“It’s not,” Alvaro told a reporter, “that I choose these people because I think they are better, but because they have things to talk about. The man who gets up in the morning and goes to the factory every day to produce some tool or something – what does he have to tell me of life? I have nothing against the poor devil, but you can’t make conversation with him unless it’s about football or women.”
Joshua had come to the King’s Road, at Margaret’s request, to take his godson to lunch. Murdoch’s boy Ralph. Ralph was in trouble at St. Paul’s. He had been caught smoking pot. Murdoch hadn’t helped matters any by telling the headmaster that he was a bloody hypocrite and that in any event pot would soon be legalized. Waiting for Ralph in The Eight Bells, Joshua leafed through one of the new magazines, Climax, that he had picked up in a neighboring newsagent’s shop.
GET YOUR OWN VICKY MOSS COCK CANDLE
This is it, gang, your chance to have your very own Vicky Moss Cock Candle, a beautiful multi-coloured realistic candle of a rigid cock, unavailable anywhere else. A guaranteed conversation piece, these candles are so realistic they could even be used as the real thing, but we offer them as a novelty only. Comes in two sizes, regular and the Vicky Moss Cannonball Special.
For the sake of Ralph’s generation, Joshua, Murdoch, and the others had once won a famous victory. After Ypres, following the Battle of Britain, never had so many adolescents owed so much to so few libertarians. When our St. Crispin’s Day came, Joshua thought, we certainly held that thin red line. Writing intrepid letters to the Times and taking the stand as indignant witnesses, they had seen to it that the ban on one of the most tedious novels written, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was lifted. And lucky Ralph’s inheritance was now Climax, Forum, and the porn flicks.
Ralph and his kind had not been raised on crippling Jewish, Calvinist, or Catholic lies. Self-serving lies. Unlike their fathers, they had not been shackled by the manifest hypocrisies of either church or synagogue. Ralph had been brought up to masturbate not in fear of being struck blind, but with pride in his stroke. There were no forbidden foods in his heritage. Or original sins. Liberated from a stultifying class system, he was attracted by a society built on caste. Which is to say, his was a free and questing spirit, impressed more than anything with the wisdom of the East, the inner peace he sensed among the swollen-bellied, starving masses of India. Ralph was also fascinated by pagan rituals. Although Joshua hadn’t seen him in years, he immediately recognized him as he came swaggering into the pub. Ralph had grown into a tall, gangling young man, with Margaret’s crooked teeth and Murdoch’s weak, squinting eyes and lank, unruly hair. He wore a velvet blouse, unlaced to the navel, bellbottom trousers, and sandals. He twitched, he bit his nails.
“Are you taking me to Alvaro’s, Joshua?”
“I’m not a member,” he said, telling him about Alvaro’s interview with the Standard. “Besides, most of the writers I know only talk about women or sports. And if it’s not that, it’s royalties. We’d never do.”
Joshua took him to a decent but unfashionable Italian basement restaurant instead, and there Ralph told him that he wished to become a writer. “But my father says I shouldn’t call myself Murdoch. He says critics would only compare my work to his, to my disadvantage.”
“Your father has many endearing qualities, but he can also be an oaf. Call yourself anything you like.”
“I don’t dig his stuff, anyway. You both write about how groovy it was to be born poor. But that’s superficial. All that kitchen-sink stuff has become a bore.”
“How were we to know?”
“And he’s writing very badly now. Margaret can’t get him the advances he once got. The Americans are no longer interested in him.”
“I understand that you’re in some kind of trouble at school.”
“Oh, shit, it was only pot. And they’re taking me back. They only throw you out if you’re caught pushing. Besides, Margaret smokes with her boyfriends. Or my uncles, as they once were,” he said, smirking. “I want to go to America.”
“Sure. Why not? But finish school first.”
“Can you help me get into films?”
“I thought you wanted to be a writer?”
“I want to direct my own scripts.”
“One of the few directors I know,” Joshua said stiffly, “began as a clapper boy. Are you willing to do that?”
