Underfoot In Show Business (12 page)

“I told you before, lady, I never heard of the guy!” said the bartender.

“Now don’t tell me that!” snapped the secretary, whose nerves were pretty frayed by then. “He lives on your block and we’re told he’s in your bar regularly.”

“I don’t know him by name,” said the bartender. “If you want to tell me what he looks like, maybe I seen him.”

“He’s tall, with blond hair and sideburns,” said the secretary, “and he dresses—”

“Oh, you mean
Douglas!
” said the bartender. “Just a second. Hey, Douglas! Lady on the phone for you!”

So Winston-alias-Douglas got on the phone and said, Hello, there! How
were
we all?...The what?...Oh, The
Wall
! Sure, he had it. Had it right there with him. Hadn’t got too far into it yet, he’d been busy with his own writing, but it looked to be a pretty fair book, he thought. . .

That was the last we saw of Winston. He moved on to another studio before Monograph had a chance to fire him.

In a business which depended on the Winston Atterburys and Wide-Margin Wirtzes, the turnover was fairly heavy. Along with whose who were fired, there was the occasional reader who blossomed into a successful writer (Ayn Rand was once an outside reader) and there was the occasional Dolly who didn’t need the job and quit when she got bored with it.

We missed Dolly after she left. As I said, she was a sociable, friendly soul and much as we resented her, we all liked her. Jason, who inherited her specialty, mentioned her affectionately one afternoon as he came out of the story editor’s office with the new
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

“Poor old Dolly,” he said, “I wonder if she misses—” And then he stopped cold.

There on the cover of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, streaming across the bottom like a banner, was Dolly’s name and the announcement that a story by this gifted new
Journal
writer would be found within.

Dolly’d not only thought she could write better stories than those: she’d gone home and done it.

And I mean to tell you the Monograph Studio outside reading department was fit to be TIED.

ALL I DID was answer a call from Warner Brothers’ story department and wander over to Warner’s prepared to bootleg a little extra reading—and the sky fell on me.

The state of mind known as “stagestruck” has never been confined to the hopeful young who think they have a creative or performing talent. There are hundreds of men and women who lay no claim to such talents, but who have wangled permanent niches for themselves in the theatre purely because they’re incurably stagestruck.

First are the theatrical agents, whose skill at selling and negotiating might have made them richer—and would certainly have given them more security—in any of a dozen mundane industries.

Then there are the backers. They range from the pants manufacturer—whose few thousand dollars invested in a half-million-dollar production gives him the illusion of being In The Theatre—to Howard Cullman, former chairman of the New York Port Authority, who throughout an impressive business career has invested most of his money in Broadway plays.

Third are the theatrical lawyers who take only theatre people as clients, invest their legal fees in their clients’ productions and attend preproduction conferences and auditions as assiduously as the producers they wish they were and sometimes become.

In a category all his own was a singular gentleman who died before this book was written, but who is alive and cherished in my memory and will be as long as I live. He is the Owl in this story; and all I knew about him when I wandered over to Warner’s that day was that his name was Jacob Wilk and that, publicly, he was the eastern story editor for Warner Brothers Pictures. Privately, Jake Wilk was Broadway’s foremost, if not its only, secret producer. This is how he secretly produced plays:

Some reader would cover a novel that seemed a likely vehicle for one of Warner’s stars and would recommend the novel to Jake. Jake would read it and decide it would make a fine Broadway play. (Movies didn’t interest him.) He’d go over in his mind the names of all Broadway playwrights until he came to the one who was exactly right for this particular book. Then he’d phone the playwright.

“I want you to read this book,” he’d say. “I’ll send it over to you. I think you ought to adapt it for Broadway.”

“I’m tied up right now, Mr. Wilk,” the playwright would say with innocent tact, “but as soon as I get time I’ll certainly read it.”

Jake would send him the book that afternoon and phone the playwright next morning.

“Have you read it yet?” he’d ask.

The playwright in some surprise would repeat that he was “tied up.”

“All right,” Jake would say agreeably, “I’ll be in touch with you.”

The next day he’d phone again.

“Have you read it yet?”

He’d keep this up day after day until finally, to get Jake off his back, the playwright would sit down and read the bloody book. And the next day when Jake phoned, the playwright could say heartily:

“Jake, I’ve read it and you’re right, it would make a very funny play. But I’m all tied up this season. Why don’t you get somebody else?”

“That’s all right,” Jake would say. “I’ll wait till you’re free.”

