Anthony From Afar

I remember my first meeting with this Anthony. It was in the busiest social center in Hollywood, the assembly room that is to the actor what his club is to a London barrister; the unemployment insurance office on Santa Monica Boulevard.

My friends, who know what I think about the handing out of Trinkgeld and other lagniappes to the laughing boys of the acting fraternity, will ask what I was doing in a place like that. I was not after handouts. The way it happened, a friend of mine, a bristle-edged New York novelist named Gordon Rengs, had made the mistake of staying on in Hollywood after finishing his first movie script. The hotter hotheads of the Writers' Guild, fellows who are pleased to think that the typewriter has something fundamentally in common with the pick and shovel, had clenched their fists, a gesture not easy to make when your fingers are hooked with writer's cramp, gathered up their exclamation points and put through a strike for a two-pool wage. Months passed. Gordon, who had literally eaten up his savings, had had to choose whether he would let his electric typewriter or his Alfa-Romeo be repossessed and, being the romantic he is, had decided for art over mobility; as he had no way of getting around, I had offered to drive him to the money dispensary.

Well. This day I was walking up and down in the rear of the unemployment office while Gordon Rengs tried to collect his bonus for not working. A rangy young fellow with ominous shoulders came over to take his place in one of the pay-window lines and, looking over the room as though it were the lobby of Grauman's Chinese on premiere night, his eye caught mine, he stared, there was a moment of large question marks; after which his classic cowpoke countenance lit up with a smile I can only describe as canyonesque.

It's not an unmixed blessing to have a well-known face. People have peculiar, much too emotional, reactions when they meet in the flesh a face they have seen over and over on the movie screen or the television tube. Some of them want to take it home. Almost all of them want to touch it. (continued on page 56)

Anthony From Afar (continued from page 44)

A few, the more perverse, would like to hit it. In very few cases can they simply let it go by on the assumption that, after all, it is a face like any other, with the standard capacity for gulping things down and making noises, distinguished only in the sense that it has gotten around and been photographed more than most. I have never considered it any clinching proof of merit that my features have been ogled at and day-dreamed over by multitudes; all that means is that I have worked with pleasing regularity over the past 20 years, accumulating exposures the way a hod carrier accumulates calluses. But it also means that it is not easy for me to walk down the street or in any way appear as a private citizen in public places. My face has become a magnet, even a target. People keep stopping to gape at me and I never know whether they're going to say hello or spit.

This young fellow snorted, gaped, goggled. He left his place in line to walk over to me and say, "Unless I'm seeing things, no, I've got to be right, it's Farley Munters."

I did not care for the muscled heartiness, the positive, belligerent joy in his manner, all the more so considering the nature of the place he had cornered me in. I' said, "I don't think I've had what is called the pleasure?"

"I've been seeing you in pictures for years and years," he said with enthusiasm. Of course he would want to drive home the chronological gap between us; young actors use their one weapon, youth, like a machete. "I'm a big fan of yours, Mr. Munters, sir." His deference I found insulting; I am, after all, only a shade past 40 and not yet entirely used to being thrown in with the sirs. "My name's Anthony Trilling, sir."

He was very blond. He was very tall. He was at the most 24. His eyes were impossibly blue. Though dressed abominably, with a yellowish salt-and-pepper jacket and off-green, welt-seamed slacks that looked like rejects from a Salvation Army swap shop, plus suede desert boots that seemed to have been run through a bog of French's mustard, he had the snub-nosed good looks that stand out on a dance floor and the leanness through the hips and thighs that goes well on a saddle or skis or in a sports car. He was obviously an actor who introduced himself all the time to strangers; his handshake had too much breezing energy for a man whose entire program at the moment was to collect a stipend for not doing the one thing he claimed he could do with enough professionalism to justify people paying him good money for it.

"If that's really your name, I'm happy for you," I said. I was not happy with myself when I heard my mouth adding, "I'm waiting for someone."

"Right. Sure. You betcha. Mr. Munters," he said with the air of reciting high mass, "I would never in my worst nightmares think of you at any time in your life collecting unemployment." He made a dramatic hissing sound between his teeth. "A man like Farley Munters, unemployed! That'd be like, like Bernard Baruch on, on a bread line!"

Then Gordon was coming up, grunting, "No pourboires for us literary folk, they tell me I'm not eligible for payments because I'm on strike. Strike me dead and they very well may. There goes my IBM after my Alfa. I won't be able to write, not even home for money, without my trusty electric typewriter. Arise and shine, ye prisoners of starvation."

As I turned to leave, Anthony Trilling said, invisible hat in hand, practically curtsying, "I only hope before I'm finished to be one tenth the actor you are, Mr. Munters, one twentieth."

I said, "Work hard, and don't eat fatty foods."

He said seriously, "That's a heck of a good tip. I'll do that, you betcha." Without warning he unleashed a smile that was all equatorial sun.

• • •

Hollywood is a town of drugstore and coffeehouse cowboys, and most of their hangouts are along the Strip. When I am home with my family in Kew Gardens I stay put, I have no interest in seeing faces without blood connection to mine and even those that are so related to me I would rather not see uninterruptedly, but when I am by myself in Hollywood I pick up the local virus fast, a virus that makes you jumpy and a bit feverish unless you're sitting in some Strip establishment at a marble table drinking an espresso or a mocha frost; I become one more cowboy with round and hungry eyes, staring and being stared at.

What I stared at a staggeringly disproportionate amount of the time, in the days that followed, was the young, eager, lean-boned, relentlessly enthusiastic face of Anthony Trilling.

The first time I saw him I was driving home from the studio along the Strip and had stopped for a red light at La Cienega. Anthony Trilling was standing on the corner diagonally across from me, devoting all his attention to an eye-buggingly constructed girl whose black hair was piled in a beehive hairdo and whose entire lower half was stunningly outlined by glare-pink Capri pants hugging her skin straight down to her studded gold high heels. She was holding on to one of his hands with both of her own, trying to keep it away from her, and he was systematically slapping her lovely cheek. He looked up for a moment and saw me. He flashed a big how-are-you grin, waved, and returned to his work.

Two nights later I met Gordon Rengs at the night club called the Crescendo. Gordon had earlier been at a strike meeting of the Writers' Guild at the Beverly Hilton and he was telling me in tones of disbelief how it felt to attend a proletarian rally in the fanciest grand ballroom in town while half the clenched-fist firebrands were at the bar in the lobby with their fists clenched around martini glasses.

"There's a difference between us," he was saying. "I felt uneasy in that ballroom, it seemed to me we should all of us be in white ties and tails and doing the tango with Ginger Rogers or Rita Hayworth, and instead there were men raising their fists and demanding that we start to picket the exploiting studios. Men making $2000 and $3000 a week, wanting to march up and down carrying placards against the exploiters. I don't fully understand this town. There seems to be a class struggle going on between various strata of millionaires."

A tall figure congealed alongside our booth. It was Anthony Trilling, dressed in a ridiculously short-jacketed and lean-legged Italian suit vaguely olive in color and with a high sheen.

"Mr. Munters!" he beamed. "A pleasure, it's real good to see you!" Saying which, he took a seat next to me and assumed a man-to-man pose. "I'd like to explain something, about the other afternoon, I want you to know, Mr. Munters--"

"Allow for the possibility," I said, "that I don't want to know. There is an infinite variety of things in this world that I prefer to be kept in the dark about."

"No, listen," he said in dead earnest, "I know it must have looked funny. See, this girl, the thing of it is, she was sort of living with me, and she went over to Schwab's and ran up a bill of close to $200 for cosmetics and junk like that, all on my charge account, only by this time she wasn't living with me any more. When I ran into her and accused her of doing it out of spite, why, she got nasty and dared me to do something about it, so I had to belt her. Two hundred, that's a lot of loot, and us not even being together any more and all." He nodded, satisfied with his logic.

"Some theoreticians might say that in certain circumstances a girl could need $200 worth of cosmetics to cover her black-and-blue marks," I said. "I wouldn't say that, necessarily, but some theoreticians might. Some cosmeticians, too."

"Get the point?" he said, ignoring my point. "We were already busted up, I told her to get lost and moved her stuff (continued on page 58) Anthony From Afar (continued from page 56) out, and after that she went and hung this charge on me. A thing like that, you can't let them get away with it."

Early the following week I was having a quiet lunch by myself in the commissary at MGM, where I was working on a picture. Up came, of course, of course, Anthony Trilling, this time shaggily splendid in a jerkin and pants of unshaved buffalo hide, black wig cascading to his awesome shoulders, a jagged scar running like a file of caterpillars from his forehead to his chin. He informed me that he had a part as a buffalo hunter in a popular television show, small but with some lines. I congratulated him and added that supporting roles are not to be dismissed because enough of them enable an actor to support himself and thus keep from being a public ward.

