“EZ!” I said, as though I had not seen him for a long time. It had been five weeks, a century in Hollywood. Shelupsky did that to people. If you were working on a script, you would see him three times a day and get phoned five times in the middle of the night, but as soon as you were off payroll you became a stranger. I found myself pumping the studio head’s meaty hand like a well handle in Botke, the Polish village of Shelupsky’s youth that the mogul talked about sometimes when he was in the mood. “You look so good.”
“You got five minutes, Larry. You wanna kiss my ass with it, be my guest.” Shelupsky examined his Gerard-Perigaux. “Nu?”
“The year is 1654—”
“Where?”
“New York.”
“They had a New York in sixteen-something?”
“Nieuw Amsterdam, you’re right,” I said, having learned early that any piece of information a third-grader might be expected to know had to be passed along in a tone of voice that was as much complicitous as informative — of course you know this, EZ, of course you know that. “Of course you know the Dutch are in charge, EZ, and the mayor, what they called the burgomeister — of course you know that — is the famous one-legged Peter Stuyvesant, a real sneaky bastard — think Charles Laughton, but pre-menstrual. First line of the movie: ‘I want this scum off my island!’”
“What island?”
“Manhattan.”
“What scum?”
“Ah,” I whispered dramatically. “I got you at scum. The fourth word in the movie and I got you.”
“What you got is four minutes.”
“The scum in question is on a boat, The St. Cathriene, which is jam-packed with…”
Shelupsky rolled his eyes. “Less than four minutes and you’re playing acting school? Just give it to me, what’s on the boat? Coconuts? Booze? The Harlem Globetrotters?” Suddenly he had a thought. “Chorus girls?”
“None of the above, EZ. What’s on the boat is…”
“Either tell me what’s on the boat or get the fuck personally out of my office, Bellringer.”
I allowed my voice to drop an octave. I had taken a risk. Now was the pay-off. “What’s… on… the… boat… is…”
“Wha-at?”
I spelled it out. “J-E-W-S.”
Shelupsky’s office suddenly became so quiet you could hear a featured player’s contract being torn up on the floor below. The studio head looked at his watch, platinum and gold, a gift from Nora, after all. Slowly he raised his eyes. “What?”
“Jews.”
“What Jews?”
“Jews,” I said. “Jews, like… Jews.”
“What Jews? Colored Jews? You want I should make a movie about colored Jews? Larry, sometimes I think you got shtupped so much in the rear end it made your brains fluffy. My young friend, Racetrack don’t make movies about Jews. Despite what they think at the Turf Club — and those fucking cock-sucker goyim, no offense, should go intercourse themselves — Jews are white people. Racetrack don’t make movies about white people. Racetrack makes movies about coloreds. Jesse Lasky makes movies about white people, Sammy Goldwyn makes movies about white people, everybody else makes movies about white people. EZ Shelupsky makes movies about not white people. That’s why I got you to write for me. If I was so stupid to make movies about white people you’d be out of a job. Because what you know about white people you could write in a homo picture book. Anyway, even the regular studios don’t make movies about Jews.”
“That’s exactly right, EZ.”
“Exactly right is not an argument, Larry. If you’re agreeing with me, we’re not having a discussion. In other words, we don’t need other words. Larry, what are you trying to say, that you want me to get out of the colored movie business and go into the Jewish movie business?”
“No, sir. Race films are a good business, and as far as I can see they’re good for my people.”
“Damned straight. They give colored people hope, dignity, a sense of who they are. You think I’m in this for the money? I’m sure you do, and you’re not wrong. It’s a business. But so’s poetry. You know what’s the motto of MGM? Ars Gratia Artis. It’s on all their pictures. Means “art for the sake of art.” Louie Mayer told me when he stuck it on his movies he didn’t even know if it meant anything. And you know what? It don’t. Without art being a business, it wouldn’t be fly-paper on a wall. You think Rembrandt painted for the pleasure? It was his racket. He got paid for it. Also Beethoven with piano playing. Also…” Here the studio head seemed to run out of famous artist-entrepreneurs. He tried another tack. “You know the letters we get from colored people thanking us for giving them movies of their own? Without Racetrack Films, Larry, the American Negro would be invisible, even to himself. So what’s with you and Jewish movies? Is this a joke or what?”
“You know as well as I do, EZ, that colored films don’t have a future.”
The studio head looked at me like I had questioned the sanctity of democracy, or capitalism, or horse racing. “I know no such a thing.”
“Then you’re not as smart as I think you are, EZ. As everyone thinks you are.”
EZ’s mouth twisted up like a deftly peeled lemon rind. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“We’re going to have a war.”
“Maybe,” Shelupsky said. “Probably. If it isn’t on Roosevelt’s mind, even though he keeps denying, it’s on that bastard Hitler’s. Eventually. Yeah, I agree. So?”
“So people like me are going to be in the service, and certain barriers are going to fall.”
“As much as I’d like to think so, Larry, I’m not sure. I’m sure they got homos in the Navy, but that’s the Navy. It’s the tight pants.”
“Not homos, EZ.”
“Harvard men?” Shelupsky was much impressed with the fact that though I was more educated than he, he was the one who signed the checks. “Or is that the same as homos?”
I wonder which he thought was worse. “Neither homos nor Harvard men, EZ. Negroes.”
“From your mouth to Roosevelt’s ear. But to tell you the truth, I doubt it.”
“Even now, theaters in the North are dissolving the color line. In New York there’s no such thing as colored-only houses. Maybe a few in Harlem, but that’s just geography. Dark people are going to light people’s shows, but light people aren’t going to dark people’s.”
“New York ain’t America.”
“San Francisco? Chicago? Detroit?” I said. “You know that it’s happening all over. Even in L.A.”
“Two-thirds of this country is in little towns where the mayor can’t read and the whole city council is spelled K.K.K. That’s the America you’re not looking at. All of life isn’t a big city.”
“Things are going to be changing, EZ. You don’t want to hang your hat on something that’s not going to be there when you want to put it back on your head.”
Oddly, perhaps because it seemed to echo Shelupsky’s own inconsistent syntax, this thought seemed to strike home. He looked at me for a moment like an equal. No, not regarding race. I would never know what was in the studio head’s heart regarding the colored question. But as a movie man.
“You trying to tell me something, Bellringer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That I’m in a dying business?”
“It’s got some life in it, but not a lot.”
“It’s always darkest before the storm,” Shelupsky said.