The Golden Age (59 page)

The graphic arts still had their hard-eyed money lobby in Fifty-seventh Street as well as their own highly rigged stock exchange, dominated, suitably, by a Rockefeller who had invented something called the Museum of Modern Art or, as Wallace Stevens liked to intone in his most poetic voice, “a mus-ee-um of
mod
-ern …? art …?” —the words “modern” and “art” each ending with a bewildered sigh. But the museum, like most Rockefeller institutions, had a vital financial function: to publicize and endorse those artists that its patron collected and so drive up their prices. It was all, Peter had once written, like the Defense Department’s symbiotic support of the numerous weapons industries that supported, in turn, the Pentagon and their cheery go-between, the Congress.

As they took their seats, Peter asked Aeneas the usual Broadway question. “So what do you hear?”

“Everyone connected with the show’s ecstatic, of course.”

“Of course.”

Peter must have sounded mocking, because Aeneas’s response was sharp. “Everyone’s working for a hundred dollars a week or less.”

“Well, it is a …” Peter could not find the word.

“Showcase,” supplied Diana, cheeks pink from excitement. “What’s it about?”

“The Trojan War,” both Peter and Aeneas answered her. Peter laughed. “Aeneas has heard Touche play most of the numbers. So have I. Once, with a bailiff at the door, come to collect the furniture. I think Touche talked him into investing.”

Aeneas was scribbling in his notebook. “It’s about the Trojan War and the Judgment of Paris. Set in the town of Mount Olympus, Washington State. Time of the Spanish–American War. Ulysses is a local boy who goes off to fight. The story starts when he comes home to his wife, Penelope …”

“No
Odyssey
?” Diana sat between them.

“That’s
after
the war. When Paris …” Aeneas was now studying his playbill. There was loud chatter in the aisles as the people who wanted to be seen took their time getting seated. In the pit, the orchestra was warming up.

Aeneas continued. “Paris is a traveling salesman who arrives by balloon. He awards the golden apple to a local Venus married to a military man, of course, and so Paris upsets the local Juno and Minerva. Then Paris flies off with the prettiest girl in town, Helen. So Ulysses and a half-dozen ex-soldiers go after Paris, to bring Helen home.”

“Isn’t all this a bit pretentious?” Peter wanted Touche to have a success, but to use a classical story, like the
Odyssey
, seemed like asking for it from an American audience proudly cut free from the classics.

“It’s basic mythical stuff. So why not? Cole Porter did pretty well by Shakespeare.
Kiss Me, Kate
’s going to be around forever.”

“Forever,” said Peter, “is a long time. In ten years it’ll be forgotten.”

“
Madame Butterfly
’s still around.”

“But that’s Puccini …”

“Oh, do shut up, Peter.” Diana was brisk. “Don’t be such a snob.” Then house lights dimmed; overture began. Moross’s music tended towards the melodic ballad, alternating with turn-of-the-century blues,
ragtime, waltzes. Peter was charmed despite his vow to himself not to be overwhelmed by Aeneas’s enthusiasm for what, Peter was certain, had to be the most intrinsically banal of collaborative efforts, the musical comedy, which, at its best, was neither music nor much in the way of comedy.

The curtain rose. Loud applause for the set. Since the audience was mostly made up of theater people, they cheered their own. But even Peter was struck by the brightness of the stage and the sense that it really was 1900 and that a new century was beginning. Wars are all ended. Boys are all coming home. Girls are all waiting. Mother Hare, a local witch, is distressed that no one is dead.

Then, suddenly, up flared Touche’s wit, which had got him entirely banned from working in films or television; fortunately, the national censors had no power as yet over Broadway.

Ulysses and his fellow “Boys in Blue” reminisce about the late war with Spain. Ulysses began:

A great wave of applause swept from the back of the theater across the orchestra pit and onto the stage, where the hitherto edgy actors began, suddenly, easily, even joyously, to play. That’s why, thought Peter, astonished by his own revelation, they call it play—a Play. He turned to pass this wisdom on to Aeneas, who was too busy writing, small flashlight illuminating small notebook.

Peter wondered how different this New York audience of known theatricals would be from the rest of the country. Certainly different from the audience at Washington’s National Theatre, where the lyrics for Ulysses and the Boys in Blue would be considered treasonable by the Red-bashers who were now in full command of Congress and press. The defeat of the United States in Korea had given ammunition to those who saw Stalin’s hand everywhere. McCarthy was still formidable, his enemies mostly chastened; then after the election of 1952, Truman had gone
home to Independence, his place taken by the famously bad-tempered General Eisenhower, who had concluded, as euphemistically as he could, a surrender to the North Koreans, back of whom were China’s Red demons backed, in turn, by the Satanic puppet-master in the Kremlin.

