The Magic Christian (4 page)

Gonzales bowed with winning old-world grace and caressed the ladies’ hands.

“What a
perfect
love he is!” shrieked Mrs. Winthrop-Garde of the animal on Gonzales’s leash, and turning to her own,
“Isn’t
he, my darling?
Hmm? Htnm?
Isn’t he, my precious sweet? And whatever is his
name?”
she cried to Gonzales when her own animal failed to respond, but yapped crossly instead.

“He is called . . .
Claw,”
said Gonzales with a certain soft drama which may have escaped Mrs. Winthrop-Garde, for she rushed on, heedless as ever.

“Claude!
It’s
too
delicious—the perfect darling! Say
hello
to Claude, Angelica! Say
hello
to Claude, my fur-flower!”

And as she pulled the angry little spitz forward, while it snapped and snorted and ran at the nose, an extraordinary thing happened—for what this Grand and Gonzales had somehow contrived, and for reasons never fathomed by the press, was to introduce in disguise to the Garden show that season not a dog at all, but some kind of terrible black panther or dyed jaguar—hungry he was too, and cross as a pickle—so that before the day was out, he had not only brought chaos into the formal proceedings, but had actually destroyed about half the “Best of Breed.”

During the first hour or so, Gonzales, because of his respected position in that circle, was above reproach, and all of the incidents were considered as being accidental, though, of course, extremely unfortunate.

“Too much spirit,” he kept explaining, frowning and shaking his head; and, as he and the beast stalked slowly about in the midst of the group, he would chide the monster-cat:

“Overtired from the trip, I suppose. Isn’t that it, boy?
Hmm? Hmm?”

So now occasionally above the yapping and whining, the crowd would hear a strange
swish!
and
swat!
as Gonzales and the fantastic beast moved on, flushing them one by one.

Finally one woman, new to the circle, who did not know how important Gonzales was, came back with an automatic pistol and tried to shoot the big cat. But she was so beside herself with righteous fury that she missed and was swiftly arrested.

Gonzales, though, apparently no fool himself, was quick to take this as a cue that his work was done, and he gradually retired, so that “Best in Show” was settled at last, between those not already eliminated.

Grand later penned a series of scathing articles about the affair: “Scandal of the Dog Show!” “Can This Happen Here?” “Is It Someone’s Idea of a Joke?” etc., etc.

The bereft owners were wealthy and influential people, more than eager to go along with the demand for an inquiry. As quickly as witnesses were uncovered, however, they were bought off by Grand or his representatives, so that nothing really ever came of it in the end—though, granted, it did cost him a good bit to keep his own name clear.

“A
ND HOW WAS
your
trip,
Guy?” asked Ginger Horton, sniffing a bit, just to be on the safe side it seemed.

Guy shrugged.

“Oh, same old six-and-seven, Ginger,” he said.

“I beg your pardon,” interjected his Aunt Agnes smartly.

Esther beamed, truly in league at last with her long-dead favorite sister’s only son.

“It means
not too good,
Agnes,” she said emphatically. “It’s an expression used in dice-playing: You ‘come out’—isn’t that right, Guy?—on ‘six,’ your
point,
then you throw, in this case, a
‘seven’
which means:
no good, you
lose.” She looked to her Guy. “That’s it, isn’t it, dear?”

“Oh, it’s a
gambling
expression,” said Agnes Edwards with a certain amused complacency, though she must have raised her cup rather too hurriedly, for Esther was content merely to beam at Guy.

“Then your trip wasn’t . . .
too good,
is that it?” asked Ginger Horton seriously, setting her own cup down squarely, pressing the napkin briefly to her lips.

Esther started to answer, but in the end looked to Guy instead.

“Oh, it’s just a manner of speaking,” said Guy Grand easily. “What really gives the expression bite, of course, is that
six
is generally an easy point to make, you see, and, well. . . but then the fact is really, that the . . . uh, the
national economy,
so to speak, isn’t in the best of shape just now. Not a buyer’s market at all really. A bit bearish as a matter of fact.” He gave a chuckle, looking at the Pekinese.

Ginger Horton seized the opportunity to bring the dog into it.

