Who He?

CHAPTER I

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...