The Butterfly Plague (20 page)

Hell’s Babies
took place in Chicago, and it told the story of a floozy’s rise to fame.

One day, not long before this particular day, Dolly had described the South Pacific-pool scene for his mother, and Naomi had said, “But, dear…”

Dolly, extricating himself from the sensuality of the mood, had looked at her quite blankly.

“What’s the matter, Mother?” he asked.

Naomi appeared to be confused.

“Didn’t you say that
Hell’s Babies
takes place in the city of Chicago?”

“It does,” said Adolphus.

“But then why…” She stopped—took a breath and said, “why this pool in the South Pacific?”

“Well—it’s a musical, Mother,” said Dolly—incredulous that she should have to ask. Naomi had just given him a queer look and had wandered away down the beach, accompanied by the yellow dog and carrying her orange parasol.

“Mr. Damarosch?” said Walter meekly, waking Dolly from his reverie. “There are some men here to see you.”

From the tone of Walter’s voice and from the look in his eye, Dolly was prompted to panic.

“What have I done?” he said, trying to hide in his chair.

“It’s not the police, Mr. Damarosch,” Walter explained.

“Well, why didn’t you say so? You said it was ‘some men’ to see me. Doesn’t that always mean the police?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Damarosch,” said Walter. “I haven’t been in any trouble yet.”

“Well you will be. Who are they?”

“Well, that’s it,” said Walter, faltering.

“Say it, boy. Soy it.”

“The men here to see you are from New York.”

“Oh,” Dolly understood.

Mr. Niles, head-of-the-studio, had expressly stated in his note that on no account, under no condition, was Dolly to speak to anyone from New York City. The reason was plain. Money talks. New York owned Niles Studios.

Dolly blanched.

“What will I do?” he asked. “They’ll want to know why I’ve spent so much money on this scene. They’ll want to know why I’ve hired Ajax Apollo—who cannot act. They’ll want me to tell the story—outline the plot of
Hell’s Babies
from start to finish—and I can’t. They’ll want to know why I’m making this picture and I won’t be able to tell them. I’m an artist! I don’t answer questions!”

Walter said, “They’re coming over, now.”

Dolly stared where Walter pointed. Three men, all of whom were the same height, all of whom had the same square, blue-eyed face and the same brown hair, were advancing from the far side of the sound stage. They might have been triplets. They even walked in step; a dancing trio. Vaudeville.

Dolly wanted to fall down.

They all wore blue suits and carried black bags full of either money or sinister weapons—the posture of the bags heavily implying the latter. They were held “at the ready.”

Dolly backed away. Surely they would do him some harm and he did not know where to go.

Just at that moment, far off across the sound stage, a dressing-room door opened. Down stepped Ajax Apollo, six feet tall, nineteen years old, the very picture of male sexuality. He wore, over his well-tanned altogetherness, a chartreuse robe.

He was followed by a retinue of tiny men who wore white coats and who carried little blue towels and boxes of tissue. They were like dancers and walked on their heels, with their toes pointed out to either side. They also bore a slight resemblance to penguins. Albino penguins.

Adolphus touched Walter on the arm, turning him in the direction of Ajax Apollo.

“Get him,” he hissed.

One of the New York visitors heard this. Dolly smiled in a friendly way.

Mr. Apollo approached. “You want somethin’?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dolly, still smiling. “There are three lovely men to see you.”

Ajax stood up tall. He smelled of makeup and incense. He rarely smiled. He did not need to. No one ever looked at his face.

Adolphus stepped forward.

He motioned New York to follow him.

They did so. “You must promise not to touch him,” he said. “But you may look.”

Dolly got to within a cane’s length of Ajax.

Ajax was watching him carefully.

Dolly inserted the end of his cane, chest-high, in the front of Mr. Apollo’s robe. The robe swung open—at first tentatively, and then, so wide that it fell from the shoulders into the waiting hands of two attendant penguins.

New York trembled. One of them grumbled, “He’s wearing a jock-strap…”

“Yes,” said another, “but at least it’s made of gold.”

9:10 a.m.

Walter to Adolphus: “Miss Jacobs will be out in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you, Walter. Now we can use the standins.” The standins were called. They wore tights and each had a figure that supposedly corresponded to the figure of the star it represented. In one case, this was true.

