Timebends (36 page)

Like hundreds of others in the Yard, Mike had made an art of avoiding work on board warships by finding inaccessible corners to sleep in, but this was as much a sign of his realistic appraisal of the navy's need for his services as a fuck-you attitude, which of course was mixed into it. For the Yard was vastly overmanned, planning was often chaotic, and one man more or less in this beehive could not mean too much. One genius who had rigged himself a bed high in the dark upper reaches of a heavy cruiser's engine room awoke one morning to leave for home only to find himself at sea beyond sight of land. He did not return to his Red Hook crap game for six weeks.

Still, Mike had his morals, and when he really believed he was not being suckered he could turn into a phenomenally resourceful worker, especially when we were trucked out of the Yard at night to repair navy ships lying in the Hudson River waiting to sail out among the German submarines known to be lurking beyond Sandy Hook. With raw winter winds biting into our faces, we many times straightened steel and welded cracked struts on depth-charge platforms with never a complaint from him. We were drawn together then, since we relied on each other's help in avoiding falls into the icy waters, but this did not mean I was ever to be an honorary Sicilian. Besides, Mike was probably put off by my evasiveness about my pre-Yard work experience, a gap I left because I knew that neither he nor the others in our shipfitters' gang would believe that I had given up what would have seemed lucrative work writing radio scripts in order to freeze aboard a ship in the river.

With Sammy Casalino, another of my age and rank, shipfitter third, I had gradually become too friendly to continue avoiding my past, especially when it was noised about that I must have spent some years in prison. I was a writer, 1 finally told Sammy. He was a high school graduate and in his own view a man sensitive to culture and art, a rebel of a kind who had married a Jewish girl. “I hate race prejudism,” he would say, disapproving not only the
widespread anti-Jewish talk in the Yard but the occasional beatings of British seamen by Italian-American workers who would ambush them on Adams Street in the middle of the night because Britain had “betrayed” Italy by declaring war on her. That they were at the same time repairing and building ships to destroy Italy just showed how tough it was to earn a living in this particular world, but the fact was that while rooting for Mussolini they were also deeply attached to Roosevelt and the America with which II Duce was at war. It was all a mere anarchy loosed upon the world and would now and then break into its underlying absurdity, as when the yardmaster put up a notice asking workers to avoid wasting cadmium, which had to be imported over the water at great risk and cost. Cadmium nuts and welding flux were used on underwater hull areas because cadmium did not rust. The very next night men were hunched over everywhere filing rings for their women out of the nuts, which could be brought to a high silvery sheen, and making bracelets out of the rods of flux.

Sammy's and my disgust drew us closer together, and that midnight over our lunch sandwiches he told me a troubling dream. “I come into my cousin's bedroom—Rita—and there she is layin' on a bed lookin' up at me, and you know what? I fell down right on top of her.
Right on top of her!
I woke up I was sweatin' like a pig! Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I delicately suggested that it could mean he liked his cousin. “Oh, yeah, I always liked her a lot.” And maybe down deep in his mind he might dream of making love to her? “To
her?
Chrissake, I told you she's my
cousinl”
And that ended that.

As I had anticipated, telling Sammy that I was a writer was simply an additional proof to him that I probably had a prison term to hide, and now instead of avoiding my past I was drawn into trying to impress him with the truth. It happened that a script of mine about Amelia Earhart, the flyer who had disappeared in the South Pacific some years back under mysterious circumstances, was to be broadcast on the Du Pont Cavalcade of America radio series on a Monday night, our off-night, starring the movie actress Madeleine Carroll. As we were walking out of the Yard that Monday at a little past four in the morning, moving past the marine guards at the gate, I said, “A play I wrote will be on tonight, Sammy. You'll hear my name mentioned.”

The look he gave me was half suspicion of my sanity and half fear that in some unfathomable way I was setting him up. “Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “it's onNBC at eight. My name comes at the end.”

When I reported for work on Tuesday and as usual ran into Sammy on board the damaged British cruiser we were assigned to, I waited in vain for him to mention the program, and after some hours of suspense I finally asked if he had remembered to listen. Oh, sure, he'd listened. And had he heard my name? Yeah, he'd heard it. Well?

