Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

“Craaw,” Bassey said. “Got something for the boy.”

  Carl looked at him, from his muddy boots to his unwashed, unshaven face, and wondered what he was up to.

  “Y’know how he’s always talkin’ about owls. Well, I went ’n’ fetched him one.”

  In an unexpected, cat-quick movement he shut the kitchen door behind him and was gone. But in an instant he was back, carrying a cage. In it was a wild, clawing something that made a hideous, hoarse, rasping sound. A rapacious hooked beak was slashing at the bars of the cage, which was being shaken violently by powerful talons. The face was a spectra white Halloween mask come savagely to life. The eyes were large and black and full of fury.

  It all happened so quickly that it seemed a jumble of discontinuity, but Bassey extended the cage toward Benjy as if to present to him the captured barn owl, and in surprise, or to ward off an enemy, the boy moved his hand toward the cage. The angry bird lurched forward and—whether with his talons or his beak, Carl wasn’t sure—ripped the flesh from the tips of Benjy’s fingers. Benjy’s scream was shriller than the owl’s. Blood was spurting along his fingers. He was screaming hysterically when Peg grabbed him up and ran out of the room with him.

  “See how deep it is—maybe we should call a doctor,” Carl called after them. Then he turned on Bassey. “You son of a—”

  “He ain’t hurt. Just a little scratch on his finger.”

  The owl was screeching and flailing to fight free of its cage.

  “Take that damn thing out of here!”

  “I thought he’d like to see what a real owl looks like.”

  “Bassey, that was a mean, despicable thing to do. I never want you to set foot on this place again.”

  “All right by me. Just pay me the twelve dollars you owe me and we’ll be even.”

  “Twelve dollars! I don’t owe you a nickel.”

  “Two hours a day for the last three days. Don’t worry—I keep track.”

  “You can sue me for it, damn it.”

  “I’ll get the constable on you, that’s what I’ll do. City people comin’ in here, hoggin’ everything …”

  “Damn it, Bassey, what you did to that boy … Now get out of here.”

  The barn owl was still flapping, hissing, struggling to get out of its cage.

  “And take that goddamn owl with you!”

  Bassey hulked out of the door with his ferocious prisoner gnashing at its bars. Through the small square window in the kitchen door Carl watched his atavistic neighbor trudge across the lawn into the field that separated this house from the squalid carriage house. Carl bolted the kitchen door and went up to the nursery. Benjy was still whimpering and staring moodily at his bandaged hand.

  “That wasn’t the good owl that lives in your tree,” Carl said. “That was the bad owl who lives in the barn.”

  Benjy didn’t say anything. Carl offered to piggyback him around the room, but Benjy didn’t want to. He sat on his bed, staring at his fingers.

  Carl tried again. “Don’t you want to say good night to Owl—the good owl?”

  The little boy was silent.

  “The good owl is waiting for you to say good night to him,” Peg said weakly.

  Benjy’s silence made them want to keep talking, but they couldn’t fool Benjy any more. There weren’t any friendly owls. Owls had feet to grab and claw you with, and hard, angry mouths to tear at your flesh and eat you up. Real owls had mean, fighting eyes and all they wanted to do was hurt you and kill you.

  The next day Benjy did not mention Owl. He had cut him out of his vocabulary as one painfully omits the mention of an old friend who has betrayed him. Sometimes he would just sit at the window and stare out for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, something he had never done in his going-on-five-year-old life. Carl would have been relieved if he had said, “I hate that old owl,” but he never did. Owl was a closed chapter in a life that Carl darkly imagined as an accordionlike unfolding of disenchantments.

  With Bassey gone, Carl went back to burying the garbage in inadequate holes he never had the time or the patience to dig. To add to his country woes, he was no longer on speaking terms with his neighbor George. George had taken Bassey’s side of the argument over the twelve dollars, and Carl accused George of becoming a professional country snob. George went back to his luxurious farmhouse in angry silence.

