supposed to be such a scandal. But I am very glad they never renamed Berggasse after him. There should be no Freudgasse. If there is to be a street like that in Vienna, it should be Schnitzlergasse.” I was having trouble finding his point, though apparently he was coming to one. “Schnitzler understood. All that sex was also once very real.”

Could’ve said there was plenty of that around too when I was there, same as the stucco.

“That’s why I went into the streets. Not into a lot of silly Hausfrau dreams. They had to be paid, they were always paid to come, but never that much, not enough to lie. Rudi helped there. He kept them down to pfennigs.”

“Moro got them for you?”

“He had them already.”

I cocked one eye at him over the lip of my coffee cup.

“Yes, yes,” he insisted.

I began taking notes. “How many?”

“A string of them. Ten, twelve, as I remember. I used eight.”

“The same eight?”

“Always. I required that.”

It seemed just possible enough, just nutty enough, if he really had details to offer. “What did he look like then?”

“Much the same. Tall, thin. All neck and nose. Hungrier. He had a straw hat, a Panama. Inside, on the hat band, he kept all the names and such. With a little red pencil. He used to bite the end of it to sharpen it. You had the feeling he was living out of that hat, maybe saving a meal a day, feeding off his pencil.”

“Was he acting anywhere?”

“Don’t I make it clear what he was doing? They were very young, the ones he brought me. No real depth of experience, but the truth was closer to the surface. I could get at it. Much harder with people like those two we had tonight. You strip them naked, and they have hides, not skins.”

“But he wasn’t an actor then?” I kept after my query.

“A great one. For my purposes.” He got off on his own kick. “You’ve seen my method. Re-enactment. Documentary drama. Not dreams. I would have each of them repeat the previous night. No fantasies. What really happened. The strolling, the bickering, bargains, prices, undressing, false breathing, fake orgasm, kinks, the fatigue. Not everything, naturally, we had to condense, but the pace of things.”

“Jesus.” It just slipped out. “How far did you take it?”

“That depended on Rudi.”

From here on, I had trouble keeping up with my notes because Yost got headlong excited.

“Let me tell you something about Rudi. Sometimes a girl, he would be up on her, telling her what a strudel she was, what a miserable dry screw she really offered a man. In coito, you understand, never missing a stroke. And I would be encouraging the girl to speak her own thoughts, how much she hated the terrible, battering sex act, wanted to be a child again. She would begin to curse Rudi—but not Rudi really—he was always the brutal man from the night before—call him the filthiest cock-wilting names. Show him how she was faking, jam her toes into his ears, spit at him even. And then Rudi would make some little tweak, maybe turn and kiss her ankle, or slide his own foot up under her neck, fondle her with his toes—he could do the most incredible tricks with that bony body of his—and she couldn’t help herself. She’d try to stop. I’d shout at her to stop. But she would climb right to it, still cursing until the moans started, inamorata. He was that good with them.”

“With all of them?”

“At first. Then I saw I was wasting him that way. So I divided them up, had half of them play the men. There was that between most of them anyhow. That left Rudi free … well, just to chat. I had a feeling that might work even better, and it did. He wasn’t cunt-trapped. If you are screwing, even if you are Rudi, you can’t really concentrate all your effort outside yourself. This way he could work with one of the girls, aggravate and titillate her, while I did the same with the other. You can understand what was beginning to evolve.” He looked hard at me to be sure I did, only going on after I gave him a knowledgeable nod. “I took it the next step when I saw he was just so much more adept at it, more prurient than I could ever be. I realized my own limitations, not enough therapists do. I let him work on both girls, turn them into furies, lather them into weeping sweats, while I kept outside, at a clinical distance, and controlled the vignette. Essentially the same arrangement as you saw tonight. Only Lars will never be any Rudi.”

“Was it—I mean, two at a time all the time, or more sometimes, or everybody all at once ever, or how …?” And I remember thinking: phrase all questions clearly, even salacious ones.

“Again,” he yielded, “I left all of that to Rudi. We were after realism, so it was usually only two. Lonely, furtive. What you could find down any Vienna street, done every which way, sometimes right there on the cobbles. But if three girls did get themselves into some beastliness with a man, we repeated it all the next day with four of them. Rudi took great care with the fourth, made her feel like a man, virile, even without the anatomy, which he said was all rubbish anyhow. He was amazing, you must realize. Even after you say it was his livelihood, he still had a miracle touch. And they always had good words to say for him. Even when he beat them.”

Before I could raise an eyebrow, he was sniffing back at me.

“Yes, yes. It all came out, it always does. You saw how this evening. We got onto the subject one day, I forget how, and they suggested that one of them play Rudi, beat the others. If you care to know, I’m convinced the idea came up out of respect for Rudi. Because there was never trouble about any one or the other of them being beaten, but always a lot of back and forth about who was going to be Rudi. They were finicky about that. It was an honor.” He pondered. “Perhaps something they wouldn’t have felt later on, but they were still, remember, all very young.”

“Did you ever write any of this up?”

“Only in the abstract.” He shook his head. “You couldn’t tell this was the source.”

“Shy about it?”

