Then God Is Forgiven: A Novel

By Sam Bauman

Megan was a young British actress in Shaws St. Joan in Portsmouth when he first saw her. He met her and lost her. He went to Hollywood as a would-be writer and she followed with a Swedish husband and a tremendous talent. He watched her through two husbands, several race car drivers and a grilling by Sen. Joe McCarthy. He married her sister but always wondered if it were Megan that he loved.

Then God is Forgiven is a novel of an actress who didnt care about the injuries her actions inflicted on others, and of an Ohio youth who became a lost man through her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 9, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462839384

Sam Bauman

Author Sam Bauman has been a journalist and copy editor for more than 50 years, serving with the New York Herald Tribune, Pacific and European Stars & Stripes, The Associated Press, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Los Angles Times, Playboy, Newsweek and currently is arts and entertainment editor for the daily Nevada Appeal in Carson City, where he lives. He also writes about entertainment, skiing and mountain hiking for magazines. He has covered stories in Asia, Africa, Europe, Scandinavia and the Mideast. He is divorced and the father of two sons, Marc and Nick.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Ending

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of deja vu as my mind continued to try to cope with her death. For a moment it was all terribly familiar, the cemetery, the mourners, even the damp English weather, and then I realized what my head was doing—it was matching the English countryside with that grimly soggy Hollywood scene when Humphrey Bogart, complete in trench coat, watches them bury The Barefoot Contessa.

That was enough to end the attack of deja vu (which a friend had once told me was a symptom of advancing dementia precox and I could believe it at that moment). Then, the sun broke through the overcast and the lush green of the cemetery was suddenly beautiful, peaceful even, and the words of the vicar (at least I thought he was the vicar, although I wasn’t quite sure of English church hierarchy) were almost comforting, although they certainly had little to do with the woman he was eulogizing.

I wondered how many of the mourners—surprisingly few, considering her fame (and notoriety)—really knew the woman they were remembering, really knew that fierce spirit that had pushed her beyond her own limits, really knew the desperation with which she sought life, to live it at 110 percent at all times, just like the race car drivers she had found so fascinating.

Then the ceremony was over. The mourners lined up to toss their flowers into her grave, but I didn’t get in line. I hung back, just as I had through the entire ritual, not wanting to spoil it all. So I could watch them as they filed across the greensward, her big, burly father with his silver mane; her mother, erect with a face that could warm your heart when she smiled; her brother, his face showing the signs of alcoholism, the tracery of broken veins on his cheeks and nose; and probably several of her lovers.

I knew most of them, some well, some not so well. I disliked most of them except for her mother, who had always treated me as if I were a human being rather than an American screenwriter. A failed playwright, if you would like a classier title.

In minutes I was alone with the gravediggers. I walked slowly up to the grave, feeling like an imitation Bogart, although my Burberry was certainly up to his standard. I thought about some of the scenes of graveyards, of Hamlet, of course; Death of a Salesman; even the Hemingway scene in A Farewell to Arms, in which the hero says farewell to Catherine, except it was like saying goodbye to a statue.

The gravediggers paused in their preparations to look at me. They apparently wondered if I were someone important who had arrived late and asked. I told them I was just an old friend who had come to pay my respects. I pulled a daisy out of one of the sprays stacked beside the gaping hole, and I tossed it into the grave. I tried to come up with a phrase, something Bogart would have been proud of, but I couldn’t. For all my facility with language, I was at a loss for words. Finally, I said to myself, ashamed to say it out loud, So long, baby. It could have been so different.

I turned and walked away and heard the shovel bite into the dirt. I continued walking back to my rented car. It could have been so different. No, I knew it couldn’t have been any way except the way it was. I should have known it from the first day I met her, the first time I saw her up on that crummy stage in Portsmouth, playing Joan of Arc in Shaw’s St. Joan. No, it couldn’t have been any other way than the way it was…

We were both young then, I a little over 23, she just turned 21. I was living in London on a Fulbright, working on a play at the London Academy of Music and Drama Arts. I had cheap digs in Cottage Green; a sitting room with a gas fireplace and inevitable shilling meter and a tiny bedroom. The bath was down the hall and was shared with two Pakistani lodgers. I had a used Olivetti portable, a Zenith Transoceanic radio and enough clothes to squeak by for a week without laundry. In theory I was in class much of the time, but in fact I spent most of my time in pubs and in my room. In the pubs I drank warm English top-fermented beer, and in my room I worked on my latest play, After Noon Is Night.

