Boswell (12 page)

I went into the auditorium and sat down. (I sit toward the front. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I want to see everything.
Everything!)
The place was filling up rapidly. I was breathing heavily. At last it was sinking in that I wasn’t safe. But then the house darkened and Pathé News came on. It was safe, after all, I thought. The newsreel was two weeks old; I had seen it ten days before in a town in Nebraska. That’s right, drown me, ye backwaters!

Blissfully I watched for the second time some floods in the Ohio Valley. It was cute the way the narrator described it. (When no one is killed in a disaster the narrator is cute, though he gets serious when there’s a lot of property damage.) I saw a demonstration in Frankfurt, Germany, of a new kind of roller skate. The shoe part of the skate was about two feet off the ground. The wheels were attached by powerful springs to the shoes and every time the skater made a stride he’d bounce up high in the air. Then some girls tried it and of course they couldn’t do it very well and they fell down and you could see their underwear. Then there was a Press Club luncheon in Washington for President Truman. (Some people behind me applauded. A bad sign—in the real small town, in Nebraska, there had been boos.) A reporter asked the President about his plans for November and Truman smiled and was coy. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” he said and everybody laughed. (I could find out.
I
could.)

There was a Bugs Bunny at which I laughed contentedly. (The only time I am really at ease in a movie is during the cartoon. There
is
no Bugs Bunny. There
is
no Mickey Mouse.) And then, the worst time for me, the coming attractions, all those stars to look at. I stuck it out, and actually it didn’t go too badly. Science fiction and second-rate westerns and I hadn’t heard of many of the actors.

Then, at last, the picture came on.

It was just as grand as I remembered. It’s about three old bachelors who own different department stores and have to live together in the same Manhattan apartment because each distrusts the other. It shows how their lives are changed when Sabu, the Elephant Boy, comes to live with them. Sabu is an orphan whose parents have been eaten by tigers back in his native India and Edward Arnold hears about it and brings him to the States for Christmas. He’s got it worked out that this will help his sales figures, and Eugene Pallette and S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell have to go along with him because if they don’t they think it will hurt
their
sales figures. Of course none of them is really thinking about Sabu, and everything is so strange and new for him that he gets a little nervous and has to run off from time to time to the Bronx Zoo and climb in with the elephants and talk it over. But if it gets out that Sabu isn’t happy it will hurt
everybody’s
sales figures, so the three old men make up amongst themselves that they’ve got to be better to Sabu. Well, it’s a wonderful movie. Edward Arnold was never suaver, Eugene Pallette was never fatter, nor his voice more husky. They play curmudgeons, even S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell. The three of them are very shrewd, very stuffy—all anybody could want in a father.

After a while, though, although they don’t dare let the others see it, they really begin to like Sabu for himself, and then they start to outbid each other for his affection. They know he likes animals and there’s a scene where Edward Arnold sneaks out during the night and brings back a baby elephant for Sabu. When Eugene Pallette sees it the next morning all he can say is “Hmph, you call that an elephant?” and that night he goes out and brings back a bigger one. S. G. “Cuddles” gets it all mixed up and brings Sabu a beautiful pair of matched tigers. This bothers Sabu because of what tigers have done to his parents, but he doesn’t let on. As a matter of fact he gradually begins to forgive the tigers. Listen, why not? These old men can’t do enough for him. I’ve never seen anything like it. They turn on the love. They pour it all over him. What don’t they give that nut-brown orphan! Pajamas, robes, electric trains, radios! They have three different department stores to choose from! And at night Sackell sings Rumanian folk songs to him and Edward Arnold recites poetry. Even Eugene Pallette comes in and croaks out something at bedtime. They tuck him in all night long.

It’s marvelous—all those people breaking their necks for him, the economy of the City of New York contingent on Sabu’s happiness—all those daddies. He even has a kind of kid sister in Margaret O’Brien, who lives next door and comes in mornings to teach Sabu manners and how to be a good American. Actually, the only person not taken with Sabu is Margaret O’Brien’s cousin (and this I resented, seeing it as a deflection from the real meaning of the picture), played by Dickie Dobber. This was a snotty kid, a
real
curmudgeon. That sort of thing doesn’t look good on a child and I was glad when Sabu’s elephants turned on him.

