Persons who want to stay Missing, do we?
I stopped reading. It was too much to take on so short notice. On no notice at all.
Lightning and thunder were striking all over the apartment. The drums of the past, the
rhythms and beats of what had made me what I laughingly was today, filled all the
hollows and recesses of the universe. Ghosts walked.
Jo Malmedy, playwright, had somehow opened a can of worms. A large can of
very wriggly, creepy-crawly worms.
And I didn't know how he had found the combination key.
Or what he even meant by it all.
What he was trying to prove.
But irresistibly, magically, my eyes were pulled back to the typed pages again.
Radar pure and simple. Mindless, unable to fight back, incapable of shutting the
nightmare out.
The pages of Yesterday flipped over. With dry, ironic ease.
I took the trip. The mind-bending, frightening journey.
There was no place else to go but back.
Back to before, what-once-was. What-had-been.
I went protesting, fighting, unwillingly, all the way.
There was a mystery all right. A very great one.
No one could know what had happened when I first met Dolores Ainsley Brand.
No one on this earth. I had never told that chapter of my life to anyone. Least of all, Jo
Malmedy, who must have been a Hoboken kid of about three at the time, still a thousand
light years away from being the Boy Wonder of Broadway and Show Business. And
Oscars and Tonys and Emmys.
Dolores couldn't have told him, either.
Dolores was dead. Same year, same accident.
Killed by me.
Her enormous ghost parades all around the apartment as I went on reading the
crisp, neatly-typed pages of Jo Malmedy's play. She might have been laughing, in that
old vulgar, men's room sound of her, as we both read together. The walls echoed.
The memorable, heart-breaking past is always like that, too.
You can never run away from it.
All the legs in the world are useless. "It'd be fine if he'd learn to write---but
he needs that knowledge precisely as much
as Elvis needs vocal lessons."
Anthony Boucher, New York Times Sunday Book Review
THE MAD MARCEL
Marcel Alevoinne was waiting for me that night in Downey's. In the booth
closest to the telephones by the front door. I knew he would be prompt so I was on time,
too. There was a lot to know, much more to learn, and Marcel Alevoinne was the man
to ask. The Irish bar on Eighth Avenue, just a spit and a cough from the heart of the
Broadway theatre district, was the favored watering hole of every successful and
unsuccessful thespian still roaming free and wild in Big Town. I had bent my own elbow
a thousand times in Downey's. They knew me and I knew them. We had grown up
together. From the frantic Fifties to the Screaming Seventies. It was the place to go for
all performers, great and small. Way up or far down. For a private detective, with a
stake in Show Business, it is the Promised Land, too. Gas for the motor.
A Grapevine with liquored wheels. Gossip Gulch.
I needed Marcel Alevoinne that night.
Everybody on Broadway did, sooner or later. He wasn't really a Frenchman. He didn't even like France. His real name was
Clarence Oldenfield Wilson and he had left Hartford, Connecticut in '51 with so many
academic credits and awards that the Manhattan literary societies embraced him as if
Thomas Wolfe had come back to life. Fourteen best-selling novels later he was still the
corniest, homeliest, Pulitzer Prize winning man of American letters in the entire
universe. But more than that, he had survived and thrived in a society that ate talent
alive and drove all old-fashioned men to cover. They called him Mad Marcel because
anger, honest anger against frauds, liars and bureaucratic systems which strangled
creativity, filled all his work the way Pearl Buck's locusts descended on the Good Earth
farmers. He had emerged from Hartford with the outlandish name of Marcel Alevoinne
because he had known how to beat the book crowd at their own game and thoroughly
resented the fact that his unthinking parents had graced him with a monogram which
came out COW no matter how you sliced it. But Chuck O. Wilson was a bull, from the
nostrils down. And up. "And expert is a man who comes from forty miles away, Noon,"
he had once told me. "and all I had to do to fox those Publisher's Row hyenas was give
myself a fancy French name, deny my upper class New England background and drop
the hint that I was one of seventeen starving gamins in a New Orleans back alley flat-
before I went to college, of course---and voila, the artist is born. It's a bullshit world,
son, and the higher the bullshit, the harder it is to see the truth."
Of course, the real story came out years later but everybody was pretty satisfied
with the glory of Marcel Alevoinne. He was a great read, and stayed that way through
two decades of changing literary fads, and became one of the most successful novelists
who ever twirled a platen roller. So Charles Oldenfield Wilson passed into musty myth. Things came to such a pass that nearly everybody forgot that Marcel Alevoinne was a
gag name. A hoax alias. Hardly anybody remembered that dodge from way back in '51.
I did because Marcel and I were old acquaintances. The best kind there is. Brother
Mads. Fellow Fireaters.
I liked him mad. Because he had a lot to be mad about.
