“I can’t recall a single director in the history of movies who has turned out so many rotten pictures or been so continuously ridiculed by every critic with even the most rudimentary classroom knowledge of what films are all about,” a film critic complained recently,* “somebody should do something about Otto Preminger. Like teaching the man how to make movies.”
This cry from the heart recalled my own brief hour as a glass of fashion and a mold of form. And my fascinating fall.
It must have been about the time that Carol Channing was doing her unforgettable Mehitabel on Broadway. Who could then have foreseen the same actress, stripped to panties and bra, making love to Frankie Avalon in Skidoo? Or that Mr. Preminger’s own star, then ascending, would peak with Hurry Sundown?
“I can’t afford the rent,” I told the studio agent who’d conducted me into a spacious and well-appointed apartment.
“Otto is taking care of it,” he informed me in a whisper.
A fellow toting a case of scotch walked in. He had SUNSET LIQUORS stitched in gold across white coveralls.
“I didn’t order that,” I told him.
“Otto’s taking care of it,” the agent whispered again.
The SUNSET LIQUORS man returned with a case of beer and a bag of ice.
“I didn’t order that either,” I insisted.
“Otto will take care of it,” the agent reassured me softly.
“What’s the name of this place?” I asked him.
“Chateau-Marmont,” he told me in the same hush-hush tone. I couldn’t tell whether he had a speech impediment or was just naturally secretive.
Two more strangers came in, carrying a floor-model television set. I looked at the agent.
“Set it down over there,” I instructed them.
The following morning I answered a knock. Someone wearing a white jacket and carrying a medic’s bag entered.
“Your barber,” he announced himself.
“I cut my own hair,” I told him.
“I was sent for,” he explained.
“I didn’t send for you,” I decided, turned him about and eased him out.
“Somebody just sent someone to shave me,” I later complained to the Whispering One.
“I don’t know,” he told me softly as ever, “but Otto would have paid for it.”
“Why?”
“He likes you.”
“Can’t he even wait till me meets me?”
“He’s going to pick you up at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
I was waiting at the curb ten minutes before the hour. When you’re making a movie there’s not a moment to lose. Otto drove up in a Caddy so long he’d have to back up to turn the corner. I got in.
“Good morning,” I greeted him.
Otto didn’t bother with that.
“You like donn?” he asked instead—and the windows opened of their own volition!
“Or you like better opp?”—the windows closed automatically.
I be dog. I’d never in my whole life till now had one button do three things—up, down or stand still. By the way Otto was beaming, I judged he’d patented all three. Would he ever like me enough to let me blow the horn?
We wheeled past a golf course. Above the greens two large birds kept hovering.
“How you like apartment?”
“Comfortable,” I acknowledged.
“Is Frankie’s.”
“Frankie?”
“Sinatra.”
Then waited for me to cry, “Spit on me! I’m in the very front row!”
“Oh, I thought it was Bogie’s,” was all I could think to say. I judged the birds to be buzzards looking for dead golfers.
We began picking up helpers. One had two cameras slung around his neck. He plumped for opp. The next was carrying a makeup kit. He came out for donn. The third was a middle-aged fellow who lit up a pipe as much as to say he actually didn’t give a damn, one way or another, opp, donn or sidewise. Otto caught his eye in the rearview mirror and you should have seen that fellow emptying the bowl of that pipe into the ashtray. He was still scanning the upholstery for traces of ashes when we reached the studio. Nobody was helping him to find them, either. If you want to make a movie you have to break the tobacco-habit first.
While the make-up man was pitty-pattying Otto’s cheeks, I followed the camera-fellow around, plugging in extensions for him. I was happy to be on hand where history was in the making.
No sooner had the makeup man given Otto a fresh complexion than the photographer told him to smile pleasantly—then tripped the flash without delaying. He was working against time and he knew it.
The phone rang. Otto answered it without changing position.
“No no,” he informed the caller, “for that we import entire cast,” and hung up. “Everybody wants to be Mahatma Gandhi,” he explained. I was learning something every minute.
After the makeup man and the photographer had completed their chores, Otto beckoned me to his desk. He gave something a nudge and its top rolled back, revealing an illuminated panel of push-buttons. He invited me to press one he indicated. I did. There was a low, whirring sound. An instant later a secretary entered.