"Farley," he said with his own brand of programmatic joviality, "I'd like you to know, we're just about made up."

"You're made up very well," I said. "Your hair looks like the forest primeval and that barroom brawler's scar seems to have been come by honestly."

"What?" he said. His face looked puzzled, then eased back into its customary grin. "Oh. You mean my make-up. I wasn't talking about what they did to me in make-up. What I mean is, Norva and I made up."

"Norva?"

"Norva Hameel. You know, the girl that was with me that afternoon."

He sat down. Now that he had put us on a first-name basis, which I disliked more than his calling me sir, he apparently assumed that we were natural luncheon partners.

"Norva's that ice-skater that became a dancer," he said informatively. "You know, she did a couple things on TV, the Perry Como show and the Frank Sinatra show, she got pretty good notices. We're getting back together. She's class, she's a ratey chick, though sometimes she gets out of line and you have to come down on her. Women don't respect you otherwise, they figure you for some kind of patsy if you let them walk all over you."

"You mean, if they walk over you they have a tendency to walk out on you?"

"That's the absolute truth of it," he said. "They don't walk out on me."

About that time I took to dropping over to Cyrano's in the late evening to have an espresso and see the busty sights. All the people in the area who weren't nailed down by families, or who had families that had run out of nails, were beginning to congregate in this tastily set-up room. It was a good coffeeing place for a dislocated New Yorker with the handcuffs of time on his hands; he could always find there a tableful of other New York D.P.s trying to fill in the hours until blessed bedtime. Here I would meet with writers like Gordon Rengs and Ivan Masso and an occasional actor like Tony Reach, one of the few members of my profession whom I can tolerate socially because his attitude toward life is that of a truck driver, which is what he looks like, rather than an actor, and we would play the game of topping each other's witty sayings while we watched the girls, the fantastic girls.

One girl I found myself watching with regularity was Norva Hameel. I found her to be extravagantly designed in all details. She was in the place every night, each time with a different man who was never, not once, not even for a moment, Anthony Trilling. The men she appeared with were invariably 20 years older than Anthony Trilling.

Anthony Trilling was there, too. Never with anybody. He always sat in a far corner, his back against the wall, looking the crowd over as he sipped his cappuccino, the picture of the dashing young man about town having a quiet coffee break from his hectic night life. The smile of masterful self-assurance never dimmed on his face as he surveyed the room and toted up the lush possibilities. Every so often he would casually pick himself up and stroll to another table to chat with some particularly striking girl, leaning close to her, talking into her ear with jocose insinuation, the smile fixed on his face with all its stickum sureness; after a few minutes he would amble lazily back to his table and take up his solitary post again, smiling as Cheshire-catly as ever, very certain of himself and his multiplying merits. The one girl he never tried to speak to was Norva Hameel. He never looked in her direction. For her part, she never looked in his.

He developed a horrible habit. The first few times he spotted me at a table he would beam his indomitable smile my way, wave his hand in a respectful salute, and let it go at that. But the fourth or fifth evening, after he had made a few sallies toward the girls at neighboring tables, only to return to his own with his lips twisted in supreme cockiness, he suddenly, after studying our group, reached a decision, heaved himself to his feet, and came over. He said, "Farley, fellows, nice to see you, mind if I sit down?" And before I could figure out an answer that would mean no without spelling it out he was installed next to me, giving me the affable, we're-all-in-this-together grin, elaborately at ease with himself and the world. It got so that he was joining us each and every night we assembled there. A ghastly silence as of the grave, of Forest Lawn, of Utter-McKinley, would fall over the table the moment he loomed up. We never had anything to say to him. My friends simply assumed that he was my buddy -- he had actually taken to calling me "old buddy" -- and continued to talk among themselves, leaving me to cope with this hilarity machine. They referred to him as Farley's beamish boy and were happy to grant me a monopoly on him.

For some reason he assumed that I had a ravenous hunger for all the least details of his biography. Before too many evenings had passed he was busy filling me in on his life story.

"I was a lineman for the telephone company in Ann Arbor, Michigan," he told me chattily. "That was how I made my living, climbing telephone poles and splicing wires. I never thought about anything but shinnying up poles days and balling nights. But the girls, the girls especially, they would always be kidding me about how I looked like a movie star and I ought to be in pictures. I always took it for a lot of loose jaw and I just balled away the nights and never let it get to me. But then these Hollywood people came to Ann Arbor to shoot a picture on location and damn if one of the girls didn't go up to the producer and tell him there was this young stud in town with a million-dollar face and build and he would be a natural for the movies, and she got this man to take a look at me. You know how it is, Farley, I went along with it just as a gag."

"For laughs," I said. "For the lark of it."

"Sure. But the producer, he looked me over and said it was worth a try, if I would pay my expenses out to Hollywood he would arrange for a screen test. Me, a monkey on the telephone poles, going to Hollywood for a screen test! But the chicks, they kept after me and after me. And the guys down to the telephone company, they were forever bugging me about it, too. So finally I said, what the heck, I was due for a vacation anyhow, what was the harm to it if I took me a trip to Hollywood and balled around some with the glamor chicks. So I went, just for a vacation."

"To see the sights," I said.

"And ball me up a storm. Well, the studio didn't offer me a contract or anything like that after my test, but it's close to two years now and here I am in Hollywood, with my own pad in the hills and working enough on TV to get along, I've got union cards that say I'm an actor and I'm on the scene and not complaining. Not me, Farley, no sir. Not that I'm so hipped on being a big actor, it's not that primarily. I like the life and they tell me I've got some future here, (continued on page 62) Anthony From Afar (continued from page 58) but that's not the thing of it. Acting is more or less a thing to keep me on the scene in this balling town. What happened was, as soon as I made the scene with these Hollywood chicks I knew all the other places were spoiled for me, old buddy. There are balling chicks all over the world but I tell you, the ones out here are special. There's action in this town. Too much for one stud."

Another night he made a sweep with his hand to indicate all the special chicks in this special place and said with a humorous smacking of the lips:

"Know what? Sometimes I sit here and look around and I have to say to myself, this is happening to me, this is really happening, because I can hardly believe it. Look at them with their saucy faces and blue eyelids that never stop batting! They're the most beautiful chicks in the world, enough to make a man slobber on both sides of his mouth and in the eyes, too, and they're in the same room with me and they're right here for the asking, the smiling, the nodding, the lifting of a finger! Isn't that too much? Isn't it the end? What a grabber of a town, Farley! It heaves the beautiful stuff at you and all you have to do is hold your hands out!"

He noticed that my eyes were on Norva Hameel, who was sitting across the room holding hands with a middle-aged man I vaguely recognized as a talent agent. His face turned serious, serious for him, anyhow, the high-voltage smile went down a few volts, and he said in a lowered voice:

"Farley, I guess I forgot to tell you, I had to break it off with Norva again. She's really hung on me, but she doesn't know the meaning of money and she sleeps all day long and she can't get to sleep at all unless she puts her thumb in her mouth and rocks herself back and forth, back and forth. What I'm trying to say, she's a kook, and living with somebody as messed up as that is a drag. I guess she was trying her best to make it with me but her best isn't good enough. There are too many swingers in this town for a fellow to try and make it with a kook, one that can't get herself organized and moving. I didn't kick up any fuss, I just told her quietly I was sorry but we were getting nowhere fast and she'd have to cut. She cried a lot and I didn't feel good about that but what can you do? I found her a nice little pad off Robertson and helped her move and it's finished for good. I don't talk to her when I see her around because it would just stir up all the sadness in her and make her feel bad, and I'm telling you straight, I wish her only the best. She's a good kid in lots of ways, but man, it's a messy scene, messy, and there are too many other things to do with your young life."

I watched Norva Hameel playing with her companion's fingers while he planted a kiss on her ear lobe. I said, "Exactly. There's no point to stirring up the sadness in her."

By this time Anthony was looking around the room and turning on all the happy face volts again. I could not think of another word to say. Something about his unflagging good cheer I was beginning to find insufferable; more than that, it threw me into a profound depression. My own face was fixed in a novocained freeze that made me think I would never be able to smile again, an exercise I do allow myself from time to time, though not too often or with too much broadness or for too prolonged a stretch.

He became a little restless as my silence went on and on. His hands went up to adjust his slim-jim tie. Finally, with his stubborn happiness clinging to his face like overlooked egg, he said he had to talk to somebody, excused himself, and went over to a nearby table. He bent down to talk some sort of special intimacies into the ear of a very pretty blonde, who listened with sober face, listened some more, looked up at him for one shaved second with a polite on-again-off-again smile, and turned her back on him. His fingers went to work on his tie again. He looked quickly around the room, no slightest trace of a sobering shadow on his face. He gave me a fast and total grin, waved cheerily and went out.

