Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (30 page)

* * *

S: . . . I have no knowledge of any. I’ll tell you what, right now, Congressman, I’ll bet my show on it. You come up with any on the cast and crew, I’ll withdraw the show.

B: We’ll hold you to that, young man.

R: I want to thank you for appearing for this deposition today, and for being so forthcoming with us, Mr. Spacer.

B: I agree.

R: You are excused.

* * *

There was one reporter waiting outside in the hallway, besides the government goon keeping everyone out.

The reporter was the old kind, press card stuck in his hat, right out of
The Front Page
.

“Got any statement, Mr. Spacer?”

“Well, as you know, I can’t talk about what I said till the investigation’s concluded. They asked me questions. I answered them as best as I could.”

“What sort of questions?”

“I’m sure you can figure that out. You’ve seen the televised hearings?”

“What were they trying to find out?” asked the reporter.

“I’m
not
sure . . .” said Bill.

The government goon smiled. When he and the reporter parted ways in the lobby, Bill was surprised that it was already summer twilight. He must have been in there five or six hours. . . . He took off for the studio, to find out what kind of disaster the broadcast with Zach Glass had been.

* * *

Bill wiggled his toes in his socks, including the stump of the little one on the right foot, a souvenir from a Boy Scout hatchet-throwing contest gone wrong back when he was twelve.

He was typing while he watched
Blues By Bargy
on TV. Saturday night noise came from outside.

Then the transmission was interrupted with a
PLEASE STAND BY
notice. Douglas Edwards came on with a special bulletin, which he ripped out of the chundering teletype machine at his right elbow.

He said there were as yet unconfirmed reports that North Korean Armed Forces had crossed into South Korea. President Truman, who was on a weekend trip to his home in Independence, Missouri, had not been reached by CBS for a comment. Then he said they would be interrupting regularly scheduled programming if there were further developments.

Then they went back to
Blues by Bargy
.

* * *

“Look,” said Phil. “James, you gotta get those rehearsing assholes outta here, I mean,
out of here
, earlier. When I came in Saturday to set up, I found they used all the drop-pipes for their show. I had to make them move a quarter of their stuff. They said they needed them all. I told ’em to put wheels on their stuff like we’re having to do with most of ours, but we still need some pipes to drop in the exteriors, and to mask the sets off. And they’re hanging around with their girlfriends and boyfriends, while I’m trying to set up marks.

It was Sunday, the start of their week at the Ziegfeld Roof. They were to block out Monday’s and Tuesday’s shows, rehearse them, and do the run-through and technical for Monday’s broadcast.

“I’ll talk to their stage manager,” said Morgan. “Believe me, moving here gripes me as much as it does you. Where’s Elizabeth?”

“Here,” said Elizabeth Regine, coming out of the dressing room in her rehearsal Neptuna outfit. “I couldn’t believe this place when I got here.”

“Believe it, baby,” said Phil. “We’ve got to make do.” He looked at his watch. “Bill, I think the script may be a little long, just looking at it.”

“Same as always. Twenty-four pages.”

“Yeah, but you got suspense stuff in there. That’s thirty seconds each. Be thinking about it while we’re blocking it.”

“You’re the director, Phil.”

“That’s what you and James pay me for.” He looked over at the stage crew. “No!” he said. “ Right one, left one, right one,” he moved his hands.

“That’s what they are,” said the foreman.

“No, you got left, right, left.”

The guy, Harvey, joined him to look at the wheeled sets. “Left,” he pointed to the rocket interior. “Right,” the command room on the Moon. “Left,” the foreground scenery and the rocket fin for the Mars scenes.

“And from whence does the rest of the Mars set drop in?” asked Phil.

“Right. Oh,
merde
!” said Harve.

“And they’re the best crew on television,” said Phil, as the stagehands ratcheted the scenery around. “They really
are
,” he said, turning back to Bill and Morgan. “That way we stay on the rocket interior, and you leave, run behind the middle set, and step down onto Mars, while the spacephone chatters away. Also, you’ll be out of breath, so it’ll sound like you just climbed down fifty feet of ladder. . . .”

* * *

It was seven when they finished the blocking, two rehearsals, and the run-through of the first show of the week. Phil was right, the script was one minute and fifty-three seconds long.