It was a play about life in a nut house. I had spent one summer working in such an institution during college and the play was based on an experience I had had there. It centered on a catatonic youth in his late teens, found naked in an Ohio cornfield. I had done a one-act version of it in college and it had played well. Now I was expanding it, or at least trying to. But I had already stumbled across my basic weakness, which was to plague me from then on: I really didn’t have a lot to say about anything. Yes, I could write dialog, I had a good ear. And I could keep the action moving along, never getting bogged down in explaining things. I could do nice little set pieces, almost brilliant summations. Yet when I strung it all together, something was missing.

But at that time I was still confident I could find that missing element and bring my script to life.

So on that first weekend when I saw her, I was still hopeful, still young enough to believe in myself, still naive enough to think that I could make the world sit up and take notice. It was an English spring weekend, not exactly all sunshine and gentle breezes, but I was tired of the city and I decided to visit Portsmouth, see the Royal Navy’s hometown and sniff the salt air of the channel, perhaps wander a bit. I did Portsmouth in a trice (I used words like trice then). It was a lovely old city, and I enjoyed the Saturday afternoon, wandering the streets, visiting an art gallery or two, a bookstore. I saw a posting for a performance of St. Joan and decided to see the play.

I had once been a spear-carrier in a version of the Shaw play that we had done at Antioch College, and I remembered the dialog as sparkling and even somewhat mystical for Shaw at any rate. So I got a student ticket for 10 shillings, got a newspaper cone of fish and chips for dinner and had two beers in a pub. The play started at 7:30, an early hour. The theater was off a side street, a one-time church converted for the local drama society’s use. The pews were still there, although the pulpit had been removed and a platform stage erected. It was a small theater, perhaps seating one or two hundred. By curtain time the place was packed, with some standing.

You probably remember how the play starts, with the bailiff stopped by Joan for a horse to ride to the Dauphin. It was then that I saw her.

Her name on the program was Megan Walton, and the brief biographical sketch said she had studied with various schools about England, none of them known to me. Her halftone photo was washed out, a typical English face of high cheekbones, pale hair and big eyes.

I was unprepared for the real Megan. When she burst on the stage in that opening scene I was awed by her beauty. It was like a great hand had suddenly squeezed my heart and lungs, making me gasp aloud. I know: cliché. She was of medium height; her wide eyes a brilliant blue that seemed to sparkle in the inadequate lighting, her honey-colored hair like a cascade of sunlight. Her skin was flawless, that great creamy hue that real English beauties enjoy. Her mouth was small, her lips a pale pink, without makeup. She wore a baggy jacket over a rough shirt, knee breeches, and flat shoes. There were suggestions of a figure, but one couldn’t tell much from the costume she wore.

When she spoke it was like a gentle tug at your mind, bringing instant agreement with whatever she said. Later I was to call it her Orson Welles voice, although she didn’t have that wonderful rumble Welles projected. But she had the natural dramatic tone, and she was able to fill the house with it, without strain, without apparent effort.

The play wasn’t as good as I remembered it, some cheap japes thrown in for comic relief, some pretentious lines used to give it dignity and meaning. But Megan, she simply left me stunned. I walked out of the theater into the night, planning to catch a train back to London. Something held me there, waiting I didn’t know for what. I read the poster advertising the play again, inspected the store windows, watched the cars going by on the wrong side of the street.

She emerged from the theater and I went up to her.

Thank you, it was a very good performance, I said to her.

She was with two women and all stared at me curiously.

Thank you, she said and it was as if she had said, I love you. I was hooked.

You’re an American? she added.

I admitted my guilt.

What are you doing in Portsmouth instead of London? she said, genuine curiosity in her eyes.

Wandering, I guess, I said. I’m at LAMDA on a Fulbright.

She nodded. An excellent school. In theater?

Writer, I said, a little ill at ease with the claim.

Come along, we’re going to a party, she said. My name is Megan. This is Alice and Linda.

I shook hands all around.

It all seemed perfectly natural and she accepted me without further question. We talked about the play—she didn’t feel the false notes that I thought I had detected—and about theater in general. Alice and Linda walked on ahead of us, leaving us to chat things up.

You’re writing a play then, she said, not as a question but as a matter of fact.