Ralph’s smile was pitying. “Man,” he said, “but you and my father make a pair. You no longer work your way up from the bottom floor. Those days are past.”
“How do you get to direct your own scripts then?”
“You make yourself a reputation.”
“And how do you do that?” Joshua asked, paying the bill.
“I’m going to be in next week’s Private Eye. They found out about St. Paul’s and they’re giving me a mention.”
“And that’s a start?”
“Yes,” he said, grinning.
Before they parted, Ralph borrowed £10. Margaret had warned Joshua that he tried to borrow £10 here, a fiver there, from all her friends, and not to give him anything. But such was Joshua’s distaste for Ralph that he could not deny him.
“Thanks, Uncle,” Ralph said with a meaningful smile, and then he was gone.
At a dinner party the same evening, Joshua discovered that the lady seated next to him had just returned from Ibiza. Such a darling place.
Had she been to San Antonio, Joshua demanded, excited.
Yes.
Had she run into a German there? Tall, sorrowful. A Dr. Dr. Mueller.
No.
What about the Casa del Sol?
Good heavens, but there were so many hotels there now, it was difficult to remember the names.
In the morning, Joshua stopped at a travel agency on Sloane Square. “Is it possible for you to book me a hotel on Ibiza?” he asked.
Certainly, sir.
“The Casa del Sol,” he said.
But she could find no listing for it.
“It’s in San Antonio,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir. I simply can’t find it.”
“But I’ve stayed there.”
“When?”
“Nineteen fifty-two.”
“Well now, that was fourteen years ago, wasn’t it? There have been a good many changes on Ibiza since then.”
Seething, Joshua turned into the King’s Road and promptly split his trousers down the backside. He tried to buy another pair, but in all the fabled boutiques of Chelsea he could not find a pair without bellbottoms. All at once, he was filled with a fierce resentment against style-making London, the new, modish foolery. And his indignation was compounded by an especially mindless week, which had seen a new pronouncement in the Evening Standard by Mary Quant. Think pink, Miss Quant cooed, and suggested that next year’s clothes could do more to highlight the inherent loveliness of pubic hair. Furthermore, Miss Quant revealed that her mate diverted himself after a hard day at the office by trimming her own pubic hair into a heart shape, making her vagina a living valentine, so to speak.
Joshua retreated into the nearest pub, drank a large gin, and another, and another, and then phoned Pauline. “I’m coming home,” he said.
Where a pleasant surprise awaited him.
The paperback rights to The Volunteers had been sold in the United States for a modest advance, even by the standards of those years, and he took his father out to lunch to celebrate. “Twenty-five hundred bucks,” Reuben said. “Well, that’s great. Really great. Hey, Josh, aren’t those paperback books handled by magazine distributors, like?”
In New York, a year later, Joshua’s paperback editor took him out to an expensive dinner and told him how pleased everybody was with his surprisingly good sales. “The book is ordering astonishingly well in places like Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, and Florida. And, oh yes, Louisville, Kentucky, where I always thought they never read about anything but horse-racing. Frankly, we never expected there would be such interest in
a book, however talented,” he put in quickly, “about the Spanish Civil War.”
“Obviously,” Joshua said, reaching for his drink, “there’s been strong word-of-mouth in some areas.”
5
A WEEK AFTER TRIMBLE’S GUY FAWKES PARTY, JOSHUA sat in his study unable to work, fingering the long thin key to the Kingdom of Shapiro, wondering if, after all, the time had come to crack the safety deposit box in Cornwall. Or cash the check Kevin had given to Pauline. Then, miraculously, the phone rang and something did turn up. Peabody at Playboy. As they couldn’t afford Harold Robbins, he said, and Jacqueline Susann wasn’t available, would he consider doing a piece for them on the new Hollywood? Only three days later, Joshua flew out to L.A.
