Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

Sam Epman began pacing the rug-covered floor of his suite, a short bald man wearing a gray tropical suit and bright green slipper socks. He sucked interminably on his cigar, leaving a trail of agitated smoke behind him.

“So what’s our movie all about? Our movie is all about power. And we are going to tell our story of power in modern, everyday, American English. We are going to tell this story of a political assassination in terms every citizen of the United States will be able to understand. We are going to keep the old Roman setting, and the same situation, but we are going to relate this tale of a power grab so that there will be no mistake about it. We are going to tell it so that everybody seeing this first-rate motion picture will understand that it applies to their lives today, now, this minute, we are still assassinating people in our grabs for power, does that make sense?”

“It seems to make a lot of sense,” Wainwright said quietly.

Epman turned to face me, and I nodded quickly.

“You want to know the title?” Epman said. “This is the title — hold your hats. The title is S.P.Q.R.” He paused for effect. Wainwright and I stared at him blankly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Is it a cryptogram?” Wainwright asked.

“No, it ain’t a cryptogram, but it has mystery, you got to admit that. It also has six-foot-high letters we can spread across a Cinemascope screen one letter at a time, S...” He wrote the letter in the air with his cigar. “... P... Q... R... can you see those letters materializing on the screen? S.P.Q.R., with the triumphal music of ancient Rome in the background, starring Burt Lancaster or whoever, superimposed over a reconstruction of old Rome, a Roman street teeming with life, jumping right into those opening lines of—”

“Do you think you can get Lancaster?” Wainwright interrupted.

Epman waved the interruption aside impatiently. “Lancaster, Shmancaster,” he said, “who cares what star we get, a star we’ll get, a whole bunch of stars we’ll get, don’t worry. What the hell are actors but instruments a director blows on them and he gets from them the music you wrote? You got money, you get stars. Only in astronomy are stars life-giving suns. In real life stars are only a fiction we made up to keep the people happy. These are the Roman gods and goddesses of today, only we don’t erect statues of them, we make celluloid pictures instead. Don’t bother me with stars, stars we’ll get by the bushelful. How do you like the title?”

“It sounds impressive,” Wainwright said, “but I don’t know what it means.”

“Your first day in Rome, you ain’t supposed to know what it means yet. That’s why you’re here, to dig around, to get the feel. How you going to write about Rome if you ain’t got the feel of it? Wouldn’t it be cheaper if I kept you in New York instead of shlepping you all the way over here? But this is what’s going to give the picture class, ancient Rome right down to the last detail, but the actors speaking English we can all understand.” He turned to me. “You know what S.P.Q.R. means?”

“No,” I admitted.

“It means Senatus Populusque Romanus. And in English that means ‘The Senate and People of Rome,’ and it was stamped on government property all over the city in ancient Roman times, and you can still see it all over Rome today. S.P.Q.R.”

“Was it used during Caesar’s time?” I asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn. I guess it was. If it wasn’t, we’ll stretch a point, because I ain’t going to throw away an excellent title just because Julius Caesar didn’t happen to think of it.” He paused. “So? How do you like it?”

“I’m not sure,” Wainwright said cautiously. “It may be a little too esoteric for the common man.”

“Those are two words I don’t know the meaning of,” Epman said. “Esoteric and common man. The common man knows only what you throw at him in the advertisements. We take a full-page ad in the New York Times , and the ad on one side has these big black letters S.P.Q.R. and on the other side running down the full length of the page, this babe in a Roman toga — she’s supposed to be Calpurnia. The toga is cut down to her navel in the front, and you can see her whole leg right up past her thigh where the toga is slit on the side. The common man he don’t wonder any more what S.P.Q.R. spells. The common man takes one look at this half-naked babe, and he knows right away that S.P.Q.R. spells SEX.”

“You take out the same ad the next day, only on the right-hand side, instead of the babe, you got a guy stabbing another guy in a toga, and the common man figures out that S.P.Q.R. spells VIOLENCE. There ain’t nothing common about the common man except his reactions. The only thing that scares him is class, because he ain’t sure what it is. So to give him class, you got to make believe it’s crap. After a while, when he begins to think class is really crap — which he understands — he feels comfortable. S.P.Q.R. is a classy title, believe me.”

Epman paused.

“What’s so great about a title like From Here to Eternity , would you mind telling me? It sounds like maybe Norman Vincent Peale wrote it. You flash it across the screen — it’s so long that half the people in the audience they fall asleep before they finish reading it. But all of a sudden it’s a great title because it’s attached to a successful property. Okay. One thing you can bet your life on. S.P.Q.R. is going to be a successful picture. It’ll be the best damn picture I ever made, and believe me I made plenty. We don’t gross forty million bucks on this one, I’ll eat the shooting script.” Epman chuckled and then studied the end of his cigar. “S.P.Q.R.,” he said softly. “It’s a good title. It’ll become a magnificent title when it’s attached to a success.”

“There are many people,” Wainwright said with that same air of caution, “who feel that success is often predetermined by the choice of a title.”

“Well, all I got to say to those people is they’re wrong,” Epman answered, “Look at Anatomy of a Murder. That’s a cockamamie title if ever I heard one, and they stick on the book a dust jacket it could make you puke. So what happens? It’s a best seller for more than a year. You want to talk about titles, I could quote you titles don’t even make sense and they were attached to some of the biggest properties ever came down the pike. What is Gone with the Wind? An inspiration? It makes you cry? It makes you laugh? Me, it makes me want to go out and buy an overcoat. What’s Lolita all about? It sounds like the story of a Mexican flamenco dancer instead of a guy he leches for twelve-year-olds. Titles, don’t start with titles. You want to know the secret of a title? I’ll tell you. The best title in the world, it means absolutely nothing. It means a reader, an audience, they look at it and decide for themselves what it means. That’s a title that says something. To say something it has to say absolutely nothing. And S.P.Q.R. doesn’t say a goddamn thing.” He paused. “Which is exactly why it says everything.”

Epman blew out a wreath of smoke and then asked, “Am I right or am I right?” He seemed to be directing the question at me, but I was spared an answer by the sudden opening of the outer door to the suite. We all turned to face the door. Epman stroked his mustache.

“Sam, darling, would you help me with these packages, please?” a voice said, and I recognized the voice instantly as belonging to Flora Epman, the producer’s wife. The voice emanated from a petite redhead in her fifties who, despite a barely noticeable thickening about the waist, was a living testament to what the slick magazines often called The American Way of Life. Wearing a black corduroy raincoat over a tan linen suit, beige pumps, frilly white blouse showing at the throat of the suit jacket, long red hair carefully rolled into a bun at the nape of the neck, face and throat preserved through the magic of countless applications of queen bee jelly, Flora struggled into the room with her packages, and Epman hurried to unburden her.