HIS MIND CONJURES A world in which everyone is a star. A galaxy in which each human being stands out and each forms the greater beauty of creation. Everyone is cherished, and honored, and loved. Everyone is seen and elevated. Each person deserves the world’s attention, and its respect. A world of performers, playing the roles they’ve been cast in. In this world, everyone is special by not being special. The queen of England is worthy, but no more so than a laborer in the field, who worthily plays the role with dignity and conviction. When everyone is a star, no one is found wanting. No one feels shame. No one suffers.
All the world’s a stage, as the Bard said, but that also means everyone dons a mask. You can’t ever tell what’s under it. Nor does it matter. We love and cherish the mask without knowing what’s deeper. We can touch the movie screen with our hands and feel nothing. Inside the costumes may lie unheeded people with silent urges that don’t follow any script. The script gives them direction, and purpose. The predestined nature of their roles and the limits of their freedom, determined by some unseen hand, keep them on a straight road. How can one feel shame when they simply recite the expected lines, and enact the expected motions?
Even the criminals are following the script that’s been handed them. They serve their own purpose in the world, as good stories need heroes and villains; each person is an expression of a particular form of need, desperation, happiness, or aspiration. It’s all accepted as the complexity of the world’s very fabric.
But in this world in which we are all players, we likewise find no audience. Everyone is on the stage, so no one is in the seats. Each actor plays the part of one who listens and watches, but that really is no more than a feature of their performance. They only wait to speak again, pausing until the next cue.
But they’re happy in their freedom from indecision. Very few of them agonize as to who they should be or how they should conduct their lives; everything is predetermined. No one suffers from their mistakes; all is how it should be.
But then there are those few lonely wanderers who have been left from such certainty. Somehow, they were missed. They seek their place, and they never feel quite situated. They feel the constriction of their assigned costumes and lines. They listen for their cues but don’t hear anything, so they improvise and create. They feel miscast, untethered, hidden in the shadows at the stage’s edge, unnoticed or sometimes noticed too much.
How can they be unhappy among all the happy faces? There are some small joys in seeing uncertainty looming ahead, as uncertainty is infused with possibility. In this world, this unscripted life of a few wayfarers can be terrifying, and exhilarating, and dangerous. They travel new roads, but silently: Everyone else, in their worlds, assumes these people are just fellow actors, and presume that what they do is as scripted as their own comfortable sinecures.
1959
PASSION CANNOT BE FINESSED. Nor can it be reserved. Lust, even less so. All the careful ministrations, all the delicate repartee, all the small gestures, and then to a sweat-streaked bed where the field of play shows signs of battle and surrender. The cigarettes burning in ashtrays, clothing strewn across floors, a pair of martini glasses drying on the night table, the air humid and redolent, the first glow of sun hitting the treetops, the deep inhalations and pensive touches on new flesh. Kaleidoscopic, wheeling, dreamlike.
And then the quiet click of the door and the Acrobat is alone again, an aging man, savoring his vigor, swept up by sensation and risk. Another stranger, a friend for a night or maybe a few, then the hush, both immediate and extended, words not spoken and tales not told, and then the hunt beginning anew.
To dress in crisp shirts and razor-creased suits is to reenter civilization. Here is the finesse. A fresh shave, the spritz of cologne, the socked feet sliding into the calfskin caress of bespoke shoes. Exactly 281 millimeters in length and 107 millimeters in width for the left foot; the right 279 and 108. Asymmetrical, the way he can see his face is; he notes in the mirror the slightly lower-set right eye that makes the right side of his face the better one. And two features that should be obvious to all, but seem not to be. The first is the part of the hair on the “wrong” side, which is right for him. That came from the director von Sternberg on the set of Blonde Venus, who spat out in that guttural Viennese accent that the hair was all wrong. And it must have been, as that movie seemed to raise his fortunes.
The second thing should be even more obvious; he has secretly wondered if it was the true ingredient to his appeal: that he only has one front tooth. He lost the other, the right central incisor, as a boy. On a long-ago winter’s day, running across icy paving stones and losing his footing and slamming down face-first. The tooth, spat out onto the wet pavement; the blood, filling his mouth; the first thought, about how angry his father would be. For a long while afterward, he’d kept his mouth mostly quiet, though to be a working-class lad with a gap seemed quite normal. But then, the odd denouement: Over the next few years of puberty, as he filled out and his jaw came in, the teeth slowly drifted toward each other and the gap inexplicably closed itself. His imperfect smile somehow made itself perfect. Had the tooth not been lost, he imagines the result would have been a busy and overcrowded mouth not unlike his father’s, that toothy Anglican overbite. The nine-millimeter difference, it seems, between a leading man and a character actor.
Many a man absent a front tooth might have been sure not to smile, but to become a smiling performer was, to him, like showing people exactly who you were and having them simply not notice. Later on, a little bit of covert dentistry ordered by the studio helped further; the dentist ground the Cyclopean tooth so the line matched the surrounding lateral incisors, leaving a cockeyed grin that aimed to please. Even as the film technology got better, and the screens larger, and the lenses sharper, no one seemed to pick up on something he felt was so patently obvious. Another of his secrets right out in plain sight.
