John Irving - A Son of the Circus

In Bombay, however, the first truly distinctive element of Gordon Hathaway’s character was brought to light: namely, he was so frightened of the food in India—and so hysterically conscious of those diseases that, he was certain, would destroy his intestinal tract—that he ate nothing but room-service food, which he personally washed in his bathtub. The Taj Mahal Hotel was not unused to such habits among the foreign, but by this extremely selective diet Hathaway had severely constipated himself and suffered from hemorrhoids.

In addition, the hot, damp weather of Bombay had excited his chronic proneness to fungal infections. Hathaway stuck cotton balls between his toes—he had the most persistent case of athlete’s foot that Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had ever seen—and a fungus as unstoppable as bread mold had invaded his ears. Old Lowji believed that the director was capable of producing his own mushrooms. Gordon Hathaway’s ears itched to the point of madness, and he was so deaf from both the fungus and the fungicidal ear drops—not to mention the cotton balls that he stuck in his ears—that his communication on the film set was comedic with misunderstanding.

As for the ear drops, they were a solution of gentian violet, an indelible purple dye. Therefore, the collars and shoulders of Hathaway’s shirts were dotted with violet stains, for the cotton balls frequently fell out of his ears—or else Hathaway, in his frustration at being deaf, plucked out the cotton balls himself. The director was a born litterer; everywhere he went, the world was colorfully marked by his violet ear-cottons. Sometimes the purple solution streaked Hathaway’s face, giving him the appearance of someone who’d been deliberately painted; he looked like a member of a religious cult, or of an unknown tribe. Gordon Hathaway’s fingertips were similarly stained with gentian violet; he was always poking his fingers in his ears.

But Lowji was nevertheless impressed by the fabled artistic temperament of the first (and only) Hollywood director he’d ever met. The senior Daruwalla told Meher (she told Farrokh) that it was “charming” how Hathaway had blamed his hemorrhoids and his fungus neither on his bathtub diet nor on the Bombay climate. Instead, the director faulted “the fuckin’ stress” of the compromising relationship he was compelled to conduct with the film’s philistine producer, a much defamed “suit,” who (coincidentally) was married to Gordon’s ambitious sister.

“That cunt of misery!” Gordon would often exclaim. Failing originality in all his cinematic pursuits, Gordon Hathaway was nevertheless rumored to be the first to coin this vulgar phrase. “Fuckin’ ahead of my time” was a way he often spoke of himself; in this coarse instance, he may have been correct.

It was a great source of frustration to Meher and Farrokh to hear Lowji defend the grossness of Gordon Hathaway on grounds of the man’s “artistic temperament.” It was never clear if the philistine producer’s success in exerting certain pressures on Gordon was because of Gordon’s desire to please the suit himself, or whether the true force of the exertion emanated from Gordon’s sister—the so-called C. of M. herself. It was never clear who had whom “by the balls,” as Gordon put it; it was unclear who “jerked” whose “wire,” as he otherwise put it.

As an admitted newcomer to the creative process, Lowji was undeterred by such talk; he sought to draw out of Gordon Hathaway the presumed aesthetic principles that guided the director through the frenzy with which this particular movie was being made. Even a novice could sense the hectic pace at which the film was being shot; even Lowji’s untested artistic sensibilities could detect the aura of tension with which the screenplay underwent revision every evening in the dining room of the Duckworth Club.

“I trust my fuckin’ instinct for storytellin’, pal,” Gordon Hathaway confided to the senior Daruwalla, who was in such earnest search of a retirement career. “That’s the fuckin’ key.”

How it shamed Farrokh and his poor mother: to observe, throughout dinner, that Lowji was taking notes.

As for the screenwriter, whose shared dream of a “quality” picture was nightly and disastrously changing before his eyes, he was an alcoholic whose bar bill at the Duckworth Club threatened to exceed the Daruwalla family’s resources; it was a tab that pinched even the seemingly bottomless purse of the well-heeled Promila Rai. His name was Danny Mills, and he’d started out with a story about a married couple who come to India because the wife is dying of cancer; they’d promised themselves that they would go to India “one day.” It was originally titled, with the utmost sincerity, One Day We’ll Go to India; then Gordon Hathaway retitled it One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling . That small change initiated a major revision of the story, and sank Danny Mills all the deeper into his alcoholic gloom.

It was actually a step up for Danny Mills—to have begun this screenplay from scratch. It was, if only in the beginning, his original story. He’d started out as the lowliest of studio contract writers; his first job, at Universal, was for 100 dollars a week, and all he did was tamper with existing scripts. Danny Mills still had more screen credits for “additional dialogue” than for “co-script,” and his solo screenplay credits (there were only two) were for flops—utter bombs. At the moment, he prided himself for being an “independent,” which is to say he was under no studio contract; however, this was because the studios thought he was unreliable, not only for his drinking but for his reputation as a loner. Danny wasn’t content to be a team player, and he became especially cantankerous in the cases of those screenplays that had already engaged the creative genius of a half-dozen or more writers. Although it clearly depressed Danny to revise on demand, which he was doing as a result of the nightly whims of Gordon Hathaway, it was entirely rare for Danny to be working on a story that had at least originated with him. For this reason, Gordon Hathaway thought that Danny shouldn’t complain.

It wasn’t as if Danny had contributed a word to The Big Sleep or even Cobra Woman , and he’d had nothing to do with Woman of the Year or even Hot Cargo; he’d written neither Rope nor Gaslight —he hadn’t added so much as a comma to Son of Dracula , or taken one away from Frisco Sal —and although for a while he’d been identified as the uncredited screenwriter for When Strangers Marry , this proved to be false. In Hollywood, he simply hadn’t been playing in the big leagues; the general feeling was that “additional dialogue” was the very zenith of his ability, and so he came to Bombay with more experience in fixing other people’s messes than with creating his own. Doubtless it hurt Danny that Gordon Hathaway didn’t refer to him as “the writer” at all. Gordon called Danny Mills “the fixer,” but in truth there was more that needed fixing in One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling after Hathaway started changing it.

Danny had envisioned the movie as a love story with a twist; the “twist” was the wife dying. In the original screenplay, the couple—in her dying days—succumbs to the fakery of a snake guru; they are rescued from this charlatan and his gang of demonic snake-worshipers by a true guru. Instead of pretending to cure the wife, the true guru teaches her how to die with dignity. According to the philistine producer, or else to his wife—Gordon Hathaway’s interfering C. of M. sister—this last part was lacking in both action and suspense.

“Despite how happy the wife is, she still fuckin’ dies, doesn’t she?” Gordon said.