Barney's Version (Movie Tie-In Edition)

  8

  “Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Radio-Canada. Can I help you?”

  “Please connect me with ‘Artsworld.’ ”

  “ ‘Artsworld’ here. Beth Roberts speaking.”

  “I’d like to talk to Miriam Greenberg.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Miriam. It’s Barney Panofsky. Remember me?”

  “Oh.”

  “I just happen to be in Toronto and I was wondering if you were free for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Dinner, then?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “I heard your interview with Mailer and I think you put all the right questions to him.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Say, what about drinks at five o’clock?”

  “Barney, I don’t go out with married men.”

  “Drinks, for Christ’s sake. It’s not a federal offence. I just happen to be right across the street in the bar at The Four Seasons Motor Hotel.”

  “Please don’t be difficult.”

  “Some other time, then?”

  “Sure. Maybe. No. But thanks for calling.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon at my desk in my cottage in the Laurentians, where the night before I watched an old black-and-white movie on TV with a brooding, more than somewhat prickly Chantal for company. Operation Hellfire, directed by Hymie Mintzbaum in 1947, starred John Payne, Yvonne de Carlo, Dan Duryea, and George Macready. The story opens two weeks before D-Day on an American army camp in England. Major Dan Duryea, a graduate of the school of hard knocks, is fed up with Sergeant John Payne, a lazy playboy heir to a department-store fortune, and orders him parachuted into occupied France to contact a group of partisans led by somebody code-named Hellfire. Hellfire turns out to be Yvonne de Carlo, and she and Payne take an instant dislike to each other. Everything changes, however, after Payne, shooting from the hip, rescues her from the torture cellars of Gestapo man George Macready, who has just ripped off her blouse. Together, on D-Day Plus Two, sweethearts Payne and de Carlo blow up a troop train bound for the beaches of Normandy. And when Duryea and his battle-weary troops march into St-Pierre-sur-Mer, prepared for another costly struggle, they find it has already been liberated by Payne, who is swilling champagne with de Carlo on the village square, surrounded by admiring peasants. “I thought you’d never get here,” says Payne with a wink for de Carlo. The end.

  I want to make something absolutely clear. I did not invite Chantal out for the weekend. She took me by surprise, arriving in time for dinner on Saturday, laden with goodies she had picked up at the Pâtisserie Belge on Laurier Avenue: pâté de foie gras, thick slices of baked ham, a quiche lorraine, containers of beet and potato salads, cheeses, a baguette, and croissants for breakfast. I was careful to greet her with no more than an avuncular peck on both cheeks after I had relieved her of her overnight bag.

  “Hey, aren’t you glad to see me?” she asked.

  “Of course I am.”

  But I pointedly did not open a bottle of champagne. Instead, I fetched a glass of Aligoté.

  “I’ll set the table,” she said.

  I explained that a movie directed by an old friend of mine would start on TV at eight, and I wanted to eat in front of the set. “Oh, how charming,” she said. “I’ll try not to talk.”

  I resisted joining her on the sofa, but settled into an easy chair at a safe distance with a bottle of Macallan and a Montecristo Number Four. Afterwards, I heard myself saying, “Chantal, I’m really glad to have you here, but I want you to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms tonight.”

  “Has my mother spoken to you about us?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Because I’m no longer a child and this is none of her business.”

  “Chantal, my dear, this isn’t right. I’m a grandfather and you’re not even thirty yet.”

  “I just happen to be thirty-two years old.”

  She looked so glowingly young, so fetching, that I decided if she refused to sleep upstairs and slid into bed with me instead, I would not protest. I’m weak. I could do so much and no more. She glowered at me and then disappeared upstairs, and the next thing I heard was the slam of her door. Damn damn damn. When King David was old he was warmed in his bed by nubile young women, so why wasn’t I entitled as well? Pouring myself a hefty drink, I thought, possibly I should go upstairs to comfort her. But I didn’t do it, proud of myself for once, and anticipating praise from Solange. I didn’t get to sleep until four a.m., and when I got up at noon Chantal had already driven off without leaving me a note. And that evening Solange phoned: “She gave up her weekend to drive all the way out to your place to help you with next month’s budgets and all you wanted to do was watch TV and booze. What did you say to her, you bastard? She hasn’t stopped crying since she got here and she doesn’t want to work for you any more.”

  “You know something, Solange. I’ve had it up to here with women. Including you. Especially you. And now I’m seriously thinking of moving in with Serge.”

  “I want to know what you said to hurt her.”