“That’s alright, dear,” Otto excused her, “I was just demonstrating.” I felt I should have gotten some credit.
He pressed another. The fellow who didn’t care one way or another came in; with the bowl of his pipe still visible in his lapel pocket. This was more fun than making windows go up and down.
“You and pipe bot’ oudt!” Otto gave him a direct order. The fellow wheeled back out of the door before it had closed behind him. When you’re making a movie you have to stay on your toes every minute.
“See?” Otto asked me, “If you can turn on TV by remote control, why not send for people like so also?”
I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. Provided they’d come.
“Why you write about such people you write about?” he wanted to know.
“They live around where I live.”
“Why you live around such people?”
“Because when I live around other people they turn out to be such people, that I go back and live around just such people.”
“What a lousy excuse,” seemed to be Otto’s thought.
“You like underdogs?”
“I like some people who are under, but not because they’re under. Under is just where they happen to be. You like people just for happening to be on top?”
Being on top or being underneath wasn’t just a happening to Otto, I judged. For he seemed to think I was putting him on: being on top was self-sufficing, it appeared: as being under spoke for itself. Opp. Donn.
The phone rang again. This time it was for me. The Whispering One.
“Be nice to Otto,” he cooed; and hung up.
“That was my agent,” I told Otto. “He coos.”
“What he coo?”
“I should be nice to you.”
“You find that difficult?”
“Why force matters?”
“Don’t you want people to like you?”
“Very few.”
“I see you’re not success-oriented. I’m very success-oriented myself,” he assured me as if I could never have guessed. “I would like to be less success-oriented; but my standard of living prevented. Why can DeSica do on two hundred thousand what it takes us a million to make? Because DeSica wasn’t born in a success-oriented society, that’s why. I’ve made pictures myself that lost money! I’ve also made pictures that gave people enjoyment! What if it wasn’t art? They lost money anyhow! Do you remember the camera work in Great Expectations? That wasn’t mine either!”
He began wiping his makeup off with Kleenex.
“Why did L. B. Mayer object to making the Red Badge of Courage and it turned out he was right? He could pick up a phone and say ‘Send me ten creative artists! I want ten creative artists!’—and he got them! There was a man who knew how to set people against each other! People say if he were alive today he wouldn’t be as great as he was—I say he’d be even greater! One day to the next, nobody working under L. B. Mayer knew if he was going to get a raise or get fired. Today actors become producers because of tax problems. So everything costs too much.”
I wanted to push another button.
“That’s why this is the free world—if everything didn’t cost too much we’d stop being free! So what do reviewers expect of me? To go against society? Every time I make a movie I pay the price for being born into a success-oriented society as though it were my fault!”
I didn’t know what society could do about it either. Unless there was a button somewhere somebody hadn’t yet pushed.
“I don’t even read reviews about myself,” Otto went on, “if someone don’t like me I take it to heart.”
I began to see that society had a responsibility, too. Come to think of it, if Otto hadn’t been a really nice person to begin with he would be even rottener now than he already was. You have to see both sides of a question when you’re making a movie.
“Now,” he seemed to be coming in for a landing or at least to touch his wheels on the airstrip—“Now I begin doing things for others. How did you begin?”
“How did I begin what?”
“Doing things for others. So people like you.”
I tried to remember back to how I’d gotten my start in this field. “I’m not sure,” I had to admit, “but I do remember running a little game we called ‘peek’ outside of Camp Twenty Grand near Rouen. We called it that so the fellows wouldn’t think they were playing blackjack. Actually it was blackjack but with revised rules. Such as the house taking all ties and keeping the deck. But we still paid off double when a player hit twenty-one. It gave me a good warm feeling, like doing something for others, when one of the fellows got lucky like that. The good warm feeling I got was because I knew that the money he’d won would come back to the house automatically; because of the rule about taking all ties. Still, it was doing something for the other fellow all the same; even though only temporarily.”
Otto was looking at me as if he hadn’t seen me until now. And was just beginning to make up his mind. It took him a couple minutes to put it all together.
“In my films,” he decided aloud, “director directs all. I hire the writers. They work for me. I take the blame, I get the credit. But I am pleased to have met such interesting person.”
His congratulations were offered but not his hand.