Thirty thousand ill-trained American troops had died. Meanwhile, the American Communist Party leaders had all been locked up even though their party was a legal one. But then most laws of the land had been set aside during this terrible emergency in which the United States, with no military nor economic rival in the world, was, somehow, in terrible danger from an atomic Pearl Harbor for which schoolchildren were being prepared by government-sponsored drills so that when the mushroom clouds sprouted across the land they would know enough to duck under their desks and so survive to fight the Asiatic hordes with rulers, chalk erasers, baseball bats.

Onstage a slender middle-aged man was doing a soft-shoe number. Simultaneously, he was singing, in the character of Hector, the defeated Trojan hero. The actor had much the same charm and style as Fred Astaire and came, no doubt, from the same school of vaudeville. He was in pensive mood as he contemplated the perils that Ulysses and the Boys would face on their way home.

There was applause as Hector strutted offstage.

“Jack Whiting,” said Aeneas. “He’s …” But Peter could hear nothing more through the applause.

A thin bubbly lady scientist was relentlessly cheery as she predicted last earthly things to a triumphant chorus of

Peter rather wished that Touche had had the nerve to show just how well evil could flourish in America’s atomic world, but then if he had been so bold, he would not even have got to the stage of the Phoenix Theatre.

At the final curtain, the vaguely familiar tune from the first
act was reprised, and Peter realized that Touche had played it for him when they first met, years earlier, in the Chelsea Hotel. It was a love-is-all-that-we-have duet between Ulysses and Penelope, united at last.

When the music stopped, the audience was still hoping for more. But the curtain fell. Cheering. Stamping. Whistling. Actors took their curtain calls. Aeneas hurried up the empty aisle; only the daily newspaper reviewers had left. By the time Aeneas got them to the lobby, Diana had blown her nose loudly and Peter had dried his eyes with the back of his hand.

“What is it that works?” Peter asked Aeneas in the brightness of the lobby; behind them the audience, still at their seats, continued to applaud.

“The war is over,” said Aeneas. “That’s what works.” He put away flashlight and notebook; dried his glasses.

“Only it’s not. The Russians are still coming. We all know that.”

“The war,” Aeneas growled, “is over on the stage of the Phoenix Theatre as of March eleventh, 1954. That’s why everyone’s cheering in there. That’s what everyone wants. That’s what we thought we had when World War Two ended. We were all ready to start up our lives again. Then, we got Korea and …”

“But,” said Diana to Peter, “it’s really over now. And we can,” she reprised the song,
“go home at last.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” But Peter could tell that there were all sorts of conflicting emotional crosscurrents at work in the American psyche, and Latouche had certainly tapped into one. Then a smiling man in tuxedo—a producer?—told them, “There’s a small party downstairs. By the johns.”

The small party was gradually joined by much of the cast and Latouche’s numerous friends. Waiters, out-of-work actors, served champagne. The room filled up, everyone talking at once.

Tim Farrell was standing with Gore Vidal at the foot of the stairs. Gore, Peter noticed, with some pain, was still lean while he himself had never been heavier or hungrier. He had already finished off a paper cup of peanuts from the bar despite a warning sound from the watchful Diana beside him. Diet tomorrow.

Peter greeted Tim and Gore. Greetings on such an occasion involved numerous “wonderfuls” on all sides as Latouche’s triumph was duly celebrated, not to mention that of the composer, Jerry Moross, who was also standing at the foot of the stairs, with his wife, Hazel, waiting for Touche. Sooner or later everyone was obliged to wait for Touche, who led a dozen simultaneous lives, making the weather for others.

“Where is Emma?” Peter asked.

“In Washington. Doing her bit for McCarthy.”

“If I knew Tim better,” said Gore, “I’d suggest he divorce her.”

Tim laughed, somewhat weakly. “Well, that’s a bit drastic. Anyway, we’re Catholic.”

Peter wanted to know what had brought novelist and film director together.
“Studio One,”
said Gore. “I’m writing plays for TV. To survive. Tim’s one of the regular directors.”

Tim turned to Peter. “Have you ever seen a play on television?”

Peter admitted that he had not. “We have what President Truman calls a ‘television machine’ in the office. To watch McCarthy’s Senate investigation of our Army. Infiltrated, it would seem, with communists.”

Tim looked somewhat glum—loyalty to Emma?

“Actually,” Gore was helpful, “only the Dental Corps appears to be riddled with communists. There’s something about dentistry that makes faith of any kind plausible.”

Tim frowned. “It’s nothing to joke about. Also, remarks like that get heard upstairs.”