  “You just tell her I expect her in my office at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  9

  I last saw Hymie Mintzbaum on my most recent trip to Hollywood, only a few months ago. There to peddle a pilot, I was suddenly overcome by the itch to try my liver-spotted hand at screenplay-writing again. So I stupidly went to pitch a screwy idea of mine to the young squirt who now runs the studio. Shelley Katz, a grandson of one of the founding fathers, passes for a maverick in Beverly Hills. Instead of tooling up and down the canyons in a Rolls or Mercedes, his birthright, Shelley’s signature is a souped-up 1979 Ford pick-up truck, its creatively dented fenders, I suspect, the work of somebody in the studio art department. Shelley would probably have said to him, “What I’m after is a realistic redneck-type look as in a story set in some pisspoor town in, say, northern Vermont. Some rust would be a nice touch. Good man. I want you to know your work is appreciated. We’re a family.”

  Parking valets at the Dôme and Spago’s earn fifties for reporting the Ford pick-up’s arrival in the lot to a number of relevant agents and producers (“It’s here, and he’s inside, just. No, I’m not phoning anybody else. Honestly.”), enabling them to hurry over to pay obeisance, maybe earn a chance to shmooze a little, plug a project.

  “Our hero,” I said to Shelley, “is a latter-day Candide figure.”

  “Candide?”

  “You know, Voltaire.”

  “Which is it?”

  This is not to suggest that Shelley is a functional illiterate, but, rather, one of the industry’s new Wunderkinder. Had I dropped the name of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, or the Submariner, he would have nodded knowledgeably, allowing that we were both scholarly types. The young today. Christ Almighty. Privileged beyond compare. Born too late to remember the Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day, Rita Hayworth peeling off that elbow-length glove in Gilda, Maurice Richard charging over the blue line, the siege of Jerusalem, Jackie Robinson breaking in with the Montreal Royals, Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, or a beaming Harry Truman holding up the front page of the Chicago Tribune with the banner headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. “Our protagonist,” I continued, “is an innocent. A kid. My story opens in 1912, he’s on the Titanic, the maiden voyage, everybody in the audience is waiting for the icebergs to hit —”

  “You know what Lew Grade said about his Raising the Titanic, a real stinker? ‘It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic Ocean.’ ”

  “But, lo and behold,” I went on to say, “the ship docks safely in New York, where the innocent kid is met by a sexy reporter, a Lauren Bacall type, who —”

  “Lauren Bacall,” he said. “You’ve got to be kidding, unless she’s playing somebody’s mother.”

  “A Demi Basinger type, I mean, who asks him what the trip was like? Boring, he says, and then —”

  “Demi
Basinger? That’s some wicked sense of humour you’ve still got there, Mr. Panofsky. I want you to know I do appreciate this window of opportunity to strategize with somebody who used to be a player, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass on this one. Hey, I’m married to Hymie Mintzbaum’s granddaughter. Fiona. I love her. We’ve been blessed with two children.”

  “And do you love them too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Then the phone rang. “Speak of the — I almost said the you-know-who. It’s my wife. Excuse me.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Uh huh. Uh huh. Now you calm down, darling, and apologize to Miss O’Hara and tell her it’s okay. I think I’ve just solved the problem. Honestly. Yeah. No. I can’t explain right now.” Hanging up, he beamed at me. “When Fiona told Hymie you were coming in to dialogue with me, he asked would you like to join him for dinner tonight at Hillcrest. Keep the limo. My pleasure.”

  My sense of betrayal had passed since our brawl in London, so I was inordinately pleased that Hymie wanted to patch things up. There would be so much to talk about. Before starting out for Hill-crest, I stopped at Brentano’s, and bought Hymie the latest novel by Beryl Bainbridge, a writer I admired. Then I called for my limo.

  I would not have recognized Hymie had not a waiter led me to the table in the Hillcrest dining room where he sat, dozing, in his motorized wheelchair. His crown of tight curly black hair had been reduced to random white balls of fluff, fragile as dandelion heads at risk in the slightest breeze. The linebacker’s body had diminished to a near-empty sack of projecting bones. The waiter, who had thoughtfully provided Hymie with a bib, now shook him awake. “Your guest has arrived, Mr. Mintzbaum.”

  “Flush glish mmerm,” said a roused Hymie, reaching out for me with an unsteady twig of a hand, the one that still worked.

  “Just say you’re glad to see him too,” said the waiter, winking at me.

  Hymie’s eyes were rheumy, and his mouth was tugged down on one side, yanked by an invisible wire. Spittle trickled down his chin. He smiled, or tried to, the result a rictus, and pointed at my glass.

  “Would you care for a drink?” asked the waiter.

  “Make it a Springbank. Straight up.”

  “And the usual for Mr. Mintzbaum, no doubt,” he said, moving off.

  His head bobbing up and down, Hymie began to whimper. He reached out for me again, taking my hand, the pressure feeble.

  “It’s okay, Hymie,” I said, and I wiped his eyes and then his chin with his bib.

  The waiter brought me my Springbank and poured Hymie an Evian. “Floshui beshuga shlup,” said Hymie, his eyes bulging with effort, as he knocked over his Evian and pointed at my glass.