Bill looked at the camera ramp. “I still want to do something with
that
,” he said, “
while
we’ve got it.”

“Wednesday,” said Phil.

“Why Wednesday?”

“You got a blast-off scene. We do it from the
front
. We get the scenery guy to build a nose view of the ship. Red Mars background behind. Like the ship from above. You and Neptuna stand behind it, looking out the cockpit. You count down. Harvey hits the C02 extinguisher behind you for rocket smoke. I get Harry or Fred to run at you with the camera as fast as he can, from
way
back there. Just before he collides, we cut to the telecine chain for the commercial.”

“Marry me,” said Bill.

“Some other time,” said Phil. “Everybody back at 4:00 
P.M.
tomorrow. Everything’s set. Don’t touch a
goddamn
thing before you leave.”

* * *

Toast of the Town
, hosted by Ed Sullivan, was on TV.

Señor Wences was having a three-way conversation with Johnny (which was his left hand rested on top of a doll body); Pedro, the head in the cigar box; and a stagehand who was down behind a crate, supposedly fixing a loose board with a hammer.

Halfway through the act, two stagehands came out, picked up the crate, showing it was empty, and walked off, leaving a bare stage.

“Look. Look!” said Johnny, turning his fist-head on the body that way. “There was not a man there.”

“There was no
man
there?” asked Wences.

“No,” said Johnny. “There was not a man there.”

“What do you t’ink, Pedro?” asked Wences, opening the box with his right hand.

“S’awright,” said Pedro. The box snapped shut.

* * *

“Come in here,” said Morgan from the door of his makeshift office, as Bill came into the theater.

Sam was in a chair, crying.

Morgan’s face was set, as Bill had never seen before. “Tell him what you just told me.”

“I can’t,” Sam wailed. “What am I gonna do? I’m forty years old!”

“Maybe you should have thought of that back in 1931.”

“What the hell is going on? Sam! Sam? Talk to me.”

“Oh, Bill,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Somebody. One of you. Start making sense. Right now,” said Bill.

“Mr. Sam Shorts, here, seems to have been a commie bagman during the Depression.”

“Say it ain’t so, Sam,” said Bill.

Sam looked at him. Tears started down his face again.

“There’s your answer,” said Morgan, running his hands through his hair and looking for something to throw.

“I was young,” said Sam. “I was so hungry. I swore I’d never be that hungry again. I was too proud for the bread line, a guy offered me a job, if you can call it that, moving some office stuff. Then as a sort of messenger. Between his office and other places. Delivering stuff. I thought it was some sort of bookie joint or numbers running, or money laundering, or the bootleg. Something illegal, sure . . . but . . . but . . . I didn’t . . . didn’t . . .”

“What? What!”

“I didn’t think it was anything un-American!” said Sam, crying again.

“Morgan. Tell me what he told you.”

“He was a bagman, a messenger between United Front stuff the Feds know about and some they probably don’t. He did it for about three years—”

“Four,” said Sam, trying to control himself.

“Great,” continued Morgan. “Four years, on and off. Then somebody pissed him off and he walked away.”

“Just because they were reds,” said Sam, “didn’t make ’em good bosses.”

Bill hated himself for asking; he thought of Parnell Thomas and McCarthy.

“Did you sign anything?”

“I may have. I signed a lot of stuff to get paid.”

“Under your real name?”

“I guess so. Some, anyway.”

“Guess what name they had him use sometime?” asked Morgan.

“I don’t want to,” said Bill.

“George Crosley.”

“That was one of the names Whittaker Chambers used!” said Bill.

“They weren’t the most inventive guys in the world,” said Morgan.

“I knew. I knew the jig would be up when I watched the Hiss thing,” said Sam. “When I heard that name. Then nothing happened. I guess I thought nothing would . . .”

“How could you do this to me?!!” yelled Bill.

“You? You were a one-year-old! I didn’t
know
you! It wasn’t personal, Bill. You either, Morgan.”

“You know I put my show on the line in the deposition, don’t you?”

“
Not
till Morgan told me.” Sam began to cry again.

“What brought on this sudden cleansing, now, twenty years later?” asked Bill.

“There was another letter,” said Morgan. “This time naming a name, not the right one, but it won’t take anybody long to figure that one out. Also that they were calling the Feds. I was looking at it, and looking glum, when Sam comes in. He asks what’s up; I asked him if he knew anybody by the name of the guy in the letter, and he went off like the
Hindenburg
. A wet
Hindenburg
.”

