The Magic Christian (5 page)

It brought some of the audience bolt upright. Others the scene affected in a sort of double-take way, reacting to it as they did only minutes later. The rest, that is to say about one-third of the audience, failed to notice it at all; and the film rolled on. No one could believe his eyes; those who were positive they had seen something funny in the realism there, sat through the film again to make certain—though, of course, the altered version was never run twice in succession—but
all
who had seen were so obsessed by what they had seen, or what they imagined they had seen, that they could no longer follow the story line, though it was, from that point on, quite as it was intended, without incongruity or surprise.

Grand had a good deal of trouble about his alterations of certain films and was eventually sued by several of the big studios. You can bet it cost him a pretty to keep clear in the end.

“M
Y
L
ORD
R
USSELL
books came today,” said Ginger Horton, suddenly dropping her voice to a stage whisper, because the dog in her lap seemed to have gone asleep.

“Pardon,”
said Grand, almost shouting.

Mrs. Horton, dramatically wide-eyed now, raised a finger to her lips.

“I think Bitsy’s asleep,”
she cooed, then stole a glance at the dog. “Isn’t it
too
sweet!” she said, lifting her face to the others, beaming angelically.

“Oh, it
is
too sweet!” agreed Agnes and Esther, craning forward to see, like ancient things stretching across the sand. “Guy,” hissed Agnes, “do come and see!”

“Best not,” said Guy sagely, “might wake it.”

“Guy’s right,” said Ginger Horton, compressing her lips tersely and cautioning the two ladies back. “Oh, how cross my Bitsy’d be. You
are
sweet, Guy,” she added, with a piercing smile for him—but before he could acknowledge it with one of his own, she let a look of great care return to her face.

“I was
saying
that my Lord Russell books came today.”

“Lord Russell?” Guy inquired genially.

“Laird K. Russell,” murmured Esther in pure wonder as some dear forgotten name loomed up to marvel her softly from the far far away.

“Bertrand Russell!”
exclaimed Agnes sharply, “the philosopher! Good heavens, Esther!”

“Not Bertrand Russell,” cried Ginger Horton, “Lord Russell of Liverpool. The atrocity books!”

“Good Heavens,” said Agnes.

“Well, do you know what we did?” Ginger Horton demanded. “Bitsy and I sat right down and pretended that
this . . . this . . . Thorndike
had been
captured
and brought to justice and all those atrocities had been done to him! To him and to a lot of other nasty little people we could think of!”

“Gracious,” exclaimed Agnes.

“Not
Bill
Thorndike surely?” said Grand, coming forward on his chair with a show of concern.

“Oh, it’s just absolutely
maddening!”
said Ginger Horton. “I don’t even want to . . . to
talk
about it. Not in front of Bitsy, anyway.”

“The dog?” said Grand. “It’s asleep, isn’t it?”

“Bitsy knows, of course,” said Miss Horton darkly, ignoring this, “and only too well!”

“Ginger,” said Agnes, “can you really be so sure of that?”

“Oh, in simply a thousand-thousand ways,” said Ginger Horton.

“Do you remember that young Mr. Laird K. Russell?” asked Esther of Agnes in the pause that followed. “He came to our Westport summer ball for little Nancy.”

“Great Heavens, Esther, that was over sixty years ago! Surely you don’t mean it!”

Esther nodded, her eyes dim with distant marvel, a pale smile on her lips.

“Esther, really!”

Ginger Horton sniffed, at no pains to hide her annoyance with this change of focus, while Agnes tried to recover the thread.

“Do have more tea, Ginger—and please tell us wherever
did
you get that darling little sunsuit? How perfectly clever it is!”

“You
are
sweet, Agnes,” said Ginger, brightening, yet seeming to imply a moment of reproach for Esther and Guy before turning her attention to the great pink tent of a sunsuit she was wearing.

“Yes, I think it’s fun, don’t you? Of course Charles did it for me.”

“Simply too adorable!” said Agnes. “Isn’t it, Guy?”

“It’s extremely attractive,” said Guy in most richly masculine and persuasive tones, and the ladies beamed all around.

