When I phoned him at the sanitarium, asking for Sam Buckle, the name he
had left originally with Ellie, he refused to come to the phone. So I
wired him. "Quit worrying about taxes. I accept your earlier offer to be
your agent as well as producer. Good luck on your experiments."
_Parodisiac_ was much too good to hold for the closing of _Updraft_.
Indeed, the first play was showing no signs of weakening, so I began
rounding up talent outside the original cast. This was a cinch. Meredith
Crawley finished Act I, Scene I, and accepted the male lead without
turning another page. So did Alicia Pennington, even though it meant
giving up a personal appearance tour to publicize her latest Hollywood
release that was supposed to win her an Oscar.
Not that I had to go after talent like this to put _Parodisiac_ across.
It was so potent I believe I could have made it a hit with a cast out of
a burleycue revue.
The season was getting late, so I did the unthinkable. I cut normal
rehearsal time in half and slammed it at the big town without even a
trial run in the back-country. Nobody connected with the show
objected--not even Hec Blankenship, my publicity manager. In fact it was
he who suggested the sleeper treatment.
With nothing more than last-minute newspaper notices we opened the
box-office to a completely uninformed public, and did it knock the
critics for a loop! Only a couple showed up for the first performance,
along with less than a third-full house of casual first-nighters.
* * * * *
People wandered out stunned. A substitute drama-critic from the _Times_
looked me up after the show, and there were tears of gratitude in his
eyes. "My review of this play will establish my reputation," he told me.
"If the boss had had any notion of what you were pulling, he'd have been
here himself. But what about the author? I thought you were going to
have to call the police when you failed to produce the author."
* * * * *
It had been rough. The skimpy crowd had milled about for a half hour
screaming "Author, author!" Meanwhile, I was too choked up after the
last heart-wrenching scene to get up and make a speech.
Everything had gone perfectly. Even the brief rehearsal time failed to
leave any rough edges. Crawley and Pennington were so carried away with
their parts that they easily doubled their considerable dramatic stature
that first performance. The supporting cast caught fire, too, and,
well--the likes of it is rarely seen anywhere.
The lines seemed to come out of the actors' hearts, not their mouths.
Cue-lines blended with the dialogue interplay, the artificiality of
stage-sets, costumery and make-up disappeared, and the simple, yet
profound drama unreeled like a bolt of vividly printed silk, flowing
smoothly, strongly, absorbingly to the tragic-comical climax that left
the emotions reeling from the suspense and warm with relief.
Two days later I looked at the figures on advance ticket sales and could
find only one conceivable complaint. _Parodisiac_ would make Hillary
Hardy so much money that not even taxes could force him to produce
another for a great while.
What promised to be a major irritation, fending off the press from Hardy
and protecting his anonymity, was converted into a master
publicity-stroke by Hec Blankenship. He swore the few of us who knew
about Hardy's youth and whereabouts, to complete secrecy, then he
proceeded to build his publicity around the "mystery-author."
"But he's got a past!" I objected when Hec first presented the scheme.
"Old friends and relatives will spill the beans."
"Have you really looked into Hillary's past?" Hec asked.
I confessed I hadn't. Hec said that he had. It developed that Hillary
Hardy was not our boy's real name. In his passion for anonymity he had
been changing his name every time he changed locations, which was often.
Hec had traced his background through three moves that brought the
author across the country, but the trail petered out at a ranch in
Wyoming where Hillary had worked a month as a cow-hand.
The mystery-author gag worked. Inside of two weeks our promotion expense
dwindled to almost nothing. Columnists were fighting for the privilege
of pouring out free copy on both plays. Some of their speculations as to
Hardy's real identity were pretty fabulous--Winston Churchill, Noel
Coward and even a certain, witty ex-presidential candidate for the
Democratic party--but no one found him out, and the advance sellout
began gaining a week every day.
Now, I have made and lost my share of theater fortunes, and I have
learned a certain caution. At the moment I was quite content to ride
with my two smash-hits and leave Hardy to his experiments. Strangely, it
was he who called upon me for action.
A month after launching _Parodisiac_ he showed up at my office, looking
leaner and more intense than ever. His crew-cut was growing out, but it
was from neglect rather than a sudden artistic temperament, I was sure.
After locking the doors and cancelling my morning appointments, I said,
"Well, golden boy, what brings you to civilization?"
His smile was still strong and warm, but it was no longer youthful.
There was a look of deep wisdom in his blue eyes that finally justified
the magnificent play he had written.
"Money," he answered briefly.
"Haven't my checks been reaching you?" I asked in amazement.
"Oh, yes. Very gratifying," he said pacing a groove in the deep carpet
pile. "But I'm moving into prenatal memory now, and I accomplished it by
administrations of a new B vitamin derivative. I have a staff of
biochemists working for me producing this substance, but it's fearfully
expensive. I need more of it, larger lab facilities to produce it
secretly. I want to buy the sanitarium."