  Sometimes Benjy would wake up crying at the sound of the barn owls, and Peg complained that their constant hooting was disturbing her sleep too. To top it off, the R. of B.B.&R.—Mr. Ryan—had retired, and Carl found himself saddled with major responsibilities for replacing lost accounts, which required after-dinner meetings in town two or three times a week. Before the end of winter he and Peg began searching through the Sunday Times real-estate section. Carl could hear Bassey saying, “Craaw!” and George muttering something over his pipe about summer soldiers. Well, to hell with them. At least if he and Peg moved closer in, there would be no physical threat from those hideous barn owls to give Benjy nightmares and jangle their peace of mind. But as he checked off, with a nagging sense of surrender, half a dozen promising locations in Scarsdale, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, picturing quiet tree-lined streets far from mud, garbage ditches and Basseys, a sound even more threatening than the scream of the owls grew louder and louder in his head: “Craaw! Craaw craaw CRAAW!”

  THE REAL

  VIENNESE

  SCHMALTZ

  Harold Edson Brown’s indignation could be heard throughout the entire studio. The only thing that was louder than his voice was the sports coat on which a couple of gag men had once played a game of checkers.

  It was an outrage. Here he was, Harold Edson Brown, the highest-paid writer on the lot, the only Pulitzer Prize winner on contract (though that winning play had been written twenty years ago with an enthusiasm and intensity which had sickened and died before he ever reached Hollywood), the man who had juggled such themes as mother love, camaraderie and sex for over ten years without ever dropping a script, being denied the fattest assignment of the year.

  “What d’ya mean I can’t write it?” Brown demanded in that golden voice that had gilded some of the most wilted Hollywood lilies of the past decade. “I didn’t do so bad with Mardi Gras. At the Pole ain’t exactly a stinker either. I got range.”

  (Actually Harold Edson Brown was one of the town’s better-educated writers. Bad grammar was an affectation he enjoyed because he knew everybody else knew he knew better.)

  “But you don’t know Vienna,” the producer repeated. “I’m going to throw millions into The Blue Danube. I’ve got to have the real Vienna—the old Viennese schmaltz.”

  “The real Vienna—that’s right down my alley. Don’t you think I’ve ever been to Vienna?”

  “Sure. For two days. The only time you left your hotel room was when you chased that dame into the lobby. I happen to know. I was with you.”

  “But I’m an expert on Vienna. I didn’t spend seventeen months on The First Waltz for nothing.”

  “I should say not! Not at two grand a week. But The Blue Danube has to make First Waltz look like a quickie! I want the whole picture to sway like a beautiful waltz from start to finish. It’s got to be absolutely lousy with the real Viennese schmaltz.”

  “And just who is going to supply this R.V.S.?” Brown asked irritably.

  The producer spoke the name with the proper air of mystery. “Hannes Dreher.”

  “Hannes Dreher! Never even heard of him. What are his credits?”

  “Myron Selznick sold him to me. He’s come straight from Europe. He’s written Vienna’s favorite operettas for years. This picture has got to be authentic. So it’s going to be written by a one hundred percent genuine Viennese.”

  Harold Edson Brown sat at the head of the writers’ table in the commissary dishing out the latest inside dope like the man-about-studio he was, when a funny little stranger edged himself into the room.

  “Who’s that penguin with a hat on?” asked a gag man.

  Haro
ld Edson Brown prided himself on being a one-man studio bulletin. He always knew who had just been hired and who was about to be fired. He was supposed to have an in with the producers. “That must be Hannes Dreher,” he announced. “He’s the Austrian genius they imported for The Blue Danube. I’ll get him over.”

  The lunch hour was at its height and the commissary vibrated with rapid talk punctuated by the grating clatter of many plates. Hannes Dreher was still standing close to the door, like a bewildered child arriving at boarding school for the first time. His coat looked as if it had started out to be a cutaway and changed its mind, and beneath it he wore the old-fashioned white vest which gave him the penguin look. His heavy gray fedora was balanced on his head like a book. The eyes were a gentle, light watery blue, and the only weapon he had developed throughout his half-century on this earth was the vagueness which drew a screen of gauze between him and the brashness of life.

  As Harold Edson Brown strode toward him with his two-thousand-dollar-a-week smile and his hand outstretched in the manner that had earned him the nickname Ward Boss of Writers’ Row, Dreher shied like a horse that had been whipped.

