Every morning I hate to be born, and every night I'm afraid to die. I
live my life within these parentheses, and since I'm constantly walking
a tightrope over hysteria, I'm perceptive to the dilemmas of other
people as they cross their own chasms.
I'm a script-writer by trade, specializing in mystery shows. I'm
married to an actress. We're both of us second-raters in the
entertainment business ... mostly anonymous to the public, fairly
well-known to our colleagues. Between us we make from ten to twenty
thousand dollars a year, depending on the breaks. This is only fair
money in our business.
It seems like a fortune to our families, and we dazzle them with our
glamour. We hate this, but we can't dispel the illusion that General
Sarnoff claps me on the shoulder and calls me by my nickname. Now
we've given up trying. We realize that people want their friends to be
glamorous, so we've stopped trying to avoid undeserved admiration. But
I can't stand deception, and if I appear to be cynical in this story,
it's because I'm leaning over backwards to tell you the truth. As a
matter of fact I'm the reverse of cynical ... rather naive, in love
with adventure and romance, with the moral and ethical standards of an
Eagle Scout.
This is all I intend telling you about myself, because the story isn't
about me; it's about some tightrope walkers I know, and their strange
adventures in this fantastic frontier town we natives call The Rock.
The Rock, of course, is Manhattan Island, the only part of Greater New
York that we consider to be the genuine New York; and in our business
there is a very small society of natives born and raised on The Rock.
You'd be surprised at how few there are.
The Rock is the roaring frontier of the new life we are all beginning
to live, a life that is a terrifying mixture of the conscious and
unconscious levels of our minds. It is new and terrifying because the
unconscious depths which were concealed up to now, have become exposed,
and participate openly in our every-day life, turning it into a savage,
merciless war.
It's like those subway rides you take on trains that tunnel deep under
the city, emerge abruptly into the daylight to roar past third-storey
windows, and then plunge down into the lower levels again. So, when you
meet people on The Rock, you never know when some unexpected turn will
carry you up for a flashing glimpse through the windows of their souls,
or down into the black depths of their hatreds and formless desires.
Adventurers from all over the world crowd into our town, just as
fortune-hunters went west a century ago. In the old days in Denver and
Fargo you fought for your life and your fortune, but in our frontier
town you fight for your sanity as well. The drives and ambitions,
the deep passions and compulsions, the blind search for symbols and
compensations that bring the bandits to The Rock are naked and exposed,
and this is where the danger lies. A man may declare war on you because
you're a threat to his job, or merely because you're the symbol of a
threat to his precarious stability. When you cross a street you never
know whether you're going to be sandbagged by a thief's blackjack or a
neurotic's nightmare.
The Rock is so wild and wide-open that nobody ever pretends to mask the
deep chasms and smouldering fires in their lives. We carry our fears
and fixations like naked weapons as we walk our tightropes, and we use
them as quickly and murderously as Billy The Kid used his six-gun. The
result is that we fight, love and adventure on all levels and never
bother to distinguish reality from illusion because both are equally
living and dangerous.
I'll try to separate fact from fancy in this adventure I'm going to
tell you, but in the end I think you'll agree that it's unnecessary.
Like the classic bartender in the classic Western, you'll duck behind
the beer kegs at the first shot, whether it comes from a real gun or
the explosive ferment in a man's mind. And don't imagine for a moment
that this story is a plug for psychoanalysis. Whether you believe
in analysis or not, you must admit that man, like the iceberg, is
nine-tenths submerged. I'm simply going to describe what life is like
in our frontier town where the submerged levels float up to the surface.
The locale of this story is a show I never worked. It's a TV variety
clam-bake called "Who He?" ... one of those lunatic mish-mashes that
started out as a panel quiz show and ended up as a musical. It stars
Mason & Dixon, supported by Kay Hill and Oliver Stacy. It's directed by
Raeburn Sachs, written by Jake Lennox, with music by Johnny Plummer.
It's produced by Melvin Grabinett Associates and costs the client, Mode
Shoes, $50,000 a week.
"Who He?" is not an expensive show as TV variety shows go. It's in the
middle bracket. I think you might be interested in a rough break-down
on the budget which will give you some idea of the stakes for which the
people in this adventure were fighting. The monetary stakes, that is.
