“Experiments! Experiments! What is this business?”
He brightened. “Would you believe it? I’ve contacted memories back to three months after my birth. And at this rate I’ll reach birth itself within a few weeks.”
I shuddered. What a nasty ambition! “What’s the percentage?”
“You don’t understand,” he said warming to his subject. “The further back I go the more nearly I approach total recall. At present I can contact any memory in my experience back to six months, day by day, minute by minute. I can run off these memories like colored movies, recalling every sight, sound, smell, feel and taste.”
“So what happened earlier than six months that’s so important?”
“Probably nothing of great interest,” Hardy granted, “but the further back I go, the more intense is the reality of all my memories. For instance, right now I can return to the day, hour, minute and second I went to school for the first time. I can remember the look on the teacher’s face and hear the screams of twenty-six kindergarten kids. I can smell the freshly oiled floors and the newly painted walls. I can feel the wart on my mother’s finger, the one I was holding onto for dear life.”
The almost fanatic glow in his eager, young face impressed me. Realism of memory! Could that be the essence of his successful first play? Did his down-to-earth touch account for Updraft’s surprising audience appeal?
I pleaded, “Don’t let me down now, Hillary. I gambled thousands of dollars on your first play. If you can repeat we’ll both enjoy an even better pay-off. Besides, have you looked into what your taxes will be?”
“Taxes? No, I really haven’t, but I’m sure I have enough to last another year. Sorry, Mr. Crocker. Maybe later, but right at the moment—”
His broad-shouldered, lean athletic form drifted through my door and was gone.
Two weeks later Parodisiac arrived, typed on fools-cap, uncorrected, with pencil notations and coffee-spots on it, but it was by-lined, “Hillary Hardy,” and after a single, quick scanning I was overjoyed to pay the expense of transcribing it to more durable paper. The play was powerful, witty and emotion-stirring. It was a work of art.
And on the last page was scribbled in the border: “I looked into my tax bill, and found you were right. I’m almost broke after Uncle Sam takes his cut, so here is the play you asked for. Hope you like it. (signed) H. H.”
There was a P.S. “Expect to hit birth this week.”
When I phoned him at the sanitarium, asking for Sam Buckle, the name he had left originally with Ellie, he refused to come to the phone. So I wired him. “Quit worrying about taxes. I accept your earlier offer to be your agent as well as producer. Good luck on your experiments.”
Parodisiac was much too good to hold for the closing of Updraft. Indeed, the first play was showing no signs of weakening, so I began rounding up talent outside the original cast. This was a cinch. Meredith Crawley finished Act I, Scene I, and accepted the male lead without turning another page. So did Alicia Pennington, even though it meant giving up a personal appearance tour to publicize her latest Hollywood release that was supposed to win her an Oscar.
Not that I had to go after talent like this to put Parodisiac across. It was so potent I believe I could have made it a hit with a cast out of a burleycue revue.
The season was getting late, so I did the unthinkable. I cut normal rehearsal time in half and slammed it at the big town without even a trial run in the back-country. Nobody connected with the show objected—not even Hec Blankenship, my publicity manager. In fact it was he who suggested the sleeper treatment.
With nothing more than last-minute newspaper notices we opened the box-office to a completely uninformed public, and did it knock the critics for a loop! Only a couple showed up for the first performance, along with less than a third-full house of casual first-nighters.
*
People wandered out stunned. A substitute drama-critic from the Times looked me up after the show, and there were tears of gratitude in his eyes. “My review of this play will establish my reputation,” he told me. “If the boss had had any notion of what you were pulling, he’d have been here himself. But what about the author? I thought you were going to have to call the police when you failed to produce the author.”
*
It had been rough. The skimpy crowd had milled about for a half hour screaming “Author, author!” Meanwhile, I was too choked up after the last heart-wrenching scene to get up and make a speech.
Everything had gone perfectly. Even the brief rehearsal time failed to leave any rough edges. Crawley and Pennington were so carried away with their parts that they easily doubled their considerable dramatic stature that first performance. The supporting cast caught fire, too, and, well—the likes of it is rarely seen anywhere.
The lines seemed to come out of the actors’ hearts, not their mouths. Cue-lines blended with the dialogue interplay, the artificiality of stage-sets, costumery and make-up disappeared, and the simple, yet profound drama unreeled like a bolt of vividly printed silk, flowing smoothly, strongly, absorbingly to the tragic-comical climax that left the emotions reeling from the suspense and warm with relief.
Two days later I looked at the figures on advance ticket sales and could find only one conceivable complaint. Parodisiac would make Hillary Hardy so much money that not even taxes could force him to produce another for a great while.
What promised to be a major irritation, fending off the press from Hardy and protecting his anonymity, was converted into a master publicity-stroke by Hec Blankenship. He swore the few of us who knew about Hardy’s youth and whereabouts, to complete secrecy, then he proceeded to build his publicity around the “mystery-author.”
“But he’s got a past!” I objected when Hec first presented the scheme. “Old friends and relatives will spill the beans.”
“Have you really looked into Hillary’s past?” Hec asked.
I confessed I hadn’t. Hec said that he had. It developed that Hillary Hardy was not our boy’s real name. In his passion for anonymity he had been changing his name every time he changed locations, which was often. Hec had traced his background through three moves that brought the author across the country, but the trail petered out at a ranch in Wyoming where Hillary had worked a month as a cow-hand.
The mystery-author gag worked. Inside of two weeks our promotion expense dwindled to almost nothing. Columnists were fighting for the privilege of pouring out free copy on both plays. Some of their speculations as to Hardy’s real identity were pretty fabulous—Winston Churchill, Noel Coward and even a certain, witty ex-presidential candidate for the Democratic party—but no one found him out, and the advance sellout began gaining a week every day.
Now, I have made and lost my share of theater fortunes, and I have learned a certain caution. At the moment I was quite content to ride with my two smash-hits and leave Hardy to his experiments. Strangely, it was he who called upon me for action.
A month after launching Parodisiac he showed up at my office, looking leaner and more intense than ever. His crew-cut was growing out, but it was from neglect rather than a sudden artistic temperament, I was sure.
After
