Genius Read online

  Copyright © 1962 by Patrick Dennis

  Afterword copyright © 2018 by Michael Tanner

  All rights reserved

  This edition published in 2018 by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dennis, Patrick, 1921–1976, author.

  Title: Genius / Patrick Dennis.

  Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037854 (print) | LCCN 2017042592 (ebook) | ISBN 9780912777474 (pdf) | ISBN 9780912777481 (epub) | ISBN 9780912777498 (Kindle) | ISBN 9780912777467

  (softcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. |

  Motion pictures—Fiction. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction. | Satire.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.E537 (ebook) | LCC PS3554.E537 G46 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037854

  Cover design and illustration: Natalya Balnova

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For

  H. D. V.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  Genius

  ’Twas the Night Before Christmas in the Railway Station

  Afterword by Michael Tanner, MD

  I

  If you are over thirty it would be presumptuous of me to ask if you had ever heard of Leander Starr. Anyone with any pretensions to culture could answer immediately that he was once—and perhaps still is—America’s greatest director, ranking with Robert Flaherty, Maurice Stiller, Erich von Stroheim, and half a dozen others. There can be hardly anyone (past the age of thirty) who has not seen his great religious extravaganza Ruth in the Alien Corn, still considered to be the model for all great Biblical pictures. His wordless documentary, Yucatán Girl, involving a deaf-mute Mexican beauty, a lot of Indian ruins, and the Vienna Philharmonic, has only to be mentioned in certain circles to bring on a full minute of reverent hush. And, of course, his witty, brittle, sophisticated soufflés cooked up for such late and great comediennes as Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow are still gems in the revival repertoire.

  If, like me, you are beyond forty, there is no need to tell you that Leander Starr’s stage work was regarded with nothing short of wonder. His direction of comedies for Gertrude Lawrence, Ina Claire, Francine Larrimore, the Lunts—to name only a few—was magic. Nor did he bow out at the drawing-room door. He could take the most impossible plays of such improbable authors as Marlowe, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Garcia Lorca, Beckett, and Brecht and turn them into real Standing Room Only hits. No easy trick.

  However, if you are under thirty—and half of this nation is—Leander Starr may take a bit of explaining, for unless you are one of those eager movie buffs who haunt the Museum of Modern Art film showings and the flea-baggiest of cinema art houses, you are not likely to have seen many examples of his superb work. For some years—and for many good reasons—Mr. Starr has preferred to live outside the boundaries of the United States. His work has been sporadic: a couple of pictures filmed in Italy; a psychological Western made in, of all places, the south of France; an all-star historical epic concerning Richard Coeur de Lion at Walton-upon-Thames; and half of a very literate B.B.C. television series based roughly on the Wolfenden Report. Topnotch work, all of it, and still proving that the old master has never lost his touch. But Starr has since seen fit to abandon Italy, France, and England as well as his native shores. In recent years he has been At Liberty more often than not.

  While the name Leander Starr spells truth and beauty to many, it spells financial ruin, indebtedness, and bad checks to quite a lot of others. Cut to the bone, his great documentary Yucatán Girl runs exactly four hours and fifty-two minutes and is unsalable to the average motion-picture theater. His sparkling comedy, An Affaire, may have won four Academy Awards, but it was so ruinously expensive to produce that it broke even only because it generally was shown on a double bill with Blondie Has a Baby. Even though his great historical pageant, The Euphrates, filled the old Hippodrome to capacity for two full years, it did so at a loss of twelve hundred dollars a week—not including the veterinarian’s bills. The first and the fourth Mrs. Leander Starr still scream loudly, publicly, and regularly for back alimony. To my certain knowledge he owes for food and lodging—and very elegant lodgings, too—at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Ambassador East, Hampshire House, the Plaza, Claridge’s, the Ritz (London), the Ritz (Paris), the George V, the Hassler in Rome, and the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The Department of Internal Revenue is especially anxious to confer with Starr over a small matter of many, many thousands of dollars’ worth of back income taxes if he should ever be unwise enough to touch on American soil. He even owes money to me.

