Shambling Towards Hiroshima Read online

  “This is a masterpiece,” I said.

  “They’re building another little city over in Hangar B,” Joy explained. “Not an exact duplicate, much rougher, vulgar really — inferior materials, paper, cardboard, balsa wood, tin foil — but it’ll do for the rehearsal.”

  “This way, Thorley,” Yordan said, guiding me toward the harbor. A bronze chamber suggesting a bathyscaphe lay embedded in the bottom of the four-foot-deep pool. “The tank connects to the outside wall of the hangar. Before the Jap delegation arrives, you’ll pop the hatch on the dry side and climb into the compartment. As the curtain rises, you’ll open the wet hatch and breach the surface.”

  “It will be the greatest entrance in the history of theater,” Joy said, joining us by the bay. “A primordial dragon emerging from the deep to spread chaos, panic, and pragmatism throughout Shirazuka.”

  I certainly wasn’t expecting to meet anyone I knew, but I now recognized the foreman as a colleague: Willis O’Brien, who’d thrilled filmgoers with his stop-motion animation for the silent Lost World and, eight years later, King Kong — though, sad to say, he hadn’t worked on any equally classy monster movies since. I imagine he detested Son of Kong no less than did the audiences who never went to see it.

  “Mr. O’Brien?” I inquired tentatively.

  The special-effects wizard cast me a skeptical glance. “Do I know you? Or, more to the point, am I allowed to know you?”

  “He’s allowed to know you, but he’s not allowed to know what you know about Operation Fortune Cookie unless he already knows it,” Yordan explained. “And vice versa.”

  “Syms Thorley,” I said, shaking the great man’s hand.

  “Call me Obie.”

  “We once met on a Sam Katzman set,” I told him. “Mack Stengler had recruited you to help with the first shot of Corpuscula. You were racking focus while the camera traveled toward your wonderful model of Castle Werdistratus. I had my monster makeup on, so you probably don’t remember me.”

  “I was proud of that castle,” Obie said. “We had birthday candles flickering in the windows.”

  “Is Castle Werdistratus the reason you got this job?” I asked.

  “In truth it was The Last Days of Pompeii. God, what a lousy picture. Blacksmith gets perfect family, blacksmith loses perfect family, blacksmith finds Jesus, everybody dies. Ah, but my erupting Vesuvius, now that was something. Earthquakes reducing the temples to instant ruins. Fiery ash raining down from the skies. Two tons of steaming oatmeal gushing through the streets.”

  “I actually thought the Jesus stuff was pretty moving,” I noted. Back then, we assimilated Jews said shit like that without even thinking about it.

  “I can’t blame you for missing my credit,” Obie said. “‘Chief technician Willis O’Brien’ — what the hell is that supposed to mean? I wanted the card to read, ‘Catechism by Jesus Christ. Cataclysm by Willis O’Brien.’“ He turned to Joy and offered her a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t tell me. Syms here is slated to play the lizard, right?”

  Before she could answer, Yordan interposed his spidery frame between Joy and Obie. “Let’s go over it once more, O’Brien. When a civilian drops by Hangar A, you can talk about three things: baseball, gas rationing, and the goddamn heat — period.”

  “Might I again make the case for using stop-motion instead of a sap in a suit?” Obie asked Yordan. “In three weeks the Lydecker boys could build you a scaled-down version of our Shirazuka miniature, and meanwhile Marcel and I will come up with an absolutely sensational behemoth model, fire-breathing, naturally, and with wings. Give me forty shooting days and a competent crew, and I’ll deliver a spectacle that will make my Vesuvius explosion look like a fifth-grade science project.”

  “There isn’t enough time,” Yordan said.

  “All right — two weeks for Babe and Ted to build the city, another two weeks for me to animate the scene,” Obie said. “If you’re worried about the budget, we’ll do it in sixteen millimeter.”

  “The Jap emissaries have seen monster movies before. Maybe they’ve even seen King Kong. No, this has to be a live performance.”

