Erwin Orwin’s after-the-first-night parties were never geared for failure, and the party he put on for the premiere of The Pink Safari was no exception. It was, as always, held on stage, as soon as possible after the fall of the curtain; he kept the set as it was, except for taking out the backdrop, and filled the vast available space with tables, bars, an enormous buffet, and a throng of people to match.
It was part of Erwin’s touch-of-Napoleon technique that he never followed theatrical fashion, neither in this particular area, nor in most others. He did things his own way – and thus, after a first night, he did not go to Sardi’s. Sardi’s, with bulging hampers, a fleet of heated trolleys, and crate after crate of the right stuff, came to him.
The curtain had rung down, reasonably near to schedule, at eleven-thirty; by twelve o’clock, the stage was jumping again. It was a merry charade, because we thought we had cause to be merry – the show had romped through without a hitch, the audience had seemed to love it, and everyone was saying, between drinks: ‘They can’t pan this one …’ These were famous last words, of course, and Broadway was littered with expensively embalmed theatrical corpses to prove it; but this time, this time it seemed they really couldn’t … So we celebrated, with a good heart, steady nerves – until the time for the reviews drew nearer – and most of the stops out.
An orchestra played for us, and in between times Teller’s mother’s cousin took over at the piano, pounding out the Safari tunes which people were already beginning to hum. The guests danced – there were loads of pretty girls available, all with hair like Susan’s – and ate a lot, and drank more, and gathered into knots and wandered around the set, arguing, or melted into the shadows for a brisk clinch.
There was probably some kind of esoteric message in the fact that this celebration party, held on stage, put some people into the full glare, and others wandering in and out of the wings, and others nowhere to be seen. Life, my boy, life … Myself, I had the glare, and it was beginning to blur a little at the edges.
It was a theatrical crowd, the famous and the infamous jumbled together like differing grades of egg; the only grade not represented were the critics on the dailies, absent with leave, crouched even now, with the knives or unguents of their trade, over the prostrate body of my brainchild. There were moments, many moments, when I did not care what they did with it; moments when this whole evening seemed to slop over into absolute falsity – a falsity presented in specific terms by our own Safari cast who, ruthlessly coy, delayed their various entrances until the moment seemed propitious, and then swept back upon the stage, ready, they hoped, to take the best curtain call of the evening.
Actors … But I could not deny that they deserved it. They had all been wonderful, and they knew it, and we knew it, and thus they were entitled to this little extra slice of nonsense. Dave Jenkin, attended by his raucous girlfriend, was especially prominent, prancing around the stage like a compatriot boxer at the moment of victory; but he had risen to the very top of his form that evening – agile, cheeky, sometimes very funny, and always timing to perfection – and he now had, as far as I was concerned, a free hand to put on any kind of an act he chose. He had proved himself a star. Let the star gyrate a bit.
I was gyrating myself, though in smaller and smaller circles.
People congratulated me. I congratulated people. Erwin Orwin held court behind a massive corner table, piled with food. Teller’s mother’s cousin gave of his best. On my side – it was a night for remembering that there were two sides to everything – I had Jack Taggart, looking all-competent, and Hobart Mackay, looking out of place, and beautiful Susan Crompton, looking just fine.
Beautiful Susan was excited, but full of the pangs of remorse, for something really important. She had fluffed one of her only two lines, though with an air of such ravishing incompetence that the audience had roared with laughter. (I could imagine Erwin saying, out of the corner of his mouth: ‘We’ll keep that one in.’) But Susan, at the moment, was not to be consoled. It was obvious that she would talk about this setback for many months to come.
‘I thought I’d die, right there on the stage!’ she declaimed, as soon as we had met, and I had told her how wonderful she was. ‘And I’d rehearsed it so many times!’
‘It didn’t matter,’ I assured her. ‘Really it didn’t.’
‘It did, it did!’ she wailed. ‘It was awful! And what will people think? What will she think?’
‘She?’
‘Your wife!’
I felt able to promise that Kate would not, for this particular reason, think any the worse of her. I had no doubt that this was true. I couldn’t check it with Kate, because I couldn’t see Kate, at that moment. I was not in good shape, for all sorts of reasons. It had been a long evening, a raw evening. I had spent a lot of it with Kate, but now, in the midst of the crowds and congratulations and the merry merry fun, I was finishing it alone.
