The Gorgon Festival (20 page)

“I’ll help you with the experiment, Diana. If it succeeds, we’ll start from there.”

Now he could see the affinity between her plan and his.

Ward’s loss in salary at his conditional acceptance of partnership with Diana was almost made up in fringe benefits. After moving him into her penthouse suite and office under his new cover name, “Mr. Alexander,” she went to Westwood the next morning and bought him an entire wardrobe, an auburn wig, and a set of ear plugs he requested to mute her humming of pop music. But she retained title to all he wore, vexing him with such remarks as “You’re handsome in my new pajamas.”

In the conventional sense, Diana was not a mad scientist, merely a free-lance oddball who had used gerontology to make money. Her acquisitiveness he attributed to the Great Depression, her heritage of Yankee thrift, and her thirty-year marriage to a college professor. She was cramming possessions into a psychic vaginal hiatus; in contrast, his breast obsession qualified him as an all-American boy. Yet, Ward, by accepting her defects of character and concentrating on her physical assets, managed to love her by the Gestalt method.

She was efficient. She recruited an ad manager, program director, and grounds foreman without a penny’s outlay. Mr. Alexander was appointed to all three positions by his senior partner. So, between frequent scrub baths to rid himself of tannin, Ward spent his two days in seclusion rewriting her ad, reviewing her program, and planning the layout of the grounds for the festival, but not without clashes over policy.

Their second breakfast together in the penthouse was the scene of their first domestic tiff.

To restrict the audience to the elite of the youth subculture, Diana had priced tickets at $15 for boys and $30 for girls. In a value judgment typical of her generation, she equated the elite of the young with the wealthy, but this “elite,” Ward knew, would be drug-pushers, rock musicians, Bel Air burglars, high-priced groupies, and UCLA sociology majors.

She wanted a predominantly male audience accompanied by girls of such proportions their escorts would pay twice for their company, or two or more escorts would split the ticket cost for shares in their company. Diana wanted only top competition matched against the girls of Adorable U.

“At these prices,” Ward commented, “we’d better cancel the free beer. A full can of beer is a deadly weapon. When the crowd finds out that Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach are not a rock trio, they’ll throw things.”

“Cancel the beer,” she said promptly, “but my recital stays. By creating an optimal environment for music appreciation, I intend to blow their minds with Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach.”

“They’ll wreck your grand piano,” Ward insisted.

“You don’t get the scene, Alex. At the prelude to Brahms’s
Fourth
, the rejuves emerge from golden pavilions on each side of the stage dressed in see-through gowns of Arcadian shepherdesses… We’ll let E-24 lead the counterclockwise procession. She sets you spinning,
mais oui?
… Then, E-44 leads the clockwise procession… You dig her, eh, Alex?”

Her asides were delivered with jealous astringency and to divert her, he remarked, “Save the forties and over for the end of the procession. We don’t want a premature climax.”

She ignored his suggestion, saying, “As they circle through the crowd, tossing daisies from their baskets…”

“Make that poppies, for symbolic value.”

“They wend slowly back into the tents.” She was not ignoring him but gripped by her vision. “Then, Beethoven. Tripping out to the strains of the
Eroica
, they’ll be dressed in miniskirts with breakaway panties… You’ll teach them your tantalizing little prance, won’t you, Alex?… And Beethoven will have gripped the audience.

“Now, Bach, and the girls emerge to the grand finale of Bach’s
Passion
, buxom, beautiful, and in the buff. For every lad in the audience, from that moment onward, Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach will have written ‘our song.’ ”

Rapt in contemplation, she paused. Ward had spotted a flaw in her timing but withheld comment as he rued his inadequate musical education. Never had he suspected that Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach were concupiscent composers.

“Still, Diana, we’ll need an audience, and the classics don’t draw. We’ll need a couple of big names in the rock field.”

“Gollenberger and Stein,” she said. “I don’t care for their bleeding-heart social messages, but they’re under contract to the Electric Daisy Chain and I’ll order them here.”

