I Could Go on Singing (3 page)

“Let me finish. Please. In all these years of tours, she has never entered England. Why not? The boy is there. His father is there. Old wounds. Jenny Bowman is just beginning a tour. That is her business. We keep her on a sustaining contract, small money, plux
X
dollars per picture plus percentage, and a minimum of one every two years. She owes us this picture. We want her for it. The arrangement was that she would come back here after the tour and we would get into it. George Kogan arranged this tour. Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Israel. Presenting Jenny Bowman. Fine. A month ago I heard a rumor she would open the tour in London. I was astonished, Jason. I was apprehensive. To ease my mind I called certain contacts in New York. I thought that perhaps it was some inescapable booking arrangement. But no. I found that the London engagement was at the
insistence
of Jenny Bowman. And I found that she has been more than normally difficult of late. Moody. Too gay or too depressed. I am a pessimistic man, Jason. If there is any way for things to go wrong, they very probably will. It is the rule I follow. Suppose, in her emotional state, she wants to see the boy, and the boy’s father after all these years. The British press is merciless. It is savage. It rends and destroys. It could destroy her. Would you say she is in potential trouble, Jason Brown?”

“Yes. But …”

“It is a nervous habit with you, Jason, to say yes and then say but. There is affection between you. She trusts you. And you know no good can come of stirring up something which happened over thirteen years ago. She is vulnerable now. With you to steady her, and the script to remind her of what she might lose …”

“And what the studio might lose, Sid.”

“Careers have survived strange things, but thus far no one has tested the survival aspects of public knowledge of a bastard child.”

“But the father adopted him, didn’t he?”

“It would be placed in the worst possible light by the press.”

Jason thought for a moment. “So you hired me on the remote chance I might be able to yank your chestnuts out of the fire, Sid. If I can, it is cheap insurance. You’ve been complimenting me on my integrity. Don’t you think I have too much integrity to use an old and valued relationship like that, to go meddle in her life to save the studio a property?”

Wegler shrugged and smiled. “Jason, I could try to be subtle with you, but you have been in the business too long. This is a simple thing, is it not? You have been hired to work on a script. There is a way I want you to work on that script. You can refuse. There is a clause in the contract covering such eventualities, and it is covered in the studio agreement with the Screenwriters’ Guild.”

The trap had snapped so loudly Jason was startled by the sound of the sharp teeth. He saw himself unemployed and virtually unemployable. He looked blankly at Sidney Wegler and said hollowly, “Why you son of a bitch!”

Wegler shook his head sadly. “As I told you, things like this make me feel shabby. This is Friday. She opens in London Sunday night. Transportation is being arranged for you,
Jason. All expenses of course. Our man in London is Tommy Bird. Use him, but don’t trust him. I would go myself, but of course Jenny despises me. A word of advice, Jason. Think of it as something you are doing for her. It will make you much happier.”

“Does Jenny know I’m coming?”

“Be a surprise.”

Now, on the jet six miles above the black Atlantic, Jason Brown knew he most certainly would be a surprise to Jenny Bowman. And he vowed that he would take Wegler’s advice at its face value. Do it for Jenny. And if what seemed best for Jenny Bowman seemed to run counter to what was best for Sidney Wegler, then no one need ever know in what gentle direction he had urged her, if indeed he could exert any influence over her at all. Jenny Bowman, with the bit in her teeth, was a fearsome thing indeed.

He thought of her and felt a little residual quiver of old longing in the pit of his stomach. He remembered what a friend had said of her once. He said Jenny had yare. The word had needed much explanation. It is something a boat has when it turns out to have that little indefinable something the marine architects never built into it. A special rakish style to its buoyance, that wondrous hell-with-you flavor that the very true and very special boats have.

The handsome stewardess brought him his third drink and gave him the menu for the Air France midnight snack. Something bland, he thought. Traditional offering to the sneaky Goddess of Ulcer. She had not made herself apparent in some time, but he had the dreary expectation that this trip would bring her out of hiding.

(In Acapulco, on the morning beach, they had eaten the hot boiled shrimp and stuffed the shells into the sand, drunk the icy Dos Equis, swum, touched, smiled, looked deep into each others eyes, then hurried to the little rented car to clatter up the long hill to the cabana at the Americana, and she had laughed aloud on the way up, at joy anticipated, at the good tastes of food and heat and love.)