9:30 a.m.

No Myra Jacobs.

“Walter! Take a note!”

9:40 a.m.

Ajax Apollo had to be returned to his dressing room. Portions of his body makeup had been spoiled.

New York was seated, gingerly, in chairs and offered drinks. They must recuperate before the appearance of Myra Jacobs. They wiped their brows with borrowed tissues and smiled with anticipation. Nervously. Making movies was more engrossing than they had thought.

9:45 a.m.

Mr. Niles appeared on the set, looking worn and frightened.

“Where are they?” he quavered to Dolly.

“Over there,” said Adolphus.

“Ah, good,” said Mr. Niles, even permitting himself to smile with relief. “You showed them Myra?”

“No,” said Dolly languidly. “The fact is, so far I’ve only shown them Ajax Apollo.”

Mr. Niles, small and gray, brightened.

“So far, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well, well,” said Mr. Niles. “Well, well, well. Good. Then, if the actors are ready, we should begin. Keep them distracted, Dolly.” Mr. Niles referred to New York. “Keep them distracted, my boy! That’s what we’re here for.”

He trotted away, unburdened, for the moment at least, of their oppression.

9:50 a.m.

Walter loped up and said, “Mr. Damarosch to see Mr. Damarosch.”

“Father?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let him come on,” said Dolly.

The sound stage was now a ship. The passengers had all but assembled. In a moment, George would appear.

9:55 a.m.

George Damarosch made his entrance at some distance from Dolly, at the far side of the stage, and Dolly had a good chance to study him as he made his way across, led by the same bobbing Walter who had announced him.

Dolly really had no idea how old his father was. He tried to calculate it in years, but it was impossible, because George had never celebrated his birthday and Dolly did not know what date it fell on, let alone what year he had been born. He only knew that George had been born in Canada, in a city called Regina, and that, having looked it up on a map once, Dolly found Regina to be in the middle of a rather large expanse of Empire-red plains with no other place names around it. But that did not help in establishing his father’s age. What did help was the way he looked, and judging by that, by appearances, one would have to say that George Damarosch was at least sixty. But, Dolly thought, watching him now crossing the shiny, empty spaces of the stage, he must be nearly seventy. To a child a parent is always middle-aged, and Dolly’s most recurrent image of his father was when he himself was in his early teens and twenties, when George, visiting or being visited, had looked something between a prosperous and robust forty-eight and a virile but stout fifty-five. Now, he seemed more of a grandparent than a parent.

He got to Dolly’s side. Adolphus rose.

There was a silence.

George waited for Walter to leave them, and then he coughed.

Dolly took a step in his father’s direction. George immediately sat down in Dolly’s chair, leaving the gesture of respect stranded in mid-formation.

Dolly drew another (Myra’s) chair from its nearby place, making an irritating squeak on the floor as he did so, and he sat down and stared at his father, and George stared at Dolly and blew his nose in a frayed magenta handkerchief.

“You look in bad condition, ‘Dolphus,” he said finally. “Have you given up living entirely? You look terrible. You look like a freak.”

“I am a freak, Father,” said Dolly simply. He was neither angry nor adamant.

“Come to think of it, I suppose you are,” said George, looking around over his shoulder for spies. And something else.

“What would you like, Father?” Dolly asked.

“Brandy.”

“Brandy,” said Dolly. He called Walter. Walter came. A bottle followed.

George almost looked Dolly in the eye.

He gazed around the sound stage and spoke with oblique attention.

“You bled lately?”

“No, Father.”

“You look peaked. Who takes care of you?”

“I take care of myself.”

“Get a nurse. I always said you should have a nurse. Get yourself a nurse, Doll, and we’ll all go free.” Here the implication was that George, with a minimum of aid from a few others, had spent his entire life in Dolly’s service. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Get yourself a nurse and we’ll all go free,” said George. “Yes.”

“How have you been, Father?” Dolly asked, desperate not to fall into the old pattern of having the conversation revolve for several hours around the question of his affliction.

