The Best Revenge (14 page)

*

You want to know what that desire tastes like, listen in. My secretary, Charlotte, has Walzer's agent Bertha Goodman on the line.

“Hello, Bertha, Ben Riller here.”

I haven't said anything of substance yet, but I'd bet Bertha's blood pressure is fluttering her heart valves. Why is he calling? Does he like the Walzer play?

“Hello, Ben. To what do I owe this?”

She has to be thinking: If he didn't like it, he wouldn't call me, he'd just send it back.

“I've read the Walzer play.”

What have I said? Nothing. I haven't committed. I can hear Bertha's breathing on the phone.

“I like it,” I say.

The first whiff of success. She's torn between wanting to hear the rest and quivering to call the author and tell him, “Riller likes your play!” Take it from me, the reason she's so anxious to pass on the news is that the electricity she is now receiving becomes voltage she will send straight into the author's heart. Walzer's chest will vibrate like one big tuning fork. My opinion has become transformed into her power. The author was wise enough to seek protection under her wing. Now, with a few words, she has the possibility of changing his life forever.

The first hint that a play
may
get done produces a reaction equivalent to hearing the first three numbers of a six-number lotto jackpot and you've got those three numbers! Dummy, consider the odds of getting the other three! “Riller likes your play,” and they all become instant believers: This one will go all the way.

“I'm glad you like it,” Bertha Goodman says, pretending studied calm.

“Before I commit,” I say, and in the interval before my next words are spoken, Bertha is sliding down an incline toward a precipice as in a dream gone haywire. It isn't definite. “Before I commit, I'd like to meet Walzer, see what he's like.”

Bertha swallows air as if she's been underwater for too long. “Of course,” she says.

I name a time. She says Walzer will be there. Conversation over. For Bertha Goodman and Gordon Walzer a new life begins.

For a minute I put my feet up on the desk. I've produced seventeen plays and it's still a thrill when the engine starts. Opening night is a long way off. Six hundred gowns accompanied by six hundred tuxedos will be attending your hanging or beatification, and you won't know which until long after midnight when your press agent's spies read the next morning's reviews to him on the telephone. I love it.

*

I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself having a conversation with God about Meryl Streep. Dear God, I was saying, I'm supposed to be decisive. If I'd said yes to her right then in my office, I wouldn't have had to settle later for an actress who with her whole body couldn't convey what Streep can infuse in an audience by the lifting of one part of her upper lip. With Streep,
Other People
would have run two years. If it had run two years, I'd be beholden to You for my good luck and wouldn't be looking for miracles in the wrong places. I'd have been up to my neck in happiness by this time, getting out a second road show, lining up the rest of the foreign productions, I wouldn't have had time to get involved in
The Best Revenge
—God, are you listening? Show business is a hill of ice, and when you're on top all you see is the little figures climbing up toward you with pickaxes. From now on I promise to look up, not down. Believe me, I'll recognize You.

Maybe I never thanked You enough for giving me fourteen out of seventeen hits. Why are You slamming me with everything in Your arsenal? Is it because I didn't say yes fast enough to Meryl Streep before her picture hit big? How about we do the Meryl Streep interview over again and this time I'll make the right decision as soon as she's in the door? I'm sure You've wanted to do some things over again, how about giving me this one chance?

All right, if You feel You can't set a precedent, how about encouraging me to go forward by, say, letting
The Best Revenge
be a hit. Commercial comedies don't need Your help. Here's a chance for You to invest in what I'm sure You believe in, real quality. What do You say? I've never asked You personally for anything before, be a sport, help me this once. Get me off the hook and I'll put on a revival of Eliot's
Murder in the Cathedral
or, if You prefer, a festival that will make Oberammergau look like amateur night in the sticks. Is it a deal?

I was sitting up in bed, in the dark, Jane fast asleep, waiting for a response, when I heard Louie's voice.
Save your breath,
he said.
It's the Devil who negotiates. God never made a deal with nobody.

*

The first time Ezra ever asked to read a play was when I decided to do
The Best Revenge.
“Stick to law journals,” I told him. “You don't know fuck about theater.”

“I want to read it for libel.”

“It's fiction. It's made up. Don't be a pain in the ass.”

That's how Ezra gets his way. You give in to get rid of the nuisance, a lawyer's trick.

Two days later he barged in, plunked
The Best Revenge
down on my desk as if it was a stack of subpoenas, and said, “Ben, find another play. There are a million of them out there.”

“Ezra,” I said, “why don't you divorce Sarah, there're a million better-looking women out there.”

“You twist logic like a corkscrew.”

I went around to Ezra's side of the desk close enough for him to feel my breath. I said, “I want to do
The Best Revenge
as much as a man wants to do a particular woman he's in love with, even you can understand that. I'm off and running. Don't get in my way this time.”

“What do you mean ‘this time'?”

“The other time was long ago. I wrote a play, remember?”

“Oh, that.”

“You kept me from showing it to Louie.”

“You kept it from him, Ben. Not me. Taking on Walzer's play for the wrong reason—or even the right reason—doesn't make it a commercial play. Jumping into something this offbeat isn't like you.”

“Bullshit, it's more like me than anything I've ever done.”

“The others smacked of success the minute you got your hands on them. This one's fancy. Fancy means upscale. Upscale means problems. All I'm saying is find another play.”

“Who's going to do
The Best Revenge
if I don't?”

“Now that is super-idiotic. Social responsibility is something you're supposed to grow out of. Besides, what makes you think you're the only theater maven in New York? If the play's good, someone will do it fine. Maybe someone who is not dependent on other people's money. If it's not done on Broadway, then maybe it'll get done off Broadway, or off off Broadway, or in Minneapolis, and you won't get hurt.”

