Part 10 (1/2)
”Thanks,” he said, and slit the envelope. Belinda closed the door softly behind her.
The letter was from Susan Brenner. He had liked her and was sorry events had made it impossible for him to see her anymore.
He read the letter. ”Dear Jesse,” Susan Brenner had written, ”Ed doesn't know I'm showing you his play, and if he finds out, I'm going to be in for a rough half hour with him. But no matter. Whatever happened between you and him must be ancient history by now, and all I'm interested in is getting the play on in the best way possible. He's been mixed up with mediocre people in recent years, and they've hurt him and his work, and I have to try to keep him out of their hands this time.
”I think this is the best thing Ed has written since The Foot Soldier. It has some of the same feeling, as you will see when you read it. The only time any of Ed's plays has received the production it deserved was that once when he worked with you and Frank Baranis, and I'm hoping that the three of you can get together again. Maybe the time has come when you all need each other again.
”I have faith in your talent and integrity and your desire to do things in the theater that are worthwhile. I am sure that you're too reasonable and honorable a man to allow a painful memory to interfere with your devotion to excellence.
”When you've read the play, please call me. Call me in the morning around ten o'clock. Ed rents a little office nearby where he works, and he's out of the house by then. As ever, Sue.”
Loyal, innocent, optimistic wife, he thought. As ever. Too bad she hadn't been around that summer in Antibes. He stared at the script on his desk. It had not been typed or bound professionally. Probably Susan Brenner had faithfully typed it herself. Brenner, he knew, could hardly afford hiring a service to do it for him. A painful memory, Susan Brenner had written. It wasn't even that anymore. It was buried under so many other memories, painful and otherwise, that it was like an anecdote told about a stranger in whom he was only remotely interested.
He stood up and opened the door. Belinda was at her desk reading a novel. ”Belinda,” he said, ”no calls until I ask for them.” She nodded. Actually, the telephone rang very seldom these days in the office. He had spoken out of old habit.
He sat down at his desk and read the unevenly typed script. It took him less than an hour. He had wanted to like it, but when he put it down, he knew that he didn't want to do it. The play, like Brenner's first one, was about the war but not about combat. It was about troops of a division that had fought in Africa and was now in England preparing for the invasion of Europe. It seemed to Craig that it attempted too much and accomplished too little. There were the veterans, hardened or pushed near the breaking point by the fighting they had already seen, contrasted with the green replacements being whipped into shape, in awe of the older men, uncertain of their courage, ignorant of what to expect when their time came to go under fire. Along with that, and the conflicts engendered by the clash of the two groups, there were scenes with the local English, the girls, British soldiers, families, in which Brenner tried to a.n.a.lyze the difference between the two societies thrown together for a few months by the hazards of war. In style, Brenner varied from tragedy to melodrama to wild farce. His first play had been simple, all of one piece, fiercely realistic, driving in one straight line toward an inevitable b.l.o.o.d.y conclusion. The new play wandered, moralized, jumped from place to place, emotion to emotion, almost haphazardly. Brenner's maturity, Craig thought, if that was what it was, had deprived him of his useful early simplicity. The telephone conversation with Susan Brenner was not going to be a pleasant one. He reached for the phone, then stopped. He decided to reread the play the next day after he had thought about it for twenty-four hours.
But when he read it the next day, he liked it no better. There was no sense putting off the telephone call.
”Susan,” he said when he heard her voice. ”I'm afraid I can't do it. Do you want to hear my reasons?”
”No,” she said. ”Just leave it with your secretary. I'll pa.s.s by and pick it up.”
”Come in and say h.e.l.lo.”
”No,” she said, ”I don't think I want to do that.”
”I'm terribly sorry, Sue,” he said.
”So am I,” she said. ”I thought you were a better man.”
He put the telephone down slowly. He started to read another script, but it made no sense to him. On an impulse he picked up the phone again and asked Belinda to get Bryan Murphy for him on the Coast.
After the greetings were over and Craig had learned that Murphy was in splendid health and was going to Palm Springs for the weekend, Murphy said, ”To what do I owe the honor?”
”I'm calling about Ed Brenner, Murph. Can you get him a job out there? He's not in good shape.”
”Since when have you been so palsy with Ed Brenner?”
”I'm not,” Craig said. ”In fact, I don't want him to know that I called you. Just get him a job.”
”I heard he was finis.h.i.+ng a play,” Murphy said.