Joshua loved Hollywood and its confident hustlers. On a previous visit he had delighted in spinning through the canyons in somebody else’s Mercedes, gearing down to consider the more outlandish mansions, each garden perfect. He liked to wander through the unbelievably opulent men’s shops on Rodeo, startling the prissy clerks by bargaining. He enjoyed the tanned, trim, middle-aged producers on health diets, toting scripts to market in Gucci attaché cases, even as their East Side grandfathers had once carried sewing machines on their shoulders. They strutted into the Polo Lounge or La Scala or Dominic’s, bound in safari suits, blissfully playing the room, death just another sour-grapes rumor out of the East, bad word of mouth, something that used to figure in grainy European-made films, which everybody knew were bum grossers.
Strolling down Wilshire Boulevard, the morning after his arrival, he ran into Murdoch, a Sidney Murdoch so bloated he hardly recognized him. The two friends, who hadn’t seen each other in half-a-dozen years, fell tearfully into each other’s arms and immediately repaired to La Scala for lunch.
“Who would have dreamed,” Murdoch said, recalling their first meeting, “that we ever would have lived to run into each other here?”
“Those unforgiving literary lads we once were.”
“Are you appalled, dear boy?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m thrilled. And I want you to know I’m doing splendidly here.”
Murdoch had been raised on the Hollywood of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Bogart, and Rita Hayworth. The scandalous life of the stars. The depravity that was the rule on board Errol Flynn’s yacht and in Charlie Chaplin’s mansion. He had flown out to Hollywood on an assignment grudgingly dredged up by a fearful Margaret, who had long been his literary agent as well as Joshua’s. Margaret was understandably concerned about his venture and lectured him severely about his drinking and his lechery. “You don’t understand what you’re getting into. Hollywood’s quieter than Leatherhead on a Saturday night and considerably more boring.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure,” Murdoch said, filled with glee.
Murdoch, innocent Murdoch, his once magical powers failing, had been hired by Bill Markham to write a treatment based on his magnificent second novel, set in the Midlands. Determined not to be mistaken for just another British ninny on arrival, he had put a good deal of uncharacteristic thought into his transatlantic attire. Gone were the Hush Puppies, the shirts from Marks & Spencer, the baggy tweed suit from Cecil Gee’s. Murdoch had floated off the plane wearing a floppy widebrimmed felt hat, dark glasses, a foulard from Sulka, a shirt from Mr. Fish with more stripes than an old-fashioned barber pole, flared trousers, and soft Chelsea boots. The studio flunkey who had been dispatched to drive him to The Beverly Hills Hotel chatted knowledgeably, he thought, about the delights of Covent Garden and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“Oh, who gives a damn about all those prancing pooves,” Murdoch said.
The flunkey said he would be sending a limo round to pick up Murdoch at seven for a dinner party at the Markhams’. Murdoch, anticipating a poolside quivering with Playboy centerfolds, juicy as they were wanton, hurried into the shower and soaped his hairy belly. He shook talcum powder over his genitals. But when he arrived at the Markhams’ mansion, he discovered that he was the only guest; he was dining alone with Bill and his cultivated wife, Ellen. Svelte, bony Ellen, who wore her black hair straight back, gathered with a jade clip. She wore a silk shirt and narrow black slacks. Her antique man’s pocket watch, settled between small tight breasts, was suspended from her long neck by a gold chain.
“How good of you to have me here,” a deflated Murdoch said.
The dinner party wasn’t at poolside, either, but at a table set in a room that had been cleverly redone with fittings transported from a seedy Camden Town pub, complete with jars of Scotch eggs floating in filthy brine and a mottled mirror advertising Watney’s.
“I can’t imagine what awful things you’ve heard about film people,” Ellen said, “but I want you to know that Bill brought you out here because he has the highest regard for your integrity.”
When she leaned forward to flick her cigarette at the ashtray, her pocket watch dipped, dangling free, and when she leaned back again, it swung with her, landing between her breasts with a most disconcerting thud. “You have written a seminal novel,” she crooned.
“It’s a minor masterpiece,” Markham pitched in, suppressing a yawn.
“But I’m willing to make any changes you require,” Murdoch offered affably.
