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  The next news of Starr arrived in the form of a clipping from Time that my sister sent to me in a letter containing less sensational social notes:

  MILESTONES

  Marriage Revealed. C. (for Charles) Leander Starr, 35-ish, Hollywood wunderkind; and Caroline Drexel Morris, 22, Philadelphia postdebutante currently AWOL from the Red Cross; he for the third time, she for the first; in South Africa last month.

  My sister went on, rather gleefully, to say that there had been a slight stink with the Red Cross authorities and that it just wasn’t like Caroline to run off into the bush in full dress uniform. A very few months later—five to be downright caddish about it—the birth of their daughter Emily was announced from somewhere in Africa, and a few months after that mother and child were back in Philadelphia suing for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty. Within a year the fourth Mrs. Leander Starr was installed; a year later she was gone and then there was silence.

  The war had been over for nearly five years when next I encountered Leander Starr. By then I was living in New York with a wife and two children. I had a job in a small advertising agency where I wrote copy for pharmaceutical firms and, on my own time, what my mother-in-law described as “little things on the side.” In fact, those little things on the side were what kept us afloat, just. The most recent little thing—a short, insane dialogue between a right-wing senator and a method actress—had appeared in a now defunct pseudo-sophisticated magazine and had won quite a lot of insincere favorable comment from the Right People. A reputable publisher had asked to see anything along the lines of a novel that I might have—and I had plenty—and I was enjoying a very minor, very short-lived celebrity.

  Leander Starr, needless to say, was again heard of constantly. He had returned to America and had overwritten a long piece for Life about his hardships in Africa. The pygmy picture, Negrillos, was packing them in at the Little Carnegie and kindred theaters. He had taken a lavish suite of offices on Fifth Avenue and was, as variously reported in the gossip columns, negotiating to do a play by Noël Coward, a musical with Mary Martin, an all-Negro Merry Wives of Windsor, to found a national repertory company, to film the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, to restage the entire Ring Cycle for the Metropolitan Opera Company, and to marry Hope Hampton. Taking the fullest advantage of our African encounter, I had sent a couple of tentative letters offering him first look at a play I had written. Each letter had produced an answer, very badly typed and spelled, stating that Mr. Starr was currently in Hollywood or London or Bayreuth, where he would remain for an unconscionable length of time, and signed “Alistair St. Regis, Secretary to Mr. Starr.”

  So it was 1950 before I met Leander Starr again. It was a Wednesday, and I was taking a client and his wife to an expense-account lunch. They were a sweet, grandparently Jewish couple who manufactured a superior brand of mouthwash in New Jersey. He always called me Son and she was forever knitting sweaters for our children and insisting that we remove them from the hot, humid city to their place outside Princeton (which was twice as hot and humid). She adored the theater and we were lunching early at Hampshire House so they could hustle around and catch a matinee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Ziegfeld. We were discussing something wholesome, like toilet training, when Leander Starr burst into the dining room like a comet. “Darling boy,” he bellowed, “at last!” Brandishing his copy of Flair, from which gatefolds and streamers of tissue fluttered wildly, he descended upon our table and bussed me on both cheeks. Somewhat flustered, I got up, gave him a manly handshake, and introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. Grossman.

  “Enchanté, Mrs. Grospoint,” he said. Then he sat down and ordered a double Martini made with House of Lords gin. “But, dear boy, why have you forsaken me—a sick, lonely, old man thrown to the wolves in this barbarous city.”

  “That’s what I always tell him, Mr. Stern,” Mrs. Grossman said. “The idea raising those beautiful babies in a dirty place like this. Why, out by us there are beautiful places going cheap. Sam could help him and with an F.H.A. loan . . .”

  “But the talent of you, precious Patrick. I knew it when we met in Capetown . . .”

  “Durban,” I said.

  “Yes, of course, with Deanna Durbin. I knew it then. I saw the mark on your forehead.”

  “Maybe it was Ash Wednesday.”

  “The mark of genius. A born writer.”

  “You should see what he’s done for our product,” Mr. Grossman said proudly. “New bottle, new label, new spiel on the radio.”

