Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [118]
For the next two years he was seen getting shot, clubbed, knifed, hanged, or otherwise knocked apart by the various avatars of the fastest gun in the West, and he had parts in two films. One was a science-fiction thriller in which he, an accountant for a firm engaged in top-secret government research, is “absorbed” by a blob of goo. In the other, an adventure story set in the big woods, he played a lumberjack who loses his nerve, and then dies topping a tree (the top of the tree splits, and he is squeezed half to death, and then falls). Then he got a good part on “Playhouse 90” as a farm boy who hungers after the wife of the hired man—a subplot to the main event, a rewrite of Desire Under the Elms with a big rock instead of a tree as the God-symbol; and then he was given his own series.
It was a Western, and he played the part of a sheriff in a small Colorado mining town. The device of the show was that he carried no gun, but had a knife up his sleeve. He would not pull the knife unless extremely provoked, but if he did pull it, woe unto the provoker, for he always aimed to kill. They filmed twenty-six original episodes, and five years later the series was still being shown as reruns. Meanwhile Walt Disney had given him a contract and he was a made man. He was a rich and famous actor. You see him all the time, these days, having serious conversations with dogs and sadly killing Indians.
Sally left him. She could not stand his success, the fact that without growing at all he had grown beyond her, and she could not stand seeing the talent she had loved being used as a mere device. This, she understood, had been what she herself had done, and it hurt her. Especially because he did not see it at all, he did not know that his great beauty as an actor was being wasted, used up, for trash. He was perfectly happy. When he was working he got up early in the morning and went to the studio, made up, sat and waited for his part, did exactly what the director asked, and when the shooting was over, went home. When he was not making a picture, he was sailing. He now had a 70-foot schooner with a paid crew of five, and the head of the crew, a salty old Mexican he had met in Santa Monica, was his constant companion and in fact appeared in all his movies in bit parts. When Sally left him he sold his house and moved out to the boat in Santa Monica, and when the divorce proceedings were held he appeared in court, agreed that Sally was to have one-third of his income, and shook hands with her. Everybody was happy but Sally.
When she came back to San Francisco she discovered that among the set whose central ambition seemed to be getting their names into Herb Caen’s column she had a certain currency as the ex-wife of one of the ascending giants of Hollywood, and so instead of reverting to her maiden name she kept his, using it as both a shield and an entrée. In Hollywood she had been a nothing, the wife of an actor, someone to whom you made a point of saying hello; in San Francisco, on the other hand, she was a celebrity in her own right, someone who had given up all that to return to the only really cultured and exciting city in the Western Hemisphere. Sally knew what a damned lie it was; she knew she had run away from all that excitement, all that bubbling creativity, because down there she had been only a bystander; she knew she had come back to San Francisco to find some thing, some place, where she could again be central. And so she married Jack Levitt. Which fact was duly reported by Herb Caen, and all San Francisco, or at least Sally’s set, was agog. Her friends were even more agog when they dropped around to the Telegraph Hill apartment and discovered that Sally didn’t live there any more and had left no forwarding address.
She was, in fact, through with café society. She had found something meaningful, and