  “You must be Hannes Dreher. Glad to meetcha, boy. I’m Harold Edson Brown.”

  Dreher smiled at him gratefully, bringing his heels together so gently that they produced no click. Because he always tried to be kind, he did his best to act as if he had heard Brown’s name before.

  “The same gang put on the feed bag here together every day. Make yourself at home.”

  Dreher bowed timidly. “Dankeschön, Herr Brown, you are very nice.”

  As Dreher ate, Brown nudged him familiarly. “Well, kid, you’re running into plenty of luck. Just between you and me and Louella O. Parsons, the boss is throwing Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy into The Blue Danube. Which means you grab yourself an A credit right off the bat.”

  “The Blue Danube,” Dreher reflected. “Die schöne, blaue Donau.” He looked out, through the window, and Brown’s eyes followed, but there was nothing out there to see.

  “You’re in a great spot, baby,” Brown continued. “We’ve had plenty of these Viennese horse-operas but they’ve always been strictly phonies. The boss tells me you’re going to give it the real Viennese schmaltz.”

  “The real Viennese schmaltz,” Dreher repeated with a slow smile his eyes did not reflect. “Ach, that is very hard to give, ja?”

  “You sure you wouldn’t kid me, Mr. Strauss?” Brown laughed. “I’ll bet you do your typing in three-quarter time.”

  Brown looked in on Dreher on his way to lunch next day. “Well, how’s the beautiful blue Danube?” he asked. “Rolling along?”

  Dreher looked up from his desk wearily. He hadn’t written a line all morning and there were tight lines of worry around his eyes. “Nein, nein, she moves very slow,” he answered.

  “Oh, you’ll hit it,” Brown said. “How about ducking out for a little lunchee?” As the self-appointed good-will ambassador of the writers, he had to make the screwy little foreigner feel at home. And of course it wouldn’t do him any harm to be chummy with Dreher, just in case he got a sole credit on Danube and became a big shot.

  “Dankeschön, Herr Brown,” Dreher said. “But when I write I am never hungry. See, I have brought a sandwich with me.”

  From that moment on Brown had Dreher pegged as an all-day sucker. He couldn’t figure him at all. In his ten years in the business he had seen hundreds of writers come and go, but he had never seen one take a job so hard. Believe you me, he would tell his pals, the little Austrian sausage is doing it the hard way, strictly from torture.

  Brown himself was the town’s champion horizontal writer. He was one of the last holdouts against the Screen Writers Guild because he didn’t believe a writer should have ethics. He had a well-developed memory and a great gift for other writers’ phrases. All he ever did was stretch out on a divan between the hours of ten and five and dictate last year’s story with a new twisteroo. So you could have knocked him over with a paper clip when he found out that Dreher was checking in at eight-thirty every morning and pounding away until seven or eight at night. And he was even more flabbergasted when he got news straight from Leah of the stenographic department that Dreher hadn’t turned in a single page. Since the new efficiency move was a minimum of five pages a day, this sounded like professional hara-kiri.

  Next time Brown saw the producer he couldn’t resist giving Dreher a stab in the back, just a little one for luck.

  “What’s Dreher been doing?—Dozing on the banks of the Danube?”

  But the producer only nodded like Solomon. “Give him time. A man who loves Vienna like him! For the real Viennese schmaltz—I’m willing to wait.”

  When Brown had to stop back at his office late one night to pick up a script, he was amazed to find Dreher still plugging away, his office full of smoke, an atmosphere of desperation, his hand pushing and pulling a cigarette into his mouth in a series of twitching gestures. The floor around his typewriter was cluttered with pages he had rolled up into nervous little balls and thrown away.

  “How’s she coming, pal?” Brown asked.

  Dreher put out the cigarette he had just lit and tried to smile the way he had heard you should in a studio. “This is the … how you say … toughest … story I ever wrote,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” Brown said. “A real Viennese like you. It oughta be a cakewalk. Old Vienna in the springtime! Waltzing in the streets! Love on the banks of the Danube! You oughta be able to write it with your eyes closed!”