The network charges $25,000 for a half-hour of coast-to-coast time. Mig
Mason, the star, gets $2,000 a week. Diggy Dixon, who is co-starred
with him, doesn't get a nickel because Mason's a ventriloquist and
Dixon is the dummy. Stacy, Kay Hill and other talent and specialties
including the dancers get $3,000.
The writers, Jake Lennox and Mason's gagmen, split $1,500 between
them. Lennox also gets a small cut in the producer's take for helping
create the show. Incidentally, one of the gagmen got married for the
first time on his forty-third birthday. The marriage broke up after
two weeks. The bride went home to Canada and the gagman went down to
Washington and became a spy for the government. We're still trying to
figure it out. Maybe he decided that any tight rope, even an espionage
tight rope, would be safer than the one he was on.
Raeburn Sachs gets $750 a week for directing "Who He?". How Sachs got
started in the business is one of the great legends, and the only
explanation for his weird public and private life. He was a stencil
clerk in a Chicago advertising office, and one day he drove to work
in a new Cadillac. He also wore new clothes and a new look. Everybody
asked Ray if he'd robbed a bank. Chicago-type joke. Ray told them
proudly that he'd written a hit tune called "Lumbago" or something like
that.
Nobody ever heard of the tune. The office did a little detective work
and discovered that "Lumbago" did exist, had truly been written by Ray,
and had been recorded as a favor to him by a cousin who led a band
working for a Chicago recording company. The gimmick was that there was
another side to the record, the Flip, they call it, and Sinatra was on
the Flip. Sinatra made the sales, but Ray shared the money. That made
him a reputation and started him as a variety expert. He's been trying
to justify that wrong Flip ever since.
Here's a little more budget: Johnny Plummer, married to the most
exotically beautiful noodnick in the world, is allotted $1,500 a week
for orchestra, copying and his own fee. The noodnick has standing
orders to keep out of the theater because she disrupts the camera men,
and camera time is counted like radium. Cameras and technicians cost
$2,000. Sets and props cost $3,000. Special effects like rain, snow,
Acts of God and Rear-Projection cost $500.
The producer, Mel Grabinett (Mr. Blinky to his enemies; he has no
friends) takes $3,000 which he cuts up with Jake Lennox and Ned Bacon
who developed "Who He?" with him. Jake and Ned get two and a half bills
each. That's $250. Borden, Olson and Mardine, the advertising agency
representing the client, adds 15% of the gross cost of the show for
agency fee, and that plus prize money and incidentals comes to $50,000
a week to demonstrate the superior quality of Mode Shoes.
Some forty hard-working, variously talented people put together "Who
He?" every week ... artists, technicians and business men. Each of
them is walking his own private tightrope, but all of them must walk
the communal tightrope of the show on Sunday night at nine o'clock
before 37 million viewers. The individual pressures added to the common
tension of the show make it seem inevitable that the program will
blow up during rehearsal and never get on the air. Yet "Who He?" has
appeared 39 weeks in succession without mishap. Without mishap, that
is, until the performance on New Year's night.
It was one of those nightmares. Everyone who saw the show knew
something was wrong. Mig Mason performed so badly that you could see
his mouth twitch and his neck muscles jerk during the ventriloquist
routines with the dummy. Oliver Stacy handed out the wrong prizes.
Johnny Plummer missed his cues. Floor managers and stagehands wandered
dazedly before the cameras. The dancers went through the production
numbers as though they expected the roof to collapse at any moment.
_Variety_ happened to catch the show that night and murdered it.
_Variety_ was unfair. Their reviewer should have checked first. He
would have learned that the show went out the window because one man
fell off his private tightrope with such a disastrous jar that everyone
else was shaken. He would have discovered that less than five feet of
sight-line saved the theater audience and the TV viewers from the
spectacle of a dead man hanging by the neck from the iron grid above
the stage.
For twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, stars, actors, dancers
and technicians went through the motions of playing "Who He?" under
a corpse with starting eyes and swollen tongue ... a victim of the
savage, merciless warfare in our frontier town, murdered by the ferment
in a man's mind.
I knew the corpse. I know what killed him. I'm still friendly with most
of the cut-throats who watched him die. I've spoken to them, questioned
them, and heard what they couldn't say as well as what they said. I've
pieced out all the strands that wove themselves into a rope around a
man's neck. This is the story of what happened....