Fala Factor (19 page)

“Um,” Benchley began, rubbing his hands together. “Urn,” he repeated and then let out a small laugh as if he had been caught eating the last cookie in the jar. “There seems to be some slight mistake here. I wasn't aware that this was a political rally.” He laughed again. “I was told by my agent, or maybe I should say former agent or soon-to-be former agent, that this was a war-bond promotion. I'm not even a registered voter in this state. Thank you.”

Benchley gathered up his coat and ambled down the aisle past us with a small, constipated grin as Lyle applauded furiously and a few others joined him.

“Thank you, Robert Benchley,” Lyle said, applauding.

“Wait a minute,” came the wino's voice. “He ain't even on your side.”

“We promised celebrities,” Lyle said patiently. “We never said they would support us. We begin by having them present and then the truth of our cause convinces them and you. Now that we have heard from our celebrities—”

“Hold it,” called the wino standing. “You mean that's it? No more celebrities? No free coffee, nothing?”

“Just truth,” said Lyle, almost giving in to exasperation.

Bass was moving up the aisle now in search of the troublesome wino. While his back was turned, four women, probably a bridge club, escaped out of a side emergency exit. Bass found the wino and carried him at arm's length out of the theater.

“I want a refund,” screamed the wino.

“You paid nothing and got much,” shouted Lyle. “You got the truth and the truth will work on your conscience.” The crowd was mumbling and considering following the valiant bridge club. One woman actually stood, but she had waited too long to make up her mind, and Bass, now returning, fixed his eyes on her coldly, and she sat.

“We have one more speaker,” Lyle said clearly, sensing that he could hold the group no longer without a real celebrity or refreshments or, possibly, a good idea or two. “With the assassination of Dr. Olson I have had to go through the difficult task of assessing the qualities of the many qualified members of our party to select a successor as party organizer. I've agonized over this decision, consulted our leadership in Washington, New York, and Dallas, and come up with the name of a member of your own community, Mr. Morris Dolmitz.”

Five rows ahead of us, Academy Dolmitz sank deeper in his seat and failed to hold back a gurgled “Shit.”

Lyle applauded, and the crowd paused with minimal curiosity, looking for the one in their midst who had been selected by Lyle to make a fool of himself.

“Mr. Dolmitz is a prominent businessman in Los Angeles,” Lyle said. “A man of great political knowledge who has much to say. Mr. Dolmitz. a few words please.”

Bass applauded and grinned like a kid and Lyle beamed, waving for Academy to get up and speak.

“Go on. Academy, I called. “Your new career awaits.”

“Blow it out the wrong way,” Academy spat out through his clenched teeth loud enough for everyone to hear, but he was trapped. He shuffled into the aisle cursing that he was ever born, brushed his mane of white hair back, and went to the steps leading up to the low, small stage. Bass, clearly protective, hovered behind him to help in case his former boss and inspiration fell. Clearly uncomfortable, Dolmitz stood next to Lyle, who held out his hand. Dolmitz shook the offered hand and looked over at Jeremy and me apologetically as if to say, “See the things you have to go through to turn a dishonest buck?”

Academy stepped in front of the music stand, glared out at the uneasy audience, and said, “I've got nothing to say.”

He turned and Lyle whispered to him urgently while someone in the audience started coughing and a voice, female, said, “Dorothy, are you all right? You want a glass of water or something?” But Dorothy stopped and Academy bit his lower lip, trying to think of something to say.

“I didn't expect this … honor,” he finally said. “Did you know Robert Benchley won an Oscar in 1935, best short subject?”

“
How to Sleep
,” I said. “MGM”

Academy nodded his head, one-upped by me again.

“I've met Oscar winners before,” Academy went on, warming to his favorite subject outside of making money. “Lyle Wheeler, the art director who won the award for
Gone With the Wind
,” Academy said quickly so I wouldn't get a chance to identify Wheeler from the audience, though I wouldn't have been able to do it “Wheeler came into my bookshop one day and bought a couple of books by French writers, Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, that crowd. Wheeler was a nice guy. I tried to get him to put down a few bucks on a sure thing I had going out of Santa Anita, a two-year-old named Sidewalk, but Wheeler didn't go for it. That's all I've got to say.”

