Where the Truth Lies (6 page)

VINCE: Listen, pal, I didn’t come here to be insulted!

ME: Oh, where do you usually go?(Mug for audience.)

VINCE: I’ve half a mind to leave the stage.

ME: Come back when you find the other half.(Prance around piano.)

VINCE: That does it. I’m not singing another song.

ME: Always give the public what it wants!(Walk on inside of ankles.)

But three-quarters of our stage time was ad-lib, just clowning around with the audience. With the movies going great for us and the TV specials right through the roof, the only reason for playing nightclubs anymore was because of a certain contract certain people had with us that if we didn’t take them seriously they’d take a contract out on us, seriously. So we viewed the weeks at the Versailles in Miami, the Biarritz in Vegas, and the Casino del Mar in northern New Jersey as a working vacation.

And when we worked the audience, we were like advance men scouting a location. What we were scouting was who we’d be boffing later that night. It didn’t matter if the girls came to the show with dates. They’d come back without them. That was the main reason we didn’t mind doing a second show every night; Reuben, my valet, would get word to them after the first show that we wanted them to be our special guests for the second show. How they got rid of their dates I never knew, but they always did.

This particular night, I’ve got Maureen the redhead ready to room-service me later, so for a change I’m not scouting, just mingling with the crowd, and this fat guy starts heckling me. “You stink, Morris!” he yells at me. Every joke I make he yells, “You’re not funny!” It’s coming off pretty personal. He’s even going out of his way to laugh at Vince’s straight lines. Vince is looking at the back of the room for the captain to step in, but we don’t see him anywhere.

Now, I don’t like to let a heckler take control of the show, but unfortunately this guy is really loud and there’s no way I cannot acknowledge him. “Sir,” I say, “when you go to the movies, do you talk to the screen?”

“Go back where you came from, you bastard!” Great comeback on his part. I’m also wondering where he thinks I came from. I have a standard repertoire of zingers, but what the guy is feeding me is hard to riff on. What makes it tougher is he’s not heckling Vince; it’s just me. Vince is sensitive to this and tries the “politely shame them” angle. “Excuse me, sir. Clearly you don’t like our act, but you’re spoiling the evening for the rest of this nice audience. The management will refund your cover charge if we’ve failed to amuse you. Now can we please continue the show?” Some decent applause comes from the rest of the patrons, which is, of course, the whole point of Vince saying what he said. The heckler shouts, “No, we all loveyou, Vince. I just think the monkey is a jerk.” Meaning me.

Vince hears the word “jerk” and plunges straight into quoting a lyric I wrote for him in our first motion picture,Smithereens. The song was called “Just My Pal and My Gal.” Vince recites, “Mister:‘I’m honored to work with this jerk,’ ” indicating me and walking his hand-mike down to the heckler. Russ Cummings has the piano player noodle behind him as he croons,“I never frown with this clown. I love to joke with this bloke. I feel real cool with this fool.”

The heckler grabs Vince’s mike and says into it, “Fine, but don’t give the mike to this kike!”

The crowd can’t help but laugh.

Vince starts breaking up too. He says, a bit sheepishly, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not often my partner and I get topped by a member of our audience, but this gentleman has just done the near impossible, and we’re wondering, sir, if you’d be a great sport and help us out onstage. What do you say, folks?”

The folks say hooray. Vince explains, “You see, Lanny and I keep an old routine called ‘School Daze,’ that’s D-a-z-e, in our hip pocket for whenever a celebrity friend of ours might drop by. But don’t you think this gentleman—what’s your name, sir? Phil? Don’t you folks think Phil here is as funny as, say, Red Buttons or Red Skelton or Red China even? How about it?”

The crowd loves this, they’re all cheering Phil as he downs the rest of his drink. Vince waves everybody quiet one more time and says, “Now, in this routine, our friend Phil here is going to play a crazy professor who’s giving Lanny and me our final high school exam … so if you’ll excuse us while we help Phil change into a ca-raaaaay-zy professor outfit—Russ, a little costume-changing music, if you please!” He looks at our musical director, Russ Cummings, who quickly calls out a title and cues the band into “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.”

