The Going Price for Adoration

Poised between devouring love and destroying hate, the screaming crowd burst through civilization's thin veneer

"Gordon Rengs!" Shelley Makravetes chirped at me over the phone. "Give a listen to this, Gordon Rengs! About that Roar of Charlemagne script you did for me two years ago? We're finally going with it, boy! With Anson Luddy in the lead, no less! We're shooting exteriors at the Pacoima ranch, and Luddy'd like you standing by, for say two months, at your usual absurd price, of course, in case we need any hurry-up script changes! We're budgeted at five mill on this one, Gordie, boy! This is in the category of very large! An all-out, and pure family-type, can't miss, Gord!"

Two smoggy Mondays later, at the studio ranch, I met Anson Luddy in the Brobdingnagian flesh. The whole downtown shopping district of Charles the Great's family-type walled home town of Frankfurt am Main street had been reconstituted there ("Instant Frankfurt," Shelley announced to me with the creator's pride in his finished product); suddenly, from out of the mossy old castle that apparently was the city hall, there next to the municipal parking lot, came striding this improbable family-type tor of a man, dressed in homespun tunic, breastplate and visored helmet -- part viking, part Olympic discus thrower, part Johnny Appleseed, part paul Bunyan -- with maybe a smattering of heist-artist sterling Hayden and the merest smidgen of trail-boss John Wayne; his jai-alai scoop of a hand was held out to me in what I took to be a welcoming.

No wonder Anson Luddy looked larger than life: he was larger than any life you see on your daily rounds, by several inches, in any dimension you'd care to name. There was no mystery about shelley Makravetes' willingness to hold up production indefinitely, and to keep reshuffling all the other expensive ingredients in his multimillion golly-gee family-type pie, in order to get this scowling gaint for his leading man. It made no difference whether Luddy played Genghis Khan or Beanstalk Jack, Robin Hood or John Glenn; all over the world people by the massy millions would throng to any theater that had Luddy's incitement of a name on its marquee to see Luddy, more Luddy, nothing but Luddy.

So, at 44, I took hold of the first hand ever extended in my direction by a movie star of the first magnitude, and listened to his growl of a voice saying, "You're a man I've been wanting to meet." The vowels came at me roughedged and slow, as though reluctant to leave his bullish throat.

"Oh? You mean, you like the script?"

"Script?" From their vantage point well over six-feet up, his crisp blue eyes plied me with joyless questions. "Wasn't talking about fool scripts." He seemed let down. He thinned his lips, which, I knew from three-dozen movies, generally hung in meaty immobility, too heavy with programmatic standoffishness to alter with the more superficial play of mood. "All right. If we're talking movie talk: what do you think of this casting me as Charlemagne?"

"My question first: What do you think of the script?"

Knotting of brows: "You've put down the minimum of words to tell what looks like a story, words that almost make this kindergarten fabrication sound true, words mediocre enough not to upstage the actors; which means, I think it's a good script, as scripts go. What do you think of me as Charlemagne?"

"It's complicated. Originally, Shelley had Tony Curtis in mind, so I wrote Charlemagne as Tony Curtis. Tony Curtis as Charlemagne would have been a good Tony Curtis, and you as Charlemagne will be a damned-good Anson Luddy."

"Meaning: this picture isn't about Charlemagne, it's about Anson Luddy?"

"If I understand the logic of the movie business at all, it adds up to this: Charlemagne can't pack them in at the box office, but Anson Luddy can and does, so we call our hero Charlemagne and make him come out Anson Luddy. With this logic in mind, and intending no sarcasm, I can honestly say: I'm glad you're doing the part."

"I'd return the dubious compliment and say I'm glad to be doing it," he said, narrowing his eyes, "but I don't think you give a damn one way or the other."

With that, he squinted provocatively at me for a moment, then turned and made his ponderous, cannonball-shouldered, sequoia-thighed way to his mobile dressing room, where he sat on the stairs, pulled a book from under his chest armor, and settled down with grouty lips to read. From time to time he raised his blue-sherbet frosts of eyes to consider me, but whether this was in contemplation or derision, I had no idea.

• • •

For the next two weeks Luddy stayed in his corner whenever he wasn't doing a scene, reading, and I sat a cautious half-block away, satisfied to reinforce the psychic distance between us with some of its physical counterpart, doing my best not to go to sleep. During those 10 working days I was asked to change exactly seven words in the script; in one case an "a" was substituted for a "the" and in another, after lengthy conferring a "these" was made a "those." Computing it on a piecework basis, the studio was paying me exactly $571.43 for each word change, more than Lincoln had been reimbursed for the entire Gettysburg Address or the English barons for their superior phrase-making in the Magna Charta; and as for the inspired prophet who inscribed those two Letters to the Corinthians, I doubt that he received for his total effort a royalty check anywhere close to my rate per word. The literary market, I reflected, is nothing if not erratic.

On the morning of the third Monday, Shelley came over to the disc-wheeled tumbrel in the shadow of which I was stretched out on the grass doing my usual crossword puzzle. He patted one of the twitchy Arabian steeds hitched to the expertly ruded-up conveyance.

"When's the last time you got paid this kind of coin for not writing?"

