Girl of My Dreams (43 page)

Nils glanced at Billie, who was thrashing around in her trim bin. Her assistant cutter was off on Sunday and she was having trouble locating the shot of Guy Kibbee in the car pursuing Bennett and McCrea. Fifteen years earlier, the director told me, he'd have been afraid to come into a cutting room. Any intense gesture at the Moviola, or having film wind through his fingers too vigorously, could have caused a bruise or even a bleed. But his hemophilia, with maturity, had receded from a constant menace to an occasional nuisance. “I sometimes have bleeds at the beginning of a picture,” he said. “Pure nerves. My fingertips themselves may seep blood. After that, the bleeding stops and won't happen again until I start another picture. My best friend wasn't so lucky.”

“Your best friend?” I asked. Then I recalled the story about Nils and his hemophiliac friend running away to a shirtwaist factory in Massachusetts where wires and gears and needles were a threat to make the young boys bleed.

“We do all we can to manage our destinies, Owen,” he said coyly, “yet we don't have the control we think we have. We worship reason at our peril. Even the supreme rationalist Isaac Newton postulated a certain subtle spirit, as he called it, that pervaded all matter including the human body. Most scientists remain aloof behind their cloak of pompous reason. Unreasonable reason only impedes the perception of deeper reality.”

As he spoke Nils had removed a handkerchief from his pocket and twirled it, demonstrating its emptiness. Billie stopped hunting for trims to watch him; this was why she liked working with Nils. He passed the handkerchief from his right hand to his left, still twirling it. As he passed it back into his right hand, the handkerchief disappeared and four shiny little metal balls dropped to the floor, bounding up so Nils could scoop three of them. “Missed one,” he said. “Billie dear, could you catch it for me?”

“You son of a bitch,” she said as she stooped to pick up the fourth ball and it became powder in her hands. “What did you just do?”

“A good trick is like an unsolved crime, isn't it?” he said. “That's why I had to go into pictures—I didn't want to be a criminal forever. Do you have those shots?”

“Christ, in a minute,” Billie said, reluctantly going back to the trim bin. “Okay, maybe five minutes.”

“Rationality itself is the biggest trick of all,” Nils said, turning back to me, “because it makes us think we have power when we don't. Instead, we must pay attention to our visions, no matter how fiery, dangerous or painful. Keep your pain. As long as you suffer you live. The lesson of hemophilia. If the world is a miracle, which I believe, then the history of life is a mysterious dream. Hegel himself, a logician par excellence, told us all history is a river of dreams, and if we could merely collect the dreams people had dreamed during a given period, the true picture of an age would emerge.”

“What do you mean your best friend wasn't as lucky as you?” I asked. He looked at me sharply and for a moment I thought he was about to tell me to get out of his cutting room for being insufficiently appreciative of his trance on mystery and reality.

“Yes, my best friend was unable to perceive the miracle of the mystery and remained chained to reason, a black kind. Mario Tedeschio was as attracted to risk as I was to magic, but he thought his risks were logical. Perhaps in a way they were. After we ran away together to a Lowell mill, risking our lives or at least our easily bled bodies among the looms and whirring machinery, we weren't allowed to see each other. But the bond between us remained, and several years later I found out where he was through another hemophiliac. I was in New York still working for Houdini. Mario had become like these guys out here at Muscle Beach, a fitness fiend. He had me come up to Harlem to the old Stillman's Gym one day, and what I saw was alarming. Mario was working out wearing boxing gloves. I told him he was nuts to endanger himself. He said he only shadow-boxed. The other fighters were swinging away at each other or hitting punching bags. Little guys in vests and derbies with cigar stubs in their mouths were throwing medicine balls into big guys' bellies. But Mario used huge oversized gloves. Though he hit a punching bag once or twice, mostly he was taking swipes at himself in a mirror. I thought it was stupid, but he didn't seem to be hurting himself.”

“So his own bleeding had receded too,” I said.

“No, that was the thing, it hadn't. Just from wearing the gloves and mostly punching air he had bruises on his hands. He winced when he hit a punching bag. He shrugged that off and lifted weights too. Mario's mother, Evalina, had driven him crazy with her overprotectiveness, and now he was driving her crazy because she didn't even know where he was. Since only a mother can pass the gene for hemophilia along to a son, insane as it was, Mario had never forgiven Evalina. If Evalina could have kept him in a padded cage, she would have. I started to feel I was the lucky one for having a mother who pretty much deserted me. When we were together in New York, Mario couldn't stop looking over his shoulder, even on crowded sidewalks. He was afraid his mother had hired private detectives to find him. I was pretty sure she didn't have the money for that. He said he was making plans to go to Tahiti, where he would fish and start a resort.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Doesn't a hemophiliac need to be near a blood supply?”

