Wake Up and Dream (29 page)

Clark gauged his arrival on the red carpet outside the Carthay Theater on the night of the premiere of
Possessed
perfectly, leaving just enough time to hang around with the crowds without it seeming like he was waiting for Joan Crawford. They might have had to move this whole showboat to the Carthay because Howard Hughes was putting on some carnie ride called
Broken Looking Glass,
which wasn’t any proper kind of movie at all, up at Grauman’s on this same night, but you sure as hell wouldn’t have known it from here. Flashbulbs flashed. Floodlights hazed the sky. Then Crawford arrived, and the crowd went apeshit, and Clark gave the newshounds a knowing grin as he offered her his arm. Then she planted a kiss on him for just that teenie bit longer than expected. All in all, the two of them put on as good an act out on that red carpet as anything they’d done in the talkie.

“Savor the moment, Gable,” she’d murmured. “You never know how long it’ll last.”

He got a call from the studio a week or two after to come in on a day between shootings. He was living in a serviced bungalow in the grounds of the Marmont by then. A low, adobe-walled structure, the roof a shrug of pantiles, windows a raised eyebrow of arches, it and a cluster of other similar peasant-style dwellings formed a corral amid the winding drives, hibiscus bushes and palms. Quiet Mexicans in white pajamas did the watering and clipping. Every time he stepped outside and climbed into whatever car he was currently driving, he decided that paradise, if you excluded the Mexicans, must look pretty much like this.

He drove south toward Culver City with no particular thoughts in his head. Some publicity thing, most likely. Maybe there was a new director or leading lady they wanted him to meet. Past the Beverly Wiltshire and past the Brown Derby and past the Cotton Club, he reached the fortress-like walls of MGM studios, and followed them around to the Grecian-pillared entranceway, where the security guard gave him a smile and a salute as he raised the barrier. Trying to remember the guy’s name—was it Walter,
Willy
?—Clark Gable responded with a cheery wave.

MGM occupied several lots around Culver City in those days, but this, the largest and the headquarters, was a city in itself. Not just a congested jumble of the new enclosed soundstages which had replaced the open or glassed-in lots of the silent era, but also a school, a small hospital, several decent restaurants, and even a small railroad to carry things here and there.

He pulled in at his designated space in the main parking lot beside the offices. He smiled back at himself as he checked his parting in the car mirror. It went without saying that it was another beautiful day.

The receptionist didn’t quite get up for him—that was reserved for
real
stars—but she did make a small bobbing movement, almost a curtsey, from behind her glass and chrome desk. Then another broad came from somewhere to find him, one of those near-edible gofers who bumped at you with their breasts, and fluttered their eyelashes so much you were sure you felt a breeze. She reminded Clark about a party up in Laurel Canyon she was
sure
they’d both been to as she led him along corridors to wherever it was they were heading, although he concentrated mostly on the sway of her ass.

He’d imagined the usual handshakes in an exec’s office, but he was being taken down deeper, darker routes into one of the technical areas. A small
uh
-
oh
sounded in his head. If he was being required to revoice some of his lines, the request to do so should have come down the channels from the director, or at least his assistant. Anything less was a diminution of status. Maybe he should speak to Mina about this. Maybe he should have spoken to Mina already. Or maybe Mina already knew about this, and simply hadn’t bothered to tell him. All that Californian sunlight which Clark had been carrying with him started dimming inside his head.

As if sensing his unease, the pretty gofer stopped and turned and nudged at him sweetly with her breasts. This was, she assured him in breathy pants, something that all the MGM roster of actors were doing. Just a small, quick, test. Nothing really, but rather exciting nevertheless.

He was put in a room where all the walls had been faced with what looked like chickenwire, except for a window into a bigger and better lit space. With the amount of electrical stuff in there, and but for the chickenwire and the absence of a microphone, he could have been in a sound booth. But he could tell that the creation of corkscrew glass and wire which dangled from the ceiling before him had nothing to do with receiving sound. Just looking at it made his teeth itch, and set off a weird, resonant buzzing inside his head.

