Shambling Towards Hiroshima Page 12

  Now came the moment of truth, the hour of reckoning, the battle of the gods. On the Japanese side: the divine, benign, beatific, saintly, murderous, bloodthirsty Hirohito. On the American side: a different sort of deity, an eschatological reptile with few if any illusions about himself. Unless some equally powerful dragon came to Hirohito’s aid, the ghost of Yofuné-Nushi perhaps, rising from Toyama Bay, the god-emperor’s fate was sealed.

  The most violent passage in Waxman’s score reverberated through Hangar A, the one titled, with a nod to the late FDR, “Righteous Might,” and as the cue built to its climax, I brought both my fists down hard on the palace. The fortress withstood the blow. Again I pounded. Fissures appeared, snaking across the plaster of Paris walls. A third blow. The fortress crumbled. Obie’s stage-blood packet exploded. Crimson cataracts rushed down the slopes like lava from a volcano.

  For the beast’s triumphant exit, Waxman reprised the majestic “Gorgantis Theme,” and thanks to its stirring strains I found the strength to quit the scene without losing consciousness. As I lumbered toward the Japanese cinematographers, bloody but unbowed, they nervously overcranked their cameras — which meant that, developed and projected, the footage would appear in slow-motion. I kept on going, stumbling over cables, staggering past the orchestra. Suddenly the rear door swung open, admitting a dazzling shaft of desert light. I passed through the blessed portal to the glistening sands beyond, where Whale, Obie, and the twins stood waiting to hoist me into the troop transport. Once I was safely ensconced beneath the canvas canopy, Dr. Groelish and his academically ravishing daughter emerged from the shadows.

  “You were stupendous,” Joy said, flourishing a $5,000 check, the remainder of my salary.

  “I believed every minute of it,” Obie said, scrambling aboard along with Whale and the Rubinstein sisters.

  “Your greatest performance ever,” Dr. Groelish said as we sped away from Hangar A.

  “You found your Caliban,” Whale said.

  “You balled the jack,” Gladys said.

  “You shot the moon,” Mabel said.

  “I cut my foot,” I said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood. Take me to the infirmary.”

  VI

  A DOUR AND DRIZZLY Monday has come to Baltimore. Raindrops skitter down my windows like translucent beetles in some unspeakably poetic science fiction movie by Andrei Tarkovsky. The management of this Holiday Inn has reacted to October’s chill by cranking up the heat, and so far all my attempts to counter their zeal by fiddling with the thermostat have failed. So here I sit in my stuffy little room, determined to complete this memoir before my sins get the better of me and I undertake my rendezvous with gravity.

  Breakfast arrived a few minutes ago, at 7:45 A.M. to be precise, just as I’d finished fleeing the scene of my crimes against Shirazuka. My dealings with room service have been promiscuous of late. Pancakes, a cheese omelet, hash browns, English muffins, butter, marmalade, orange juice, coffee. The condemned man’s last meal is a feast.

  Strangely enough, the breakfast steward was the same Ray Wintergreen who brought last night’s dinner. When I asked why he was working such grueling hours, he explained that, shortly after leaving my room, his newly acquired pewter rhedosaurus in hand, he’d learned that a fellow employee had called in sick. Ray had immediately agreed to work overtime, happy in the knowledge that the extra pay would increase the fund he’d earmarked for replacing his mother’s ten-speed bicycle. Before a dump truck ran over her beloved Schwinn, the sprightly woman had enjoyed pedaling on country roads all the way to the Mason-Dixon line and back.

  “The world would be a better place if more people did that,” I said.

  “Rode bicycles?” Ray said.

  “Bought them for their mothers.”

  “Mom’s an early riser,” Ray noted, carefully transferring the breakfast tray from his cart to my desk. “I called her an hour ago. She said to thank you for the rhedosaurus. She’d forgotten what a kick Grampa got out of that movie.”

  “Once again I find myself in the awkward situation of having no gratuity to give you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the exhausted steward said, opening his mouth to maximum diameter and drawing in a breath. “A Raydo is worth a thousand tips.”

  I yawned reciprocally. “By an odd coincidence, we’ve both been up all night.”