“Mario said he'd be fine once he was far enough away from his mother. Tahiti would do that. My last morning in New York before Houdini was moving on to Detroit, Mario told me to meet him at Stillman's, ten sharp. On the subway to Harlem I was thinking why is Mario doing this. Tahiti? A resort? Training as a boxer? I was leafing through the
Herald Tribune
and reached the sports section at Eighty-sixth Street. Jack Dempsey was in town training for his championship fight with the Argentinian bull, Luis Firpo. He was going to box a number of sparring partners that morning at Stillman's. Jesus, I thought, I'll never get near the place it'll be so packed. Neither will Mario, even if they do know him from working out there. Well, we'll meet outside Stillman's. As the subway stopped at Ninety-sixth Street, it hit me, and I gasped for breath.”

“What hit you? What are you talking about?”

“I almost jumped off the subway to run the last thirty blocks, but I realized the train was a lot faster than I'd be, probably faster than a taxi. There was no Tahiti. The only resort was the last one. I ran to Stillman's from the 125
^th
Street stop.

“The mob outside the gym made me feel helpless. I ducked into a stationery store and bought a large envelope, stuffed a piece of the newspaper into it to make it look thick and important, and quickly lettered on the outside: FOR JACK DEMPSEY FROM TEX RICKARD—URGENT. Rickard more or less owned Dempsey and was promoting the fight, but I gambled he wouldn't bother coming to a sparring session. Stillman's bouncers saw the envelope and hustled me upstairs into the crowded gym, where you could hardly breathe for the cigars and sweat. I headed toward the ring, shoving and pushing and waving my envelope, yelling ‘Urgent for Mr. Dempsey.' I made it almost to ringside, as far as Doc Kearns, the champ's trainer and manager, who was screaming at a spy from the Firpo camp to get the hell out of his fighter's training facility. But I was too late.”

“What do you mean too late?” I asked.

“What was going on, maestro?” Billie said to Nils.

“Mario Tedeschio was already in the ring, and I saw him bounce a punch right off Dempsey's chin. It wouldn't hurt the champ, of course; people said Dempsey chewed on pine to make his jaw stronger. But it would get his attention, it would get the champ going, which was exactly what Mario wanted. I screamed to Doc Kearns that Dempsey's sparring partner was a hemophililac. Kearns said, ‘What's that, did he do time for it?' I screamed back, ‘No no, the guy's a bleeder, he can bleed to death from a cut!'

“That's not true, of course, a single cut wouldn't kill Mario, but I had to get Doc Kearns, who was as much a doc as Al Capone, to stop the session. By the time I was able to make Kearns understand that this kind of bleeder had a terrible disease and was in mortal danger from injuries of any kind, Dempsey was whaling away at Mario. They were wearing headgear, but the champ was mostly working on body punches that day. A left to the midsection, one to the chest, a right to the stomach, a left to the eye, another right to the solar plexus, a straight left to the nose. Then a shower of blows I couldn't count, mostly to the chest and stomach. Mario wouldn't go down. He had trained himself pretty well and blocked about one of every two punches, skipping away from the champ. I saw his face starting to swell under the headgear. The Mauler got Mario against the ropes and hit him with everything he had. By now I was screaming and Kearns was yelling—‘Stop hitting, cut it out Champ, ring the goddam bell for Christ's sakes.' But the fans, who'd all paid Stillman a buck apiece to get in, they were yelling too, and Dempsey was pounding Mario into a pulp, literally slugging the life out of my chum.

“When the bell finally rang to end the round, Kearns jumped into the ring, with me right behind. But Kearns's concern was not Mario, it was for his meal ticket. He was telling the Mauler to get up off his stool, they had to beat it out of Stillman's fast. I ran to Mario, slouched on the stool in his corner as he began to swell up and get as dark as a thundercloud. His stomach was already purple from internal bleeding. His blue head wobbled, puffing up everywhere, even the ears. Cranial bleeding can destroy brain cells. The only red blood was from his nose and eyes, which were streaming. Yet Mario himself was smiling. The smile of a wounded, triumphant ghost.