I tapped Tony Reach on the shoulder. "You know a lot of girls," I said. "Do you know the one over there?"

"Which one?"

"Norva Hameel, the dancer."

"Know her? I had a wild 10 days with her in Acapulco, last year I think it was, yeah, sometime last year."

"Do something for me, will you? Invite her and her friend over here and keep the friend occupied for a while. I want to ask her something."

"For you, old buddy," Tony said, "anything. Ask her any questions you want except about Acapulco. I don't want you to find out my trade secrets."

Tony got up and crossed the room, his big, rock-solid body swinging easy as it does. In a minute he was back with the couple, introducing them around. I pulled out a chair next to mine and indicated to Norva Hameel it was all hers. She sat. If she really had bought $200 worth of cosmetics, I reflected, just about all of them were on her face at this moment, but all the same she was fantastically made, a cunning bit of handiwork, from her aquamarine eyes to her high and mighty bosom and back up again to her come-and-get-it dimples.

"I understand you know somebody I know," I said in my best offhanded style. "Anthony Trilling?"

She looked at me with dark fjords soaring in her wonderful blue-green eyes. "He's a creep," she said.

"I don't know him very well."

"Well, I do, and he's a creep."

"I somehow had the impression that you and he were pretty good friends."

"Did he tell you that? I never had anything to do with him, I'd have to have leukemia and I don't know, go bald in the bargain, before I'd give him a second look, no, a first look, still and all he goes around telling everybody he and I are very matey in all departments. That in itself shows you he's a creep, doesn't it?"

"As I say, I don't know too much about him. This interests me, Miss Hameel. What do you find so objectionable about him?"

"He's seen too many old Cagney movies. He thinks the way to impress the girls is to grind a grapefruit in their face."

"He's tough with women?"

"He likes to show them his muscles. He thinks it's manly to slap them around. If you ask me, that's because there's some question in his mind about just how much of a man he really is."

"That may be very astute of you," I said. "All the same, weren't you and he pretty close at one time?"

"I get it," she said. "He told you I was living in his apartment. He went all around town telling people that."

"And you weren't? Living in his apartment, I mean? If you don't mind my asking?"

"I was living there, all right. Only he wasn't. Look, Mr. Munters, you're a wonderful actor and I've been in your fan club for years, you're a man I really and truly admire, so if you want to know the facts about me and this nut I'll be glad to give them to you. The way it all started was, for months this Anthony was following me around town like we were at opposite ends of some umbilical cord. He'd come up to my table in restaurants and clubs and give me the big hello as though we were pals from the cradle. I always gave him the quick brush because I've got no time for gawking boys when there are a few men around. Then he began sending me flowers and silk kerchiefs and charm bracelets. I always sent his nothing presents back. Pretty soon he was ringing my doorbell and calling me on the phone, asking for dates, and I always told him no, I make it a practice not to go out with men under 40, which by the way is true, I want to make a point of that, and if he wanted a girl so bad why didn't he go down and look over the pickings at Hollywood High? There was no stop- (continued on page 104) Anthony From Afar (continued from page 62)

Ping this nut. He had the hots for me and he wouldn't quit. Then I got in a jam. Financial reverses. All my finances went into reverse. I'd done a couple TV things, you know, musicals, and for a while there I was going pretty good, but then my agent couldn't line up anything for me for the longest time and before I knew it I was broke and behind in the rent and the landlord was serving me with eviction notices. One way or another Anthony snooped around, talking to some of the younger fellows in my agency I suppose, and he found out about the spot I was in. So he came loping around and he says to me, he's moving into a big house up in Laurel Canyon with a friend of his, and his apartment off Miller Drive is paid up for three months, so why didn't I just take over this apartment and live there rent free till things straightened out for me? I didn't have penny one, I couldn't turn down an offer like that. Only the understanding was, I was going to be living there off Miller Drive and he was going to be living up in Laurel Canyon. He had different ideas. After I moved up there he was calling all the time, wanting to see me, and a couple of times I let him come up, just to have a quick drink, you know, just to be nice to him for the loan of the apartment. The second week comes the kicker. This night he shows up with his suitcases and says he's sorry but his friend's parents and kid sister have just come out from Philadelphia and there's no room for him in the Laurel Canyon house any more, so he has to move back into his apartment. It was all part of a plan, I smelled it right away. I told him I'd moved up here on the assumption that the place was mine for three months and I had no place else to go but I most certainly was not going to share my bed and board with him so he had to make other arrangements. That was when he began to smack me. He really gave me some hits. I got knocked around fine. But he didn't get what he was after. Or maybe bashing me around was all he was after. I hear there are men who get their kicks that way. Well, the end of it was, the neighbors heard the screams and racket and called the fuzz. I told the officers my story and they put Anthony in a cell overnight and in the morning let him go on the promise he wouldn't come near the apartment as long as I was occupying it. That's all the buddy-buddy Anthony Trilling and I ever were, and that's how come I was living at his place for a little over a month. It may sound like a hot affair to some people but to me it's a gang of assault and battery and that's all."

"It sounds like this fellow's love life is one long Hit Parade." I could think of no more sensible comment to make.

"Do you mind if I ask you one more thing? Wasn't there some business about $200 worth of cosmetics that were charged at Schwab's?"

Her full lips smiled a frosty Norwegian smile.

"You bet there was," she said. "Here's the inside wire on that. When this nut was giving me the going-over he smacked me across the mouth and cracked off my front tooth, this one here, right at the gum line. I couldn't very well go around seeing producers and casting directors with a big black hole in my mouth so I had to borrow $200 to get this broken tooth capped. Knowing I could never get a cent of this money back from dear Anthony I did the only thing I could think of to make him pay, I knew he had a charge account at Schwab's so I went down there and got all these cosmetics and things and one of the salesgirls, a girl I'm pretty friendly with, she and I go to the same gym, she agreed to put it on this nut's account. He was out $200, exactly the amount I was out, even Stephen."

I was not sure I wanted to pursue this story any further but there was no easy way to back off.

"About three or four weeks ago, on Sunset Strip," I said, "I saw him slapping you. Was that over the things you charged?"

"Sure. I ran into him on the street and he threatened to get the fuzz after me for fraud or something. I told him, fine, let him do that and I would get the fuzz on him for beating me up and costing me that money to get my tooth capped, and I assured him I could make more trouble for him than him for me because he was already locked up once for hitting me."

"There's only one thing I don't understand," I said. "A couple of weeks ago Anthony told me you and he had made up and were back together. What was in his mind, to tell me a thing like that?"

She snorted through that lovely Norwegian nose.

"I can tell you exactly what was in that garbage pail he calls his mind. This was a couple of weeks ago? Well, just about two weeks ago there was a ring on my doorbell and when I went to answer it who was standing there, big as life and twice as sassy, but old friend Anthony. I told him if he came near me I would call the cops but he pushed his way in anyhow. He had to talk to me, he said. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't eat, he was going out of his mind thinking about me and brooding about how things could have been different between us. I told him I had no objection to his brooding over me so long as he got lost while he was doing it. He had to have another chance, he said with tears in his eyes. How could he have another chance, I said, when he never had a ghost of a one in the first place? That was when he fell down on his hands and knees and began to eat the carpet, practically. You won't believe this, but this big he-man, this Mr. Muscles, was rubbing his cute little nose into the carpet and sobbing like a baby with the colic and telling me through his fat tears that he would do anything, even let me keep the cosmetics from Schwab's and in addition get up the $200 for my tooth, he'd do all this and more, he'd take a vow on his mother's grave never to lay a hand on me again, cross his heart and hope to die, if only I would move back into his place and be his little tootsie. I told him that before I would live in the same house or even on the same block with him I'd have to be a quadruple amputee and have the world's worst case of gingivitis, too. What do you think he says at this dramatic high point in our lives? He doesn't pick himself up from the floor and make for elsewhere like any self-respecting man. No, not him. He begins to weep and moan some more and says that I don't have to give him my answer right away, he wants me to take my time and think it over, give it some careful thought because this could mean a lot to both of us, our whole lives were at stake, and with this he begins to kiss my shoes and send up a real holler about how lonely he was, how genuinely and sincerely lonely, these I believe were his exact words. Well, it must have been right after this soap-opera bit that he told you we were kissing and making up. You see? Somehow he got things so twisted in that twisted excuse for a head that he really thought I would consider his proposal. Yes, by the way, there was a proposal, too. He offered, if I wanted it that way, to marry me. That was when I said those things about quadruple amputees and gingivitis. I guess he really imagined I would come back to him, though I'd never been anywhere in the vicinity to begin with. He must have, because he told several people we were going to be back together. Together! I wouldn't take togetherness with him in the Forest Lawn Cemetery. I told him that, too, and all he said was, don't make any hasty decisions, don't say anything you'll regret, think it over. In between the sobs about being genuinely and sincerely lonely, this was the essence of his blow-top remarks. I want you to understand me, Mr. Munters. I want this to be very clear. Even if he wasn't the nut of the world I wouldn't waste one minute on him because all my experience tells me that it takes a man up to his 40th birthday at least to get his diapers off. I want you to appreciate my thinking on this, in case I haven't established it. Does that answer your question?"