Maybe I put too much edge on that. He gave me quite a look: bitter almond. “My research was never completed.”

“How come?”

“Rudi, one day, just didn’t show up with them.”

“Like that?”

“Like that. Though I think I know why.”

“You know. I don’t.”

“I was beginning to help them.”

A little bit of the pâtissier crept back into his manner now. Once again, the sweets of life.

“Fine for me, and them, but he was in a bind. If he kept bringing them to see me, he would lose them. One girl—he called her Esmeralda—when she first arrived, she was tightly oral. So I had her play a man going after normal sex with another girl playing a normal girl. There were many tears, Rudi was very hard on her, had to be. But when she was at her most distraught, I suddenly had her switch, play the normal girl. The sheer relief was enough to do it. A very touching thing. But not so good for Rudi. Even if he wasn’t losing his girls yet, the girls were losing their specialties. Once the fixations go …”

“Fascinating.” All I could think to say.

“You can hardly blame him, but of course—since it was also a question of my livelihood—I do blame him. As understanding as he was with those girls, spiritual even—and you can say that they weren’t going to know any better life, his protection was at least some protection—still, he was a corrupter. An evil, really. It never surprised me that he was so menacing in the films. I wonder sometimes. Suppose he’d known he wouldn’t be a starving pimp forever, that money and fame were coming. Then would he have let me continue, bring help to those girls? And I have to say—” He was folding up his napkin, tucking under the food stains so that a fairly clean white square lay before him on the table. “—I have to say, I doubt it.”

That’s the gist of what Yost had to tell me about M. We talked on a bit more, about how much the work he’d done in Vienna was still in advance of what any of the kooks were doing out in California. He half apologized for the poor show I’d seen that evening, not really up to the bold sexual standards he admitted were “the real spice of therapy.” But I don’t really think it would have been any better as a nudie. His real problem was simply being sixty-seven years old. “What I can ask now is limited. Nobody trusts the coaxing of a dirty old man.” I felt some sympathy for him, trying to cover his eld with a lot of flour and sugar. That is, until I happened to bring up his name to Moro. In actual fact, I had to bring up his name three times before M. made the connection.

“I don’t know any Dr. Yost.”

“He knows you.”

“What kind of a doctor?”

“Sort of a shrink.”

“You have me.”

“Knew you in Vienna. And eight of your girls.”

M.’s eyes popped. “You don’t mean Horst Yost?”

“Right.”

“It was the Herr Doktor that threw me off.”

“He’s not a doctor?”

M. smiled, his Viennese smile: the gemütlich death’s-head. “In Vienna, always grant a man a little bigger title than he really deserves. But Herr Doktor is stretching things. Horst was a nurse.”

“Kid me not.”

“Not for a living, I don’t think. For kicks. He was a medic at the Somme, picked up a taste for the macabre—to add to his other tastes. I found out about him through the medical school.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Those days in Vienna I was very broke. All I had to cover my head was an old Panama, kept it together with shop twine, and I got an infected ear. So I went around to the clinic there. This overweight male nurse signed me in, then hastily started examining me. I remember the pad of his thumb was almost as soft as my ear lobe. An intern came along and shooed him away. ‘That’s our Horst,’ he told me. ‘Did he diagnose you?’ I said no, and he probed into my ear, a little roughly, I thought. ‘Too bad. He could have told you there really is no pain.’ When I finally said ouch, he smiled, gave me all the dirty gossip about Horst. This Yost fellow was not only vaguely aberrant, but a definite pest. Even tried to break in on those Wednesday nights that Freud used to chair. He sneaked in as a case, through Rank, apparently, but then did nothing except denounce everybody else there. He sounded right for us, so when my ear got better—thanks to the clinic, where I stole a nice warm scarf—we went after him.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and those eight girls. Les Huit Chats.”

“You were making them out to be French?”

“Rumanian.”

“Rumanian?”

“Perversion always comes from the east.”

“I follow.”

“Just one more little touch to help protect us, give us an excuse. We were decadent, therefore people would tolerate what we said.”

“Said?”

“Politically.”

“How did politics get into it?”

“That’s all it was, at bottom.”

I scratched my head. “Start over.”

“That’s what we were doing. Political cabaret. We still didn’t go over very well. My all-too-gentle Viennese. But we tried. In Berlin, we would have succeeded.” He smiled again, realizing he had me badly caught out. “You don’t know about this early career of mine? You should. Les Huit Chats was a revue I created. A little Marx, a lot more ass.”

“I don’t know if we’re talking about the same things or not.”