One of Guy Grand’s sayings at conference was this:

“Show me the man who’s above picking up bits and pieces—and
I’ll
show
you:
a fool!”

Just so, Grand himself kept his finger in more than one peripheral pie. In 1950 he bought out Vanity Cosmetics, a large and thriving Fifth Avenue concern. He surprised staffers at Vanity by bringing in his own research chemists, from allied fields. But these staff executives, all old-timers themselves, were only waiting for reassurance, and it wasn’t long in coming when Grand spoke of fresh blood, new horizons, and thinking big.

“You’ve got to look ahead in this man’s game,” he emphasized at first conference, “or by jumbo you’re up crap creek without a paddle!”

Granted he spoke harshly, but in his tone was tough jaunty conviction and brutal know-how.

“He’s all right,” said one Vanity staffer after the session. “He speaks his mind, and devil take the hindmost!”

“Joe, he’s my kinda guy,” another was quick to agree. “. . . I mean what the hell, we’re
all
out for money—am I right, Joe?”

These regulars though, were more or less cut off from lab contact now, as Grand told them he wanted to “go it alone for a bit.”

“Just
want to see how the land lies,” he said.

He worked tirelessly with his new chemists, himself clad in a great white smock, bustling about the lab, seeing to this test and that result.

“Back in harness!” he liked to say at conference (for it was his habit to go there wearing his smock), and it made the others feel a bit inadequate—spic and span as they were in their smart tweeds and clergy gray—while the new chief sat stained and pungent from the lab.

“You civies have a soft touch here,” Grand would tweak them—though of course they were only too eager now to go to the lab themselves.

“You know I wouldn’t mind a crack at the lab,” one of the senior exec’s would say with serious mien if he could get Grand aside.

“Yes, I’ll just bet you wouldn’t,” Grand would reply with a glittering smile, “and how about a handful of these while you’re at it?” and he would flash a fat roll of ten thousands that he could just get into the catchall pocket of his big white smock.

Though the exec might suspect that Grand was speaking symbolically, the gambit was always impressive.

“Yes, sir,”
would be the earnest reply, “I really
would
like a crack at the lab!”

But Grand would grimace oddly and wave a finger at the senior staffer; then he would give a thin cackling laugh and fly to his flasks and beakers.

“The old boy’s sharp as a razor,” most of them said. “He’s my kinda guy.”

What happened in the end was the development of a couple of fairly new products. The first was
Downy,
a combination shampoo and soft-set; and it was heralded by a large-scale promotional campaign. The formula of
Downy
was supposedly based on a principle used by the Egyptians in the preservation of their dead—though this was but vaguely referred to, being simply the scientific springboard for the product and thereby catching the endorsement of men in various fields, and gaining press coverage beyond mere paid advertisement. The main promotional emphasis though was on the social allure and overall security it seemed to promise, “DOWNY,” according to these releases,
“will make your hair . . .softer than the hair of
YOUR OWN CHILD!”

It was unconditionally guaranteed to do so. These releases went on to present certain inductive proofs that the formula of
Downy
had been “Cleopatra’s secret,” that in reality she had been a woman of “only average prettiness
(which one must never never underestimate)”
and that she had won her thrones and her men with “what is
now
YOUR OWN . . . DOWNY.”

The promotional campaign was in progress for quite a while before the product was offered to the general buyer, though it had of course been used with amazing success for a long time by a number of famous beauties, and there were plenty of testimonials to that effect. So that when it was finally offered, the sales ran high indeed.

“I think we’ve hit on something here,” said the smock-stained veteran, Grand Guy Grand, at conference with the staffers as the market tabulations poured in that first morning. “I
don’t
like to count the chickens so to speak, but
I think
we’ve hit on something here . . . something that may well spell “touchdown’ in the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. U.S.A.!”

The others were agreeing wildly, but Grand was quick to show conference acumen, “. . .
not
count the chickens, I say”—and he raised a cautionary finger—
“nor
put all in
one basket!”

And even as he hinted at research for another new product already under way, adverse reports about the soft-set began coming in by the carload. For what this Grand Guy in his work with the new chemists had contrived was a potion that did
not
soften the hair, after all, but on the contrary, made it
all stiff and wiry.

