AS DES McCROSSAN’S train pulled out of the L.A. Terminal he eyed his reflection staring back at him from the rear window of the Observation car:

Otto Kleist would like this “shot”: My face watching me from an observation car window. Through my face we see train tracks- throwing off light as they pick up speed-pushing L.A. into The Past. But Otto would shoot it Expressionist black and white-with the date Supered Over: AUGUST, 1950

He gazed out at the train yards on his right:

Forget film. Going to do it live again on Broadway. Should’ve have taken Bogie’s advice and gone back to New York the minute Para-gon dropped me.

Bogart liked plain talk. That’s how they’d become friends. Des had banged up his right hand and as he walked along a row of marina slips past Bogie’s yawl, the Santana, Bogie had looked at the large bandage and called, “Hey! How’d you get that?”
“By being stupid,” Des had shouted back.
Bogie had laughed and invited him aboard. They’d hit it off so well Bogie had asked if he’d like to crew on his yawl. Weeks later, lazing along to break in the Santana’s new mainsail, Bogie had suddenly said, “I hear Paragon dropped you.”
“That’s right.”
“You like it out here-you want to stay here?”
“I like making films.”
“Then do what I did-go back to New York, find a play with a good part, and make them bring you back.”

“Find a play . . .” how long since I was on a stage? How long since I’ve lived my old stage discipline. The way I did from that day in New York when I walked into Orson Welles’ new Mercury Theatre offices in the old Empire Theatre building . . .

Welles, sitting with Hiram (Chubby) Sherman at a beat-up desk, and looking like a 22-year-old 200 pound cherub, was smoking a cigar when Des walked in . . .
“What can I do for you?” Orson asked.
“Well,” said Des, swallowing hard. “I’d like to be in your repertory company.”
Orson blew a great smoke ring. “Why?” he asked
“F. Cowles Strickland said repertory acting was the only true test for an actor.”
“You worked with Strick, eh? Where?”
“St. Louis.”
“We’re doing Julius Caesar-ever played any Shakespeare?”
“No,” Des said. “But I played in Strick’s production of Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday.”
“That so?” Chubby said, leaning forward , “What’d you play?”
“Firk,” Des told him and offered his Review from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Chubby eyed Orson: “Firk, eh? How’d you play him?”
“A cross between Puck and Mercutio,” Des replied.
“Interesting way to go,” Chub said.
A sentence in Des’ review had caught Orson’s eye. He nudged Chub as he read some of it aloud, giving it his full organ-throated treatment: “Like Richard Cory, Desmond McCrossan glitters when he walks.”
He turned to Des. “Sorry, young man, can’t use you.”
To Chub he dead-panned: “If we let this young man glitter on our stage, and, like Richard Cory, he goes home and puts a bullet through his head, we’ll be accessories after the fact.”
“I don’t know,” Chub said. “He glittered for Strick and didn’t blow his brains out.” He turned to Des. “We’re also going to do Shoemaker, but I’m playing your role.”

Des had been hired on the spot: as “walk-on” and general understudy. He’d worked round the clock: by day, understudy rehearsals, (and acting classes, voice classes, fencing classes, financed by occasional Radio jobs); by night, The Mercury stage. In “spare time” he’d studied more of the world’s stage literature: Ford, Middleton & Rowley, Webster; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes; Plautus; Chekhov, Gorky, Ostrovsky and Turgenyev; Schiller, Goethe, and Buchner.
One day, George Colouris (Marc Antony) told him, “For a real career, you should play all the great juvenile roles and some of the older ones by the time you’re thirty.” On this advice Des had undertaken the learning of Benedict, Romeo, Mercutio, Tybalt, Iago, and Hamlet:

“Find a play . . . and make them bring you back.” Bogie had said. Bogie didn’t know Joan: “Give Hollywood a chance!” she’d yelled when I suggested returning to N.Y. So I gave it a chance. For two more years I gave it a chance-I like making films. What I hate is what Otto Kleist called its Zeitgeist. “You know this word?” Otto asked us when we began work on The Mutilators. “Spirit of the times, it is. The moral air ve breathe.” Otto Kleist- probably the only film director who’d think of “moral air” in The Land of the Vigilantes. I mean, way back-when I asked Paragon’s Head of Talent why Paragon didn’t put me to work after the reviews I got in my first film, I’d never even heard of the MPAPAI . . .

“Well, you see, Kiddo,” Bill Muckenfuss had told Des after he’d appeared The Fate Fighter, “there’s more to this business than getting good reviews. There’s the MPAPAI.”
“What’s that?” Des had asked.
“See?” he’d sighed, “You’re so new-MPAPAI is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. They’ve got a lot to say about who works in this town.”
“Who are the ‘they’ in ‘they’?”
“Oh, Duke Wayne, Adolph Menjou, Robert Taylor, Ward Bond, Hedda Hopper, people like that. They keep tabs on people they think need watching . . .”