Bass applauded furiously again as Academy climbed down from the stage and Lyle stepped forward as his political world seemed to be crumbling around him, but he had been through it before.

“Mr. Dolmitz has assured me that he fully supports the aims of the Whig Party,” Lyle said as feet shuffled and Dorothy attempted to control her returning cough.

“No more states in the Union…. God meant us to have forty-eight adjacent states that we can protect and can protect each other. Peace with our enemies in Europe, peace with honor or we crush them. No quarter for the Japanese. The elimination of sales taxes. Establishment of a new cabinet position. Secretary of Women's Affairs.”

“Right, right,” said Academy, sinking back into his chair and trying to hide.

“My secretary will be in the lobby as you leave with written information on the New Whig Party, membership applications, and answers to questions you may have. Now, if you will put your heads down, we will have a full minute of silent non-denominational prayer.”

Lyle looked at everyone in the auditorium as he clapped his hands and heads went down, even mine, Jeremy's, Dolmitz's, and the cowered sandwich man's in the first row a few feet from Bass.

Head down, eyes closed, I whispered to Jeremy, “You going to join the Whigs?”

“The line between dedication and madness is as thin as the space between two thoughts,” said Jeremy. “The madman who bears away our faith is labeled a saint and the saint who fails to gather our faith is labeled mad.”

“And?” I said, eyes still down, listening beyond Jeremy's voice to shuffling feet and clearing thoughts.

“And,” he said, “you had best open your eyes and see where your moment of feigned faith has brought you.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at nothing The stage was empty. Lyle and Bass were gone. Jeremy was already in the aisle. I joined him noisily and eyes opened around us. When others saw that Lyle and Bass were gone they headed for the exit. I almost collided with the sandwich man, since I was going in the opposite direction.

Jeremy leaped on the stage. I was a beat behind him. He went for the curtain, pulled it open and disappeared behind it. I followed, finding myself in the darkness feeling my way across the movie screen on which Olivia de Havilland would soon be pining away. I followed the sound of Jeremy's feet going to the right and, at the right side of the screen, found a small door and stepped through.

Jeremy was ahead of me, standing on the cement floor in a room behind the screen. Light was coming in through a dirty window. The room was a storage area: tables, old theater seats, boxes of light bulbs and electrical equipment, sacks of popping corn, a pile of movie posters, and a box of lobby cards. A few of the cards in sickly colors, with Lash Larue and Fuzzy St. John looking up at me, were on the floor. All very interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the wire cage in the corner, the door of which stood open. There was a small bowl of water in the cage and a general faint smell of dog.

I found the door to the outside before Jeremy. It was behind a painted Chinese screen with a gold dragon. It was a double door and I pushed it open with Jeremy at my side. We were in the back of the theater. The gravel parking lot was to our right. We ran the few steps and turned the corner in time to see Lyle's Chrysler shooting little rocks from its rear tires as it hit the driveway, almost hit a woman and a small boy, and barely make it into traffic in front of a delivery truck.

Jeremy and I ran for my car and lost additional time as Jeremy slid across the driver's seat and I followed him. By the time we pulled into traffic on Reseda a few seconds later, Lyle and Bass were out of sight.

“You got a suggestion?” I asked Jeremy, who sat placidly, eyes forward, thinking about a poem or another world, or a rematch with Bass.

“Intuition,” he said. “Let your hands tell you. Let your mind go.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You have a better plan?” He smiled.

I smiled back. “I'm taking a chance that he likes the same big streets and doesn't know we followed him to the theater,” I said. “I'll cut ahead of him on Sepulveda.”

Five minutes later I was cruising south on Sepulveda when Jeremy said softly, “Ahead, about two blocks.”

I didn't see anything, but I trusted his eyes and kept going. Before we hit the hills, I spotted the Chrysler, slowed down, and kept my distance, trying not to think about how much gas I had left. Fifteen minutes later, we hit downtown Los Angeles. I reached over to turn on the radio but I changed my mind. Jeremy was not a radio fan.