“They’ll be excellent to back up your recital, but, musically, Gollenberger and Stein are one name. We’ll need a preliminary combo to entertain early arrivals while you’re getting ready.”

“Forget it,” she snapped. “My budget won’t support paid musicians.”

“Diana, we’re talking of gate receipts that might hit a hundred thousand dollars.”

“But I’m using the Electric Daisy Chain guards at the admissions gate. Those chiselers charge double time for holiday work.”

“Then, deduct the musicians’ cost from my half.”

“Your
half?
” Her face froze with hostility. “By Labor Day, I’ll have worked on this experiment for three months, you for three weeks. You get no half.”

“From my prorated share, then.”

“Policy has been decided, Alex. As a loyal member of the management team, it’s your duty to implement that policy… Unless you’re attempting a take-over of the organization.”

From her remark, he gathered his pro rata would not pay for one hunched-over guitar picker, but he persisted.

“This policy hamstrings both your advertising and programming departments. To show faith, I’ll get you the most sought-after trio in town for the cost, to you, of a toll call to Los Angeles.”

She held up her hand for silence, thinking. He thought she would ask the name of the trio, but she said, “Very well. Since you’re program director, I’ll grant you telephone privileges—for this.”

In the office Ward dialed, and Freddie’s voice, thick with sleep, answered his greeting. “Man, you oughtn’t waste your one call on me. I’m no lawyer yet.”

“I’m not in jail, Freddie. Dad and I are running a booking agency for musicians.”

“You two sell Murder, Incorporated?”

“Listen. Less my ten percent, I can offer your trio a one-shot booking for five hundred bucks, before an audience of five thousand, and I hear Elvis will be there, scouting for a back-up trio of blacks. How long will it take you to round up the Untannables?”

“About three days.”

“Move fast. You’ll only have about three weeks to rehearse, and Mr. Alexander, the program director, is a hard man to please. Choose about six modern numbers and submit your repertoire to him at ten o’clock, Labor Day morning. He’ll provide lunch, but he’ll want to listen to your numbers before the program starts and iron out your rough spots. Now, to get there…”

By the evening of the second day in the penthouse, Ward presented the rewritten ad, retaining the border and adding a map of the location, for Diana’s approval.

On the morning of the third day, Ward descended, lily-white beneath his auburn curls and dressed with but a single flaw to conform to the image of a rising young junior executive. Tucked under his cuffless trousers were boots. He told Diana he wore the boots to remind himself he was now a pragmatist with both feet solidly on the ground.

As one of Diana’s key personnel he was given a key to the east wing, but the door was no longer locked. Rejuvenation of the thirty-eights had been completed except for hair dyes and dental work the DNA had not effected.

On motorcycle and afoot, Ward scouted the grounds, planning for himself and for the festival. Below the eucalyptus grove which formed an acoustic wall, a meadow sloped gently into a natural amphitheater for over a hundred yards to a precipitous ravine. He decided to place the acoustic shell’s back to the cliff, facing the ranch house a quarter of a mile away.

In his first morning’s exploration, he traversed the grove on his motorcycle several times, driving slowly among the huge boles. By noon, he was back in the office, organizing work parties.

Among the ranch guests, practically every masculine job skill was represented, for this was the generation of Rosie the Riveter. In the name of physical fitness, they dug ditches, laid pipe, did carpentry, grading, painting, and wiring for the amplifiers he spotted with mathematical precision around the perimeter of the amphitheater. Outfitted in brown, wearing pith helmets, they might whistle as he passed, but they worked.

Busy with the indoctrination of the thirty-eights, Diana signed his requisitions automatically. Miniature grading machines, wheelbarrows, gravel, lumber, and pick-up trucks were brought in from Santa Monica. Equipment was charged to the expense accounts of the guests, and it was capital equipment visible to the eye, an asset belonging to her, and not, like salaries, money gone forever.