“The moral air ve breathe-”

He raised his glass to the absent Otto Kleist and parodied Bogart’s “Casablanca” reading: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

Across the observation car aisle, not a muscle in Joan McCrossan’s smile changed: Taking me three thousand miles from home on a train because you have a chip on your shoulder, and ‘Here’s look-ing at you, kid?’
“Here’s mud in your eye,” she said.
He chuckled.
“What’s funny?”
“Tommy Driscoll’s cat,” he said.
“What about him?”
“Name was Toby. We were on the road. Some nights Tommy would just sit at his make-up table and say, ‘I sure miss Good Old Toby.’ The first time he said it I said, ‘Good companion, eh?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘Toby keeps pretty much to himself. ‘Affec-tionate, though,’ I said. ‘Actually, Toby’s kind of snarly,’ Tommy replied. I went down a long list of good things and Toby struck out on all of them; he was bad-tempered, a scratcher, and a biter. But Tommy wound up the interrogation by saying, “But I miss him, I sure miss Good Old Toby.’” “That’s what made you laugh?”
He smiled sidelong at her. “Yeah,” he said. “I was just think-ing that, in a way, love is having ‘a Good Old Toby’.”
“Having a cat?” She tossed her head in vexation at the idea.
“And I don’t see why we couldn’t have taken the plane!”

Would it help if I told you that I need this time on the train to figure out who I am. An actor isn’t just his credits. He needs to age in front of his audience-moving from role to role, extending his range and theatrical confidence. When I got drafted from a Broad-way show I was a “Juvenile Leading Man”. I’m now a 34-year-old what? With a couple of movie credits to get me through Stage doors I haven’t seen for almost seven years, faking whatever is required of me-until I re-learn what used to be second nature.

“We could have stayed in Hollywood,” Joan went on. “You’re as good as any of them still making it-better than most!”
“Truce?” he said, and touched his glass to hers.