”He's still not in good shape.”
”Have you read it?”
Craig hesitated. ”No,” he said finally.
”That means you've read it and you don't like it,” Murphy said.
”Keep your voice down, Murph, please. And don't say anything to anybody. Will you do something for him?”
”I'll try,” Murphy said. ”But I don't promise anything. The place is reeling. Do you want me to do something for you?”
”No.”
”Good. It was a rhetorical question, anyway,” Murphy said. ”Give my love to Penny.”
”I'll do that,” Craig said.
”I have to tell you something, Jesse,” Murphy said.
”What?”
”I love to get telephone calls from you. You're the only client who doesn't call collect.”
”I'm a wasteful man,” Craig said. As he hung up, he knew that the odds were a hundred to one against Murphy's finding anything for Ed Brenner on the Coast.
He didn't go to the opening of the Brenner play, although he had bought a ticket, because the morning of the day of the opening he received a telephone call from Boston. A director friend of his, Jack Lawton, was trying out a musical comedy there and over the phone had said that the show was in trouble and asked him to come up to Boston and look at it and see if he had any ideas as to how it could be helped.
Craig gave his ticket for the opening to Belinda and took the plane that afternoon to Boston. He avoided seeing Lawton or anybody connected with the show before the evening performance because he wanted to be able to judge it with a fresh eye. He didn't want to go into the theatre burdened with the complaints of the producers against the director, the director's criticisms of the producers and the stars, the star's recriminations about everybody, the usual cannibalistic rites out of town when a show was doing badly.
He watched the performance with pity. Pity for the writers, the composer, the singers and dancers, the princ.i.p.als, the backers, the musicians, the audience. The play had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to put on, talented men in every field had worked for years to bring it on the stage, the dancers performed miracles of agility in the big numbers, the stars, who had been acclaimed again and again in other plays, sang their hearts out. And nothing happened. Ingenious sets flew in and out, the music swelled in an orgy of sound, actors grinned bravely and hopelessly as they uttered jokes at which no one laughed, the producers prowled despairingly in the back of the house, Lawton sat in the last row dictating notes in an exhausted hoa.r.s.e voice to a secretary who scribbled on a clipboard with a pencil equipped with a small light. And still nothing happened.
Craig writhed in his seat, breathing the air of failure, wis.h.i.+ng he could get up and leave, dreading the moment later on in the hotel suite when people would turn to him and say, ”Well, what do you think?”
The thin desultory applause of the audience as the curtain came down was a slap in the face to everyone in his profession, and the fixed smiles of the actors as they took their bows were the grimaces of men and women under torture.
He did not go backstage but went directly to the hotel, had two drinks to restore himself before he went upstairs to the papery chicken sandwiches, the table with whisky bottles, the bitter, pasty faces of men who had not been out in the open air for three months.
He did not say what he really thought while the producers, the author, composer, and scene designer were in the room. He had no loyalty to them, no responsibility. His friend Lawton had asked him to come, not they, and he would wait until they left before he told Lawton his honest opinion. He contented himself with a few anodyne suggestions-cutting a dance here, restaging a song number slightly, lighting a love scene differently. The other men understood that he was not there to say anything valuable to them and left early.
The last to go were the producers, two small, bitter men, jumpy with false nervous energy, rude with Lawton, almost openly scornful with Craig because he, too, had so clearly failed them.
”Probably,” Lawton said as the door closed behind the two men who had come to Boston with high hopes and glittering visions of success, ”probably they're going to sit down now and call a dozen other directors to come up here and replace me.” Lawton was a tall, hara.s.sed man with thick gla.s.ses who suffered horribly from ulcers every time he staged a play, whether it went well or badly. He sipped from a gla.s.s of milk continually and swigged every few minutes at a bottle of Maalox. ”Talk up, Jesse.”
”I say, close,” Craig said.
”It's as bad as that?”
”It's as bad as that.”
”We still have time to make changes,” Lawton said defensively.
”They won't help, Jack. You're flogging a dead horse.”
”G.o.d,” Lawton said, ”you're always surprised at how many things can go wrong at once.” He wasn't young, he had directed over thirty plays, he had been highly praised, he was married to an enormously wealthy woman, but he sat there, bent over his ulcer pain, shaking his head like a general who had thrown in his last reserves and lost them all in one evening. ”Christ,” he said, ”if only my gut would let up.”
”Jack,” Craig said, ”Why don't you just quit?”