The phone was ringing when I got back to the Chateau. You know who it was.
“Otto is upset. We told you not to discuss salary with him.”
“We didn’t get around to that. He told me about his personality, that was all. He’s having trouble with it.”
“He’s upset about something.”
A long pause followed, as though the man were just sitting there trying to figure something out all by himself. I held on until he’d figured it.
“You must have made him feel insecure,” he finally decided.
“Not intentionally,” I reassured him, “I just couldn’t take him seriously.”
“He felt it was the movie you didn’t take seriously.”
“Come to think of it,” I had to admit, “I’m not sure that I do.”
A curious change began transpiring at the Chateau. I noticed it first when the same two fellows who’d brought me a TV came in and took it away.
Then the fellow with SUNSET LIQUORS stitched in gold on his coveralls handed me a bill for the liquor he’d delivered.
“Mr. Preminger is taking care of this,” I tried to argue.
“He must have had a change of plan,” was SUNSET LIQUORS’ guess. And waited until SUNSET was paid.
The next morning a rental notice was pushed under the door. I phoned the rental office.
“Mr. Preminger is taking care of this rental,” I told the woman who answered.
“Mr. Preminger isn’t exactly crazy,” she informed me, “we can give you forty-eight hours and not an hour longer.” And she hung up with that ultimatum.
Well I be dawg. Could it be that Otto didn’t like me after all? Would my Hollywood career wither before it had blossomed? Would I be stigmatized with the spendthrift gentry? Would I have to admit to my friends in Indiana that I’d never even met Frank Sinatra? With only forty-seven rent-free hours remaining and the clock ticking away, I would have to do something. I phoned Otto’s office. His secretary answered.
“May I have an appointment to see Mr. Preminger at 2:30 this afternoon?” I asked her humbly. Then waited while she checked that out with the illuminated panel.
“That will be satisfactory, Mr. Algren,” she congratulated me.
“Then have Otto meet me at the Club House bar at Santa Anita,” I filled her in. “Post time is 2:30.”
It was my turn to hang up.
* * *
Otto wasn’t at the bar at post time. When you’re making a movie you can’t always get to the track on time. Catching a small winner in the first race helped me to swallow my disappointment. Another winner in the fourth left me with so little to swallow that I rechecked the bar. I began teasing the olive in my martini pretending I was going to gobble her whole and then just taking the tiniest nibble. A jock-sized man loitering in the shadow of the bar’s farthest corner kept watching me. It came to me that I knew him.
Max.
Nothing had changed about Max except that the left lens of his shades had been cracked. He was still in the same two-pairs-of-pants suit he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, two years before, in Chicago. And he still owed me three hundred and fifty-five dollars. I didn’t rap to him because a man who has to follow horses through a cracked lens isn’t about to pay off a two-year-old debt.
He hadn’t been a total stranger to me when he’d hit on me, that afternoon at Sportsman’s. I knew the same people Max knew. Some of them were even permitted on the premises. Letting Max inside had been the oversight of the track security office.
I’d showed him what I’d encircled on my program: Scatterug. I wanted to play the horse because I knew Scatterug had sound judgment. He’d once tried to bite me at Cahokia Downs.
The horse was 9-1 on the board.
“When he gets up to 10-1, I bet him,” I’d assured Max just as the odds flashed to 11-1. I turned to make my bet. Max had followed me.
“If I can’t stop you from playing it, how about giving me your action, Nels?” he’d asked me, “I pay track odds.”
I gave him a fifty to put on the nose. It had saved me the trouble of going upstairs to the window.
Scatterug had come past the stands running fourth on the rail, with the rider having all he could do to keep the horse from moving up too fast. The horse had felt like running. The rider had let him move up to second on the far turn; and had held him to the rail until he’d made the turn for home. Then he’d let him out. When he’d come past me on the stretch, I glanced back to see where the other horses had gone; and they’d looked like they were standing still. $24.40. Max owed me six hundred and ten dollars.
“Nels!” he’d returned with a twitch in his neck and had begun accusing me—“Nels! The first time you give me action you hit!” He’d pocketed the fifty; that much was clear.
That had left me with a pair of alternatives: I could come in on him to the people he was holding out on and have them beat his head in; or I could carry him on the chance he’d get lucky himself. I didn’t mind if people beat his head in: yet it wouldn’t get me my six-hundred-ten.