The guys who were mooching and prodding in the space beyond weren’t wearing white coats. This being Los Angeles, they wore paisley cravats and Palm Beach suits. One of them leaned to a microphone and spoke to Clark through a loudspeaker. He had on a scratched namebadge which said he was
Hiram P.
Something
-
or-Other
the Third
, but he had to squint at his clipboard before he called Clark Mr, ah, Gable. He peered at Clark a little more closely like he maybe even recognized him from some movie he’d seen. Then he smiled to reveal a most un-Hollywood set of buck teeth and told him, just like the breast-bumping girl had, that this was nothing more than a few quick tests. Best to think of it as simply a rehearsal, Mr Gable. Better still, a test shoot.

Dials twitched. Valves glowed. Things buzzed and hummed. Then the frail coil of glass and metal hovering before him started buzzing and humming as well. This, he was just about starting to realize, must have something to do with all that voodoo stuff about—what was the guy’s name again?—Lars Bechmeir’s new discovery that Howard Hughes had then gone and invested in so heavily.

“All we want you to do,” Hiram P. Something-or-Other’s voice crackled, “is exactly what we already know you’re good at. We want you to try to act for us, Mr Gable. Is that alright?”

Could have done without the
try to
, and there was nothing worse than being dropped into a situation for which you’d had no chance to prepare, but Clark swallowed, nodded. Then, after the first one-two-three count-in, there was a sudden increase in the angry buzzing and a smell of rubber burning, and Hiram and his mates were flapping around for several minutes as they struggled to fix some fault.

These guys didn’t have the look of MGM employees, although they were some of the oddest ever hired guns. Clark tried asking them a few questions as he waited. He even got some replies. No, this equipment wasn’t even MGM property—this Bechmeir guy had already set up some kind of trust through which they were employed and all use of his patents had to be channeled. Neither was any of it owned by the Hughes Corporation, although Hughes had already shot and premiered that first feelie-movie to what you might call
mixed
reviews. The whole business sounded odd to Clark. It was probably just another flash in the pan like 3-D or Smellovision, although he understood that MGM had to try to keep track.

“I want you to feel happy, Mr Gable. Just straightforward common-or-garden happiness. Any time you’re ready.”

“Now?”

“No,
no
. Sorry, no. Not
now
. You’ve got to
tell
us you’re ready. And then I’ll get this spool here turning—you wouldn’t believed how much magnetic wire costs by the foot—and then I’ll count one, two, three, like it’s the start of a song. And
then
you feel happiness. Right?”

“Right.”

Clark thought of himself as generally a pretty breezy kind of guy, at least off-set, but he knew he was better at doing brooding, dark performances. Until recently when he did happy as an actor, it had generally been because he was being especially nasty. Like raping the leading lady, or torturing the guy who’d come to rescue her.

“What’s the, uh, premise?”

Hiram and his colleagues exchanged glances. “It’s just, well,
happiness
. There isn’t a premise. Try using your imagination, is what we suggest.”

No use doing what any actor would normally do, which was simply to
act
happy. Not with this icily humming twisting thing reaching down from the chickenwire ceiling to claw at the insides of his head like the underneath of the iceberg that did for the Titanic. No use changing the way he stood and moved, or using the smile and the eyes and the voice. For these were just effects, calculations. Sure, when you acted happy, you felt happy, but it was as different to regular happiness as kids playing baseball in a dusty backlot was to Walter P. Johnson winding up on the mound for the Nats. Poor Peg Entwistle had once explained Stanislavsky to him, but as far as he was concerned, acting was a craft, plain and simple, and he really didn’t buy all that
acting-from-the-inside
shit. Far as he was concerned, if it was inside, it might as well stay there.

“You ready, Mr ah Gable?”

“Sure.”

Sunsets, maybe. Or cars. Yeah, cars. Or better still, sex. No, no, no, no. Not sex. That was some other emotion entirely. But what about kittens? Weren’t they supposed to make you feel happy? Yeah, kittens at Christmas. Or sex in a car filled with kittens at Christmas. Or how about…

But the damn thing had broken down again. He could tell that just from the renewed smell of burning and the bellyache which now seemed to start right down in his groin. Eventually, though, after much fiddling from Hiram P. Bucktooth and his minions, they managed to get the thing working. It still felt odd. But odd wasn’t even the word. It was like he was being joined, stretched, swallowed. No. It wasn’t even that. It was like, in some way which had nothing to do with those guys on the other side of the window, he wasn’t
alone
. His fingertips tingled. His scrotum crawled. He looked left and right and glanced behind his back in case someone had somehow snuck in here without his noticing. He also felt, if he was totally honest, like he needed to take a shit.