"Everytime I work on a movie I get paid this kind of coin for not writing. The industry won't come of age until it gives up the pretense that the scenarist's job has anything in common with writing."

"Any suggestions for a more fitting term?"

"A few come to mind. Creative Typing. Tenoning and Mortising with Words for Fun and profit. The syllabification of the Inconsequential in Conversational Mode. We'll find something."

"A meat cleaver down on your meat head, buddy-boy." Shelley brooded for a while. "That Anson worries me. How much horseback fighting and tearassing around parapets can you do on Metrecal?" He drifted off.

Two days later, when lunch break came, I went over as usual to the truck that served us as commissary, a sort of Monel-metal chuck wagon, got my cardboard plate heaped high with shortorder specialties (Salisbury-steak patty, twist of carrot, spill of cottage cheese, soggy pineapple ring) and walked back to my retreat alongside my tumbrel. In a moment a gravelly voice from behind ground out, "You're not going to eat that slop?"

It was Luddy, in a sort of burlap jerkin.

"Don't know what else to do with it," I said.

"I can think of something," Luddy said. He reached for the plate, went over to the horses tethered before the cart, and offered them my lunch. The animals jawed the garbage out of sight in two seconds, and looked as pleased as if they had just eaten uncorrupted high-protein grass. Luddy came back and flopped on the lawn next to me. "I'll see that you get some decent chow today. I should have invited you to lunch before, but I had some reading to do." He held up a book, one of mine, Messages, Hints. "Hard to get, and hard to read."

"Hard to write, too." He'd caught me so far off base that I had no further gems to offer.

"I can believe it. Parts of it have bite, especially the parts about Spain. But you go too far with the word games. The words can get in front of the people."

Could I have put it better myself? "The dodge of a writer in his first gropings: the hideout of style. If you don't see your people clearly, weave embroideries of words around them; diversionary maneuver. Most books are about words rather than people, I'd say. Because most writers are better at weaving words than seeing people." I followed his power-shovel hands as they tried to restore order to his blond hair. "I know the book's not easy going. All the same, it shouldn't take two-and-a-half weeks to --"

"Don't get me wrong: I started it yesterday and finished it today. Since we started shooting I've read all nine of your books."

I said, "Don't you know you can get blackballed (continued on page 216)Going Price(continued from page 96) from the industry for reading a book in the original rather than a story-department synopsis of it?"

"For Christ sake, Rengs," he said, squinting his total displeasure, "when are you going to stop talking at me as though my head was full of nothing but movie crap? I fought in Spain. Lincoln Battalion. Jarama de la Morata front. I was a kid off the tuna boats around Galveston, a talker, I shot my mouth off about the Moscow Trial frame-ups, the G. P. U. musclemen, the commissars tried to liquidate me twice, I had to weasel out over the Pyrenees, get the point, I'm interested in Spain, I had stakes in Spain, I'm not just browsing in the subject."

So, in the middle of our third week of family-type kinescopic empire building, Charles the Great and I returned to his dressing room to have some homecooked vittles and to mull over the strategies of the good lost war against El Caudillo, the bemedaled Franco who had jousted us all, with the help of the Moors and the Messerschmitts and the Moscow musclemen, and without retakes, clear out of the Iberian Peninsula and our dreamy youth.

• • •

I had been seeing Anson Luddy on the screen for 23 years, the full span of his movie career. When my eyes first encountered his image, in the year 1940, he was a lean, lithe, panther-graceful Greek god who lazed around in blue jeans and raveling sneakers and spoke sullen monosyllables out of the corner of his Apollo-cool mouth. Today, 50 pictures later and 50 pounds heavier, but still all muscle, he moved with deliberate lumbering rather than an Olympian airiness, his eyes were harder and there were lines of care, of inside lacerations, on that once unblemished and ready-for-anything fist of a face; but he was still the rag bag of the populace's simmering fancies, who adventured on the tall crags along which our imaginations are forever goat-dancing in defiance of gravity and clocks. How was I to accept him as a 17-year-old deck hand, or, indeed, as of any chronometric age or mundane occupation, crouching his way along the Jarama de la Morata front trying to dodge the very real bullets of the all-too-real G.P.U.? It took too radical a stretching of the mind to vision Anson Luddy in any sweat not fashioned of Make-up's cunning glycerins. But there it was: once, without too many poses, maybe, Pacoima's Charlemagne had tried to lead an impactive life. And now, two-and-a-half decades later, he'd had me put on salary to spill his guts to. I was pleased, and more, to be of service. I am in favor of audiences for any Charlemagne who has something to say besides giddy-yap.

• • •

Two weeks passed. Between takes, over lunch (aromatic delicacies for me, Metrecal or a dump of cottage cheese for him), strolling through the lush arboretums and nurseries of the ranch, we talked ourselves deaf, dumb, and at least myopic, mostly about political ideologies.

"What else but politics is there to talk about?" he asked me one day.

"We could talk about Metrecal. I haven't seen you eat a solid meal since I came to what is laughingly called work. Are you trying to lose weight, or have you lost your mind?"

