The Book of Illusions (5 page)

In motion, the mustache is a tool for expressing the thoughts of all men. In repose, it is little more than an ornament. It marks Hector’s place in the world, establishes the type of character he is supposed to represent, and defines who he is in the eyes of others—but it belongs to only one man, and in that it is an absurdly thin and greasy little mustache, there can never be any doubt as to who that man is. He is the South American dandy, the Latin lover, the swarthy rogue with hot blood coursing through his veins. Add in the slicked-back hair and the ever-present white suit, and the result is an unmistakable blend of dash and decorum. Such is the code of images. The meanings are understood at a single glance, and because one thing inevitably follows from another in this booby-trapped universe of missing manhole covers and exploding cigars, the moment you see a man walking down the street in a white suit, you know that suit is going to get him into trouble.

After the mustache, the suit is the most important element in Hector’s repertoire. The mustache is the link to his inner self, a metonym of urges, cogitations, and mental storms. The suit embodies his relation to the social world, and with its cue-ball brilliance shining against the grays and blacks that surround it, it serves as a magnet for the eyes. Hector wears the suit in every film, and in every film there is at least one long gag that revolves around the perils of trying to keep it clean. Mud and crankcase oil, spaghetti sauce and molasses, chimney soot and splashing puddles—at one time or another, every dark liquid and every dark substance threaten to smudge the pristine dignity of Hector’s suit. That suit is his proudest possession, and he wears it with the dapper, cosmopolitan air of a man out to impress the world. He climbs into it every morning the way a knight climbs into his armor, girding himself for whatever battles society has in store for him that day, and not once does he stop to consider that he is achieving the opposite of what he has intended. He isn’t protecting himself against potential blows, he is turning himself into a target, the focal point of every mishap that can possibly occur within a hundred yards of his person. The white suit is a sign of Hector’s vulnerability, and it lends a certain pathos to the jokes the world plays on him. Obstinate in his elegance, clinging to the conviction that the suit transforms him into the most attractive and desirable of men, Hector elevates his own vanity into a cause that audiences can sympathize with. Watch him flicking specks of imaginary dust from his jacket as he rings the doorbell of his girlfriend’s house in
Double or Nothing
, and you’re no longer watching a demonstration of self-love: you’re witnessing the torments of self-consciousness. The white suit turns Hector into an underdog. It wins the audience over to his side, and once an actor has achieved that, he can get away with anything.

He was too tall to play an out-and-out clown, too handsome to act the part of innocent bungler as other comics did. With his dark, expressive eyes and elegant nose, Hector looked like a second-rate leading man, an overachieving romantic hero who had wandered onto the set of the wrong film. He was a grown-up, and the very presence of such a person seemed to run counter to the established rules of comedy. Funny men were supposed to be small, misshapen, or fat. They were imps and buffoons, dunces and outcasts, children masquerading as adults or adults with the minds of children. Think of Arbuckle’s juvenile rotundity, his simpering shyness and painted, feminized lips. Remember the forefinger that flies into his mouth every time a girl looks at him. Then go down the list of props and accoutrements that shaped the careers of the acknowledged masters: Chaplin’s tramp with the floppy shoes and ragged clothes; Lloyd’s plucky Milquetoast with the horn-rimmed specs; Keaton’s saphead with the pancake hat and frozen face; Langdon’s moron with the chalk-white skin. They are all misfits, and because these characters can neither threaten us nor make us envy them, we root for them to triumph over their enemies and win the girl’s heart. The only problem is that we aren’t quite sure they’ll know what to do with the girl once they’re alone with her. With Hector, such doubts never enter our mind. When he winks at a girl, there’s a better than even chance that she’ll wink back. And when she does, it’s clear that neither one of them is thinking about marriage.