Then comes the best part of all: the scene where they give Sabu the marvelous birthday party on the day he’s legally adopted by the three magnates and becomes an American citizen. This is where José Iturbi (playing himself) is one of the entertainers and Carmen Miranda (playing Margaret O’Brien’s maid, but really more like Sabu’s aunt than hired help) tries to get him to play some snappy rumba. Everyone is shocked, of course, because José Iturbi is an irascible Latin genius and believes only in serious music, but in the middle of the concerto that he’s composed for Sabu’s birthday he gives a sly wink and goes into a jazzy riff that leads into the rumba. Dickie Dobber unbends and nods at Carmen Miranda as if to say, “Hey, José Iturbi’s all right!” but of course Carmen Miranda knew it all along. (After all, José Iturbi really
is
a Latin. Like Carmen Miranda herself.)

Well, it was marvelous, and pretty soon I had forgotten it was really Edward Arnold up there, and Eugene Pallette, and, oddly, even José Iturbi, but just then—just when Edward Arnold is starting to tap his foot to José Iturbi’s music and the elephants are beginning to sway their trunks—the film snapped. You could actually hear it tear and go around flap-flap on the reel. Everybody groaned.

In the darkness, before the lights came on, I heard a voice next to me.

“Damn it, it’s the best scene in this turkey. You know old Kuperman, what a stickler he is for realism? He had the property man use VO in Eugene’s glass. Well, you saw it yourself. When the barman pours Edward’s drinks it’s from the bottle to his left. Eugene’s shots come out of the one next to it.”

“You’re kidding,” someone on the other side said.

“You know old Kuperman.”

“Was Pallette really loaded?”

“Loaded? There were a dozen and a half takes, Elizabeth.”

I knew. Even before the lights came on, I knew. It was Sabu, the Elephant Boy! It was Elizabeth Languor, the film soprano!

A man runs and runs. He does his push-ups, lifts his weights, builds his body, wrestles his wrestlers, pins, is pinned. It’s the old one-two. The old give-and-take. He gives and gives; they take and take. It’s not like in the old days when there were guarantees. That wop Aeneas had a belt, a spear. As long as he
wore the one and threw the other they couldn’t touch him. Even the gods couldn’t touch him. Me they can touch. I do my best. I go on a bus thirty-five miles out of my way to a town nobody ever heard of, to a “Chilanthica,” a place to raise kids, where it’s fun to be a citizen, where when you vote you come away feeling clean all over. I pick a picture nine years old—and look what happens.

Once I was waiting to buy rolls in a bakery when a man rushed in carrying a package. He was
mad.
“See here,” he screams, shoving this package onto the counter, opening it as one might open a newspaper full of garbage. “See here, damn it,” he yells at the old lady who owns the bakery. “I warned you about the nuts. My wife is a sick woman she can’t eat nuts it gives her gas. And what do I see? Nuts!
Nuts!
I particularly didn’t want nuts!” That’s right. I know how he feels. You get what you don’t ask for.

When the lights came up I glanced to my left. Not despondently to see if I was right, or even hopefully to see if I was wrong, but—here’s the sickness, you see; here’s me all over—
instinctively,
to see what they were wearing. Sabu had on white trousers, a rope belt, a tailored black shirt. Wound round his head was a turban with a glittering black jewel in the center. I was surprised to see that he wore glasses. My first thought was of this journal. “Sabu, the Elephant Boy and Hollywood star, has to wear glasses when he goes to the pictures.” I glanced hastily at Elizabeth Languor. Gold brocade slacks, a gold belt, a soft pale sweater over a tight black T-shirt. There was a scarf around her neck. Hmm, I thought, a scarf, maybe to protect that throat. They caught me staring at them—did they think they had been recognized? Did they expect me to ask for an autograph?—and I turned away.

What should I do? Leave? Change my seat? Ignore it?

I couldn’t leave. The picture had been ruined for me, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t change my seat. Indeed, had they changed theirs I would have followed. Ignore them? Hah!

Instantly, you see, I was off the wagon. I tried to rationalize. You’ve never done an elephant boy before, I told myself, conscious that I had used Herlitz’ word. After all, it’s not as if you went looking for it. It fell in your lap. My lap, indeed. The gods have laps, not men.

Then my struggle was over. I leaned toward Sabu and listened.