“Seem to be having more than our usual teething troubles with the equipment today. If you’ll just bear with us, Mister, ah… I’m sure we’ll get there…”

Get there they did. Or somewhere. They made him do fear, which was all too fucking easy. And elation—although wasn’t that just happiness with extra gravy?—and all he reckoned he’d come up with was more of this sick displaced feeling, which was how he actually felt. Then there was another glitch, and more smoke. No way of telling from the reaction of the guys beyond the window with their off-kilter teeth and fashion sense how he was doing, but it was already pretty obvious he wasn’t doing that well. If Hiram P hadn’t called an end to things when he did, Clark was seriously concerned that he was either going to have an embarrassing personal accident, or faint.

“Guess you’d like to see the results?”

He shrugged.

He was already fully convinced by now that nothing would ever come of this process. Too fiddly. Too messy. Too—well, just plain
wrong
. Nevertheless, he was mildly curious to see what they’d done as they took him into their temple of bakelite, glass and bad acne and wowed him with their talk of wavelengths, volts and amperes. Then they showed him a big glass bulb with a green ghost floating in it, and told him that was what he looked like to the receiver thing in there. They re-spooled the wire through the reading heads and reminded him again about how expensive this stuff was, and ran it back through crocodile clips out of some kind of amplifier into a dome-shaped grid that looked like a large, upturned sieve sat on rubber grommets right there before them on the desk. The sieve sparked and crackled. It gave off that thunderstorm and clean armpits smell with which the whole world would soon become familiar. And then it actually
glowed
, and to Clark it felt as if the devil himself had just shoved his coldest, biggest finger right up his ass.

“You okay, Mister ah…? We’ve found that some performers have a particular sensitivity to their own emanations.”

“Felt better.” He guessed he was probably swaying a little in the chair in which they’d sat him. And they probably thought by now he’d come straight from the speakeasy.

“This, er, is, erm, happiness.”

The field danced and glimmered. It wasn’t happiness, but it sure as hell was
something
.

“Jeeze…”

And then he found that he was reaching toward this fizzing pit of nonsense without even thinking about what he was doing. The weirdest thing of all was that the bloody stuff seemed to be reaching back to him—shaping itself to clasp his hand with wraith-like fingers before Hiram P grabbed him and hit the off switch and muttered about how he could have damn well gone and electrocuted himself. When Clark was finally led back along the corridors, he realized that he did need to visit the restroom—and pretty badly at that. As Miss Don’t-I-Know-You waited outside and preened her tits, he hunched over the studio porcelain and was copiously, copiously sick in spasming yelps.

All in all, it was a pretty bad introduction to new technology that had become
de rigeur
in almost all the big studios within a year, even though the results were most often a mess. Clark’s contract was renewed and he did his best to soldier on through
Windy August
and
The Raging King
, but the technicians were confused, and the rentals and royalties which the canny Bechmeir Trust were demanding of MGM for the use of their equipment meant skyrocketing costs.

None of the actors professed to like the new turn that their business was taking, and the demand in those early days was for nothing but crude emoting—all the nuance which had started to appear in the better talkies had instantly disappeared—but Clark seemed to have an especial antipathy. That first feelie experience with Hiram bucktooth in that chicken shed seemed to have set a jinx which continued to follow him. He got used to sparks and hissings and directors’ curses and the smell of things burning. But he almost preferred those times to the ones when the iconoscopes actually worked. He didn’t like the way those cold glass eyes made him feel—which was ill, basically, but a with whole lot of other crap going on around the edges. It was as if he was being sucked away. No, it wasn’t even that. It was as if the real guy he was almost sure he was somehow wasn’t standing there any longer and had slipped away like the sliver of last night’s soap down a plughole into—what? Some other place, time, dimension? These weren’t the kind of thoughts that Clark was used to having, and he felt no more comfortable with them than he did with the iconoscope itself. When he tried to explain all of this to his fellow actors, quite a few of them went partway to agreeing with him, but then they’d shrug and tell him it was a knack like any other. That it took a bit of getting used to, for sure, but it was like booze, or getting your sealegs, or smoking locoweed, or any of the other fancy new pastimes which were then making their way into the industry, and it was really just a question of giving it your best.