Yes, trying to anyhow, I said. I originally did it as a one-acter, but now I’m expanding it.

She looked at me shrewdly. Terribly difficult, I would think, she said. Most one-acts don’t have enough substance to stretch into three.

You sum it up nicely, I said, suddenly aware that she had hit it just right, that stretch was indeed my problem.

I wanted to write once, she said, digging her hands in her windbreaker pockets. But it was all a bloody waste of time. I don’t seem to be able to put two decent words together.

You seem to do all right now, I said.

Perhaps, chum, but that’s writing. Talking I can muddle through, she said.

We were walking through one of the less attractive neighborhoods of Portsmouth, car garages, rubbish lots, small factories. We stopped at what appeared to be a factory door and I followed the three. The party was already in progress, a bar set up on sawhorses and planks, a record player with some Ted Heath records playing. There were perhaps twenty men and women about, most in theater type clothing—dramatic and cheap. We went to the bar and helped ourselves to the straw-wrapped fiasci (plural, thanks to reading about Italian wines) of wine. I hung onto Megan, being a stranger to all others. She introduced me to several of the other guests, none of whose names I caught. They all accepted me with a tinge of curiosity, my accent, I suppose.

One tall blondish fellow greeted Megan entirely too familiarly for my taste, throwing his arms around her and kissing her on the mouth, simultaneously shaking hands with me as if I were a hat rack.

Megan finally led me to a broken-down sofa, grease spots dotting it like acne, and we sat down.

I told her about myself at her gentle prodding—my youth in Ohio, growing up with a newspaperman father, an artistic mother and three lusty sisters. About going to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, an Ivy League type college in the great Midwest. About my play, of course. And at all times she seemed vastly interested, curious. It was a special quality she took to everything she did: a deep interest in the subject of the moment, total absorption, devouring the crumbs and bits of one’s life or the story’s potential.

Your play, she said at one point, it sounds terribly dramatic, with the soliloquies, stark staging and all that. Almost as if it were a poem rather than a play.

Part of it is in blank verse, I admitted. I had started out with free verse, but quickly decided that was not structured enough and had switched.

Perhaps I could give it a read, she said. I’ll be up in London next week, reading for a part in a new staging of ‘The Tempest.’

My favorite Shakespeare play, I said.

Isn’t it everyone’s? she said, again hitting a commonality. Alistair Sims is to star.

Sims was not a well-known actor in America, but I had seen several of his films in London and had found him to be an engaging performer with a beautiful sense of timing and a gentle, raspy voice that seemed to ask the right questions.

If you have the time, we could meet, I said, hoping desperately.

Well, the reading is Wednesday morning. We could meet at Eros in Trafalgar Square, you see, she said. Perhaps about one?

I was lucky we got that far because the big tall blond guy came over and pulled her up from the sofa, leading her over to a group engaged in some kind of argument. I was quite clearly not invited. And I couldn’t help but notice the familiar way his hand rested on her ass.

It was to become an almost occupational hazard, my unspoken jealousy and her blithe, unconscious way of feeding it.

I finished my wine—it was of the cheaper Italian variety, not that I knew much about wines in those days—and left. Nobody said goodbye. I sat in the train station until the first morning train to London and rode the way both brooding about the blond guy and buoyed by the thought of the Wednesday meeting.

I prepared for that meeting carefully, clean shirt, even clean underwear. Not that I presumed. I put the carbon of the script for the one-act in a manila envelope for her and took the tube to the Square. In front of the Eros statue I waited.

By one-thirty I was sadly convinced she wouldn’t show and I was about to leave when I saw her pulling a tall, dark-haired older man across the pavement, through the pigeons, to me.

Hullo, sorry I’m late, she said breathlessly. The reading went on and on and I don’t know if I got the part but this is William Bright. He was reading, too.

We shook hands briefly.

Is that your manuscript in the envelope? she said, reaching out for it.

I gave it to her, saying yes.

Wonderful! she said. I want to read it right away, but we have another audition we want to try. So let’s get together later. Is your address on the script?

I had failed to do that, thinking foolishly that we would sit and read the play together. So I hastily jotted it down on the envelope.

All this time William had been silent, his dark eyes brooding deep, his square jaw fixed, so handsome I could have spit in his face.

We’ve got to run, she said, leaning over and giving me a peck on the cheek. I’ll write.

