“I don’t know, EZ.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re new at this end. But I’ll show you the ropes. Larry, you’ll be my pertejay.”
“Your…?”
“Pertejay. I’ll take you under my wings. You wanted to be a partner?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then you got it.”
“I do?”
“Sure,” EZ said, waving his cigar. “How much you want to put in?”
“Put in?”
“Put in. Larry, we’re talking heavy investment, heavy profits. I’ll put in half a mil. You?”
“EZ, I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You made a quarter mil on one bet, Larry. Don’t tell me you spent that already.”
“How do you know how much I made?”
“What do you think, I’m stupid? I’m on the board of Hollywood Park. If I don’t know who’s betting what, who does — the ponies? Also, it was my horse.” He smiled. “Allegedly.”
I waited. “Allegedly?”
“Do me a favor and give me a little credit, Larry. You think I don’t know one gray beast from another? I got close to fifty animals in my colors, and I know every one of them like I fucked them an hour ago. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be a horse owner, I’d be a would-be. I appear like a would-be to you? Look around.” He motioned with the cigar so expansively that its aroma could have smelled up the horizon. “Wrong I have been. You make a lot of bets — on women, horses, pictures, people, okay, some you lose. But stupid? Stupid I’m not. You want to be a partner with EZ Shelupsky, Larry, you got to put in cash. You know what I want from you to make this Jew movie? Two hundred thou. You drive that crappy Ford to keep people off the scent, but I know you got it.”
Just then EZ’s maid came up with the coffee, and poured it while looking directly at me.
“Adelphia,” he said. “You ever meet Mr. Laurence Bellringer? He’s going to be an important man in this town. Hell, maybe he’s going to be the most important colored man in the whole movie business.”
Adelphia looked at me with undisguised loathing. It was bad enough being a maid, the look said, but worse to have to serve another Negro and pretend he was something else.
“Nu, Larry?” EZ said. “You wanted it? Here it is on a plate. Try these little sandwiches, smoked whitefish. Flown in from Chicago. Really delicious.”
XII
EZ Shelupsky never held it against me for not putting my money into a Jewish movie, and I suspect this is because for him the simplest way to judge whether something was worthwhile was whether other people would risk it. Besides, it turned out EZ was already involved with other things.
The script Fritz wrote, which cost $3,600 in writing fees to both of us, EZ sold to Universal for $20,000, which after the war dumped it on Paramount for $12,500. Paramount, which was releasing a movie a week, actually made it, with Dan Duryea as the priest, but by this time the priest was no longer a secret Jew, and there was no continuing story of the first Jews arriving in Nieuw Amsterdam or the priest’s grandson who grows up to supply horses to the Revolutionary Army. I saw it in London, where it played in Piccadilly on a double bill with a Danny Kaye musical, after which it disappeared completely. They did get in the business about the priest teaching the Apaches how to ride and breed horses, but it was hardly Fritz’s script. Did Fritz ever see it? I would have asked him if I’d had the chance.
Shortly after our collaboration, Fritz was invited to Washington to work for a part of the government that would become the Office of Strategic Services — after the war, it was renamed the CIA — and when war broke out he joined Army Intelligence where eventually he was on the prosecution team during the Nuremberg Trials. After the war I heard he resumed his work in Washington, or elsewhere. I know he never set foot again in Hollywood. His wife and children never made it out of Europe.
The war changed everything.
Nora Bright left EZ Shelupsky after his studio burned down, but that was to be expected. What wasn’t was that EZ went to the World’s Fair in New York and discovered something called television. Determined not to make the same mistake he had made when talkies came in, he threw himself into the new medium, investing heavily in local stations in California and then setting up a production company to create variety shows, including one in 1956 that starred Nat King Cole — the first show hosted by a Negro with white guest artists. Southern stations turned their backs, but the show was a success with viewers, and EZ eventually produced other shows with black performers. Whether it was his background in race movies or simply because he got along with colored entertainers, he became one of the major players in early television — if there was a Negro in it, EZ had a piece. On and off, I worked for him as a writer and then as a producer into the ’60s, when he slowed down to spend more time with his beloved ponies. His horses won the Belmont and the Preakness, but he never had a mount in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby. He was, however, an honorary Kentucky Colonel, which reflected his rank in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war. “I had nothing better to do,” he liked to say, “because Hollywood Park was closed until V-J Day.” He made dozens of films for the army, including all the training films for Negro soldiers, which often featured his old colored stars from Racetrack. A 4F, I was exempt from the draft, and as a civilian wrote most of those scripts. After the war EZ liked to be addressed as “colonel,” and as he grew older became one of those Hollywood legends whose life story was told and retold as though he had lived with the fossilized saber-tooth tigers in the La Brea Tar Pits off Wilshire Boulevard.
Whenever I saw him he kidded me about the Jewish movie, or asked with a straight face whether I was ready to settle down with a wife and start a family and give up being a queer, but only that once did he mention the switched horse. I avoided bringing it up, not least because I knew that he knew that I knew Allen Sloane had been behind it.
After the war, Sloane remained in London where he did quite well. He had a Thames-view suite at the Savoy, a Bentley and chauffeur — “I don’t like driving on the wrong side”—and a flourishing business directing what would become England’s largest bookmaking operation.
“Funny how things work out,” he told me at his hotel, where the waiter at the American Bar opened a bottle of house champagne for us without a word being spoken. “Here it’s legal.” He placed his large hand on mine, the violet of his cuff peaking out from a bespoke sleeve. As ever, he was dressed beautifully, now in the British fashion, his suit a symphony of thin gray-and-purple stripes on black, his tie a pale silver. As before, he smoked with an unaffected elegance that I envied. “And it’s all because of you.”
“One hand washes the other,” I said. “You bet on me.”
“And you came through.”
It hadn’t been much. I made some calls, eventually reaching an old roommate at Harvard who worked for the Department of Justice. He asked me to tell him everything I knew about Allen Sloane, and then he made some calls. Within a week, Sloane was on his way to England on a British laissez-passer. The British were short of ships and planes and tanks and ammunition, but what they were most short of was pilots.
“I get here, they say, ‘How are you on night flights? Basic instruments, that sort of thing?’ I say, ‘I still own a plane in California. I been flying nights ten years.’ Right then and there they make me an instructor in the RAF training program at Usworth — that’s way the hell up near Newcastle — with the rank of captain. They had to give me a rank because otherwise in the way things go here nobody would pay attention, and then one day they say, ‘Would you mind terribly much taking command of a squadron of Hurricanes since you’ve been teaching how to fly them?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ Good thing, too, because it was just in time for what they call the Battle of Britain. When that was over we started escorting bombers, Lancasters and Blenheims, over Germany, and I was Major Allen Sloane, RAF — how’s about that? — and everyone was saluting me, and I became what they call an ace. And then the war is over and they pin some fruit salad on me and tell me thank you very much, now you can go home.”