Laughter, however, is by no means guaranteed. Hector is not what you would call a lovable figure, and he is not someone you necessarily feel sorry for. If he manages to win the viewer’s sympathy, it is because he never knows when to quit. Hardworking and convivial, the perfect incarnation of
l’homme
moyen sensuel
, he is not out of step with the world so much as a victim of circumstances, a man with an inexhaustible talent for running into bad luck. Hector always has a plan in mind, a purpose for doing what he does, and yet something always seems to come up to thwart him from realizing his goal. His films are fraught with bizarre physical occurrences, outlandish mechanical breakdowns, objects that refuse to behave as they should. A man with less confidence in himself would be defeated by these setbacks, but other than an occasional burst of exasperation (confined to the mustache monologues), Hector never complains. Doors slam on his fingers, bees sting him on the neck, statues fall on his toes, but again and again he shrugs off his misfortunes and continues on his way. You begin to admire him for his steadfastness, for the spiritual calm that comes over him in the face of adversity, but what holds your attention is the way he moves. Hector can charm you with any one of a thousand different gestures. Light-footed and nimble, nonchalant to the point of indifference, he threads himself through the obstacle course of life without the slightest trace of clumsiness or fear, dazzling you with his backpedals and dodges, his sudden torques and lunging pavanes, his double takes and hop-steps and rhumba swivels. Observe the thrums and fidgets of his fingers, his deftly timed exhales, the slight cock of the head when something unexpected catches his eye. These miniature acrobatics are a function of character, but they also give pleasure in and of themselves. Even when flypaper is sticking to the bottom of his shoe and the little boy of the house has just lassoed him with a rope (pinning his arms to his sides), Hector moves with uncommon grace and composure, never doubting that he’ll soon be able to extricate himself from his predicament—even if another one is waiting in the next room. Too bad for Hector, of course, but those are the breaks. What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

More often than not, Hector finds himself at the bottom of the social ladder. He is married in only two of his films (
Hearth
and Home
and
Mr. Nobody
), and except for the private detective he plays in
The Snoop
and his role as traveling magician in
Cowpokes
, he is a working stiff toiling for others in humble, low-salaried jobs. A waiter in
The Jockey Club
, a chauffeur in
Country Weekend
, a door-to-door salesman in
Jumping Jacks
, a dance instructor in
Tango Tangle
, a bank employee in
The
Teller’s Tale
, Hector is usually presented as a young man just starting out in life. His prospects are far from encouraging, but he never gives the impression of being a loser. He carries himself with too much pride for that, and to watch him go about his business with the sure-handed competence of one who trusts in his own abilities, you understand that he’s a person destined for success. Accordingly, most of Hector’s films end in one of two ways: either he gets the girl or he performs an act of heroism that captures the attention of his boss. And if the boss is too thick-headed to notice (the wealthy and powerful are mostly portrayed as fools), the girl will see what has happened, and that will be reward enough. Whenever there is a choice between love and money, love always has the last word. Working as a waiter in
The Jockey Club
, for example, Hector manages to nab a jewel thief while serving several tables of drunken guests at a banquet in honor of champion aviatrix Wanda McNoon. With his left hand, he knocks out the thief with a champagne bottle; with his right, he simultaneously serves up dessert to the table, and because the cork flies out of the bottle and the headwaiter is sprayed with a liter’s worth of Veuve Clicquot, Hector loses his job. But no matter. The spirited Wanda is an eyewitness to Hector’s exploit. She slips him her telephone number, and in the last scene they climb into her plane together and take off for the clouds.

