Timebends (51 page)

I wanted to laugh but nodded and assured him that it did, and he seemed to relax in contentment, which relieved me as well. I could feel the heat of his body through my sleeve. That people like him were being hunted down like beasts was once again incredible. I determined to conquer whatever problems there were in the screenplay and to make sure it strengthened support for our men fighting the enemy, but to do so by giving each character his own viewpoint and space in the film.

Back in Hollywood in a few weeks, I was discouraged to find yet another putative director wandering about in the Cowan offices, also unpaid. One afternoon I was staring in futility out the studio window when, as in a dream, about twenty perfectly shaped chorus girls carrying identical metal lunch boxes appeared on the green lawn, sat down under a two-story-high white Grecian arch supported by Doric columns, remnant of some set or other, and proceeded to eat. Their faces were painted half white and half green to match similarly divided tights and two-color stockings and shoes. One of them rose now and then on long, gorgeous legs and moved like some humanoid gazelle to chat with another. They were beyond earshot, and the silence loaned the scene an added air of hallucination. A tractor appeared pulling a wheeled circus wagon with an enormous brown bear behind the bars. It halted amidst the girls, who laughed and waved happily to the bear, who looked down at them as though he too were in a dream.

A bulky old Minerva open touring car driven by a uniformed chauffeur now moved into view and came to a glistening halt just below the cage. It was the kind of glorious limousine Sid Franks and I had loved to watch lining up along the curb on 110th Street. A white-uniformed nurse stood up from the backseat and helped an old gentleman to his feet. He was then handed to the ground
by two men who had hurried out of one of the sound stages in the background to meet the car. The passenger, I now made out, was W. C. Fields.

A portable stair was set in place beside the cage, and the great comedian, wearing a straw hat despite the wintry chill, made it up the three or four steps to a platform level with the floor of the cage, where a photographer stood focusing a Graflex. Fields was handed an apple, which he held up between the bars to tempt the bear to its feet. The bear blinked uninterestedly at the apple. Fields tossed it to him, and the bear gulped it down but did not rise. Fields took another apple and held it high between the bars, still with no results. Suddenly, without apparent reason, the bear stood and gripped the bars with his gigantic paws, stretching his muzzle toward the apple, which Fields held just beyond his reach. The flashes went off: a picture of Fields and the bear a few inches apart, Fields's expression astonishingly bearlike as he traded looks with the animal.

As the bear held his position stretching for the apple, Fields carefully drew from his breast pocket a water pistol and with an expression of infinitely vicious joy squirted it directly into the bear's astounded face. The animal reared back and nearly fell over. Fields hurried with amazing agility down the stair and into his car and was instantly driven away, the nurse covering his lap with a blanket.

It was not easy to turn my mind back to the World War II epic lying on my desk. Anyway, I had come to the end of my invention and was simply moving elements of the story from one place to another, with Cowan cryptically hinting that the script “still had a way to go.” But where and to what end? The contrast between the holiness of the sacrifices in the war and the absurdity of Hollywood began eating into me now that I had exhausted my imagination. The girls had left the lawn, the bear and his cage were gone, and only the flat, empty Grecian arch remained.

I was surprised now by the sound of a motorcycle engine right under my window. A rider dressed in black leather, black helmet, emblazoned gauntlets, and black leather puttees was swinging off the black machine. A truly Hollywood-type messenger, I thought. Again I tried to concentrate on the script, but there was a knock on my door. Opening it, I found the motorcycle rider with his helmet under his arm, removing his gauntlets. To my surprise he wore eyeglasses and was middle-aged. I imagined he carried a special message to me from Cowan, who was at the moment back
in Washington, doubtless arranging for the use of a hundred thousand tanks and a million men.

“You're Miller, right?”

“That's right.” I expected him to hand me an envelope.

“My name is LeMay. I'm your collaborator.”

“My collaborator?”

“Didn't Lester tell you? He's put me on the script with you.”

“No, he never mentioned it. Come in, sit down.”

I had in that instant decided, without conflict or even effort, to quit the project, but I wanted to find out how this procedure worked.

We sat at the lone desk. Alan LeMay, whose name I gradually recalled in connection with action films, seemed a contented technician happy to tackle yet another problem job. He now took out of his pocket a brand-new deck of file cards, which he laid on the desk. “I think the best way would be to put the name of each character on a card …”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but have you read my script?”

“No, not yet, but I will. But I think we can save time if you give me the names of each of the characters and we make up a card for him.”

“And what do we do with the cards?”

“What we do, we combine them to reduce the number of characters. In other words, under each name we put his main story actions and see if we can take several actions and give them to one guy instead of three or four.”

“I see. So we can end up with… like a big guy and a little guy?”

“Not necessarily only two. We might end up with three or even four, but there'd be one major guy and a sidekick, sort of. On that order. But have you had lunch?”

“Not yet. How about a ride on your motorcycle?”

“Great. I know a place about a mile away.”

On the way out of the office I felt, for the first time in Hollywood, thoroughly at home with myself. I paused at the desk of Cowan's secretary to ask her to send him a wire in Washington thanking him for the opportunity to write this film but saying that I had never agreed to a collaborator and was returning to New York tomorrow, my services at an end.

LeMay was a terrific maneuverer through traffic, and the ride on the back of the British Triumph was glorious. We leaned way over on turns and came to such a stylishly sudden halt in front of the restaurant that I nearly slid up his leather back and over his head.