It had been very exciting; one could not be blasé about an evening which had gone with such a triumphant swing, the glittering culmination of nearly a year’s hard work. Like Dave Jenkin, I felt entitled to my own little prance of victory … I had sat in a box beside Kate, with an unauthorised row of drinks close to hand, and watched the thing unfold, so well and so smoothly that presently I stopped sweating, and drank only to success, and for pleasure.
Safari had been funny, as I hoped it would – wildly funny, bitterly funny, cruelly funny on a cruel strand of the world’s multiple troubles. I enjoyed it, and nodded when bits of it went especially well, and glowed a little when people laughed, and glowed even more at the final applause. But all the time, I could guess what Kate must be thinking. Indeed, I knew. Was racial strife ever funny? Were there jokes to be made out of side-by-side squalor and affluence? What had happened to Ex Afrika? What – that famous old conundrum, the despair of the leading savants of two continents – what had happened to me?
Her main reaction to the play itself had been silence; in fact, we had only spoken to each other twice during the entire evening. When Susan came on, Kate said: ‘So that’s your Miss Thing.’
‘She was,’ I said, with a slight extra emphasis.
‘Well done.’
It was rather too elliptical for me.
Later she had seemed to have a moment of tears, though for what and for why I did not know. Was it when the Negro child died, and a single sad guitar theme picked its way out of the jungle of the native-location music? Or was it for other things? For me, for herself, for us? I could not tell, I did not know how to ask.
At the second interval, she put a curious question: ‘Do you remember “God is black”?’
I did remember, though I could not see why she had recalled it tonight. It had been something long ago, in Johannesburg, when I had told her: ‘If you want to know what it feels like to be a native in South Africa, go along to the steps of the Town Hall, and take a look at the pillar at the far end.’
I would not tell her why, so she had gone to look, and found what I had found earlier that day – the words ‘God is black’ scrawled in chalk on one of the civic pillars. When she came back, she had asked: ‘But what does it mean?’
‘Despair and hope, in three words.’
It was a hot day, and she was rather cross. ‘You might just as well have told me what it was. I never walk as far as that.’
Now, in the theatre, it was my turn to ask: ‘What made you think of that?’
‘I was remembering,’ she answered, and that was all she would allow me. Though we sat together, sculptured, like royalty, with fixed dynastic smiles, we were utterly divided still. It was part of the rawness of that evening, and it came at the end of five weeks of the same forlorn, contemptuous, bitter disengagement.
When next I thought about the time, it was 1 a.m.; the party was thinning out, though not very much – no party with a theatrical basis ever broke up before the food and drink were finished, and there were still those reviews to come … I sighted Kate once, talking to Jack Taggart; across the stage, they noticed me looking at them, and they smiled back, but it did not seem that they smiled very much. Hate Steele Month was still on.
A rather pretty girl, with bare feet and her dress torn, came walking hurriedly out of the wings; then she turned, and called to some unseen adversary: ‘You don’t have to rape me!’ ‘I would say that was true,’ said the cynical fellow standing next to me at the huge central bar, and I laughed with him. But suppose it had been my sister … Dave Jenkin was doing a wild tap-dance routine in the middle of the stage, putting most of it out of bounds for other dancers. Erwin was at his post, still eating, talking very gravely indeed to one of his backers, who talked very gravely back.
I overheard Susan say: ‘You know, I think you’re absolutely right! I was over rehearsed!’
It was my newly adopted world, and I didn’t like it at all.
Then the man on the other side of me suddenly turned out to be my publisher.
‘It’s past your bedtime, Hobart,’ I told him.
‘It’s past our bedtime,’ he said precisely.
‘I hope no one misconstrues that.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘That would not surprise me at all. What very peculiar people you have in the theatre.’ Then he turned to look at me more closely. ‘Aren’t you rather pale?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been working. Si monumentum requiris – can’t pronounce the rest of it. And worrying. And of course drinking. All people like me are pale … Tell me that you liked the show.’
‘I liked the show.’
‘More!’
‘It should do very well.’
He was something less than effusive, and I couldn’t quite let it go. ‘Don’t have a complete mental breakdown over this.’
‘No, I really did like it, Jonathan. I thought it was very good.’ He added, with a certain amount of care: ‘You know – of its kind.’
‘Like a beautifully designed sewer?’
He laughed, while I drank. ‘Like a beautifully designed musical. But don’t forget, I published Ex Afrika.’
‘There’s plenty of Ex Afrika in this.’