  “My shift ends at noon, and then the Wonderama people are paying me twenty bucks to help them get their Gorgantis balloon off the roof. Next week they’re renting it to an Apple Butter Festival in Pennsylvania, and then it goes to New York City for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Shall I pour you some coffee?”

  I grunted in the affirmative. “If I were in charge of this hotel, I’d buy the balloon from the convention the instant Macy’s is finished with it. Such a magnificent Gorgantis will attract swarms of customers.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Ray said, filling my Holiday Inn mug. “All weekend people have been stopping by and asking about our dinosaur. They like the idea of us becoming more family-oriented.”

  “And what could be more family-oriented than a fire-breathing demon who roasts people alive?”

  “But Mr. Hackett, he hates the thing,” Ray said, sidling toward the door. “If you want my opinion, he doesn’t have a good head for business. He told the convention he wants that darned balloon out of here by noon, not one minute later, or he’s going up on the roof with an ice pick.” He opened the door and stepped into the hall. “It’s been great getting to know you, sir. Enjoy your breakfast.”

  Enjoy my breakfast. That is precisely my intention. We who are about to die know how to live.

  When I finally got to inspect the foot injury I’d acquired while wading through Shirazuka harbor, my first and only war wound, it looked every bit as dreadful as I’d feared. The resourceful Rubinstein sisters soon managed to improvise a bandage from Whale’s ascot, a stopgap measure that I’m convinced kept me from bleeding to death. By the time we reached the China Lake infirmary, the cut had started clotting again, so that all the Navy surgeons had to do was give me a Novocain injection, clean out the gash, close it with sutures, and shoot me full of penicillin.

  Stalwart professional that I am, I defied the doctors’ wishes and had Joy drive me to Hollywood the next morning. At noon I reported for duty on the set of Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra. If you ever see the picture, an experience I don’t recommend, note how the mummy’s limp is more severe than in his previous outing, Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. A similar hobble characterizes my appearance in the last two alchemical creature movies, Corpuscula Meets the Vampire and Son of Corpuscula.

  And so it began, the great waiting. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the scattered company of What Rough Beast was convulsed by anticipation. I scrupulously scanned every issue of the Los Angeles Examiner, listened devoutly to H. V. Kaltenborn’s broadcasts, and routinely called Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set. Nothing, nada, zero, zip — not one news bulletin suggesting that our demonstration shot had sent Marquis Kido, Chief Secretary Sakomizu, Deputy Minister Kase, and Information Director Shimomura running to Emperor Hirohito with tears in their eyes, insisting that he spare his nation a behemoth attack.

  Meanwhile the Pacific War ground on. Throughout the horrific month of June, kamikaze pilots continued their suicidal missions against the advancing American fleet, the Army Air Force relentlessly firebombed Tokyo, and the sands of Okinawa soaked up the blood of 72,000 American corpses, 131,303 Japanese dead, and 150,000 civilian victims. During that same dreadful interval, the Manhattan Project got back on track when Oppenheimer’s team concocted an implosion-triggered device fueled by plutonium, a design they successfully tested on July 16 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. They named this primal atomic explosion Trinity. In the name of the Father, and of the second sun, and of the profane ghosts of a thousand immolated kangaroo rats, horned lizards, Gila monsters, and kit foxes. Amen.

  From the instant we heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a question b
egan haunting the What Rough Beast troupe. Did Harry Truman reason that, because the stomping of Shirazuka had not translated into a Japanese surrender, an exhibition of the Manhattan Project’s equally dramatic fruits would prove futile as well? For what it’s worth, history vindicates us on that score. All existing records suggest that, despite their favorable response to the China Lake Petition, Truman and his advisors were — with one exception — never sympathetic to the idea of an A-bomb demonstration, neither before nor after it became clear that Operation Fortune Cookie had not met expectations. The dissenter was Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who favored full disclosure of the new weapon. Every other member of the Interim Committee of the Manhattan Project feared that if the A-bomb proved a dud, the Japanese would merely be emboldened to dig in and wait for the Allies to get sick of the war. And even if the sneak preview came off without a hitch, the Interim Committee reasoned, the witnesses would probably fail to grasp the true military import of what they were seeing. Finally, in the Committee’s view the element of surprise was vital: only a bolt from the blue, with consequent massive casualties and unimaginable suffering, would shock the Imperial Government into accepting the draconian surrender terms of the Potsdam Proclamation.

