VII
Fritz von Blum dozed off at the same hour every afternoon, so most of our work had to be done by four. Neither alcohol nor coffee nor cigarettes could keep him from his regular nap. After a week I became accustomed to use his nap-time to take a walk down the irregularly paved, palm-lined flagstone path out past the pool where the pretty youth had staked out a corner with his pretty friends — they were apparently a crew of new contract players with MGM, which every year brought over enough young British actors on the bet maybe one or two would make it, the others to be unceremoniously dropped; they were put up in the main house, whose rooms were dark, and thus known as the Hallroom Boys. After making eye contact or not, I’d walk out through the main entrance down to Schwab’s for a couple of packs of smokes, Luckies for me, Chesterfield for Fritz, glance at the front page of the Examiner — Packard to Debut Air-Conditioned Car; Cincinnati Wins National League Race — To Face Yankees Minus Gehrig in Series; “Wizard of Oz” Opens Big at Grauman’s Chinese; King George Tells Press He “Rather Likes Hot-Dogs” After U.S. Visit; Germany Closes All Jewish Firms — and then make my way back to the Garden of Allah, past the pretty Hallroom Boys by the pool, to waken Fritz. He never stirred when I came in, but by the time the coffee was cooked you could see him coming to. I wasn’t sure whether it was the percolator pop-pop-popping or the sweet, steamy smell of the coffee. He drank it black, with enough sugar to sink a battleship in Pearl Harbor. In two years, that would actually happen.
But it was still only three, an hour to go before Fritzi conked out, and I was already looking forward to my stroll to Schwab’s. We were getting nowhere, slowly.
“Dura necessitatus,” he said.
“Necessity is hard,” I said. Little by little, my Latin was coming back. “Dura Hollywoodus.”
“Not so harsh, Hollywood,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Compared to what I left.”
“That’s our story,” I offered back. “Man leaves what he knows for what he doesn’t, because what he knows is going to kill him.”
“You think Hitler will kill the Jews?”
“Never happen,” I said. “What’s he going to do, burn them? He’s more or less stuck with the Jews unless the U.S. lets them in, which we won’t. Anyway, if he did get rid of all the Jews, he’d have a hard time selling his program. It’s like what would happen to the Klan if suddenly there weren’t any Negroes. Frankly, Fritz, I have trouble understanding how come the Jews are hated so much. What makes them hated like that?” I wanted to say you for them, but it would sound too much like what I was thinking: How come the Germans hate you so much, Fritz, when all you are is a pudgy Latin-spouting screenwriter who is about as much threat to anyone as one of EZ’s inoffensive ponies? “You got family back there?”
“Some.” He thought a moment, as though reviewing faces in an album.
“They don’t want to leave?”
“Someone has to take them,” he said. “You know the most expensive word in German? Visa.”
“What about Palestine?”
“Sewed up tight. You can try to run the British blockade, but if you are apprehended it is not a pleasure to be sent back.”
“You made it out.”
He shrugged. “America needs screenwriters with good Latin,” he said. “Let us go on with our story.”
“Where are we?”
“Father Antonio has joined an expedition to the north, ostensibly to promote Christianity, but in reality to escape the Inquisition, which has followed him to Mexico — ”
“In the person of the same priest who was on to him already in Seville.”
“Larry, my dear, I know just how to play this. One lingering shot as Father Antonio, he is still Father Antonio, sees said nemesis disembarking from a sedan chair — ”
“A what?”
“One assumes they had sedan chairs. Or maybe coaches. I prefer the visual decadence of the sedan chair. People carrying people. And we hold that shot, all Father Antonio’s eyes, terror, fear, turning wheels, how to escape, what to do. And all this before we know who it is that causes this fear, and then only in the very briefest of shots. So we have seven counts of terrified eyes, and finally only one count of whom he is so terrified to have seen. Merely a blur. This is cinema, Larry. In good cinema, as in bad life, we never know what will happen next.”
“I thought I was telling the story.”
“My deep apology,” Fritz said. “Please.”
“So in the next scene we see him hooking up with an expedition to the north to discover treasure, ostensibly to convert the Apache and Navajo tribes of what is now New Mexico and Arizona, but it’s really about gold and silver. The expedition runs into trouble from the beginning. We’re looking at a hundred men, most of them small-time Spanish aristocrats, the second sons, the ones who didn’t inherit title or wealth, who usually became priests, but in those days with the promise of treasure in the new world they become gentleman brigands in a country where there are already dozens of silver and gold mines and maybe hundreds more waiting to be discovered, and plenty of labor to work them. The church won’t permit enslaving Christians, so we have this dichotomy, the conquistadors need to keep the Indians unbaptized while the padres are there only to baptize them.” I paused. “Maybe Father Antonio stands up for the Indians, which puts him at odds with the Spaniards.” None of this sounded like a movie. I fell back on what I knew. “Fritz, we need a villain.”
He lit a second Chesterfield from the butt in his hand, his fingertips so stained with nicotine they were darker than my own. “Hollywood needs villains, but in the world outside the cinema it is not so simple. Myself, I can understand the second sons. Adventure, romance, riches. Of course they were fools, but some made out well. The first sons, they stayed put, sleeping in their beds. The second sons were sinners, but that is different from villains. Qui dormit non peccat. He who sleeps — ”
“Doesn’t sin.”
“Exactly, my dear Larry. So we should avoid feathering and tarring — “
“Tarring and feathering.”
“Yes, those who do. Desperation, foolishness, greed. But greed is not evil in itself. We all do damage.”
“You’re saying a story without a villain? The whole idea is Father Antonio breaks away from the conquistadors, or maybe defends them, or maybe he’s challenged by the Spaniards as an Indian-lover, or maybe — ”
“We should leave room for… uncertainty, no? Clarity in logic, yes, but in art — ”
“You know what, Fritz? You ought to know this. Wasn’t it Goering who said every time he hears the word culture he reaches for his gun…”
“Hanns Johst. Many people think Hermann Goering, but Goering was quoting Johst. Wenn ich ‘Kultur’ höre… entsichere ich meinen Browning. It was in Johst’s play ‘Schlageter.’ Terrible work. Not Goering, but a playwright.” He smiled. “Like us.”
“Well, every time you say art I break out in hives.”
His eyes narrowed. “Bees?”
“Skin eruptions. The sweats. Heebie-jeebies. Anxiety.”
“Angst.”
“Yeah, ohngst. It’s very simple. If Father Antonio — later Abraham, when he throws off the cassock — if this guy is going to be a hero, the audience needs to play him off a villain.”
“Maybe the times are the villain. You have no sympathy for the second sons?”
“I have no sympathy for lynch mobs, the Klan, human monsters. You have sympathy for Nazis?”
“Not sympathy. But I can understand. Hate is like love. It does not occur in a vacuum. Auri sacra fames. The accursed hunger for gold. But they are accursed first.”