The Pillow Fight (41 page)

‘I don’t really mind if you do sleep with her,’ she said, and I felt that this was true. ‘I just want to know about it, that’s all.’

‘Why?’

‘Just so that I know where I am.’

‘You’re in bed with me,’ I told her. ‘What more could a girl ask?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But don’t say I make you do things you don’t want to … Wasn’t that an awful row at rehearsal this afternoon?’

‘It was just a row.’

‘I don’t know how people can behave like that.’

‘They’re actors.’

Her quick change of subject was typical, not only of her attitude towards us – a friendly, take-it-or-leave-it permissiveness – but of what she was really interested in nowadays. Susan had become deeply intrigued with the small internal politics of the show, which I could never take seriously; for her, it really was exciting to watch, listen to, speculate upon and endlessly discuss the private lives and public demeanour of every member of the
Safari
cast.

Such up-to-the-minute gossip had become of daily, hourly, engrossing importance to her; and in this she was only joining the throng, following a trend which was probably as old as the theatre itself.

It was a self-contained world, private, trivial and confined. One was aware all the time of the total absorption of theatre people, not in their art (which though dull would have been excusable), but in themselves. Their days were filled with tremendous, to-and-fro discussion about nothing – about make-up, diet, clothes, missed cues, dry-ups, other shows, flops, smashes, show-stoppers, good and bad reviews and arguments in which they had demolished the opposition. There was occasional, grudging praise for perfection, and instant, spiteful comment on any observed weakness. It was like a nursery, full of boastful little show-offs stealing each other’s toys.

Above all, these people, like most exhibitionists, were immensely vain. Happy when they were bitching about the rest of mankind, they were happiest of all when listening to single-minded homage of themselves. The old theatre chestnut: ‘But let’s talk about
you
. What did
you
think of my performance?’ still remained the classic attitude.

At the beginning, when Susan joined the cast, I had feared that I might have to watch her being propositioned before my shadowed eyes; that, in this world of handsome, active youth, jealousy would find too much to feed on. I need not have worried. On a few occasions, I did observe the faint beginnings of a romantic approach. But it never lasted, it ran out of muscle well before the muscles came into play. These young men were actors, and their sole enduring love affair was with themselves.

Buttressing this vanity was an immediate readiness to quarrel. There were perennial feuds between various members of the cast, devious intrigues whose currents altered each day, like the changing delta of a shallow-running river. As on the stage itself, everything had to be larger and brighter coloured and more dramatic than life. The most furious rows could change to vows of eternal friendship overnight, and veer back again at the drop of a mink stole.

This was the touchy world of the tiff, the hunched shoulder, and the smacked face, and if one did not join in and take sides, one was rated heartless or, worse still, conceited, and a fresh grouping, a mute stockade of set faces and meaning looks, very soon made one aware of the fact.

Some of our crises stemmed from having a cast more ‘mixed’ than in any other comparable operation in New York. We would have had our troubles anyway, but this was an extra guarantee of action. The tender area of race relations (referred to by Susan and her friends as ‘the black and white bit’) ensured that when all other themes of discord ran out, there remained a rich lode of ill-will which had scarcely been mined at all.

The row that afternoon, which Susan had recalled with such pleasurable awe, had been typical of our brittle, tantrum-prone society. There were four leads in
The Pink Safari
, two black and two white; they all seemed to get along pretty well (‘So they damned well ought to, for the money,’ Erwin Orwin had growled, when I mentioned this amiable circumstance), except for Dave Jenkin, the leading Negro actor, who, as a matter of professional habit, did not get along with anyone but himself.

Dave Jenkin was a promoted song-and-dance man who had progressed, by an admittedly rocky road which would have vanquished anyone with less endurance, guts and gall, from small-time vaudeville player to Broadway personality and (when he found something to suit him) a very competent actor; in the process, he had also graduated, with outstanding success, from little bastard to big. Within the sacred grove of race relations, however, no one was allowed to point this fact out. He was one emperor who, by statutory falsehood, was always fully clothed.

