The Drifters (68 page)

‘Best job I ever had was Don Muang,’ he told me once. Bangkok had come early in his career and he had spent two happy years in Siam. By then the pain of his divorce was wearing off and he was beginning to adjust to his well-organized bachelor’s life. ‘Don Muang was good.’ It was also Kai Tak, not Hong Kong; Kemajoran, not Djakarta; and Dum-Dum, not Calcutta. You also had to be attentive when occasionally he used real names, for on the few occasions that he referred to cities and nations, he kept to the names he had learned in school. Thus it was Constantinople, Persia, Siam, and to hell with innovations like Istanbul, Iran and Thailand.

There was another subject for which Holt used a specialized vocabulary: the general area of life itself, the passions, triumphs and despairs that overtake the average man. For here he related all value judgments to Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart. Like the haunting jazz of the thirties, the chain of excellent movies made by these
two men pretty well summarized the life experience for Holt, as the following bits of conversation show.

The son of the Pan American agent in New Delhi cringes before a bully at the international school: ‘You remember how Spencer Tracy made Freddy Bartholomew face up to life on that ship.’

A Japanese politician with a notable reputation proves to be a fraud: ‘It’s exactly like Spencer Tracy proving the facts about Miss Hepburn’s husband.’ Invariably he referred to lean and lovely Katharine Hepburn in the formal style, and once when an embassy wife in Indonesia gossiped about her, Holt rose and left the room.

Two men court the same secretary from the French embassy in Constantinople: ‘You saw what happened when Humphrey Bogart and William Holden were both in love with Audrey Hepburn.’ This other Hepburn he always referred to as Audrey. For him there was only one Miss Hepburn, the actress.

An assistant faces a difficult job transporting a heavy piece of equipment to an outpost: ‘You saw how Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey took their ship to Murmansk.’

An installation runs considerably over budget: ‘Exactly what Spencer Tracy faced when he was trying to get Elizabeth Taylor married.’

A difficult job can be completed only by the exercise of indomitable will: ‘Your problem is the same one Spencer Tracy faced when he was determined to catch that fish.’

An Indonesian government official has to make a crucial decision: ‘You have to stick with it all the way, just like Humphrey Bogart when he was writing the truth about Rod Steiger and the fight racket.’

The agricultural attache in the American embassy makes a damned fool of himself over a Hong Kong party girl: ‘Who can explain these things? Look at the way Humphrey Bogart kept coming back to Ava Gardner after he had made her a great actress.’ This one stumped me, as did many of his references. When I asked what picture he was referring to, he said, impatiently, ‘You know. The one where a voice sang “Que Será, Será” in the background.’

He lived an intense emotional life which appeared, at casual inspection, to have been structured upon the films made by these two actors. Actually, it was the other way
around; American life in those years was so clear-cut, the national values so well agreed upon, that films mirrored the consensus-type of life Holt led. Instead of his aping Tracy and Bogart, they were copying him. Art thus followed life, which is the preferred sequence; today art, especially popular music, invents new patterns which students follow in enthralled obedience.

Because Tracy and Bogart summarized the best that America was producing in those middle decades, Holt remembered almost every picture they had made and considered it appropriate that they had never appeared in the same film. ‘They wouldn’t have fitted,’ he said when I asked him about this. ‘Completely different men.’ He did not say, ‘Their styles were different.’ He said that as men they would have clashed, for he saw them not as actors but as living men who happened to be thrust into evocative situations.

Bogart represented the man Harvey felt he was; Tracy, the gentleman he would have liked to be. At his frontier stations he had ample opportunity to watch his favorites in their best films, for construction firms provided their men with five films a week, and the oldies from 1940 to 1960 predominated. Once, when a woman dressmaker in Hong Kong had to go out of business because a Yugoslavian adventurer had stolen her cash, Holt sat morosely listening to Glenn Miller tapes and reflecting the matter. ‘I keep thinking of the way Humphrey Bogart saved that newspaper for old Ethel Barrymore. A woman in business ought to have someone she can rely on.’