  A second question soon took root in our company’s collective imagination. How would we have felt if Truman had rebuffed General Groves’s appeal for two successive A-bomb attacks and instead honored Admiral Strickland’s request that the behemoths be transported to Honshu’s coastal waters without delay? My guess is that our guilt would have been even greater, if such a thing is possible. True, the Gorgantis suit had always elicited a certain affection among the China Lake troupers, but the monsters themselves were manifestly among the most horrendous weapons ever to appear on Earth. Whatever quantity of anguish Leslie Groves’s raids caused the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was surely no greater than the devastation that Blondie, Dagwood, Mr. Dithers, and their cousins would have inflicted on those same cities, or any other targets that caught Strickland’s fancy.

  Six months into the American Occupation of Japan, I visited Commander Quimby in his subterranean office, and he told me everything he’d learned about the activities of Kido, Sakomizu, Kase, and Shimomura following their visit to China Lake. From the handful of captured documents that General MacArthur’s staff had declassified thus far, Quimby concluded that our demonstration shot had shaken the four witnesses to the core, but soon afterwards they’d begun convincing each other that giant fire-breathing mutant iguanas weren’t so terrible after all. By the time they made their report to Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Suzuki — an oral account supplemented by their silent 35mm footage of the lake-dwelling adult behemoths and the dwarf’s attack on the miniature Shirazuka — the emissaries had decided that their nation could defeat the monsters. And so, when Hirohito and Suzuki in turn informed General Anami and his staff about the strategic reptiles, their presentation lacked urgency, and the militarists had no trouble dismissing these biological anomalies as a species of conventional ordnance, easily countered through artillery and civil defense.

  I was grateful for one, and only one, of Quimby’s findings. According to the first round of declassified documents from Tokyo, it never occurred to Kido, Sakomizu, Kase, or Shimomura that the dwarf who’d savaged the model metropolis was a man in a suit. While the newspaper photographs of the Santa Monica Beach Monster may have given the Japanese espionage community momentary pause, one can safely infer that Max Kettleby’s Los Angeles Examiner story had never come to the four emissaries’ attention.

  When I returned to China Lake to join Joy in burying the second generation of dwarves — despite their severe progeria, Huey, Dewey, and Louie had lived for almost a year after V-J Day — she did her best to cheer me up, but I was inconsolable. Mired in some irreducible amalgam of self-pity and bitterness, I’d become convinced that failure of Operation Fortune Cookie traced to aesthetic defects in our production of What Rough Beast.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Joy said, adorning Huey’s grave with a Santa Rita prickly pear cactus.

  “Brenda’s script had certain virtues,” I said, “but it was ultimately banal.”

  “The problem wasn’t Brenda’s script. The problem was the insanity of the Japanese high command.”

  “Obie’s model city should’ve been more intricate.”

  “Nonsense,” Joy said, honoring Dewey with a beavertail prickly pear cactus.

  “Whale’s direction was flat. Waxman’s score was schmaltzy. The lizard suit wasn’t demonic enough.”

  Joy decorated Louie’s final resting place with a California barrel cactus. “If it had been any more demonic, Satan would’ve sued the Rubenstein twins for appropriating his persona.”

  “My acting lacked conviction. Stanislavski would not have been impressed.”

  “Rubbish, Syms. You gave the performance of a lifetime. I was there.”

  “No doubt about it, Joy. We dropped the ball.”