  “You’re being naughty, Mr. Mintzbaum.”

  “Don’t talk to him like that,” I said, “and bring him a Springbank, please.”

  “He’s not allowed.”

  “At once,” I said.

  “Providing you tell her it was you who insisted on it.”

  “Her?”

  “His granddaughter. Mrs. Katz.”

  “Fetch.”

  “I know what Mr. Mintzbaum is having,” said the waiter, passing me a menu, “but what about you,” and he paused before adding, “sir?”

  “And just what is Mr. Mintzbaum having?”

  “Some steamed vegetables topped with a poached egg. No salt.”

  “Not tonight he isn’t. We both want roast brisket and latkes. And don’t forget the horseradish.”

  “Cryta fishum,” said Hymie, rocking with delight.

  “And we’d like a bottle of Beaujolais. And, oh dear, I see that Mr. Mintzbaum hasn’t got a wine glass. Bring him one.”

  “Mrs. Katz is going to hit the roof.”

  “Just do as you’re told and I’ll handle Mrs. Katz when she gets here.”

  “Your funeral.”

  Hymie stabbed at his gaping mouth with his fork, his eyes raging.

  “Don’t even try to talk, Hymie. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  The waiter brought him his Springbank. I clicked glasses with him and we both drank. “Here’s to us,” I said, “and the good times we had together that nobody can take away from us.”

  He sipped his drink. I wiped his chin with his bib.

  “And here’s to the Eighth Army Air Force,” I said, “and Duke Snider and Mozart and Kafka and Jelly Roll and Dr. Johnson and Sandy Koufax and Jane Austen and Billie Holiday.”

  “Flugit,” said Hymie, weeping softly.

  Pushing my chair closer to him, I helped Hymie cut up his brisket and latkes. When the waiter approached our table again, Hymie began to splutter and gesture. “Okey-doke. Gotcha,” said the waiter, and he brought Hymie a pad and a pencil.

  It took Hymie a while, concentrating, writing something, ripping out a page, starting again, ripping again, breathing hard, drooling, before he finally handed me what he had managed to print:

  And now we were both drunk, but, fortunately, our compromising plates had been cleared by the time Fiona Darling swept into the dining room, Shelley trailing after her like a spoor, the two of them working the tables, raining blessings on those who were still A-list, while those not entitled to call-backs were dismissed with a nod. Finally they got to us. Stubby Fiona Darling, bejewelled, shrink-wrapped into a chiffon evening gown that bulged in the wrong places, her black velvet cape secured by a diamond-studded clasp. Shelley wore a tux, one of those purple ruffled shirts that always reminded me of a washboard, a string tie with a Navajo pendant, and hand-tooled cowboy boots, proof against snakebite when he risked crossing Rodeo Drive. “I’ll bet you two old rascals had plenty to talk about,” said Fiona Darling, crinkling her cute, surgically sculpted nose, and impressing a scarlet lipstick stain on Hymie’s all-but-bald pate. “I hear you guys had some lifestyle when you were in Gay Paree together in the old days.”

  “Why in the hell didn’t Shelley warn me that he couldn’t speak?”

  “Now now. That’s not nice. You sure are lacking in empathicity. Hymie is just difficult to understand at times. Isn’t that so, Gramps?” The rest is confusion, but I do remember that the waiter took Fiona Darling aside, and then she turned on me: “Did you let him drink hard liquor and eat red meat with wine?”

  Hymie, his eyes popping, struggled to be heard. “Fluga pshit.”

  “He’s incontinent,” said Fiona Darling. “Would you like to be the one to clean up after him at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “Don’t tell me you do it?”

  “It just happens to be Miss O’Hara’s night off tonight.” I remember Hymie reversing his wheelchair back from the table, stopping, then propelling himself at a shrieking Fiona Darling, Shelley pulling her out of harm’s way in time. Or maybe that didn’t happen and it’s just a case of my tinkering with memory, fine-tuning reality. Next I think a frustrated Hymie, who had always abhorred squealers, rode off in pursuit of the waiter, intent on ramming him, but attempting too sharp a turn at speed and colliding with a woman at another table. But possibly I only wish that had happened. Dining out on a story, I tend to put a spin on it. To come clean, I’m a natural-born burnisher. But, then, what’s a writer, even a first-timer like me?

  In any event, I recall angry words were exchanged. An increasingly screechy Fiona Darling called me an irresponsible drunk. Then I inquired, icy polite, if her breasts were her own or had been artificially enhanced, as to my expert eye they appeared to be of unequal thrust and density. This prompted Shelley to threaten to punch me out. Responding to that challenge, I coughed out my dentures and slid them into a jacket pocket before raising my fists. Fiona Darling rolled her heavily made-up eyes heavenwards. “Oh, isn’t he disgusting,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.” And she wheeled Hymie out of the dining room, even as he continued to jabber incoherently.