Alis, in a sky-blue dress with a bustle, and a flowered hat, was dancing in the middle of the room, a blue parasol perched on her shoulder. A song was coming from the comp monitor, and Alis was high-stepping in time with a line of bustled, parasoled girls on the monitor behind her.
I didn’t recognize the movie. Carousel, maybe? The Harvey Girls? The girls were replaced by high-stepping boys in derbies and straw hats, and Alis stopped, breathing hard, and pulled the remote out of her high-buttoned shoe. She rewound, stuck the remote back in her shoe, and propped the parasol against her shoulder. The girls appeared again, and Alis pointed her toe and did a turn.
She had piled the desks in stacks on either side of the room, but there still wasn’t enough room. When she swung into the second turn, her outstretched hand crashed into them, nearly knocking them over. She reached for the remote again, rew’d, and saw me. She clicked the screen off and took a step backward. “What do you want?”
I waggled my finger at her. “Give you a little advice. ‘Don’t want what you can’t have.’ Michael J. Fox, For Love or Money. Bar scene, party, nightclub, three bottles of champagne. Only not anymore. Yours truly has done his job. Right down the sink.”
I swung my arm to demonstrate, like James Mason in A Star Is Born, and the chairs went over.
“You’re splatted,” she said.
“ ‘Nope.’ ” I grinned. “Gary Cooper in The Plainsman.” I walked toward her. “Not splatted. Boiled, pickled, soused, sozzled. In a word, drunk as a skunk. It’s a Hollywood tradition. Do you know how many movies have drinking in them? All. Except the ones I’ve taken it out of. Dark Victory, Citizen Kane, Little Miss Marker. Westerns, gangster movies, weepers. It’s in all of them. Every one. Even Broadway Melody of 1940. Do you know why Fred got to dance the Beguine with Eleanor? Because George Murphy was too tanked up to go on. Forget dancing,” I said, making another sweeping gesture that nearly hit her. “What you need to do is have a drink.”
I tried to hand her the bottle.
She took another protective step toward the monitor. “You’re drunk.”
“Bingo,” I said. “ ‘Very drunk indeed,’ as Audrey Hepburn would say. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A movie with a happy ending.”
“Why’d you come here?” she said. “What is it you want?”
I took a swig out of the bottle, remembered it was empty, and looked at it sadly. “Came to tell you the movies aren’t real life. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. Came to tell you to go home before they remake you. Audrey should’ve gone home to Tulip, Texas. Came to tell you to go home to Carval.” I waited, swaying, for her to get the reference.
“Andy Hardy Has Too Much to Drink,” she said. “He’s the one who needs to go home.”
The screen faded to black for a few frames, and then I was sitting halfway down the steps, with Alis leaning over me. “Are you all right?” she said, and tears were glimmering in her eyes like stars.
“I’m fine,” I said. “ ‘Alcohol is the great level-el-ler,’ as Jimmy Stewart would say. Need to pour some on these steps.”
“I don’t think you should take the skids in your condition,” she said.
“We’re all on the skids,” I said. “Only place left.”
“Tom,” she said, and there was another fade to black, and Fred and Ginger were on both walls, sipping martinis by the pool.
“That’ll have to go,” I said. “Have to send the message ‘We care.’ Gotta sober Jimmy Stewart up. So what if it’s the only way he can get up the courage to tell her what he really thinks? See, he knows she’s too good for him. He knows he can’t have her. He has to get drunk. Only way he can ever tell her he’s in love with her.”
I put out my hand to her hair. “How do you do that?” I said. “That backlighting thing?”
“Tom,” she said.
I let my hand drop. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll ruin it in the remake. Not real anyway.”
I waved my hand grandly at the screen like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. “All a ’lusion. Makeup and wigs and fake sets. Even Tara. Just a false front. FX and foleys.”
“I think you’d better sit down,” Alis said, taking hold of my arm.
I shook it off. “Even Fred. Not the real thing at all. All those taps were dubbed in afterwards, and they aren’t really stars. In the floor. It’s all done with mirrors.”
I lurched toward the wall. “Only it’s not even a mirror. You can put your hand right through it.”
After which things went to montage. I remember trying to get out at Forest Lawn to see where Holly Golightly was buried and Alis yanking on my arm and crying big jellied tears like the ones in Vincent’s program. And something about the station sign beeping Beguine, and then we were back in my room, which looked funny, the arrays were on the wrong side of the room, and they all showed Fred carrying Eleanor over to the pool, and I said, “You know why the musical kicked off? Not enough drinking. Except Judy Garland,” and Alis said, “Is he splatted?” and then answered herself, “No, he’s drunk.” And I said, “ ‘I don’t want you to think I have a drinking problem. I can quit anytime. I just don’t want to,’ ” and waited, grinning foolishly, for the two of them to get the reference, but they didn’t. “Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe,” I said, and began to cry thick, oily tears. “Poor Marilyn.”
And then I had Alis on the bed and was popping her and watching her face so I’d see it when I flashed, but the flash didn’t come, and the room went to soft-focus around the edges, and I pounded harder, faster, nailing her against the bed so she couldn’t get away, but she was already gone and I tried to go after her and ran into the arrays, Fred and Eleanor saying good-bye at the airport, and put my hand up and it went right through and I lost my balance. But when I fell, it wasn’t into Alis’s arms or into the arrays. It was into the negative-matter regions of the skids.
LEWIS STONE: [Sternly] I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Andrew. Drinking doesn’t solve your problems. It only makes them worse.
MICKEY ROONEY: [Hangdog] I know that now, Dad. And I’ve learned something else, too. I’ve learned I should mind my own business and not meddle in other people’s affairs.
LEWIS STONE: [Doubtfully] I hope so, Andrew. I certainly hope so.
In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn’s getting drunk solved everything: her stuffed-shirt fiancé broke off the engagement, Jimmy Stewart quit tabloid journalism and started the serious novel his faithful girlfriend had always known he had in him, Mom and Dad reconciled, and Katharine Hepburn finally admitted she’d been in love with Cary Grant all along. Happy endings all around.
But the movies, as I had tried so soddenly to tell Alis, are not Real Life. And all I had done by getting drunk was to wake up in Heada’s dorm room with a two-day hangover and a six-week suspension from the skids.
Not that I was going anywhere. Andy Hardy learns his lesson, forgets about girls, and settles down to the serious task of Minding His Own Business, a job made easier by the fact that Heada wouldn’t tell me where Alis was because she wasn’t speaking to me.
And by Heada’s (or Alis’s) pouring all my liquor down the drain like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and Mayer’s putting a hold on my account till I turned in last week’s dozen. Last week’s dozen consisted of The Philadelphia Story, which I was only halfway through. So it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, off to work we go to find twelve squeaky-cleans I could claim I’d already edited, and what better place to look than Disney?
Only Snow White had a cottage full of beer tankards and a dungeon full of wine goblets and deadly potions. Sleeping Beauty was no better — it had a splatted royal steward who’d drunk himself literally under the table — and Pinocchio not only drank beer but smoked cigars the Anti-Smoking League had somehow missed. Even Dumbo got drunk.