And she was gone, pulling William after her through the crowds of tourists and birds, disappearing into London.

I found an open pub (I never did figure out closing times in London) and downed three large ales. I was hopelessly in love, so much so that I sat down and, over the next few days, wrote three terrible short stories about unhappy lovers, a series of poems equally rubbish, and finished the second act of my play, changing my heroine from a brunette to a blonde.

I didn’t hear from her until shortly before I was scheduled to sail back to America, my Fulbright having run out and my play finished but unperformed. The letter was enclosed in the same manila envelope with the script. It had seen better days, with coffee stains, what I took to be wine blotches, dog-ears, indecipherable marginal notes scattered about. Her letter, on stationery from the Hotel Parker in Naples, was brief:

"Dear Max Baker,

"Sorry about the delay, but I got a part in a movie being shot in Rome at Cinecitta and things got awfully unhinged. And then I got another role in an American film being done in Naples and one thing led to another.

Anyhow, finally finished your one-act and I think it quite good. Very meaty parts in it! Love to see the expanded version of it. Perhaps you can send it to me, care of my parents in Portsmouth.

She had scribbled her address on the letter at the bottom. Plus a P.S.: Congratulate me. I got married in Rome to a wonderful man. A Swede and now I’m a Swedish meatball!

It was all I needed to make the voyage back a total disaster. I moped the entire eight days, thinking of her married to a Swede. She hadn’t even told me his name.

In New York I talked to several agents, getting in to see them on the strength of my lapsed Fulbright and London cachet. Only one, the seeder of the lot, agreed to see if he could place my script.

I rode the Pennsylvanian Limited back to Ohio and got a job writing commercials for a Cincinnati radio station. I heard nothing from the agent until almost a year later. His note, with the script, was another brief dose of bitter medicine:

Dear Max—Sorry, no luck with the script. Everyone agreed that it was well written, moved nicely, and worked theatrically. Biggest negative was it didn’t add up to a whole hell of a lot."

So I quit my job and got in my car, an old Plymouth inherited from my father, and said to hell with it and headed for California.

Again on the strength of my Fulbright, I got a job with Warner Bros. as a junior, junior writer. It was nothing to sneeze at, $80 a week and spending most of my time sifting through over-the-transom script submissions. But at least I could call myself a professional writer, even though it meant living in flat in Silver Lake and subsisting on tacos and draft beer.

But I wasn’t alone in my quest, although there were twenty actors for every would-be writer in Los Angeles. And I quickly fell in with the movie crowd—the fringes, that is. We haunted the sneak previews, read all the gossip and trade sheets, talked about the Europeans as the inspiration of the industry and secretly dreamed of having a job connected with an MGM Gene Kelly musical.

Warner Bros., of course, wasn’t big on musicals. Its staple was the crime epic combined with Bette Davis originals and costumers. It was a fiefdom of the four brothers, smaller of the majors, profitable and a little behind the times. Jack Warner didn’t believe in coddling his employees; I shared a small office with two other junior juniors, once in a while getting a chance to actually read a shooting script as opposed to the flotsam that came in over the transom. In less than a year I was the senior junior, junior, as the other two had moved on to what they claimed were better jobs, writing copy for local radio stations. It was still show biz, they said.

Jack apparently didn’t see any need to replace them, so I was stuck with reading all of the junk that flowed in. This meant I spent longer hours than I wanted to keep from being buried by the mail sacks. I took to cheating, of course, as every other junior, junior writer (read reader for writer) in history. I barely got through most cover letters before firing the scenarios back. Once in a while if the writer was female and enclosed a picture (and an amazing number of them did for some obscure reason, maybe that they wanted to be actresses as well as screenwriters) and she was fetching enough, I’d read some of the script. But it was always a waste of time. Most would-be writers didn’t even bother to learn the format for screenplays or the one-page synopses favored by producers.

One ugly Saturday in an ugly November (and LA can be very ugly in November) I was desultorily reading a submission from Broken Bow, Nebraska, when a real writer wandered into my cell. I knew he was a real writer, his name was Ian Crooke, an Englishman who had written some serious novels but then had fallen into the Hollywood trap of easy money. His last two films had been flops, all message and no action, the critics had said.

He was a lean, pointy-faced man, tall, high cheekbones, unruly red hair and a pale complexion that looked as if he used an umbrella to keep out of the LA sun. I looked up at him questioningly. He was obviously drunk.

