Based on a True Story, page 15
Shortly after our collaboration, Fritz was invited to Washington to work for a part of the government that would become the Office of Strategic Services—after the war, it was renamed the CIA—and when war broke out he joined Army Intelligence where eventually he was on the prosecution team during the Nuremberg Trials. After the war I heard he resumed his work in Washington, or elsewhere. I know he never set foot again in Hollywood. His wife and children never made it out of Europe.
The war changed everything.
Nora Bright left EZ Shelupsky after his studio burned down, but that was to be expected. What wasn’t was that EZ went to the World’s Fair in New York and discovered something called television. Determined not to make the same mistake he had made when talkies came in, he threw himself into the new medium, investing heavily in local stations in California and then setting up a production company to create variety shows, including one in 1956 that starred Nat King Cole—the first show hosted by a Negro with white guest artists. Southern stations turned their backs, but the show was a success with viewers, and EZ eventually produced other shows with black performers. Whether it was his background in race movies or simply because he got along with colored entertainers, he became one of the major players in early television—if there was a Negro in it, EZ had a piece. On and off, I worked for him as a writer and then as a producer into the ’60s, when he slowed down to spend more time with his beloved ponies. His horses won the Belmont and the Preakness, but he never had a mount in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby. He was, however, an honorary Kentucky Colonel, which reflected his rank in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war. “I had nothing better to do,” he liked to say, “because Hollywood Park was closed until V-J Day.” He made dozens of films for the army, including all the training films for Negro soldiers, which often featured his old colored stars from Racetrack. A 4F, I was exempt from the draft, and as a civilian wrote most of those scripts. After the war EZ liked to be addressed as “colonel,” and as he grew older became one of those Hollywood legends whose life story was told and retold as though he had lived with the fossilized saber-tooth tigers in the La Brea Tar Pits off Wilshire Boulevard.
Whenever I saw him he kidded me about the Jewish movie, or asked with a straight face whether I was ready to settle down with a wife and start a family and give up being a queer, but only that once did he mention the switched horse. I avoided bringing it up, not least because I knew that he knew that I knew Allen Sloane had been behind it.
After the war, Sloane remained in London where he did quite well. He had a Thames-view suite at the Savoy, a Bentley and chauffeur—“I don’t like driving on the wrong side”—and a flourishing business directing what would become England’s largest bookmaking operation.
“Funny how things work out,” he told me at his hotel, where the waiter at the American Bar opened a bottle of house champagne for us without a word being spoken. “Here it’s legal.” He placed his large hand on mine, the violet of his cuff peaking out from a bespoke sleeve. As ever, he was dressed beautifully, now in the British fashion, his suit a symphony of thin gray-and-purple stripes on black, his tie a pale silver. As before, he smoked with an unaffected elegance that I envied. “And it’s all because of you.”
“One hand washes the other,” I said. “You bet on me.”
“And you came through.”
It hadn’t been much. I made some calls, eventually reaching an old roommate at Harvard who worked for the Department of Justice. He asked me to tell him everything I knew about Allen Sloane, and then he made some calls. Within a week, Sloane was on his way to England on a British laissez-passer. The British were short of ships and planes and tanks and ammunition, but what they were most short of was pilots.
“I get here, they say, ‘How are you on night flights? Basic instruments, that sort of thing?’ I say, ‘I still own a plane in California. I been flying nights ten years.’ Right then and there they make me an instructor in the RAF training program at Usworth—that’s way the hell up near Newcastle—with the rank of captain. They had to give me a rank because otherwise in the way things go here nobody would pay attention, and then one day they say, ‘Would you mind terribly much taking command of a squadron of Hurricanes since you’ve been teaching how to fly them?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ Good thing, too, because it was just in time for what they call the Battle of Britain. When that was over we started escorting bombers, Lancasters and Blenheims, over Germany, and I was Major Allen Sloane, RAF—how’s about that?—and everyone was saluting me, and I became what they call an ace. And then the war is over and they pin some fruit salad on me and tell me thank you very much, now you can go home.”
He poured some champagne for me, picked up his glass and clinked mine. “Chin-chin,” he said, his eyes narrowing in the semi-dark of the hotel bar. He sighed. “So I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t have a home. I’m not an American citizen. I’m a man without a country.’” He smiled. “So somebody calls somebody, just like you did, and then somebody invites me to the Home Office, and documents are prepared, and in just the time it takes to place a bet on a horse I become a British subject, swearing loyalty to the king, and a few people I know from the RAF come by and say, ‘Allen, old chum, is there anything you’d like to do now you’ve no Jerries to shoot down?’ So I told them what my old profession was, and they said, ‘Jolly good, we’ll back you. Least we can do and all that.’ And they did, and here I am.”
There were two questions on my mind. Sloane was beaming. I went for the first. “EZ’s lady, the one you were fucking better than him.”