Now he was looking worried, as if he did not know whether to answer me seriously or not; he seemed more than ever, like a professor – a professor with an unruly class which might start acting out the Blackboard Jungle while his back was turned. At length he said: ‘Well, it’s half the story, isn’t it? The funny half – no, that’s not it exactly. The top half, sad and funny both, but basically the part that doesn’t matter.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘You see I’m trying to be quite honest about this … All the part under the surface, the core of Ex Afrika, is still in the book. And only in the book.’
I drank again. What was it Kate said about criticism? I must learn to be brave about it … ‘Then we’re both satisfied. I have a show, you have a book.’
His brow cleared. ‘I’d be completely satisfied if you’d write me another one.’
‘I will, Hobart, I will. Don’t crowd me.’
I passed my glass across the bar for a refill, and the barman, a refined youth not quite at home in these raffish surroundings, asked: ‘Something similar?’
‘Too right!’ I said, in my Australian accent.
He sniffed as he passed the champagne glass back to me. I had made another enemy – and a barman at that.
‘I’m not crowding you,’ said Hobart.
‘What?’
‘You said, “Don’t crowd me”, and I’m not.’
‘Oh.’ He had sounded rather irritated. ‘That’s good to know.’
I had the impression that he was not going to talk to me very much longer.
‘How are things at home?’ he asked presently.
‘Terrific,’ I said. ‘One long honeymoon.’
‘Kate was looking very well.’
‘What’s “was”? She is!’
‘I meant, when I talked to her.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t think I’ll wait for those reviews after all. I’m sure they’ll be wonderful.’
‘You wish to leave me?’
‘It’s time to go.’ For a small man, he could be firm enough when he wanted to be. ‘Good night, Jonathan. Let’s have lunch, one of these days.’
‘With a new book by Steele?’
‘With or without a new book by Steele. But in a perfect world–’ he gestured, and smiled, and was gone.
I turned to the barman, and said: ‘Something similar.’ But he was now a different barman, an oldish, disgruntled, rushed-off-his-feet man who did not speak the language of leisure. He snatched my glass, and asked curtly: ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘Don’t you know a champagne glass when you see one?’
He glared at me, and stuck out a bristly chin. ‘Yeah. That’s why I asked. Champagne’s finished.’
‘Who says so?’
He pointed to an empty bottle. ‘Look for yourself, Mac.’
‘Good God! Don’t you know who I am?’
‘No.’
‘Good God!’
Very weak dialogue, Steele, I thought, as I turned away; we won’t keep it in. But I knew where the champagne would be, if there was any left in the theatre. Like Lord Muddley, it was the kind of thing I heard about.
Erwin – enormous, overflowing, massive old theatrical czar Erwin Orwin – made room for me at his table as I sat down beside him.
‘Hallo, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Have some more champagne. You know my associate, Mr Ehrlich?’
‘No.’ I shook hands with Mr Ehrlich, a tall, thin, precise Jew with very formal manners and, I should have guessed, lots of money. ‘But I do now. And yes, Erwin, I’d like some champagne. I feel bound to tell you that in certain parts of this building, the champagne has run out.’
‘Mine hasn’t,’ said Erwin. ‘There’s got to be a limit for actors, that’s all.’ He snapped his fingers, and a man jumped forward, with a magnum of Louis Roederer at the ready; he snapped them again, and a cigar was brought, and a third man lit it almost before I knew it was in my mouth. ‘Well, Johnny, how does it feel to have a hit?’
‘We have a hit?’
‘What else? This is going to be the toughest ticket in town.’
‘Five stars,’ said Mr Ehrlich. ‘Not a star less.’
‘Ehrlich is the German for honourable.’
‘Even so,’ said Mr Ehrlich.
‘Your girl was terrific,’ said Erwin.
‘All right, Erwin. But thanks for giving her a try, anyway.’
‘Have you another work in mind?’ asked Mr Ehrlich.
‘A novel.’
‘May it make another great musical enterprise!’
We talked about that, and this and that, and the theatre, and how good Dave Jenkin had been, and how The Pink Safari would make a fabulous film (side glances exchanged between Mr Ehrlich and Mr Orwin), until two o’clock, when there was a sudden outbreak of ooh-and-ah on the other side of the stage, and people came running in with the morning papers, and we had our reviews.