"It does," I said. "I consider it a very full and rich answer. It may keep me from sleeping for a week, it was so rich and full."

"Well, Mr. Munters," she said, "you wanted to talk about Anthony Trilling. You can't talk about garbage without bringing up its smell."

"Something just occurred to me," I said. "When you go to sleep do you put your thumb in your mouth and rock yourself back and forth?"

"No. I have a simpler technique, I just close my eyes and go. But I can think of somebody who does those things."

"Who?"

"Anthony Trilling."

"How would you know that?"

"One afternoon I came back to the apartment in the hills from some interviews and found Anthony stretched out on the lounging chair in the patio. He had his thumb in his mouth and he was rocking back and forth. I wasn't just saying that about preferring mature men, Mr. Munters. It's a big thing with me, to avoid the thumb-suckers. Maybe we can go into it another time."

"Your teeth are lovely," I said, "including the capped one. It's been a pleasure talking to you and I'd like to hear your theories about maturity levels sometime. I think right now I'll go back to my hotel and lie down."

• • •

The following week disaster struck. Struck, then ricocheted.

Gordon Rengs was in a bad way just then, finding it hard work to fill in the hours. He didn't have any writing projects of his own to busy himself with, since he'd just spent two months on top of a mountain in Big Sur finishing a long novel and so was for the moment drained and without a thought in his head; worse yet, with the writers' strike still on he couldn't get any script work in this town, there was no money to be made; and he was too busted to clear out.

We had a routine. I would pick him up in the morning on my way to the studio and then he would take the car and head for the beach at Santa Monica to get the sun and count up the blank spaces in his head. Toward the end of the afternoon he would come back to the studio and wait until I was through work, and we would drive home together.

When he showed up on this black afternoon I was in my dressing room waiting to be called for the shooting of one last scene. We chatted about this and that. I was soaking some reeds that I intended to make a floral basket with.

"You should always wear an 11th Century monk's cowl," he said. "You look gorgeous."

"If I were sure of that," I said, "I'd hie me this very day to the nearest nunnery."

There was a silence. I fingered the round bald spot on my monk's wig. It felt like cellophane.

"I was at Muscle Beach this morning," he said. "I didn't stay long."

"Oh? Why was that?"

"There was a weightlifter there who must have been at least 65. He was doing handstands and pushups. I had the impression that from the time he was able to walk he had been spending all his waking hours doing handstands and pushups. It depresses me to see the means become the end."

"Muscles are useful. With them you can build more muscles."

More silence.

Hollywood does something peculiar to New Yorkers, they run out of things to say to each other and there are long gaps in their conversations. When they are together they look like people in a mesmeric coma who rouse themselves from time to time to say something fitful and rather absent-minded to each other and then slump back into their comas again. In New York we can get together night after night and never be at a loss for things to babble about but out here we falter, our eyes get glazed and we begin to avoid looking at each other. I don't know why that is; but one thing to consider is the fact that in this place everybody talks about movies and when you look upon yourself as a nonmovie person, an outsider to the movie world, you have nothing to say about movies except that they are good or bad or long or short; but neither can you turn your thoughts to other matters of perhaps weightier import because movies are the preoccupation of this monolithic town and other matters seem somehow unreal and beside the point here. In any case, we occasional visitors sit for long periods with each other and try to keep our eyes from meeting.

"Speaking of muscle," Gordon said at last, "there's this business with that young fellow you know. I hope the party goes off well."

"Party? Young fellow?"

"Anthony, what's his name, Trilling. The one who's arranging the birthday party for you."

"Muscle Beach must have left you mentally disturbed. I don't know about anybody giving a birthday or any other kind of party for me."

"Anthony is. Didn't he call you? He said he was going to."

"I haven't heard from him. Maybe he's tried to reach me here but I've given them instructions that I don't want any phone calls put through while I'm on the set, it interferes with my basket weaving. Why would Anthony be giving me a party?"

"Farley, I don't want to be a spoilsport, I hate to have to draw your attention to this, but the dismal fact is that you've got a birthday coming up next Tuesday and Anthony Trilling has his hot little heart set on celebrating the event."

"I don't let my wife give parties for my birthdays," I said. I fingered the bald spot again, it felt like chamois now, wet chamois. "Why should I let a young squirt like Trilling do something I forbid my own wife? How the hell did he find out about my vital statistics, anyhow?"

"He's an admirer of yours, Farley. He went to the library to bone up on the details of your illustrious career in Who's Who and he came across the date of your birth, it was as simple as that. I ran into him yesterday at the beach, it clean slipped my mind. I'd parked the car at the Santa Monica Pier and as I was walking along the sand past Muscle Beach there was Trilling standing on his hands on the parallel bars and yelling my name. You should see his muscles, he looks like a skinful of mushmelons, he's obviously a weightlifter from way back, it seems that he comes to the beach every free day he has to work out. He told me he'd found out you had a birthday coming up and he thought it would be real nice, you betcha, to throw a party for you and make you feel less lonely in your home away from home. You betcha."

"Call it off, Gordon. Scotch this thing before it becomes a monster. I don't propose to spend a whole evening basking in the terrible glare of Trilling's smile. You can get radiation poisoning from a dazzler like that."

Gordon looked surprised. "I thought he was a friend of yours, that's the only reason I agreed to the idea. You and he always have your heads together."

"As a novelist you should have a more acute eye. What happens when our heads are brought together is that he is always talking and I am making a concentrated effort not to listen. I've become an expert at it, I've learned how not to listen to him for 20 minutes at a time." I groaned. "You agreed to have this party?"

"I'm afraid I did, Farley. I thought you and the beamish boy were, as he puts it, old buddies. You should have tipped me off."

"I don't listen to him and I don't talk about him. Some crosses you bear in stony silence, as a matter of human dignity." I looked into the mirror and decided that Gordon was, on the whole, more right than wrong. I did look almost lordly in these robes. "Where is this gala to be?"

"At my place. Trilling said he would be glad to throw the party in his apartment but it's a small place and he wants to invite a lot of people. He asked if I had a big apartment and when I said it was big enough he suggested I be the host while he made all the arrangements and I couldn't see why not. My place, Tuesday, eight o'clock, don't dress, loincloth and tortoise-shell glasses will do, and I'm afraid there's no way out of it. The lad said he was getting to work on the phone right away. He's probably invited half the population of Hollywood by now."

"Tuesday. Tuesday." Something about the time bothered me. Then I thought what it was. I clapped both my palms to my fringe of ratty monk's hair. "Are you sure my birthday's Tuesday?"

"That's it. I checked. There are some things that are out of our hands, Farley."

"It can't be Tuesday." I groaned again. "Don't you read the traders? No, I guess you don't any more than I do. But at least I keep my ear reasonably close to the ground and I know what Tuesday is, it's Academy Awards night, the saints preserve us. Hey. Ho. Fetch me my smelling salts."

"Is that right?" He blinked at me. "Well, yes, I guess you're right, I remember hearing talk about it. Still, what difference does that make? You never go to the Awards. You didn't even go the two times you were up for an Oscar yourself."

"Of course I don't go. I don't even belong to the Academy." Gordon knew my thoughts on that subject. I have a very strong conviction that acting is, or should be, a nine-to-five or eight-to-ll job, and that when an actor walks off the set or the stage at closing time he should put all this nonsensical grimacing he does for a living behind him and try to look like one more unspectacular citizen, devoting his attention to unshowy activities such as basket weaving. For this reason I do not go to union meetings and I belong to none of the extracurricular movements that my fellow craftsmen are forever flocking to so that when the day's work is done they can go on talking about said work through the wee hours of the night. I think, in short, that an actor should feel enough embarrassment about the bulky wages he is paid for making faces that he would want to lose himself in the crowd when he gets off stage. "Gordon, you know what's going to happen that night. In this town all the people who can't go to the awards in person are glued to their television sets watching them. We'll have to sit with a bunch of idiots whose horizons are all marquees and watch for two solid hours while actors pat each other on the back and make carefully rehearsed choked-up speeches. Two solid hours. For my birthday they give me the Chinese water torture. Mine host, it will be the agony of the decade."

