The Camera Always Lies Read online

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  First Things First

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  Vital Signs

  john metcalf

  HUGH HOOD

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © Hugh Hood, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hood, Hugh, 1928–2000, author

  The camera always lies / Hugh Hood.

  (Reset books)

  First published: Toronto : McClelland and Stewart, 1967.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  isbn 978-1-77196-025-0 (pbk.). — isbn 978-1-77196-026-7 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  ps8515.o49c3 2015 c813’.54 c2014-907971-0

  c2014-907972-9

  Readied for the press by Dan Wells

  Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

  Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support

  of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the

  Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  1

  DOWN THERE

  1

  Three bottles stood beside the telephone, on the table between the beds. The biggest was about the size and shape of a bottle of fifty aspirin tablets, and the others were vial-shaped, cylindrical, and made of a translucent greenish plastic. Each of the vials would hold a dozen tablets. All three bottles carried the prescription label of the same doctor and drugstore, and they had all been obtained in April of this year.

  A woman lay on one of the beds at an uncomfortable angle, neither quite on nor quite off, with her feet crossed and dangling awkwardly toward the floor. One shoe had come off. It looked as if she had been sitting or leaning on an elbow and had then slumped down without getting under the covers. Except for the shoe which had fallen off, she was fully dressed. She looked like a piece of the furniture.

  Sometimes her chest lifted slightly and the barely expelled breath raised a tiny bubble of saliva in a corner of her mouth that burst with a faint pop, the only sound in the room. Outside, in the motel court, cars could be heard coming in and going out, and voices called across the court with Saturday-night cheerfulness.

  “Just before Rutland on Route Seven,” said a hearty voice, and “I’ve been through there,” said another. Glasses clinked. In the next suite a radio played. Fair evening light came through the Venetian blinds, striping black shadows across the drugged woman’s face and playing on her slightly opened eyes.

  Her body stirred. From some source in the brain a signal was flashed to the limbs, moving them so that she rolled onto her left side and got her elbow underneath her. Several seconds passed while she tried to lift herself on her shaking arm. Her eyes opened wider, but she didn’t seem to see much. There was a slight film on the eyes.

  As she hunched herself up on the left elbow, her right arm began to come across her body, slowly but with purpose. Something animated the cortex; purpose formed the signals and kept them coming; the right hand groped around and then clawed its way up the side of the bedside table, finally resting on the top. As the fingers flicked convulsively open, the forefinger and thumb hit one of the vials and knocked it over, and the light, cheap, greenish-plastic object rolled soundlessly past the phone and fell on the deep-piled carpet. The hand clenched, fingers tightened and loosened, and finally the forearm rolled over and the hand grasped the telephone receiver. Until now the woman’s face had been quite still, but at the feel of the cold smooth surface in the palm, her mouth twitched open automatically; she salivated and tried to speak, but nobody could have understood the sounds she made. Her face contorted with an extreme effort.

  “. . . et . . . et . . . err . . .”

  She dropped the receiver and fell back on the bed. The receiver swung quietly back and forth at the end of its cord between the beds. In the motel office an orange light appeared on the switchboard. The owner, drowsing in a swivel chair, sighed and leaned forward to put the call through. He jiggled a hook on the switchboard.

  “Hello,” he said, “Suite Thirty-four?” There was no answer.

  At five-thirty, earlier that evening, Rose Leclair had left the Rivoli, where she had been seeing Goody Two-Shoes for the second time, and had gone by cab to a parking garage near the Queensboro Bridge, a block or two past her house on East Sixty-first. She had sat in her car for some time, overwhelmed by a wave of shame, betrayal, embarrassment, and defeat.

  “Everything O.K., Miss Leclair?” asked the garage attendant after a while. He told reporters later that her behaviour had scared him.

  “She’s got plenty of go, that one,” he told them, “so I knew right away something was wrong.”

  His words roused her and she made an effort, and spoke to him fairly cheerfully. “I’m fine, Charlie,” she said, smiling at him, and he went off shaking his head. Sitting in the car in the shadowy garage, she felt resolution grow more firm in her mind; she rummaged in the glove compartment. The three bottles were there. She had been hoarding them, saving up for three weeks now, and she had a few extra pills loose in her bag. She took the bottles from the glove compartment and studied them, hating especially the feel of the little green vials. There was something faked and betraying about it, like the touch of gunmetal. She put the bottles in her bag and started the car. It occurred to her that she could do it right here, just by rolling up the windows, but it would probably cause Charlie a lot of trouble.