I said that Holt remembered almost every film made by his heroes, but when he told me they had never worked on the same picture, I was bothered, for I seemed to remember a still photograph showing them together in a movie about a prison riot. When I asked about this, Holt growled, ‘Impossible. They’d destroy each other,’ but I could not get that old photo out of my mind, so I wrote to a film magazine and received confirmation: they had played together in Tracy’s first film but never thereafter. I forwarded the letter to Holt in Burma, and he wrote back: ‘Must have been a terrible picture. I’d like to see it someday.’

Whenever Holt returned to the States for leave or instruction on new machines, he would hole up in a motel and sit before the television night after night, looking at
the old movies. He was pleased that the people at home were able to enjoy the same old films that he had been enjoying in places like Chengmai and Kandahar. It was after one such visit home that Holt interrupted my sales pitch in Sumatra to say, ‘Over in Pakanbaru the English people are showing a movie. I saw it years ago and again on television in Seattle. You ought to see it.’

We drove forty miles into the steaming town, where an English engineering firm had provided a coconut shed with an improvised screen and a flickering projection machine. Since there was only one projector, we had to sit around in pale electric light drinking gin while the projectionist changed reels. I sat next to a rubber expert from Germany and behind a Swiss who was trying to sell the Sumatrans a complicated machine for making glass. There were about fifty of us, come from all over central Sumatra, but none enjoyed the night’s movie so much as Harvey Holt.

Perhaps enjoy is not the word. He lived each moment of the film with terrible intensity, giving me the impression that for him this was something more than another in the distinguished chain of Bogart movies. I had not seen it before nor even heard of it, and in subsequent weeks when I spoke of my experience in other camps I found no tech rep who had heard of it either. It was excellent. Bogart was a film writer in Hollywood, accused of murder and trusted only by Gloria Grahame. As the first spasmodic reels unfolded, you got the idea that it was just another murder mystery and that Miss Grahame was certain to save Bogart from the electric chair or gas chamber or whatever it was that California used. In the long intervals between reels we discussed this probable development with the German rubber man, who said approvingly, ‘It takes the Americans or the French to put together a really good
policier.
’ I asked if he thought Bogart had been involved in the murder of the young woman, and he said, ‘Never. Not in an American film. In a French film, yes.’

This type of opinion held through the first four intermissions, but I noticed that Holt did not react to the guesses. He was the only one present who knew how the film came out, and he took quiet satisfaction in eavesdropping on our wrong guesses, for during the fifth intermission the German and I confessed that we had been
mistaken. This was something more than a mere
policier.
It was a character study of the film writer in conflict with the likable girl who was befriending him. ‘I have the curious feeling,’ the German whispered as we looked out toward the jungles that encroached upon Pakanbaru, that Mr. Bogart is not going to get the girl this time. He’s truly psychopathic … something like your friend Holt.’

And in the last reel Bogart did become the archetype of a tech rep—lonely, embattled, obstinate, totally incapable of understanding a woman—so that in the final shot he stalked off-camera, a defeated, bitter man taking his battle to some other terrain populated with other actors whom he would be incapable of understanding or adjusting to. It was a shocking end, and when the watery lights come on, and the night sounds of the jungle closed in upon us, a sense of loneliness pervaded the coconut shed. When the German said goodnight he added, ‘Sometimes we get surprises, even in American films.’

On the long drive back to Holt’s camp I said, ‘I didn’t catch the name of that movie.’

‘In a Lonely Place,’
he said. He rarely used the names of movies. In future conversations this would be spoken of as ‘that time when Humphrey Bogart kicked away the love of Gloria Grahame.’ He thought that Bogart should have received an Oscar for this film. ‘Miss Grahame, too, for that matter, but she got one that time when she was Dick Powell’s wife.’ This missed me, but before I could query him, he added reflectively, ‘Funny, Powell was a screenwriter too. I guess Miss Grahame goes for screenwriters.’

On the impulse of the moment I asked, ‘When you tracked down the tiger, did you imagine yourself to be Humphrey Bogart?’

He turned away from the steering wheel and looked at me in astonishment, saying nothing. I pointed to the road and he returned to his driving. After some minutes of silence he said, ‘So far as I know, Humphrey Bogart was never in Sumatra.’ Later he added, ‘Miss Grahame … in some of those last scenes … she looked like Lora Kate.’ I supposed that Bogart in his domestic chaos had looked a good deal like Harvey Holt, but I kept my mouth shut, and when we got back to the camp out of which Holt was working, he asked, ‘You like to hear some music?’

