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  ALSO BY

  JEROME CHARYN

  (most recent titles)

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  Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories (2015)

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  First published in the United States in 2017 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2017 by Jerome Charyn

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-15-3

  Contents

  MR. CHANCE

  LANA, 1969

  DOWN ON THE FARM, 1967

  LITTLE RED

  MOSES AND GAVRILA, 1944

  MR. CHANCE

  — 1 —

  BEFORE THERE WAS KOSINSKI, there was Peter Sellers. I wouldn’t have known anyone without Pete—not Stan Laurel, not Princess Margaret, not Mr. Chance. I’d met Sellers in ’63, when he was the darling of film producers. Every studio wanted him after Lolita. There wasn’t a comic role that Pete couldn’t play. He was Laurel and Hardy, a fat boy who could glide around in a thin man’s bod. But if you loved him in Lolita as the demented playwright, Clare Quilty, please look again. Sellers was Quilty, whose saraband of voices and masks camouflaged a murderous rage. He threw a chair at his first wife and threatened to kill her. He threatened his own darling son and daughter. And he threatened me.

  “I’ll maul you, love. I’ll do you in.”

  His great-great-granddad was Daniel Mendoza, one of England’s most beloved boxers, the first Yid who had ever had an audience with a British sovereign, and Pete’s megalomania had convinced him that he was as burly as Mendoza. But he knew that my own granddad, Archibald Diggers, had once been lord of the London docks. And that’s how come Pete had hired me in the first place. I was an Anglo-American stranded in New York, a journeyman actor, playwright, and philosopher who was driving a limousine to pay the bills. And Sellers told my boss that he would allow no one but Archibald Diggers’ grandson to chauffeur him around Manhattan.

  “Ian,” he said, “I want to kill a man.”

  I’d seen him as Quilty. And I’d pissed away a fortune on acting classes. I decided to go along with his riff.

  “Right, Mr. Sellers. Kill a man.”

  “I want you to run him down. Knock him off at the knees.”

  “Will you sit up front with me, Mr. Sellers? Or hide in the backseat?”

  “Hide? I wouldn’t miss it, love. It’s a lark.”

  It was some Hollywood mogul who had slighted him, or what Sellers imagined as a slight. This mogul was staying with his wife at the Pierre, but he had a mistress in SoHo. And Sellers and I lurked outside a loft on Leonard Street in my company’s Lincoln Continental. The mogul’s name was Garganus, and he was the fattest man I had ever seen, fatter than a sumo wrestler, fatter than Orson Welles. Garganus must have had a glandular problem. But I didn’t hold it against him. I had no grudge against fat men. It was his mistress who fucked with my head. Her fatal flaw was that she reminded me of my wife—blond she was, a real looker, and all legs.

  I gunned the motor. I had little to lose. I couldn’t get into the Screen Actors Guild, and my wife had left me for a furniture salesman. I had as much rage as Clare Quilty. And Sellers could sense that. It excited him. He seemed in a trance.

  “Calm yourself, Ian, like a good little lad.”

  “I’m going to kill that fat fuck,” I said. “I’ll knock him and his tart off at the knees. He’ll shed a few pounds . . . and Blondie won’t be so tall.”

  A fat man himself, Sellers sank behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Someone is bound to recognize me. I’ll be ruined. And what about my mum? She’ll have to tell all her mates that her own boy is a homicidal idiot. Be a good lad, Ian. Drive away, drive away. I’ll reward you with a bonus.”

  “Mr. Sellers,” I said, “if I can’t kill him, then I might as well kill you.”

  We were inseparable after that. He took me everywhere with him, even to Hollywood. I was glad to leave Manhattan and the specter of my wife. And I didn’t mind Sellers’ little insanities. He claimed there was a woman at the airport who was hexing us and giving him the evil eye. He wanted to cancel our flight, but I calmed him down. We were going on a pilgrimage to seek out Stan Laurel, who was hiding somewhere in L.A. Sellers’ cadre of international detectives couldn’t locate Stan Laurel, couldn’t seem to find his address. Stan had dropped out of sight after Ollie’s death, in ’57, and swore never to perform in public again. But Sellers was obsessed with Stan. His fortune-teller, a certain Mrs. Murray, had predicted that he would never make his mark in films until he met Stan Laurel.