  “Very high class,” Mrs. Grossman added. “And a lovely wife and two gawjus children.”

  “Ah, Patrick,” Starr declaimed, brandishing Flair, “I was lying sick in what I hoped would be my deathbed when I read your piece in this pretentious rag. I laughed. I screamed. I clutched my sides in an orgasm of excrutiating glee. I said to myself, ‘I must find this man again.’ Since reading your divine little fantasia I have not slept. I have had my entire staff hunting you down. No stone has been left unturned, and yet the very earth seems to have swallowed you up.”

  “You might have tried the New York telephone book,” I said. “Or possibly Mr. St. Regis could have told you I live on East Seventy-second Street.”

  “A dark, dirty little place like that,” Mrs. Grossman said, twitching her mink indignantly. “With such lovely babies it’s a crime.”

  “Mother, some people like the city,” Mr. Grossman said.

  “That’s right, Mother,” Starr said, “and if you’ll just get on with that chicken salad and not waste the time of America’s future Pulitzer Prize winner . . .”

  “Mr. Starr,” I said pointedly, “Mr. and Mrs. Grossman are old friends and clients of mine. I’m in advertising.”

  “Bah! I’d rather hear that you were pimping. With a gift like yours, chained to a desk on Madison Avenue.”

  “Actually, it’s on East Forty-ninth Street,” I said.

  “That’s what I keep telling him, Mr. Stark,” Mr. Grossman said. “He should move out to Jersey, work directly for us. Air-conditioned. Pension plan. Lovely homes. Good schools.”

  “And the children could use our pool,” Mrs. Grossman added.

  “Will you be still!” Starr thundered. “Dearest boy, leave these savages and come to work for me. When I read this glorious piece of nonsense a whole new concept of the musical revue came washing over me.”

  “A revue?” I said. Embarrassed as I was, I couldn’t help being fascinated. “You mean blackouts, show girls . . .”

  “Ah, how few understand me. Even you can be obtuse. No, I do not mean a line of strumpets swinging their tits over the orchestra pit.” Mr. Grossman choked into his water glass. Mrs. Grossman, fortunately, was a trifle deaf. “I mean something new, something intimate. I mean just four performers—all stars. Darling Gertie Lawrence, dear Bea Lillie, Jack Buchanan, and . . .”

  Mrs. Grossman’s fork fell with a clatter. “You’re in the theater, Mr. Storr?” she asked, her hearing-aid glasses glinting with a new love and respect.

  “Yes, Mrs. Grosfeld, I carried a spear in Aida. Waiter, bring me another just like this. In fact, make it two.”

  “Well, perhaps we could talk about it some other time,” I said. “The Grossmans want to get to their matinee, and I’ve got a lot to do at the office. If you let me know where you live perhaps I could stop in some evening on my way home and discuss . . .”

  “But I live here and you’re coming upstairs with me now. Call your office and tell them you’ve resigned. Good day, Mr. Grosgrain, Mother.”

  As I was propelled out of the room I heard Mrs. Grossman say, “You know he looked a lot like that big movie director, Orlando Starr.”

  “You know, I believe that’s who it was, Mother.”

  Mr. Grossman was stuck with the check, but they still speak of it as a red-letter day in their lives.

  Mr. Starr lived in great style at Hampshire House—as he did every place else—in two large apartments thrown together. The total effect was acres and acres
and acres of textbook Dorothy Draper—dark green walls; Regency stripes and cabbage roses; great buckets of white plaster molded into sconces, mirror frames, chandeliers, consoles, and mantels; and a number of large, effusive watercolors by James Reynolds. As a cozy touch, Starr had covered every available surface with signed photographs in tarnished silver frames. King Carol, Nazimova, Marilyn Miller, Marie of Rumania, George Bernard Shaw, Gabriel Pascal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, and Ernest Hemingway were among those immediately recognizable to me.

  “Wow!” I said.

  “It’s tatty, but it will have to do until I can find something fit for human habitation. Sit down, dear boy, you look dazed.”

  “I am, rather.”

  “We’ll have something to drink and then get right down to work. St. Regis,” he bawled, “where the hell are you?”

