A Son of the Circus Page 12

  As for his dress, he was a marginal eccentric; as he aged—and as he more peaceably embraced a directorial career of complete compromise—he grew more outlandish in his attire, as if his clothes had become his foremost creative act. Sometimes he wore a woman’s blouse, open to the waist, and he arranged his hair in a long white ponytail, which became his trademark; in his many films and TV crime dramas, there could be found no such identifying features. And all the while, he decried the “suits”—which was his word for the producers—“the fuckin’ three-piece mentalities,” who, Hathaway said, had “a fuckin’ stranglehold on all the talent in Hollywood.”

  This was an odd accusation, in that Gordon Hathaway had spent a long and modestly profitable career in close cahoots with these same “suits.” Producers, in truth, loved him. But none of these details is original, or even memorable.

  In Bombay, however, the first truly distinctive element of Gordon Hathaway’s character was brought to light: namely, he was so frightened of the food in India—and so hysterically conscious of those diseases that, he was certain, would destroy his intestinal tract—that he ate nothing but room-service food, which he personally washed in his bathtub. The Taj Mahal Hotel was not unused to such habits among the foreign, but by this extremely selective diet Hathaway had severely constipated himself and suffered from hemorrhoids.

  In addition, the hot, damp weather of Bombay had excited his chronic proneness to fungal infections. Hathaway stuck cotton balls between his toes—he had the most persistent case of athlete’s foot that Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had ever seen—and a fungus as unstoppable as bread mold had invaded his ears. Old Lowji believed that the director was capable of producing his own mushrooms. Gordon Hathaway’s ears itched to the point of madness, and he was so deaf from both the fungus and the fungicidal ear drops—not to mention the cotton balls that he stuck in his ears—that his communication on the film set was comedic with misunderstanding.

  As for the ear drops, they were a solution of gentian violet, an indelible purple dye. Therefore, the collars and shoulders of Hathaway’s shirts were dotted with violet stains, for the cotton balls frequently fell out of his ears—or else Hathaway, in his frustration at being deaf, plucked out the cotton balls himself. The director was a born litterer; everywhere he went, the world was colorfully marked by his violet ear-cottons. Sometimes the purple solution streaked Hathaway’s face, giving him the appearance of someone who’d been deliberately painted; he looked like a member of a religious cult, or of an unknown tribe. Gordon Hathaway’s fingertips were similarly stained with gentian violet; he was always poking his fingers in his ears.

  But Lowji was nevertheless impressed by the fabled artistic temperament of the first (and only) Hollywood director he’d ever met. The senior Daruwalla told Meher (she told Farrokh) that it was “charming” how Hathaway had blamed his hemorrhoids and his fungus neither on his bathtub diet nor on the Bombay climate. Instead, the director faulted “the fuckin’ stress” of the compromising relationship he was compelled to conduct with the film’s philistine producer, a much defamed “suit,” who (coincidentally) was married to Gordon’s ambitious sister.

  “That cunt of misery!” Gordon would often exclaim. Failing originality in all his cinematic pursuits, Gordon Hathaway was nevertheless rumored to be the first to coin this vulgar phrase. “Fuckin’ ahead of my time” was a way he often spoke of himself; in this coarse instance, he may have been correct.

  It was a great source of frustration to Meher and Farrokh to hear Lowji defend the grossness of Gordon Hathaway on grounds of the man’s “artistic temperament.” It was never clear if the philistine producer’s success in exerting certain pressures on Gordon was because of Gordon’s desire to please the suit himself, or whether the true force of the exertion emanated from Gordon’s sister—the so-called C. of M. herself. It was never clear who had whom “by the balls,” as Gordon put it; it was unclear who “jerked” whose “wire,” as he otherwise put it.

  As an admitted newcomer to the creative process, Lowji was undeterred by such talk; he sought to draw out of Gordon Hathaway the presumed aesthetic principles that guided the director through the frenzy with which this particular movie was being made. Even a novice could sense the hectic pace at which the film was being shot; even Lowji’s untested artistic sensibilities could detect the aura of tension with which the screenplay underwent revision every evening in the dining room of the Duckworth Club.