"I'll tell you about that," he said. "I don't have a weight problem, never did. Nope, it's just that, after seeing enough compulsive eaters in action, I lost my appetite. Not the compulsive eaters in Spain Oh, no, this came later. I'm talking about another category of compulsive eaters altogether. The ladies. The little darlin's. The wolfers in high heels. They turned my stomach for good, the trencherwomen did."

"Just which ladies would you have reference to?"

"The first time I met them was down in Havana. After I got out of Spain I knocked around the Caribbean, working on charter boats, that's what I was doing when this Hollywood company came down there on location and gave me my first movie job. Well, down there I was working for the rich playground people, and I met a lot of the frilly girls of the playful set, and, brother, they had big eyes, they had slobbering eyes. They didn't throw themselves at me because of what I was and felt like inside, it was because I looked like some kind of athletic bindle-stiff ape to them and they got ants in the pants imagining what brutish delights I, the well-desingned animal, would lead them to, with my promises of steamy degradation and all-around beastliness. That make any sense to you, my getting spooked by all those lacquered tootsies zeroing in on me? Remember, I had just turned 20. I still had the naive idea that women dropped their eyes and guys reached for them. I wanted to be the taker, I was only the target." Luddy had the air of a man imparting vital information to himself. "Yeah. That's it. You know something? I don't have the exhibitor personality. It makes me feel like a girl, to be scanned and appraised by the eyes of the world. Here and now I make this confession, Rengs. Every minute he's before the cameras, tough Anson Luddy feels like a girl. Because he's on the wrong end of the staring. But when I started to make movies they really stared, the ladies, and their eyes got steamier and steamier. My head was full of ideas about the dynamics of the class dialectic and ways to a more equitable social arrangement, and this was what I wanted to talk about, but the women would run their eyes up and down my carcass and say, hmm, stop talking, stop thinking, you gorgeous hunk of stud, you come and service me fast, sweet stuff. I'd be walking down the street, full up with the news from Moscow and peking and Vietnam and the Congo, and suddenly the ladies would be coming at me in a howling mob, grabbing for my middle -- amazing, the way they always grab for the middle -- as though I had no right to pretend to an existence above the neck. Their eyes grab, too. Well, I worked up a contempt for my body and its needs. That, yes, that's the exact point where I stopped eating, when I saw what slobbering and irrelevant appetites got worked up in other people, particularly women, at the sight of my adorable frame. The more they slobbered over me, sizing me up like a meal, the more my own salivary glands dried up. For some reason I'm ashamed of that. Without being able to put my finger on why, I've got this feeling it would do me more honor if I'd lost my appetite in Spain, as a result of spain, where heads were very much in contest. But the slobbering women are another sort of spain, maybe. Listen, Rengs. I'm not on call tomorrow, and I'm in the mood for driving down pacific Coast Highway to get Charlemagne out of my head and breathe some fresh air. Want to come?"

"Where'll we go?"

"The inspiring thing about Hollywood is that you can start traveling in any direction and in no time at all get to a place that's not Hollywood. Let's play it by ear. Pick you up at eight o'clock."

Taffy came over that night with a bad case of the jitters, too keyed up to go out to dinner; we fired some briquettes and barbecued steaks on the patio. I had met Taffy when she showed up in Pacoima, well-filled Capris, come-all-ye eyes and all, to play Charlemagne's sister; I had liked her because she seemed so spectacularly unsuited for the role of sister in anybody's life; she had very quickly begun to play a refreshingly unsisterly role in mine.

It was hard for her to sit still. Halfway through her main course, she got up and did a few fast hully-gully steps alongside the avocado trees; a bit later, when I brought out the Bing cherries, she ate a couple and jumped up again. She was a girl whose ferments went directly to her muscles. I asked her what was wrong.

"When I was running myself ragged trying to get bit parts," she said with a too-quick and overcharged laugh, "I was cool as the cucumbers in the safeway and collected as taxes. Now the parts are coming, I'm on my way, and I can't get to sleep without two Doridens, and the entire insect population of L. A. County seems to have taken up residence in my embroidered pants. What's my aliment, no tolerance for improvements?"

"Nobody's born with the talent to take the good with the bad," I said. "It's something you have to learn. But I don't think the booze is going to help you, as a particular individual."

"I'm not a particular individual," she said, refilling her glass. "I'll drink almost anything."

An hour later she was falling-down drunk. She brought this to my attention by falling down in the middle of an inspired boppy saraband and passing out cold with her head under a hydrangea bush. I put her to bed. Next morning, for all the bismuth mixture I forced on her, stomach was really paying her back.

When Anson arrived, I introduced him to Taffy and said, "Sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to go. Something's come up."

"Mostly my dinner," Taffy said.

She was sagging on the edge of the sofa as though she'd been rained on for a year. Anson studied her.

"Hangover?" he said.

"That's one thing," she said. "Also, they boned me when I wasn't looking."

"I think I'll stay with her, Anson," I said. "She's feeling depressed about working regularly and somebody should see her through the crisis."

"Is it a big crisis?" Anson said.

"Very big," Taffy said. "I'm getting a lot of work."

"In that case," Anson said, "two might see you through this better than one. You come with us. First off we'll stop and get you a pick-me-up and some eggs and plenty of black coffee, and you'll feel your skeleton coming back. You're an actress? Actresses often feel boned when their careers begin to go well. You must be an actress, to be having a crisis of good fortune."

