Cat's Pajamas (9 page)

“I'm sorry, Duke.”

“Back in L.A. I kept meeting folks who're into herbal medicines and psychic cures and such, and they advised me to go see this swami fella, Kieran Morella of the Greater Manhattan Heuristic Healing Center.”

“Southern California at your fingertips, and you had to come to
New York
to find a hippie guru flake?”

“You can laugh if you want to, Egghead, but I hoofed it over to Kieran's office the instant I stepped off the plane, and what he said made sense to me. Sure, it's an unconventional treatment, but he's had lots of success. He uses a kind of hypnotism to send the patient back to the exact moment when some little part of him turned cancerous, and then the patient imagines his immune system rounding up those primal malignant cells the way a cowboy rounds up steers.”

“Steers? Hey, this is the cure for you, Duke.”

“Next the patient tries to tune in these things called quantum vibrations, and before long the space-time continuum has folded back on itself, and it's as if he'd never developed cancer in the first place.”

“‘Unconventional' is a good word here, Duke.”

He swallowed another analgesic. “To help the patient get the proper pictures flowing through his mind—you know, images of his lymphocytes corralling the original cancer cells—Kieran shows him clips from
Red River.
Kinetotherapy, he calls it.”

“Jesus, he must have been thrilled to meet you,” I said.
Red River
is one of the few John Wayne westerns that Stuart and I can watch without snickering.

“He almost creamed himself. Now listen tight, Egghead. You might think I'm just talking about me, but I'm also talking about you. All during my flight east, I kept thinking about that American
hibakusha
business, and eventually I decided maybe your theory's not so crazy after all.”

“Howard Hughes has nuked us, Duke. Your fellow Bircher has pumped us full of gamma rays.”

“Let's leave Howard out of this, Robert Welch too. Here's the crux. The minute I told Kieran about this possible connection between
The Conqueror
and the Big C, and how the Cinemascope lenses may have captured the very moment when the radiation started seeping into me—how it's all up there on the silver screen—well, he got pretty damn excited.”

“I can imagine.”

“He kept saying, ‘Mr. Wayne, we must get a print of this film. Get me a print, Mr. Wayne, and I'll cure you.'”

Duke snapped his fingers. Taking care not to disturb his matrix of playing cards, Sweeney Foote rolled off the bed. He went to the closet, reached into a valise, and drew out an object that looked like a Revell plastic model of the cryptic black monolith from
2001: A Space Odyssey,
a movie that Duke had refused to see on general principles.

“The Conqueror
arrived this morning, special courier, along with the necessary hardware,” said Duke. He took the little monolith from Sweeney, then passed it to me. “Brand-new technology, Jap thing called Betamax, a spool of half-inch videotape in a plastic cassette. Sony thinks it'll be the biggest thing since the Crock-Pot.”

The Betamax cassette featured a plastic window offering a partial view of both the feed core and the take-up spindle. Somebody had written “The Conqueror” on a piece of masking tape and stuck it across the top edge. “Ingenious,” I said.

“It's all very well to wring your hands over Hiroshima, but if you ask me the Japs have done pretty well for themselves since then, especially the Sony people. My first kinetotherapy treatment occurs in two days and—you know what, Angela?—I'd like you to come along. You could help me concentrate, and you might even get a healing effect yourself,”

“I couldn't afford it.”

“I'll pay for everything. You're not out of the woods yet.”

“I'm not out of the woods,” I admitted ruefully.

“Monday afternoon, two o'clock, the Heuristic Healing Center, 1190 West 41st Street near Tenth Avenue. There's a goddamn mandala on the door.”

“Let me talk it over with Stuart.”

“With the Big C, you're never out of the woods.”

I pour myself a glass of sherry, rewind
Trinity and Beyond,
and press
Play.
As before, the fiery mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo explosion fills my television screen, shot after shot of billowing radioactive dust, and for a fleeting instant I experience an urge to bow down before it.

How beautiful art thou, O Mighty Fireball. How fair thy countenance and frame. Give me coffers of gold, O Great One, and I shall heap sacrifices upon thy altar. Give me silken raiment and shining cities, and I shall wash thy graven feet with rare libations.