“Have you ever done anything else with Kuperman?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not yet. Irv Teller thinks I’m just right for the Arab who goes over to the Jewish side in
Storm in the Desert.
Koop starts shooting it in the fall, but I’m a little reluctant.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve never worked with camels,” he said.

Elizabeth and I laughed. Sabu looked at me severely.

The lights went out again. “Vun-two, vun-two,” S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell said. “Loook, loook at ze elements, vat zey do ze roomboom.”

“Iss prununce
chroo
mba,” Carmen Miranda said, snapping her fingers and grabbing his hips.

“Hmph,” Eugene Pallette growled huskily, something funny happening to his eyes, “you call
that
shaking? I’ll show you shaking.” He began moving his hips violently and caught little Dickie Dobber full in the chest, jamming him helplessly between the two elephants.

“That’s not in the script,” Sabu said to Elizabeth Languor. “He did that on his own.”

Real VO, I thought. Real Eugene Pallette drinking real VO.

The camera moved in jerkily to expose Dickie Dobber’s white, panic-struck face. The elephants rumbaed menacingly. Only Sabu could call them off.

“Koop left this in?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, isn’t it marvelous?”

When everything was calm, Edward Arnold went up to Eugene Pallette and pulled his sleeve. “Better stay away from the bar,” Edward Arnold whispered. He said “bah.”

“He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” Elizabeth Languor said.

“He certainly is,” Sabu said.

“I was with him in
Latin Holiday,”
Elizabeth said.

Was that you, I wondered to myself. I thought it was Jane Powell.

“Honestly,” Elizabeth said, “he’s so paternal and dignified. He had little Jane Powell thinking he really
was
her father.”

That’s right, I thought, you were the one who went to school in Switzerland, the daughter of the big industrialist.

Eugene Pallette looked up at Edward Arnold. “What bar?” he asked. He was panting heavily.

“By the wall,” Edward Arnold hissed.

“Hmph,” Eugene Pallette rasped, “you call
that
a wall?”

Sabu put his arm around Elizabeth Languor’s shoulder. “‘And let there be no moaning at the bar when I put out to sea,’” he whispered. He said “see.”

I squirmed in my seat; I bit my lips; I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I had never been happier. There he was—Sabu, fourteen feet tall up there on the screen. A Star. Only not a star up
there
—up there only Rama, triply adopted son of department store magnates, Down here, beside me. I could smell elephant on him. Fourteen feet tall down here. It was a wonder he could even fit into the seat. And Elizabeth Languor thrown in! Could there be greater happiness in this world? I forgot my guilt and uneasiness. What guilt, what uneasiness?

Suddenly it wasn’t enough just to sit there—I had to impress them in some way. But if I spoke they would change their seats. They would call the usher, and I might be arrested. The law is made to protect the great. That’s civics—the folks in Chilanthica would know about that. I could explain to them who I was. “Perhaps you’ve seen me wrestle, Sabu and Elizabeth. On television. On the TV. Perhaps you saw me break the Mad Magruder’s ass.” I could lower my voice. I could wink, blow my fingernails; “it’s all
fix
ed!” I would say precisely. Then later, over a tall drink, I would tell them the secrets of my trade, and in a little while, after confidence had been developed, I would pounce. “Is
Holl
ywood
f
fixsed?” I would say. “Is
Hollywood fixseď?”

Idiot! You think they don’t have jails in Chilanthica? (I saw it, a single jail, like the town’s single movie. The “pokey,” they would call it.)

I tried to control myself, to concentrate on
Plenty of Daddies,
but I couldn’t even understand it any more. The temptation was simply to turn in my seat and stare at them. Every so often that’s just what I did. I would turn my head an inch and glance at them out of the corner of my eyes. I was sure they noticed it. I was sure, in fact, that while they pretended to watch the picture they were staring at me in the same way, and that if I had nerve enough I could say just the right thing to engage them. The chat over a drink wasn’t such a wild notion after all. I wasn’t an idiot; I am an interesting human being. Surely they could respond to
that.
That was the pitch, of course, but how would I make it?

Nothing happened. The movie was almost over, and soon the lights would go up and we would all shuffle out to our cars, our houses, our buses, our hotel rooms. Surely it was too much to expect that Sabu and Elizabeth would go across the street to the ice cream parlor.