Moving Pictures by Pratchett Terry

Author:Pratchett, Terry [Pratchett, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 1990-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

24

ONE DAY I WAS APPROACHING THE INTERSECTION OF OUR QUIET Lorraine and stately Wilshire Boulevards when the wail of saxophones attracted my attention to two white Pierce-Arrows cruising down Wilshire in tandem. In the rear seat of the chauffeur-driven lead car was the handsome, ruddy-faced, ever-grinning Mickey Neilan, with his arm around a dark-haired beauty, Father’s obstreperous Gloria Swanson. And in the motorized chariot behind them, another chauffeur drove half a dozen jazzmen of the Abe Lyman Orchestra, there to serenade the royal couple wherever they went, and believe me they went everywhere, from the raucous all-night Plantation Club to the decorous gingerbread castle of the Hotel Del Coronado.

I waved from my bike and Mickey, whom I had known all the way from the early Pickford-Famous Players days to those cross-country extravaganzas on the Chief, waved back with his broad, infectious Irish grin. The entire scene was over in a few ticks of the stopwatch I carried in my pocket, but the moment still shines like a diamond in the crown of memory. Did I know then, as I sat on my bike absorbing the splendors not of a mogul but of an irrepressible Irish king, that his silver train of Pierce-Arrows was doomed to sweep down Wilshire Boulevard until it reached the Palisades and plunged into the obscurity of the sea? There must have been something more than a casual wave to a famous director with whom I was only marginally acquainted to make that moment so memorable. A little bird of reality seemed to be cawing, “Too much … too soon … too good to last…”

The reality bird may have been the voice of my mother who never lost her ghetto sense of survival. Facing the gusty winds of Hollywood, she would bend but never break. She might spend sums of money on clothes and houses, American antiques, private schools, travel, and favorite forward-looking charities but she spent wisely, with care and taste, keeping a ledger of investments, determined never to return to the poverty of an impractical father and a trapped mother. While Father didn’t spend money so much as he flung it away by the fistful.

I went up to do the math homework I loathed, leaving Father at the card table with Zeppo Marx. Zeppo was the rather good-looking one who played the inane romantic leads in the Marx Brothers comedies: the only Marx brother who wasn’t funny. Whatever frustrations Zeppo may have suffered in front of the cameras, eclipsed as he was by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, he more than compensated for them with an aggressive card sense that made him the terror of the moguls. He could destroy the smartest of them, with a deck of cards in lieu of a pistol.

When I came down for breakfast next morning at seven o’clock, Father and Zeppo were just winding up the game and settling accounts. I watched as Father wrote out a check for $22,000. He was potted from all-night drinking (while cool-head Zep kept mental record of every card discarded), and I remember his hearty laugh.

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