"You're both so understanding," Taffy said, "I think I will come along, just to get even. If you're planning to have a real good time you'll be needing my company to restore the balance."

We went out sunset in Luddy's beat up Mark Iv jag, and just before we hit the beach, turned off at the Santa Ynez Inn. Two gin fizzes brought Taffy back to life; by the time she had wolfed down her eggs and part of mine (Anson held himself to V-8 juice, dry cinnamon toast and Postum), she seemed as relaxed as if she were behind in the rent again. When we started south along the coast she heaved a profound sigh, rubbed her belly contentedly, and purred, "I may live. The prognosis is suddenly on the upswing. Mr. Anson Luddy, you don't look like a movie notable, you look like a Grand Prix driver on his day off. Are you cold or just incognito?"

He had on blue jeans, his eyes were shielded by the widest smoked goggles I'd ever seen, a buff poplin cap was pulled down almost to his brows, the turtleneck of his rough straw-colored sweater was rolled up to hide his neck and his jacket collar was turned up over that.

"Wait'll you get to be a big movie star, miss," he said. "Just wait. You'll find yourself traveling around the country with a burlap bag over your head with a burlap bag over your head with two slits for your eyes to see out of. Great adventures await you when you success yourself into the burlap bag."

"If I spend enough of my life cooped up in burlap," Taffy said, "and if that makes enough discomfort for me, maybe I'll be able to ease off on the drinking. Say, Mr. Anson, instruct me. Do big movie stars wear their burlap bags when they drink in public? How do they take their nourishment, through a straw? Is there a special slit for the straw? I've got to learn all these technical details because there are plans afoot to make me a big star. In case I still want to drink, do I have to take my martinis through a slit, through a straw? What about the olives? They won't go through a straw, will I have to put the straw away and slide them through my eating slit or what?"

Luddy's reaction to this mild-enough jollying was anything but mild. He swerved abruptly to the curb just north of the Santa Monica pier, slammed on the brakes, hit the steering wheel hard with his ham hock of a fist, and said in his best Chief Justice voice, "What the hell're you doing in the movies anyway? What good's it going to do you being a morsel for the whole damned world?"

Taffy looked startled. "Gee, Anson," she said, "some folks are nice enough to believe that I'm already something of an appetizing dish, and if I want to make a career of it ----"

"They'll eat you alive!" Luddy blasted out. "They'll crunch your bones between their bulldozer teeth and leave you a pile of calcium crumbs for the street cleaners to brush off! The tastier you get to that great big admission-paying mouth out there, the less taste you'll have for anything but to hide! You hear me?" He seemed to be addressing his fist. "Don't offer them your hide on a silver platter! Keep some of it for yourself! There're careers that don't reduce you to roast beef in the window!" He became aware that he was not alone with his monitoring fist. He looked over at us and his eyes welled with apology. "Sorry. Thinking of personal matters. Impolite to take leave of company without goodbyes, won't happen again."

"Go any time you want," Taffy said. "Just make sure to leave a forwarding address."

We proceeded to spend a meandering, knockabout day. We walked over to the wide beach at Venice West, bought a ball and threw it fitfully for a while. We headed down Sepulveda and stopped at the new terminal at International Airport to examine, first, the 10th-of-a-mile-long mural along the corridor of the American Airlines building, an astonishing stretch of colored tiles arranged in angular Mondrian chunkings of subtly shifting hues, then the Skyways restaurant, a great flying saucer suspended high over the ground on Giacometti constructivist stilts that were themselves arcing technocratic objets d'art. At Palos Verdes we wandered along the cool arcades bordering the fine Old Spanish square at the center of town. Farther south on the Palos Verdes peninsula we took a breather at Portuguese Bend to have a look at the all-glass and foliage-interiored Wayfarer's Chapel of the Swedenborgians, a creation of Frank Lloyd Wright's son, where a modern dancer in flowing Isadora Duncan robes was doing a bit of dramatic miming to portray the story of Ruth.

Finally we stopped at the restaurant at Marineland for a drink. Luddy seemed moody as he looked around at the tourists, shielding his face with his paw.

"Marinas," he muttered to himself. "Ski resorts. Funiculars. Scuba diving, surfing, sleep-in trailers, do-it-yourself tile mosaics, judo classes. UCLA extension courses in home ceramics. One big damned playpen. Making all of Southern California into a coliseum, greatest romp area mankind,s ever seen, and getting so exhausted, haven't got the emotional capital to pay the entrance fee. Fun! Hit the road! Reach for the brass ring! Circuses, when bread won't stay on your stomach!"

With this dribble of unrelatedness, he ordered six tequila martinis in a pitcher. He drank straight from the pitcher. As for Taffy, she was soaking up her beloved Scotch sours again.

The minutes hobbled by.

"Hey," Taffy said suddenly, "this is Marineland, right? Where they have the fish?"

"Several acres of fish," Luddy said.

"I'm an old fish fancier," Taffy said. "What say we go and look at our finny friends?"

We proceeded toward the main building, a great rounded structure with outside ramps that slanted upward to give access to the second and third stories.