Sam was crying again.

Bill’s shoulders slumped.

“Okay, Morgan. Call everybody together. I’ll talk to them. Sam, quit it. Quit it. You’re still a great writer. Buck up. We’ll get through this. Nothing’s happened yet. . . .”

* * *

Live. The pressure’s on, like always. Everybody’s a pro here, even with this world falling apart. Harry and Fred on the cameras, Phil up in the booth, Morgan with him, Sam out there where the audience would be, going through the scripts for Thursday and Friday like nothing’s happened.

He and Elizabeth, as Neptuna, are in the rocket interior set, putting on their spacesuits, giving their lines. Bill’s suit wasn’t going on right; he made a small motion with his hand; Fred moved his camera in tight on Bill’s face; Philip would switch to it, or Harry’s shot on Neptuna’s face; the floor manager reached up while Bill was talking and pulled at the lining of the spacesuit, and it went on smoothly; the floor manager crawled out and Fred pulled his camera back again to a two-shot. Then he and Neptuna moved into the airlock; it cycled closed. Harry swung his camera around to the grille of the spacephone speaker; an urgent message came from it, warning Major Spacer that a big Martian dust storm was building up in their area.

While the voice was coming over the speaker in the tight shot, Bill and Elizabeth walked behind the Moon command center flats and hid behind the rocket fin while the stage crew dropped in the Martian exterior set and the boom man wheeled the microphone around and Fred dollied his camera in.

“Is Sam okay?” Elizabeth had asked, touching her helmet to Bill’s before the soundman got there.

“I hope so,” said Bill.

He looked out. The floor manager, who should have been counting down on his fingers five-four-three-two-one was standing stock still. Fred’s camera wobbled—and he was usually the steadiest man in the business.

The floor manager pulled off his earphones, shrugged his shoulders, and swung his head helplessly toward the booth.

It’s
got
to be time, thought Bill; touched Elizabeth on the arm, and gave his line, backing down off a box behind the fin out onto the set.

“Careful,” he said. “Sometimes the surface of Mars can look as ordinary as a desert in Arizona.”

Elizabeth, who was usually unflappable, stared, eyes wide past him at the exterior set. And dropped her Neptuna character, and instead of her line, said: “And sometimes it looks just like Iowa.”

Bill turned.

Instead of a desert, and a couple of twisted Martian cacti and a backdrop of Monument Valley, there was the butt-end of a big cow and a barn and silo, some chickens, and a three-rail fence.

* * *

Bill sat in the dressing room, drinking Old Harper from the bottle.

Patti Page was on the radio, singing of better days.

There was a knock on the door.

It was the government goon. He was smiling. There was one subpoena for Bill, and one for Sam Shorts.

June 2000

B
ILL CAME OUT THE FRONT DOOR
of the apartments on his way to his job as a linotype operator at the
New York Times
.

There were, as usual, four or five kids on the stoop, and as usual, too, Rudy, a youngster of fifty years, was in the middle of his rant, holding up two twenty-dollar bills.

“ . . . that there was to trace the dope, man. They changed the money so they could find out where all them coke dollars were. That plastic thread shit in this one, that was the laser radar stuff. They could roll a special truck down your street, and tell what was a crack house by all the eyeball noise that lit up their screens. And the garage-sale people and the flea-market people. They could find that stuff— Hey, Bill—”

“Hey, Rudy.”

“—before it All Quit they was goin’ to be able to count the ones in your billfold from six blocks away, man.”

“Why was that, Rudy?” asked a girl-kid.

“ ’Cause they wasn’t enough money! They printed the stuff legit but it just kept going away. It was in the quote ‘underground economy.’ They said it was so people couldn’t counterfeit it on a Savin’ 2300 or somebullshit, or the camel-jocks couldn’t flood the PXs with fake stuff, but it was so they didn’t have to wear out a lotta shoe leather and do lotsa
Hill Street Blues
wino-cop type stuff just to get to swear out a lot of warrants. See, that machine in that truck make noise, they take a printout of that to a judge, and pretty soon door hinges was flyin’ all over town. Seen ’em take two blocks out at one time, man. Those was evil times, be glad they gone.”