– I want to get back to pictures.
Okay, says Ben Shipman. I’ll make some calls.
In the end, it is Fox that comes through for them. Fox doesn’t have a reputation for comedy, but it’s a big studio.
What are they offering? he asks Ben Shipman.
– Fifty thousand dollars. One picture, with the option on a second. Non exclusive. You and Babe are free to work elsewhere, if you wish.
– What about artistic control?
– It’s not in the contract, but they’ve agreed to it.
– Shouldn’t it be in the contract?
– I can go back and renegotiate, but it’ll cause delays. They seem straight.
Ben Shipman is an honest man. It is in Ben Shipman’s nature to believe what Ben Shipman is told, except in a court of law. If the Fox executives aver that Ben Shipman’s boys will be allowed the same degree of control over their pictures that they enjoyed under Hal Roach, Ben Shipman has no reason to doubt it, and if the Orsattis have any objections to the deal, then Ben Shipman has not been informed. It does not strike Ben Shipman that the Orsattis may simply not care.
And so Ben Shipman consigns his charges, his friends, to the pit.
173
He and Babe make Great Guns.
They make A-Haunting We Will Go.
They make Air Raid Wardens.
They make Jitterbugs.
They make The Dancing Masters.
They make Nothing But Trouble.
They make The Big Noise.
They make The Bullfighters.
Fox and MGM are their new overseers, but he cannot rouse himself even to indifference. There is to be no artistic control, and he will have no input on scripts. He will not be permitted to edit, and the directors will not listen to his ideas.
Fox strips them of their hats and suits.
Fox strips them of their nobility.
Fox strips them of their characters.
What are we? he asks.
And Babe replies, We are what we have always been.
– But this is not how we are. I don’t recognize these men.
They are strangers among strangers. They are strangers even unto themselves.
No one at Fox values them, and they are relegated to the B-picture crews, but their work makes money for the studio. Ben Shipman shows him the figures. Ben Shipman tells him that Great Guns could earn a profit of $250,000 for Fox.
Ben Shipman is wrong.
Great Guns earns twice that amount.
So the pictures are profitable, but they are profitable despite few of those involved even pretending to respect what is put before the Audience. Budgets are quoted, but the money never makes it to the screen. Actors are cast, but they cannot act. Directors are assigned, but they will countenance no collaboration. Even when he is finally permitted to co-direct, he is not credited, as though his input is an indulgence that might damage the studio’s reputation were it to be formally acknowledged.
Do you know why these pictures make money? he asks Ben Shipman.
– They make money because of you and Babe.
– No, they make money because we are selling our legacy, frame by frame. Nobody likes these pictures. The Audience comes because it loved us once.
– The Audience loves you still, or else it wouldn’t be there.
– No, the Audience loves only the memory of us. It loves men who no longer exist.
It is left to Babe to intervene, Babe to salvage, Babe to persuade, Babe to console. Babe is practical. The IRS wants money. Myrtle, Babe’s ex-wife, wants money. What is a man to do, but work?
Times are changing, says Babe. Maybe we ought to change with them.
And he understands. Babe does not entirely resent being released from a jacket too tight, a hat too small. Babe contains more than one persona within him. So, perhaps, does he, but he has never chafed at the constraint.
– But if we change, what do we become?
And these pictures give him an answer.
They must become, like all old men, supporting players in the lives of others.
They must become the shadows of themselves.
174
He sees less of Babe in these years.
He does not feel slighted. As a man who has built his own high wall against the world, he knows that only by sequestering himself with Lucille can Babe deal with the pressures weighing on him: the poverty of these films they are forced by necessity to make; his ongoing torment by Myrtle, who seems consumed by a kind of madness that manifests itself in the pursuit of money to which she is not entitled; and the not unconnected attentions of the IRS, which also seeks money, but without the excuse of madness.
All this, Babe has brought upon himself.
I made a mistake, Babe tells him. With the divorce from Myrtle.
Babe, it emerges, forgets to collect the final decree. It languishes for years, until Babe requires it in order to marry Lucille. The IRS takes this to mean that Babe and Myrtle were still married and domiciled during this period, and therefore Babe is required to pay their joint taxes, all while Myrtle drags Babe back into court, over and over, so often that Ben Shipman suggests they club together and buy a bench.
I don’t understand why Myrtle is doing this to me, Babe tells him.
He has no answer. He thinks of all the years Babe spent cleaning up Myrtle’s shit and piss, of the bars and the sanitariums. He thinks of Babe’s refusal to abandon Myrtle until she left him with no choice. He thinks of Babe’s guilt and Babe’s loneliness.
He thinks the alcohol may have damaged Myrtle’s brain.
– You’re happy, and she’s not. Perhaps it’s just as simple as that.
But he knows that even this may not entirely be true. Babe’s sadness runs deep, even deeper than his own. He sees it when Babe looks in a dressing-room mirror and takes a great wad of flesh in hand, like some version of Shylock seeking his own reduction. He sees it when Babe reads of Walter Brennan and Victor McLaglen, of Henry Travers and Charles Coburn, and imagines a career of roles that might have been. Even Lucille speaks of it sometimes, on those rare occasions when he and Ruth socialize with them.
When Babe is sad, Lucille whispers, I hear him call himself a fat old man. Babe asks me why I love him. And I always reply: how could I not?
And he understands, because he loves Babe also.
How could he not?
175
At the Oceana Apartments, he reflects that in all their years together, Ben Shipman has never uttered to him the words ‘I told you so’, although Ben Shipman has been offered ample opportunity. Instead Ben Shipman has quietly followed him from crisis to crisis, like a valet with a dustpan, ever ready to sweep up the broken shards of his master’s relationships.
Ben Shipman calls him on the telephone, as Ben Shipman does every day. There is always some small business matter to be discussed, some offer of work to be declined: a script, a television interview, a personal appearance. When there is no business, there is a mutual acquaintance encountered on the street, or a kind mention in a newspaper column in Peoria or Des Moines.
But he has been spending much time lately in contemplation: of Babe, of the errors of his life. It is how he knows that he is dying.