He’d give the playwright a week and then he’d phone him:

“Are you free yet?”

And from then on he’d phone the playwright every day with “Are you free yet?” until finally the playwright would explode at him over the phone:

“Look, Jake, even if I were free, we don’t have the rights to the damn book, we don’t have the money and we don’t have a producer!” And he’d hang up before Jake could answer.

For a month or so, the playwright would hear nothing further. And just as he’d forgotten all about Jake and his book, Jake would phone him and say:

“We’ve got the rights to the book, I have a producer and two thirds of the backing, and I can get the final third from Warner’s on a preproduction deal as soon as they’ve seen your script. Are you free yet?”

And so the dazed playwright would sit down and write the play and in due time it would open on Broadway. Some of the plays he secretly produced were smash hits; sometimes, as Jake’s daughter put it, there’d be “a string of flops that opened and shut like clams.”

But whatever the outcome, from the moment one of his plays went into production, Jake would exhort everybody involved not to mention his name in connection with it. He didn’t want Warner’s to know he was messing with another Broadway play (though some of Warner’s most successful films were made from Jake’s Broadway plays).

“Keep my name out of it,” he’d say. And they’d keep his name out of it. But they couldn’t keep Jake himself out of it. During rehearsals of one of his secret productions he was so incessantly underfoot that the producer and playwright threw him out of the theatre with enough force to break his arm. It didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him. Because when Jake got a Broadway brain-storm it became an obsession. If you thwarted him the obsession intensified.

How I know is, the last of Jake Wilk’s obsessions—and the one totally and permanently thwarted by Broadway—was me. You may know what it’s like to have an obsession. You’ve got no idea what it’s like to be one.

As I said, it began with a phone call.

“This is Warner Brothers’ story department,” a secretary said. “Can you stop in and see Mr. Jacob Wilk, our story editor, this afternoon?”

I assumed that Gene Burr, Jake’s assistant, had recommended me as a reader. Gene Burr had bought me a drink a few weeks earlier to tell me how much he liked my new play, and he knew I was struggling to make ends meet on Monograph’s pittance. I went over to Warner’s and up to the story department and was ushered, all unsuspecting, into the office of Mr. Wilk.

He sat behind a cluttered desk, the walls around him covered with framed posters of Broadway hits which I assumed he had purchased for Warner’s. He had, but of course that’s not why they were on the wall. He’d secretly produced all of them.

He looked up when I entered and glared at me from behind rimless spectacles. He had greying sandy hair and a strong, unremarkable sixty-year-old face.

“Hello,” he barked. “Sit down!”

I sat, quaking. I didn’t know then that Jake never spoke, he barked, and he never smiled, he glared, and he never had the slightest idea that that’s what he did.

On his desk was the familiar blue-bound copy of my play which Gene Burr had liked and had given him to read, and Jake now glared at that.

“This is a good play,” he snapped. “Who’s seen it?”

I gave him the names of the four producers who had so far turned it down.

“Who’s your agent?” he barked. I told him. He reached for the phone and called my agent and demanded to know who else had seen the play.

“Has Leland seen it?” he rapped into the phone. “Irene?” He listened a moment and said impatiently, “All right. I’ll be in touch with you,” and hung up. Then he looked past me and bawled out of the open office door like a train conductor:

“Where’s Leland Hayward?”

Jake had a secretary and two assistants and he never addressed any one of them by name in my hearing. When he wanted something, he just bawled into empty space and whoever was within earshot came running. This time both the secretary and Gene Burr came running.

“Leland Hayward’s in Rome on his honeymoon,” said Gene.

“Take a note to him,” barked Jake, and as this was clearly meant for the secretary, Gene withdrew. “Dear Leland. Let me know what you think of this script as soon as possible. Regards. Jake.” He handed the secretary the blue-bound script and said: “Get his address in Rome. Send it airmail.”

It passed through my mind that Leland Hayward might be less than eager to spend his honeymoon reading my play. Such an extraneous thought never passed through Jake Wilk’s mind. He glared at me and said:

“Get me some scripts. Irene hasn’t seen it, Guthrie hasn’t seen it, nobody’s seen it!”

Believe me, everybody was going to.