  She emerged into the lovely end-of-April light just at dinnertime, feeling hungry and ignoring the impulse. She didn’t want to eat something, make herself sick swallowing the pills, throw up, and have to start hoarding them all over again. She was planning, looking ahead, figuring, and ignored her hunger and her beautiful house on East Sixty-first, deliberately bypassing it. She considered driving out to Pelham Manor, where Kate Dixon had rented a house for the run of her show, but decided against it. She picked her way north through the Bronx, and up around Fordham she hit University Avenue, old U.S. Route 1, which she followed aimlessly, detesting the effect of the erosion of time on the scenery, the dirty alleys, rusted bits of bodywork behind service stations, vacant lots of gravel and rank high grass.
She noticed suddenly that she had come as far as Pelham; she had no business bothering poor Kate, who had troubles of her own.

  She turned onto the Hutchinson River and started north into Westchester, trying to think of a place. At each ramp she read the sign and rejected the town as unsuitable. It was important to be where nobody knew you. She had a vision of lawyers and agents and producers viewing her afterwards, and it made her feel nauseated even without food. Who would want to die in Purchase or Mamaroneck? She made one tentative pass after another at an exit, without following through.

  Soon she was into Connecticut on the Merritt Parkway; she had come much further than she’d intended. She passed New Canaan and was tempted by the name, which struck her as appropriate, but she had missed her chance and had to continue north in the heavy traffic to the Route 7 turnoff. She turned north and drove slowly towards Wilton through clusters of eyesores, and about fifteen minutes’ drive beyond the town, at a restricted pace, brought her to the Cresta Corona Motel, where she took a suite for the night from Lou Aspinall, the owner. She arrived in declining sunlight, flipped her gloves onto one of the beds, spent almost half an hour swallowing the tablets three or four at a time, washing them down with gulps of water, feeling her stomach heave at the cold flood, and slumped back across the bed a little after nine-thirty.

  2

  GOING DOWN

  1

  “In the Rivoli on Easter Saturday?” asked Mr. Callegarini with delight.

  “March 25th, 1967,” said Bud Horler. “Easter is early next spring.”

  “It’s definite, not a doubt about it, not the least in the world,” said Lenehan like a stage Irishman. “Faith, no.”

  “What a booking!”

  “You said a mouthful,” said Horler, smiling.

  They were sitting on a rooftop patio outside a branch bank on Santa Monica Boulevard, over near the West Los Angeles line, high enough for them to catch the occasional gleam of light reflected off the ocean. It was a clear sunny April day, warm for that time of year, bringing out the indigenous fauna. Girls in abbreviated swimsuits passed and repassed their table, causing Horler, Lenehan, and their confidential secretary Larry Solomon to reflect gravely.

  “I’ve arranged a lot of financing in my time,” said Horler meditatively, “but never in exactly these circumstances.” They were drinking rum out of pierced pineapples through straws, a sybaritic nuance encouraged by the bank, which inclined more and more towards the Pompeian tone in its conduct of affairs.

  Mr. Callegarini smiled. “It is the bank’s wish to make finance as simple and pleasurable as, say, boating. It is an error to think that serious actions must be painful. It’s very simple. You want money and can pay to rent it. We have money and are prepared to rent it. Why should there be any mystery, or guilt, or hidden fear, connected with finance?”

  “Why indeed?” echoed Lenehan, sucking contentedly on his pineapple.

  “Like public worship and private prayer, finance, though important, ought to be carried on in a joyous spirit. That is the bank’s feeling. We try to create, in our offices, open palaces of sun and air. This is a California bank, founded here in a glad Western spirit, financially strong here; the branch system is our great strength and it flourishes in the California community. Our branches reflect our climate and our ecology, open as they are to sun, light, and the venturesome heart.”

  “Come off it,” said Horler.

  “I admit it,” said Callegarini, “I’m quoting the official literature. But after all, it makes sense. Jeez, when I was a kid borrowing money was like going to confession. You went into a little cubicle and told your sad story, and they’d absolve you—or maybe they wouldn’t—with fifty dollars against a lien on your furniture.”

  “I remember my uncle’s, back in the old country,” said Horler reminiscently. “When you went around to put something in pawn, they seemed to see into your very soul. Rather daunting it was too. Drink up.”

  “That’s a firm date?”

  “Tell him, Larry.”

  Pausing to examine a girl’s buttocks as she wandered past in virtually nothing, Solomon opened his briefcase. “Hmmmmmn,” he said distractedly, “hmmmmn, here are the agreements. The percentages are specified on page eleven, holdover options on page thirteen, release dates in other key cities, here and here.” He shook out the document, and Paul Callegarini handled it with expert and familiar negligence.