Max hadn’t taken it on the arfy-darfy, I’ll give him that. He’d paid me off two hundred fifty. In pieces. The last time I’d had to loan him another five to pay off his cab. I’d told him next time take a bus. I hadn’t seen him since. Now, as I finally put an end to the olive’s anguish, he rapped to me to come over and share his shadow.
“Meet Big Bernard,” he invited me.
I hadn’t noticed, until then, that the shadow in which Max was loitering was Big Bernard. He was so big he blocked off the light of half the bar. Bernard was plainly the heavy in this road show.
“This was the guy I was tellin’ you,” Max explained to him, “the first time he give me some action he hit.”
Big Bernard looked down at Max. Neither of his shades was cracked.
“That don’t make him a bad guy, does it?” he asked Max.
“Where you stayin’, Nels?” Max asked me.
“A place I’m getting thrown out of tomorrow.”
“We got us a pretty good place,” he invited me, “you could sleep on the couch in the front room. Would that be okay, Bernie?”
“You don’t even know you’re alive,” Big Bernard decided with finality.
“It’s alright with Bernie,” Max translated.
Big Bernard removed his shades and looked down at Max for a long moment. He had the biggest, lightest, baby-greyest eyes I’d ever seen. They were the eyes of a man who’s been shortsighted so long that nothing they’d seen had ever given his conscience the faintest twinge. They were the eyes of a man who could do anything.
“How can the man tell if he wants to sleep in our place when he never even seen it?” he finally asked Max, “How do you know he even wants to hang out with us? You better start breathin’ or somebody’s going to come along and bury you.” He turned to me: “We’ll run you out to our place. You can see for yourself.” Everything Big Bernard said was final.
“I’m ready to leave when you fellows are,” I told them.
“Now all you got to do to get heat on us is start jumpin’ the lights,” Big Bernard warned Max as he climbed into the back seat and let me share the front with Max, “I’ll turn state’s evidence on you.”
“You want to drive yourself then?” Max asked him. But received no reply.
The first light Max jumped was a yellow. I thought it was accidental until I saw him smirking into the rearview mirror to watch Big Bernard’s apprehension. The next one he jumped was another yellow—but this time he didn’t smirk when he looked into the rearview. He turned sickly green. “Are you clean?” he had just time to ask—but I had no time to figure what he thought I might be holding. Motorbike Cop One curbed us on the left side and Motorbike Cop Two was leaning into my side.
“Let’s see what you look like in the daylight,” he told me. But as soon as I stepped out he became more interested in seeing what Max looked like. I had a fleeting hope that they wouldn’t look in the back seat. But Cop One was already seeing what Big Bernard looked like.
“Take off them shades,” Cop One told Big Bernard. Big Bernard took them off. “What’s your name?”
“I wasn’t driving,” was Big Bernard’s defense; which didn’t come to much.
“I didn’t ask you was you driving. I asked you who you was.”
“Herbert Harris.”
“Let’s see some identification, Herbert.”
Big Bernard extracted his wallet carefully, carefully selected a card from among several and handed it to the officer. Cop One looked over the card, turned it over, then asked, “Who’s Philip Harris?”
“A standup comedian,” I tried to help out; but nobody paid me any mind.
“I’m Philip Harris,” Big Bernard testified.
“Then why’d you say Herbert Harris?”
“The full name is Philip Herbert Harris. I use the middle name because I don’t want to be confused with the comedian.” The officer handed back Mr. Harris’ card.
“Now let me see the other names.”
“It’s the only card I got.”
The officer just stood with his gloved hand out until Big Bernard handed him another. The officer took it but kept his hand out until Big Bernard had handed him three more.
“Which one of these is you?”
“They’re all friends of mine,” Big Bernard explained.
“We got a wrong passenger here,” Cop One filled in Cop Two. “Do you make his buddy?”
“Not yet,” Cop Two answered, “but we’re getting around to it. Five ID cards so far.”
Knowing they’d be getting around to me any minute, I offered my wallet to Cop One.
“Who asked you for that?” he wanted to know. I put it back in my pocket. Some cop.
He walked around to the car’s locked trunk.
“Let’s take a look in here.”
