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Roy Holdstrom leaped into his Laurel and Hardy flivver and steamed toward the backlot at ten miles an hour.
“Congratulations,” someone said. “you silly goddamn son of a bitch!”
I turned. Fritz Wong stood in the middle of the next alley. “I yelled at them and at last you have been assigned to rewrite my lousy film God and Galilee. Manny just ran over me in his Rolls. He screamed your new job at me. So …”
“Is there a monster in the script?” My voice trembled.
“Only Herod Antipas. Leiber wants to see you.”
And he hustled me along toward Leiber’s office.
“Wait,” I said.
For I was looking over Fritz’s shoulder at the far end of the studio alley and the street outside the studio where the crowd, the mob, the menagerie gathered every day, forever.
“Idiot!” said Fritz. “Where are you going?”
“I just saw Roy fired,” I said, walking. “Now I need to get him rehired!”
“Dummkopf.” Fritz strode after me. “Manny wants you now!”
“Now, plus five minutes.”
Outside the studio gate, I glanced across the street.
Are you there, Clarence? I wondered.
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20
And there indeed they stood.
The loonies. The jerks. The idiots.
That mob of lovers worshiping at studio shrines.
Much like the late-night travelers that had once jostled me along to haunt the Hollywood Legion Stadium boxing matches to see Cary Grant sprint by, or Mae West undulate through the crowd like a boneless feather boa, or Groucho lurk along by Johnny Weissmuller, who dragged Lupe Velez after him like a leopard pelt.
The goons, myself among them, with big photo albums, stained hands, and little scribbled cards. The nuts who stood happily rain-drenched at the première of Dames or Flirtation Walk, while the Depression went on and on even though Roosevelt said it couldn’t last forever and Happy Days would come again.
The gorgons, the jackals, the demons, the fiends, the sad ones, the lost ones.
Once, I had been one of them.
Now, there they were. My family.
There were still a few faces left from the days when I had hid in their shade.
Twenty years later, my God, there stood Charlotte and her ma! They had buried Charlotte’s dad in 1930 and taken root in front of six studios and ten restaurants. Now a lifetime later, there was Ma, in her eighties, stalwart and practical as a bumbershoot, and Charlotte, fifty, as flower-fragile as she had always seemed to be. Both were frauds. Both hid boilerplates behind their rhino-ivory smiles.
I looked for Clarence in that strange dead funeral bouquet. For Clarence had been the wildest: lugging huge twenty-pound photo portfolios from studio to studio. Red leather for Paramount, black for RKO, green for Warner Brothers.
Clarence, summer and winter, wrapped in his oversize camel’s-hair coat, in which he filed pens, pads, and miniature cameras. Only on the hottest days did the wraparound coat come off. Then Clarence resembled a tortoise torn from its shell and panicked by life.
I crossed the street to stop before the mob.
“Hello, Charlotte,” I said. “Hiya, Ma.”