“Well, it’s all over
our
head, isn’t it, Bitsy? Hmm? Isn’t it over your Bitsy-witsy head? Hmmm?”

“
Bearish .
. .” Esther began to explain.

“I think we all know what
that
means, Esther,” said Agnes shortly, raising one hand to her throat, her old eyes glittering no less than the great diamonds she clutched there.

Evidently Grand liked playing the donkey-man. In any case, he had bought himself a large motion-picture house in Philadelphia. The house had been losing money badly for six months, so it was natural that the manager and his staff, who knew nothing of Grand’s background, should be apprehensive over the probable shake-up.

The manager was a shrewd and capable man of many years’ experience in cinema management, a man whose position represented for him the fruit of a life’s work. He decided that his best move, under the circumstances, would be to go to Grand and cheerfully recommend salary cuts for all.

During their first conference, however, it was Grand, in his right as new owner, who held the initiative throughout.

By way of preliminary, and while the manager sat alertly on the edge of a big leather chair, Grand paced the floor of the comfortable office, his hands clasped at his back, and a slight frown on his face. Finally he stopped in the center of the room and addressed the manager:

“The
Chinese
have an expression, Mr . . .
Mister Manager,
I believe it occurs in the book of the
I Ching:
“Put your house in order,” they say,
“that
is the first step.”

This brought a flush to the manager’s face and caused him to shift in his chair.

“My dad,” said Grand then, and with severe reverence, “pushed out here in . . . 1920. There were few frontiers open for him at that time. There are fewer still . . . open-for-us-today!”

He faced the manager and would have let him speak; in fact, by looking straight into his face, he invited him to do so, but the man could only nod in sage agreement.

“If there is one unexplored territory,” Grand continued, waxing expansive now, “one virgin wood alive today in this man’s land of ours—it is cinema management! My dad—“Dad Grand”—was a championship golfer. That
may
be why . . . now this is only a guess . . . but that
may
be why he always favored the maxim: ‘If you want them to play your course—don’t put rocks on the green!’”

Grand paused for a minute, staring down at the manager’s sparkling shoes as he allowed his great brow to furrow and his lips to purse, frantically pensive. Then he shot a question:

“Do you know the story of the Majestic Theatre in Kansas City?”

The manager, a man with thirty years’ experience in the field, who knew the story of every theatre in the country, did not know this one.

“In August, 1939, the management of the K.C. Majestic changed hands,
and
policy. Weston seats were installed—four inches wider than standard—and ‘a.p.’s,’ admission prices, were cut in half . . . and two people were to occupy each seat. The new manager, Jason Frank, who died of a brain hemorrhage later the same year, had advanced Wyler Publicity nine hundred dollars for the catch-phrase, ‘Half the Price, and a Chance for Vice,’ which received a wide private circulation.”

Grand broke off his narrative to give the manager a searching look before continuing:

“. . .
but
it didn’t work, sir! It
did not
work . . . and I’ll tell you why: it was a
crackpot
scheme. A crackpot scheme, and rocks on the green! It cost Frank his licence, his health, and in this case perhaps his very life.”

Grand paused for effect and crossed to the desk where he took up a sheaf of onionskin papers and threshed them about before the manager. Each sheet was black with figures.

“According to my figures,” he said tersely, “this house will fold in nine months’ time unless there is, at minimum, an eight percent climb in ‘p.a.’s’—paid admissions.” Here he frowned darkly, let it pass, forced a smile, and then flapped his arms a time or two, as he resumed speaking, in a much lighter tone now:

“Of course there are a number of . . . of
possibilities
for us here . . . I have certain plans . . . oh granted they’re tentative, under wrap, irons in the fire, if you like—but I
can
tell you
this:
I am retaining you and your staff. We are not ploughing the green under. Do you follow? Right. Now I have arranged for this increase in your salaries: ten percent. I won’t say it is a
substantial
increase; I say simply:
ten percent
. . . which means, of course, that all . . .
all these figures”—he
waved the sheaf of papers in a gesture of hopelessness and then dropped them into the wastebasket—“will have to be
revised!
More time lost before we know where we stand! Yet that can’t be helped. It
is
a move—and I say it is a move . . . in the right direction!”