Yet he’s always been convincingly false, as actors always are. Made up and powdered down and blushed and dyed, so as to appear completely natural. Authentic on the screen, like a piece of wax fruit. The actresses were all magnificent. Shining, drool-inducing beauty, best left on the movie-house screen. And that’s where he’s different. He’s the real item, disguised as wax fruit. The odd-toothed man, unrecognized as such. Well, all right, there was one: The producer Mack Sennett, still floating around Hollywood after the collapse of Keystone Studios, had approached him at a cocktail party and mumbled in his ear that he was in on the secret: “Three teeth where there should be four . . .” That Sennett saw it from a theater seat was impressive, but this was the man who’d once assembled the famous Bathing Beauties, so he knew what for. He gleaned the secret code that makes people feel he’s just like them, even in his riches and glory.
The film he’ll be shooting is of middling interest to him. Another piece of light fare that will earn him sizable money, and nothing more. Bob Hope turned down the role he’ll be playing, which says everything. But he’s come to be able to do these pictures nearly by rote. And, of course, he’s negotiated an ownership stake, and a percentage of the gross. No fool, he.
He comes by the studio the day after New Year’s, just to see what’s going on. On Soundstage Eight, he watches Scotty McDonald, the head gaffer, setting up lights with his crew and sees a kindred spirit: a lot of jobs done, a level of excellence achieved, but no more fire under the cauldron about it all.
Scotty sees him and ambles over, the usual hint of mischief in his eyes.
“Boss,” he says, “I was just telling the fellows that acting is what happens to good-looking guys who aren’t good at anything useful.”
“Lucky none of you fellows are good-looking, then.”
Scotty smiles and says, “Who wrote that one for you?”
“I’m actually capable of independent thoughts, my dear man. And it’s always been a problem.”
The Acrobat watches one of Scotty’s younger charges at the top of a ladder, adjusting the barn doors on a hanging light.
“Scotty, there was a time I lived like that, on ladders and stilts and wires, out there by myself. High in the sky.”
“Did you get afraid or something?”
“Not afraid at all. Never had much chance to think about it, really.” The Acrobat points to the young man. “I could still be up there. How about if I go up the ladder next?”
“No chance. The talent’s not allowed to clamber. I’d lose my damned job.”
“It feels odd to have my feet on the ground sometimes. No risk anymore. No excitement, at least of that sort.”
“Boss, I’ve been married to the same woman forty years and have had this job about as long. No excitement can be a joy.”
“There are certainly joys to which I might not have given their due.”
“Seriously? Now, is that you, or a line from a show?”
“I actually admire what you have, Scotty.”
“And I admire what you have,” Scotty says, nodding toward a girl, apparently an extra, who is standing at the base of the ladder and hardly gaping at all.
Vanity and shame and preening and avoidance. His impulses, when he doesn’t have a studio script to follow, so often seem oppositional and hard to master. When he’s at home, stuck in the stasis of being “between projects,” he feels his most vulnerable. He feels most anxious just before a picture goes into production. He has the house in Palm Springs, which helps when he can get there. But he’s stayed here in Los Angeles as he engages in the Treatment.
So he is the man in his manor. Tight inside a box of locks forged to keep out the world.
He wanders, restless, from room to room. He’s Citizen Grant in his hall of mirrors. Betsy had gotten a decorator who told them lots of mirrors “opens up the room with light.” But now Betsy’s gone, off to London and probably for good, and every time he turns his head he sees himself looking at himself.
The funny thing is, he always catches himself by surprise. As if he’s seen a ghost. A strange sense of his father’s face. Or maybe one of the characters he’s occupied and then abandoned, so many that their names run together. Noah and Eugene and Dudley and Mortimer, whimsical names for whimsical men who evaporate in the moments after the final scene is shot, but now hover in the reflections in his empty house, as skeptical of him as he always was of them. He stands at a distance from many selves and wonders why they’re looking at him like that. In the inversion of the mirror image, they all have their hair parted on the proper side.
But the women never show up in those mirrors. Women he’s romanced and at times married, and each from whom he has parted, so many their names run together. Virginia, Phyllis, Barbara, Betsy, and any number of smaller interludes. Just when he thinks they might be looking over his shoulder, with some amused measure of disappointment or concern, they’re nowhere to be found, specters who have vanished from his field of vision. That makes him wonder how much he’d ever cared, or they. Every marriage was meant to be permanent and ended up just as fleeting as another role he played. But he’s seeing, as well, that he is seeking something none of them could provide, though he has no idea what that something would be.
The closets are filled with the suits, his version of a terra-cotta army. They are creased to such edges that his clothes-presser father would have nodded in approval. The Acrobat was imbued by his lineage to occupy the suit, like armor against the chaos of the world, like splints of thread and starch, to prop him up and give him shape. He is both all he should be, and none of it, when he cinches the knot of a silk tie to his throat; his other clothes (the tennis outfits, the swimsuits, the ascots and the cashmere sweaters and polo shirts) feel as much costumes as the harlequin he sometimes donned as a young performer. The suits are like most of his roles in these films of his: basically the same, with subtle alterations.
By the cavernous closet, there’s a shelf with a purpose known only to him, ...
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