  Dreher closed his eyes slowly. “Ja, the blue Danube,” he sighed. “The lovely streets of Vienna—and the waltzes.” He stopped short; his fingers stiffened. After too long he said, “Ach, no, it is no … cakewalk.”

  Brown perched on the edge of his desk and waved his cigar around. “How’s this for an angle? I’m just thinking out loud, see, but suppose we’ve got a charming young Viennese student. Nelson Eddy. You know, like the Student Prince? Well, Nelson’s in love with the barmaid, Jeanette MacDonald, only he can’t marry her because he’s engaged to some princess he’s never seen. But Jeannette’s really the princess who ran away from the castle to find life, only she don’t want to tell Nelson because she wants to be sure he loves her—for herself, see?

  “So … well anyway, you can pick it up from there—and how do you like this for the topper at the finish?—Nelson and Jeanette doing a duet alone in a little sailboat floating down the blue Danube, and suddenly their song is echoed by thousands of voices, and you’re into a terrific number with all the lords and ladies paired off in little boats singing “The Blue Danube” like it’s never been sung before?”

  Brown built his climax at the top of his voice, emphasizing its power by thumping Dreher’s chest. Dreher had tried to listen attentively. Even though he recognized Brown’s angle all too well. He looked from Brown’s confident face to the labored, tediously crossed-out manuscript beside his typewriter. It was bad enough for Brown to appropriate a famous old plot. But when a man begins to plagiarize his own work! For Dreher couldn’t fool himself any longer. Brown’s enthusiasm-coated clichés had jolted him into realizing that the story he was working on was nothing more than a feeble carbon copy of his first operetta.

  “Dankeschön,” he said miserably. “You are very … helpful.”

  “Aw, don’t mention it, Hans. Just let the plot take care of itself.” And from the door: “Just give it that real Viennese schmaltz.”

  Dreher stared after him for a moment, absently shredding the cigarette he was about to light. Then he was grabbing everything he had written these last two weeks, viciously tearing it in two, flinging it into the wastebasket, and crazily twirling another blank sheet into his typewriter.

  He began again, slowly, tentatively, as if every word were being wrung from it—peck, peck-peck, pause, peck-peck. The typing faltered and stopped. As he pressed his small fists against his forehead, he could still hear Brown walking down the hall whistling “T
he Blue Danube.” Then his keys beat another slow-motion staccato, until finally page after page was being torn from the roller and thrown among the heap that lay crushed on the floor.

  Harold Edson Brown stopped looking in on Dreher after that, because he had seen the handwriting on the producer’s desk. The finger was on Hannes Dreher.

  “One month and I haven’t seen a page,” the producer grumbled to Brown. “I think he’s a fake. For my money he’s never even seen Vienna.”

  Impulsively the producer got Dreher on the phone. “I don’t want any more stalling, Dreher. If you got something I can read, get it up here. If you haven’t, get out. I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”

  Next morning Dreher knocked shyly on the door and presented the producer with a manuscript the size of a telephone book. His hand trembled with strain and fatigue as he laid it on the desk. For the last twenty-four hours he hadn’t even left his office. He had written faster and faster, pounding feverishly into his typewriter the words that came rushing, the most furious labor of his career, attacking his story the way Van Gogh slashed color at his canvases.

  The producer fingered through Dreher’s script dubiously, and only said, “I’ll call you back in an hour.”

  An hour later when the producer told his secretary to call Mr. Dreher down again, Dreher was still sitting anxiously in his reception room.

  The producer had impressed him with his club-room informality at their first meeting. Now he was barely polite, and his voice sounded crisp and anxious to get it over. “Dreher, I only had to read the first fifty pages to know it was all wrong. It’s not what I wanted at all. It’s got no life, no charm, it reads like a horror story. It doesn’t sound as if you’ve ever been to Vienna. I’m afraid we’ll have to close you out as of today.”

  By the time they were shaking hands, the producer was already getting Brown on the phone.

  At the threshold Dreher’s only response was to smile with amusement but no joy, and to bring his heels together in a weary click, as he said good-bye.