  Obie sighed in resentful resignation, then faced Shirazuka and, raising his megaphone, issued an order to a hip-booted artisan standing knee-deep in the harbor. “The water’s still not dark enough! This is the goddamn Jap Ragnarok, Buzzy! I want it to look like the Devil’s own ink!” He pivoted toward a craftsman perched atop the mountain range. “Those clouds are all wrong! I want cumulus ice cream, and you’re giving me cirrus cotton candy!”

  “I hope you appreciate what you have in that man,” I told my companions.

  “Professionalism?” Joy suggested.

  “Obsession,” I said. “Without it, Hollywood wouldn’t exist.”

  “Neither would the Empire of Japan,” Yordan said. “Me, I’ll take professionalism.” Our final stop of the day was a rambling brick structure with an adjoining Quonset hut, the whole installation bearing the code name Château Mojave. It was here that Joy and Admiral Yordan had arranged for me to meet my writer, my director, my costumers, and — most important of all — my reptilian alter ego. We entered the main building, a gloomy atelier permeated by the saccharine reek of glue and the smoky aroma of tanned leather. Artisans wearing New Amsterdam ID badges bustled about carrying dressmaker’s dummies and rolls of fabric. Seated at the central worktable, two robust women — identical twins — sorted through a surreal inventory of eyeballs, talons, lizard scales, and webbed amphibian feet. Joy made the introductions. The creators of my behemoth suit were the celebrated Rubinstein sisters, Gladys and Mabel, who’d fashioned the full-scale, prophet-swallowing, profit-making whale for DeMille’s Voyage of Jonah, as well as the gigantic crocodile for the same mogul’s Trials of Job.

  “We sewed the last stitch an hour ago,” Gladys Rubinstein said, pointing toward the far corner. Cloaked in a tattered serape, a hulking mass rose against the window, blocking the daylight. “We’ll do the unveiling when Brenda and Jimmy get here.”

  The talents to whom she referred, our temperamental writer and sardonic director, arrived only five minutes apart, each accompanied by a distressed ensign who looked like he’d rather be supervising a large African carnivore. These two Hollywood stalwarts were, respectively, the very Brenda Weisberg who’d goaded Darlene into writing Corpuscula, and the very James Whale who’d given the world the first two Frankenstein films. Within the monster-movie subculture of mid-forties Hollywood, Brenda was perceived as the sort of commendable hack without whom the industry couldn’t function, but Whale was something else, a cult figure, an ambulatory myth. He dressed the part as well, his three-piece silk suit accessorized by an ascot and a walking stick.

  “What are you working on now, Mr. Whale?” I asked, realizing too late that my question might be in bad taste.

  “Beating the Japanese, Syms, just like you,” he replied. “Call me Jimmy.” His precise British accent struck me as cultivated in both senses of the word, as if he’d made the Shavian move of promoting himself to the upper class through sheer linguistic facility.

  “I’m thrilled to be collaborating with you, Mr. Whale. Jimmy.”

  “Collaborating?” Whale echoed with amiable indignation. “Good heavens, Syms, you make us sound like a couple of Vichy quislings. By the way, I rarely patronize the cinema these days, so please don’t ask me if I’ve seen your work. I’m sure it’s marvelous. Truth to tell, I wanted Boris for the role, but apparently Dr. Groelish and his daughter wouldn’t hear of anyone but the Monogram Shambler.”

  “Karloff is brilliant, but not quite athletic enough,” Joy explained.

  “May I assume Miss Weisberg brought the script with her?” Whale asked.

  “She’s not permitted to have that particular document on her person until we work out the kinks in her security clearance,” Yordan said.

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” Whale said. “Are you saying Miss Weisberg was allowed to write the script, but she’s not allowed to poss
ess it?”

  “She’s not even allowed to read it,” Yordan said. “So far, the only people who enjoy that privilege are Admiral Strickland, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Secretary of War Stimson. The old man wired his approval to China Lake this morning.”

  “You want a summary?” Brenda offered.

  “Please,” Whale said.

  “I call it What Rough Beast.”

  “I don’t get it,” Yordan said.

  “Yeats,” Brenda said.

  “We’re at war, Miss Weisberg,” Yordan said. “Poetry sends the wrong message.”

  “If anybody changes the title, I’m walking,” Whale said.

  “Jimmy, you are a man of breeding,” I said.

  “Savoir-fairy,” Whale said with a sly grin.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “I’m not sure you do, Syms. Love is a many-gendered thing.”

  At this juncture Dr. Groelish ambled into the Château Mojave, just in time to hear Brenda offer her précis of What Rough Beast.

  “We start with a totally dark stage. Nighttime in Shirazuka. As the moon rises, so does Gorgantis, lurching out of Toyama Bay like a monster from an aquatic hell.”

  “Gorgantis?” Whale said. “Tsk, tsk, that will never do.”

  “I like it,” Joy said.

  “You got a better idea, Jimmy?” Brenda asked.

  “We’re keeping it, Whale,” Yordan said.

  “The first engagement takes place entirely by moonlight,” Brenda said. “The monster sinks every warship in the harbor, including the dreadnought Yamato, then wades ashore and devours an entire passenger train. End of act one.”

  “Does the Yamato defend herself?” Whale asked.

  “O’Brien put working turrets on the foredeck,” Yordan replied. “It fires BB’S. Very impressive.”

  “After the sun comes up, Gorgantis tromps through the heart of the city, crushing and burning everything in his path,” Brenda said. “The Japs send in what’s left of the Imperial Air Force, but the monster swats the planes out of the sky like mosquitoes. End of act two.”

  “More of O’Brien’s models?” Whale asked.

  “Radio-controlled fighters and dive bombers,” Yordan said, nodding.

  “Finally, the lizard heads for the Chiaki Mountains, determined to bring the war to the Emperor’s doorstep,” Brenda said. “The enemy counterattacks with tanks and artillery, but Gorgantis melts them with his blazing breath. The climax comes when he leans over Mount Onibaba and pulps the Imperial Palace with his claws. Fade-out.”

  “Elapsed time?” Whale asked.

  “Twenty-five minutes, a half-hour at most,” Brenda said.

  “Sounds about right,” Yordan said. “We mustn’t bore the delegation.”

  “I don’t suppose I have any lines,” I said.

  “Only roars,” Brenda said.

  Yordan managed a glower with his good eye. “It’s time you met your PRR.”

  Gladys seized the serape with both hands, whipping it away as abruptly as a magician unclothing a dinner table without disturbing the place settings. Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre n’a plus rien a dissimuler, so let me now confess that the instant I laid eyes on my Personal Reptile Rig, I fell madly in love with it. To view a dwarf behemoth in a 16mm black-and-white longshot was one thing, to contemplate such a creature in the flesh quite another. Jaws dropping, eyes expanding, the What Rough Beast troupe stood in amazement before the Rubinsteins’ creation, savoring the elegant green asbestos scales, golden dorsal plates, mighty tail, helical horns, swirling barbels, and tusks as bright and sharp as samurai swords.

  “I can work with this,” Whale said.

  “Magnificent,” Joy said.

  “Spectacular,” Dr. Groelish said.

  “Fabulous,” Brenda said.

  “There’s a backup suit in the Quonset hut,” Mabel noted, “just in case this one gets damaged in the run-through.”

  “The Navy has always appreciated the power of redundancy,” Yordan said.

  “Syms, I have one word for you,” Whale said. “Caliban.”

  “Of course,” I said, as if I understood what he was getting at. Although I could see no obvious connection between the son of Sycorax and my Gorgantis character, Whale obviously did, which probably explained why he was a living legend and I was starring in Revenge of Corpuscula.

  “This is not a cerebral part,” Whale elaborated. “You are a monster from the id. You are Death with haunches, la Grande Faucheuse with scales. Feel your way into your swampiest self. Cavort, gambol, improvise, surprise. ‘Thou poisonous slave, got by the Devil himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth!’“

  “Like hell he’s going to improvise,” Yordan said. “He’s going to follow the script exactly.”

  “It’s okay, Admiral,” Brenda said.

  “I’m used to it. If I don’t give the director material he can capriciously throw away on the set, I’m not doing my job.”