LeMay probably did some good work on the picture and was naturally replaced by another writer and yet another, but
The Story of GI Joe
was finally made and turned out to be surprisingly good. Of course it had lost almost all relation to the original scheme and had become the plain story of a caring infantry captain, played by Robert Mitchum, who in the end is killed. It was a moving tale but totally without any formal invention or interest for me. Ernie was played by Burgess Meredith, then a youthfully lyrical actor with a sweet American intelligence. I sensed, however, that a dimension of Pyle was missing, not from the performance but from the conception of the script. I only realized what it was decades later, during the Vietnam War, when I recalled Pyle's insight that all war was civil war between brothers and that this fratricide overshadowed all compensatory glory and threatened any claim to meaning itself. The film, understandably, was about a fight between enemies, for it was very nearly impossible at the time to equate the Germans with those who fought them. Yet with his ordinary Main Street language, Pyle had glimpsed the war on the awful plane of tragedy—a word he would have shied from as far too intellectual—and if Cowan brought off a respectable achievement that honored Pyle and Americans, it was a far shallower portrait than they deserved.

My name, of course, never appeared on the film, but half a dozen years later—after
All My Sons
and
Death of a Salesman
—I was surprised one afternoon by a call from Cowan, complete with his transparently rote little laugh, asking if I wouldn't like to have my name added to the re-release. I said that I didn't think it was my script anymore.

“But a lot of your stuff is in there, Arthur. In fact, most of the best of it is yours.”

“Really? I don't recall recognizing anything, but maybe so.” Then, half as a joke, but only half, I said, “Tell you what, Lester. You pay me twenty thousand and you can put my name on it.”

He laughed and I laughed, and for me that was the end of
The Story of GI Joe.

Albuquerque again, but Pyle was now some five years dead and nearly a decade had passed since we strolled together down an empty moonlit main street trading uncertainties. Now the Super Chief rested on the sunlit siding, taking on water. I walked back to the last car and stood staring down the empty track stretching away across beige New Mexico. This silence would always excite me, the wide sky as clear and blue as Creation. For a man of thirty-five, I seemed to have done nothing but work; I had had, as Thornton Wilder put it in
The Matchmaker,
a lot of adventures but no experience. When, I wondered, does one cease to work and start to live?

I was conscious of time fleeing and my waste of it, unable as I was to embrace the greatness of the American story that I knew was all around me on this haunting continent. I was proud of
All My Sons
and
Salesman,
but they were already the past. The vision returned of that lone Indian man Ernie and I had noticed looking off toward the sunset on an Albuquerque street corner. Absurdly enough, I felt lonesome for the sight of him and imagined that if I could find that corner, even after all these years had passed, he would still be standing there lost in the motionless staring that was so full of his sadness. He had become in my imagination a natural feature of this landscape.

I felt the excitement of approaching Hollywood tomorrow, this time with some successful plays behind me and a challenging movie script that I was glad to have written even if it should never reach production. It too was an attempt to hack out a road that
would penetrate to the American center, the point of creation beyond which there was nothing.

Sitting on a beer box someone had left near the tracks, I tried to imagine myself a local man who had come to watch the trains passing. The lure of another identity and of losing oneself in America. There was something mistaken in my life. Maybe I had simply married too young.

Kazan was studying the waterfront script in our compartment. It was a persuasive story I had created, yes, but one I had not really lived and therefore did not quite trust.

A gray cat appeared from under the train and looked at me. For him, perhaps, I belonged here. Thin as a fan, he arched pleasurably against the train's sun-warmed wheel. If I let the train leave me behind, I thought, I would know no one in New Mexico. A feeling of freedom and infinite choices touched me.

I had known, in fact, only one native of New Mexico, and I thought about him now, the only man I had ever met who wore octagonal glasses and parted his hair in the middle. He had a snub nose and a rather stolid Dutch look. In 1950 it would have been very difficult to explain to Americans why Ralph Neaphus had had to die—and may even have chosen to—at twenty-three, in the spring of 1937.

Raised on a New Mexico ranch, Ralph had never been east of the Mississippi before coming to the University of Michigan. With his rather schoolteacherly look, he was one of those soft-spoken Westerners who come slowly to a decision and thereafter cannot be budged. He had hardly ever talked politics with me as we washed dishes side by side month after month in the Co-op cafeteria kitchen. Anyway, there was little to dispute about Spain—for us the issue was beyond doubt, the fascists had to be stopped. It never occurred to me to ask him if he was a Communist; it hardly mattered then. And by no means were all the volunteers Party members.

As I drove east with him across Ohio—in my little 1927 Model T coupe we were much too big for, which I had recently bought from a graduate student for twenty-two dollars—I carried my own indecision within me like a kind of sinfulness. One moment I was ready to break loose and go off with him to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the next I was too appalled at the idea of not living to write a great play. Worst of all was the blinding prospect of informing my mother that I was off to war. It never occurred to me that if I went I might survive. I already thought of Ralph as dead, sitting there next to him as the car's iron engine ticked faithfully on, he as silent as New Mexico itself. Night came on, and
it began to rain. We were on Route 17 east of Buffalo, climbing into the mountains. The single windshield wiper had to be operated manually, and a bump would send the wheel spinning if only one hand was gripping it while the other was swinging the wiper. The rain came heavier and heavier until I could see nothing at all, so I pulled cautiously to the side and felt earth under the wheels. Figuring we were in a field somewhere, I stopped and switched off the engine and cut the lights. The cloth roof sounded like shrapnel was falling on it in waves.

Sitting there shoulder to shoulder steaming in the dark, I had my first chance to ask about the procedure. He had an address in downtown New York where he would report. The Party would give him the papers he needed. He did not know if they had uniforms in the brigade, but he doubted it and expected to wear his own clothes into battle, an odd image to me. “I'm pretty good with a rifle” was his first and only statement that approached self-description. But I did not think it unusual for someone of the left to suppress personal feelings, which after all were of no real significance—only duty was. There was something of the psychology of priests in this. I tried to pump him; had he informed his parents he was going?

“Yes,” he said, and that was all.

“How do they feel about it?”