  I first bumped into Leander Starr—both literally and figuratively—almost twenty years ago in the Edward Hotel in Durban, South Africa. It was during World War II, and I was on my slow, circuitous way to Egypt. In fact Durban was full of people who were all heading to or from some place else. The small resort town had become a sort of halfway house for everybody—rich refugees en route to South America, troops bound from England to the Middle East and India, hospital ships plowing back and forth from God-knew-where to God-knew-where. Everybody’s principal occupation was waiting around for whatever ship or plane or train would take them wherever it was they thought they were going and getting a suntan while doing so. And there were worse places to wait.

  As everyone was in the same boat—or, to be more specific, waiting for the same boat—there was a kind of hectic gaiety about the town. There were the beaches in the mornings, the races and cricket in the afternoons, and bottle clubs like the Stardust in the evenings. The hills around the town were thick with villas named things like Sans Souci or Mon Repos where patriotic English colonials entertained everything and anything that showed up more or less in uniform. The most unlikely people started up the most unlikely flirtations and friendships simply because they knew—or hoped—that the relationships would be fleeting and that if and when the next P&O boat hauled anchor they would never even see one another again. As I say, it was a pleasant break in the long trip to war, and I passed a convivial month of total idleness there, housed very nicely at His Majesty’s expense as a volunteer in the American Field Service.

  As for flirtations, I had done worse than most. The redhead in whom I had invested a great deal of time and money had suddenly produced a strapping and hitherto unmentioned husband in the person of a lieutenant commander off a British troop ship. I had been left holding the bag and my temper while she introduced me to him as “darling Dulcie’s Ammedican fiancé, darling” and whizzed off in a smart right-hand-drive Packard to resume domestic relations with the Royal Navy.

  Looking lean, leggy and—I thought—rather dashing in my British officer’s shorts and outsized pith helmet, I strode dramatically into the Edward Hotel, intending to drown my sorrows in gin and lime. It was teatime and the place was thronged. I chose the only available table, a small one in a dim corner, rather regretting that in the darkness my tragic mien was all but lost on the rest of the customers, while noticing with some pleasure that the surrounding gloom somewhat enhanced my tan. (I was very young and could be forgiven a certain theatricality.) However, I was not allowed to brood over my gin for long. The doors flew open and a youngish blonde, very beautiful and rather disheveled, raced in. She gave a wild, hopeless look around the crowded room and made strai
ght for my table. “May I?” she said, and all but fell into the empty chair opposite mine.

  “Charmed,” I said suavely, rising to my feet and sending that damned pith helmet rolling crazily across the floor.

  “Sit down, you fool!” she hissed.

  “But my hat . . .”

  “I’ll buy you a new one. Just sit down and don’t be conspicuous.”

  “Well, when it comes to being conspicuous, madame,” I began stuffily. Then I got a better look at her. “Say, aren’t you Monica James?” Having spent half of my formative years watching double and even triple features, there was hardly a movie name I didn’t know from the biggest star down to the most minor bit player. Monica James had been a fragile English ingénue of considerable promise in half a dozen Gaumont-British films.

  “Yes. Now will you shut up?”

  “Well, really, Miss James. I simply wanted to say that I have always admired your work. Particularly the last picture you made with Leslie Howard under Leander Starr’s direction. It . . .”

  “Leander Starr! Don’t even mention that beast. He’s hounded me from . . . Oh, dear God, here he is! Don’t let him see me.”

  I turned, as did everyone else in the room, and there stood the great Leander Starr, got up to look like Trader Horn. Dark as our corner was, it didn’t take him long to spot Monica James. He strode purposefully to the table and said, “Young man, you are in the process of breaking up a happy home. My seconds will call on you this evening.”

  “Don’t be such a blathering ass, Leander,” Miss James said.

  “Young man, this woman is my wife, and those whom God hath joined together let no man . . .”