We entered now into a circus of gulp. This sprawled institution seemed designed to demonstrate that protoplasm, however unlikely the form it takes, has one trend and one purpose on this earth: intake, gorge, glut, bolt, cram, batten, slurp. Here, Greedygut was king. Up above, in the open pool that could be viewed from roof top, the whales maneuvered their sluggish tons, rolled, shimmied, flapped their tails, in return for tasty tidbits tossed to them; porpoises leaped and gyrated in perfect synchronization, hurled themselves through hoops, did piscatorial entrechats, for the reward of slithery fillets. Down below, in the glass-enclosed tank, groupers, sting rays, eels, sharks, octopuses, tunnies, marlins, tortoises, unique in their shapings but united in the preoccupation with maw, obsessed with the urge to embladder whatever was outside the skin, to gastronomize the other, swarmed around the attendant who lumbered through in a diver's helmet, scattering delicacies of shrimp and chopped squid as he went. In the outdoor amphitheater, the sea lions and dolphins played basketball, tooted horns, pulled rowboats, slid down chutes, burped into microphones, donned funny hats, spurred on in their antics by the trash fish their trainers kept tossing into their always ready mouths. In other enclosures, otters contorted themselves and penguins did lumbering soft-shoes in response to the appetizers held out to them by enrapt spectators.

Taffy found it all noteworthy and delightful. Anson's face was getting longer and longer. In fact, he seemed horrified. "Swill and swill some more," he mumbled to himself. "Try to digest those brass rings" -- a statement that did not seem to call for a reply.

We had finally seen all the sights. We headed back across the grounds, toward the main building.

• • •

When we joined the crowd alongside the mammoth circular glass tank, the thing happened that I suppose has got to happen to every Anson Luddy sooner or later in a public gathering place: he was recognized.

Not by the other visitors, though. Not at first. The man in the diver's outfit was down in the tank again, plowing his leaden-legged way along the hull of the old whaler's boat as he scattered his prawns and cuttlefish patties to the thronging, jawing sea creatures that followed him like storm troopers in drill formation. This man came close to the glass wall, peered out, and spotted Anson, who, for a moment, had forgotten to keep his Cracker Jack prize of a face covered.

It's not every day you go to work 40-feet down in the briny, to feed fish to fish in an endless sort of gustatory closed circuit, and suddenly come face to face with an Anson Luddy. A Luddy face simply does not show up during business hours. It makes no damned sense, looming up among the pinched, peaked nine-to-five mugs of your workaday clients and colleagues. It belongs to the womby night, when you go dreamy-slack and extraterrestrial over your buttered popcorn or TV dinner.

It must have been some such qualmish sense of categories toppling that led the fish feeder to gape at Anson, pressing his diver's helmet against the glass wall of the tank to get a better look. I could see his brown eyes bulging and burning as they took unbelieving inventory of Anson's features. He looked like a grouper spread-jawed at feeding time.

Anson did not notice the mute underwater drama taking place practically at his elbow. He was too busy thinking about brass rings, or some such engrossing subject.

It mystifies, how often that which fascinates you makes you want to hit out at it. I won't lay it down as absolute law, but movie fans have been known to mob their idol with such enthusiasm as to send him to the hospital; romantic literature is densely populated with lovers administering lethal potions of this or that hemlock to each other as they hymn their mutual thralldom; each Mario seeks to gun down his Magician. Conceivably the thing that bewitches is taken as a danger precisely because it wields so much power, immobilizes and drains will, freezes eyes, steel-traps thoughts; and if hitting it is so reassuring, it must be more than a punishment meted out to the totalitarian object for its snaring and crushing magic, the blow must also help to establish that there is lifesaving and facesaving space between trancer and trancee, as witness the fact that the victim is still authorchic enough to command his own muscles.

This, at least, is the only sense I can make out of what the fish feeder did next.

He began to thump on the glass wall. Anson turned his head, startled; so did the nearby rubberneckers.

The diver put his hands alongside his temples and began to waggle his fingers, as a playful parent does when he makes funny faces at a child. Anson looked puzzled: he was thinking many-fathomed thoughts about the big modern business of fun, and from the bottom of a fabricated sea, at the prow of a whaling boat designed for sinking, surrounded by frantically flailing cut-ups of the deep, a man was doing unmotivated comedy routines at him.

Now the diver pressed his index finger against the glass and began to trace capital letters, writing backward. His finger left smudgy, dim lines wherever it went.

In a moment the message was spelled out for all to see: "Anson luddy Go home."

Strange spume from a contrived sea. The diver's eloquent fingers, which were now fluttering before his nose area in the age-old gesture of screw you, made it very clear that he was directing himself to a particular individual in the crowd.

The onlookers turned. And there, impossibly, gloriously, was Anson Luddy, looming up an awesome head above his neighbors, within spitting range, kicking range, rending range.

All the females roundabout -- grannies, mumsies, teeners, even moppets -- fixed widening eyes on their shining knight from the drive-ins that interlard the missile bases of the southland; they stared, with eating eyes, and they broke into smiles, as though in anticipation of larger meals. They looked like so many groupers gaping to be fed. And, in reflex to this ocular salivation of their womenfolk, the men and the boys began to smile, too, though less broadly, halfshamefaced, half-sullen.