  “Right here, Mr. Starr, sir.” St. Regis bustled in, a needle and thread in one hand, a shirt of Starr’s in the other.

  “Send for a magnum of decent champagne and get me Gertie Lawrence on the telephone.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Perhaps I should call my office,” I said.

  “Yes, dear boy, do that. And tell those whoremasters that you’re resigning as of now. Or would you like me to do it for you?”

  “Maybe I’ll wait until payday.”

  The telephone rang, and he pounced on it. “Starr speaking. . . . Good. Put her on. . . . Angel girl! Drop everything and come to New York immediately. I have the most brilliant young writer under contract and we’re all going to do a revue together—just you and Bea and Jack and some competent tonsil artist, say Charles Collins or Al Jolson. . . . Well, then somebody who isn’t dead. I can’t keep track of all these singers. . . . Well, darling, tell Rodgers and Hammerstein you’ve changed your mind. They’ll understand.” There was a long pause and I could hear an excited woman’s voice at the other end of the line. Starr’s face darkened and he seemed to swell up like some sort of angry reptile. “Well! If that’s all the thanks I get for hypnotizing you into the only two decent performances you’ve ever turned in, I’m glad to know it before it’s too late. Just don’t come grovelling to me when you’re out of work and forgotten.” The voice was still protesting as he slammed down the receiver. “Pitiful creature. Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. We’ll find someone who can sing and is a star. Just put the champagne down there and open it, please. St. Regis, sign the check and then get me Bea Lillie. Now, dear Patrick, about our little revue. . . .” The telephone rang again.

  It was seven o’clock when I swayed out of Hampshire House, drunk with Starr’s champagne and dreams of glory. During the afternoon he had called the White House once, London twice, Hollywood three times, and a number of other places I’ve forgotten. When Starr wasn’t telephoning other famous people, other famous people were telephoning him. One call, from Starr’s end of the conversation, sounded like the classic fury of a Woman Scorned; another, answered blandly, cajolingly, and noncommitally, with many vague references to “my accountant” and “my business manager,” gave every impression of coming from a collection agency. But I didn’t care. By the time the champagne was finished I was in a state of pure euphoria.

  “Sweetheart,” I said to my wife, “we’re in clover.” Then I keeled over onto the bed. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized we hadn’t said one clear or definite word about the intimate little revue.

  For the next three months I worked like a stevedore. Although I hadn’t been quite foolhardy enough to quit my job at the agency, I had asked for a short leave of absence—a request that was summarily refused. Instead, I was rewarded with three new accounts and the vague promise of a raise the following year. My days were spent writing about the pills and sprays and capsules and gargles our clients forced upon a public of apparent hypochondriacs. My nights and Saturdays and Sundays were taken up with writing what I considered to be devastating material for Starr’s intimate little revue. I almost never saw my wife and children, and I was able to pin Starr down to an appointment even more rarely. He was all over the place—Palm Beach or Palm Springs, Houston or Hollywood, Boston or Bermuda. It was always, he explained, to nail down another backer or to sign another star. Late one night when I was trying to get to sleep—not that that was ever much of a problem—I counted up a total of thirty-five stars he had selected to appear in our four-person revue. And they were thirty-five absolute stars whose aggregate salaries would have come to more than a hundred thousand dollars a week in a show that might possibly have grossed fifty thousand. When I mentioned this to him over the telephone he merely said, “Nonsense, we’ll charge double.”

  He frequently called from some faraway place. Once he announced that Cole Porter would write the music, then Irving Berlin, then Kurt Weil, and finally that all three would simply love to collaborate. He declared that Mainbocher had submitted designs for costumes to be worn in skits that I hadn’t even written. He would call my office or my home at all hours of the day and night, dragging me out of meetings, out of bed, and—more than once—out of the tub, while my wife growled about wet footprints on the rugs. But when I tried to reach him it was a different matter. The calls to Hampshire House were always intercepted by the ubiquitous Alistair St. Regis who almost always announced that Mr. Starr was out of town or working or sleeping or simply not in. I tried many times to call him at his offices on Fifth Avenue. The telephone there was simply never answered.