He spoke to the manager for an hour, thinking aloud, getting the feel of things, keeping his hand in, and so on. Then he dismissed him for three months’ paid vacation.

Grand’s theatre was one of the city’s largest and had first-run rights on the most publicized films. In the manager’s absence, things proceeded normally for a while; until one night when the house was packed for the opening of the smart new musical,
Main Street, U.S.A.

First there was an annoying half-hour delay while extra camp-stool seats were sold and set up in the aisles; then, when the house lights finally dimmed into blackness, and the audience settled back to enjoy the musical, Grand gave them something they weren’t expecting: a cheap foreign film.

The moment the film began, people started leaving. In the darkness, however, with seats two-abreast choking the aisles, most of them were forced back. So the film rolled on; and while the minutes gathered into quarter-hours, and each quarter-hour cut cripplingly deep into the evening, Grand, locked in the projection room high above, stumbled from wall to wall, choking with laughter.

After forty-five minutes, the film was taken off and it was announced over the public-address system, and at a volume strength never before used anywhere, that a mistake had been made, that this was
not
the new musical.

Shouts of
“And how!”
came from the crowd, and
“I’ll say it’s not!”
and
“You’re telling me! God!”

Then after another delay for rewinding, the cheap foreign film was put on again, upside down.

By ten thirty the house was seething towards angry panic, and Grand gave the order to refund the money of everyone who wished to pass by the box office. At eleven o’clock there was a line outside the theatre two blocks long.

From his office above, Grand kept delaying the cashier’s work by phoning every few minutes to ask: “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?”

The next day there was a notice on the central bulletin board:

“Rocks on the green! All hands alert!”

It also announced another fat pay-hike.

Into certain films such as
Mrs. Miniver,
Grand made eccentric inserts.

In one scene in
Mrs. Miniver,
Walter Pidgeon was sitting at evening in his fire-lit study and writing in his journal. He had just that afternoon made the acquaintance of Mrs. Miniver and was no doubt thinking about her now as he paused reflectively and looked towards the open fire. In the original version of this film, he took a small penknife from the desk drawer and meditatively sharpened the pencil he had been writing with. During this scene the camera remained on his
face,
which was filled with quiet reflection and modest hopefulness, so that the intended emphasis of the scene was quite clear: his genteel and wistfully ambitious thoughts about Mrs. Miniver.

The insert Grand made into this film, was, like those he made into others, professionally done, and as such, was technically indiscernable. It was introduced just at the moment where Pidgeon opened the knife, and it was a three-second close shot of the fire-glint blade.

This simple insert misplaced the emphasis of the scene; the fire-glint blade seemed to portend dire evil, and occurring as it did early in the story, simply “spoiled” the film.

Grand would hang around the lobby after the show to overhear the remarks of those leaving, and often he would join in himself:

“What was that part about the
knife?”
he would demand querulously, stalking up and down the lobby, striking his fist into his open hand, “. . . he
had
that knife . . . I thought he was going to try and
kill
her! Christ, I don’t
get
it!”

In some cases, Grand’s theatre had to have two copies of the film on hand, because his alterations were so flagrant that he did not deem it wise to project the altered copy twice in succession. This was the case with a popular film called
The Best Years of Our Lives.
This film was mainly concerned, in its attempt at an odd kind of realism, with a young veteran of war, who was an amputee and had metal hooks instead of hands. It was a story told quite seriously and one which depended for much of its drama upon a straight-faced identification with the amputee’s situation and attitude. Grand’s insert occurred in the middle of the film’s big scene. This original scene was a seven-second pan of the two principal characters, the amputee and his pretty home-town fiancèe while they were sitting on the family porch swing one summer evening. The hero was courting her, in his quiet way—and this consisted of a brave smile, more or less in apology, it would seem, for having the metal hooks instead of hands—while the young girl’s eyes shone with tolerance and understanding . . . a scene which was interrupted by Grand’s insert: a cut to below the girl’s waist where the hooks were seen to hover for an instant and then disappear, grappling urgently beneath her skirt. The duration of this cut was less than one-half second, but was unmistakably seen by anyone not on the brink of sleep.