he: A Novel(65)

So listen closely to what I’m about to say, and I’m speaking as your employer and your friend. The studio is on spring break. When production resumes, you’d better be on my lot and ready to work, or so help me I’ll see you out on the street, and I’ll hold you to your contract so you’ll never again work in this town unless you work for me. And in the meantime, you sort out your private life, and you keep that woman away from your home and my studio until your divorce becomes final. Have some respect for Lois. Jesus, have some respect for yourself.

He could argue his case, he supposes, assuming Hal Roach lets him get a word in, but he does not even try.

Because Hal Roach is right.





123


He returns to work.

He agrees to star in Babes in Toyland, but only if he is permitted to adapt the script in his usual manner. Hal Roach consents, if reluctantly. Hal Roach’s script is for a family picture featuring the names of his two biggest stars above the title, but with a great deal of secondary business going on around them. Hal Roach fears that what he will get back is a vehicle for his two biggest stars, tailored to their strengths but also indulgent of their weaknesses.

Babes in Toyland is a success, but Hal Roach derives no pleasure from it. Babes in Toyland is not the great adornment to the studio for which Hal Roach has worked so hard, and its existence is tainted by the battles fought with one of its stars. Worse, that same star is now pronouncing it to be the most entertaining of their features, he who fought so hard against making it, he who forced its postponement, he who cost Hal Roach time and money and effort, he who showed Hal Roach no gratitude, no gratitude at all.

And Hal Roach will never forgive him.





124


At the Oceana Apartments, he hears Ida chopping vegetables for the pot, and music playing from one of the residences below. He has closed the balcony door. He is feeling the cold. He has tried to write more gags, but the remaining pages of his legal pad remain bare. Some days you have to walk away and let the gags come to you instead of running after them like a man in pursuit of a wind-thieved hat.

He puts a blanket over his knees. He suspects that the anniversary of a death may be approaching, but then the anniversary of a death is always approaching. He has reached an age where barely a week goes by without the necessity of an observance.

He has never visited Babe’s grave. He did not even go to the funeral. He has never attended funerals: not his son’s, not Teddy’s, and not Babe’s. He could not have coped with Babe’s funeral. He would not have been able to let Babe go.

And he has not let Babe go, since he speaks to him every day, and writes gags for him every day, and likes to believe that he can sometimes sense Babe’s presence, even though he knows that this is an illusion. If there is any ghost here, he has created it in his own image.

When his daughter was young, he would take her to Sunday school at the Beverly Hills Community Church. It was important to him that she should predicate her existence on the possibility of a higher order to the universe, even if he himself remained doubtful about such a design. Now, with the chill entering his bones, he thinks the embrace of order may have been conceivable to him only in terms of his art, and so many of the problems in his personal life arose from a failure to comprehend the distinction between these two facets of his being.

He wishes he were back in Hal Roach’s office on the lot. He would like to be able to tell Hal Roach what he has concluded. He has not spoken with Hal Roach in so long. It ended poorly between them, and when he reads an interview with Hal Roach, or sees Hal Roach being celebrated on television, he encounters a version of their years together that is not entirely familiar to him.

But they are both old men now, and old men misremember.





125


He and Babe make Going Bye-Bye!

They make Them Thar Hills.

They make The Live Ghost.

They make Tit for Tat.

They make The Fixer Uppers.

They make Thicker Than Water.

These are the last of them. No more short pictures. Hal Roach will have his way. The industry will have its way.

He feels the heart going out of him. He can tolerate Hal Roach’s manipulation of contracts, Hal Roach’s refusal to pay him what he believes to be his due, Hal Roach’s coolness toward him – he can tolerate all these as long as he can make the pictures he wishes to make, as long as he can be proud of what he creates, and as long as he can be with Babe. Babe is alone in understanding the effort he puts into the construction of these pictures, and the cost of that effort to him. Babe is alone in understanding how much he cares about what appears on the screen after their names.

And meanwhile Hal Roach hunts.

Hal Roach flies his plane.

Hal Roach blusters.

Hal Roach licenses Henry Ginsberg to engage in guile and perfidy.

Because Hal Roach does not care.





126


Another round of contract negotiations. He anticipates their approach like the footsteps of bailiffs on the stairs, their imminence presaging no good.

Hal Roach has their next picture lined up.

Scotland and India, Hal Roach tells him. Kilts. We may even run with that as a title.

He knows what it is about. He has read the treatment.

Well? says Hal Roach. What do you think?

What he thinks is that Hal Roach is still preventing him from settling his contract at the same time as Babe.