“We are. You’ll see. Les Huit Chats was the kind of satire you’d know from George Grosz. The big come-on was the girls wearing nothing but big, furry tails wired straight up the buttocks crease. Each of them was supposed to be the pet of some European leader. Lap cats, I guess you would say. I did the imitations while they rubbed all around me. I had a wonderful Ludendorff, could do him for you right now. Except you weren’t even born then, wouldn’t have any meaning for you. I did an even better Hindenburg, no helmet, only a big spike coming out the top of my head. The French were harder. Pétain I had down all right, by making him very Prussian, but his cat very svelte, very piquant. But my Poincaré was bad. Finally had to show him down on his hands and knees, lapping milk out of the same saucer as his cat, Marianne. Too bald. And she was a fat, tabby-looking Municher, not French enough. I think I did the English best, after my Germans. I had a young Churchill that I made sound a lot like the later Churchill—just chance—I was thinking of him as a warmonger then. One of the girls did a very nice Clementine, purred very, very pukka. My finale was Lloyd George. Did him with a Welsh accent and a Bible, had the piano tinkle ‘Rule Britannia,’ all the cats rush him at once, pile on, tails quivering. For a curtain call, I gave each girl a kittenish bundle to hold, and they sang, ‘Lloyd George ist mein Vater, Vater ist Lloyd George!’ Then, meeooowww, and a terrible, screechy alley-cat cry that, if you listened closely, came out ‘Verrr-ssaaiillees!’” He was off chortling over these W-W-One gross canards, down humpy old memory lane, but I wasn’t going to be led astray.

“Did Horst know about your act?”

“I doubt it. Horst was different, something we did privately. To keep the act going, understand, for the money. But, then again, not all that different …”

“Let me ask you something straight.”

“You want their ages again.”

“No.”

“The youngest was thirteen. She was Hindenburg’s Siamese. The joke was he couldn’t surrender to her because of his oath to the Kaiser.”

“Were these girls whores?”

“Such a question.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t really have an answer.”

“Were you pimping?”

M. glowered. “What kind of a story is that, even from Horst?”

“Horst says you even beat them.”

M. thought a moment. “I think maybe we did put on something like that for him once.”

“No. For real.”

He laughed very hard, even at me, I suspect. “What is this ‘for real’? Nothing was for real.”

“His research.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. He does have some standing.”

“Impossible.” But he started to do a little more explaining. “These girls weren’t whores, exactly. They were performers, artistes. They screwed mostly for their own convenience. Whom they liked, when they liked, for whatever they wanted to get out of it. Me, for instance. I admit it helped them to stay in the act, but I never heard any complaints from them either. We all knew each other very, very well. We wanted to stay together if we could. Succeed.”

“How would you describe what went on with Horst?”

“Horst may have had his own ideas, but it was an act. Our act. That simple.”

“Same as the cabaret?”

“With variations, almost. We did it for him five, maybe six times. We went pretty far sometimes, but this was private. Maybe, in subtle ways, he influenced us, turned us more macabre. We would’ve dropped him if our real act had ever caught on, but that never happened.”

“He told me you brought him a string of hookers. Your string. On the cheap.”

“Let him tell it any way he wants, but he paid through the nose.”

“He claims you paid them in pfennigs.”

“In front of him, yes. He loved that. Part of their humiliation. Understand, he had quirky tastes, even for a voyeur.”

“Jesus.”

“You must realize what you are up against in Horst. He is complete that way, if no other way. You know why he broke off with us?”

“One day you didn’t show. He says.”

“Why should I do that? We stayed open a month on his money. We cherished him. I was doing every kinky trick I knew to keep him entranced. So were the girls. But one of them slipped up. Esmeralda. I had her playing a fluffy Angora for my Woodrow Wilson. She really was very hairy. Tyrolean-Italian, or gypsy maybe. Horst was fascinated with her. She misunderstood, or just didn’t think, or maybe she was a little hot for Horst herself. She rolled out from under one of our ensembles, all-girls-together it was, and saw Horst standing there, panting and blushing, with this weepy, almost honey stare of his. She reaches out for him. ‘Why don’t you ever join us, Schwanzmeister?’ Mein Gott, Schwanz-meister! To Horst, who doesn’t want himself to know he’s there. He ran into a corner and froze. His back to us, like the little bad boy sent to stare at the wall. I went over to him, tried to coax him away. He dropped to his knees, wedged his head into the corner, and began to grind it against the plaster. Wouldn’t stop. Tearing out his hair but keeping his hands to himself, if you understand. All we could do was leave him in peace. That’s the only time I really did feel like beating one of them, the stupid slut.”

“But,” I felt I had to say, “he’s got a following. He’s published. His is now considered a legitimate approach.”

M. shrugged. “We put on a good show. That’s all I can tell you. Used to block things out ahead of time, work up improvisations for him. Essentially, of course, it was mime. Just as hard to do, too. But he wanted us to talk dirty as well, so we did. Mostly me. Maybe that’s what he wrote up …” Then he got a shade more curious. “Horst seems to have become much more sly. Tell me again, how is he getting away with it these days?”

I went over the same ground more fully, trying to explain how far removed Yost seemed now from any such raw and lubricious scene, how tame and proper, how sweet, how innocuous, how dull. M. puzzled over this, picking at his hooked nose so long that I thought he’d gotten distracted. But that’s how M. gets at his thoughts sometimes, through either nostril. Not a pleasant habit. Best delete.

“No. Horst is still up to his same old tricks.”

“How could he be?”

“You must realize how extreme a voyeur Horst really is. He is still getting people to do their act for him, isn’t he?”

“Come on. A man and woman bitching at each other with all their clothes on? Can’t be very many jollies in that for him.”

“Not many,” M. smirked, “but still some.”