Based on a True Story, page 13
He lit a second Chesterfield from the butt in his hand, his fingertips so stained with nicotine they were darker than my own. “Hollywood needs villains, but in the world outside the cinema it is not so simple. Myself, I can understand the second sons. Adventure, romance, riches. Of course they were fools, but some made out well. The first sons, they stayed put, sleeping in their beds. The second sons were sinners, but that is different from villains. Qui dormit non peccat. He who sleeps—”
“Doesn’t sin.”
“Exactly, my dear Larry. So we should avoid feathering and tarring—“
“Tarring and feathering.”
“Yes, those who do. Desperation, foolishness, greed. But greed is not evil in itself. We all do damage.”
“You’re saying a story without a villain? The whole idea is Father Antonio breaks away from the conquistadors, or maybe defends them, or maybe he’s challenged by the Spaniards as an Indian-lover, or maybe—”
“We should leave room for... uncertainty, no? Clarity in logic, yes, but in art—”
“You know what, Fritz? You ought to know this. Wasn’t it Goering who said every time he hears the word culture he reaches for his gun...”
“Hanns Johst. Many people think Hermann Goering, but Goering was quoting Johst. Wenn ich ‘Kultur’ höre... entsichere ich meinen Browning. It was in Johst’s play ‘Schlageter.’ Terrible work. Not Goering, but a playwright.” He smiled. “Like us.”
“Well, every time you say art I break out in hives.”
His eyes narrowed. “Bees?”
“Skin eruptions. The sweats. Heebie-jeebies. Anxiety.”
“Angst.”
“Yeah, ohngst. It’s very simple. If Father Antonio—later Abraham, when he throws off the cassock—if this guy is going to be a hero, the audience needs to play him off a villain.”
“Maybe the times are the villain. You have no sympathy for the second sons?”
“I have no sympathy for lynch mobs, the Klan, human monsters. You have sympathy for Nazis?”
“Not sympathy. But I can understand. Hate is like love. It does not occur in a vacuum. Auri sacra fames. The accursed hunger for gold. But they are accursed first.”
“If that’s the case, there’s no good or bad, no heroes and villains, no right and wrong.”
Fritz sighed, expelling so much smoke it appeared he might be on fire, that somewhere in his mild depths was a kind of purifying blaze. “You are a Communist, Larry?”
“More or less.”
“So you have read Das Kapital?”
“Parts.”
“I have read it all, which is why I am not a Communist. Have you then looked into Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Of course not, why should you? But I will tell you something. Stalin, armed with Das Kapital, has now signed a pact with Hitler, armed with Mein Kampf. You know what the Romans would have said? Cave ab homine unius libre.”
“Beware the man... of one... freedom?”
“Beware the man of one book.”
“I don’t get it.”
“These people, these conquistadors, they are poor men, fools. And they do terrible damage. But they were themselves damaged. Would not our story of Father Antonio be stronger, really stronger, if we could show him not as a victim of these fools—fools with swords and guns, primitive guns but guns still, yes, and fools still—but as a hero within himself? He leaves the expedition not because they are evil, but because he must find for himself the good.”
“And we show that how, visually?”
Fritz rested his too-large head onto the back of my green leather couch. He seemed to be examining the stucco on the ceiling, seeking patterns perhaps. “You are a Communist because of what happened to your people. The Communists promise you this and that, paradise on earth, a world without racism, without perhaps race. And you say, ‘I will embrace that.’ But in so doing, you embrace another evil.”
“I’m sure there is a reason Comrade Stalin signed the pact.”
“Certainly. To buy time, perhaps. Build up his military, to take half of Poland, to take other lands, to better negotiate with London and Paris and Washington. Who knows? But in the end, it is evil in a pact with evil. So you are saying, ‘Fritzi, better the evil of a Stalin than the evil of Ku Klux Klan.’ But I say, ‘Larry, doing what is right is better than doing what seems right.’ Father Antonio must seek himself in the wilderness. He goes to the Apaches with his horses, these special horses, and lives with them, savages perhaps, but civilized enough not, unlike the Spaniards, to force their own beliefs on a stranger, and returns to the Judaism of his fathers, throwing off enforced Christianity, giving hope—horses being the physical form of hope—to these poor people so that they may fight off the—”
“Fritz, it’s a fucking movie.”