“I lost the key,” Max said quickly.
“We’ll make a new one for you at the station,” Cop One offered. “Do you want to open it here or there?”
“I just found the key,” Max discovered.
The trunk was packed tight with record albums.
“Let’s see a bill of sale.”
Big Bernard looked over the trunk.
“I won ’em in a crap game,” he confided to Cop Two, “I got lucky against a fellow he was in the record business. He didn’t have enough cash to pay off. I didn’t want to be hard on him; so I took records, poor fella.”
“We better send for the detail,” Cop One suggested to Cop Two, and Two agreed.
A small crowd gathered while we were waiting for the detail. Two moved them on. “Nothing happenin’ here, folks, just a traffic violation.” He took my arm like he’d never seen me before and told me to move on, but I held my ground. I wasn’t a folk: I was a suspect. I went over and stood beside Big Bernard. He looked more dangerous than Max.
A squadrol pulled up. Two citizen-dress men got out.
“Get in the car,” One told me. This was more like it. I’d give him my name, address and social-security number, nothing more. “I can’t crack this one,” he’d have to admit to the Chief of Detectives after the long grueling under the lights, “he don’t have a nerve in his body.”
I handed him my wallet.
“Did I ask you to show me that?”
I put the wallet back. Some citizen-dress man.
At the station Big Bernard and Max had to take off their jackets and stand with their hands above their heads while being frisked. I put my hands over my head, too.
Cop One pulled Big Bernard’s suspenders back almost a yard—“Look! Booster suspenjers!” he chortled—and held them there long enough for everyone to see there was enough space down there to hold a record player and a couple transistors—then let them snap—thwang!—against Big Bernard’s big belly, and everybody laughed. Even Max.
So Cop Two pulled Max’s suspenders back and, sure enough—they were booster suspenjers, too! He pretended to be looking for loot down there for a minute—then snapped them—thwang!—against Max’s belly.
Everybody laughed again except Max.
“Shall I take my jacket off, sir?” I asked. I could hardly wait to show them I was wearing a belt.
“No. But you can take your hands down from over your head.”
This time everybody laughed. Including me.
“Where you from?”
“Indiana.”
“Ever been arrested in Indiana?”
“They were all bum raps.”
“Mug and print these boys,” the desk man decided.
“All I’m wearing is a belt,” I clued him in. But it was too late. They didn’t care what I was wearing.
That was how I got to get locked up with Big Bernard and Max, to wait for the paddy wagon to take us down for mugging. Big Bernard took one bench of the cell and Max took the other. I stood up. They were both pretty tired, I could see. Both were sleeping when the lockup fellow let us out to take the ride downtown.
A double line of prisoners was waiting to take the ride. A paddy-cop manacled each pair before they climbed into the paddy. Big Bernard and Max got manacled together because they were friends. I was the last one in line and held out my wrists; but I didn’t have a co-criminal to get manacled to. The paddy-cop just climbed into the wagon and waited for me to follow. When you work for the police department you shouldn’t take chances like that.
The driver started wheeling, causing me to miss the first step up, then began circling the yard slowly, thinking he had a full load. The paddy-cop in the back held the door open for me. But I had to chase the wagon a whole lap around the yard. On the second lap I made the step. The paddy-cop was very nice. He held out his hand to help me in.
“I see you made it,” he congratulated me and closed the door. I hoped the other fellows wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing manacles.
A Caddy has it all over a paddy for seeing L.A. Because windows don’t go opp-donn in a paddy. The reason is that a paddy don’t have windows. Which leads you to keep wondering how fast you’re going when you’re actually standing still; and why when you’re standing still it feels like you’re making time. But the ride was worth it to get printed and mugged.
“I ain’t mad at you because the first time you give me your action you hit, Nels,” Max told me when he came out of the wagon. “I was pretty salty at you for a while but I ain’t salty no more. Take the key out of my jacket—the other side, that’s it. The address is 9901 Manola Way. Write it down so’s you don’t forget it. If we don’t see you for a few days tell the landlady we went out of town on business. Make yourself at home.”
That was all he had time to tell me. I was happy that Max wasn’t mad at me any more. I was even happier to have the key to 9901 Manola Way.