  He wouldn’t sit down with studio execs, wouldn’t go through the gate at Paramount until Stan had blessed him. Meanwhile his managers worried about the revenue they would lose while Sellers searched for an invisible man. But they were all wearing blinders. I found Stan Laurel in the phone book. He was living at a seaside resort in Santa Monica. I talked to him on the telephone. He was modest and shy, but said he would be happy to sit with Sellers.

  Pete had rented a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where Brando used to dwell, according to Mrs. Murray, so Sellers wouldn’t hear of staying at any other dump in Hollywood. Soon he mesmerized the entire hotel—Sellers had a way of stunning you. That was his genius; that was his maddening gift. He had turned himself into Marlon Brando in front of our eyes, but the metamorphosis was so subtle, we had little time to reflect. Suddenly we had Marlon Brando where Peter Sellers had been. The lethargic man in horn-rimmed glasses glided and slid like a cat. He might have usurped Brando’s midwestern drawl. But that would have been much too simple for Clare Quilty, who could imitate any voice. He was silent, but when he had to talk, he talked like Pete. And that was pure devilry, as if Marlon Brando, for the unique pleasure of the Chateau Marmont, were playing Peter Sellers.

  When I told him about our appointment with Stan Laurel, he wasn’t particularly pleased.

  “What, that old tit? Why should I bother with him?”

  Then his mood shifted yet again. He began to fawn over me, like a child who had just been slapped.

  “Mustn’t keep Stan waiting. He’s my idol, you know. I’d watch him and Ollie for hours. Couldn’t get me out of the picture show. We wer
e stuck in Ilfracombe during the blitz. Mum had moved us out of harm’s way. And all that sea air made me ropey. I was used to the greasepaint and sweat of the music hall—Mum had her own act. She played the Ratcatcher’s Daughter, and other choice roles. And now all we had was sun and sea. And so I crept into that comfy tomb of the local movie palace. And there in the dark was Stan, with his wimpy voice that could comfort a lad who’d been the only Jew at St. Aloysius’. Mum thought it best to send me to a Catholic school, you see, so I could learn the catechism. Priests made the best professors, Mum said. No one bothered calling me Peter. All they had to say was ‘the Jew.’ I was one of a kind. I could have murdered Mum. But I hugged her for half an hour, thinking murder. ‘My darling,’ I said, wanting to bite into her throat and silence her forever. And it was Stan Laurel’s whimpering that kept me sane. There wasn’t another funnyman on the planet who could weep with a smile on his face. And I’m here to pay homage to Stan. Come, boyo, I’ll wash his feet.”

  He wouldn’t consider renting a car. He’d had his Bentley Continental shipped over from London—he was always buying and selling premium cars. He sat up front as we rode out to Santa Monica Bay.

  “I’m so excited,” he said. “If you’re lying, Ian, I’ll beat your brains into pulp. Stan will really see us? I’ll die of shame if he sends us away.”

  He kept up this riff until we arrived on Ocean Avenue; then he turned silent. I could sense his sour mood; his whole bod seemed to rattle with rage. Anything could have triggered this transformation—the hint of salt in the air, the jolt of some lost memory, or an overload of random static inside his head. I saw nothing that should have alarmed him, nothing but a harmless row of resorts.

  Stan Laurel lived at one of these hotels, which had an enormous swimming pool half a block away from the ocean. But I couldn’t taste the sea. The air on Ocean Avenue had the sweet smell of lacquered wood.

  Pete wouldn’t get out of the car. He dug his shoulders into the Bentley’s expanse of cushions. It was like being lost in a caravan.

  “I can’t face Stan,” he said. “I’m all knackered. I’m done in.”

  “I’ll knacker you in a minute if you don’t crawl out of that bus.”

  He was whimpering, in Stan Laurel’s voice, but I hardened to his magic and hauled him from the cushions.