“But it was all true,” he complained.

“What do you mean?”

“The story. Except the end, nobody knows how she came down or where, so I figured you wrote that part.”

“No, I wrote the whole thing, Sammy. It's based on known facts, but those are actors in a studio in Manhattan, and somebody has to write down what they say. I mean, Madeleine Carroll isn't Amelia Earhart.”

“I know that, for Chrissake.”

He stared cloudily into space—“writing” meant inventing. And I think he realized as he stood there that he had believed Madeleine Carroll really was Amelia Earhart speaking and at the same time that this was impossible since Earhart was dead. Adding to the confusion was my having said that I had voluntarily come down to the Navy Yard to contribute to the war effort when he knew I could have made far more money in radio, which was glamorous besides. All these truths left him feeling deceived, and from now on he became rather formal with me. That is, until he could no longer hold back news of another of his dreams of Cousin Rita, whom he now saw taking the garbage pail out to the curb in front of her house, and bending over to set it down, “she let her bathrobe fall open.” Another time she was climbing a ladder that he was steadying in place below, and she started to sway, “so I had to look up and … Jesus!” Clomping into the Yard every afternoon at a quarter to four in his regulation steel-toed work shoes, bundled up to his neck in his dun mackinaw, his earlaps down, opening his tin lunchbox to the marine inspectors as he entered the gate, Sammy looked just like the sixty thousand indistinguishable others, each with his identical tin lunchbox and his unique and mystifying dreams.

Whenever a drydock was finally flooded and a ship instead of sinking floated safely into the harbor and sailed out into the bay, I was not the only one who stared at it thinking it miraculous that out of our chaos and incompetence, our bumbling and goofing off and our thefts and our dedicated moments in the wind, we had managed to repair it. More than one man would turn to another and say, “How the hell'd it happen?” as the ship vanished into the morning mists and the war.

Rejected for military service, I had tried to justify my existence by throwing myself into writing patriotic war plays for radio, mostly sponsored by Du Pont and U.S. Steel,. We were all one big happy family fighting the common enemy, but the more expert I became the more desiccated I felt writing the stuff, which was more like a form of yelling than writing. Still, it was an easy dollar and allowed me to continue working at plays and stories and took less time than teaching or some other job. An enormous, rotund blond man named Homer Fickett produced and directed Cavalcade from the Madison Avenue offices of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, probably the largest ad agency of the time and a voice box of corporate America in helping to refashion the necessary profit motive into themes of high-minded service. It was Bruce Barton who had announced that Jesus Christ was the world's greatest salesman, implying, one supposed, that admen were disguised missionaries and BBD&O a seminary brought up to date. The secretaries washed in Pears Soap, and Homer's fair cheeks blushed as he made me bury my copy of the
Nation
or
New Masses
or even
Partisan Review
in my coat pocket before some closely shaved executive found me out.

Homer needed me; I had become his utility man, whom he could phone in an emergency for a half-hour script to be conceived and finished in a day. Two or three times a year he would find himself rehearsing a script too substandard to broadcast on Cavalcade, radio's class act, but these alarming revelations often came to him only two or three days before the broadcast date. There would then be a desperate phone call, and on my agreeing to pitch in he would messenger a book about some incident in American history, and I would read it by Wednesday evening, cook up a half-hour script on Thursday, and get it to him on Madison Avenue by Friday morning. He would cast and rehearse it and be ready for broadcast on Tuesday evening, with a thirty-piece orchestra doing the bridges live. For this I received five hundred dollars, a good solid piece of money at a time when my used Nash-Lafayette had cost me two fifty and my Grace Court house came to twenty-eight thousand. (The last of its prices that I know of, in the sixties, was three-quarters of a million.)

But occasionally a worthwhile theme came along, like the story of Benito Juárez, the nineteenth-century Mexican leader—which, unaccountably, BBD&O thought would be a grand idea to do since Du Pont did a lot of business and owned plants south of the border.
There was no rush with this one, and I decided to amuse myself by writing the script in verse, more gracefully to condense the innumerable events of Juarez's affecting life.