Well, I don’t know what the hell Vince is going on about, but he walks this heckler named Phil offstage, leaving me alone. So I start doing the bit where I ask the trombone player from the house band if I can play along—I make a few noises on the bone and then the slide comes off in my hand and as I try to put things back together, I “accidentally” knock over all the music stands—so now the stage is a shambles and I look into the wings and what I can see is Vince slamming the guy face-first into a radiator by a brick wall just before the dressing rooms. The guy bounces up off the radiator and lands on the floor. I would tell you that the guy has a broken nose, but that wouldn’t be true. The guy now has no nose. There’s just this black-and-purple mess above his mouth and below his eyes. Someday he might have a nose again, but not this year.

The audience can’t see or hear anything, but from where I am, I see plenty. The guy is groaning, weakly. Vince stands over him and says, “You call any goddamn Jew on this planet anything you like, I don’t care, but nobody calls my partner a kike, you hear me?” And he kicks him and would have kicked him again if Reuben hadn’t stepped in. He pulls Vince away, straightens his tux (somehow not a drop of blood has gotten on Vince’s shirtfront, but that was Vince, I’ll tell you), and Vince walks back out onstage, suave as ever.

Now the audience is wondering where Phil is. So I ask Vince, for the audience’s benefit, “Hey, where’s our friend Phil?”

Vince says, “Oh, he developed a sudden case of the jitters.”

“Would that be like a virus?” I ask. I give Vince the little hand signal we have that means “Feed the line back to me,” and Vince lobs it perfectly.

“Lanny, why do you want to know if his jitters might be like a virus?” he says for the audience’s benefit.

“I thought it might be a jitterbug!” I squeal and go into my “I’m so simultaneously ashamed and thrilled with myself” dance. The band starts playing one of those rock-and-roll vamps and I’m good for five minutes, right up through my trademark death-pratfall.

Of everyone in the club, Phil’s table is laughing the hardest. They weren’t laughing so hard a month later when Vince told the judge that Phil had tripped over a folding chair in the wings. Reuben and the lighting operator and the wardrobe mistress and the showgirls all verified this. The club’s captain said so too, and he was particularly emphatic, considering he was in the changing room getting his doorknob polished by one of the showgirls at the time. The judge gave Phil’s attorney a little lecture about people who bring unfounded lawsuits against celebrities. Later we signed some eight-by-ten glossies for the judge, one to go in his chambers and one for the window of his nephew’s dairy restaurant. (I wrote, “You’veglatt to be kidding!” Cute.)

Boffing ladies and bashing gentlemen. I tell you, there was nothing under the sun Vince and I wouldn’t do for each other.

SEVEN

In Hillman’s law library, I slowly closed the ring binder as if irrevocably shutting the door behind a departing dinner guest who’d stayed until oneA .M. when everyone else had been decent enough to leave by eleven.*

Very well. I’d faced the Beast, my hands tied to the sacrificial stake of a legal stipulation, and lived. Lanny wasn’t King Kong or Dracula, neither as warmhearted as the mammal nor as cold-blooded as the undead. Now there was one overwhelming question in my mind, and as John Hillman reentered the room without knocking, I realized he was the person on the premises most likely to have the answer.

“Miss O’Connor, your time is up. You’ll forgive me if I …” He moved to the binder and quickly leafed through the pages, making sure none was missing. He then nodded toward Naomi, who indicated that I should put my hands above my head as before. I saw Hillman unconsciously lick his lips. It was one thing to tolerate the liberties Naomi was apparently at liberty to take with me, but I did not want to supply Hillman with any images to carry home to his master bathroom for masturbatory purposes. I asked if he’d mind turning his back. He humored me with a patronizing shrug.

*It would indeed be an impressive feat if I’d been able to memorize the pages by Lanny Morris from which I’ve just quoted in full. Obviously, since I first read these pages in Hillman’s office, I’ve had access to and have acquired the rights to quote from them here.

In addition to Naomi’s laying on of hands, a second disquieting sensation was creeping over me, and it concerned what I’d just read. It was not merely the sense that “something was wrong with this picture.” No, it was more as if I’d been asked to detect what was wrong with this picture and suddenly noticed that this picture was tattooed on the back of a corpse.

As Naomi lumbered out of the library, Hillman must have noticed the dazed expression on my face and asked if something was the matter.