“By the time the ambulance arrived and attendants lifted Mario onto a stretcher, Kearns had cleared Dempsey out of Stillman's and most of the crowd was gone. Mario looked up at me from the stretcher. ‘I landed a couple of pretty good ones, didn't I?'

“‘Why, Mario?' I asked my friend when I saw his eyes rolling back and he was about to lose consciousness.

“‘Tell my mother,' he said, ‘I did it for her. Aw, why bother? Anyhow, this is the quickest way to Tahiti, isn't it?'

“Those were his last words. He vomited a dark pool on the stretcher. Bled to death internally, his body a cavity of blood by the time we got to the hospital. I said I was next of kin because I knew Mario wouldn't want his body sent back home for his mother to make a shrine in a cemetery. He's buried in Queens not far from where my boss Houdini was stuck a few years later. Mario had tricked Jack Dempsey into killing him.”

“How terrible you had to be a witness,” I said.

“Mario wanted a pal to see him through, that's not so bad. One paper ran an item about the sparring session, the
New York Evening Graphic
. Mario had talked some idiot at Stillman's into taking his word that he could mimic Firpo's bulling-forward style for a couple of rounds. Walter Winchell was still after the Champ for ducking service in the World War, so he wrote that Dempsey didn't mind killing in the ring even though he never took his chances in the trenches of France. Tex Rickard issued a statement that Dempsey was heartbroken at what happened to Mario and he'd suspend training for the rest of the week. Regardless, the Mauler finished off Firpo in two rounds.”

“Did you ever get in touch with Mario's mother?” I asked.

“Never. For all I know, she thinks he's alive and in Australia or something.”

“Or Tahiti,” said Billie Bonsignori, who at last had the new shots in. “I can't even imagine what it would be like to have hemophilia.”

“Oh, a bleeder is like everyone else,” Nils said rather breezily, “only more so.”

We watched the car pursuit, Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea in a Ford on their way to their rendezvous on the beach, with Guy Kibbee following in a Hudson. Nils thought the shots were okay. “But the suspense is already there,” he said.

“The suspense is never already there, honey,” Billie said. “You have to build it like you were building with blocks.”

“Time is not linear,” Nils said. “We can speed it up, slow it down, reverse it. A Moviola can play with time as much as memory does. We don't have to be literal.”

Nils looked at me. “I think you need the cars,” I said. “I wonder if you also have an anguished close-up of Kibbee.” That was me, all right, indentifying with the cuckold.

“As it just so happens, young man,” said Billie, “I do have that shot.”

“Great,” said Nils, “let's see if we can hit the nail even harder on its head with Kibbee listening to a song on his car radio about his sweetheart in someone else's arms.”

“Careful, maestro,” said Billie, “or I'll tell that to Littlewits, and he'll make us do it.” In order to include the close-up I'd suggested, she ran the shots in reverse. McCrea appeared to be backing his car into Kibbee's. As Billie reeled her Moviola backward, I saw a little note tucked in Nils's copy of the script. I knew the handwriting:

Your hands are cut

And they bleed.

I guess that's what

They think they need.

I look at you

And see you suffer;

I know my cue—

To be your buffer.

Pammy was going to be in Nils's next picture whether he liked it or not, apparently, and had already begun her campaign. Nils looked at me looking at the note.

“You know she's a switch-hitter,” he said.

I knew nothing, said nothing.

“She was in Mexico last weekend with Elsbeth Hammond.”

Hammond was a casting director known as a shrewd judge of budding talent. She gave useful tips to young actors, principally toning them down, nudging them not to try so hard, be the way they were at home. She was wiry-haired and attractive in an athletic way, her firm arms and breasts appearing to be extensions of her will, like racquets are for tennis players. “Write me a part for a little Deanna Durbin type I want to put in a comedy,” she once told me, “and then go bulk yourself up a bit. You're much too spindly.” Since Pammy was a big star, I was surprised she even knew a casting director, stunned that she actually desired a woman. I'd thought the night of Mossy's party when she waltzed off with Marlene Dietrich was a joke, not a sexual frolic. When I was allowed years later to go through Pammy's journals, I did come upon the escapade Nils referred to. Setting up the weekend, Pammy had written Hammond, keeping a carbon: