Shambling Towards Hiroshima Read online

  “Toss it over the transom, Max. I’ll be happy to take a look.”

  The next morning, after our usual Sunday breakfast of waffles and black coffee, I picked up the Los Angeles Examiner and was shocked to see my picture — and the behemoth’s picture, too — luridly displayed on the front page. Fake Sea Monster “Gorgantis” Captured in Santa Monica, the headline screamed. Horror Player Syms Thorley Terrorizes Neighborhood with “Were-Lizard” Suit, the subhead declared. Max Kettleby’s article appeared on page 12, accompanied by additional photographs, including one of Darlene looking quite fetching in her bathing suit. Wonder of wonders, Kettleby got our bogus story straight. By his account, the “notorious Santa Monica Beach Monster” was merely a gimmick by which actor Syms Thorley and writer Darlene Wasserman aimed to “beguile producers into reading a horror script they co-authored.” Mr. Syms and Miss Wasserman were terribly sorry for having “perpetrated an inadvertent hoax” that caused many local residents to worry that they were “about to be eaten alive in their beds,” and the two B-movie celebs hoped that “all monster buffs everywhere will enjoy Curse of the Were-Lizard if it ever gets made.”

  Predictably enough, I didn’t need to check in with Commander Quimby on my wrist radio, because he contacted me. He spoke entirely in tremolos. I quickly apprehended that he was furious over what he’d seen in the Examiner, and of course the Navy brass at China Lake were also livid. Owing to my antics, Quimby insisted, every Jap spy hiding in southern California — of which there were doubtless many, all devoted Examiner readers — now knew about the classified lizard rig. I countered that, thanks to my quick wits and Darlene’s nimble fibs, it would never occur to a Nip agent to relay the story to his supervisors in Tokyo, since the whole foolish business was obviously just a Hollywood stunt, with no discernible connection to the American war effort.

  “You’ve seriously compromised the security of Operation Fortune Cookie!” Quimby screamed.

  “Oh?” I said. “How?”

  “Admiral Strickland is beside himself! Commander Barzak, too!”

  “So now there are four of them?”

  “Try to get it through your head!” Quimby seethed. “You did something terribly, terribly wrong!”

  “Well, the minute you figure out what it is, be sure to let me know,” I said. “I’ve got this nifty Dick Tracy set on my wrist, and I’m always hoping somebody will call me.”

  “Come next Sunday, you’re going to be on the road by 0700! I’ll expect a radio bulletin from you at 0800 precisely and another one at 0900!”

  “We Überweapons are nothing if not punctual.”

  Fifteen minutes later Katzman telephoned, outraged that he’d been mentioned fourth on the list of producers to whom we intended to pitch our sea monster movie, “after that schmuck Selznick, that jackass Zanuck, and that flaming anus Cohn.”

  “Sorry, Sam,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. The cops had guns. How do you like the costume?”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Katzman said. “If Cohn wants to stick some stupid Chinese dragon in a movie and lose his shirt, that’s his business.”

  “So you don’t want to see the script?”

  “What I want is for somebody to tell me why Darlene is working on this were-lizard-sea-monster-it-crawled-out-of-the-surf horseshit when she’s supposed to be writing the next Corpuscula picture!”

  “Occasionally an artist has to follow her heart.”

  “Put your girlfriend on the goddamn phone.”

  I shot Darlene a glance that said, He wants to talk to you. She reciprocated with a gaze that said, Fix it.

  “Your favorite writer is taking a shower,” I told Katzman, “but I can say for a fact that yesterday she knocked out thirty pages of Corpuscula Meets the Vampire.”

  “Glad to hear it. As for you, looks like we can start shooting Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra a week from Monday.”

  Seeking to end the conversation on a convivial note, I told Katzman that the new Kha-Ton-Ra script was the best one yet, and if Beaudine didn’t fuck it up we’d probably do some major box office. Katzman, satisfied, said “Shalom,” then hung up. I consulted the kitchen calendar. The revised schedule meant that, less than twenty-four hours after sparing hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers the trouble of conquering Japan, I would once again be putting on my mummy bandages for the sake of the world’s Kha-Ton-Ra fans. I was nothing if not versatile in those days.

  Doubtless Moses was correct when, reporting on the birth of the universe, he revealed that God rested on Sunday. God, however, did not have a Hollywood career to maintain — and so it happened that I spent the entire afternoon and most of the evening typing up the final draft of “Lycanthropus, a screenplay by Syms J. Thorley.” Throughout this interval, the telephone stubbornly refused to ring. This made no sense. How could the caliphs at Fox and Columbia not be curious about Wasserman and Thorley’s Curse of the Were-Lizard script? Did everybody hate the Gorgantis suit as much as Katzman did?

  Shortly after 9:00 P.M. I did get a call — from Dagover, of all people. He claimed he was distressed that we’d exhibited “so much pointless hostility” on the set of Revenge of Corpuscula, a sentiment that I assumed also applied to our six previous fractious collaborations, but he still harbored some hope that “we might become friends, or at least amicable enemies.” Toward this end, he was inviting Darlene and me to “a little get-together chez Dagover on Saturday night.”

  “I have to work the next day,” I said. Ending the war in the Pacific, I nearly added. “An educational film for the Army, teaching our boys how to avoid the clap. Tedious, but I need the money.”

  “The Army shoots movies on Sunday?”

  “Their dirty little secret.”

  “And you’re playing a gonorrhea victim?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Corpuscula Meets the Whore of Babylon, I love it,” Dagover said. “Please come to my party. Darlene can make sure you don’t stay up past your bedtime.”

  The bastard sounded so sincere I knew he was looking to screw me, but I couldn’t figure out how.

  “I’m expecting lots of royalty to show up,” Dagover persisted. “Cohn, probably, and maybe Zanuck and Val Lewton. It might be an opportunity to sell them that sea monster movie I’ve been reading so much about.”

  No, I thought, but it sure as hell might be an opportunity to pique their interest in Lycanthropus. “Sounds tempting.”

  “The Rubinsteins built you one terrific lizard. It’s got boffo written all over it.”

  “You think so?”

  “It would be great to see you on Saturday, Syms. Eight o’clock. Bring your script. Darlene, too.”

  I smelled a rat, several rats, a whole Dwight Frye wet dream multitude of rats. “You’re starting to win me over, Siggy.”

  “I’m still at Mastodon Manor, the stucco house at the corner of Curson and Lindenhurst, right by the La Brea Tar Pits. If the party gets dull, we’ll dig up a woolly mammoth and have Atwill bring it back to life.”

  Although Darlene found Siegfried Dagover as insufferable as I did, she harbored a genuine fondness for his beleaguered wife, Esther, a corn-fed naïf from Iowa who painted innocuous watercolors and deserved better in her bed than a monomaniacal German expatriate with bad teeth. And so it happened that, when a migraine laid Darlene low early on Saturday evening, shortly after my regular six o’clock call to Quimby and two hours before Dagover’s party, her distress traced as much to the canceled visit with Esther as to the affliction itself. I offered to stay home and attempt to relieve her symptoms, but Darlene insisted I attend the event, partly so I could convey her regards to Esther, but mostly because Dagover wasn’t necessarily lying about Cohn, Zanuck, and Lewton being there. With hope in my heart and the Lycanthropus script tucked in my satchel, I climbed into the panel truck, traded grins with Gorgantis, and sped out of Santa Monica via Wilshire Boulevard, mentally rehearsing the evening’s presentation to the producers and telling myself, over and over, that tomorrow�
�s production of What Rough Beast mattered more to me than becoming the next big thing in werewolves.

  After racing through Beverly Hills without mishap, I turned left on Ogden when I should have waited for Curson, then proceeded to learn more than I wanted to know about the cul-de-sacs south of Pan Pacific Park, but at long last I found Mastodon Manor. It would be gauche, I decided, to waltz into the party with my script in hand, so I left the satchel sitting on the passenger seat. If Zanuck or Lewton really did show up, I would turn the conversation toward Hollywood’s failure to fully exploit the box-office potential of horror movies, then casually mention that we were in the vicinity of a werewolf screenplay that had me very excited.

  I threw a tarp over the PRR, locked up the truck, and followed the flagstone path to the villa. A strapping blond house-boy named Rudolph, reportedly a Hitler refugee like Dagover, greeted me and took my coat. As I strolled through the burbling throng, engaging in the usual head-bobbing and smile-flashing rituals with people as indifferent to my presence as I was to theirs, I realized that to be invited to a Siggy Dagover party was to enter a select company. The guest list was a veritable Who’s Almost But Not Quite Who in Hollywood. Cowboys abounded. Private eyes proliferated. Particularly conspicuous were the mad scientists. Atwill, of course, plus Lugosi and Chaney, Jr., not to mention John Carradine, whose endocrinologist in Captive Wild Woman was the most underrated horror performance of ‘43, George Zucco, who’d single-handedly transformed Dead Men Walk into a marvelously macabre oddity, and Peter Lorre, so gloriously depraved as the surgeon who grafts a murderer’s hands onto Colin Clive’s ragged stumps in Mad Love. Colin himself was probably at home, either tying one on or sleeping one off.

  Noting my arrival, Dagover came sashaying across the room, weaving among the B-movie elite, his plump, unhappy spouse at his heels. Poor Esther, married to the wrong man, living in the wrong town, hosting the wrong party. This bewildered creature hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say to a bunch of hard-drinking alpha males who spent their days pretending to perform blasphemous medical experiments and their nights fantasizing that they were going to give up alcohol tomorrow.

  “You don’t have a drink in your hand,” Dagover observed. “I can remedy that.”

  “Hello, Esther,” I said. “You may not remember me—”

  “Syms Thorley,” she said, brightening. “I don’t see your enchanting ladyfriend.”

  “In bed with a migraine.”

  Esther’s smile collapsed like a pricked balloon, and I promised myself that, before leaving Mastodon Manor, I would beg for a tour of her studio.

  “I’ve been deputized to hug you on her behalf,” I said, then threw my arms around her supple flesh like a seringueiro determining the circumference of a rubber tree.

  “As I recall, you’re a connoisseur of amontillado,” Dagover said.

  “Not before midnight, Montresor,” I said. “I don’t see Cohn anywhere. What about Zanuck?”

  “They sent their regrets,” Dagover said. “Lewton is planning to drop by later. Katzman, too. You brought the script, right? Your sea monster should be right up Sam’s alley.”

  “He already passed on it. The suit doesn’t work for him.”

  “Just between you and me, that man has execrable taste.”

  Obviously a case could now be made for my turning around, driving home, and nursing Darlene, but the possibility of Lewton’s advent kept me rooted to the spot.

  “Sam knows he has lousy taste,” I told Dagover. “He’s proud of it. The last time he went to services, he saw flaming letters blazing above the Torah. ‘Thou shalt not commit art, Sam Katzman. It’s bad for business.’“

  As the evening wore on, I came to realize that my brush with the law had evidently been the most interesting thing to happen in Southern California that week. Gorgantis was the talk of the evening. No fewer than ten people sidled over to give me what they imagined was a good-natured ribbing. “You missed your calling, Syms. You should be sitting behind a fancy desk at Metro, cooking up publicity stunts.” “I want you to know that if the cops had arrested you, I would’ve chipped in two bucks toward your bail, maybe even three.” “Tell me the truth. You and Darlene created that sea serpent to spice up your sex life, right? All I want to know is, does it work?” Eventually my ribs couldn’t take it anymore, and I sought out Esther, imploring her to lead me upstairs to her studio, a wish she was only too happy to grant.

  During the seven years since I’d last seen Esther’s paintings, her drafting skills had improved, her brushwork had become masterful, and her sensibility had turned morbid. Where once her walls had glowed with soothing still-lifes of flowers and sea shells, I now confronted a cavalcade of grimy, wasted men who looked prepared to commit any act short of bathing, interspersed with landscapes whose unifying subject was the failed disposition of the dead. To my immediate left, the earth of a Haitian cemetery fractured beneath a crop of rising zombies. On a nearby easel, a dozen gossamer ghosts streamed forth from a crumbling mausoleum, headed for a come-as-you-aren’t party somewhere east of oblivion. At the back of the studio, a moldering mob of former churchyard tenants marched into a nearby abbey bringing bad theological news.

  Watercolors remained the artist’s medium of choice, and I could not help admiring the skill with which she’d pressed those intrinsically cheery hues into the service of irremediable gloom. This was not the Esther Dagover oeuvre I knew, but I liked it.