Young man, you are in the employ of the brothers Warner? he asked.

I admitted it.

As you are in the writers’ building, one presumes that you can type. Is that assumable?

I admitted it again. Why change a winning line?

And that you can also read?

I felt it time for a change. Sure, I can read if it’s in English. I didn’t do too well in French.

He sniffed. A common American failing, he said. He gestured at me with a thick, rolled up bundle of ms. Could you read and type this so that I can have it by Monday? I’m squiffed to my eyeballs and couldn’t find the letter E if my next paycheck depended on it, and it does.

I took the sheaf of paper and read over the first two pages of scribbles. It was ridiculous, but I could read it.

You couldn’t type it in draft? I said. Nobody worked with handwriting anymore. Secretaries taking dictation protected you from that if you were a real writer.

Did it at home, Coldwater Canyon, he bragged. By the pool. He topped himself.

This is beyond the call of duty, I said. And besides, I have a hot date tonight. Which was a pure lie; the closest I had come to a hot date since I had arrived in LA was sharing a bagel with a wardrobe assistant in the cafeteria.

I’ll credit you with additional dialog, he said wickedly.

He had me there. A credit like that and I could get in the Screen Writers Guild.

I’ll have it in your office Monday morning, I said.

He nodded. I thought you would. I say, what’s your name?

Baker, Max Baker, I said.

He nodded. You’re on your way, Max, he said owlishly. And weaved his way out of the office.

Neither of us had the foggiest idea of how prophetic his parting words were.

I read through the 70-some pages of scribble. It was a mixture of brilliance and balderdash. It concerned a young American foreign correspondent working in prewar Nazi Germany and his involvement in a spy ring seeking information for the State Department. It wound up with a novel twist on getting the hero out of Germany and into France just before the panzers rolled, but the dialog was just awful, neither English nor American, and certainly not the way that Americans were convinced German Nazis spoke. In short, the plot was great, the climax powerful, but the getting there boring.

Still, a job is a job and a credit is more than a job so I warmed up the Underwood and began work. I was a good typist, having progressed from hunt-and-peck to touch through the offices of my college lit teacher who told me you had to be able to type fast to type good. Ha.

So I got it done by midnight. I pulled the carbon books apart and put two copies of the ms in spring binders. I even put labels on the binders, Trip to Berlin, by Ian Crooke with additional dialog by Max Baker.

I put the two copies in his office. The third smudged carbon I took home with me and Sunday I spent doing a rewrite on my portable. I don’t know why I did it, I had no brief to do so, but I felt I could really make a contribution. And maybe do myself some good.

I got it done again by midnight and read it over. It was now a film script, to me. It had action, the people spoke like real people (with enough wit and refinement to at least make it better than bar talk). I hadn’t really altered any of the scenes except to cut back and forth more quickly, to give the actors shorter lines, cut out some of the abstractions. And make the hero more appreciative of the love interest. I was adding my own desire there, of course.

So Monday I was in early, red-rimmed eyes leading the way to Ian’s office. He was a senior writer and therefore had a secretary, but she was 40ish and wore starched blouses so I could see why he wouldn’t want to ask her to do a typing job on Saturday.

I asked if he was in and she announced me. He opened the door to his office and beckoned me in.

It was a nice office; carpet on the floor, window looking out on one of the shooting lots, a sofa, nice desk, typewriter (one of the big, heavy ones that make typing a breeze). He slumped behind the desk and pulled a bottle of Boodles Gin out of a drawer, poured us both tumblers. He drank half of his at a gulp while I tried to sip mine. A major mistake, clearly. When I could see again I saw him hefting the binder.

Well, what did you think, junior, junior? he said.

I thought it had a pretty good plot line, I said. A cut above most scripts that way.

But… he said. There’s a but in your voice.

I don’t know, I’m just a beginner…

Cut the horseshit, he said.

Dialog, I said. It’s way off. Too preachy, idiom wrong. Not terse enough. It’s a spy thriller, a newspaper guy the hero and he talks like a college prof. Like my college prof.

I see, he said, finishing his gin. And how would you do it?

No fool I, I had brought my version with me. I handed it over to him without a word.

He took it and began reading. After a few pages he told me to pour us another drink. I had barely touched mine. But I topped up