He threaded his machine with a tape he had built up
patiently through several years, one that held all the songs and ballads of the golden age when the great bands carried frail and beautiful girls with them, some with surprising voices, and we sat in the darkness of the jungle as those wispy voices came to us from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, Glen Island Casino and Station WOR, laden with lush sentiment: ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘Falling in Love with Love,’ as sung by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Love for Sale,’ and ‘Night and Day,’ sung by three different soloists. When ‘Green Eyes’ unexpectedly appeared, Holt apologized for the Spanish intrusion. ‘Normally I don’t go in for this gook spook, but this one was a great favorite of Lora Kate’s.’

‘Where’d you meet her?’

‘College. Colorado Aggies at Fort Collins. Grew up in Fort Morgan.’

‘What happened?’

The tape had come to one of the songs that Holt liked most, ‘Sentimental Journey.’ ‘I heard this for the first time in camp on Iwo Jima. I was a kid eighteen. I wondered if I would ever know any beautiful women like the ones I had seen singing with the big bands. You know, Helen Forrest and Martha Tilton. Or Bea Wain, for that matter.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t that I was afraid of being killed. I’d seen so many men get it that I knew this was pure chance. Like Humphrey Bogart when he was fighting Sydney Greenstreet for the statue.’

He rewound and reversed the tape so that he could hear ‘Sentimental Journey’ again, and said nothing till it played through, heavy with the longing of old nights. When the tape passed on to ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ he turned down the volume and said, ‘So when I got home safe and saw this really terrific girl in chemistry … we got married … I wanted to work overseas … to hell with Wyoming and Colorado …’ He laughed. ‘You ever try to make a woman from Fort Morgan, Colorado, happy at Yesilkoy?’

We played music till dawn: ‘Just One of Those Things,’ ‘I’ll Never Smile Again,’ ‘Symphony.’ When Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ Holt repeated the tape three times, and as we went to bed he said, ‘I’ve never been much with the black people, but they sure can sing.’

Holt got good pay. When you were a tech rep you could pick up extra money if you volunteered for what they called hazardous duty. Holt always did, for although he was instinctively afraid of the towers on which communications were based, he had schooled himself to climb them.

‘I was stationed at Gago Coutinho …’

‘You lost me.’

‘Moçambique,’ he said impatiently. ‘Coutinho flew the Atlantic years ahead of Lindbergh. We had finished putting in a Big Rally II and the others had gone back home. This typhoon was blowing across the Indian Ocean—heading away from us but still with a powerful sting in its tail. Snapped off the top of our tower four miles outside of Gago Coutinho—but not all the way off. One girder refused to break loose … kept the steel mass hanging there … thrashing hell out of what was left. So somebody had to climb up there and cut it away. You face these things. It’s like Humphrey Bogart driving that truck when he left Ann Sheridan’s restaurant.’

Later, when I was surveying Moçambique for an industrial project we had in mind, the Portuguese weatherman at Gago Coutinho told me what had happened that night. ‘Such winds. Maybe ninety miles an hour. One stubborn girder refused to let loose. We could see it with binoculars. The manager of the station yelled, “Somebody has got to go up there and cut that junk loose.” You could hear it crashing against the tower. If it hit a man it would crush him in an instant, so the manager kept yelling for volunteers, but he certainly made no move of his own and none of the Portuguese or the natives wanted any of it. He looked at me and said, “You’re the weatherman. It’s as much your tower as anybody else’s.” But I walked away. Then Harvey Holt drove up, and when the manager began yelling at him, he said, “Get me a torch,” and the manager, who had worked in England, started yelling to all of us to find a flashlight, but Holt said, “Acetylene.” And believe it or not, he climbed that tower in that storm with that mass of steel slamming against the struts. We could see him from down here … the white, flickering light at a great height … a ghost … a ghost.’

Holt lashed himself to the girder, whose twisted top refused to break loose, and with his torch began cutting through the contorted metal, but as he worked, the rest of the top, thrown about by the gale as if it were balsa wood, kept crashing into the pylon, so that he had constantly to withdraw his hands and feet lest they be crushed by the steel. He worked for nearly half an hour in this way, cutting a little whenever a lull in the wind permitted but most of the time dodging the flying steel.