“Ars est celare artem.”
“Art is to... do something or other... to art.”
“To conceal! Art is to conceal art!”
“Fritz,” I said, picking up my suit jacket and heading for the door. “I’m going out for some smokes. I know when I come back you’re going to be snoozing. Then I’m going to make us some coffee. Then we’re going to write a fucking movie that people—in this case, Jews—are going to be able to identify with, that they’re going to cheer when they leave the movie house, that they’ll tell their friends about when they go to what-do-you-call-it, temple. It’ll be the pageant of the Jewish people. One: Here is Father Antonio, and through him we tell the story of the Jews in Spain, anti-semitism, and he comes to the New World, supplies the Indians with horses, special horses, and teaches them riding, training, breeding and what veterinary skills there were. Two: Fifty years later, a ship turns up in New York harbor, excuse me, Nieuw Amsterdam (which at least to you I don’t have to fucking explain), and it’s come from Brazil, which the Jews are fleeing, and no one will take them—echoes of today maybe, but that’s what we want, a strong story with a smell of the headlines—and on that ship is this young Jewish lawyer who stands up to Peter Stuyvesant and says the Jews are not leaving until an order comes from the Dutch East India Company, which has sponsored Nieuw Amsterdam, and when months later the reply comes back, it says, ‘Let these Hebrews stay,’ which of course is because the directors of the Dutch East India Company are Jews, and that’s how the Jews came to America. Three: Which we haven’t even thought about how to do, is one of the passengers on the ship, The St. Cathriene, is none other than the former Father Antonio, who eventually went down to Brazil to live as a Jew and now for the second time becomes a refugee, and he’s telling his story to the Jewish lawyer, who is his son, and to his grandson. So the final part of the story is the grandson grows up in Virginia, and he’s a revolutionary, and a horse breeder, and he supplies the fast horses for George Washington’s troops. That’s it, that’s our story, which we have to tell in a hundred minutes.”
“Larry, you can’t even summarize this tale, these tales, in one hundred minutes, much less visually. Do you know what your Alfred Hitchcock said? The length of a film is determined by the capacity of the human bladder. This is three separate films.”
“Movies.”
“Movies. To do justice to this, we need a wide, wide, wide canvas, or a triptych, three screens framed together. History is not a travelogue. It is made of human interaction. Go back to Mr. EZ Shelupsky and tell him we have three films.”
“I need one treatment for one film, Fritz. And if you can’t do it, then I’ll go back to EZ and get someone else.”
Maybe I expected Latin. What I got was the briefest of all gestures, the little man’s little hands, so delicate—it was hard to think they could ever have wielded anything more than a pen (that was a dueling scar on his cheek; Fritz had been a member of the Jewish dueling society at Heidelberg)—both hands turning out, palms raised. Was it resignation, refusal, helplessness? I couldn’t make it out, and I had stopped caring. I went out down the flagstone path past the pool. The beautiful young Hallroom Boys were gone. It was coolish, overcast, about to rain. On the way back the skies opened up. I used that day’s Examiner as an umbrella. It soaked up the downpour so that when I got back only the large black headlines were legible: Hitler had invaded Poland.