Unpredictable in his behavior, full of contradictory impulses and desires, Hector’s character is too complexly delineated for us to feel altogether comfortable in his presence. He is not a type or familiar stock figure, and for every one of his actions that makes sense to us there is another one that confounds us and throws us off balance. He displays all the striving ambitiousness of a hardworking immigrant, a man bent on overcoming the odds and winning a place for himself in the American jungle, and yet one glimpse of a beautiful woman is enough to knock him off course, to scatter his carefully laid plans to the winds. Hector has the same personality in every film, but there is no fixed hierarchy to his preferences, no way of knowing what fancy will strike him next. He is both a populist and an aristocrat, a sensualist and a closet romantic, a man of precise, even punctilious manners who never hesitates to make the grand gesture. He will give his last dime to a beggar on the street, but he will not be motivated by pity or compassion so much as by the poetry of the act itself. No matter how hard he works, no matter how diligently he performs the menial and often absurd tasks that are assigned to him, Hector conveys a sense of detachment, as if he were somehow mocking himself and congratulating himself at the same time. He seems to live in a state of ironical bemusement, at once engaged in the world and observing it from a great distance. In what is perhaps his funniest film,
The Prop Man
, he turns these opposing points of view into a unified principle of mayhem. It was the ninth short of the series, and in it Hector plays the stage manager of a small, down-at-the-heels theater troupe. The company pulls into the town of Wishbone Falls for a three-day run of
Beggars
Can’t Be Choosers
, a bedroom farce by noted French dramatist Jean-Pierre Saint Jean de la Pierre. When they open the truck to unload the props and carry them into the theater, they discover that the props are missing. What to do? The play can’t go on without them. There is an entire living room to furnish, not to speak of replacing several important accessories: a gun, a diamond necklace, and a roasted pig. The curtain is supposed to go up at eight o’clock the next evening, and unless the entire set can be built from scratch, the company will be out of business. The director of the troupe, a pompous blowhard with an ascot wrapped around his neck and a monocle in his left eye, peers into the back of the empty truck and faints dead away. The matter is in Hector’s hands. After a few brief but incisive comments from his mustache, he calmly weighs the situation, smooths out the front of his immaculate white suit, and marches off to work. For the next nine and a half minutes, the film becomes an illustration of Proudhon’s well-known anarchist dictum:
all property is theft
. In a series of short, frenetic episodes, Hector rushes around town and steals the props. We see him intercepting a furniture delivery to a department store warehouse and walking off with tables, chairs, and lamps—which he packs into his own truck and promptly drives to the theater. He pilfers silverware, drinking glasses, and a full set of china from a hotel kitchen. He bluffs his way into the back room of a butcher shop with a false order form from a local restaurant and trudges out with a pig’s carcass slung over his shoulder. That evening, at a private reception for the actors which is attended by the town’s most prominent citizens, he manages to remove the sheriff’s pistol from its holster. A little while later, he skillfully undoes the latch of a necklace worn by a bulbous, middle-aged woman as she swoons under the seductive power of Hector’s charms. He is never more unctuous than in this scene. Contemptible in his simulations, loathsome in the hypocrisy of his ardor, he also comes across as a heroic outlaw, an idealist willing to sacrifice himself for the good of his cause. We recoil from his tactics, but at the same time we pray for him to pull off the theft. The show must go on, and if Hector fails to pocket the jewels, there won’t be any show. To complicate the intrigue still further, Hector has just caught sight of the town belle (who happens to be the sheriff’s daughter), and even as he continues his amorous assault on the aging battle-axe, he begins making furtive eyes at the young beauty. Fortunately, Hector and his victim are standing behind a velvet curtain. It hangs halfway across an open doorway that separates the entrance hall from the drawing room, and because Hector is positioned on one side of the woman and not the other, he can look into the drawing room by leaning his head slightly to the left. But the woman remains hidden from view, and even though Hector can see the girl and the girl can see Hector, she has no idea that the woman is there. This allows Hector to pursue both of his objectives at once—the false seduction and the true seduction—and because he plays one against the other in a clever mix of cuts and camera angles, each element makes the other one funnier than it would have been on its own. That is the essence of Hector’s style. One joke is never enough for him. As soon as a situation has been established, another piece of business must be added to it, and then a third, and possibly even a fourth. Hector’s gags unfold like musical compositions, a confluence of contrasting lines and voices, and the more the voices interact with one another, the more precarious and unstable the world becomes. In
The Prop Man
, Hector tickles the neck of the woman behind the curtain, plays peekaboo with the girl in the other room, and finally snags the necklace when a passing waiter slips on the hem of the woman’s gown and spills a trayful of drinks down her back—which gives Hector just enough time to undo the clasp. He has achieved what he has set out to do—but only by accident, rescued once again by the mutinous unpredictability of matter.