  “You’re a monster, you are. I’ll have you arrested for assault. Your granddad was a murderer, and so are you. . . . Can’t you see, Little Ian, this bloody place reminds me of Ilfracombe. It has the same sickening sweet smell, the rot of old wood and bitter, broken lives. I’ll never make it inside. I’ll start to puke.”

  “Then I’ll give you a tin can to puke in.”

  And I shoved him past the rotting doors of Stan’s hotel. The lobby looked as if a hurricane had hit it; pictures of the sea hung from crooked nails in the walls; chairs and tables tilted at an impossible slant. The hotel clerk stood behind a desk that seemed about to cave in. He had an intercom that was composed of snaking wires with silvered tips. He plugged one wire into a metal board, whispered a few words into his own fist, and announced that we could go upstairs to see “Mr. Stan.”

  Stan Laurel looked like an aging child in a sweater that was much too small. He lived in an apartment that seemed to fit perfectly with his own size. He’d been given an Oscar in 1961, for a lifetime of clowning, and the statuette sat on a desk laden with lamps and assorted bric-a-brac. And the moment we arrived, Stan pretended to polish the statuette with his sleeve. It must have been part of a comedy routine he’d prepared for pilgrims such as ourselves. I’m sure he didn’t have the vaguest idea who Peter Sellers was.

  He was blinking and smiling at us in the middle of his routine, when suddenly his little red eyes seemed to pop out of his skull. Pete had grown enormous, stood like a giant who was much too large for Stan’s living room.

  “Babe,” the little man whispered without his famous falsetto. “Babe, is that you?”

  Sellers didn’t answer him at first. He’d turned himself into Oliver Hardy in the middle of Stan’s blinks, but Hardy without a mustache, or bulbous cheeks and a bald crown.

  “Stanley,” he said, “where is my breakfast?”

  The little man started to cry. “I’m so happy,” he said. He shook my hand, but he didn’t dare approach this phantom who talked like Oliver Hardy.

  “Must I repeat myself?” Sellers said with one of Hardy’s signature smirks. “Will I have to wallop you?”

  “Please, please,” said Stan. “I haven’t been walloped in years.”

  And then he went into his old weeping act. The big fat man had always made him cry.

  “Ollie, I don’t have a thing in the house . . . not the butter you like. I haven’t shopped once since I moved to Santa Monica. The bellhop always fries my eggs.”

  “And what if I discharged the bellhop and fried your head in the griddle until your ears started to explode?”

  “Oh, I would love it, Ollie, I really would.”

  Stan hopped around his cluttered room in ecstasy. I worried that he would have a heart attack. But I couldn’t slow him down.

  “Mr. Sellers,” I said, nudging the big fat phantom. “Do something. He’ll hurt himself.”

  But Stan himself came to a stop. And he had that pixieish grin of a shrewd performer; he’s the one who had invented Laurel and Hardy’s little ballets. “Thank you for coming. Too bad I don’t have any tea in the house. Would you like my autograph . . . and a picture of Babe and me?”

  And that’s when I really took my measure of Pete; the whole aura of Oliver Hardy vanished from his face; he shrank into his own skin.

  “No,” he said. “The pleasure of meeting you was enough. I shan’t forget it.”

  “Forgive me. I can’t recall your name.”

  “It’s a trifle,” Sellers said. “It has no significance. We’ll be on our way.”

  “But do come again. Next time I won’t forget the tea.”

  Sellers was seething by the time we left the Oceana Hotel.

  “You were marvelous,” I said. “For a moment you had him fooled. He looked so depressed, so shrunken, when we came in—a relic in his little room. And then his eyes lit. He really thought his old partner had come back to life. His face was on fire. It was kind of you, Mr. Sellers.”

  “He gives me the creeps. Do I want to end up in some dungeon by the sea? Fondling a statuette? No thanks. You can cross Stan Laurel off my list. I’m sorry you ever found him.”

  And I drove Peter Sellers back to studioland in that silver Bentley of his, while he sat in utter silence.