"Don't worry," Gordon said. "There'll be lots of pretty girls to ease the pain."

"Pretty girls? From where?"

"From the four points of the compass, compliments of beamish Anthony. He's inviting all the girls in town."

• • •

That night I went looking for Anthony. I found him at his usual table at Cyrano's, alone as usual, unruffled as usual. I swallowed my distaste and joined him. The doubled intensity of his beam told me he was tickled to death and proud as a penguin.

"About this party," I began.

"It'll be a brawl," he said. "I tried to call you at the studio to tell you about it, but they said you weren't accepting any calls. You can leave the whole thing in my hands, it'll be a bash."

"It's a nice gesture," I said, "and I want you to know I'm touched, but don't you think you ought to have some help with the arrangements? People like Gordon Rengs and Tony Reach could be very helpful in drawing up the guest list, for instance. Tony especially."

"I specifically told Gordon that I'd make up my own guest list and do all the inviting. Farley, I've got me a guest list that'll make you flip. Most of them are already invited. It'll be a gas."

"Just which people are you inviting?"

"Leave the details to me, Farley. Let me worry about it, old buddy. I'll just tell you this, there are going to be 15 fellows, all your best friends around town, and 30 girls, two for each guy. That's the perfect proportions for a party if you ask me, let each stud know he's got two gals in the room who are for him alone and he'll feel rich. This party will make Hollywood history."

"Tell me," I said, "who are these 30 girls?"

"I'm inviting the finest stuff around, all the real swingers, just the ones I know personally, ones I've gotten a taste of myself and can vouch for. It'll be the gassiest collection of Hollywood swingers ever put together under one roof."

"If you run short of names or if some of your people can't come I'm sure Gordon and Tony would be happy to make some suggestions. They might call up a few of their friends."

"Run short? Are you putting me on? Listen, Farley, news is already getting around about this party and some of the swinging chicks have been calling me, trying to get invited. There'll be plenty of stuff to go around, don't you worry. Two and maybe three times around. Each stud is going to have all the stuff he can handle and then some."

"Well," I said, "I'd feel better if you'd let my friends help out. I hate to think of you doing the whole thing yourself."

"That's the way I want it, Farley. This is from me to you, and it's an honor to be able to do it." He regarded me with switchblades of slyness opening in his eyes. "You'll never guess who one of the girls is I'm getting for you."

"For me?" I wished I had my monk's cowl on to put more conviction in my next lines. "You don't seem to understand my position, Anthony. I'm a married man."

"I know that, Farley. But what the heck, you're 3000 miles away from your family and you're working damn hard all week and a sensitive man like you, I know it, he's got to relax and live a little."

"Anthony, forget about getting anybody for me. Invite anybody you want but don't tell any of the girls they're for me. There are too many grapevines between here and New York and I don't want any word about wild parties for me getting back to my family, I've reached the age where I value my peace and my quiet hours by our Kew Gardens fireside."

"It's too late," he said with a kind of crowing triumph. "She's already invited. For you, specifically."

"Who's invited?"

"Norva." His mouth bubbled with gaiety as it formed the magical syllables.

I stared. "Norva Hameel?"

"Right."

I stared some more. "Anthony, have you taken leave of your senses entirely?"

He patted me on the arm. "No, seriously, Farley, I thought this over from all angles. I asked myself, what kind of a girl would be just right for my friend Farley, who would he really appreciate, who would knock him out, you know? And the answer each time was, Norva! See, she's not my dish, we're not for each other, but she's got a lot of real fine qualities and she's a darned good looker, too, and I know you two will hit it off like busters, I just know it. She thinks you're the living end, she feels honored just to be asked for you. I promise you, you're going to flip over this number, Farley. I guarantee you'll have an evening with her that'll go down in the history books. Take it from me. I've been there."

"I thought you weren't talking to her," I said.

"Oh, that was just here in Cyrano's and around town, you know. But I wanted you two to get together so I called her and she said she'd be delighted. You know what I think? I think this party'll be good for her. If somebody real distinguished like you treats her nice and warms up to her, why, it could help her to get over me. She needs somebody to pay some attention to her to get her mind off, well, me."

I studied the tablecloth. My hands were itching to heave the sugar bowl or the bread sticks at him, maybe both, one missile at each joyous eye.

"You really think she'll come?" I said to the tablecloth.

"I know it," he said, showing me all his showcase teeth. "She's dying to get to know you."

My mouth felt dry. I signaled the waiter for another espresso.

"All right, Anthony, you're in charge of arrangements. On to the brawl."

"Two girls to each stud," he said. "Three, maybe. That's the way to make a fellow feel rich and wanted, right, old buddy?"

He gave me his widest, richest grin.

• • •

I should explain that my antipathy to birthday parties is more than a piece of eccentricity or orneriness. I hate them with all my being. With each passing year my feeling grows stronger that there is no reason why your dear ones and your close friends should make a ceremony of standing over you on your birthday and counting you a little further out when there are so many total strangers in the world only too glad to do it.

All the same, when I got to Gordon's on the dreaded night, just to see how the third act of this dramaturgically soggy farce would turn out, I was impressed by the care that had gone into the preparations. There were cartons of ice cubes, a well-stocked bar, a barman, canapés, a maid to circulate the canapés; Anthony had arranged the whole thing through a catering service and it had been arranged lavishly. I wondered if Anthony had spent on all these fancy touches the $200 that under other circumstances he might have paid to Norva Hameel for her dental bill. A baker's dozen of my men friends were on hand, all in their best suits, and Anthony was hopping here and there in high spirits, his face flushed, making sure that everything was shipshape. Beauty, Gordon's big, black Belgian sheep dog, a gentle bitch with soft and brimming eyes, was lying in the corner, just as satisfied to be left out of the incipient festivities.

"When are the others coming?" I said to Anthony.

He looked at his watch. "It's a little before eight. They should start showing up in a few minutes."

He was wearing another skimpy Italian suit, a silvery one whose jacket was a modified double-breasted with cutaway front and a loose-hanging belt in the back. It looked like a high-school graduation outfit that its owner had decided to take out of the mothballs after sprouting a good six inches. I wondered again why the current vogue demanded that a man-size body be draped in boy's garments; maybe the idea was to suggest that there is an imperishable tyke in even the weightiest of weightlifters? What comes next, knee pants and Eton collars?

"Listen, Farley," Tony Reach said, "I skipped the Awards to come to this wingding and I'm not complaining, you understand, but while we're waiting for the broads to arrive do you mind if we watch the program on television?"

"Why should I mind?" I said. "Obviously as a working actor you want to see whom the Academy had the appallingly bad judgment to pick for its top honors over yourself. Go ahead and needle yourself and think of gloomy thoughts about the botchy taste of your colleagues if it makes you happy."

"If you're going to be snotty about it," Tony said, "let me point out something, colleague. What you weren't nominated for this year was the best job of acting in a supporting role but what I wasn't nominated for was best job in a starring role. I'll pull rank on you if I have to, old colleague."

"I was nominated twice," I said, "and you were nominated only once. Would you like me to pull a little rank on you?"

"Gentlemen," Gordon Rengs said, "you do your venerable profession no credit with your cheap bickering. This room is full of people who have lost out on all sorts of top awards over and over and none of them is being vain enough to boast about it." He switched the television set on and moved over to the corner to pat Beauty, who raised her lovelorn limp pools of eyes in boundless gratitude.

A half hour later we were still sitting around the room watching the most eminent actors of Hollywood cooing each other out of the limelight, the same 15 of us in our best suits. Anthony was hunched on a large leather ottoman to one side of the television set, his eyes glued to the screen, munching potato chips. He did not seem to be in the least aware of the cross-examining glances that were beginning to be directed at him by all these nattily dressed men without women. He chewed rapidly.

A half hour after that we were still watching the program, still without the ladies. Not one guest had arrived. I had had two drinks and as nearly as I could count it Anthony had had five. He was shoveling the potato chips into his mouth with conveyer-belt hands. There seemed to be moisture gathering on his forehead. He considered the carpet for a moment and his smile stretched another inch.

"I didn't think that was the best musical score at all," he said suddenly, smiling at the carpet. "I thought that was a very ordinary musical score and I would never even have nominated it. I can think of at least five movies that had better musical scores and they weren't even named in the nominations. I'll bet you anything the voting must be rigged for the old-timers or something like that. "He was talking very fast and with no variation in tone.

All eyes in the room were turned to him. He was avoiding them all.