Suddenly everyone was kissing and laughing and shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. The party took a wild upward swing. Dave Jenkin was uttering loud yells of delight, hugging his girlfriend, turning cartwheels all round the stage. The orchestra, which had been flagging, began to roar and thump out our songs, with many an extra clash of cymbals. More champagne appeared, released from some prudent reserve, and with it came fresh smiles and whoops and people joining hands and dancing. Erwin, delighted, put his arm round my shoulder; even Mr Ehrlich gave my hand a small informal squeeze.
People crowded up to our table, waving newspapers, pointing to headlines, upsetting glasses, clapping me on the back, kissing the nape of my neck. ‘They mentioned me!’ Susan cried, and collapsed into the nearest chair, overcome by the sheer grandeur of fame. Someone yelled: ‘Three cheers for The Pink Safari!’ and the cheers came up like high-pitched thunder.
We had a hit.
They were fantastic reviews – the dictionaries must have been combed for adjectives, and we had enough quotable comments to crowd a full-page ad. ‘Safari a Smash!’ ‘Rip Roaring Success’, ‘Five Star Hit!’ ‘My Fair Safari!’ ‘Dazzling Display of Talent’, ‘Resounding Triumph’, ‘You MUST take This Safari!’ – there it was in black and white, quotable, memorable, unarguable. Erwin Orwin’s press agents couldn’t have done better. I couldn’t have done better myself.
In all the swamping praise, there was only one example of the still small voice. It seemed to be speaking to me, in direct and cautionary terms. It was important. It was, inevitably, the Times.
Those readers (said the man, after calling the show ‘an undoubted success’) who enjoyed that fine novel Ex Afrika may find themselves putting their hands over their ears – or even holding their noses – at The Pink Safari. But (as no one knows better than author-playwright Jonathan Steele) there are thousands of people in and out of New York who don’t give a finger-snap what happens to novels, good or bad, but who do like plush musicals; and these devotees should keep the SRO notices nailed up at the Orwin Theatre for many a long month – or year.
I thought: If we trim that down to ‘Should keep the SRO notices nailed up at the Orwin Theatre’, we couldn’t ask for a better quote. And from the Times …
It was the last snide thought of the evening.
Erwin was leaving, attended by a pallid, puffy-eyed, yet jubilant phalanx of his aides. ‘Good boy, Johnny,’ he said, as he shook hands, and then: ‘Give me a call tomorrow. I’ve got some ideas.’
I was still sitting down – bad manners, but a matter of necessity. ‘Did you read the Times?’ I asked him.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Wonderful review.’
‘Not so wonderful about the book.’
‘The book’s great.’
‘No, I mean the novel.’
‘Oh, that. Well, of course they had to say something. Don’t let it get you down.’
‘But it’s true.’
He was looking down at me with expert appraisal. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Go home. Get some sleep. You’ll think differently tomorrow.’
‘It is true.’ I waved my hand round the Safari stage, brilliantly contrived for my last-act, lovable, loyal losers. ‘This is all wrong. All wrong!’
Now he had a different look, or rather a very strange progression of them: near-anger melting into a gleam of anxiety, and then to one of his widest grins. ‘Confidentially, I agree with you,’ he said, and shook my hand again. ‘But don’t you tell a soul.’
I wasn’t going to tell a soul, till I had sorted it all out. But someone, I found, was going to tell me.
The someone was my hotshot agent and non-critical friend, Jack Taggart. He took the chair vacated by Erwin Orwin, and smiled at me, and said: ‘Well, you did it.’
‘Yeah.’ But I was dispirited, and it wasn’t going to change tonight. ‘What did I do, Jack?’
‘Made The Pink Safari a riot.’ He had a glass of his usual whisky and water in his hand, and he raised it, toasting me. ‘Cheers. This thing can’t miss. Erwin was talking to me about a film deal.’
‘Am I in on that?’
He sighed gustily; the theatrical atmosphere was catching, even for him. ‘Don’t you ever read your contracts? You get a big cut anyway. And if you adapt this thing as a screenplay, you just about double everything. If you want to. Do you want to?’
‘Hell, I don’t know.’
He looked at me very soberly. ‘You really don’t, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, if you want my advice–’
‘I want your advice.’
‘I’ll give it you in two words.’ His corncrake voice was suddenly forceful. ‘Forget it.’
This was confusing, and though confusion was nothing new, it still deserved translation. ‘Translation,’ I said.
‘What do you really want to do next?’
‘Not another of these bloody things, anyway.’