As the reports flooded in, along with an avalanche of lawsuits, staffers at the conference table grew restive.

“Well, can’t win ‘em all,” said Grand with a good loser’s chuckle. “Common Zen savvy tells us as much,” and he was content to dismiss the product’s failure with this, eager now to get started on something new; but as it became ever more apparent that their million-dollar planning had gone so terribly wrong, the staffers got panicky.

“We do our best,” said Grand, shaking his head stoically. “No man can say more.”

It appeared though that one of the senior execs, a white-haired man of about forty-two, might actually jump out the window.

Grand, who held the initiative throughout most of the conferences, quietly led the man back to the table, and summed up in this way:

“Talk is cheap, gentlemen, and since I’m not one personally to favor tired phrases, I
think
I’ll spare you the grand old maxim about ‘spilt milk,’ but I do want to say this: Show me the man who
looks back
—and I’ll show
you:
a first-rate imbecile!”

This brought conference around, and under Grand’s good guidance, they ignored the raging anathema without and looked to the future.

“Our M.R. people have come up with something,” said Grand, “—that’s what we pay them for—well, they’ve come up with a couple of consumer principles we can kick around here at conference: one, the insatiate craving of the public for an
absolute;
and two, the modern failure of monotheism—that is to say, the
failure
of the notion that
any absolute
can be presented as one separate thing.”

Grand paused to touch his fingers together before him, shooting sharply evaluative looks at several staffers nearest before he continued:

“And they’re quite right, of course. We of the . . . the extreme Occident, for right or wrong—and there I’ve said it myself—think in
dichotomies . . .
have done so since our very inception. Oneness? Never had a chance in this great land of ours! Well, I ask you staffers, where does that leave us? Monotheism shot to pieces on the one hand—dire craving for an absolute existing on the other. I submit to you staffers that the solution establishes itself before our very eyes: namely, that an
absolute
—in any particular field—must be presented as a
dichotomy!
Yes, if one mother company, such as our Vanity, could confront the public with a
pure dichotomy,
in any particular product, it would gain virtual monopoly there. Yes, and
we
will present such a dichotomy! Two sides which embrace the extremes and meet in the middle! I say people will make their choice
within
the dichotomy presented by the mother company; they will not go outside it, because then the issue would become vague and the implications of the choice no longer clear and satisfying . . .
satisfying
in terms, I mean to say, of the self-orientation for which they
do,
in the last analysis, buy these products at all. Are there any dissensions from the view I’ve expressed?”

There were none to speak of and Grand continued briefly:

“Now what we want is one product which we can present in the two forms—good and evil, old and new, primitive and civilized—two items designed for the same use but presented as completely antithetical, both morally and philosophically—not aesthetically, however . . . packaging will be high-tone and identical, let the departments concerned take note . . . now do any of you—execs, staffers—know what that product might be?”

They did not, but this was evidently just a teaser anyhow, for Grand had already selected his product, and the work on it even now was under way. It was to be a body deodorant of course—presented, as he had suggested, in two forms. The first was traditional, combining the clinical and the erotic, offering, as it did, “. . .
Protection for Those Most Precious Moments of All
—
It Cuts Away Body Odor like a Knife.”
It was technically superior to any others on the market, making use of “. . . liquid glass, harmless plastic sealers . . .” and so on. It was called
Stealth.
The second deodorant was based on another principle altogether,
biology.
An ancient wisdom revived, it had to do with natural selection among mating animals, and did, according to eminent and quoted authorities, rest securely on the olfactory motive-response by which animals find and achieve harmonious, monogamous relationships. Thus, the second product was designed not to obscure the natural body odor but to cleverly assert it. And, in M.R. terms, an undeniable correspondence and natural attraction would result between appropriate compatible persons. It was called
Musk and Tallow.
Art irritant jingle, in stereophonic sound, on the high-velocity repetition principle, was to be used:
“Don’t Lie Fallow
—
Musk and Tallow!”
repeated many many times within a few seconds.