But I was disappointed in not getting printed and mugged. All they gave me was a lady cop who said, “Roll up your sleeve.”
“What for?” I asked her. I wasn’t being defiant. Simply curious.
“To look at your vaccination,” she explained.
“It isn’t much to look at,” I admitted modestly.
When I rolled up my sleeve I was puzzled to find there was no vaccination mark there at all.
“This is a real puzzler,” I had to confess.
“Try the other sleeve.”
I be dawg. There it was!
“What did they bring this one in for?” she asked as if nothing could have interested her less.
“To get printed and mugged,” I told her hopefully.
“Who’d you kill recently?” she asked, looking at the lockup fellow and smiling instead of studying me. Then she just walked away. Some lady-cop.
The lockup fellow let me have a cell all to myself. I knew they’d put someone in there with me who’d start asking me questions like don’t I get a bang out of playing with matches or would I like to buy some hot diamonds. But I wouldn’t talk. He too would have to report back to the people who’d paid him, “That fellow don’t have a nerve in his body.”
Nobody showed up and it got sort of lonesome by myself. So I hung my belt on the bars where the screw would see I could hang myself any time I wanted.
He noticed it but all he said was, “Keep your pants on.”
And he kept on walking.
After a while he opened the cell and I saw we were going back to the station. Just when I’d begun to like it where I was.
The paddy was waiting, and the prisoners were being manacled before they climbed in, just like before. I didn’t see either Big Bernard or Max, but I didn’t want to get left out again. So I pushed my way up the line a little and got manacled to a fellow who was dressed like he’d killed somebody very recently. By the time we got back to the station we’d become good friends.
The same officer was at the desk. I was glad to see him because he’d trusted me not to make a break for freedom.
“Why’d they bring you back here?” he asked me.
“I’d rather have stayed with my friends,” I told him. “Can I wait for them here?”
“It’s alright with me,” he told me, “they’ll be along in anywhere from four to six months.”
The way Max was going about paying me off seemed a little odd to me.
“Why don’t you just sign a twenty-five-dollar bond and go home?” the desk man asked me.
“I don’t have twenty-five dollars.”
“Then just sign the bond and send us your check.”
Do you know that after I’d signed the bond, that fellow didn’t even look up? I just kept moving toward the door, one step at a time—I think that dumb cop almost wanted me to make the street!
It had been a good day, all in all: Two winners, a ride in a paddy, and an apartment rent-free until the fifteenth of the month. I went back to the chateau, to get my clothes, in good spirits.
I was all packed when I got a knock.
There stood Otto accompanied by a small, frail, middle-aged fellow, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and holding his hat.
“This man is an old fan of yours,” Otto explained.
“Are you Nelson Algren?” the hat-in-hand fellow asked as though hardly able to believe his good luck.
I acknowledged that I was. Why be coy?
“Would you read this for me?” he asked, handing me a rolled script.
“I’d be happy to,” I assured him. I know how shy unpublished writers can be.
His manuscript had already been published after a fashion. It was a subpoena charging me with breach of contract. The Old Fan hurried away. Some fan.
As I hadn’t signed any contract to breach, I wondered how much Otto had paid him to have the phoney drawn up and served. I’d known he had me figured for a mark; but now he was really going too far. Then, to top everything, he handed me a bottle of scotch.
It wasn’t the first time that another man had threatened me. It wasn’t the first time one had given me a bottle of whiskey. I’d also seen a man pleading on all fours. This was the first time I’d had one hand me a bottle of whiskey, go down on all fours—then shake his fist at me from a kneeling position.
I could recall being booted out of a joint by a foot that had spun me through an open doorway. Yet I hadn’t been told that I was being kicked because I wasn’t returning the kicker’s love. It was my first time for that, too. Finding one of my hands unoccupied with any other task at the moment, I used it to take the profferred whiskey.
It was nicely gift-wrapped. I unwrapped it fast before he had a chance to take it back.
Otto began a lurching shuffle around the living room. All I could do, subpoena in one hand and bottle in the other, was to follow him with the same shuffle. We went two laps in this curious clockwise procession—until he pulled up and swung about so suddenly that, thinking he was going to snatch back his bottle, I turned and began lurching counter-clockwise. Otto began following. When I finally pulled up he’d sunk into a chair on the other side of the room; looking more than ever in need of a makeup man. So I collapsed in another chair.