  “I trust my fuckin’ instinct for storytellin’, pal,” Gordon Hathaway confided to the senior Daruwalla, who was in such earnest search of a retirement career. “That’s the fuckin’ key.”

  How it shamed Farrokh and his poor mother: to observe, throughout dinner, that Lowji was taking notes.

  As for the screenwriter, whose shared dream of a “quality” picture was nightly and disastrously changing before his eyes, he was an alcoholic whose bar bill at the Duckworth Club threatened to exceed the Daruwalla family’s resources; it was a tab that pinched even the seemingly bottomless purse of the well-heeled Promila Rai. His name was Danny Mills, and he’d started out with a story about a married couple who come to India because the wife is dying of cancer; they’d promised themselves that they would go to India “one day.” It was originally titled, with the utmost sincerity, One Day We’ll Go to India; then Gordon Hathaway retitled it One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling. That small change initiated a major revision of the story, and sank Danny Mills all the deeper into his alcoholic gloom.

  It was actually a step up for Danny Mills—to have begun this screenplay from scratch. It was, if only in the beginning, his original story. He’d started out as the lowliest of studio contract writers; his first job, at Universal, was for 100 dollars a week, and all he did was tamper with existing scripts. Danny Mills still had more screen credits for “additional dialogue” than for “co-script,” and his solo screenplay credits (there were only two) were for flops—utter bombs. At the moment, he prided himself for being an “independent,” which is to say he was under no studio contract; however, this was because the studios thought he was unreliable, not only for his drinking but for his reputation as a loner. Danny wasn’t content to be a team player, and he became especially cantankerous in the cases of those screenplays that had already engaged the creative genius of a half-dozen or more writers. Although it clearly depressed Danny to revise on demand, which he was doing as a result of the nightly whims of Gordon Hathaway, it was entirely rare for Danny to be working on a story that had at least originated with him. For this reason, Gordon Hathaway thought that Danny shouldn’t complain.

  It wasn’t as if Danny had contributed a word to The Big Sleep or even Cobra Woman, and he’d had nothing to do with Woman of the Year or even Hot Cargo; he’d written neither Rope nor Gaslight—he hadn’t added so much as a comma to Son of Dracula, or taken one away from Frisco Sal—and although for a while he’d been identified as the uncredited screenwriter for When Strangers Marry, this proved to be false. In Hollywood, he simply hadn’t been playing in the big leagues; the general feeling was that “additional dialogue” was the very zenith of his ability, and so he came to Bombay with more experience in fixing other people’s messes than with creating his own. Doubtless it hurt Danny that Gordon Hathaway didn’t refer to him as “the writer” at all. Gordon called Danny Mills “the fixer,” but in truth there was more that needed fixing in One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling after Hathaway started changing it.

  Danny had envisioned the movie as a love story with a twist; the “twist” was the wife dying. In the original screenplay, the couple—in her dying days—succumbs to the fakery of a snake guru; they are rescued from this charlatan and his gang of demonic snake-worshipers by a true guru. Instead of pretending to cure the wife, the true guru teaches her how to die with dignity. According to the philistine producer, or else to his wife—Gordon Hathaway’s interfering C. of M. sister—this last part was lacking in both action and suspense.

  “Despite how happy the wif
e is, she still fuckin’ dies, doesn’t she?” Gordon said.

  Therefore, against the slightly better instincts of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway altered the story. Gordon believed that the snake guru wasn’t villainous enough; hence the snake-worshipers were revised. The snake guru actually abducts the wife from the Taj and keeps her a prisoner in his harem of drugged women, while he instructs them in a method of meditation that concludes with having sex—either with the snakes or with him. This is an ashram of evil, surely. The distraught husband, in the company of a Jesuit missionary—a none-too-subtle replacement for the true guru—tracks the wife down and saves her from a fate presumed worse than her anticipated death by cancer. It is Christianity that the dying wife embraces at the end, and—no surprise!—she doesn’t die after all.