‘That’s what I meant. You’ve done it once. Don’t do it again. Don’t even think of it. Finish the book instead, or write a new one.’
When a neutral man, suddenly and at last, took a position, it was always surprising, and I was surprised now. This was the first time that Jack had ever offered a suggestion which wasn’t strictly professional, such as the choice between two differing rates of royalty. It was like an unloaded gun firing, a man serving a writ, a talking horse … But there was much more to come.
‘And while you’re at it,’ he went on, ‘leave New York. For a while, anyway. It’s been nice having you, Johnny, but this town is not for you.’
‘How in hell do you figure that out?’
‘It’s getting in the way of your work.’
‘You’ve been talking to Kate.’
‘Sure I’ve been talking to Kate. The first time ever, about this sort of thing. It turned out that we had exactly the same ideas.’ He was looking very thoughtful, staring at the table-top, fiddling with his glass. ‘A lot of it is none of my business. But you as a writer – that is. There’s a whole range of new work for you to do, on race relations. It’s the crucial thing now, I believe, and you know a great deal about it. You mustn’t go to waste … There are plenty of experts taking care of that damned east-west axis, hardly any working on the north-south one, the really important one … North and south in this country, north and south in the world. We live on the rich top of it; down there they’re boiling with anger and frustration, they’re sick of the misery … Do something about that, Johnny. Show it, explain it, do a little bit to cure it. It’s your job. Panel shows, and this–’ he waved his hand round the stage, ‘–and novels about the sex life of the rich white trash, just – are – not!’
This was too odd, too astonishing, for me to cope with, at that moment; I filed it away under ‘Some Other Time’, and went back to something else.
‘Where is Kate, anyway?’
‘She left,’ he answered, rather shortly.
‘Didn’t like the reviews?’
‘Not that, either. She left hours ago.’
‘To go where?’
‘Home.’ He was standing up suddenly.
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘I don’t think home is 77th Street.’ I saw that he had become very angry with me, for some reasons I couldn’t work out. Ah well, he had only joined the majority … ‘I told you that already. The rest is none of my business, like I said. But I’ll say this, damn it, and then goodbye.’ He was looking at me in an extraordinary way, like a sentencing judge, like the sternest father in the world; it was a thousand miles away from all he had ever been. ‘You need a fresh start, more than anyone I’ve ever met. And you need Kate. She had guts and integrity. She’s the only one who can help you.’
‘I don’t need help.’
He said: ‘My friend, you are dead without her,’ and smiled a very bleak smile by way of goodbye, and was gone.
I called after him: ‘Thanks, Jack!’ It was meant to be sarcastic, but at that bad moment it only sounded true. Someone called out: ‘Wonderful, Johnny!’ and someone else – it was Sally Coates, who had played the lead and done such miracles with it – leant over and gave me a smacking kiss, and said: ‘That’s for being the perfect author!’
Suddenly I didn’t appreciate it at all. It was all right for other people to be ecstatic; but now something had reversed all the rules. Now I only wanted to know what Kate thought, I only wanted to please her … On that instant, caught in the crowds and the cheers and the kissing on stage, I was lonely; irrationally, hopelessly lonely.
None of this was any fun if I couldn’t show it off to Kate; and no fun either if she didn’t laugh at me for doing so. She had become, once again, the only one I had to satisfy; the only begetter, and the whetstone to keep sharp on. I had to go back – go back all the way, as she had once said. I had to have her with me again.
It could not happen soon, nor easily; but it had to happen.
I stood up, on too swift an impulse, and inevitably, typically, I knocked over my chair, with a resounding crash. As people stared or laughed, and a waiter sprang forward to straighten things up, I decided that this had better be the last time I did that, too.
Susan was one of the people I passed on the way out. She might have been watching me for some time; her face was oddly concerned, even compassionate; she wasn’t thinking about her career – she was worrying about me, perhaps wondering if I would make it, whatever ‘it’ was. She touched my arm as I drew near, and I came to a rocking halt.
‘Going, Johnny?’
‘Yes. Home. I can’t stand this any longer.’
‘Oh.’ Her beautiful eyes – her very beautiful eyes – were looking directly into mine. ‘Goodbye, Johnny, in that case.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said awkwardly, squeezing her shoulder.
She had never made me feel bad, bless her, and she did not do so now. She just smiled her lovely smile, and said: ‘You do that. But goodbye, anyway.’