He smiled. “Left me when I joined the RAF.”
“She wasn’t much of a lady then,” I said.
“You’re right about that.” He turned, facing me directly. “I was a little hard on you, back in L.A.”
“Hard on me?”
“Calling you a queer.”
“Well, it’s accurate,” I said. “At least you didn’t call me a nigger.”
“That would have been just as bad,” he said. “Considering.”
“Considering?”
“You really don’t know? EZ never said?”
“I never mentioned you.”
Sloane stood, took off his bespoke jacket, folded it neatly on the maroon leather banquette so that its bright magenta lining shone in the dim room, then sat back down again. A tiny ridge of moisture appeared on his brow. “That was no lady,” he said. “That was...”
The waiter appeared, poured out more champagne, then disappeared.
“That was...?”
“A guy.”
It took a moment. I picked up my champagne—really good champagne, but I would have been happy for kerosene—and drained the glass. “You’re telling me...”
“It was just something that happened. I never knew I was like that, like you, and it’s not something that happens a lot now. I mean, I like ladies, but in that particular case I happened to fall in love with a... guy. A very feminine guy. A colored guy, actually. Not very colored, much lighter than you. Almost lighter than me. When we met I thought he was a woman. What did I know? From the outside you couldn’t tell.”
“This guy was EZ’s lady? You’re telling me that EZ is queer?”
“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “He was married to a lez, and he never had kids, but it could be he was in my situation. Suddenly he met someone—this was a beautiful person, physically, and kind of mysterious—and maybe the same thing happened to him that happened to me. Hey, I didn’t know I was going to be an RAF officer, or an Englishman—it just happened. Things happen.” He smiled. “Well, Larry, you made it happen, and for that I’ll always be grateful.”
“But I didn’t make you...”
“A queer?”
“A queer.”
“But I’m not, not really. Hey, sometimes it happens, but it’s more like I’m everything. To tell you the truth, remember that horse we switched?”
“Of course.”
“I would’ve fucked him, too. That was one beautiful horse. A champion. You had to love that horse. I loved him the first minute I saw him, and he was wild, not even saddle-broke. I’m not even embarrassed to say this. I knew he could run, but it was more than that. I loved him. So what does that make me, queer for animals? Okay, then I’m queer for animals. I also like good clothes and nice cars. I guess I’m a mental case, right?”
“No more than any of us,” I said, thinking of EZ Shelupsky with a colored queer, in love with a colored queer, and then of Allen Sloane stealing him away. Well, I thought, there’s a story that will never be a movie. “And the horse?”
“What about him?”
“What happened to the horse?”
“He stayed with EZ. I mean, you can’t swap a horse back.”
“So you got EZ’s... lady, and he got...”
“My horse,” Sloane said. “I never looked at it like that. If you do, maybe EZ got the better deal. All I got was a broken heart. I should have kept the horse.”
“Then you wouldn’t have ended up here.”
“Yeah, I would’ve ended up in Panama. I guess we both came out of it okay, EZ Shelupsky and me. But I’ll tell you, that was one hell of a horse. A guy in New Mexico calls me, says he has a horse—a guy I’d been doing business with. Frankly this is not the first time I switched a horse. Of course, with lip-tattooing you can’t do it anymore, not here either, not even in Ireland, though it still happens in France. So I go out to look and... this is some horse. Turns out to be one of those wild horses the Indians had, but in looks, in everything horse, this was like a throwback to the Spanish horses, a pure small thoroughbred. Nobody could tell it wasn’t a thoroughbred. It must have been descended from those horses the Spanish brought over. What they call the Izquierda Line.”
I turned away. Someone was playing a piano in the far corner, and I tried to concentrate on listening to the notes. It was Over the Rainbow, a jazzed up version that would not have been recognizable when the movie came out in 1939, but now seemed right. It was as if I were hearing it for the first time, and hearing it I was back for a moment when Allen and Fritz and EZ had all crowded together into my young life. When I looked back, Allen was pulling on his jacket.
“Really good to see you again, Larry,” he said. “Anything I can ever do for you, you let me know. You know what Fritz used to say?”
“No, what?”
“Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.”
“The times change...”
“The times are changed, and we are changed in them. One hell of a smart guy, Fritz.”
“Yes,” I said. “You hear from him?”
“Fritz? Nah, nobody hears from him. He’s not a regular person. I don’t have to tell you. You know what else he said?”
“Tell me.”
“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.”
“Anything said in Latin...”
Sloane waved to the waiter, then took my hand in his, squeezing it in farewell. “Anything said in Latin,” he said, “sounds profound.” He winked, and—like the confident clarity of my own youthful promise—was gone.
THE DZANC BOOKS EBOOK CLUB
Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.
Hesh Kestin, Based on a True Story