  “What have you done to this bank? What are these girls?” asked Solomon. They were conferring under an orange-and-mauve beach umbrella, around a glass-topped table to which an attendant brought additional refreshments from time to time. These furnishings were deployed on a small, carefully tended patio of gravel, flagstones, and false-looking grass, with a mock lake at one side and a series of descending levels at the other, down to the street four floors below. There were short connecting staircases from one level to the next; people climbed up from the street and sat on low benches beside the little lake. They brought popsicles with them, and lunches, and the girls went to and fro; the one who had caught Larry’s eye was normally a teller, but was doubling as a Naiad for the week.

  “What the hell,” he said as she rotated her hips indecently though unconsciously. “We don’t consider this a part of banking back East.”

  “California is different, thank God,” said Lenehan.

  Callegarini seconded him warmly. “Let me tell you guys, when I say ‘Thank God for California,’ I mean every syllable. I’m not a booster, I just love to be warm, and you got to admit, it is warm.”

  “Explain these girls,” said Solomon, “or we’ll think you aren’t serious-minded enough, and borrow money somewhere else.”

  “That’s easy. This is ‘Banking in Community Life Week,’ where we show how our institution fits into the social patterns. We open our entire operation to the public; they can come and inspect the adding machines, inspect the premises, see that we’ve nothing to hide. This branch had trouble last year, I recall. A widow with real estate holdings in Brentwood got stuck in the vault with the timer on.”

  “What did they do?”

  “What could they do? She damn near suffocated. So this year the time lock isn’t activated. We’ll probably have a big holdup on Friday . . . anyway, the public comes and we get to know our customers.”

  “And the girls?”

  “Scenery, stage setting pure and simple. Did you ever hear of any operation that didn’t run smoother for a few pretty girls?”

  “But the drinks, the garden chairs?”

  “That’s different, that’s the VIP treatment. They sent me to this conference with instructions that you boys are to be treated with every consideration.”

  “Why not just give us the money?”

  “You couldn’t carry it home; it would weigh too much. And besides we have to go through the formalities of examining your position. We have our stockholders to protect.”

  “But we’ll get our dough,” said Lenehan.

  “Why not?”

  Horler asked, “What do you get to drink when you want to borrow fifty dollars?”

  “There’s a fountain inside the main entrance to your left.”

  “I’ll have another of these pineapples,” said Horler. He beckoned to an attendant, who came quickly over.

  “Can I have a refill?” Horler was a jockey-sized gnome of a fellow, and the attendant, a small man himself, smiled down at him as he lolled in improbable sports clothes in his orange-and-mauve chair. People often smiled at Horler, till they knew him; it seemed so quaint, even faintly ridiculous, the sight of this miniature Englishman with the unplaceable accent, all dressed up like a big producer. His voice had an elusive charm; what he spoke wasn’t cockney or Lancashire or Yorkshire, or any of the varieties of English accent known in North America. In fact he came from Nottingham and spoke with the throaty growl of the area, unfamiliar to Ameri
cans because not often parodied on the screen.

  One of his horde of distant cousins had been on the halls in the teens and twenties, and later on, in the early and middle thirties, had made a couple of dozen six-reelers under the quota, clad always in baggy plus fours and an ineffably silly expression: Our Cousin Syd. It had been his name that had launched Bud Horler in the trade, at first as doorman in a picture palace in Nottingham in the early 1920s. He had not enjoyed a meteoric rise. He had gone through all of it: doorman, ticket taker, assistant manager, chief clerk in the office of a film-rental business operating in the Midlands, salesman for a distributor, exhibitor. He had inched forward when there was no money to be made in British film production, and precious little in operating cinemas. He had not had an easy time getting where he was, and his smart, vulgar jockey’s air concealed immense strength of purpose. What he did not know about the economics of film production would go into a pretty small nutshell. He never said what he thought, except to Lenehan.

  Horler had done two years as executive producer on a Crown Film unit at the start of the war, and his name had more or less accidentally been associated with four high quality documentaries of feature length which the unit had produced. Afterwards he had worked at Eagle-Lion, acquiring North American experience in the fiasco. He never forgot from then on that the first thing to be done when producing a feature is to arrange the release dates. He knew, better perhaps than anybody else in the industry, that it is the exhibitor who counts.

  He would explain, as his first principle, that there is no point whatsoever in making a film if you can’t get it shown. Nothing is more frustrating than the ownership of 8,200 feet of exposed film—an edited print, into which you’ve sunk sums of money varying between fifty thousand and ten million—which you can’t get shown.

  “Package the film in your head,” he would say. “Put it all together at agency lunches—the script, the players, the director. But spend no money until you’ve talked to a releasing corporation. Afterwards you can arrange financing by snapping your fingers.” He had been so unfailingly impressed by the results of acting on this maxim that he and Lenehan were on the verge of going into distribution themselves, buying a string of six features from a French producer-director and marketing them in art houses, just to get a foot in the door.