Lyle and Bass drove down Broadway to Central, took Ninth across to Long Beach Road, and then went down Long Beach to Slauson Avenue. They pulled into a dirt driveway next to something that looked like an old warehouse just off Holmes Avenue across from the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. I parked half a block ahead and looked back to see them getting out of the Chrysler. The clouds had rolled in and were rumbling as Bass and Lyle moved to the trunk of their car, opened it, and removed a wooden crate that Bass hoisted to his shoulder.

They took the crate into the warehouse and just as I was deciding to follow them, they reappeared without it and got back into the car.

“Jeremy,” I said, getting out of the car. “Stay with them. I'm going to find out if they just delivered what I think they delivered.”

Jeremy nodded and, with great difficulty, squeezed himself behind the wheel.

“I'll make my own way back to the office,” I shouted as he made a U-turn and darted off after the Chrysler, which was now a good block away.

The sky broke and the rain began to come down. I ran across Slauson ahead of a truck and found the door Bass and Lyle had gone through. Behind and above me, a tidal wave fell, sending up a wet dusty smell that lasted only a second or two.

The building was a gigantic warehouse. Beyond a pile of ceiling-high shelves filled with wooden crates I could hear voices. People were arguing. Murder seemed to be in progress. I moved slowly along the shelves toward the sound and turned a corner.

A pretty young woman with too much make-up and a ribbon in her hair and a man with a thin mustache and sagging jaw each had an end of rope that was tied around the neck of a man who looked slightly bewildered. They pulled and shouted and the man in the middle gulped, the center knot of a strange, deadly tug of war.

Then a voice called out, “Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Damn it, cut.”

That was when I saw, beyond the bright lights blasting down on the trio of actors, a camera and a small group of people.

The man who had shouted “Cut” had a light mustache, a receding hairline, and wore no shirt. A towel was draped around his neck.

“What's wrong, Jules?” asked the man who had been holding one end of the rope.

“The noise,” said Jules, pointing over his shoulder to the ceiling. “It's raining. We can't do sound in here with that.” Jules put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

“Let's shoot the scene silent,” said the man who was being strangled, the rope still around his neck. “Cut to a close-up of me and we can add rattling sounds later. You know, like my brains are getting scrambled. Then we do a point of view shot and I can see them moving their mouths, but the rope is so tight around my neck that it's cutting off my hearing.”

Jules turned, thought about it, shrugged and said, “It'll do, Buster.”

Buster Keaton, who had made the suggestion, put the rope ends back in the hands of the two actors and began supervising his own mock strangulation. He put his tiny hat on the side of his head and said, “Let's move the camera in and get going.”

The camera operator said something I couldn't make out, and Jules called to the actors. “Don's having some problem with the camera. Let's take a lunch break.”

Keaton took off his hat, removed the rope, shook himself off, and started to walk toward a door in the corner. A lighting man turned off the lights and I moved across the set, apparently a living room, and followed Keaton.

“Mr. Keaton,” I called, catching up to him as he turned. There was no expression on his face as I stepped up. There wasn't any through our whole conversation. I was a few inches taller than he was and he was a few years older than I had fixed him in my mind. The dead-pan look I remembered from his silent movies was there, but the smooth face had turned to leather, covered by unconvincing light makeup.

“It's lunch,” he said.

“I heard,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a second or two? Won't take long.”

“Can't take long,” he said, waving at me to follow him. “We'll go to my dressing room.”

I followed him to his makeshift dressing room, which was normally an office complete with desk, file cabinets, In and Out boxes with dusty paper. He opened the file cabinet, pulled out a bottle and a sandwich. The bottle was bourbon.

“Drink?” he said, turning to me.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Good.” He tossed me the sandwich. “You take the liverwurst. I'll take the bourbon, and I'll be in Forest Lawn before you.”

I caught the sandwich as he opened the bottle, poured himself an unhealthy glassful, and sat in the wooden, creaking swivel chair, his little hat still on his head. He took a drink and looked at me.