It was a curious piece of artifice. Here was a man who, if he had been white, would have been written off, by almost anyone who met him, as a loud-mouthed, uncouth and conceited boor. If the question ever came up of his marrying one’s sister, he would have been shown the door as a matter of family necessity. But Jenkin was not a white man, and so none of this could be true. He was black; therefore, he was a great coloured artist, and woe betide the first fascist swine who denied it.

He had been a pain in all our necks ever since he joined the cast. He was abominably rude to everybody. He argued all the time. He was late for rehearsal, late on cue, late everywhere except for lunch. He arrived each morning with a hangover, and left with a chocolate chip on his shoulder. He should have been sacked at the end of the first day, when he had started bragging about ‘pepping up this turkey’; but that of course would have been a clear case of racial discrimination, shaming the democratic process.

There was also the fact that he was absolutely made for his part in
Safari
, if he chose to try. But the job of coaxing him to be a reasonable human being, let alone a good actor, was so mountainous and so unpleasant that, in happier circumstances, he would have been replaced over the weekend.

There we were, anyway, stuck with Dave Jenkin, the distinguished Negro actor whose best protection was his skin. It was he who had precipitated that day’s quarrel, not the least in our long roster of confrontation. He had kept the stage waiting, at one important moment when he should have sailed in on cue; and apart from the irritation of this check, there was the additional annoyance that his voice could be heard offstage, in a deep-toned monologue which might have had a lot to do with Dave Jenkin but had nothing to do with my plot.

It was the stage manager’s job to rout him out, but before he could do so, someone more in the limelight took a hand. This was Sally Coates, the actress who was playing the ‘white girl’ lead, a cheerful and bouncing character whose reserves of energy and good humour had already done us many a good turn. It was she who had been held up and thrown out of stride, and she who, at last, felt compelled to point the fact out.

Standing centre stage, in the slacks and shirt which were the usual rehearsal rig, Sally called out briskly: ‘Dave! Wake up! You’re on!’

There was a silence, and then Dave Jenkin strolled onstage, at a pace which indicated his indifference to this or any other drama. His tightly-cuffed yellow pants and checkered shirt made a convenient focus for our dislike. He drawled: ‘You want me, honey?’

Sally Coates had already had enough of this long day, and she reacted snappishly.

‘No,’ she shot back, hands on hips. ‘I don’t want you one little bit. But the play does. You had a cue there.’

‘Well, now,’ said Dave Jenkin, in the same insolent drawl, ‘aren’t we the funny one today … Maybe if you spoke the cue louder, I could hear it.’

We were all waiting in silence – Erwin and myself sitting side by side in the second row, the director leaning over the piano on stage, the half-dozen other actors taking part in the scene, the usual drift of people watching or learning lines or hanging about – but now all staring in upon this unpleasant little tangle.

‘I spoke loud enough,’ said Sally sharply. ‘If you’d stop talking for a bit, and listen, you could come in on time.’ But she was not the girl to hold a mood of irritation. ‘OK, Dave – let’s go!’ She spoke her cue-line again. “
And if I do
,
I know just the man to take care of you
.”

Dave Jenkin stood silent, sullen and frowning. Finally he executed an absurd little step dance, a cut-and-shuffle from his remote, soft-shoe past, threw out his arms, and said: ‘What was that again?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I didn’t. That’s just the trouble, baby.’ The whining insolence was even more pronounced than usual. ‘I heard a mumble, that’s what I heard. Can’t hardly take that for a cue, can I?’

By my side, Erwin Orwin stirred. ‘Dave!’ he called out.

Dave Jenkin crouched and cupped his hand. ‘Yes, sir, boss?’

‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘Yes,
sir!
Any time I hear the call.’

Erwin drew a considerable breath. ‘All right, Sally,’ he said after a moment. ‘Let’s go back. Just give him that cue-line again.’

Sally repeated: ‘“
And if I do
,
I know just the man to take care of you
.”’ She then, being angry, improvised, ‘And I wish to Christ that was true.’