  Humming and cooing, the Rubinsteins began the laborious process of inserting me into their handiwork, which was really a kind of diving bell, its portals sealed with waterproof zippers, its air enriched with pure oxygen delivered by an aluminum cylinder embedded in the monster’s stomach. Throughout the costuming procedure Whale entertained everyone with stories from what were for him, alas, already the good old days. The director was in mourning for the thirties, that freewheeling era when you could make a witty horror satire like Bride of Frankenstein, a slapstick sci-fi lark like The Invisible Man, or a fever dream like The Old Dark House without the front office fussing too much about whether the audience would get it. You could even shoot, for the original Frankenstein, Colin Clive delivering a deliciously blasphemous line after successfully vivifying his monster, and of course the censors would lift it from the soundtrack, leaving the actor’s lips moving mutely on the screen, but how wonderful to realize he was saying, “Now I know what it’s like to be God!”

  Within a half-hour I was suited up. I felt simultaneously empowered and entombed. The PRR required me to endure many physical discomforts: the rubbery stench, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the torrid temperature, and, most of all, the pressure of Gorgantis’s immense head, suspended several inches above my cranium on U-shaped braces clamped to my shoulders and separated from the creature’s body by a neoprene seal — the idea being that if any water leaked into the mouth, the main cavity would remain dry. The skull and its contents weighed almost as much as the rest of the costume, being crammed not only with palisades of teeth but also the flamethrower nozzle, my Klaxon voice-box, and the batteries that illuminated the monster’s eyes. Equally distressing was my limited field of vision, circumscribed by the tiny isinglass peepholes in my chest, which Gladys and Mabel had ingeniously wired to the eyeball batteries, lest my breath fog them up. Beyond these anomalies, the thing functioned essentially as a suit of clothes, with Gorgantis’s ponderous hind legs encasing my equivalent limbs like a pair of seven-league boots, while my arms fit snugly into his forelegs and their attached claws. On Gladys’s orders I wrapped my right hand around a squeezable bulb that through compressed-air technology would simultaneously open Gorgantis’s jaws, activate his roar, and cause his tail to oscillate like a broom. Mabel, meanwhile, instructed me to curl my left hand around a similar bulb that, once my tail was filled with gasoline, would make smoke gush from my nostrils like steam from a tea kettle and flames leap from my mouth in great crimson streamers.

  “You look terrific,” Joy said.

  Gingerly I attempted my first step. The walls of my rubbery crypt echoed with the coarse rhythm of my breathing. Despite my fears, the bulky suit came with me, tail and all, and I stayed on my feet. A second step. So far, so good. A third step. Miraculously, I didn’t topple over.

  My colleagues broke into spontaneous applause, with Whale remarking, in all seriousness, “This is going to be my comeback.”

  I tried a dozen more steps, getting halfway across the atelier, but then the great mass of the PRR �
�� my epic thighs, titanic tail, the cylinder in my belly — began exacting its toll, and I paused to catch my breath.

  “How’re you doing?” Gladys asked.

  “I wish you’d used lighter materials,” I said, gasping, each word muffled by my vulcanized habitat.

  “If you think it’s heavy now, wait till they load your tail with petrol,” Whale said.

  “I’m having trouble keeping my balance,” I said. “Will the gasoline stabilize me?”

  “Probably not,” Mabel said.

  “So what should I do?”

  “Practice, practice, practice,” Whale said.

  “Give us a roar, Syms,” Joy said.

  I squeezed my right hand, and there emerged from the behemoth’s larynx a sound like nothing I’d ever heard before, a primordial, elemental, preternatural GRRAAGGHHH!, even as my tail swept the floor, sending chairs and wastebaskets hurtling in all directions. For one glowing moment Operation Fortune Cookie made complete sense to me. For a brief incandescent interval I believed that What Rough Beast was going to end the Pacific War. Now I knew what it was like to be God.

  III

  TIFFANY THE HOOKER left my room over an hour ago, off on another house call, but her apple face still floats through my mind, her lilting voice rings in my ear, and her wretched perfume lingers everywhere. Our intercourse, I should hasten to report, was entirely of the verbal variety, so if you’re looking for something spicier than banter about Japanese monster movies, skip to the kinky encounter between Darlene and me that I’m planning to include later in this chapter. But for now I feel bound to say a few words about Tiffany’s visit. Should I decide to cancel my jump, this tart with a heart of gold — evidently such creatures exist, which may be why my father never proscribed their appearance in movies — will deserve much of the credit.