  “I am not your wife!” Miss James said hotly. “I’ve got my divorce decree right here in my purse and it’s the most priceless possession I’ll ever own.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I know you didn’t believe me,” she said, flourishing a paper, “but now I’ve got it and here it is. My solicitor tells me that I could also have done it on grounds of malicious desertion, insanity, or the fact that you’re an habitual criminal. No matter. Adultery was good enough for me.”

  “Malicious desertion? If it weren’t for the gravity of your accusation, Monica, I would laugh. Yes, laugh!” A sweeping gesture. “It is you who deserted me and it is I who followed you across this dark continent, over bush and veld, accompanied only by my manservant and a faithful native bearer, to discover you now in flagrante delicto with your American gigolo, while a betrayed husband . . .”

  “Now see here, sir,” I said, rising to my feet. I noticed he was a couple of inches taller than I and had a longer reach. Miss James brushed aside my hardly begun protestations.

  “Leander, you came in on the afternoon express. I saw you while I was at the station buying my ticket. I saw you and I ran like a hare, but not fast enough or far enough. Now get back on the express and go away!”

  “You’re leaving me,” he said tensely, grasping her wrist. “You’re leaving me in this God-forsaken country, old and sick and defeated and alone. This is the thanks I get for taking you out of the gutter and turning you into a radiant star.”

  “That’s not quite right, Leander,” Miss James said. “You did not take me out of the gutter. I’m not a star. And I have left you.”

  “For this callow Casanova?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Leander. I don’t even know the young man’s name.”

  “Nymphomaniac!”

  “It’s Dennis,” I said idiotically. “Patrick Dennis. American Field Service. How do you do, Mr. Starr. I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you how much I’ve always admired your . . .”

  Ignoring my outstretched hand, Starr turned regally toward Miss James. “Wanton that you may be, we’re going to forget all this. I’m giving you back your rightful position as the Mrs. Leander Starr. . . .”

  “The second Mrs. Leander Starr,” Miss James said. “But by no means the last.”

  “As the Mrs. Starr. You are coming with me to the interior of this marvelous land of mystery where I have found the most fascinating tribe of pygmies. Think of the film we can make—you a willowy golden goddess surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of tiny subjects each no taller than. . . .”

  “And we’ll call it Little Men,” Miss James said, rising and gathering up her gloves.

  “That’s a hot one!” I said.

  “No thank you, Leander. You go to the pygmies. I’m going back to England. It was an education to be Mrs. Starr for the past two years, but now that I’m educated I’m going home and try to forget the whole bloody mess.”

  “I won’t permit you to return to England. The bombings. The danger.”

  “That’s frightfully sweet of you, Leander, but I’d rather be in the middle of blitzkrieg with Hitler himself than in paradise with you. No hard feelings. Thank you for the tea, Mr. Dennis.”

  “But it hasn’t come yet,” I said. Just then an Indian waiter padded softly up to the table, bearing what the Edward Hotel considered to be the absolute minimum wartime tea—tea, hot water, hot milk, cold milk, lemon, bread and butter, hot scones, jam (three kinds), honey, sandwiches, cake, pastries, and a large tart.

  “Well, thanks anyhow,” she said. “Good-by, Leander.”

  “Wait!” he shouted, lurching after her. Unfortunately, he lurched squarely into me. There was a frightful crash and the next thing I saw was the great Leander Starr sprawled on the floor, scalded by tea, hot water, hot milk; covered with cold milk, lemon, bread and butter, hot scones, jam (three kinds), honey, sandwiches, cake, pastries, and a large tart. “You pushed me, you blackguard!” he roared. A second later he was up and swinging at me. A second after that we were both out on the Marine Parade, barred forever from the Edward Hotel.