Without a word, Dave Jenkin turned and stalked off the stage. His reputed girlfriend, a small and lithe young dancer with the waist and disposition of a wasp, called out: ‘That’s the boy! You show ’em, Dave!’ and was countered by another girl, less sympathetic, whose contribution was a crisp ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch!’ Hair was pulled, faces once again were slapped; Sally’s husband, who had no part at all in the show and was in fact a nightclub singer on holiday from Philadelphia, came down centre stage and embarked on a long harangue vaguely directed at Erwin Orwin.

The piano player, a man of long-term, all-absorbent resignation, began to play the overture, in a key so satirically modulated that it sounded midway between the
Danse Macabre
and Chopin in a mood of revolutionary despair. Dave Jenkin reappeared in his street clothes, and strode purposefully from left to right on his way to the exit. Sally’s husband said something to him, whereupon Dave Jenkin, who had been a boxer before he became a tap-dancer, promptly knocked him down, and then continued his walk offstage.

Sally started to cry, and Dave Jenkin’s girlfriend took a running kick at the prostrate man, missed him, and landed flat on her cushioned-ride behind. From this non-vantage point, she called shrilly after her departing lover: ‘Keep going, honey! Don’t pay them any mind! Don’t even ignore them!’

Into this lively
tableau
, which had some affinity with the last act of
Hamlet
, Erwin injected his own personality. He suddenly stood up, and bawled: ‘Break! Five minutes! And everybody off stage!’ He then rounded on me, and snarled: ‘It’s all your God-damned fault!’ and as I looked up, genuinely startled, I saw that he was grinning, and we both broke into laughter.

It seemed perfectly natural that, five minutes later at the end of the interval, the rehearsal continued as if nothing had happened. Only Dave Jenkin, coaxed out of the nearest bar by his female friend (who had been threatened with automatic dismissal if she did not bring him back), made anything more out of it. Pleading sinus infection, he had his dresser follow him round the stage with a nasal spray for the rest of the afternoon, applying soothing surges of medicament at the conclusion of every speech.

‘I wish I had the use of that thing,’ grumbled Erwin Orwin, settling down again. ‘I’d try a different approach … But he’s good, all the same, isn’t he? The son-of-a-bitch is really good!’

Surrounded by such intermittent flurries, Steele the stolid anchor-man toiled, feeling at least a hundred years older than the assorted delinquents romping round his feet. But, trying for the long view, it was possible to feel optimistic.
The Pink Safari
had taken on a good hard outline, and a reasonably distinctive one. It had a book, a score, lyrics, a cast, eight different sets, a costume plan, and a schedule of future operations.

The time was now December. The play would be ready, even by Erwin’s spendthrift standards, in about a month. It would then have its first try-out in Boston in January, and open in New York in the spring – the second spring of its life.

The day started, like the first chapter of Genesis, on a note of novelty.

‘You have an old friend in town,’ observed Kate, with that lack of emphasis which characterised a lot of the things she said to me nowadays. She tapped the newspaper which lay by her breakfast tray. ‘But I suppose you know about it already.’

I had only called in to say goodbye on my way to work, and, already preoccupied with what lay ahead, I was paying no more attention than any other husband on thecommuting wing at ten o’clock in the morning. Straightening my tie before her mirror, I asked: ‘Who would that be?’

‘Father Shillingford.’

‘Well, well,’ I said, taken by surprise. ‘That is an old friend. Father Billingsgate. What’s he doing at this end of the tottering globe?’

‘He’s at the United Nations,’ she answered, in a short sort of voice. ‘He phoned last night. He’s appearing for South Africa.’

‘
For
South Africa?’

‘Oh, they didn’t ask him to … He was giving evidence before one of the committees, the one that’s trying to get South Africa expelled. He spoke against it. Didn’t you read about it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The
Times
is terribly bad on foreign affairs, don’t you think?’

‘The
Times
is the best–’ she began energetically, and then broke off. ‘Don’t joke about it, Johnny. People like Father Shillingford are killing themselves, working to get some sense into the world. If you’re not interested, at least you might respect what they’re trying to do.’ She was frowning; it was a familiar pattern of disapproval. ‘Anyway, he’s here, and he’s coming to dinner.’