  For what it’s worth, Operation Fortune Cookie actually did reduce casualties in World War Two. The last time I saw Quimby, sometime in 1952, he informed me that throughout July of 1945 and the first week in August, the Imperial Ministry of Homeland Security had tripled the watch along the shores of Honshu. The Japanese leaders knew that, having squandered what was left of their navy in the Ten-ichi-go sortie, they could not destroy any American subs that might appear towing sedated behemoths, but they could at least try to evacuate the targeted city before the monsters were awakened and unchained. Thanks to our demonstration shot, as many as two hundred civil defense workers who might otherwise have been in the heart of Hiroshima on the morning of Monday, August 6, 1945, were prowling nearby coves, binoculars in hand, looking for periscopes poking above the waves, and so they were spared when a uranium-fueled hell burst over the city. Three days later, another one hundred and seventy-five civil defense personnel found themselves at a safe distance when a plutonium bomb leveled Nagasaki. So you might say that What Rough Beast saved almost four hundred lives — even as it failed to deliver 177,000 Japanese from death by blast, incineration, and acute radiation sickness, and another 300,000 from turning into hibakusha, “explosion-affected persons,” the walking wounded with their lacerations, burns, mental disorders, and incipient cancers.

  To this day, I’m not sure why the Navy’s Bureau of Teratoid Operations was shut down immediately after the Pacific War ended. I know only that the ink was barely dry on General Umezu’s signature when the Pentagon ordered Admiral Strickland’s group to exterminate the three adult behemoths by deoxygenating China Lake, then destroy the twenty embryos through whatever means might prove most efficient. Upon receiving word that Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers had drowned, the War Department arranged for the Knickerbocker Project to remain classified well into the next century. Because Strickland’s budget had always been piggy-backed onto the Manhattan Project, it wasn’t difficult for the Truman White House and subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic, to act as if the giant reptiles had never existed. For the sake of the historical record, though, I must note that the Los Alamos bombs actually cost the taxpayers a mere one and a half billion dollars. The remaining five hundred million went into iguanas of mass destruction.

  Did our military leaders come to view the behemoths as a technology so awful, so disgusting, so counter to every value that civilized nations hold dear, that even the most hawkish could not abide their continued cultivation? I doubt it. Conversely, did the What Rough Beast fiasco convince the Pentagon that the monsters weren’t quite awful enough, and it would be better to specialize in the indubitable horror of nuclear weapons? A reasonable argument, but it’s more likely that the Joint Chiefs simply didn’t want to deal with the debilitating interservice rivalry that would surely follow if the Army and the Navy each had its own distinctive way of ending the world.

  Or perhaps the Pentagon’s considerations were primarily tactical. A behemoth is a capricious thing, after all,
its behavior unpredictable compared with the purely technical problem of building an atomic bomb and delivering it to a target. For whatever reasons, the Lizard Age, I am happy to report, ended almost as soon as it began.

  Unable to face another swatch of fabric or vat of foam rubber without thinking of Gorgantis, the Rubinstein sisters left Los Angeles early in 1946. They moved to Wyoming, opened a kennel, and set about breeding Labrador retrievers as seeing-eye dogs. The last I heard from Gladys, sometime in the late sixties, Mabel was dying of heart disease, the kennel had been sold, and they were living on Social Security in Bakersfield.

  Brenda Weisberg remained in the movie industry for another six years, but she never wrote anything as memorable as The Mad Ghoul or The Mummy’s Ghost or, for that matter, What Rough Beast. According to her biographer, the perspicacious Jeri Smith-Ready, Brenda seemed “curiously depressed and distracted” during the final phase of her Hollywood career, which saw her contributing DOA scripts to such humdrum pictures as King of the Wild Horses, Ding Dong Williams, When a Girl’s Beautiful, and My Dog Rusty. Did Brenda ultimately find peace? Such was the impression I got from a postcard I received in 1962. By her laconic account she was back in the Arizona of her childhood, happily married and “keeping my demons at bay by writing and directing for the Phoenix Little Theater.”

  James Whale, too, found peace, though of a more static and controversial variety. In 1957, at the age of sixty-seven, the director of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and What Rough Beast drowned himself in his swimming pool. His decision may be plausibly attributed to several factors, among them loneliness, poor health, and the frustration of a truncated career, his last feature being They Dare Not Love of 1941. I’m convinced that Whale’s homosexuality had nothing to do with his suicide, and equally persuaded that, if our behemoth demonstration had worked, he would have held on much longer — painting, sketching, planting his garden, tending to his memories.