A knife-scar ran down the back of his toasting hand, from the knuckle of his left middle finger to his wrist. It memorialized Depression-age brawling for jobs on St. Louis’s truck docks. Both his hands had flattened knuckles, the result of three dozen win-ner- take-all “Smoker” fights.
These facts had been glamorized in Paragon Films’ Press Book on him. His alcoholic mother, his birth in Kerry Patch, St. Louis’ Irish ghetto, and his Uncle Hobe’s bitter recollec-tions of the signs on St. Louis factory doors-”No Dogs or Irishmen need apply” had been eliminated. When interview-ers commented on the contrast between his scarred, muscular hands and his handsome, unmarked face, he’d been briefed by the studio’s PR people to lead them away from that by going for the joke:
“I came out of prep school into the bottom of The Depression, armed with four precepts from my elders. “From my first stepfather: ‘A gentleman always pays his tai-lor and bootmaker, first.’
“From my step-grandfather: ‘A gentleman never touches his capital.’
“From my second stepfather: ‘A gentleman always makes sure his butler has put the martini glasses in the freezer before he, the gentleman, brushes his teeth.’
“From my Grandma: ‘A real man always finds a way to put bread on the table.’”
“That’s a grabber,” Ned Crowley, Paragon’s PR man, had said while coaching him for his publicity tour for The Fate Fighter, in which Des had played a vicious prizefighter. “Got a pickup on that ‘real man putting bread on the table’?”
“I cleared scrub timber through the Missouri Ozarks. Room, board and three dollars a week. Fought on St. Louis truck-load-ing docks for the chance to load freight. Bell-hopped in a St. Louis hotel-got fired when I wouldn’t pimp the hookers on the Bell Captain’s string. Ushered in a downtown movie palace- where I learned the stage shows’ vaudeville routines.”
“Too general,” Ned Crowley had said. “Gimme a story with a human interest hook.”
“Rode as helper on my uncle Hobe’s truck through the rich-est farmland in the world. On a run through Illinois with a 10-ton load of candy bars, our truck was stopped at a roadblock near Springfield. Farmers like our own Ozark kinfolk stepped up to Hobe’s cab window. They had shotguns slung over their fore-arms, and one asked Hobe politely who we were, where we were going, did we plan to stay in town any length of time?
“‘Might stop in town for a bite to eat,’ Hobe said.
“‘Try Miz English’s,’ said the farmer. ‘Her home fries are real tasty,’ and waved us through.
“I asked what that was all about.
‘Banks foreclosin on farms hereabout, sellin ‘em at auction,’ Hobe said. ‘Somethin’s wrong when you bring in your biggest harvest ever an have to burn it ‘cause you cain’t sell it. When you got to feed your milk to the pigs or dump it onto the ground ‘cause it cost more to produce and truck to market than you can get for it. Those folks’re just identifyin anybody aimin to bid on the land. Bankers, land syndicaters, and suchlike.’
“Ned Crowley broke in: ‘They expected to find bankers in a tractor trailer?’
“I asked the same thing. Hobe said, ‘You want to bid on that land you better not come by train or fancy car. Went to a auction over to Iowa once. When the biddin opened a gun barrel, kinda gentle like, poked against my back. Man with three generations buried on that farm bid it in for what he had in his pocket, three dollars an eighty six cents. Reckon every other stranger at that auction had a gun barrel in his back, too, ‘cause he was the onliest bidder.’
“On runs through Iowa, Michigan, and Indiana, we ran into more roadblocks. Then the company Hobe drove for went broke, he couldn’t find a job and began to hit the bottle. To make a dollar any way I could, I fought in local Smokers. The Smokers were staged at catch-all weights for Winner-Take-All purses. I was a welterweight. One night, I fought a middleweight and knocked him out with a punch to the body that paralyzed his diaphragm and broke two of his ribs. After the bout, a fight manager said, ‘You nearly killed that guy, kid. Coupla years, I could make you the champ.’
“‘Couple of years I’ll have my grandma’s debts paid off and be on Broadway,’ I told him.
“‘Broadway,’ the fight manager said, ‘What’s “Broadway”?’
“My ticket out of here.”
“‘I’m talkin’ about big money, kid,’ he said.
“‘Listen,” I told him, ‘I looked it up. Two million pro fight-ers in the world. Only the top five weights draw a Gate. Five Champions, ten Logical Contenders, that’s fifty five guys out of two million with a chance to make real money, and some of those get scrambled brains. It’s safer odds being an actor.’ I told the guy. That was a laugh.”
“‘Not so far,’ Ned Crowley had replied.
“‘I mean my first try at being a professional performer got me a job that could have killed me.”
“No shit,” Ned Crowley’s interest had perked noticeably.
“Yeah. I conned a local bar owner into letting me M.C. his Amateur Night. Used material from acts I’d learned ushering Downtown, and Artie Meiser, a booking agent for a string of out-of-town clubs, caught my act:
“‘I can book you into The Four Deuces in K.C. for next week-end,’ Artie said. ‘Pays a hundred.’ He waited. “‘Plus five for extras.’
‘And train fare,’ I said.
‘Bus fare,’ said Artie. ‘You ain’t playin’ The Palace.’
“On the bus to Kansas City I went over my material very carefully. K.C. gangsters had a rougher rep than the Chicago brand. I was hoping The Four Deuces was a family place.
“It wasn’t. But it wasn’t sleazy, either. Dance floor about twelve by sixteen feet. Bandstand set for a five piece band. But Barney Owens, the owner, looked sour when he saw me.
‘Artie sent me a fuckin’ baby?’ he asked the world, like I’m not standing in front of him.
‘I’m funny,’ I told him.
‘Ever run a show?’
“Grew up in the business,” I lied.
‘We got a six-girl line, two canaries, a acrobatic hoofer, a exotic dancer, and a magic act. First show’s ten o’clock.’
‘Who’s your headliner?’ I asked him.
‘Wanda, the exotic dancer.’
‘I’ll put her next-to-closing,’ I said.
“Barney smiled. ‘Say, maybe you’ll be all right, kid.’
‘Bet your life,’ I said. ‘Got someplace for me to change?’
“He showed me to a small dressing room. Neat, clean, nice make-up mirror. I’d watched Presentation House M.C.’s arrange their programs so I asked Barney: ‘What time’s the band get here?’
‘Nine thirty,’ Barney said.
‘Great. Gives me time to go over the music cues with ‘em.’
“Barney gave me a satisfied look: ‘By the way,’ he said on his way out, ‘Wanda is Tough Eddie’s chick.’
“By nine forty five I’d worked out the order of the acts, gone over the music cues with the band leader, and was putting the finishing touches on my make-up when my dressing room door swung open. In the mirror I saw two sharpies in the doorway.
The one with muscles trying to burst through his suit, was obvi-ously Tough Eddie. The mean faced punk with him had to be Tough Eddie’s body guard.
“‘I hear you’re funny,’ said Tough Eddie.
“I met his eyes in the mirror. ‘You heard right,’ I said. ‘I’m funny.’
“‘You better be,’ said Tough Eddie.
“The band leader gave me a nice drum roll and fanfare for my entrance. I held out my hands to stop the applause, but be-fore I could open my mouth, the mean faced punk shot holes in the dance floor at my feet.
“‘Now be funny,’ sneered the punk.
“It had to be on pure adrenaline reflex, I walked over to Tough Eddie’s ringside table, shoved a hand into the punk’s collar, twisted it until the punk’s face turned blue and pulled him up face to face: ‘You fire that pea-shooter at me again and I’ll shove it down your throat.’
“I threw the punk back into his chair and grinned at Tough Eddie. ‘That funny enough for you?’ I asked.
“Tough Eddie stared at me, then broke up. ‘You’re very funny, kid,’ he said. ‘Very funny.’”
“Lose the farmers with the guns,” Ned Crowley had said. “Go for the laughs with the ‘Tough Eddie’ story.”

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