  Gordon Hathaway explained it to a surprised Lowji Daruwalla: “The cancer just sort of goes away—it just fuckin’ dries up and goes away. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly ‘dry up,’ but there are cases of remission,” the senior Dr. Daruwalla answered uncertainly, while Farrokh and Meher suffered enormous embarrassment for him.

  “What’s that?” Gordon Hathaway asked. He knew what a remission was; he just hadn’t heard the doctor because his ears were crammed full of fungus and gentian violet and cotton balls.

  “Yes! Sometimes a cancer can just sort of go away!” old Lowji shouted.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought—I knew that!” Gordon Hathaway said.

  In his embarrassment for his father, Farrokh sought to turn the conversation toward India itself. Surely the gravity of the Partition and Independence—when a million Hindus and Muslims were killed, and 12 million became refugees—interested the foreigners a little.

  “Listen, kid,” Gordon Hathaway said, “when you’re makin’ a fuckin’ movie, nothin’ else interests you.” There was hearty consent to this at the dinner table; Farrokh felt that even the silence of his usually opinionated father served to rebuke him. Only Danny Mills appeared to be interested in the subject of local color; Danny also appeared to be drunk.

  Although Danny Mills considered religion and politics as tedious forms of “local color,” Danny was nevertheless disappointed that One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling had very little to do with India. Danny had already suggested that the climate of religious violence in the days of the Partition might at least make a brief appearance in the background of the story.

  “Politics is just fuckin’ exposition,” Gordon Hathaway had said, dismissing the idea. “I’d end up cutting the shit out of it later.”

  In response to the present debate between the director and Farrokh, Danny Mills once more expressed his desire that the movie reflect at least a hint of Muslim-Hindu tensions, but Gordon Hathaway bluntly challenged Farrokh to tell him just one “sore point” between Muslims and Hindus that wouldn’t be boring on film. And since this was the year that Hindus had snuck into the Mosque of Babar with idols of their god-prince Rama, Farrokh imagined that he knew a good story. The Hindus had claimed that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of Rama, but the placing of Hindu idols in an historic mosque wasn’t well received by Muslims—they hate idols of any kind. Muslims don’t believe in representations of God, not to mention lots of gods, while Hindus pray to idols (and to lots of gods) all the time. To avoid more Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, the state had locked up the Mosque of Babar. “Perhaps they should have removed the idols of Rama first,” Farrokh explained. Muslims were enraged that these Hindu idols were occupying their mosque. Hindus not only wanted the idols to remain—they wanted to build a temple to Rama at the site.

  At this point, Gordon Hathaway interrupted Farrokh’s story to express anew his dislike of exposition. “You’ll never write for the movies, kid,” Gordon said. “You wanna write for the movies, you gotta get to the point quicker than this.”

  “I don’t think we can use it,” said Danny Mills thoughtfully, “but I thought it was a nice story.”

  “Thank you,” Farrokh said.

  Poor Meher, the oft-neglected Mrs. Daruwalla, was sufficiently provoked to change the subject. She offered a comment on the pleasure of a sudden evening breeze. She noted the rustling of a neem tree in the Ladies’ Garden. Meher would have elaborated on the merits of the neem tree, but she saw that the foreigners’ interest—which was never great—had already waned.

  Gordon Hathaway was holding the violet-colored cotton balls he’d taken from his ears, shaking them in the closed palm of one hand, like dice. “What’s a fuckin’ neem tree?” he asked, as if the tree itself had annoyed him.

  “They’re all around town,” said Danny Mills. “They’re a tropical kind of tree, I think.”

  “I’m sure you’ve seen them,” Farrokh said to the director.

  “Listen, kid,” said Gordon Hathaway, “when you’re makin’ a movie, you don’t have time to look at the fuckin’ trees.”

