Wise Children (21 page)

But all this disillusion lay before him, and indeed, before me, that night in the Super-Chief with moonlight outside on the bare mountains into which the train began to climb. I straightened up and faced him. He was so shy he hadn’t even got his jacket off, although it was quite dark inside and the only sounds the chuff and click and rattle of the train and, drifting on the wind, the laughter out of Daisy’s everlasting party. I started to undo his tie. ‘Irish’ to his friends and of descent, although American to the core. Ross ‘Irish’ O’Flaherty, a.k.a. the Chekhov of Southern California.

Of course, I remember his name. How could I not? You never forget the difficult customers.

Welcome to the Land of Make-Believe! To where the moon shone on Charlie Chaplin every moonlight night. Welcome to Dreamland.

We’d only ever seen a palm tree before at Bournemouth, it came as a shock. So big, so hairy. And the sunshine. ‘Like a benediction,’ said Irish. He was so pleased I’d got it up for him that even the weather seemed intentional. But I wouldn’t move in with him, not on your life, I’d got too much residual sense for that, although, I must say, I was very struck – struck with his faded but still potent charm; his vulnerability, under his surface assurance; his soft, light baritone with its gracious East Coast modulations; his wasted talent, of which even the morbid scripts he now churned out at so many dollars the yard retained some wizened gleam. And he did wonders for my grammar, not to mention my grasp of metaphor, as witness the style of this memoir. But cohabitation, no. Nora and I put up at the Forest of Arden.

The legendary Forest of Arden, the residential motel of the stars, with its Olde English motif. What could have been more appropriate, in the circumstances? All the little bungalows, half-timbered, thatched – replicas of Anne Hathaway’s cottage – each one nestled under clematis, set in wee herbaceous gardens, tended with loving care by Japanese gardeners, and there were Warwickshire apple trees, imported oaks, you name it. Perry set up there, in a bungalow, too, when he wasn’t nine-to-fiving it with Irish at the studio, busy on the script in the office they shared. But Daisy came and went because she’d got her own home, hadn’t she? Indeed, she’d got her own thirty-bedroom mansion, besides a tremendous many domestic duties. She was a married woman, after all.

But the Forest of Arden was a lovely, flimsy, fantastic place, where you could live in grand, two-dimensional style among the hissing lawns – those incessant sprinklers! – and there was a pool, shaped like an acorn leaf, of bright turquoise, planted with shocking pink flamingos, everso
As You Like It
even if out of period, and we would lie for hours on canvas loungers, exposing our pale, unaccustomed torsos to what Irish, in one of his
Hollywood
stories, calls the ‘ardent yet somehow insincere sunlight’.

Note it’s already ceased to be a blessing.

And how can sunlight be insincere, Irish?

He gave me a pitying look and went on reading
The House of Mirth
. God forgive me, I’d been vulgar again. He’d already noted, with some distress, how vulgar I could be from time to time. All the same, that sunlight’s insincerity perplexed me. Did he mean, the sunshine didn’t really mean it? And, if so, what did
that
mean? Or, is it that if it saw somebody better than me to shine on, it would switch off me and shine on them, instead? And yet it shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I’d ever seen, that California sunshine.

And, tell the truth, it changed me. It changed me for good and all. All manner of things conspired to change me, during those months in California, though from what to what I scarcely know, except, if you offered me a tango with the Prince of Wales today, I’d tell you where to stuff it.

Irish was banned from the Forest of Arden because he’d set fire to a thatched roof during the welcome party when he first arrived from New York as fresh talent, years ago, before the hair on his chest turned grey and he started stowing a shaker of martinis in the briefcase he took to the studio every morning. All the same, we’d smuggle him in past the desk clerk whenever we could, trussed up in Perry’s cashmere overcoat and a fedora, disguised as a big-name director, and then he’d lay down some speakeasy-style boogie-woogie on Perry’s white piano, Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well. They’d have a sing-song. ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, obviously. ‘Down by the Sally Gardens.’ And that old song about the man who resurrects. They loved that song, they roared out the choruses:

Irish would flop down flat on his back at the last verse and Perry would scatter a few drops of liquor on him.

