“Arnold,” I said, already halfway out the door, reaching back to pat him on his bony shoulder, “don’t count on it.”
14
Horse operas, crime melodramas, horror pictures, comedies, and every other stripe of B-movie were still churned out by the independent studios on Sunset Boulevard, near Gower Street. Despite the ongoing strike by the CSU-the Conference of Studio Unions-the usual parade of featured players was crossing Sunset in full makeup to grab a bite at a hamburger or hot-dog stand; Brittingham’s, the popular eatery in Columbia Square, at the corner of Sunset and Gower, was servicing its usual clientele of actors and extras, including western gunfighters with empty holsters (prop men having confiscated their sixshooters) and starlets in sunglasses and white blouses and dark slacks, freshly waved hair tucked under colorful kerchiefs.
This lack of support for the strike came as no surprise to me, and was in fact why a bit player like Peggy was getting chauffeured to the studio, daily. The CSU was a militant leftist coalition that included carpenters, painters, and machinists; they were an alternative to the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, IATSE having been organized by Nitti racketeers Willie Bioff and George Browne, both currently still in stir. Under the leadership of new Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, however, the CSU had been left twisting in the wind, and SAG actors-among other union and guild members-were crossing the picket lines.
Which was how Peggy could be working at Paramount, during a strike, and I could be keeping an appointment with Orson Welles at the giant of Gower Gulch, Columbia. A Poverty Row weed that had blossomed under the firm hand of Harry Cohn, Columbia was now a major force in Tinsel Town, and had been ground zero for the strike last October, when fifteen hundred picketers laid siege to the studio, with nearly seven hundred strikers arrested on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to assault with a deadly weapon.
But now, several months later, sold out by Dutch Reagan and SAG, the picketers were a halfhearted, signs-on-their-shoulders bunch, a sea of Reds who quickly parted to allow me to check in at the guard gate. My unionist pop would have been ashamed of this lackluster picket line-and ashamed of me, for crossing it.
I parked and strolled past surprisingly ramshackle-looking offices onto a typically bustling backlot-workshops, cutting rooms, projection rooms, soundstages. But-despite following Fred Rubinski’s detailed directions-I soon found myself wandering amid chattering extras in costume and bored grips and gaffers in work clothes, ducking cars and trucks transporting people and equipment. Finally I was just standing there, scratching my head, a detective who could have used a detective, when I felt something-or somebody-tug at my sleeve.
I glanced down and a large adult male face was looking up at me.
“You’re Mr. Heller, ain’tcha?” the hunchbacked dwarf asked. His accent said New York, Lower East Side.
“Uh, yes.”
He grinned up at me; he had a pleasant, well-lined face-blue eyes, high forehead, gray hair, late fifties.
“The boss is expectin’ ya.” He shuffled around in front of me and extended a hand. He was wearing white pants and a white shirt and white shoes, and looked like a little ice-cream man-the shirt, however, was spattered with red. “Shorty Chivello, Mr. Heller-I’m Mr. Welles’ chauffeur and personal valet.”
I shook his hand, which was of normal size, his grip firm and confident. “Chauffeur, huh?”
He laughed, saying, “Hey, I’ll save you the embarrassment of askin’ how I manage that, Mr. Heller-I got these special wooden blocks strapped to the pedals.”
“Cut yourself shaving, Shorty?” I asked, as I followed him toward a nearby soundstage.
“Aw, it’s just paint, Mr. Heller.”
“Make it ‘Nate.’ ”
“Naw, that’s okay. I’m ‘Shorty,’ but you’re ‘Mr. Heller.’ The boss likes certain respect paid… He says you’re an old friend.”
“That may be overstating, Shorty. But he was barely out of that prep school in Woodstock when I first met him in Chicago.”
“Jeez, was the boss the boy genius they say he was?”
“Shorty, he still is.”
Shorty opened the door for me and I stepped into the mostly darkened soundstage, and what I saw gave me a start: out of the gloom emerged another giant head-not another hunchbacked dwarf’s, something even better, even stranger… the profile of a wild-eyed, vaguely Chinese dragon, hovering above me, perhaps forty feet off the floor, the head itself thirty feet high, angled skyward, a shiny slide extending from its open mouth like an endless silver tongue snaking its way up into the darkness where the ceiling presumably was; disturbingly, the silver slide also exited the back of the beast’s head, emptying into a vast pit.
“Christ!” I said. My eyes adjusting to the near dark, I could see that the whole preposterous serpentine affair was constructed on roller-coaster-style scaffolding.
Shorty was shuffling around in front me, saying, “Watch your step, Mr. Heller. The boss had ’em dig that pit right through the cement… Ya shoulda heard them jackhammers!”
We skirted the edge of the mini-abyss, which was a good eighty feet long, and half again as wide, perhaps as deep.
“The boss made the cameramen slide down that thing on their stomachs,” Shorty was saying. “Put the camera on a mat. So you could get a whaddayacallit, objective view.”
I figured he meant “subjective,” but I never argue with hunchbacked dwarfs, particularly on soundstages dominated by dragons. Just as a general policy.
Moving past the towering slide, I followed the little man, the movement of his body seeming more side-to-side than straight ahead, to a door in the midst of portable walls that were clearly the back of a set-about a third of the soundstage was blocked off behind these “wild” walls, which could be moved to facilitate filming from varied angles.
Shorty opened the door and revealed a black-haired man in baggy black trousers and loose white shirt and loosened black tie, a big man at least six two and easily pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, standing at a small work table, dabbing red paint onto the wide grin of a grotesque clown mask which lay like a shield on the table. The lighting-provided by occasional work lamps hanging like fruit from extension cords vanishing up into the same darkness that swallowed the ceiling-was harsh and spotty and shadow inducing. The walls were decorated with a scratchy black-and-white mural replete with nightmarish, violent images-medical-text anatomical diagrams and grinning clown faces juxtaposed with the death smiles of dancing skeletons.
The black-haired man smiled over his shoulder at me, puckishly, dark hard eyes melting in a soft baby face where strong cheekbones struggled to be seen, dark slashes of eyebrow expressed constant irony, and an upturned nose seemed to thumb itself, all punctuated by a dimpled chin.
“Nathan, darling,” he said, in that sonorous voice radio listeners all over America adored, including many who disliked the young man who possessed it, “what do you think of my Crazy House?”
“What was that remark that got you in so much trouble?” I asked, moving next to him as he reddened the clown’s grin with a Chinese brush. “Something about a movie studio being your personal train set?”
“Well, now it’s my personal erector set.” He flashed me that raffish smirk of his that seemed to invite you in on every private joke. “Did you know that the definition of one word has kept our two noble unions from coming together? And what is that single word over which our carpenters and painters and set dressers and other skilled artisans have, shall we say, come to blows? Erection, my dear.” He sighed and smiled and lifted his eyebrows as he bent over the clown mask, touching it up skillfully.
“Erection?”
“Yes, they can’t make up their minds-does it mean, the building of sets, or does it refer to simply assembling that which has already been built?” He gave me an amused pixie look. “Perhaps I should point out to them that, in my experience, a woman who is ‘built’ can cause an erection to quite naturally occur. Wouldn’t you agree?”