On each side of the slowly rising stage and pink acoustic shell, golden pyramidal tents were reared on wooden floors. Inside they were air-conditioned, and pennants floated from their peaks. From exit and entrance ramps of the pavilions, white gravel walkways formed a huge peace symbol over grass growing green from the sprinkler system Ward installed. Above the amphitheater, in the shadow of the eucalyptus grove, cinder-block privies were erected.

To rousing chanteys from the Disney era Ward’s crews erected a guard fence around the cliff road and cleared a parking area atop the saddleback. In two weeks, the grounds were almost ready for rehearsals when Ward undertook a landscaping project that some of the girls referred to as a W.P.A. boondoggle.

As a Ranger captain in World War II, Ward had learned to study terrain for features disadvantageous to an enemy, and of late he had been thinking in military terms.

Westward from where the entrance road cut north, Lost Indian Canyon veered west, paralleling the saddleback, until it dwindled into a ravine west of Satan’s Summit. Two hundred yards east of the summit, a huge oak, protected from fires by boulders around it and gnarled by prevailing winds, stood on a knoll overlooking the canyon. The knoll where the trees stood had been undercut by a wash eastward which fed into the canyon through a narrow defile.

At this point the canyon bent south, widening, and the view overlooked a sweep of jumbled mountains and beyond to the slate-gray Pacific. The crevice where the feeder wash looped around the knoll was shaded at the mouth by an extended limb of the oak.

Ward selected a work gang and put it to cutting, grading, and graveling a footpath four feet wide from the ranch house up and over the saddleback, through scrub oaks and boulders. Following the draw, the path looped around the knoll and broke suddenly onto the view from the defile.

As the girls widened and graded the crevice and erected a restraining rail at the scenic viewpoint, Ward clambered around the canyon side of the knoll, unearthed a rounded boulder, and rolled it over to deeper shade under the tree, where he sat to contemplate the view and to consider his plans.

He knew his tactical planning was good, but he was concerned at the moment with his final strategy. He had to ask a favor of Diana which would involve an apparent outlay of cash, and he considered approaches. An appeal to her affection he weighed briefly and dropped. Although she wasn’t too accomplished in profane love, she had no capacity whatsoever for sacred love. Thinking back over her conversations, he recalled a touch of paranoia in her make-up.

Without malice, Ward made a policy decision. Using her paranoia, he would trigger her avarice into an attack on his integrity, then counter-attack with indignation.

Three days before Labor Day, near midnight, Ward and Diana sat in her office drawing up plans for the dress rehearsal. To spare Ward’s modesty, she had decided there would be no nudity on the third, or Bach, procession, since he, as sound engineer, would be present at the dress rehearsal. Her concern for his modesty, a cover for jealousy, turned him off, and he decided to deliver his ultimatum.

“As sound engineer, I’ll be conspicuous in a business suit. There’ll be narcotics agents in the crowd. If I’m picked up for your murder, you might be arraigned for harboring a fugitive. I recommend you buy yourself a pink suede shirt and dark glasses for me to wear at the festival.”

“Write your requisition/’

“Another problem’s crowd control. Some of the rejuves have been isolated so long they’re in no mood for coyness, and if the males make advances…”

“If you’re suggesting I hire more guards, forget it.”

“Say it’s more an investment in music appreciation,” he continued. “If they riot during Brahms…”

“I’ll continue to play according to schedule.”

“With no one listening. Are you sacrificing Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach to Beelzebub, Baal, and Bacchus?”

She was shamed but determined. “The primary purpose of the experiment is to test male reaction to experienced beauty and youth in the presence of inexperienced beauty and youth.”

“So much for culture,” he shrugged. “But I have professional pride, and as your sound engineer I couldn’t perform under conditions I foresee. As your program director, I couldn’t control an unrehearsed orgy.”

“What do you suggest?”

“That you hire a motorcycle club, the Orange County Patriots, to police the crowd.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she nodded. “True Americans. What do you propose to pay them?”

Her question resembled a clause in an insurance policy—was the “you” generic or specific?

“Some nominal sum,” he said. “Say, fifty dollars apiece.”

“Do you call fifty dollars a nominal sum? How many are there?”