Irish, suiting the action to the words –

What larks.

Apart from that, I used to cab it to his place, out in the sticks. You climbed steps to a cabin. There was a little, narrow bed, a chair, a table. All clean and neat, the way men on their own keep things. Clean, neat, a little drear – not a flower in a cup, nor a postcard on the mantel, nothing like that. Only his pencils in a jam jar, a pile of yellow legal pads and a cardboard carton where he stashed his empties. I stretched him out upon that narrow bed and pleasured him, poor old thing, and he was grateful, at the time.

Apart from a few small necessities, his monastically austere cabin was furnished with books. After his day at the studio he’d drive home, unwind over a few drinks, then leaf through his own back numbers – a bestseller at twenty-two years old, a second novel that didn’t live up to the promise at twenty-five, a stinker at twenty-eight, and then the one at thirty-two that didn’t sell, which is the one they remember him by. That, and the
Hollywood Elegies
, which were yet to come and would be inspired by yours truly – this painted harlot over here, still indecently hale and hearty if by the world forgot on her seventy-fifth birthday while he’s dead and gone and immortal.

After he’d thoroughly depressed himself with contemplation of his wasted genius, he’d turn to higher things and finger Shelley, say, until both glass and book slipped from his fingers and he slept.

When did it first enter his head to educate me? Because he didn’t have sufficient cash to buy a mink. Therefore he gave me Culture.

I balked at Proust.

His sweet, befuddled head; that faded golden hair; the large, light eyes with the long lashes; the short, straight nose like the nose of Daisy’s Persian cat; the soft, weak mouth indicative of that guilty sensuality so characteristic, I’ve found, of the North American temperament – that is, they like it, all right, but, all the same, they think it’s going to give them hairy palms.

Attracted as he was to my conspicuous unrefinement, all the same Irish thought it would only make sleeping with me all right in the end if we could read Henry James, together, afterwards, and I was nothing loath because there’d been precious little time for book-learning in my short life as I’d been earning a living from age twelve and sometimes Irish, when he remembered that, would forgive me everything.

Don’t misunderstand me. He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

Meanwhile, Nora was eating pasta and making love with the magnificent simplicity I always envied. She was learning how to make cannoli, too, and cannelloni – and she was still all ablaze with love, no sign of cooling, yet, helping out at Tony’s uncle’s business every spare moment, in fact, apart from whatever else they did together. Sometimes she even sported a domestic air on her return to the Forest of Arden, a smudge of flour on her frock, a trace of tomato paste on her cheek. She was preoccupied with love and so was I, labouring with my lover over his erections, which were difficult to procure and arduous to maintain, not that I ever grumbled, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and, after all that was done with, we’d send out for a hamburger and attack his well-used library. We did it alphabetically, we started out at A.

He was so smitten by my youth and beauty he started to dry out, poor old thing, so he put away soda, soda, soda by the crateful and belched in an operatic manner, arias of wind. After we’d done a couple of hours on the author of the night, we’d relax with a soda. He’d read me a sonnet: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .’

Then up would come the thunder.

The wood near Athens covered an entire stage and was so thickly art-directed it came up all black in the rushes, couldn’t see a thing, so they sprayed it in parts with silver paint to lighten it up. The concept of this wood was scaled to the size of fairy folk, so all was twice as large as life. Larger. Daisies big as your head and white as spooks, foxgloves as tall as the tower of Pisa that chimed like bells if shook. Gnarled, fissured tree-trunks; sprays of enormous leaves – oak, ash, thorn, like parasols, or glider planes, or awnings. Bindweed in streamers and conkers, deposited at intervals in heaps on the ground. Yes, conkers. All spikes. And rolling around at random underfoot, or stuck on buds, or hanging in mid-air as if they’d just rolled off a wild rose or out of a cowslip, imitation dewdrops, that is, big
faux
pearls, suspended on threads. And clockwork birds, as well – thrushes, finches, sparrows, larks – that lifted up their wings and lowered their heads and sang out soprano, mezzo, contralto, joining in the fairy songs.