VIII
Three weeks later when a gray stallion called Broken Arrow went off at forty-to-one, I had $6,000 on him to win. EZ nearly kissed me when it happened. The jinx was broken. He had a winner. I don’t think he himself had any money on the horse, and I know he didn’t know it was not his horse, because Ozzie Hirsch would not have told him: Ozzie’s job was to bring in winners, not to prevent a champion being swapped for a nag. Probably Hirsch had something on the horse, but it could not have been much. The insiders were always watching to see when a trainer, directly or not, put money down on a horse—his mount or someone else’s. When that happened everyone in the business eventually got word, the bucks piled on and the odds dropped hard. Allen Sloane was in a better position: not only could he lay money down through his organization in Los Angeles, but he was connected to other bookmakers around the country. Even a huge amount could be artfully placed, with a good part of it laid off on other horses to prop up the odds. God only knows how much he made. A million at least, this at a time when you could build a nice mansion in Beverly Hills for $20,000, and a 1939 Cadillac coupe could be had for $1,700. With the money I made—the IRS barely existed then—I could afford both: it was almost a quarter of a million bucks. I was set.
And scared. That morning I had been a Negro screenwriter running out of time on a six-week contract. I was behind in my rent at the Garden of Allah. My car needed a valve job. I hadn’t bought a new suit in a year. Suddenly I was a player.
“You bet on my horse,” EZ said to me. “Larry, you showed faith. You bet on EZ Shelupsky.” The man was glowing. “That Ozzie Hirsch, I told you he was a pro. Horses, they’re like the movie business—you got to believe in the impossible. Here is a nag that was a born follower, and now he’s a leader. How much you make?”
“I should have bet more,” I said. “I do believe in you, EZ.”
“I should have believed in you, Larry. You got something in your brain that translates to success. A spark. A whole fire. I’m proud of you like you’re my son. You know what?”
“What, EZ?”
“I’m going to make you a partner.”
“A partner?”
“Half and half. We’re going to make Jewish movies. I’m going to look over your treatment, and if it’s got anything to it I’m going to take you in fifty-fifty.”
“Fifty-fifty?”
“Straight up,” he said. “Half the investment, half the profits. I got to go to the winner’s circle now. They’re decorating flowers on my horse. Forty to one. They didn’t believe. But I believed. You believed. This photo I’m going to make sure is going to be on the front page of every paper in Los Angeles. EZ Shelupsky’s Broken Arrow a winner, comes from nowhere and wins bigger than all the horses of producers of white movies combined. You like champagne? Go ahead, drown your happiness in it. Waiter!”
IX
That afternoon when I was to meet Fritz at the bungalow—I’d given him a key—I planned to say nothing about the win. Part of it was shame. Here was a guy making a hundred a week, practically starvation wages in this business, and I was holding onto a fortune. But mainly it was caution: In the back of my mind I was afraid he might hit me up for a loan. I knew he sent money to people in Berlin—at our first meeting he’d questioned me on the “political reliability” of Western Union—though he never talked about them. If Fritz were to ask for money I’d be embarrassed to turn him down. But I would have had to. As—if they’d known about my good fortune—I would have had to turn down a whole list of others who would have come knocking at my door, including my comrades in the Party. I’d never been good with money, but then again I’d never really had any. Now I did.
It took me less time to turn into a capitalist than to turn off Sunset Boulevard onto Havenhurst looking for a place to park. I knew I would find Fritzi sleeping on the sofa. Somehow I didn’t feel like making him coffee. It wasn’t that I was suddenly better than Fritz. It was that it could hardly matter: the writing team of Bellringer and von Blum had accomplished precious little. In a matter of days I had to turn in a treatment—not a script but merely a three-page outline—and even that was nowhere in sight. What was in sight I recognized immediately as I parked. I doubt there were two cars like it in Los Angeles County, maybe in the whole state.
“Hello, Larry,” Allen Sloane said to me from the green leather sofa. “You do well at the track?”
“Not bad,” I said.
“I was just talking to your writing partner here. Very educated gentleman.”
Fritz stepped out of the kitchenette with a highball in his hand, a smile on his face, and a serious buzz on. Behind the thick round lenses his eyes were shiny as the bottoms of shot glasses. “You have such an interesting friend, Larry. We have much in common.”
“He’s a refugee,” Sloane said. “They want to make me one. Doesn’t get more in-common than that.”