  I saw no more of the great man for two days until I was having drinks in the Balmoral Hotel with another beautiful girl. Her name was Caroline Morris, she came from a fine old Philadelphia family somewhere along the Main Line, and she was going to the Middle East as a Red Cross girl. Red Cross girl, hell, she was a recruiting poster! Handsome and lifeless rather than pretty and vivacious, she personified that clean-white-gloves-straight-seams-every-hair-in-place quality so dear to the Red Cross overseas. She was a frosty article and would never have deigned to go out with me if she hadn’t been at school with my older sister and knew that we were All Right even if we did come from Chicago. To have been connected with Caroline or any of the Morrises, no matter how distantly, automatically conferred social acceptability in her eyes. She suggested drinks at the Edward. I suggested the Balmoral. Halfway through the first one I dimly recalled having heard that this living Red Cross poster had recently been the ideal Bryn Mawr girl and a perfect pill, and that before that she had been the perfect Shipley girl and still a pill. Come to think of it, I guess my sister hadn’t liked her any better than I did. Still she was beautiful, and lonely American boys away from home were supposed to flip—absolutely flip—in the company of beautiful American girls. I wasn’t flipping. In fact I was barely listening to Caroline’s rather constipated recital of how ghastly everything had been, coming over first-class from the Philadelphia shipyards. “Hideous food . . . class of people one meets . . . your sister . . . Merion Cricket Club . . . do you know Tommy Huber . . . very dry, please . . . suppose these natives are diseased . . . Mummy and Dr. Ormandy . . .” She was interrupted by a wispy man of indeterminate age who appeared quite suddenly at our table.

  “Mr. Dennis, I do beg your pardon, but my imployer, Mr. Leander Starr, asked me to stop by.”

  “Are you his second?” I asked. This didn’t seem to be the sort of man who’d be at home on the field of honor—or any field, for that matter.

  “His sicritary, yes. My name is Alistair St. Regis. Mr. Starr is ever so upset about the misunderstanding of the other day and wonders if he can buy you and your, uh, companion a drink. He’d like very much to apologize.”

  “Is he related to the Doylestown Starrs?” Carolin
e asked, showing just a flicker of animation.

  “I don’t believe so.” Then I said, “Thank you, Mr. Uh . . .”

  “St. Regis. Alistair St. Regis.”

  “Thank you, Mr. St. Regis,” I said, wondering where he’d ever dug up such a name, “but we won’t have time. Please tell Mr. Starr that what happened the other day is perfectly all right. Just one of those misunderstandings.” Mr. St. Regis hesitated for a moment and then went mincing away.

  “Mummy is distantly related to some Starrs on the Eastern Shore. They breed.”

  “No. This is Leander Starr. Le-an-der Starr.”

  “I believe ours are Roger and Maudie Starr. Mummy’s actually related to her side of . . .”

  “Leander Starr, the great director,” I said much too loudly, as though she were hard of hearing as well as stupid.

  “Oh, theatrical people,” Caroline said with a barely perceptible quiver of her splendid nostrils. “Of course, Cornelia Otis Skinner went to . . .” Her jaw fell open and there stood Leander Starr in splendid tropical dinner clothes, pure Fredric March.

  “Dear boy,” he said with a deep bow. “The mountain comes to Mohammed. I was rather hurt when my valet announced that you’d be unable to have cocktails with me. One does despise to drink alone and I am a lonely man.”

  “Oh, but do sit down, Mr. Starr,” Caroline said. She looked a bit shattered, as though she’d just been told that Bryn Mawr Hospital was a notorious abortion mill, but at least she was coming to life. Sit down he did, and for the next four hours he was spellbinding. There seemed to be nobody of any interest he hadn’t met and, as a special sop to Caroline, this roster even included a few Pews and Chews and Cadwaladers. Caroline was now a different girl. In fact, Starr was so utterly spellbinding that I didn’t realize that I’d been left alone, except for the bar chits, until just after I’d sent him and Caroline off to dinner in a Zulu rickshaw. That was the last I saw of either of them for some years. The following day I was squeezed aboard a troop ship for the long, hot trip up to Suez.