Because no wind blew of its own accord in this wood, they’d got in a wind machine. I’d have let old Irish loose after a 7-Up to do the job myself, but nobody asked for my advice. When the artificial wind stirred the leaves and flowers, they were stiff enough to clank.

What I missed most was illusion. That wood near Athens was too, too solid for me. Peregrine, who specialised in magic tricks, loved it just because it was so concrete. ‘You always pull a
live
rabbit out of a hat,’ he said. But there wasn’t the merest whiff about of the kind of magic that comes when the theatre darkens, the bottom of the curtain glows, the punters settle down, you take a deep breath . . . none of the person-to-person magic we put together with spit and glue and willpower. This wood, this entire dream, in fact, was custom-made and hand-built, it left nothing to the imagination.

And there they were, waiting in cages, snakes and hedgehogs, not to mention newts, worms, spiders, black beetles and snails, with snake handlers and hedgehog handlers ad lib at hand to keep them happy, waiting for their cue to scatter this way and that across the set as soon as the fairy chorus started up.

It was all too literal for me.

It took me donkey’s till I saw the point but saw the point I did, eventually, though not until the other day, when we were watching
The Dream
again in Notting Hill, that time, couple of batty old tarts with their eyes glued on their own ghosts.
Then
I understood the thing I’d never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow
does
come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you. But if you’ve put your past on celluloid, it keeps. You’ve stored it away, like jam, for winter. That kid came up and asked for our autographs. It made our day. I could have wished we’d done more pictures.

Genghis Khan spared no expense. Even the wee folk were real; the studio scoured the country for dwarfs. Soon, true or not, wild tales began to circulate – how one poor chap fell into the toilet and splashed around for half an hour before someone dashed in for a piss and fished him out of the bowl; another one got offered a highchair in the Brown Derby when he went out for a hamburger; and one of the girls in the wardrobe, as she tried on my Peaseblossom costume – pink bra, knicks and fright wig, ever so artistic – told me, giggling and winking, that this one she was measuring up looked to her to be about nine or ten years old, so she did her Mickey Mouse impression to put him at his ease, tempted him with bubble gum, slipped off his jacket for him. Goodness! He was shy. Then his shirt. ‘No! No!’ he cried in his little piping voice, but she insisted until off came his pants.

‘Lo and behold, this is a full-grown, thirty-year-old
man
we have here!’

She was so tickled by the memory she stuck a pin in my left buttock. In my guided tour of the literary alphabet, Irish had just introduced me to the letter B for Burns.

‘A man’s a man, for a’ that,’ I suggested and the wardrobe lady blushed and said that some men had more of ‘a’ that’ than others did and, on the whole, the boy-fairies cut something of a swathe among the ladies, except for Puck, who made them run a mile.

Puck looked like a little man but wasn’t; he was an aged child. Puck was all fingers, goose you as soon as look at you, unmentionable habits. You might find that Puck in your laundry basket, when you least expected it, curled up inhaling your soiled lingerie. Out at dinner, no matter how chic the venue, if a questing hand reached up from under the tablecloth, you knew it was Puck’s night out, too, and he was rummaging round the room at knee level, seeking what he could find. He’d started out years ago as a Hollywood toddler and still ploughed a rich furrow of cute kids, although now well-nigh geriatric, and we were stuck with Puck for box-office reasons, although he drilled holes in the walls of the ladies’ toilets and liked to take a peep and I don’t know what else. He was the spy on the set, too; would report back to Genghis Khan on the empties in poor Irish’s wastepaper basket, the used condoms in the back lot. He had a vile temper, he bit a policeman in the leg, one time, on account of an alleged traffic violation.