  Yet the few times I was able to see him, Starr was a stimulating, if peripatetic, collaborator. Dealing with him in his apartment at Hampshire House was a thankless chore, and trying to get him to sit still, to get off the telephone, to state one simple opinion, was like trying to kiss a woodpecker. On three occasions I visited him at his office, always quite late at night when the building was emptied even of its cleaning staff. The home of Leander Starr Productions occupied half the sixteenth floor of an enormous building. The offices were some of the spiffiest I’ve ever gone through—pale walnut carpeted in yellow with telephones and typewriters to match—and you had to go through quite a series of them to reach Starr’s own sanctum sanctorum. It was an eerie experience late at night, and I could never escape the feeling that the big flat modern desks were slabs in a morgue and that I was in the presence of something that was dead. In his office Starr was always cheery enough, bounding about and bursting with enthusiasm. The telephone rarely rang, and when it did he would refuse to answer. Instead, we would sit silently for five rings, ten, fifteen. When the telephone stopped we would go on with our work. Those rare meetings were really stimulating and, odd and irritating as the man could be, I felt a true liking and respect for him.

  Finally I had finished enough material to show to Mr. Starr and to the stable of stellar performers he had—or had not—signed to contracts. He was consistently evasive on such minor points.

  “Dearest boy!” he shouted over the telephone when I was at last able to reach him. “How splendid! How wonderful! Come right over and we’ll have a good go at the manuscript. Not the office but the apartment, where it’s peaceful and quiet.”

  “Not on your life, Mr. Starr,” I said. “I know how peaceful and quiet your apartment is. That’s why you’re coming to my apartment. Besides, my wife is dying to meet you. Come for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll take the phone off the hook and then you can really look over the stuff.”

  There was a pause, then he said, “Why, that would be charming, Patrick. Really charming. Have I the address?”

  “You have. Seven sharp and don’t dress.”

  “Your wife wants me naked?”

  “Exactly. Until tomorrow.”

  “Á demain.”

  By candlelight, and with the addition of some old Spode and a maid hastily borrowed from my mother-in-law, our apartment looked respectable if not resplendent. There had been deep consultation with the butcher and with Luria’s Wines & Spirits. The children had been bathed and fed, mopped up again, and put into the impracti
cal little robes some ill-advised relative had sent them for Christmas. There was nothing to do but wait. So we waited and we waited and we waited. At eight-thirty Mr. Starr arrived in white tie and bearing an immense box of hothouse flowers. “Dear Patrick, forgive my unforgivable tardiness. An interminable call from the Coast. It seems that Fred Astaire wants to get back on the stage. Do you think he’d sell any tickets? I wonder.” He kissed my wife’s hand, embraced both children, inquired as to their names and ages, and then said tragically, “My wife tore my own adorable baby from my arms and ran off with another man. I’ve never been the same since.”

  “Which wife was that?” my own wife asked, ignoring my dark look.

  “Why, uh, it was . . . Please, I can’t talk about it, even today. I didn’t mean to burden you with my troubles. After all, you’re young, happy, vital, alive. Let us be gay. Perhaps just one more of those delicious Martinis?”

  I must say for the old charlatan that he could really charm the birds off the trees without half trying. By the time coffee came in, my own wife was practically sitting on his lap. After he’d swilled down a good bit of brandy and pronounced it excellent, I said, “Now shall we get down to the reading? It’s getting late.”

  “Lord, isn’t it!” he said, after an elaborate consultation with a Philippe-Patek watch thinner than a dime. “I must dash!”

  “But the idea was for you to read my material,” I said, “here and now without any interruptions.”

  “And I’m desolate not to be able to, my boy. But I’ve promised to meet some frightfully rich people at Elmer’s—El Morocco, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I mean they’re hideously nouveau and vulgar and all that—Texas oil—but they’re perishing to invest in our show. Your show, really. And I can’t let you down at a time like this. Give me your manuscript and I swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll read every word of it before I close an eye tonight. Then I’ll give you a jingle first thing tomorrow, and we’ll get together over lunch and discuss the whole thing. Oh, I know it’s all going to be so fresh and new and different and wonderful that I won’t even have to read it. It’s just that I’m so rotten selfish I want to.”