He was six feet five, gangling like Jimmy Stewart, with straw-colored hair
flapping down the sides of a lantern-jawed face. Freckles dotted his country kisser like a
bad case of the measles. His hands could have accommodated baseballs rather than
typewriter keys. He was about forty-five and his immense height as well as his story
telling skill, homely narrative novels and over-use of adjectives and adverbs in his prose,
made the Thomas Wolfe comparison inevitable. Like Wolfe, Marcel Alevoinne bled for
Mankind. Biafra bothered him as much as Watergate ever could. He bled for himself, in
almost equal parts. Unlike Tall Tom, the modern day duplicate was a genuinely
humorous man. In the flesh as well as print. When he talked, people usually listened.
But his greatest and most notable feature was his feelings about the Critic.
Critics. The whole business of men being paid good money to render an opinion on
another man's work, to lead the audience toward enlightenment of some Godawful kind,
outraged Marcel Alevoinne. Criticism is so much easier that craftsmanship.
He hated critics. Why should it be important what they say?
Hated them with a ferocity that had quit the limits of common sense years ago.
What do they know about creating things?
The whole world knew how Marcel Alevoinne felt about critics. It was an Open
War, carried on with nearly religious fervor, despite all the awards, prizes and acclaim for his own life's work. Like Saroyan and George C. Scott and now Brando, he had
refused his own Pulitzers. And all the other blue ribbon triumphs and successes of the
academic field.
He had only taken the money for his work. The money it had rightfully earned.
Everything else to him was bullshit, Noon. Critics---goddammit---legless men teaching
the art of running!
Thus, Marcel Alevoinne nee
Charles Oldenfield Wilson.
The man I had made an appointment with in Downey's that night. The literary
giant I had come to ask about Jo Malmedy.
He was a martini ahead of me when I dropped into the booth across from the
polished brown table between us. He waved one of his monster hands and his eyes
showed their pleasure. We hadn't seen each other in months but it was always Only
Yesterday with him. If he liked you, Time had no importance whatever.
"Enter the Private Eye. Tall, wearing his cool. And looking extremely fit. You
on a diet?"
"Not lately. Where's my drink?"
"Order your own. I'm too busy thinking. That takes all the strength I have left.
Man's going to be an author, he's got to think. Occupational hazard. Sorry."
"No sweat. I'm working anyway."
"Oh?" He cocked a large blue eye at me and his voice, which should have been a
Stewart drawl considering his appearance, but was pure Mitchum chestiness, made him
sound more the hard character than I. "You look somehow slimmer. Legwork, Noon?" "Working up to it." I signaled a nearby waiter. "Depends on you, Last Angry
Man. And what pearls of wisdom you have to impart. Then maybe there will be mucho
legwork. Too early to tell yet."
I ordered a Scotch and another martini for him and we both did a brief toasting
with the eyes as we sipped. He was measuring me again across the rim of his glass and I
didn't lose a centimeter since last time. Marcel Alevoinne chuckled. Mitchum, again.
"Funny?" I dug out my Camels and he waved me off, indicating the unlit
cigarillo buried between his forefinger and second finger. Suddenly I remembered how
he always did the little cigars bit, not lighting them but using them as pointers in a
discussion while he was hammering home an argument. "How funny?"
"Funny considering what I was thinking about before you popped up. You want
to hear that first before you tell me your story?"
"There's only one Mad Marcel," I said, tipping the glass to him.
"Honored, sir." He acknowledged the tribute with a cheery grin. "All right, man
on the move. Here it is. I was thinking that I was sick of a lot of things. Things like
books, movies, plays, our so-called Entertainment Media, and mainly I was thinking
about how sick I was of the way all of it is handled. You couldn't know what it is to be
sick of your own business like that, could you? After tall, Noon has been a detective for
like twenty years and here he is---you marched in just as I was on Norman Mailer. In my
mind, of course, and the parallel struck me as very amusing."
"Mailer," I said, tentatively. Music filtered from the bar radio.
"Mailer," he agreed. "Norman M. There isn't a drop of love anywhere in any of
his writing. And now, this fine novelist, of another time, like centuries ago, is being honored for all the wrong reasons. He can't write novels so he does a reporter's job. The
critics love him, if of the same political persuasion, of course, but what's that got to do
with the Truth? You obviously love what you're doing, Noon, or you still wouldn't be
doing it. He's an oddball, besides. You're not."
I shrugged. "It's a free country." Downey's was deserted, almost.
"It is? Look again. What about Roth and his Private Vision, One-Joke books?
Masturbation or Mammaries. Right? Right! And the way his books are treated by
Private Vision critics! The Gospel According to St. Philip. My ass. Maybe you don't
know about the Academy, Noon, and the Machinery. I'll instruct you. Way back in '33
or thereabouts, to represent the very best in American Letters, it says here, the
Literartists-translation: critics, college professors, the New York Times and vested
interests, picked William Faulkner as The Man. Thereby relegating Hemingway and
Fitzgerald to second and third place. Can't you see the laugh in that? Faulkner is fine in
many a book but completely unreadable in many another. A break they never gave Ernie
and F. Scott who never have been or never will be unreadable--but there you are, Noon.