The mob radars relayed their high-speed messages back and forth, the team compacted, and, by the weird chemistry of instantaneous community, the Spokesman, the proconsul, the Internuncio, the Minister Plenipotentiary, the Front Runner, was selected by secret ballot, felt his catapulting to high office, shudderingly accepted the signal honor, and stepped forward.

He was a bit uneasy with the delicate complexity of his mission, rather, I imagine, as the Japanese ministers must have been in Washington on the night of December 6, 1941; but he had a sly hunger and a peekaboo revelry about him, too; there was in him a suggestion of much quiet lip-smacking. He was a lumpy, overpadded man, tall, his face like a blob of dough that had risen in haphazard bubbles, with the beefy hunch of a truck driver. His gray-green jacket was a demonstrative houndstooth, his open-neck sport shirt a slashed, silver-sheened plaid, his powder-blue slacks lined with faint tan pinstripes, his sandals of the open-toed and beadedhuarache type; there was a camera slung over his shoulder, there was awkward hesitation in his puffy lips and some obscure but wracking demand in his intent brown eyes.

"We'd better get out of here," I whispered to Anson.

"How?" he said. "Run, and you've got the whole pack at your heels."

The high-voltage charge that had knit together the rapt congregation in our neighborhood was now sparking out through the building. Other gapers were curving into the orbit of the crowd, like iron filings captured by a magnet; and as the clot of people grew, the emissary kept coming on his thick huaraches. He was lipping a cerise Popsicle. He'd had it in his hand when he'd been mobilized and dispatched.

He reached us, stopped, and broke into a grin which was rather like the lip poising of the hyena the moment before snapping at carrion.

"Hey, Luddy," he said with a kind of reluctant, edgy homage, "my missus thinks you're a devil, a wonder. She'd rather see your old flicks on the TV than eat."

"Right, I'm an anti-obesity drug," Anson said.

The onlookers smiled some more. They loved the idea of a democratic exchange between these two, Mr. Big and Joe Nobody, deity and dink.

I sensed what Anson, who must have had plenty of experience in the manipulation of tensed crowds, was trying to do. If he bolted, his admirers would feel deprived, neglected, betrayed. His only chance, in his own mind, anyhow, was to let them have the satisfaction of immobilizing him for a moment, of forcing him into a bare minimum of civil chitchat.

"I swear, I don't know what it is with her," the man went impishly on. "put an old Luddy flick on the little box and she's like nailed to the sofa, the dirty dishes can grow worms in the sink, the beds can stay unmade till they mildew, the kids can sprout potatoes and fungus stuff in their ears, for all she cares."

He was perfectly ready to do the talky spadework for the mass assault on Luddy. He felt that Luddy had to be hit for being Luddy, a man who cut off the light from other men. But he wanted it clearly understood that his own personal trademark was on the blow, along with the gang's anonymous one.

"Well," Anson said, his face still not bothering to assume an expression, "some people say that cleanliness isn't next to godliness at all, that it's just a Freudian washing compulsion, and neatness, too. If you don't bother to make a bed then it can't get mussed, maybe you could look at it that way."

The man sensed the undertone of contempt without being able to grasp the spoken words one by one. He tongued his dripping Popsicle reflectively.

"Wait, get my meaning, I'm not faulting you, pal, I'm only making the point what a hold you got on the little woman," he said without much humor. He fished a ball-point pen out of his jacket pocket and held up a Marineland program. "No hard feelings, now, I just wanted you to know you're the wonder boy around my house and home, they all go down on their knees to you, boy. What say you scribble your John Hancock on here for the missus, huh?"

"Sorry," Anson said, "I have a policy, I don't give autographs, I don't make personal appearances. You see how it is."

"How's that? Ain't you appearing here and now, and ain't it personal? Come on, Ans, give us the old John Hancock." The man held his program higher. "Say something personal, say, 'To Florence, happy days and all the best,' all right, hotshot? It'll tickle her to her toes."

"Tell Florence to write to the studio," Anson said. "They'll be glad to send her a picture with and inscription."

"Don't give me that, Ans. They got some fan-letter service where a couple of old-biddy stenogs sign the pictures wholesale, unseen by you; it's not the same. Come on, give the old girl the thrill of a lifetime. Ans, sign on the dotted line, what's it cost you?"

Smiles broadened, eyes expanded with partisanship for the underdog bargainer, heads nodded in the keening of the longdeprived rising up appetitiously.

"You're not trying to see my side of it," Anson said. "Suppose I give you the autograph, that means if there's any fair play I'll have to give it to everybody, and I can't just stand here all day signing programs, can I? But if I say yes to a few and turn away the rest, that's discriminating. Come on, now, You don't want to be a party to the worst kind of discrimination, do you? You know that's not the Amurcan Way. If your sister wanted to marry one of them, you wouldn't try to bust it up and put the Amurcan Way to shame, would you?"

It was a rough turn Anson was taking. Those last words were a reference to his tormentor's unmistakably Deep Dixie accent, and the crowd knew it, and the man knew it.