Finally Tony cracked his knuckles and said, "Listen, kid, did I hear a rumor you invited some broads to this wingding? The one thing I don't see at this nice party tonight is broads."

Anthony did not look up. Now he seemed to be making a study of his ankle-high, elastic-sided Italian boots. He shivered just a little. He took a long swallow of his sixth drink and looked his watch.

"Well," he said to his watch, "it's not nine yet. I told them all between eight and nine and you know how people are, especially broads, they don't like to be the first ones at the party so they figure they'll come like a half hour after the last time you said and be safe, there'll be plenty of people ahead of them, you know how they think."

He had finished the big platter of potato chips without assistance. He reached for another equally big platter that was on the coffee table and began to pile into that.

"I know how broads think," Tony said. "They think, if they're not interested in going to some party, they don't go. They're peculiar that way."

"They'll be here!" The words shot out of Anthony as though from a catapult in his throat. "There'll be 20 of them, 30, I don't know how many, groovy ones, too, I'm not putting you on! My God, holy cats, can you blame me if they all figure they'll be on the safe side and come late? They all said they were dying to come and asked for all the details and wrote down the address and everything, how could they not come, they've got to come!"

His eyes were raised now and going from one of us to the next, as helpless and full of ghastly begging as Beauty's; but all the time, there under his sweaty forehead, flanked by his alarmingly red cheeks, his lips were fighting to hold on to their nonchalant partying smile.

"You must be a big man with the broads," Tony went on lazily. "You invite 30 of them to a party and not one of them shows up. You must be a real sensation with the broads. You should tell us sometime how you got to be such a killer."

"Lay off, Tony," Gordon said. "If they said they'd come and they don't, he's not responsible."

"He's responsible," Tony said. "If they're staying away, it's not from us, it's from him."

"They're coming, they're coming, you can bet anything you want!" Anthony was holding his glass and the ice was rattling in it, his hand was shaking so much. "I do all right in that department, if there's one thing I know how to do it's how to handle myself with, with, listen, they wouldn't say they were creaming over the idea of this party and then hang up and just forget about it, I know them and I know, I'm sure, no, they wouldn't do it!"

He ran out of words then and I saw why. His eyes had been flitting around but now they had lit on the television screen and were flaring to double size. The final musical number was being presented to the Awards audience, a fast, boppy dance routine with three slender gay boys making arched-back ballet leaps around a shapely girl who was snaking her arms up and down and doing modernistic convulsions with her abdomen and long fine legs.

Anthony's idiot-inert smile wavered. The ice in his glass was making so much noise that he set it down. His hands went to his neck to do some unnecessary adjusting on his tie.

He turned his stricken eyes to me.

The twitching girl on the television screen was undeniably, unavoidably, sickeningly, Norva Hameel.

For a while he said nothing. His facial muscles did some rippling. Then he mumbled, "She said she'd come. She said so. Maybe she meant she was going to do this performance first, then change her clothes and get right over here fast, that must have been her thinking. She didn't mention anything about being late but maybe that was how she had it planned in her mind, that she'd shoot right over as soon as she did this bit at the Awards. Naturally she couldn't turn down this chance to do her routine before all these important people, you couldn't ask her to pass up a chance like that, she probably thought she could squeeze both things in, sure, first the performance and then the party, that must be it."

Tony was looking him over thoughtfully.

"Norva Hameel's a friend of yours, too?" he said. "You know her real well, like you know all the other broads you invited?"

"Norva Hameel," Anthony said with a sudden spurt of brightness, "is one of my oldest and closest friends in Hollywood."

"That so?" Tony said pleasantly. "And tell me, how do you and Lizzie Taylor spend your nights?"

"We were as close as any two people in this town, ask anybody!" Anthony sputtered. "We had a real thing, Norva and me! She wouldn't let me down, I can tell you that right now, not after all the time we spent together!" He faltered. His eyes wandered. He took a deep breath and added in a husky voice, "We were, we were an item. I can show it to you in black and white. Sidney Skolsky wrote us up once in his column."

"If Skolsky ever got a hot tip like that," Tony said, "he must have gotten it from one person, you, you big blast of funky wind. I know Norva a little better than you do, laddy boy. Before she'd waste one minute on one of you two-bit weightlifters she'd sooner take cyanide. She begins to laugh out loud every time she sees one of you tightassed muscle boys come sashaying with your fan-magazine profiles and tossedsalad hairdos down the Strip. She's told me many times what she thinks about you boys with the big chests and the football shoulders. It's her theory that you work your muscles overtime because nothing else in you will work worth a damn. And stop eating up all the potato chips, you punk. Potato chips won't do anything for what ails you."

It was an incredible splat of venom from big, easygoing, amiable Tony Reach. In all the years I'd known him I had never heard him sail into anybody with such undiluted homicide.

For a time after Tony ran out of words Anthony continued to sit very still. His head was down and no part of him moved. Then he did something astonishing. He bolted up, crammed a big handful of potato chips into the dead center of his unshrinkable smile, and almost skipped across the room to where Beauty was lying. He squatted at the dog's side and held out his quivering hand, saying with rushed, pell-mell good humor, "Here, Beauty, come on, old pal, give me your paw, all right, now, good dog, let's have your paw, will you?"

I motioned to Gordon to follow me. We went into the bedroom.

"Bad," Gordon said. "Bad things in that room."

"I expected some kind of fiasco," I said, "but this beats me. He must have invited a lot of girls and he must have been pretty sure they'd come or he would never have dared show up himself. What could have gone wrong?"

"Doesn't make sense. There's something way off with this lad but I don't know what."

"There's only one way I can figure it. This is a badly disturbed fellow who simply can't take no for an answer, who goes to pieces when he's denied something and who I suppose is denied over and over. I happen to know that on more than one occasion he's knocked girls around when they didn't dance to his tune, whatever kind of shrilling music his tune may be. Maybe the girls know how touchy he is and how much trouble he can make if they refuse him. Maybe when he asked them to the party they just said yes to get rid of him and put it out of their minds the next minute."

"Could be. If he's an arguer and a troublemaker a girl might agree to come and pretend to be writing the address down, just to cut the conversation short."

"Well, however it happened, we've got a nightmare in there now. We've got to break it up somehow, before Tony eats this kid alive."

"What's bothering Tony? He's always such a placid, good-natured guy."

"He can't stand what he calls punks. Especially Hollywood actor punks. He's an old unhistrionic pro and he'd like to break these young strutting psychos in two with his bare hands. Besides, I think he may sense some potency disturbance in this boy that enrages him, I don't know why."

"Because it echoes something in him?"

"I don't think that for a minute. Tony's practically the top ladies' man in town. He gets the cream of each new batch of girls each and every year. He couldn't have that kind of problem, I think he's just a pro in all departments who bridles at the amateurs in all departments."

"Maybe. It could also be that the two of them have potency troubles at opposite ends of the erotic scale and for that reason they're incompatible, they come at each other snarling and clawing."

"You mean, satyriasis is a form of potency disturbance?"

"That's one school of thought. Isn't it a possibility that each man jeers at the potency trouble of the man next to him, so long as it's different from his own? Well, we don't have to get technical about it."

"The question is, how do we handle this thing? Before there's blood all over the carpet?"

"Here's what I suggest, Farley. When we go back I'll sit down with Tony and keep him occupied. You ease the kid out into the patio and tell him everything's all right, no hard feelings, but it would be best if he just faded away, to avoid trouble. Once you give him an excuse to go outside I don't think he'll be too anxious to come back."

"Let's try it. I tell you, Gordie, I'm going to make it a policy from now on never to be in the same room with weightlifters, whether they're my fans and old buddies or not."

"I'm with you there, old buddy. Muscles are nice to have but when you make them your life work you're in trouble, most likely of the kind we were specifying earlier."

"Tell that to my wife, will you? She's been after me for months to start doing setting-up exercises."

"Well, old buddy, I never meant to suggest that if you're all flab and a yard wide it automatically follows that you're a real lover boy."

"Come on, let's get to work. I'm kind of sorry Norva Hameel didn't come. What I'm suggesting is that I strongly suspect she could inspire me to be a real lover boy."

• • •

It was a good enough plan we'd worked out, but we never got the chance to try it. When we returned to the living room we found the tension there very close to exploding. And it had changed in quality. All of our friends were still sitting wordlessly, looking at Anthony, but their faces had shifted from exasperation to puzzlement; when I considered the object of their attention I saw why.

Anthony was now on the floor alongside Beauty, but what he was doing with her could no longer by any stretch of the imagination be called play. He had become intent almost to the point of hysteria; he was issuing commands like a drill sergeant and insisting that the poor animal carry them out on the spot and with precision. It had somehow become a point of honor with him, more, an obsession, a matter of life and death, that the dog make every move he dictated, jump, twist, and contort herself as he willed it. His voice was rasping with strain and his eyes were feverish.