Stuart and I decided that as long as Duke was picking up the tab I should indeed give kinetotherapy a try, and so on Monday afternoon I took the N Train to Times Square. Ten minutes later I marched into the foyer of the Heuristic Healing Center, its walls hung with Hindu tapestries, its air laden with patchouli incense, and announced myself to the receptionist, a stately black woman wearing a beige Nehru jacket. The nameplate on her desk read
“JONQUIL.”
Duke was waiting for me, outfitted in blue denims, a checked cotton shirt, a red bandana, and tooled-leather cowboy boots. He looked like a supporting player in a bad science fiction movie about time travel. Sweeney Foote lurked near the coatrack, Duke's inhaler slung over his shoulder, a large crushproof envelope tucked under his arm like a private eye's holster.

Duke and I had barely said hello when Kieran Morella, a pale slender man dressed in a flowing white caftan and sporting a salt-and-pepper-goatee, orange beads, and a silver-gray ponytail—a counterculture point guard—sashayed out of his office, all smiles and winks. He gave us each a hug, which did not go down well with Duke, then took the envelope from Sweeney and ushered us into Treatment Salon Number Three, a velvet-draped chamber suggesting an old-style Hollywood screening room. At the far end two brown, tufted, vinyl recliner chairs faced a television set connected to a squat device that I took to be a Betamax videocassette recorder.

As Sweeney slunk into the shadows, Kieran produced a coffee tin crammed with neatly rolled joints, presenting the stash to us as a hostess might offer her bridge club a box of chocolates. Getting stoned was optional, the therapist explained, but it would help us reach a “a peak of relaxed concentration.”

“Hey, Doc, I've never smoked that Timothy Leary stuff in my life, and I'm not about to start now,” said Duke. “Don't you have any drinking whiskey around here?”

“I could send Jonquil out for something,” said Kieran.

“Jack Daniels, okay?”

“Tennessee's finest”—Kieran issued a nervous laugh—“endorsed by Davy Crockett himself.”

Duke and Kieran spent the next twenty minutes talking about their favorite John Wayne movies. They were both keen on the so-called Cavalry Trilogy that Duke made under John Ford's direction:
Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande
—three pictures that leave me cold. (I much prefer Duke and Ford in Irish mode:
The Quiet Man, The Long Voyage Home.)
At last Jonquil appeared with a quart of Jack Daniels and a shot glass. Kieran guided us into the recliner chairs and removed
The Conqueror
from Sweeney's envelope. He fed the cassette into the Betamax, flipped on the TV, and bustled about the room lighting incense and chanting under his breath.

“Your job is simple, Mr. Wayne.” Kieran seized a remote control connected to the Betamax by a coaxial cable. “Each time you appear out there in the Escalante Desert, I want you to imagine a kind of psychic armor surrounding your body, filtering out the gamma rays. Ms. Rappaport, you have exactly the same task. During every shot you're in”—he handed me a box of wooden matches—“you must imagine a translucent shield standing between yourself and the radioactivity. If you folks can get the right quantum vibrations going, your screen images will acquire visible protective auras.”

“We'll really see
auras?”
said Duke, impressed.

“There's a good chance of it,” said Kieran.

Duke poured himself a slug of whiskey. I took a joint from the coffee tin, struck a match, and lit up. Kieran positioned himself behind our chairs, laying a soothing hand on each of our heads.

“This is going to be fun,” I said, drawing in a puff of magic smoke.

“Concentrate,” said Kieran.

I held my breath, slid the joint from my lips, and passed it to Kieran. He took a toke. The credits came on, a roll call of the dead, the doomed, and the fortunate few, this last category consisting mainly of people who didn't have to sweat under the Utah sun to get their names on the picture: the associate producer, the writer, the film editor, the sound editor.