  — 2 —

  I THOUGHT HE WOULD SACK ME, squeeze his eyes shut and cast me adrift. He had his own entourage, a mob of sycophants, including a chauffeur, a secretary, and a bodyguard, and I wondered why he would need another waif.

  “It’s your looks, Ian, it’s your looks. A handsome bloke like you. It calms people, puts their fears to sleep. And all the birds are attracted to you. They’re drawn to you like flies, and I’m not greedy. I’ll settle for the slop that washes ashore. Besides, I could use a reader. I’m sort of illiterate. But you mustn’t tell a soul.”

  I’d studied James Joyce at school, but as Peter Sellers’ reader, I had to read Ulysses again. He’d been asked to play Poldy, Leopold Bloom. I relished the idea of Peter Sellers as Poldy. He would have heaped upon Bloom some of his own comic madness and quicksilver. But he changed his mind at the last minute. The Pink Panther had ruined him. The whole world wanted him to repeat the role of that bumbler, Inspector Clouseau. He wasn’t an actor anymore. He was a fucking franchise. But he did have the most loyal of fans, Princess Margaret, who loved to do her own impersonations of Inspector Clouseau.

  The royal family had picked up Peter Sellers, had adopted him, like some toy dog. He could be outrageous at Windsor or Clarence House and Kensington—spill his soup, tug at the tablecloth, or ride from room to room on the tea trolley, bumping into the palace chamberlain. The queen thought he was the fun
niest man alive. But it was her sister, Princess Margaret, the wife of Lord Snowden, who understood the sadness behind his savagery, since she was something of a toy dog herself. She had been performing since the age of two. She was the little sister, the unserious one, while Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, or “Lilibet,” was born with a scepter in her tiny fist. Lilibet had been reared to rule, while Margaret Rose, who was twice as beautiful, had to cross her large crystalline eyes and play the clown at her side. And thus she was fond of Peter Sellers, as one clown to another.

  “I’m nervous, dear boy,” he crooned. He had this cockeyed scheme of marrying Princess Margaret and moving into Kensington Palace. He continued to plot, even while Snowden, famous as a fashion photographer, was one of the few friends he had; they would go off together on long photographic safaris; still, Sellers plotted behind his back.

  “Ian, PM doesn’t love that pygmy. They fight all the time. God’s my witness, I watched her make a fist and knock him down. PM’s a better prizefighter than Mendoza.”

  “PM” was Princess Margaret, of course. She was also called “Ma’am.” But Sellers loved to call her “Ma’am Darling.”

  “She’s spoiled rotten, Ian. She won’t leave the palace without her detective and her chauffeur. Can you imagine having dinner at Raffles or some other bloody trattoria with a detective from Scotland Yard breathing down your neck? How could I propose marriage?”

  “She’s already got a husband, Pete.”

  His eyes began to hood over with malice. “Don’t you ever call me Pete again. I’ll cut your heart out and feed it to the lions, I will.”

  “But your mum calls you Pete all the time.”

  His mouth started to quiver. “Leave Mum out of the picture, boyo.”

  “But she’s already in the picture, Pete.”

  She would arrive at the Dorchester, where we were holed up, because Pete would rather live at a hotel than in his penthouse near Hampstead Heath. And his mum was always coming upstairs to visit in her toreador pants, her hair dyed orange or purple, depending on the season or her mood. She’d hug both of us for half an hour. “Peg and Pete,” she would coo, “Peg and Pete against the world . . . and now Little Ian.” He’d bought his mum a flat in Highgate, but she couldn’t resist the Dorchester, with its liveried butlers, who would always greet Peg with a long hello and squire her to Sellers’ door, clutching a golden cage. Peg went nowhere without her parrot, a gift from Pete. The parrot was known as Henry, which was Pete’s middle name. He’d been born Richard Henry Sellers, but Peg had a little secret. She’d had another boy, named Peter, who had died as an infant while she was on tour. She almost never spoke about him, but Pete had inherited that dead boy’s name. He was the living ghost of an earlier Peter Sellers. That was why he had such a weakness for astrologers and other clairvoyants; they nourished his belief in reincarnation.