Time moved five hours and the clock moved ten, and Jason Brown smiled a crinkled good-by at the stewardess and came down the boarding steps, fusty with sleep, his legs uncertain with stiffness, light topcoat slung over one shoulder, a rather shapeless felt hat on the back of his head. He came down to a welcome solidity of concrete, a misty, watery sunshine, the guile and calculated confusions of France, mildly cursing the efficiency of Wegler’s people who had arranged this trip. He found the area for passengers in transit, not subject to French customs, recovered his single suitcase, found his reservations on the London shuttle flight in order, checked his bag through and had forty minutes to kill. He killed it with some extraordinarily bad coffee, with exercising an implacable resistance against all the efforts—from the exceptionally clever to the clumsily grotesque—of the French to remove from his person any available number of dollars, and with composing and sending a cable to Bonny, styled to make her laugh. At four years old she seemed far more willing to accept the knowledge of having an aunt instead of a mother than she was to comprehend that all the daddies seemed to go off to work except hers. He imagined it would please her to be able to tell her small friends that now, for a change, as a special bonus added to the three weeks of his having gone to the studio each working day, her daddy was on a business trip.

Tommy Bird met the London plane. He was a pouched, balding, fidgety man with tan, nervous eyes, a man a little too elegantly dressed, a man whose eyes would wander to look at something off behind you when he was talking most earnestly. He helped Jason Brown through the swift, grave politenesses of customs and led him off to a shiny gray Humber driven by one of his younger associates in the London office.

Tommy Bird was one of the immutable characteristics of a very volatile industry. The arranger—the meeter and
greeter, the local promotion man, the beater of many drums, adjusting his beat to the relative importance of the mission. Jason sensed that, as a writer, he was being given a very muted drumbeat, but the essence of the art was to make the recipient feel that mountains were being moved in his honor.

“Got you in the Dorchester, Mr. Brown. Made sure they’ll do right by you, room and service and all. Good location. Park Lane. Here’s a card with the office numbers. Mount Street. Not too far from you. Anything you want, anything at all, you just pick up the phone and we’ll bust a leg to see you get it.”

“I suppose you people have been busy with Jenny Bowman?”

“Actually, no. I mean this concert tour thing is separate. Not that we aren’t willing and anxious, you understand. A great star. But she’s got her own team along, of course. You here to see her?”

“Didn’t they tell you?”

“Out in the field, what you get used to, they don’t tell you a thing.”

“Just to check over some portions of a script with her.”

“Something about Dawn?”

“The Longest Dawn.”

“That’s it. I remember a thing in the
Reporter
. That’s what she does next for us.”

Jason Brown looked out the window at the nondescript jumble of the southern part of the city. “Things look a little different,” he said.

“When were you here last?”

“Almost five years ago.”

“It’s jumping. Turnpikes, buildings going up, neon, teenage gangs, race riots. Civilization finally got here, Jason. Okay if I call you Jason?”

“Please do, Tommy.”

“You want I should get hold of Jenny’s manager and set anything up for you, Jason?”

“No thanks. I know George Kogan. I can manage.”

“She opens a charity thing at the Palladium tonight.”

“Yes, I know.”

“They could have sold the house three times. And try to get a ticket to the opening, the regular opening. Honest to God, Jason, the years go by and that broad just gets more tremendous. Her and the people, like some big love feast.
Over thirty years in the business I’ve got, and she hits that first note and it’s like ice water running down my back. Jolie used to do that to me, too. She’s the most since him. The stateside end of this tour has been a smash, hey?”

“S.R.O. from one end of the country to the other.”

“What a property!” Tommy Bird said with a wistful sigh.

As soon as he was checked into the Dorchester, he thanked Tommy Bird and his young associate and sent them on their way. He had forgotten the pleasure of being checked in by hotel people who seemed to take a genuine pleasure in serving him and making him welcome. He refused assistance in unpacking. The tall windows of his sedate room looked out across Hyde Park. He unpacked, took a hot bath, put on a dark suit suitable for the evening, sent the suit he had traveled in to be pressed, and went down and had a late and rather heavy lunch in a quiet corner of a big hushed dining room. He knew there was no point in trying to establish contact with Jenny prior to a performance.