“I am nice man!” he announced abruptly. ‘‘Why you make me act like ass?”
The least I could do, to make it all up to him, was to open our bottle. Or read our subpoena.
“I am success-oriented,” he began that weary tune once more—“But you—you are a free spirit! You have compassion! You are sensitive. You are kind man. You are for underdog. You are creative.”
I sensed the danger.
“I fight it,” I interrupted him, trying to get my defenses up in time—“I never let compassion interfere where I see a chance to make a fast buck. I figure I’d better wait to start doing something for my fellow-man until I’m richer than he is. Meanwhile he’ll have to get along without my help.”
“No! No! No!” Otto protested—“What am I? Nothing! What can I do? Nothing! Not without creative man like you!” He was crowding me.
“A producer can be a highly creative man,” I insisted while trying to think of one.
“No, no —a producer is a businessman, nothing more.”
“What good would an artist’s work be without a creative businessman to bring it to the world on film?” I asked hopefully.
‘ 'Good! So now you can write screen treatment for me about suffering of drug addicts—but not too much suffering. Because how can a movie be creative if only a few people say it’s any good? What we want is something creative that everybody wants to see!”
How I’d gotten so far from home I couldn’t clearly recall. All I remember was that I’d decided to jump ship and pan for gold. And here I was in a push-button fantasy listening to its proprietor. I noticed that the glass in my hand was empty; but I didn’t remember drinking it.
So was Otto’s. I refilled his and refilled my own.
When Otto took his leave he was wearing an expression too benign. I attributed this more to the whiskey than to anything I’d said. He was assuming, apparently, that the combination of the gift bottle, restoration of the floor-model TV and a rent-free apartment, plus the threat of a phoney subpoena, would suffice to keep me on his payroll.
Because, when he took his leave, still beaming, he offered me his hand.
That was the moment when I had the fleeting hallucination that Otto was wearing booster suspenders. And I knew that, if I extended my hand, I’d try to snap them—thwang! But I couldn’t snap them because I was holding the subpoena. Any more than I could shake his hand. All I could do was to put the subpoena in it.
Big Bernard’s and Max’s quarters on Manola Way were comfortable. I lived in them until the rent was due.
But I didn’t want to leave L.A. without saying goodbye to Otto. I knew it was no use trying to walk in on him to say so-long. Otto didn’t operate informally. I’d leave a message with his secretary. If he didn’t call back—as I was certain he would not—I would at least have made the civilized gesture.
When Otto answered the phone himself I was surprised.
“I’m leaving town, Mr. Preminger,” I explained, “I only phoned to wish you the best of luck with the picture you’re planning of the book I wrote.”
“Who this is?"
“Algren.”
The next voice was that of his secretary.
“Messages to Mr. Preminger have to go through his secretary, sir.”
“How come he took his call himself then?”
“Because Mr. Preminger likes to check on who’s calling me."
“You mean I have to go through Mr. Preminger in order to reach his secretary in order to reach Mr. Preminger?’ ’
“That is our modus operandi, sir.”
“Otto keeps a tight little store, doesn’t he?”
But she’d already hung up.
Poor Carol Channing. Preminger required her to perch atop an electrically-operated bed, in Lover Avalon’s apartment during the screening of Skidoo, while it was lowered beneath the floor. Miss Channing, distrustful of all mechanical contraptions, thought she’d rather not. In order to reassure her, Otto sat on the bed and commanded it to be lowered. Only moments after Otto and the bed had disappeared there was an ominous thump: the machinery had gone haywire and Otto was trapped under the floor.
Curiously, no immediate effort was made to rescue Otto. The actors looked at one another with faint smiles; the stagehands’ eyes took on a glaze. And everybody just stood around exchanging glances.
All good things, of course, must come to an end. The bed was finally brought up; with Otto still atop it. And work was resumed on a picture that would have been the worst of all time had not Otto himself later made others even worse.
One of them was the picture Otto made of the novel I’d written. The sequences were so mechanical that it left me with the impression that I’d seen a series of stills instead of a moving picture.
And I understood how Miss Channing must have felt when she saw herself, in panties and bra, making love to Frankie Avalon.
*Rex Reed in Home Furnishings Daily.