“If that’s the case, there’s no good or bad, no heroes and villains, no right and wrong.”
Fritz sighed, expelling so much smoke it appeared he might be on fire, that somewhere in his mild depths was a kind of purifying blaze. “You are a Communist, Larry?”
“More or less.”
“So you have read Das Kapital?”
“Parts.”
“I have read it all, which is why I am not a Communist. Have you then looked into Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Of course not, why should you? But I will tell you something. Stalin, armed with Das Kapital, has now signed a pact with Hitler, armed with Mein Kampf. You know what the Romans would have said? Cave ab homine unius libre.”
“Beware the man… of one… freedom?”
“Beware the man of one book.”
“I don’t get it.”
“These people, these conquistadors, they are poor men, fools. And they do terrible damage. But they were themselves damaged. Would not our story of Father Antonio be stronger, really stronger, if we could show him not as a victim of these fools — fools with swords and guns, primitive guns but guns still, yes, and fools still — but as a hero within himself? He leaves the expedition not because they are evil, but because he must find for himself the good.”
“And we show that how, visually?”
Fritz rested his too-large head onto the back of my green leather couch. He seemed to be examining the stucco on the ceiling, seeking patterns perhaps. “You are a Communist because of what happened to your people. The Communists promise you this and that, paradise on earth, a world without racism, without perhaps race. And you say, ‘I will embrace that.’ But in so doing, you embrace another evil.”
“I’m sure there is a reason Comrade Stalin signed the pact.”
“Certainly. To buy time, perhaps. Build up his military, to take half of Poland, to take other lands, to better negotiate with London and Paris and Washington. Who knows? But in the end, it is evil in a pact with evil. So you are saying, ‘Fritzi, better the evil of a Stalin than the evil of Ku Klux Klan.’ But I say, ‘Larry, doing what is right is better than doing what seems right.’ Father Antonio must seek himself in the wilderness. He goes to the Apaches with his horses, these special horses, and lives with them, savages perhaps, but civilized enough not, unlike the Spaniards, to force their own beliefs on a stranger, and returns to the Judaism of his fathers, throwing off enforced Christianity, giving hope — horses being the physical form of hope — to these poor people so that they may fight off the — ”
“Fritz, it’s a fucking movie.”
“Ars est celare artem.”
“Art is to… do something or other… to art.”
“To conceal! Art is to conceal art!”
“Fritz,” I said, picking up my suit jacket and heading for the door. “I’m going out for some smokes. I know when I come back you’re going to be snoozing. Then I’m going to make us some coffee. Then we’re going to write a fucking movie that people — in this case, Jews — are going to be able to identify with, that they’re going to cheer when they leave the movie house, that they’ll tell their friends about when they go to what-do-you-call-it, temple. It’ll be the pageant of the Jewish people. One: Here is Father Antonio, and through him we tell the story of the Jews in Spain, anti-semitism, and he comes to the New World, supplies the Indians with horses, special horses, and teaches them riding, training, breeding and what veterinary skills there were. Two: Fifty years later, a ship turns up in New York harbor, excuse me, Nieuw Amsterdam (which at least to you I don’t have to fucking explain), and it’s come from Brazil, which the Jews are fleeing, and no one will take them — echoes of today maybe, but that’s what we want, a strong story with a smell of the headlines — and on that ship is this young Jewish lawyer who stands up to Peter Stuyvesant and says the Jews are not leaving until an order comes from the Dutch East India Company, which has sponsored Nieuw Amsterdam, and when months later the reply comes back, it says, ‘Let these Hebrews stay,’ which of course is because the directors of the Dutch East India Company are Jews, and that’s how the Jews came to America. Three: Which we haven’t even thought about how to do, is one of the passengers on the ship, The St. Cathriene, is none other than the former Father Antonio, who eventually went down to Brazil to live as a Jew and now for the second time becomes a refugee, and he’s telling his story to the Jewish lawyer, who is his son, and to his grandson. So the final part of the story is the grandson grows up in Virginia, and he’s a revolutionary, and a horse breeder, and he supplies the fast horses for George Washington’s troops. That’s it, that’s our story, which we have to tell in a hundred minutes.”
“Larry, you can’t even summarize this tale, these tales, in one hundred minutes, much less visually. Do you know what your Alfred Hitchcock said? The length of a film is determined by the capacity of the human bladder. This is three separate films.”
“Movies.”
“Movies. To do justice to this, we need a wide, wide, wide canvas, or a triptych, three screens framed together. History is not a travelogue. It is made of human interaction. Go back to Mr. EZ Shelupsky and tell him we have three films.”
“I need one treatment for one film, Fritz. And if you can’t do it, then I’ll go back to EZ and get someone else.”
Maybe I expected Latin. What I got was the briefest of all gestures, the little man’s little hands, so delicate — it was hard to think they could ever have wielded anything more than a pen (that was a dueling scar on his cheek; Fritz had been a member of the Jewish dueling society at Heidelberg) — both hands turning out, palms raised. Was it resignation, refusal, helplessness? I couldn’t make it out, and I had stopped caring. I went out down the flagstone path past the pool. The beautiful young Hallroom Boys were gone. It was coolish, overcast, about to rain. On the way back the skies opened up. I used that day’s Examiner as an umbrella. It soaked up the downpour so that when I got back only the large black headlines were legible: Hitler had invaded Poland.
VIII
Three weeks later when a gray stallion called Broken Arrow went off at forty-to-one, I had $6,000 on him to win. EZ nearly kissed me when it happened. The jinx was broken. He had a winner. I don’t think he himself had any money on the horse, and I know he didn’t know it was not his horse, because Ozzie Hirsch would not have told him: Ozzie’s job was to bring in winners, not to prevent a champion being swapped for a nag. Probably Hirsch had something on the horse, but it could not have been much. The insiders were always watching to see when a trainer, directly or not, put money down on a horse — his mount or someone else’s. When that happened everyone in the business eventually got word, the bucks piled on and the odds dropped hard. Allen Sloane was in a better position: not only could he lay money down through his organization in Los Angeles, but he was connected to other bookmakers around the country. Even a huge amount could be artfully placed, with a good part of it laid off on other horses to prop up the odds. God only knows how much he made. A million at least, this at a time when you could build a nice mansion in Beverly Hills for $20,000, and a 1939 Cadillac coupe could be had for $1,700. With the money I made — the IRS barely existed then — I could afford both: it was almost a quarter of a million bucks. I was set.
And scared. That morning I had been a Negro screenwriter running out of time on a six-week contract. I was behind in my rent at the Garden of Allah. My car needed a valve job. I hadn’t bought a new suit in a year. Suddenly I was a player.