As the movie unspooled in all its pan-and-scan glory—the film-chain operator had astutely decided that the original anamorphic images would not prosper on the average TV screen—it occurred to me that my running feud with Duke encapsulated the history of the Cold War. During the making of
The High and the Mighty,
we fought about the imminent electrocution of the “atomic spies,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. While shooting
The Searchers,
we nearly came to blows concerning the Senate's recent decision to censure Joseph McCarthy. (“Old Joe will have the last laugh,” Duke kept saying.)
The Alamo
found us at odds over the upcoming presidential election, Duke insisting that there would be jubilation in the Kremlin if Jack Kennedy, the likely Democratic contender, beat Richard Nixon, the shoo-in for the Republican nomination. Between takes on
Circus World,
we nearly drew blood over whether the Cuban Missile Crisis obliged the superpowers to start taking disarmament seriously or whether, conversely, it meant that America should ratchet up her arsenal to a higher level of overkill. On the sets of both
The Green Berets
and
Chisum,
the Vietnam War inevitably got us going at each other tooth and nail.

And what about
The Conqueror
itself? What issue fueled our hostility during that benighted project? Believe it or not, our bone of contention was atomic testing, even though we knew nothing of Upshot Knothole and the radioactive toxins seething all around us. Fear of Strontium-90—like Strontium-90 itself—was in the air that year.
Fallout
had become a household word. Each night after we were back at the Grand Marquis Hotel in St. George, our base of operations during the
Conqueror
shoot, most of the cast and crew would stand around in the lobby watching Walter Cronkite, and occasionally there'd be a news story about a politician who believed that unlimited on-continent testing of nuclear devices would eventually make lots of Americans sick, children especially. (Strontium-90 was ending up in the milk of dairy-cows.) One such report included the latest figures on leukemia cases attributable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Poor old Genghis Khan,” I said to Al D'Agostino, the art director. “He had to spend
weeks,
sometimes
months,
bringing down a city.”

“Whereas Paul Tibbets and his B-52 managed it in the twinkling of an eye,” said Al, who in those days was almost as far to the left as I.

“Poor old Genghis Khan,” echoed the assistant director, Ed Killy. Ed was likewise a leftist, although he usually kept it under wraps, thereby maintaining his friendship with Duke.

“You people seem to forget that Hiroshima and Nagasaki kept our boys from having to invade Japan,” said Duke. “Those bombs saved thousands of American lives.”

“Well, Temujin,” I said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable, “I guess that settles the matter.”

The Conqueror
had been on Kieran's TV barely ten minutes when I decided that it wasn't a costume drama after all. It was really yet another John Wayne western, with Tartars instead of Comanches and the Mongol city of Urga instead of Fort Apache. But even the feeblest of Duke's horse operas—
The Lawless Range,
say, or
Randy Rides Alone
—wasn't nearly this enervated. None of those early Republic or Monogram westerns had Duke saying, before the first scene was over, “There are moments for wisdom, Jamuga, and then I listen to you. And there are moments for action, and then I listen to my heart. I feel this Tartar woman is for me. My blood says, ‘Take her!'”

“Concentrate,” Kieran exhorted us, returning the joint to my eager fingers. “Repulse those gamma rays. Bend the fabric of space-time.”

“I'm trying, Doc,” said Duke, downing a second slug of Jack Daniels.

“Why would anybody want to make a movie celebrating a demented brute like Temujin?” I asked rhetorically. I'd read the
Encyclopedia Britannica's
account of Genghis Khan the night before, baiting my hook. “Bukhara was one of medieval Asia's greatest cities, a center of science and culture. At Temujin's urging, his army burned it to the ground, all the while raping and torturing everybody in sight.”

“Ms. Rappaport, I must ask you not to disrupt the healing process,” said Kieran.

“When the citizens of Herat deposed the governor appointed by one of Temujin's sons, the retaliatory massacre lasted a week,” I continued. “Death toll, one million, six hundred thousand. Genghis Khan was a walking A-bomb.”

“Let's not get too high and mighty, Egghead,” said Duke. “Hunlun wasn't exactly Florence Nightingale, but as I recall you didn't run screaming from the part. You picked up your paycheck along with the rest of us.”

Duke had me on both counts, historical and ethical. Shortly after Temujin became the titular Mongol ruler at age thirteen, Hunlun emerged as the power behind the throne, and she governed with an iron hand. When a group of local tribes turned rebellious, Hunlun led an expeditionary force against the obstreperous chiefs, and eventually she brought over half of them back into the fold.