Or I didn’t remember seeing it. Right after the episode on the skids, Mayer had credited my account for half a dozen Westerns, none of which I remembered doing. But if I had done it, I wouldn’t have dressed her in a bustle. I wouldn’t have made her dance with Gene Kelly.
I’d put a watch-and-warn on Fred Astaire and Funny Face. I changed it to Broadway Melody of 1940 and asked for a status report on the case. It was close to being settled, but a secondary suit was expected to be filed, and the FPS was considering proceedings.
The Film Preservation Society. Every change was automatically recorded with them, and the studios didn’t have any control over them. Mayer hadn’t been able to get me out of putting in those codes because they were part and parcel of the fibe-op feed. If it was a paste-up it would have to be listed in their records.
I called up the FPS’s files and asked for the record for Brides.
Legalese. I’d forgotten it was in litigation. “Singin’ in the Rain,” I said.
The champagne wipes I’d done in the party scene were listed, along with one I hadn’t. “Frame 9-106,” it read, and listed the coordinates and the data. Jean Hagen’s cigarette holder. It had been done by the Anti-Smoking League.
“Tea for Two,” I said, and tried to remember the frame numbers for the Charleston scene, but it didn’t matter. The screen was empty.
Which left time travel. I went back to doing the musicals, saying, “Next, please!” to conga lines and male choruses and a horrible blackface number I was surprised nobody’d wiped before this. She was in Can-Can and Bells Are Ringing, both made in 1960, after which I didn’t expect to find much. Musicals had gone big-budget around then, which meant buying up Broadway shows and casting box-office properties like Audrey Hepburn and Richard Harris in them who couldn’t sing or dance, and then cutting out all the musical numbers to conceal the fact. And then musicals’d turned socially relevant. As if the coffin had needed any more nails pounded into it.
There was plenty of alcohol in the musicals of the sixties and seventies, though, even if there wasn’t much dancing. A gin-soaked father in My Fair Lady, a gin-soaked popsy in Oliver, an entire gin-soaked mining camp in Paint Your Wagon. Also saloons, beer, whiskey, red-eye, and a falling-down-drunk Lee Marvin (who couldn’t sing or dance, but then neither could Clint Eastwood or Jean Seberg, and who cares? There’s always dubbing). The gin-soaked twenties in Lucille Ball’s (who couldn’t act either, a triple threat) Mame.
And Alis, dancing in the chorus in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Boyfriend. Doing the Tapioca in Thoroughly Modern Millie, high-stepping to “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” in Hello Dolly! in a sky-blue bustled dress and parasol.
I went out to Burbank. And maybe time travel was possible. At least two semesters had gone by, but the class was still there. And Michael Caine was still giving the same lecture.
“Any number of reasons have been advanced for the demise of the musical,” he was intoning, “escalating production costs, widescreen technological complications, unimaginative staging. But the real reason lies deeper.”
I stood against the door and listened to him give the eulogy while the class took respectful notes on their palmtops.
“The death of the musical was due not to directorial and casting catastrophes, but to natural causes. The world the musical depicted simply no longer existed.”
The monitor Alis had used to practice with was still there, and so were the stacked-up chairs, only now there were a lot more of them. Michael Caine and the class were crammed into a space too narrow for a soft-shoe, and the chairs had been there awhile. They were covered with dust.
“The musical of the fifties depicted a world of innocent hopes and harmless desires.” He muttered something to the comp, and Julie Andrews appeared, sitting on an Alpine hillside with a guitar and assorted children. An odd choice for his argument of “simpler times,” since the movie’d been made in 1965, the year of the Vietnam buildup. Not to mention its being set in 1939, the year of the Nazis.
“It was a sunnier, less complicated time,” he said, “a time when happy endings were still believable.”
The screen skipped to Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, surrounded by soldiers with torches and swords. Camelot. “That idyllic world died, and with it died the Hollywood musical, never to be resurrected.”
I waited till the class was gone and he’d had his snort of flake and asked him if he knew where Alis was, even though I knew it was no use, he wouldn’t have helped her, and the last thing Alis would have needed was somebody else to tell her the musical was dead.
He didn’t remember her, even after I’d plied him with chooch, and he refused to give me the student list for her class. I could get it from Heada, but I didn’t want her looking sympathetic and thinking I’d lost my mind. Charles Boyer in Gaslight.
I went back to my room and took Billy Bigelow’s drinking and half the plot out of Carousel, and went to bed.
An hour later the comp woke me out of a sound sleep, making a racket like the reactor in The China Syndrome, and I staggered over and blinked at it for a good five minutes before I realized it was the watch-and-warn, and Brides must be out of litigation, and another minute to think what command to give.
It wasn’t Brides. It was Fred Astaire, and the court decision was scrolling down the screen: “Intellectual property claim denied, irreproducible art form claim denied, collaborative property claim denied.” Which meant Fred’s estate and RKO-Warner must have lost, and ILMGM, where Fred had spent all those years covering for partners who couldn’t dance, had won.
“Broadway Melody of 1940,” I said, and watched the Beguine come up just like I remembered it, stars and polished floor and Eleanor in white, side by side with Fred.
I had never watched it sober. I had thought the silence, the raptness, the quality of still, centered beauty was the effect of the klieg, but it wasn’t. They tapped easily, carelessly, across a dark, polished floor, their hands not quite touching, and were as still, as silent as they were that night I watched Alis watching them. The real thing.
And it had never existed, that harmless, innocent world. In 1940, Hitler was bombing the hell out of London and already hauling Jews off in cattle cars. The studio execs were lobbying against war and making deals, the real Mayer was running the studio, and starlets were going pop on a casting couch for a five-second walk-on. Fred and Eleanor were doing fifty takes, a hundred, in a hot airless studio, and going home to soak their bleeding feet.
It had never existed, this world of starry floors and backlit hair and easy, careless kick-turns, and the 1940 audience watching it knew it didn’t. And that was its appeal, not that it reflected “sunnier, simpler times,” but that it was impossible. That it was what they wanted and could never have.
The screen cut to legalese again, ILMGM’s appeal already under way, and I hadn’t seen the end of the routine, hadn’t gotten it on tape or even backed it up.
It didn’t matter. It was Eleanor, not Alis, and no matter what Heada thought, no matter how logical it was, I wasn’t the one doing it. Because if I had been, litigation or no litigation, that was where I would have put her, dancing side by side with Fred, half turning to give him that delighted smile.
MONTAGE: Tight close-up comp screen. Title credits dissolve into one another: South Pacific, Stand Up and Cheer, State Fair, Strike Up the Band, Summer Stock.