"Don't see where you have to drag politics into it," the man said with a quick stiffening of lips and shoulders. "I ask in a neighborly way for a signature and you're talking politics, what's that all about?"

"Man is a political animal," Anson said gently. "Your asking for my autograph is political because it's a power grab, a maneuver to install you over me because you think the TV screen has installed me over you and that hurts. My refusing you the autograph is political because I don't believe in discrimination and the only autographs I'm prepared to give you are those of Martin Luther King and James Meredith, two very political names."

"What are you, out of your head, Charlie?" the man said unbelievingly. This was not the kind of talk you expect from a movie star in process of being slyly mobbed. "I'm asking you for a lousy sample of your handwriting, not a soap box speech about your religion."

"If we're on the subject of religion," Anson said, "isn't this a revival meeting you suddenly decided to hold alongside the fish tank? Egging on the sinners to munch some communion out of my hide? You say you want to collect auto graphs, but what you really want to collect, isn't it some nice relics, my ankle-bone, a hunk of my meat, a lock of hair? No. I don't think I'll let you and your friends divvy me up. I'm in a dilemma, friend. The reason a man in my position can't let you lick his boots is that next you'll be chewing off his leg. Would you be good enough to stand aside? I'm afraid I have to go now."

"Now you don't want to be that way," the man said. His eyes were narrowing. He had placed his hand on Anson's forearm. "Why don't you just make a nice gesture for Old Flo and not bring up the big issues, fair enough?"

The crowd, aware that the preliminary sparring was over, sensing a showdown, pushed closer.

"Would you be good enough to let go of my arm, friend?" Anson's face was dramatically emptied of drama. His voice was easy and there was something misleadingly close to a smile on his lips.

"You want me to go back to Flo and tell her that her honey boy wouldn't even give her the time of day?" The man tightened his hold on Anson's sleeve. "You want me to give her a slap in the face like that?"

"Let go of my arm," Anson said, mild as Jell-o.

"I guess you don't think much of my missus. And her drooling over your muscles all these years, how about that."

I put my hand over the man's hand, wishing I had the good sense to want to be faraway, knowing I didn't.

"You're not getting the message," I said, relishing the foolishness I was untypically allowing myself. "He's telling you he's tired of your company. He's asking you nicely to travel on."

"Who appointed you some bum master of ceremonies?" the man said. "Let go of me, Jim."

"We'll do it in stages," I said. "You let go of him, Jim, and I'll let go of you, Jim."

"I can handle this, Gordon," Anson said.

"I'd like to handle it with you," I said. "You take 50 percent of him and I'll take 50 percent of him, that's the Amurcan Way." Muscle was silly, but I was working into a blind rage.

The hand that was holding the autographless program slammed edge first at my Adam's apple, choking me and knocking me away at the same time. There was an crowd as it surged closer.

Anson regarded the man with a kind of ponderous entomologist's curiosity.

"That wasn't a nice thing to do," he said.

"You insulted my wife," the man said with supreme logic.

I was back at his side, saying, "You insulted her by letting her marry a pig like you," and I slammed the hand holding the Popsicle as hard as I could into his beefy face. The smashed cerise ice made cascades down his cheeks and over his lips and onto his raucous plaid shirt.

The pressing crowd went, mmm-ooo, in a mass sigh of rapture. The best spectacles are those not on the program.

"You want more autographs?" I said. "On the chin?"

With his jerky sandals and his insipid box camera, he was a wall, and my one profession at this moment was scaling. Only as an old vaulter of whatever elevations were around I knew that those who make a career of scaling walls never get their feet on the ground; that was my inside plague, that I knew it but still had the itch to climb. This kind of impasse breeds writers and other indoor mountain climbers.

"Couple of bucky-coon lovers," the man said, eying both of us squint-hard. "The kind that put the dinges up front on the buses and at the lunch counters and there in Ole Miss, for the eyesore of it. Stirring up troubles and poo-pooing real folks' homey tastes."

With that, he drew himself tight to make the lunge of a raging bear in our direction.

"Good enough," Anson said with what I took to be relief, "let's get down to it, "even as he was bracing his feet apart to take the impact and reaching for the oncoming hulk with both hams of hands.

He absorbed the shouldering charge without budging.

The man caved in, I guess because Anson's knee had slammed up against his chest. It looked like the wind had been knocked out of him. His legs were buckling and he might indeed have gone down if Anson's fingers had not been gripping him firmly by the houndstooth lapels.

The crowd, now swollen to a hundred or more, went low-voiced and dejectedly, aaaawr.

"You want to cool off, fella," Anson said with almost a bedside manner.

He stretched his hand to a frowsy-haired thin woman who was standing close by, completely absorbed, and lifted the triple-scoop strawberry ice-cream cone from her spread mouth. He ran the mush cone down one of the man's cheeks and up the other, then over and around his bushy hair, depositing it finally on his head, pointed end up, like a dunce cap.

"Better wear something on top," Anson said with concern. "If you cool off too much you might catch cold."

The crowd shuddered from one end to the other, with an uneasy shifting of its centipede feet, and went, zhzhzhzh.

"Now," Anson said, "you ready to travel? Like to take a little trip?"

