She wandered the sunny rooms at peace, as if having already dreamed such a place. Phylliss said those kinds of feelings weren’t unusual — it meant the Eckankar Masters had been busy nudging you to the point where you had enough power to seek them out. As more people arrived, Ursula scanned brochures on “the ancient science of soul travel” and the soul’s return to God. God was sometimes called Hu, pronounced hue, or Sugmad. Through a series of exercises that took just twenty to thirty minutes a day, it was possible to reach a supreme state of spiritual being. One was guided in this pursuit by the Living ECK Master, or Mahanta, who was descended from the first Living ECK Master of around six million years ago. (The first was called Gakko.) The current Living ECK Master, also known as the Inner and Outer Master, was a married man from Wisconsin named Sri Harold Klemp. His picture hung in a modest frame on the wall of the meeting room. The Mahanta’s hair was thinning; there was nothing grandiose about him and Ursula liked that.
Around fifteen people gathered in a circle to discuss the morning topic, “The Golden Heart.” Passages were read from a book of the same name, written by Sri Harold. It was a diverse bunch: an impeccably dressed couple, married fifty-two years, ECKists for seventeen; a carefree, homely, shoeless girl with a wide-brimmed straw hat; a heavy-set, dikey-looking nurse; a couple of friendly, formidable-looking black ladies in their sixties; and two or three fresh-faced professional men who might have been marine biologists or aeronautical engineers. One of them looked disarmingly like the Mahanta. They broke into groups of three. Ursula wound up with the old man and one of the churchwomen.
“The Golden Heart,” he stammered. “Well, that’s just another way of saying Conscience, isn’t it?” He sounded just like Jimmy Stewart and it beguiled her.
When the lady’s turn came, she said one day she found herself en route to an ECK convention in Las Vegas to see the Mahanta. “I said to myself, ‘What are you doing?’ Because I’d followed Jesus all my life and now here I was on my way to see Mr. Klemp. When I got to the convention hall, I saw a halo around his head — I knew pretty well then, I was on the right path. For me, that path is the Golden Heart.”
The leader said it was time to chant Hu, and everyone closed their eyes. Ursula blushed as the voices raised around her, blending, fusing, overlapping — a celestial curtain rose behind the lids of her eyes, wafting so tender in the dark, and she knew what was meant by “the religion of Light and Sound.” How could something so beautiful emanate from people so common and undemanding, people just like her? Yet there it was, irrefutable, like the whistle of a thousand trains, heaven-bound.
She cleared her throat and began, her voice a rivulet joining the stream that fed the Golden Heart.
Severin Welch
This man, seventy-six years old, in robust health and reasonable spirits, has not left his home in some fifteen years, initially because he was waiting for Charlie Bluhdorn to return a call.
That was the putative reason, now hidden somewhat by time’s seductive sleight of hand. His name is Severin Welch, a widower who once wrote for Bob Hope; Charlie Bluhdorn, of course, being the legendary founder and ceo of Gulf + Western. Some decades ago, after indentured servitude to set-up and punchline, Severin Welch began a preposterously ambitious big-screen adaptation of the Russian masterpiece Dead Souls, set in the Los Angeles basin. Where else? It took a certain comic gall. Why Dead Souls? He’d read it in school, written papers on it. He once met a fellow at the Hillcrest named Bernie Ribkin. Horror was where the money was — that’s what Ribkin said when Severin took him to Chasen’s for a little interrogation; horror was the future. He told Ribkin about Dead Souls and the producer liked the title. “Just don’t call it Undead Souls,” he smiled, chomping on his cigar, “or I’ll be suing your friggin ass.”
He worked the script ten years, finishing in ‘seventy-five. Over at Morris, his then-agent — the still redoubtable Dee Bruchner — took a month to read, hating it. But Severin wanted Paramount to have first look and (back then) the client was always right. Dee morosely messengered it to a Yablans underling. Over ensuing months, the agent dutifully tracked the hundred-and-ninety-three-page ms. from suite to suite until it was the faintest blip on the radar screen, then no more.
Severin kept his day job, tinkering with Souls on weekends, a hobbyist possessed. Meanwhile, he wrote sketches for Sammy and Company and worked on specials: Mac Davis and Flip Wilson, and Hope’s twenty-fifth anniversary, with a hundred guest stars — Cantinflas, Neil Armstrong, Benny, Crosby, Sinatra, Chevalier — those were the days. Aside from Lavinia’s painful divorce in wake of her husband’s nervous collapse (she somehow blamed her father for The Chet Stoddard Show fiasco), it was a ring-a-ding good time. Severin and the wife had dinner parties twice a week, and bought a place in Palm Springs on a course. He had just one complaint and it lay in wait at the end of each day: the gargantuan discourtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Months passed — why hadn’t someone the decency and professionalism to respond? Because he was a television writer? That seemed bizarre. Chayevsky had been nominated up and down the street for Network. Didn’t that ring anybody’s bells? Didn’t the Morris agency have any clout? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable for Dee to phone someone up at the studio and say: “Listen to me! You have not responded and my client is angry. He is important to this agency and you owe him that courtesy. Call him—now.” If you don’t like something, come out and say it. I want to hear about it, don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair. Give it to me with both barrels — what doesn’t kill me sure as hell will make my script stronger. That’s the way Severin looked at it. Anything but the silent treatment.
Another year. Severin, with his golf and gags and pool parties under the HOLLYWOOD sign. He’d throw back a few, then go on a Paramount rant: if the script came over the transom, then, he said, then it would be something else. Whole different story. But Dead Souls arrived by the book, so to speak, through a powerful agency — and Severin Welch was an established writer! One of the wiseacres said he should stand in front of the studio gates naked with a sandwich board, and Severin thought that a swell idea, especially when Diantha bridled. It’d probably kill his agent, but hell, Dee was dead already for all the good he did — sitting on El Camino scratching his ass like a dull-wit stonewalling Buddha. The tragedy was, Severin knew it would be a perfect marriage — the studio that so handsomely produced The Godfather would be the ultimate venue for this multi-textured classic. Knew it from day one but was forced to go elsewhere, finally persuading the agency to send the script to other majors. At least they had the courtesy to eventually express their disinterest. Or maybe Dee’s secretary typed the rejection letters to get him off their backs. Maybe the damn script never left the mailroom — Severin didn’t really know anymore. The whole rude, unseemly business had thrown him for a loop.
With dull awareness of his compulsion, he began to place morning calls to his agent, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, year in and year out, urging him to appraise “the progress at Paramount.” To keep his finger on the pulse. The first few weeks, Dee thought it another gag from the gagman, but as the inquiries persisted, the agent grew irritated, then angry and finally intrigued by the underlying pathology. It became something of a joke among Morris acolytes; when they saw Father Bruchner at the Polo Lounge or Ma Maison, they never failed to ask after “the progress at Paramount.” Severin still made money for the agency, so his eccentricities were grudgingly tolerated.