"Buy the--"
"Lock, stock and personnel," he nodded. "I'm three months before birth,
already. My goal is conception."
A big, brassy gong chimed in my brain. "That sounds like this
_dianetics_ business that was going the rounds awhile back."
Hardy nodded. "In some respects, yes. But I have a single goal, total
recall, and I'm taking a more comprehensive approach. Psycho-therapy
helped a great deal, but I have traced-out every angle of mnemonics,
improved on most and invented some new ones. The final problem is one of
improving synaptic potentials and actual tissue tone in the brain.
Biochemistry is giving me the answers. With enough of the new B vitamin
derivative I'm confident I can reach conception--and a totality of
recall."
"But Hardy, what have you got when you get there? I still say, what's
the percentage?"
* * * * *
The look he gave me was puzzled but completely tolerant. "You raved to
me about my last play, yet you don't see what I'm getting at?" He
stopped pacing and sat opposite me with his muscular hands knotted into
fists on my desk.
"George," he said with quiet intentness, "I will be the first man since
creation to have the full potential of his brain at his creative
disposal."
"How do you figure that?"
"The brain has three principal functions. It can store information for
recall, it can analyze and correlate this information and finally it can
synthesize creatively. Now the latter two functions are inherently
dependent upon the quality of the first, or memory recall. As a truly
thinking animal, man considers he has reached some acme of perfection
because his brain is so superior to the lower animals. Actually, the
real gulf is between what man _has achieved_ and what he _can achieve_
with his brain.
"The key lies in perfecting his recall. What good does it do to keep
pouring in information when most of us are forgetting old things almost
as rapidly as we are learning new ones? Of course, we don't really ever
forget anything, but our power of exact recall grows fuzzy through
disuse. Then when we need a certain name or factual bit of information
we can't quite dig it up, or it comes up in distorted approximations.
"The same holds for calling on experience to help us with new problems.
We may grasp the general lesson of experience, but most of the specific
incidents of our lives are dulled in time. The lessons we paid dearly to
learn are largely useless. So we go on making the same mistakes, paying
the same penalties over and over again."
I shrugged. "Everybody would like a better memory, I suppose, but I've
never known anyone to go off the deep end over it like you have. What
more can you gain?"
"Can't you visualize what it would be like to have even a short
life-time of knowledge and experience laid out in sharp detail of
recall? Think of the new associations of thoughts and concepts that
would be possible! Consider the potential for creating drama, alone!
Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every
gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure--all this raw material
glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic
situations, sharp pungent dialogue--"
He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn't quite feel it. Would
such a tremendous ability necessarily be good? Something about its
immensity frightened me, and I didn't care to consider it for my own use
at all.
I said, "Don't get me wrong. If this is what's going into your
playwriting, I'm all for it. And what you do with your money is your own
business. What do you propose?"
"Can you absorb more of my work?" he asked abruptly.
"I'm your agent, aren't I? I'll peddle it if I can't use it myself," I
told him, not that I was so eager for the broker's 10% so much as I
wanted to have the pick of his output for my own productions.
I didn't know what I was taking on. He turned out his third play in just
ten days. _Ten days_, I said. I read to the bottom of page two and
decided to hell with peddling this one. I'd produce it myself.
Before I got into second gear on _Beach Boy_, however, Hillary sends a
messenger over with _Madame President_, a satire so sharp I knew it
would make _Call Me Madame_ look like _Little Women_.
What do you do? There are just so many legitimate theaters in the city.
While I'm pondering this and negotiating with a Hollywood agent to maybe
take _Beach Boy_ off my hands, along comes _Red Rice_, an epic novel of
Communist China that out-Bucked Pearl a hundred heart-wrenches to one.
One phone call sold that one to McMullin, and when they got a look at
the manuscript they raised the advance to $10,000. This was not bad for
a first novel, and I didn't resent my $1000 agent's fee.
Before the summer was over I was about ready to give up show business
and become a one-author agent. Hillary was keeping four secretaries busy
taking dictation and transcribing. He never researched, never revised,
never even glanced at the copy. I've known some prolific writers, but
none could grind it out like Hillary Hardy.
And it was good! Every piece was better than the last. His characters
were strictly 3-D right on paper, and word pictures! When he mentioned
bedbugs, you itched and bled; when the villain slugged the hero a
low-blow, you felt it in your guts; and when boy got girl--brother, turn
up the house-lights, quick.
I got so involved trying to produce five plays at once, making dickers
with publishers and motion picture studios, fighting off television
people and answering mail demanding a chance at foreign rights, that it
was mid-November before I realized that it was over a month since I'd
heard from the golden goose.
In fact Ellie drew my attention to it one morning. "Hadn't you better
call the sanitarium?" she suggested. "Maybe he had a breakdown or
something?"
The thought chilled me. Not only had I sold Hillary's complete output to
date, but I had a file full of contracts for future novels and movie
scripts worth a couple of million dollars.