The man was catching his breath. He swung one arm back and aimed a rabbit punch at Anson's liver, but Anson's free hand was there in elephantine readiness to block it.

"We don't want any of that," Anson said. "We can't go around hitting people as though we were their equal."

To make this point, Anson chopped his palm edge at the man's gullet, exactly as the man had chopped at me. He gasped, glugged, growled feebly.

"All packed up?" Anson said. "Ready for that trip?"

He heaved the man high by the lapels, dangled him once in a practice swing, and let his hulk fly off through the air in easy orbit. He landed yards away. He sat there, head down, looking puzzled. One minute you're asking jaunty-jolly for autographs, the next, you're wearing a sugar cone for a hat.

• • •

So the preliminaries were over. The troops that advanced for combat were without exception women, of all ages and varieties. Big and little, broadbeamed and scrawny, high-heeled and Wedgied, they swooped down on Anson while their shamefaced menfolk kept their distance. It is always excruciatingly embarrassing for men to see their women go amuck as they swarm with plucking, plowing fingers around a bargain counter. Anson Luddy was, for the moment, their bargain counter. Their lustiness implied that their men were no bargains.

They advanced swinging handbags, carryalls, parasols, cameras, binoculars, raincoats, even shoes. Under this relentless barrage, Anson went down, and a second later, so did I. As I rolled from side to side to escape their windmilling hands, I caught glimpses of Anson: there were many more of them bent over him, and they were really working him over. He had his hands up to his face, trying to protect his venerated features from their venerators.

In very short order the few women and teenagers who had deigned momentarily to acknowledge me as a target worthy of a sideswipe had abandoned me to move in on the Anson Luddy glory-day kill.

I sat up, feeling a bit out of focus, shaking my fogged-in head.

Something improbable caught my eye. It was the fish feeder in the tank, who still had his helmeted head pressed against the glass wall to follow the marvelous fray. He seemed to be doing some sort of dance, a bathymetric tango, jerking his members from side to side as fast as the water would let him. Each time his body reversed its rotational movement, his hands made energetic pugilistic gestures. He looked like a grouper on the gorge.

My head cleared. I moved my eyes to the turmoil around Anson's flattened body. Now I saw what the end-all of the whole operation was, how the adoration of movie fans gets localized and pinpointed in the infighting.

The women had given up their broad swiping movements and were now rummaging in, feinting at, picking over, Anson's groin, each trying to shoulder the others aside, each intent on establishing her exclusive squatter's rights to these hallowed precincts. It's all very well to knock out the enemy's outposts. That's part of the softening-up process. But ultimately you have to strike at the other guy's G.H.Q. or you're not campaigning seriously.

Anson was curled into a wretched ball, his hands trying ineffectually to shield his middle. The marauding fingers tore indifferently through them. I couldn't get to him to help, I couldn't get near.

I thought: let the wars of the future be fought exclusively with weapons that aim at the male privates and very quickly, for the first time in human history, war will become outmoded as a form of contest between man and man because each gent will be so preoccupied with trying to defend his most precious and delicate possessions with his hands that he will have neither the inclination nor the instrumentation to take a poke at anybody else.

We were saved, finally, by the guards. A contingent of them arrived on the scene and, one way or another, sweated their way to Anson's side. I was right behind them. They managed to heave the mob back.

Then Taffy was scrambling toward us and yelling, "Quick! The side door!"

I helped Anson to his feet. His belt had been torn apart and his pants were half-off. He fumbled with them.

"The minor adjustments can come later," I said. I pulled him toward the side entrance, through a path which the guards had cleared.

At the door, he jerked away from us and stopped. He was panting, his eyes were in a blaze. He surveyed the rioting grouper-faced women, still in a lusty free-for-all with the guards, with a sweeping wildness.

He bellowed: "I only cook the slop, you eat it! I spit out the idea of Celluloid at the end of the working day but you go on wolfing the stuff right through the night and scream for bigger helpings! Your bellies are full of Celluloid! When's the last time you had solid food? You think you're going to get any nutrition, making a meal out of me?"

They pressed against the guards, mouth-manifesting, straining to get at their main course again, determined to bite their initials into the hide that was treacherous enough to crease with use.

"Want their adoration?" Anson panted at Taffy. "Learn the going price! Keep track shoes handy, girl! Pray for no traffic!"

"Hope I'll be a good distance runner!" Taffy breathed back. Her eyes were wide with the future, when she would be a ranking brass ring: no marginal notes discernible. "One thing sure, never was a sitter! Let 'em chase me! When I'm my own audience, damned if I don't chase myself! All over the place!"

I wasn't listening. I was studying Anson Luddy with fascination. Now, even now, with the jawers still howling, a slowed and slacked Charlemagne cornered in a most family-type Jarama and facing camera-bearing Moors and sandaled Vishinskys who were no respecters of Metrecal diets, even now he had his fingers plowing through his golden locks in an effort to restore the carefully disheveled Luddy look: he was not at the wrong end of the staring: he cared about how he showed up in the eye of the beholder: he was an actor.

"Let's go somewhere and comb our hair!" I said, intending no slight to anybody's bents or dedications.

I pulled at him. We ran.