I sat down again and responded, “I think I don’t know why Lanny Morris let me read what I’ve just read. As self-portraits go, he doesn’t exactly come off as— I mean, have you read this?” I asked, gesturing to the binder.

He nodded. “It’s pretty pungent, I concede. Lacking in pretense, to say the very least.”

I sputtered, “Why would he ever want anyone to see this side of him?”

He took a Sobranie cigarette from a teakwood box on the library table. “I have my own theories, but of course I’d only be guessing.” I gave Hillman the same eager and attentive look that had signaled my availability to male professors in college. He ventured professorially, “I think it was Jack Kerouac who once said that every person had within himself one great book.”

I shrugged. “Trouble is, Jack Kerouac went and wrote more than one book.”

He smiled. “I may have meant Jack London. I myself …” He lit the black paper tube of Balkan tobacco. “Suffice it to say that while many people announce their intention to write their memoirs, few get beyond typing the dedication. I suspect my client wanted you to understand, firsthand, that heis in fact completing a book that will serve not only as his autobiography but also as the definitive account of the shared careers of Collins and Morris. You’ve now ‘heard’ Lanny’s writing voice, to use your own profession’s jargon. Call it what you will—”

“Deplorably narcissistic, obscenely chauvinistic?”

He waved my words away, leaving behind a wraith of blue smoke. “Such a book, this raw, this honest, would make your own attempted effort … Well, there’ve been some very nice translations of the Bible over the centuries, but they’d run a poor second in public interest to, say, the discovery of the actual stone tablets upon which God inscribed the Ten Commandments. Don’t you think?”

I told him that from what I’d just read, the only thing Lanny’s chapter had in common with the Ten Commandments was that the latter could not be found anywhere within the former.

He picked up the ring binder in a protective, motherly way and commented indignantly, “As it happens, I think my client is thoughtfully trying to save you a lot of work and grief in aid of a doomed cause.” As he walked me to the door, toward which I hadn’t been heading, he asked, “Ever hear of a man named Roald Amundsen?”

I knew the name but couldn’t remember how, and I admitted as much.

He nodded me out of the library and into the hall. “In 1911, a British explorer named Robert Falcon Scott set out with a small expedition intending to be the first man to reach the South Pole. He and his team faced unimaginable hardship. When they finally reached their goal, they discovered that a Norwegian explorer named Amundsen had gotten there five weeks earlier. All their sacrifice and suffering had been made meaningless. On their return journey, Scott and all his companions died.” Hillman smiled. “I think—this is nothing but conjecture on my part—I think my client wanted you to understand that he is, in effect, Amundsen. That he’s already reached the South Pole in both the living and the telling of his own story. I think he wanted to spare you an effort as pointless as Scott’s, one that staggered its way toward a cold and lonely death.”

EIGHT

A driving August rain in Los Angeles. Like February 29, it does actually occur every now and then, and when it does, what a lark! The drains in the street go mad and start frothing at the mouth, and the culverts run over worse than the budget ofCleopatra. Half the native Los Angeles drivers, never having seen a heavy rain before, continue to drive at seventy-five miles an hour, unaware of the undertow. The other half, never having seen a heavy rain before, instantly turn around, drive home at five miles per hour, and don’t venture out again for days. This mass sequestering is the Southern California version of snowbound and has been known to cause the citizens to “read for pleasure”—but as I say, it doesn’t rain in Los Angeles very often.

My cabdriver stared in awe as the view framed by his windshield turned into an impressionist painting in the furious downpour. So stunned was he as the daylight colors bled together on the glass that, momentarily disoriented, he spoke in English.

“Fucking rain,” he grunted and glared at me in his mirror as if there were something I could do about it, such as walk. But my bags were already in the trunk, next to the spilled puddle of motor oil that is mandatory in the trunks of all Southern California taxicabs.

We arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, with its theme building designed by Frank Lloyd Jetson, and reached the segment of the white zone designated for the loading and unloading of American Airlines passengers only. My editors at Neuman and Newberry had decided it was urgent that I meet with them in New York to explain the deal I’d put forward to Vince. A phone call like the one I’d already made to their business-affairs department would have sufficed, but for the money they were going to be shelling out, my editors wanted to have me summarize the terms of the agreement yet again in person. Pointless but unavoidable.