“I'm not a coward, Ezra.”

“Neither am I. If I were, I wouldn't have taken you on as a client when Duckworth told you to take your business elsewhere.”

“They were charging me for their research time. Why should I pay them for what they don't know? Besides, I liked the idea of hiring you, Ezra.”

“Sure, it keeps all the actors, directors, and investors who want me to sue you from hiring me.”

“Nobody's suing me.”

“I'm not talking today. I'm trying to save your ass tomorrow. I'm talking as a friend, not as a lawyer.”

“Ezra, be reasonable for a moment. If another producer does
The Best Revenge
in Siberia, will the first-string critics come?”

“If you did it, they'd come.”

“Off Broadway is not my scene.”

“But the risk would be so much less!” Ezra said, losing control of his voice.

“Name one,” I said.

“One what?”

“One goddamn functioning producer with a brain who can put on a verse drama by a new playwright and make a hit of it.”

Ezra didn't say a thing.

“You can't name one,” I said, “because there aren't any.”

“That's not your responsibility,” he said.

“What's your responsibility, Ezra?”

“You,” he said.

“That's a great curtain line, Ezra.” As I sometimes do with actresses, I smiled the kind of smile that is supposed to cure anything, and held up my middle finger as I went out the door, leaving Ezra in my office.

Why was it that the second I closed the door, I felt a wind tearing at my axis, the mistral inside my chest a premonition that if I took one more step I would tumble into a pure void like a doll in outer space?

Comment by Ezr
a

Very theatrical exit, Ben leaving me stranded in his office.

It was from Louie that Ben got his instinct for theater. When Ben and I were twelve, I went up to the Riller apartment to bring the word that my father, the bastard, had taken off for good this time. All Louie had said was, “I got two arms,” and he put one around me and the other around Ben.

Louie always had messages for Ben, for me, for the world. “If you want to know people,” he once said, “find out what causes them a secret shame.” When Louie died, Ben and I found his, in a metal box in his dresser, filled with tickets. “Hey, look,” Ben said, trying to joke, “he must have seen a lot of movies, look at these stubs.” I read the names: Provident Loan, State Street Loan, Milwaukee Loan. Eight hundred thirty-four pawn tickets. And a notebook. The last date on any of the pawn tickets was just a few weeks before the first entry of the notebook: “Manucci, $300, thank God.” We were eighteen, still kids. Ben stayed in the bathroom a long time, letting the water run so I wouldn't hear him.

Another time, Louie said, “Boys, of course the Bible was written by sinners. How else would they know?” And about women Louie always wanted the last word. “Boys, you follow your pecker, you've got a schmuck for a guide.” And, “If you're lucky like I was and you find a smart woman some day, please don't try to teach her to light matches.”

Jane used to be the silencer on Ben's pistol. If he was about to go off half-cocked, she'd find a way to stop him.

“Jane,” I said to her on the phone, “Ben's not listening to me. You know this new play of his is in deep trouble.”

“Oh, I know. But I also know that if Ben wants to chase whales, Ezra, he'll chase whales.”

“He can't afford a mistake now, Jane, his cash position is execrable. He can't risk this kind of gamble, you know that.”

“What kind of gamble?”

“How many verse dramas have shown a profit on Broadway in the last fifty years? How many have been produced altogether?”

“Ezra, Ben used scrim imaginatively in the fifties. He dropped all four walls in more productions than anyone else. He hired Crawford when everybody said she couldn't possibly make a comeback at her age. And he's always succeeded.”

“Jane, you're overlooking one essential difference. The other times he was somehow able to convince his loyal pack to invest. This time they're not buying in because they look at the script and can't understand it.”

“They have no business asking to see scripts. They're investing in his judgment, not theirs. Ezra, when you cross a bridge is it because
you've examined every strut yourself or because you have faith in the bridge builder?”

I remembered Louie saying, “Of course there's a difference between men and women. Who ever saw a woman pissing into the wind?”

That's what I was doing.

“Please,” I said.

“Please what?”

“Talk to him.”

“Ezra, you know better than anyone. The only person Ben listens to is his father.”

11

Ben

When I read
The Best Revenge
the second time I suspected the female lead had been modeled by Gordon Walzer after his common-law wife Pinky. A star I knew slightly, Ruth Welch, immediately came to mind for the part. In my Machiavellian head I suspected that the director I wanted, Mitch Mitchell, would be tempted by Ruth Welch, too.

Mitch was zapped by Walzer's words. And when I mentioned Ruth Welch, Mitch saw right through my attempt at casualness. “Ruth's a brick shithouse with kettledrum lungs,” he said, laughing. “She scares most men. Talk to her. If you survive, I'll talk to her.”

“One caveat, Mitch. Ruth works a very narrow range.”

“Ben, that range is this role. Go for it.”

My luck, Ruth Welch was not only in New York but in a play on twofers, its audiences dwindling rapidly. An actress on the rebound, she invited me for a drink at the Waldorf Towers apartment she had subleased, warning me, however, that as soon as her play closed, she was off to her house in Bermuda for a much-needed rest, and I was not to tempt her with any near-term proposition. It was the usual bullshit: Chase me. See if you can catch me.

When I arrived, I started to shake hands but she immediately offered me her cheek, then gave me a hug that hurt. As I sat opposite watching her swirl the ice cubes in her glass, ordering them to melt faster, what I saw was Ruth Welch as a huge female insect with large thighs strong enough to crush a man. If she screamed at orgasm, it had to be an absolute glass-breaker. Perfect for the role.

“Ruth,” I said, “you're brilliant in the play,” referring to the one whose audience was dwindling, “but the vehicle was a bit Model A, don't you think?”