  It must have hurt Meher to see by her husband’s expression that Lowji had found this remark most sage. Meanwhile, Gordon Hathaway indicated that the conversation was over by turning his attention to a pretty, underage girl at an adjacent table. This left Farrokh with a view of the director’s arrogant profile, and an especially alarming glimpse of the deep and permanent purple of Hathaway’s inner ear. The ear was actually a rainbow of colors, from raw red to violet, as unsuitably iridescent as the face of a mandrill baboon.

  Later, after the colorful director had returned to the Taj—presumably to wash more food in his bathtub before retiring to bed—Farrokh was forced to observe his father fawning over the drunken Danny Mills.

  “It must be difficult to revise a screenplay under these conditions,” Lowji ventured.

  “You mean at night? Over food? After I’ve been drinking?” Danny asked.

  “I mean so spur-of-the-moment,” Lowji said. “It would seem more prudent to shoot the story you’ve already written.”

  “Yes, it would,” poor Danny agreed. “But they never do it that way.”

  “They like the spontaneity, I suppose,” Lowji said.

  “They don’t think the writing is very important,” said Danny Mills.

  “They don’t?” Lowji exclaimed.

  “They never do,” Danny told him. Poor Lowji had never considered the unimportance of the writer of a movie. Even Farrokh looked with compassion on Danny Mills, who was an affectionate, sentimental man with a gentle manner and a face that women liked—until they knew him better. Then they either disliked his central weakness or exploited it. Alcohol was certainly a problem for him, but his drinking was more a symptom of his failure than a cause of it. He was always out of money and, as a consequence, he rarely finished a piece of writing and sold it from any position of strength; usually, he would sell only an idea for a piece of writing, or a piece of writing that was very much a fragment—a story barely in progress—and as a result he lost all control of the outcome of whatever the piece of writing was.

  He’d never finished a novel, although he’d begun several; when he needed money, he would put the novel aside and write a screenplay—selling the screenplay before he finished it. That was always the pattern. By the time he went back to the novel, he had enough distance from it to see how bad it was.

  But Farrokh couldn’t dislike Danny the way he disliked Gordon Hathaway; Farrokh could see that Danny liked Lowji, too. Danny also made an effort to protect Farrokh’s father from further embarrassing himself.

  “Here’s the way it is,” Danny told Lowji. He swirled the melting ice in the bottom of his glass; in the kilnlike heat before the monsoon, the ice melted quickly—but never as quickly as Danny drank the gin. “You’re screwed if you sell something before you finish it,” Danny Mills told the senior Daruwalla. “Never even show anybody what you’re writing until you finish it. Just do the work. When you know it’s good, show it to someone who’s made a movie you like.”

  “Like a director, you mean?” asked Lowji, who was still writing everything down.
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  “Definitely a director,” said Danny Mills. “I don’t mean a studio.”

  “And so you show it to someone you like, a director, and then you get paid?” asked the senior Daruwalla.

  “No,” said Danny Mills. “You take no money until the whole deal is in place. The minute you take any money, you’re screwed.”

  “But when do you take the money?” Lowji asked.

  “When they’ve signed the actors you want, when they’ve signed the director—and given him the final cut of the picture. When everyone likes the screenplay so much, you know they wouldn’t dare change a word of it—and if you doubt this, demand final script approval. Then be prepared to walk away.”

  “This is what you do?” Lowji asked.

  “Not me,” Danny said. “I take the money up front, as much as I can get. Then they screw me.”

  “But who does it the way you suggest?” Lowji asked; he was so confused, he’d stopped writing.

  “Nobody I know,” said Danny Mills. “Everyone I know gets screwed.”

  “So you didn’t go to Gordon Hathaway—you didn’t choose him?” Lowji asked.

  “Only a studio would choose Gordon,” Danny said.

  He had that uncommon smoothness of skin which appears so confounding on the faces of some alcoholics; it was as if Danny’s baby-faced complexion were the direct result of the pickling process—as if the growth of his beard were as arrested as his speech. Danny looked like he needed to shave only once a week, although he was almost 35.