The Machinery---colleges, universities, the Times again---they put their money on Will
Bill Faulkner and he was IT from that moment on. Which brings me along to that second
thing that kills me…"
"You're playing Number Six again," I reminded him, not minding at all. Fewer
men have ever put their hang-ups in words so well.
The little brown cigarillo jabbed one of my blue smoke rings.
"Pay attention," he snapped. "This is important for your comprehension of the
Brainwashing cyclamates stuck in your daily newspaper and in your book and up on your silver screen. Take Private Vision Vincent Canby of the Big Brother Times again. Ever
follow the foreign film reviews? Canby alone, and maybe three other guys in all this
world knows exactly what a Chabrol, Goddard, Bergman and Warhol mean with those
reels of films they pass off as movies. Andy Warhol---my God---isn't it enough to make
you throw up that those flicks of his wouldn't pass a Freshman's Course in Film Making
but still get so much attention and space in America's most prestigious newspaper? No
surprise really. That's merely the Homosexual Society getting in their equal licks in the
Arts. Art? Movies? Give me Capra, Zinneman, Stevens, Ford, Cukor, Hathaway,
or M.A.S.H. kind of films which entertains and helps nobody at all. And I've read more
garbage about Brando's acting ability than they found rocks on the moon! What
happened to March, Tracy, Robinson, Cagney, Muni, while all this great critiquing
was going on? I'm not laughing, Noon. I'm crying."
"I don't like it either," I admitted, "but you have to understand that---"
"I don't have to understand anything." He had set his glass down, dwarfing it
with his big hands and glaring at me in a very unfriendly way as if I was one of Them. A
Critic. "Take Jane Fonda and Joan Baez. Admirable people in one way but in another,
deadlier than nitro as influences on young minds. Why? Because they both speak and
act as if the history of the world began on the date of their births. And how do you like
the system of Homelies--Make-Out that makes stars out of the like of Dustin Hoffman
and Elliot Gould? And a laugh riot out of a Woody Allen whose material is so derivative
and negative as to be pure heisting. Groucho and Henry Morgan and a half dozen other
guys ought to sue the desk out from under him. And then there's Dick Cavett---" "What about Dick Cavett?" I asked, unable to check the flood tide of his anger
washing across the table of the booth.
Marcel Alevoinne fixed me with two deadly, sad blue eyes.
"When a man like a Clifford Irving, deadbeat and cheat, par Extraordinaire,
gets ninety minutes of prime Time on TV with a fine person like Dick Cavett, and he is
fine, Noon, and makes the cover of Time magazine, then is it any wonder that the
Young of this old Country of ours, feel as they do and cheer the miserable personal
performance of a Bobby Fisher? With mostly everyone being pragmatic now…the End
justifies the Means…everybody thinks that way, now. And I hate it. And I hate critics
who contribute to that climate by some boldly vague expertise that supposedly allow
them to make judgments and set down the rules."
"You know where I sta
nd," I sighed. "Bring back Gary Cooper. Up with Heroes.
Down with Anti-Heroes. But nobody cares much about that any more. You know that
too. So who's arguing?"
"Ian Fleming," Marcel Alevoinne declared proudly, "once said in a Bond
thriller--Life reads better than it lives---and he was so right. That is how it should be,
really. Art is supposed to transform ugliness into beauty. Lies into Truth. But in our
books, our films, our plays, and too much in the main, God help us, the Life doesn't
read good at all." He slapped the top of the table with rapid-fire emphasis, fixing me
with a glare. "How do you feel about Pauline Kael and Mordecai Richter?"
"How am I supposed to feel?"
"Mad as a bastard, Ace. They both seem to have built entire careers writing
about things about which they have the most incredible opinions. Richter said Citizen Kane is 'without one quotable line'---I could quote at least a hundred worth remembering
for him. La Kael got this beauty off--'it isn't a work of special depth'---Well, after those
splendid gaffs, why go on? But oh how I'd like to tell them both that Kane, since
'forty-one, has stayed in the heart, soul and mind for millions of people just because of
the greatest possible depth in all the creative world. I mean---folks still want to know if
Mr. Bernstein really loved Kane and why did Leland act the way he did and what if Kane
had been poor---oh, good Christ, to dismiss 'rosebud' as a 'gimmick'---that was Kael's
verdict, and call the film 'the most complete work of art ever to emerge out of
Hollywood'---Mr. Richter, if you please---are the sort of lunatic, end-all statements that
make the whole business of calling the shots for everybody else, dopey and idiotic.
Where does such statements leave films like The Grapes of Wrath, Rebecca, The
Informer, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington---name your own poison. But, oh hell, what
should I expect from Kael? She's the lady who insisted that Japan's Magnificent Seven
was the greatest battle epic since Birth Of A Nation and where does that leave---shall we
say-All Quiet On The Western Front? And why does Orson Welles need any defense at
all for Citizen Kane? Without him, no matter what Kael has dredged up in her book, the
making of Kane would be like shooting Patton without the tanks." Sneering, he banged