During the next few weeks, the play was airmailed to Leland Hayward on his honeymoon and sent by messenger to Irene Selznick, who was in the hospital recovering from surgery. It went to Guthrie McClintic and Gilbert Miller and Kermit Bloomgarden and then on down the line of lesser producers. Within a couple of months, every producer on Broadway had read it and for assorted reasons turned it down. Jake spent an afternoon tabulating the reasons. The next morning my phone rang. When I said hello, a voice at the other end, like a voice barking the final order to a firing squad, rapped:

“Wilk!”

I jumped slightly and said how-was-he and Jake said:

“I’ve found out what’s the matter with this play. You’ll have to rewrite it.”

“I generally do,” I said.

“All right, we’d better have lunch,” he snapped. “Sardi’s! One o’clock!”

I walked into Sardi’s five minutes early but Jake was there ahead of me, sitting at a large round table for five at the back of the room. This was his table. Whether he ate alone or had six guests, that’s where he sat. The two of us lunched with the width of the table between us, most of the width taken up by letters from producers telling Jake what was wrong with the play. We discussed the play’s faults, and over coffee we mapped out an entirely new plot.

(The play’s characters and setting appealed to everybody; the play’s plot appealed to nobody. I mention this to keep you from wondering what was the matter with my plays. That’s what was the matter with all of them. I’d never liked fiction and fiction was getting back at me: I never could invent a story worth a damn.)

The coffee came in a silver pot and as we talked, Jake tapped the pot absently with a finger to see if it was hot—then with two fingers, then three. As soon as he could press four fingers against it without pain, he bawled at any waiter going past:

“Coffee’s not hot!”

and the waiter carried off the old pot and brought a fresh one. During our two-hour conference we ran through four pots.

(What paralyzes me about this finger-tapping procedure is that Jake bequeathed it to me. Sitting over my breakfast or dinner coffee to this day, I tap the pot to see if it’s hot. Thanks to a long association with Jake Wilk, if the coffee’s not scalding I can’t drink it.)

When we left Sardi’s, he asked how long I thought the revisions would take and I said I hoped to do them in six weeks.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”

I started work on the revisions at nine o’clock the next morning. At ten o’clock the phone rang.

“Wilk!” barked the firing squad. “How’s it coming?”

I thought How-the-hell-do-you-think-it’s-coming-I-only-started-an-hour-ago. I said it was coming fine.

“Good,” said Jake. “I’ll be in touch with you.”

Next morning at ten he phoned again. He phoned the morning after that and the morning following. He phoned every day for a month, as regularly as he brushed his teeth, and the conversation never varied.

“Wilk! How’s it coming?”

“Fine.”

“Good. I’ll be in touch with you.”

At the beginning of the sixth week, the password changed. When the phone rang at ten and I said hello, he didn’t ask how it was coming, he didn’t even rap “Wilk!” He just barked:

“Well, where is it?”

And for the rest of the week it was Where is it? which drove me on Friday to promise him I’d finish it over the weekend. That Saturday, in the dirty apartment I normally cleaned on Saturday, I typed from 9 A.M. to midnight, breaking my back to meet Jake Wilk’s mythical deadline. I crawled beaten into bed at 1 A.M., slept late on Sunday and was nearly halfway through breakfast before he called and said Where was it?

“I still have the last scene to type, and then I have to separate the carbons and bind the copies,” I said. “I’ll drop it at your office tomorrow.”

“I’ll be home tonight,” he said. “Drop it off here with the doorman. I’ll read it before I go to bed.”

I worked all day Sunday. I finished binding one copy of the script at six o’clock, and without stopping to wash my face I tore out of the house (Maudiebird’s little hovel on Ninety-fifth Street) and down to Sixty-eighth Street to the plush Fifth Avenue apartment house where Jake lived, and left the script with the doorman. Then I went home and collapsed. Lying on the studio couch staring up at the ceiling, I lectured myself bitterly.

“Why,” I asked myself, “are you ruining your health for this madman? He could have waited till tomorrow. He could have waited till Adelaide’s wedding day in
Guys and
Dolls
, which if I remember was the Twelfth of Never!”

Joy came in the morning: no phone call. It was the producers’ turn for a while.

None of the producers who read the new version wanted any part of it. (If you can’t invent plots you can’t invent plots.) But, as I said, Jake Wilk’s obsession was not that particular play, it was me. During the weeks I had worked on the revisions, he had read his readers’ reports on several of my old plays and he now wanted to read the plays for himself. I’d thrown away most of them but there were two I’d kept and I sent them to him. He liked both of them. And having failed to get my Play No. 14 produced, he now went to work on Nos. 9 and 11.