"I told you to give me your paw, now, right now, paw!" he ground out. "Come on, quick!" He grabbed Beauty's paw and yanked it, dragging her across the carpet; she regarded him with sad, bewildered eyes. "Didn't you hear what I said? Now you give me your paw! Make it fast, now!" He tugged her forward, shoved her back. "Roll over, dog! Do what I tell you, roll!" With both hands he took hold of her fur and flopped her from side to side. "Roll, don't you understand anything? When I say roll I mean roll!" He rotated her again, roughly. There were still the remnants of that crazed, creepy smile on his lips, I could still see a mask of jollity there which was meant to say that it was all in fun, but the mask was crumbling and in his eyes was a wild gleam that I did not want to watch because it said that this was very far from fun.

I looked over my shoulder at Gordon. I knew how fond he was of his dog and how he hated the whole idea of training dogs to obey orders. I had heard him say more than once that dogs should be dogs and not jumping jacks educated to entertain their masters and make them feel masterful.

Gordon had forgotten about going over to Tony to engage him in conversation. His eyes were narrowed as they riveted themselves on Anthony.

"You're going to do what I say!" Anthony rattled on. He snapped imperious fingers. "Let's go, shake hands, I said, shake hands!" He pulled at her paw again. "Quick, now. roll, roll!" He slammed her body around some more.

Gordon stepped over to him.

"Stop bothering the dog," he said.

Anthony did not look up. "You can't be that stupid," he said. "You know what I mean and you're not obeying out of spite. Paw! Shake hands! Roll, I said! Roll!" His hands went harassingly at the animal.

"I told you to leave her alone," Gordon said.

I put my hand on Anthony's shoulder.

"Anthony," I said. "You'd better stop. She's not trained to obey orders, she just can't do it."

Anthony turned his face up then. His hands were still jerking the dog here and there.

"I'm just playing with her," he said. "Look, she ought to learn these things, dogs need training, it gives them discipline and they mind when you tell them what to do."

"Gordon will teach her what he wants to. It's his dog. Quit it, Anthony."

"No, really, listen," Anthony said. "I know dogs, I've had them all my life, they make much better pets when you show them you're master and your word is what goes. She'll learn, she looks like a smart dog, you'll see. I've had a lot of experience at this, watch." His eyes were piercingly bright and his face was one sheet of moisture from hairline to collar; his cheeks were stained with scarlet. "Beauty! Paw! This minute! Shake! Don't pretend you don't understand! Shake! Roll! one, two!" He shoved her around. She looked up helplessly as her body plowed this way and that under his flying hands.

Gordon bent over Anthony.

"For the last time," he said, "I'm warning you, get your hands off that dog."

"Paw!" Anthony sputtered. "Roll! Roll! Paw!"

Back and forth Beauty went, like a sack of potatoes in a stevedore's hands.

I don't know what got into Gordon to make him do what he did next. Maybe it was his frustration over being without work because of the strike, or his misery and emptiness now that he'd finished a big novel and was too drained to figure out another project for himself, or his being haunted by the memory of the girl he'd had to break up with when he left New York for the Coast, or his disenchantment with Hollywood because he'd been through dozens of gaudy all-surface Hollywood girls, a breed he'd never had anything to do with before, and had not been able to work out anything meaningful with a single one of them; it might have been all these things. Maybe, too, he sensed, as I did, that young Anthony had been taking a terrible whiplashing from all the eyes in this room for a good two hours, topped by Tony's devastating frontal attack on him and all his paraded merits, and feeling beaten and stripped naked had retired to the corner to assert his mastery over the one living creature in the room that was not filled with contempt for him, that was weaker and more defenseless than he was. Maybe Gordon sensed all this and could not stand to see Beauty being made the butt of this cripple's need to lord it over some living stuff. In any case, Gordon raised his hand and smashed the back of it across Anthony's cheek with all his might. It was quite a blow. The crack of it reverberated up and down my spine.

Anthony was 20 years younger than Gordon and had close to 30 pounds on him. He could have done damage to Gordon, assuming that he could have gotten to him with all of us around. But he did not even try to strike back. All he did was rise to his knees in a hunched position, his head down. His shoulders began to heave and there were choked sounds from his lips. He was sobbing and doing his best to hold it in.

Abruptly, the worst part of the fit passed and he raised his head.

Now over the film of sweat on his cheeks were the running lines of tears. But he was still, even in this ultimate humiliation, even now, when every last camouflage had been stripped from him and he was exposed as he had never in his life been exposed, he was still holding on to his cracked, tottering, insane parody of a smile, holding to it for dear life, all his facial muscles taut with the strain to keep the tears from overrunning the happy, on-top-of-everything front.

"You didn't have to do that," he said. "I was just kidding around with her. They like a little roughhouse, for gosh sakes."

Gordon was standing there in iced fury, his fists half raised to hit out again at the least provocation.

"Don't take it out on a helpless dog," he said. "Don't try to make a dog say yes when the rest of the world says no."

Anthony's eyes opened still wider. He shuddered. His hands went to his cheeks and pressed against the skin there, as though he had been slapped by Gordon's words rather than by the blow earlier. He knew what Gordon was saying. He knew exactly.

All of a sudden the smile collapsed and fell apart like a Chinese fortune cookie; and for once his face was on display for the world to see without the adornments of false joy.

It was not a face to look at when it was smileless. What had been kept out of sight by the infectious grin was an agony and an incredible panic. The world was to him a firing squad, he had the look of a man going through life as though expecting at any moment to be executed. Life in his terrified eyes was a firing squad that wouldn't fire and wouldn't lower its guns. All his days were firing squads that only stood there and aimed.

I took him under the arm and helped him to stand.

"It's all right, Anthony," I said. "Gordon doesn't like to have people touch his dog. You didn't know."

But he was not listening. His hands were still to his cheeks and he was still staring with his ravished eyes at Gordon, the source of the words that had just executed him but left him breathing, the spokesman this day for the firing squad that was as big and as lasting as the world. His lips struggled to form words.

"Why do they lie to me?" he said. "All of them? Lie to me and tell me no? Always and forever?"

He wasn't asking Gordon in particular. He was asking the firing squad of a world, of which Gordon was only for the moment spokesman. He simply wanted to know once and for all, was formulating the big question for the first time in his life in so many words, why it was that the world was a landscape of guns from horizon to horizon, guns permanently pointed in his direction, and why his life was one long death sentence that was never quite carried out.

"It's all right," I said. "Let's go outside and get some air."

He offered no resistance when I led him out to the patio. He was limp, all his cultivated muscles loose, as I guided him to the patio door and down the steps to where his MG was parked. When I opened the door of the car and pressed him easily toward it he slid onto the seat at once.

"Will you be all right?" I said. "If you don't feel like driving I'll be glad to take you home in my car."

"I'll be all right," he said.

"Get a good night's sleep," I said inanely. "You'll wake up in the morning feeling better."

"No way to feel better," he said to the windshield, to the firing squad. "More you look at it the worse it gets. They don't want you and all they want is to tell you no and bite when it suits them. All you can do is sit around and wait."

With that, he fished his key out of his pocket, slipped it into the ignition, started the car and drove off.

• • •

The next morning Gordon dropped me off at the studio, as usual, and took the car to the beach. They were not ready to call me for my scene so I was busying myself in my dressing room getting the upright reeds in position for the floral basket I was about to make; I am a firm believer in keeping the hands occupied to prevent the mind from getting preoccupied. But even with my hands working I kept thinking back over the complicated events of my splendid birthday party.

There came a knock at the door. It was the assistant director.

"Phone call for you, Farley," he said.

"You know I don't take calls on the set," I said.

"Party says it's urgent. It's a Miss Hameel, Norva Hameel." His knowing smile made me wonder if he had ever had 10 wild days in Acapulco.

I went to the phone.

"It's me, Norva Hameel," she said immediately. "Excuse me for bothering you on the set, Mr. Munters, but I had to talk to you. I want to tell you why I didn't come to your party last night and how much I would have liked to have been there if the circumstances had been different."

"I know you were busy at the Awards." I said. "I saw you on television. You were very good."

"Oh, it wasn't the Awards kept me away. I could have come over after, but it was impossible with that nut around."

"Anthony actually invited you?"

"Did he invite me? You'll never believe what he did to me, Mr. Munters. He was on the phone every day for a week, morning, noon and night, saying I had to come to this party and was going to be your date. I kept hanging up on him because I had the unpleasant feeling he wanted to show you he had some kind of mysterious control over me and could throw me into anybody's arms just by snapping his fingers. I like you and admire you, Mr. Munters, but you can see I couldn't show up under those circumstances."