  “Oh, there you are!” her husband called from the doorway. “Isn’t Esther’s work simply stunning these days?”

  “She deserves her own gallery,” I said.

  “You think so?” Esther said.

  “Giant bipedal mutant amphibian iguanas never lie,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “If you can tear yourself away from these wonderful things, we’re about to screen a classic,” Dagover said. “Which one?” I asked.

  “Val Lewton asked me that same question twenty minutes ago.”

  “He’s here?”

  Dagover answered with a burst of anxious chatter. What was eating my rival? He seemed to be stuck in some sort of Gentile seder, convinced that this night was different from all other nights. “Lewton’s not here, no. He called. We talked. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Val’s never seen it. Smart money says he’ll show up. Did you know my cousin’s in the cast? Lil Dagover. She plays the ingénue. Ingénue is an anagram for Genuine, the title of Wiene’s subsequent picture.”

  “Just as Szilard is an anagram for lizards,” I noted.

  “What?”

  By normal Hollywood standards, Mastodon Manor was an unimpressive estate, no swimming pool, no tennis court, no Roman baths, not even a wet bar, but it did have a basement movie theater complete with upholstered seats and — to avoid any hiatus during reel changes — dual 35mm projectors housed in a soundproof booth. Before a Dagover party ran its course, the guests were normally treated to one of the contraband films that had accompanied him on his flight from the Nazis. His collection included a print of almost every picture made by UFA during the twenties. Whatever his shortcomings, Dagover had apparently smuggled the whole of Weimar cinema out of Berlin just in time to prevent Hitler from putting it to the torch.

  Did I want to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari again? Not really. Under most circumstances, I would’ve gladly forgone Wiene’s aggressively eccentric movie for more time with Esther and her disaffected cadavers. Was Dagover lying through his teeth when he hinted that Lewton might be on the way? Probably — and yet there now came to my ears the steady rush of that Shakespearean tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

  “Be honest, Syms,” Esther said. “My visions are too bleak these days. They belong on the cover of Weird Tales.”

  “Even as we speak, brilliant men contemplate the immolation of countless innocent victims through fire-breathing, city-stomping behemoths,” I told her. “Compared with the desolation in the skulls of our admirals, your visions belong on the cover of the Sat
urday Evening Post.”

  Exuding an uncharacteristic unctuousness, Dagover escorted me down three flights of stairs to his subterranean Rialto, its walls decorated with posters for Metropolis, Die Nibelungen, and other UFA epics, then guided me to the best seat in the house, a lounge chair covered in maroon velvet. The place was practically empty. Evidently Caligari held little appeal for the guests at this particular party — or perhaps they’d demurred on patriotic principle, the filmmakers being, after all, Krauts. Chester “Boston Blackie” Morris and his wife had shown up, plus Sidney “Charlie Chan” Toler, Tom “The Falcon” Conway, and Warner “Crime Doctor” Baxter. Lewton was nowhere to be seen.

  Barely concealing his disappointment over the low turnout, Dagover introduced the film with forced zeal, urging us to take seriously the claim of the writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, that their work should be read allegorically, with the mountebank Caligari symbolizing the politicians who’d maneuvered Germany into the Great War and the somnambulist Cesare representing the young men who’d been hypnotized into imagining the conflict would be steeped in glory. The film, in short, was an artistic brief for pacifism, a kind of All Quiet on the Expressionist Front, with Walter Röhrig’s crooked sets instead of Erich Maria Remarque’s bloody trenches.

  As Caligari unspooled, Dagover insisted on serving me a glass of my beloved amontillado, and a second glass after that, and the consequent inebriation did much to rehabilitate the movie in my eyes. Where once I’d dismissed Caligari as a shotgun marriage of cinema and painting, I now beheld a near masterpiece, each jagged image drawing the audience ever deeper into the mind of the schizophrenic protagonist. This was precisely the direction in which the film medium had not gone, the evocation of aberrant psychological states through unabashedly artificial décor, and I found myself wishing that dozens of similarly audacious pictures had followed.

  With my third glass of sherry, my critical faculties evaporated altogether, and I realized I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I stayed awake long enough to see the angry mob kill Cesare, and then I became dead to the world.