Juárez was a coeval of Lincoln, whom he worshiped, a peasant revolutionary unusual for his democratic convictions. For once I wrote with some excitement, the form being rather novel with its organic need of imagery that would help to telescope an epic career into twenty-eight minutes. Finishing the script one afternoon, I decided to amble up to Manhattan and show it to Homer before having it typed.

NBC Studio 8-A was the big one from which the important shows were broadcast. Opening the soundproof doors, I walked into an enormous area the size of a basketball court and heard a tremendous but vaguely familiar baritone-basso voice. At first I assumed it was that of an actor performing a scene of raging fury, but moving closer, I saw that the cast of six or eight actors wore expressions of very real anxiety, some with eyes lowered to avoid looking at the giant orator, who, I now realized, was Orson Welles.

He was not acting but roaring in the direction of the sound booth, from whose depths on the PA system feeble rejoinders were brokenly emerging whenever he momentarily paused for breath. The voice from the booth was Homer Fickett's trying to soothe the star. “Now, come on, Orson, it really isn't all that bad . . .”

Welles's fists moved from the vicinity of his knees toward the ceiling. “It is a TRAVESTY, I tell you, a LIE, a purposeful and contemptible distortion of KNOWN FACTS in order to justify the unforgivable!”

“But, Orson…,” poor Homer's voice meekly tried to interrupt. The outrage continued. Everett Sloane, Joe Cotten, Mercedes McCambridge—practically the whole Mercury Theatre Company was apparently here, stopped in its tracks.

Welles's real adversary, it appeared, the cause of his outrage, was another man in the booth, a Professor Monaghan, a Yale historian who normally vetted the American history scripts for accuracy and who, according to Welles, had either been drunk or was so corrupt that the distortions he was protesting had been allowed to stand. Welles could roar with such authority because an ancestor, Gideon Welles, was the navy secretary involved in the very incident that had been dramatized as a great American success in Latin America when in reality it had been a catastrophe and a disgrace.

Fury spent, Welles now stood silent as Homer emerged from the booth to plead with him to go on with rehearsal. Again Welles
absolutely refused. Homer went white; it was only a day or two before the broadcast, and this could end in court. Welles still refused.

Homer's eye fell on me, and I gestured him to a corner of the vast studio. I had the Juárez script folded up in my jacket pocket and whispered that I thought Welles would be a great Juárez, especially since he loved doing accents. Homer, presently a beached sea lion, glanced at the unbound script I handed him, walked over to Welles, and offered him the clump, muttering an introduction to me. Welles looked very skeptically at the messy, pencil-marked dialogue but noticed that the play opened with a half-page-long narration in verse, the sight of which seemed to surprise him. Now the actors watched in silence as he read to himself; his lips began to move as he tried the fit of the words, and without glancing at me he walked to a microphone and read the page, ringing out the syllables like a rebuke to the professor, who had remained behind in the sound booth. Enormously relieved, the actors gathered around the one microphone. Passing sheets to one another and craning over each other's shoulders to read, they played out the story. I went into the booth with Homer and listened amazed at Welles's genius with the microphone; he seemed to climb into it, his word-carving voice winding into one's brain. No actor had such intimacy and sheer presence in a loudspeaker. He was then a lithe young guy, like me in his twenties, but he already had his loose and wicked belly laugh and the noble air of a lord. At the end of the reading I came out of the booth and he pulled me to him in a loving embrace, and I went home on the IRT in triumph.

I had hardly come through the door to report my incredible afternoon to Mary, who was as delighted as I was, when Homer was on the phone saying there might be a couple of problems with Du Pont on the script and that I had to meet the next morning with a small committee from the company.

There were three or four of them up there high above Madison Avenue, and they had come up specially from Delaware to talk with me since there was so little time before the broadcast. They were led by Russ Applegate, a gray-haired man of good but firm temper, in charge of the company's public relations. One objection was to the words “where parrots flew,” there being no parrots in the particular jungle through which Juárez had fled his persecutors. I immediately agreed to find some other image for the line, but the executive whose point had been so well taken felt so victorious
that he continued to discuss the jungle, in which he had been a tourist, for the better part of an hour. I marveled at the spectacle of these grown men sent all the way from Delaware to remove a phrase. But now came the good part.