he: A Novel(96)

Three months stretch into seven, then twelve. In April 1951, they are finally permitted to leave, but his health is irreparably damaged.

And Babe?

Babe quickens his step toward the grave.

All for an aging man’s vanity.

All for money to pay off a vindictive woman.

All for a picture.

A miserable, lousy picture.





191


Jimmy Finlayson dies.

Jimmy Finlayson, who might have been sixty-six, or sixty-nine, or seventy-two, or seventy-four, because Jimmy Finlayson was too vain to admit his real age, or never really knew it; Jimmy Finlayson, who traded on a squint and a stuck-on mustache, and perfected a double-take so unique that no one could ever perform another without laboring in his shadow; Jimmy Finlayson, who had little hair and too few toes, yet once believed that stardom might be his; Jimmy Finlayson, who married a woman at least eleven years his junior, and divorced her soon after, but never once regretted all the times that he fucked her between; Jimmy Finlayson, who made a career out of playing himself, who was eccentric and dour but was the first to look on Babe and see the beauty within.

Jimmy Finlayson is no more.





192


Who shall have them? None shall have them, or none in this place.

They grow poorer as their fame endures. He speaks of it with Babe and Ben Shipman, as alimony nips and the IRS tears. He will be stopped on the street, or Babe will be questioned at the racecourse, and the mouth of a person impossibly young will ask the one if he were not formerly renowned, and the other will be told of his past self being glimpsed on a television screen; and the eyes of the person impossibly young will gaze upon this gaunt, enervated patient, or this ponderous, amaranthine gambler, and wonder how someone once so famous could grow so old?

Those contracts, he says to Ben Shipman, those papers we signed, all they did was give everything away.

He is not blaming Ben Shipman, because that is not in his nature, but Ben Shipman cannot deny the truth of what is being said. Ben Shipman has done his best for these men, has always done his best for them, even if Ben Shipman forever felt himself to be out of his depth among agents and producers. Ben Shipman was born in Poland in 1892. What does Ben Shipman know from pictures? Maybe, when it came to studios and contracts, Ben Shipman was just playing at being a lawyer.

Television, Ben Shipman says. Who knew?

Hal Roach knew, he thinks, or Hal Roach guessed, or Hal Roach anticipated that just as the stage gave way to pictures, so too would pictures give way to a greater innovation, and if money was to be made from it, Hal Roach would be poised at the front of the queue, weighted with wares.

But their contracts were no worse than those of others, and better than most. If he is unprosperous, it is not entirely Ben Shipman’s fault; it is not really Ben Shipman’s fault at all.

He and Babe could have become independent producers.

As Chaplin did.

He and Babe could have controlled all aspects of their work.

As Chaplin did.

He and Babe could have owned their own pictures.

As Chaplin does.

But he is not Chaplin, and Babe never wished to be. Again and again it comes back to him. It will be the refrain that carries him from the clamor of this world to the oblivion of the next. They will carve it on his gravestone.

Not Chaplin.

Chaplin understood money. From the start, Chaplin was careful with it.

But he never understood money, no more than he understood women. He married unwisely, and too often. This is no one’s fault but his.

What can be done? he asks.

– About television? Nothing, unless we crawl to Hal Roach’s door and beg for a share.

He will not do this, not even if he were living rough under a bridge. He knows a dog that goes to Hal Roach’s door seeking scraps will leave hungrier than when it arrived.

You could go back to England, says Ben Shipman. Then: – Why are you smiling?





193


At the Oceana Apartments, he reflects on circularity.

A.J. would have laughed.

A.J.’s son, the big Hollywood star, returned once more to the stages that birthed him.

A.J.’s son, forced to grub for shillings in these father-haunted halls.

A.J.’s son, back to England with his tail between his legs.





194


No London this time, no Palladium, no Coliseum.

They play provincial theaters.

They play Dublin.

They play Belfast.

A year later, they are back, and the cathedral bells at Cobh sound a song of greeting for them, but the Audience is sparser now, and no television cameras record their presence in blighted towns. A summer season in Blackpool fails to materialize. The tour is to be cut short.

Even here, he thinks, we are not as we once were. Even here, we are being forgotten.

We are witnesses to our own evanescence.

Babe is slower. Babe sleeps. Babe struggles for breath. Babe is short-tempered. On stage, Babe labors.

Ben Shipman joins them in England. Together, they watch Babe scale the hotel stairs, helped by Lucille.

And Ben Shipman says:

– Maybe it’s good that Blackpool didn’t work out.





195


Babe stands at the window of his hotel room. Babe stares out at the rain driving hard upon the gray Humber estuary.