After the leisurely lunch, he put on his topcoat as protection against the increasing chill of the afternoon, and took a long walk through the relative emptiness of the West End on a Sunday afternoon, Piccadilly, Bond Street, St. James Square, Regent Street. London gave him a feeling of pleasant anonymity, of a measured and timeless courtesy, a feeling that if he had been able to walk on his hands, he would attract very little additional attention. It is, he thought, an older and more complex culture, larded with a certain smugness, shot through with little social nuances and distinctions we never catch, vastly more tolerant of eccentricity. A society of contradictions as strange as our own. They bowdlerize their novels, yet print daily papers exploiting the more feral and rancid aspects of sex with a smirking boldness unknown in all the rest of the western world. And he could guess what they would do to Jenny Bowman, given the slightest opening. She thought herself inured to a bad press. She had earned one from time to time. And the bigger you get, the smaller the incident required. But she would be utterly, incredulously vulnerable to what the British press would do to her.

And this, he thought sourly, would be the result of a certain quality of decency over thirteen years ago. If Wegler had anything to do with it at that time, he could imagine the pressure on Jenny to fly to Sweden or Japan and have the pregnancy terminated. Jenny Bowman, he decided, had never
been in the habit of making small mistakes. Her errors were as vast as her talents.

He struck west from Regent Street, got lost once, and then came out on Argyll Street not far from the Palladium. It was just dusk and the marquee lights had not been turned on, but he could read her name. Jenny Bowman. A recognition, as valid in Cairo as in Buenos Aires. It was a name that picked up a little corner of everyone’s mind and riffled that stack of memories. And for everyone they were good memories. Maybe that was the key to her. Dozens of journeyman movies and a few, a very few great ones, but who has ever had many of those? And those songs she had made her own, had stamped so permanently and indelibly with her personality and the cadence and tone and heart of her that any other singer attacking them sounded at once imitative, shallow and apologetic.

Jason Brown stepped out of the cool wind on Argyll Street to relight his pipe and heard the faint music from inside, a big band coming down solid and hard on “When You’re Smiling.” The music broke off and, after a hesitation, took it again from the top. He grinned and thought of George Kogan in there, man of all talents, working hard with the leader, doing the final smoothing of the beat and tempo, while in some hotel suite Jenny would be stretched out, a little more pallid than usual, staring a hole through the ceiling as she ran all the lyrics through her mind and fretted, as she always did, about her voice.

He turned away. After two blocks he remembered the name of an East Indian place where he and Joyce had eaten a curry so savage the tears had run down their cheeks. He hailed a cab. The driver knew the place and said it was still open. As soon as he walked in, Jason Brown knew it was a mistake. The memories were too strong, the years too mercilessly swift. But he stayed and ate, as though it were a penance. This memory—all memories of Joyce were linked to Jenny Bowman. One love conditions you for the next. Somehow, with Jenny, he had become hooked on that feeling of simulated strength, the needed man syndrome. And, in rebound from Jenny when she was whole again, he had almost consciously sought a woman who would need him. Joyce had been lovely, sensitive, intelligent, ardent, adoring, amusing. And she had been a drunk. What greater need? And in the first genuine binge after Bonny was born, she had failed to make that curve south of San Clemente.
God only knew where she was headed. The police following her said nobody could have made it at a hundred miles an hour. But almost five years ago they had been at that corner table, and she was three months pregnant, six months sober, and she had been fruitful, luminous, loving, the shade of her dress turning her eyes to pure lavender.

He walked again and it was almost eleven when he reached the Palladium. The big cars were waiting, the chauffeurs in small groups, smoking and talking. There were flocks of taxis and London policemen waiting to take care of the mass exodus. When he was fifty feet away, he heard that sudden explosion of sound which meant she had finished a number. It was a rushing, roaring sound and it seemed to have, as always, a depth of tone and a resonance other entertainers seldom called forth. The great animal called Audience bayed with all its thousands of throats and made the back of his neck and the backs of his hands tingle. He found the stage door. He rattled the latch and the commissionaire opened it a half foot and looked out at him dubious and questioning, a stately old gentleman of vast dignity.