Hope burns, but it burns slowly.
Who could blame them for accepting the offer? Three months in Europe, with enough money on the table for Babe to stave off the IRS and Myrtle. He needs the income less. His tax affairs are less complex than Babe’s – although it is hard to imagine anyone’s tax affairs being more complex than Babe’s – and his ex-wives are less vindictive than Myrtle – although it is hard, etc.
But most of all, it is a picture, and an expensive one: $1.5 million, more than has ever before been spent on one of their productions. It is a set, and a crew. It is he and Babe, together. His input will be welcomed. It will not be as it was at Fox, at MGM. He will be an integral part of the process.
He travels to Paris ahead of Babe to work on the script. And he has ideas, so many ideas. The yellow pads filled during his years of illness will not now gather dust.
The writers have been laboring on the script for weeks.
The script is terrible.
How can it be so terrible? It can be so terrible because it is the work of four writers: two Americans, one Frenchman, one Italian. The Italian speaks Italian, and a little French. The Frenchman speaks only French. One of the Americans speaks French, but no Italian. One of the Americans speaks only English.
You’re writing the script, he points out. You’re not supposed to be the script.
To further complicate matters, he and Babe deliver their lines in English, but everyone else responds in French, a language he and Babe do not understand. The director, Léo Joannon, does not speak English, only French. Just one member of the crew is fluent in all three languages.
It’s the Tower of Babel, observes Babe, but with fewer laughs.
– I could salvage it, if only they’d listen.
– Listening isn’t the problem; understanding is the problem. I don’t have time to learn French before I expire.
He does his best. He contributes gags, and suggests changes. But he is sick, so very sick. On top of his diabetes, he now contracts dysentery. He feels pain every time he pisses, but only a dribble emerges from his poor withered cock. His prostate is ulcerated. He is hospitalized, but there, too, no one speaks English.
Ida is by his side. Ida translates. It is all that he can do not to cry. He believes that he may die here, in Europe, his death announced in a foreign tongue.
And Babe is ill. Babe’s heart is giving him trouble. Babe gains weight while he, ravaged by dysentery, loses it, an unwelcome transfer of mass to maintain an infernal equilibrium, as though the partnership were being paid by the pound.
Lucille is worried.
Can’t we just go home? Lucille asks, when she comes to see him in the hospital.
Babe is resting. Babe wants to visit, but the heat is extreme, and Lucille does not wish Babe to exert himself. They have been led here by hubris, he thinks. They will never see the promised money because they will both be dead in the ground.
– We can’t leave. We’re contracted. If we leave, they’ll sue us.
– Let them.
It is bluster. Babe may be unwell at present, which is not good, but the stress of another court case, and the further depletion of his finances, could potentially kill him. Babe will be able to clear his debts if they can just hang on until the end of filming. The picture must be finished, for the sake of everyone involved. To abandon it would cost more than to continue, even as the budget escalates: $2 million.
$2.5 million.
He leaves the hospital. He is kept functioning with injections for the pain, like a racehorse past its prime. He rests in a tent between takes, under the supervision of a doctor, under unfamiliar skies. An English-speaking director is found for their scenes: Jak Szold, who now goes by the name of John Berry. Jak Szold has fled to Europe from the United States after being named as a Communist. If Babe has any objections to this, Babe keeps them largely to himself. Babe is simply glad to be advised by someone intelligible, and every completed scene is another step closer to the end of the ordeal.
Three months stretch into seven, then twelve. In April 1951, they are finally permitted to leave, but his health is irreparably damaged.
And Babe?
Babe quickens his step toward the grave.
All for an aging man’s vanity.
All for money to pay off a vindictive woman.
All for a picture.
A miserable, lousy picture.
191
Jimmy Finlayson dies.
Jimmy Finlayson, who might have been sixty-six, or sixty-nine, or seventy-two, or seventy-four, because Jimmy Finlayson was too vain to admit his real age, or never really knew it; Jimmy Finlayson, who traded on a squint and a stuck-on mustache, and perfected a double-take so unique that no one could ever perform another without laboring in his shadow; Jimmy Finlayson, who had little hair and too few toes, yet once believed that stardom might be his; Jimmy Finlayson, who married a woman at least eleven years his junior, and divorced her soon after, but never once regretted all the times that he fucked her between; Jimmy Finlayson, who made a career out of playing himself, who was eccentric and dour but was the first to look on Babe and see the beauty within.
Jimmy Finlayson is no more.
192
Who shall have them? None shall have them, or none in this place.
They grow poorer as their fame endures. He speaks of it with Babe and Ben Shipman, as alimony nips and the IRS tears. He will be stopped on the street, or Babe will be questioned at the racecourse, and the mouth of a person impossibly young will ask the one if he were not formerly renowned, and the other will be told of his past self being glimpsed on a television screen; and the eyes of the person impossibly young will gaze upon this gaunt, enervated patient, or this ponderous, amaranthine gambler, and wonder how someone once so famous could grow so old?
Those contracts, he says to Ben Shipman, those papers we signed, all they did was give everything away.
He is not blaming Ben Shipman, because that is not in his nature, but Ben Shipman cannot deny the truth of what is being said. Ben Shipman has done his best for these men, has always done his best for them, even if Ben Shipman forever felt himself to be out of his depth among agents and producers. Ben Shipman was born in Poland in 1892. What does Ben Shipman know from pictures? Maybe, when it came to studios and contracts, Ben Shipman was just playing at being a lawyer.
Television, Ben Shipman says. Who knew?
Hal Roach knew, he thinks, or Hal Roach guessed, or Hal Roach anticipated that just as the stage gave way to pictures, so too would pictures give way to a greater innovation, and if money was to be made from it, Hal Roach would be poised at the front of the queue, weighted with wares.
But their contracts were no worse than those of others, and better than most. If he is unprosperous, it is not entirely Ben Shipman’s fault; it is not really Ben Shipman’s fault at all.
He and Babe could have become independent producers.
As Chaplin did.