“Hodie mihi, cras tibi,” Fritz said brightly, then helpfully translated—into German. “Heute mir, morgen dir.”
Just what I needed: he was really drunk. Any lingering hope that we might grind out a quick treatment went, as EZ might say, foof. Considering that I had joined the ranks of the rich only hours before, the threat of unemployment remained a potent presence. I was disappointed in myself, angry at Fritz, and afraid.
“Know what that means?” Sloane asked. “I bet you do. A Harvard man like you.”
“Tell me.”
“What’s to me today,” Sloane said, “tomorrow to you. Fritz taught me. What do you think of that?”
“At’s whay otay emay odaytay, omorrowtay otay ouyay,” Fritz said.
Hindi? Serbo-Croatian? “What?”
“Larry, this little guy, he speaks what, four, five languages—German, English, French, Spanish, Latin, what else, Fritz?”
“Good German.”
“I said that one.”
“But good German. The best.” Fritz smiled broadly. “Better than Hitler. Better than Goering. Better than Goebbels, no question.”
“There was another,” Sloane said.
Fritz thought a moment, a drunk looking down into his treasure chest, unsure what it contained. “Greek?”
“Ancient Greek,” Sloane said. “That, too.”
“And...” Fritz said. “And...”
“Larry. The guy speaks languages. He’s got a feel.”
“Esperanto,” Fritz said finally, having exhausted his search. “Es-per-an-to.”
“I never even heard of that one,” Sloane said. “The guy speaks languages nobody heard of.”
Fritz stretched his thick little body out on the couch, his small feet like the dots in exclamation marks. Still smiling blissfully, he dozed off. Then, abruptly, his eyelids flew open behind the thick lenses. “Esperantoway isway ethay anguagelay ofway opehay.” His eyes closed again. He was out.
“You got that?”
“Fritzi and I are supposed to be working,” I said. “We’re on deadline.”
“He’ll be okay. Give him an hour. ‘Esperanto is the language of hope.’ Little guy picked up Pig Latin in otway akesshay ofway away amb’slay ailtay. What do you say to that? If we ever get into a war with Hitler this guy—guys like this—I want them on my side.”
It was coming back to me, like roller skating or checkers. “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail?”
“See that?” Sloane said. “What better proves I’m as much an American as anyone? You grew up with Pig Latin in New York, I grew up with it in Cleveland. Aside from this being very inconvenient, the feds trying to deport me, it happens not to be right. I mean, say it happened to someone else, I’d still think so. It’s just wrong. I’m not a Russky or a Canuck. I’m a Yank.”
“Probably a rich one, after today.”
“Nah,” Sloane said. “I was rich before. What’s rich? You got some money in your pocket? In the bank? It’s how you feel. I’ve known hobos feel richer than Rockefeller, and probably there are Rockefellers—minor, outlying ones maybe—feel poor next to the big ones. I guess you made out okay.”
“Six grand to win.”
Sloane whistled appreciatively.
“I had to borrow the money from all over. My parents. Imagine that. Twenty-nine years old and I had to borrow from my folks.”
“You can certainly afford to pay them back.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “With interest.”
“Now all you got to do is pay me back.”
Suddenly the room felt drafty, even cold. The windows were wide open. It was overcast outside, not looking like rain, but the sun was veiled behind a peculiar thick, blue fog. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was the beginning of the smog that would be associated with L.A. for decades, made worse when manufacturing and oil refining grew almost geometrically to satisfy the needs of a country at war. Things would change: women and Negroes would join the work force in factories, the movie business would gear up for war and then grow like crazy afterward until it bumped into television. All those new workers would be driving cars. Freeways would be built. Houses would sprout in endless patches of subdivision around the exit ramps, then supermarkets and churches and schools. More people, more cars, more smog. But for now, there was only an indefinite chill as the sun was obscured by an unfamiliar blanket of blue. I slid shut the patio doors and the two casements at the side of the room. Now I could see the haze inside. Both my guests had been smoking heavily. Blue outside, blue within. “Payback time?”
