The Mystery of the Rogues' Reunion - Marc Brandel [2]
“How old did you say he was?” the casting director had asked in the awed voice of a man who has just seen a unicorn in his back garden.
“Two years and eleven months.”
The casting director didn’t say anything more about Jupe until just before he left. He seemed to have been struck dumb. “A natural,” he had muttered as he was getting into his car. “If ever I saw one, that kid’s a natural.”
A few days later Jupe was given a screen test. Within a month he had become Baby Fatso and one of the Wee Rogues.
He was an immediate success. Not only was he a natural actor who could hiccup and lisp and laugh and cry in instant obedience to the movie director’s orders, he had a talent that none of the other Wee Rogues possessed. He could memorize whole pages of dialogue
at a glance. In the year that he acted in the series he never missed a cue or forgot a single line.
If it hadn’t been for his parents’ tragic death, Jupe might have gone on being a child actor for years. But when his uncle Titus and his aunt Mathilda Jones decided to adopt the orphaned Jupiter and take him to live with them in Rocky Beach, Aunt Mathilda, who was a kind and thoughtful woman, asked Jupiter a kind and thoughtful question.
“Do you want to go on being a Wee Rogue, Jupe?” she enquired.
“Absolutely not,” Jupe said.
He didn’t mind getting up at half past five every morning, riding to the studio, or sitting in a chair while the make-up man coloured his face and neck and even his ears bright orange to make him look more “natural” on film. He didn’t mind endlessly waiting around on the set while the cameraman fussed over the lights. He was perfectly happy reading or doing a crossword puzzle. He didn’t even really mind having to make cute remarks or pretending to toddle and lisp. What he couldn’t stand was the other Wee Rogues, or most of them.
Unlike Jupiter, they didn’t seem to understand that when they were painting measle spots on Baby Fatso’s face or watering him with a garden hose to make him tell them where he had hidden his candy, they were supposed to be acting. They didn’t seem to understand that the mischievous Rogues that people enjoyed on the screen were only made—up characters.
The other Wee Rogues seemed to think that’s who they really were. They were always horsing around and telling stupid jokes. Because Jupe was the youngest and the smallest of them, they treated him in the same teasing, bullying way whether the camera was rolling or not.
They put pepper on his ice cream in the studio cafeteria during the lunch break. They spilled glue on his chair in the make-up room. They cut all the buttons off his Farmer Brown overalls.
And worst of all, they called him Baby Fatso. All the time. They couldn’t seem to get it through their wooden heads that he wasn’t Baby Fatso. Not in real life. He was Jupiter Jones.
So when Aunt Mathilda asked Jupe whether he wanted to go on being a Wee Rogue or not, he didn’t hesitate for a second. He felt as though he had been locked in a cage with a bunch of howling, chattering monkeys for longer than he cared to remember, and his kind aunt Mathilda was offering to let him out.
As soon as his first-year contract was up, Jupe quit the Wee Rogues forever. And without him the series soon petered out.
Jupe settled down to living at The Jones Salvage Yard with his uncle and aunt. In grade school he met Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. They became friends and then a little later they became the Three Investigators, serious and professional young private detectives, solving serious and often professional crimes. Jupe did his best to forget he had ever been known as Baby Fatso. And for years he succeeded.
Then a terrible thing happened. Terrible for Jupe anyway. The studio that had made the Wee Rogues series sold it as repeats to network television.
The first Jupe knew about it was when a classmate in school asked him for his autograph. It was shortly after Jupe’s name had appeared in the local paper in connection with the rounding up of a gang