"I understand fully, Miss Hameel, and your sensitivities do you credit. But do you really think he wanted you to be my, ah, date? Wasn't that just an excuse for him to see you again?"

"You don't know how this nut's mind works, Mr. Munters. He kept insisting he wouldn't say two words to me, that I was going to be with you, and I believed him. I think it was more important for him to be able to throw me at somebody than to have me himself. It would have been another way of beating me up, one the fuzz couldn't get him for. Besides, I think he would have gotten some peculiar kicks in that cesspool of a mind of his thinking of me being with somebody else, I mean, really being with them, and him knowing all the time he'd arranged it."

"Interesting theory. I'll take it under advisement."

"But that's not what I'm calling about, Mr. Munters. Wait till you hear the whole story. What I finally did was, I couldn't stand getting all these calls from him so I did something drastic, I had the phone company change my number. I thought that would hold him but I was wrong. Yesterday afternoon I was doing some ironing and it was kind of muggy so I had the front door open to let in the air. All of a sudden I looked up and there was Anthony. He came right in and said I was going to the party and I was going to be your date. I forgot how you have to treat this nut, I was so sore, I just snapped that I wasn't going and he'd better get out. He began slugging me, the same old story, and telling me if I didn't come he would kill me. That was when I realized I was using the wrong tactics with this maniac. I was scared out of my wits. So I said, all right, if he would stop hitting me I would come. He said, fine, you were a wonderful man and I would like you, it would be an honor for me to be your date. When he left I looked myself over in the mirror and found he had given me one lovely shiner, the eye was practically closed. The make-up man at the Awards had to work over the eye for more than an hour before he had it disguised good enough so I could go on. I wanted you to know, Mr. Munters. I didn't dare to come to the party after that. I was scared to be in the same room with this raving maniac."

"I'm sorry, Miss Hameel. If I'd had the slightest idea what was happening I could have tried to stop him, I simply didn't know."

"Don't blame yourself, Mr. Munters. It hasn't got anything to do with you. He's just out of his head and there's nothing you or anybody else can do about it. What I'm doing this afternoon is, I'm going down to police headquarters and ask them to lock him up again on assault and battery charges, and if they won't do that to give me some protection. They'll believe me when they see this eye, it's closed up tight now."

"That's a shame, Miss Hameel. I'm genuinely sorry you had to go through so much."

"Well, I'll live. The police will take care of this mad killer from now on. I just wanted you to know how disappointed I was that I couldn't get to your party. Under other circumstances I would have made it a point to be there."

"It would have been a pleasure to have had you there, Miss Hameel. Perhaps another time."

"I'd like that, I really would. As soon as this eye heals up, that is."

"I hope it gets better quickly."

"I'm sure it will. They usually clear up fast. Anyhow, I can always wear dark glasses."

"Goodbye, Miss Hameel."

"Goodbye, Mr. Munters."

I had a long, leisurely lunch in the commissary. I sat by myself, eating an Elizabeth Taylor salad and reading Montaigne's autobiography, which I find to be a good antidote for almost any kind of catastrophe such as my partying of the night before. Soon after I got back to the set, about 2:30, Gordon showed up. I was surprised. He never came back from the beach this early.

"The party's over," he said. "For good. Read this."

He handed me a copy of the Mirror-Examiner folded back to the fifth page, pointing to a brief news story near the bottom. This was the text:

"The body of Anthony Trilling, 23, television bit player, was found by the police this morning in his apartment at 1173 Greenview Place, in the West Hollywood hills off Miller Drive. Trilling, whose real name, according to letters and personal documents discovered on the premises, was Paul Wasniecki, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had apparently swallowed the contents of a bottle of sleeping tablets. No suicide note was left but Detective Sergeant James W. Macready informed newspapermen that across the bureau mirror were scrawled the words, 'Too many of them too many.' It is Detective Macready's theory that Trilling used a deodorant stick to spell out these words shortly before he lost consciousness. Police were puzzled by one object found in the bedroom, a portion of a human tooth, apparently an incisor, buried in a small block of transparent plastic. This plastic cube was suspended over the bed by a string and scratched into one of its faces in irregular letters were the cryptic words, 'She still bites.'"

I put the paper down. My eyes strayed to the mirror. It seemed to me that if I did not get that damn silly wig and absurd moth-eaten robe off right away, that minute, I would be condemned to spend the rest of my days looking like that, a lumpy, greasy monk in pancake make-up. We're making up, he had said. He had made up now. With himself. He was all made up with himself. I rubbed the round bald spot on my monk's wig. It felt like the cold parchment skin of a dead man.

"Yes," I said. "The party's over."

"The sweating's over," Gordon said.

"You always see somebody like that from a distance. From afar. His smile is a wall of glass between you and him two miles wide. You never come close enough to see that the one thought in his mind is how long he can hold out with his hands tied and the firing squad aiming at him."

"You think any of the girls at Cyrano's tonight will notice he's gone?"

"No. They'll be too busy smiling, putting up a wall of glass around themselves two miles wide. Gordon, what do you make of this?"

"What I make of it," he said, "is that Hollywood acts on some as a fungus, a dry rot, a progressive rust, rather than as a community. Acting is a profession in which you tell lies to make a living and sometimes you can die of it. Life is an impossible job of work for which they'll never enact an eight-hour day or a minimum wage. Too much value is attached to the happy face and too many work themselves into the grave cultivating it. Things have a tendency to be partially bad all over, more so on some streets than on others. It's amazing, in this land of perpetual sun, how many city blocks there are that the sun never shines on. Christ, I don't know what to make of it. I would give a good deal to know the meaning of that cracked incisor in the plastic cube."

"Excuse me," I said. "Have to make a phone call."

I went outside to the wall phone. I called the Screen Actors' Guild and got the number I wanted. I dialed and waited through several rings.

"Miss Hameel?" I said. "Farley Munters."

"Oh, Mr. Munters," she said. "How nice."

"I'm afraid what I have to tell you isn't very nice. There's a story in today's paper that you ought to know about." I read the whole thing to her.

There was a long silence. I could hear her breathing.

"Paul Wasniecki," she said. I could hardly hear her. "I never knew that was his name."

"You never can tell about names around here. Or faces."

Another silence.

"Oh, my God." Her voice had more power now. "That nut. He ran out of girls to beat up on. He finally had to beat up on himself."

"His whole life was one long beating. Whether it came from himself or the outside, he was getting slapped all the time."

"So was I. Not by myself. By him."

"Well, I suppose he was trying to even the score. Give the world back what he thought he was getting from it every minute. You happened to be handy. Within reach."

"I don't think I follow you, Mr. Munters."

"What I'm trying to say is, he finally had to reach out to the firing squad and pull the triggers himself. That's it. I think so. It doesn't matter."

"But what was he doing with that piece of my tooth hanging over his bed? That's weird."

"You kept saying no to him and he thought each time you were biting him. Something like that, maybe. He thought the world was making a slow-motion meal of him."

"Well," she said, "the boys are getting separated from the men. That incredible nut."

The make-up man's dressing table was just to one side of where I was standing. I moved over so that I could see myself in the mirror. I decided that I really didn't look so bad in this outfit after all. Matter of fact, I looked rather distinguished. A bit overweight, maybe, but that could be handled with a regular regimen of setting-up exercises.

"Mr. Munters," she said, "I'm sorry, truly sorry, that we had to meet under these circumstances."

"I know what you mean," I said. "I am, too."

"Are you going to be out here long? I heard your picture was going to be finished in a few days."

"I'm doing my last scene this afternoon," I said. "I take the jet to New York in the morning, but I'll be coming back out in May, May the 17th, to do another picture. I'll be here for six weeks at least."

"That's wonderful," she said.

I could almost see the wide smile on her dimpled Norwegian face as she said this. I leaned over to see my own face in the mirror and forced my lips into a broad smile.

I thought: I shall remember Anthony Trilling's all-out grin, the cancer on the lips of my profession and my life, till the day I die, at which time I sincerely hope I will be able to summon up enough rage, not as an actor, as another trapped and tricked animal, to take over all of my face.

"Yes," I said, "I like the idea, too. California is good for my sinuses. My hay fever doesn't bother me at all out here."

"I really hope we'll have a chance to get together when you're back, Mr. Munters," she said.

"Let's make a point of it," I said.

I studied myself in the mirror. I wondered, irrelevantly, how I would look in a monk's cowl strolling around the sunny streets of Acapulco.

"I'll look forward to it, Farley."

"I will too, Norva."