“How have I been?” said George. “My, my. I find that very touching. Thank you. Nobody has asked me how I’ve been for fifteen years. I have been down. I have been low. I have been,
and you should know it, Doll, made
insignificant by a bunch of nincompoops. In the parlance of the times, I am old hat.” He stared at the set. His voice rose up into the cats. Out to the edges. “I am outre. I am a used shoe. I am a plug nickel. I am forgotten. Abused. Distrusted. Looked at askance. Hated. Dumped. Reviled and thrown out on my backside. In short, I am finished.” Then he looked up and said, “Supposedly.”

It was quite significant that he had not said he was feared in the course of saying that he was hated. In the old days the two were considered to be synonymous.

“What has happened?” said Dolly, knowing that his father would like nothing better than a chance to explain himself in front of all these people.

“Time has happened,” George said. “What they call change and progress. You could say, youth has happened, I suppose. And I am the victim. I was given the boot by the young. I hate the young. They’re monsters. No one under forty knows a thing about life and there isn’t an important office in this town that doesn’t house a bloody (sorry, Doll) but a bloody twenty-year-old kissing someone’s behind and getting what he wants for it. Well, they’ll pay. In time, they all pay. Let me tell you, they do. Someday, they’ll be sixty-five. Yessirree.” (And therein lay the tale.) “No one,” said George, with almost apoplectic emphasis, “no one ever got down on their knees behind me, by God, especially no one under twenty-five. And, by God, I never indulged in it either, and I’ll be damned if I’ll start now.”

He was saying he had been asked to, but Dolly did not know by whom.

New York came forward, displaying smiles.

Several technicians watched and listened. Mr. Cohn, in his hiding place, cringed and heard it too.

Perhaps for George the basic problem was that he should have been a dictator—one who must seize and amass power rather than one who assumes he has it. George had never bothered with a purge. He had never called in the firing squad. Never sent messengers in the middle of the night. He merely assumed he would be obeyed, and for a while he had been, until the people he should have been smart enough to get rid of rose against him in their collective wrath and brought him down. Politics is no game for kings. They are too dependent on their blood. And the blood of their sons.

Many more people had arrived on board by now, and George turned his back on them contemptuously. The new Hollywood was nothing to him, compared to the old. It was the old order (his) that had created the picture industry, and these new people, as someone was to remark in a later era, did not even have faces. In the teens and twenties of the century there had been faces and personalities of epic grandeur, suitable to their station as America’s pantheon of gods and goddesses. Now, for heaven’s sake, there were people like Myra Jacobs, Peggy Gauntlett, Alice Gray, and Ajax Apollo, if you would believe it. Pretty people, nice people, with not a remarkable nose, nor a square chin among them. Without cheekbones, without their own eyelashes, without character and without the majesty of silence. They spoke and when they spoke they spoke with the voices of Potato, Idaho; Rivers, Missouri; Halibut, Massachusetts. Flat, stale, and, for some ungodly reason, profitable. Where was the mystery? Where was the greatness? Where was the allure? There had never been and never would be stars the like of Letitia Virden in this new era. Stars who could incite the passions of the adult, not the louse-brained, sexless passions of a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. (New York blanched and clutched its black bags.) Peggy Gauntlett, indeed! The woman wore pigtails! Or Myra Jacobs, who was all body and no brain, whose fame resided in a pout and a wiggle. A woman who showed what she was, when what was needed was mystery, allure, the promise of virginity hidden beneath the mask of maturity and guile—not the mask of puberty.

George’s motto had always been, “Don’t give ‘em what they want, make ‘em want what you’ve got.” For twenty years (between 1908 and 1928) it had paid off. With stars like Letitia Virden, Naomi Nola, and the rest, and with pictures like
Queen of Hearts, Daughters of Desperation, The Belt of Satan
, and so forth, George had had a hand in forging the American Dream. Now his hand was tied. In 1928 he had brought in his six brothers and his seven nephews, and one by one they had eaten away at his empire until even brothers-in-law, third nephews twice removed, and cousins he had never heard of were into his pockets with scissors and into his back with knives. In 1936 (two months after Ruth had departed for Germany) a nephew from Colorado Springs had walked into George’s office and said, “Uncle George, I’m here to tell you that they want you in the front office,” and when George had replied that “This is the front office!” the nephew from Colorado Springs had said, “Not any more, Uncle George. We need this room for storage,” and that had been that.