“Oh, dear. No. You mustn’t think for a moment,” Ellen said, affronted, “that everybody in Hollywood is only interested in money. That would be selling us short.”
Ignoring her, Murdoch appealed to Markham. “Do you think we could get Ava Gardner to play Mavis?”
“We could get Ava Gardner to play anything,” Markham said, aghast. “She must be fifty now.”
“Oh yes. How stupid of me. What about Raquel Welch?”
“Tell him,” Ellen said.
“Sidney, this is going to be our Tiffany project.”
Murdoch began to fizz with pleasure and anticipation.
“We’re not going after prurience in this film. We’re going to shoot this back in Leeds with real actresses.”
“There,” Ellen said, “aren’t you relieved?,” and she asked him if he knew Doris Lessing.
Seated with Joshua at La Scala three days later, Murdoch had to admit that he had phoned Markham three times since that first meeting and he had yet to call back. “But I’m not the least bit worried,” he said. “I’ve written a splendid treatment. Awfully sexy. I’ve put in all the filth I could only hint at in the novel. Joshua, they are justifiably put off by literary types here because of their pretensions. They find me refreshing, because I’m prepared to adjust. I’m willing to write for the market.”
They were well into the Remy Martin before Murdoch announced how proud he was of Margaret. “When I took her on,” he said, “she was no more than a mouse, incredibly shy, with those perfectly dreadful teeth, and look at her now. Thriving. Running my life, the bitch. Mind you, she never remarried, but,” he shrugged, “after me …”
They contemplated their drinks, two middle-aged cronies in a strange land.
“There’s something I always wanted to ask you, Joshua. It’s about Cambridge.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know quite how to put this …”
Joshua waited, bemused, his manner unhelpful.
“Remember, ah, Joanna?”
“Indeed I do.”
“I feel we’ve known each other so long we can ask each other anything.”
“Would you come to the point, please.”
“Did you realize we were young then?”
“No.”
“Neither did I. But we were, you know.”
“I know now.”
“Bloody hell, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Was it you who nicked her pearl necklace that time?”
“Certainly it was.”
“You did?” he asked, startled.
“Yes.”
“But how could you do such a thing?”
“I had no money to eat with, and she looked just as
splendid without the necklace.”
“Easy as that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you, my dear. You’re lying.”
“Of course I am.”
Murdoch grinned, relieved.
“But then,” Joshua said, “we’re both liars, aren’t we? Professionals, at that.”
“Artificers,” he said, “not liars.”
“Liars,” Joshua insisted. “Both of us.”
Joshua was wakened by an early phone call in his room at the Beverly Wilshire the next morning. Good news. There was a film producer in town foolish enough to want his services – Benny Leopold of Mandrake Productions. “I need you,” he said urgently.
Benny Leopold was a Toronto real estate developer, a millionaire several times over, with an obsession: the movies. He wanted to produce. He was a chunky little man, a natty dresser, no more than five feet two, with mournful wobbly eyes and hair everywhere, winding out of his ears, curling out of his nostrils, even on the backs of his fingers. He had to sit on a cushion to see out of the windshield of his Rolls Royce. He took Joshua to Ma Maison and there he laid everything on the table. “On her deathbed,” he said, contemplating his cutlery, “my mother, may she rest in peace, made me promise that one day I would make a movie about the Jewish immigration to Canada in 1902, the struggles, the hardships our people went through, not glossing over our sexual hangups. Something, you know, adult –”
“You’re not suggesting nude scenes, are you?” Joshua asked, appalled.
“Only if they are artistically necessary.” He had a script, he said, written by an American with more than one first-class screen credit, but it needed more work. “He hasn’t got the background right. Now I’ve read The Volunteers and some of your other stuff, and I’m convinced you could at least get the documentary details right. Have you ever written a screenplay?”
“Certainly.”
Leopold looked pensive. “I’m afraid I don’t recall ever seeing your name …”
“Of course not,” Joshua said. “I’ve always used a pseudonym for my film work.”