Chapter 9 - Where the Truth Lies

IN POINT OF FACT, it wasn’t as remarkable as it might at first seem that I now found myself seated one row behind the gentleman whose intimate memoirs I’d been perusing only two days earlier. The almost unjustifiable expense of a first-class ticket (there being no discounts or deals to be had for such a luxury) and the limited number of wide-bodies in service made those twelve to twenty seats on a jumbo jet quite the exclusive club, one where mere moneyed mortals frequently found themselves mingling with the Gods.

Whenever anyone flew first-class to the opposite coast, friends would ask upon their arrival, “Well, did you see anyone famous?” The answer would invariably be something along the lines of “As a matter of fact, both Jean Stapleton and that nice Dennis Weaver were on our flight and they couldn’t have been nicer. They chatted with us while we waited to get off the plane.” Since only American, TWA, and United flew nonstop between New York and L.A. (and not all of those flights were the preferred luxury liners), the mathematical odds that a celebrity would be in your midst if you flew first-class transcontinental on a jumbo jet were in fact quite good. Thus it was perhaps not quite so incredibly miraculous that Lanny, his manager Irv Fleischmann, and his valet Reuben were currently positioned at twelve, one, and three o’clock respectively to me.

I was now dimly recalling an interview in which much credit was given to Lanny for insisting that his Filipino butler travel in the same class and stay in the same hotels as he did. It had occurred to me even when I read the tidbit that this also kept Reuben on call and close at (Lanny’s) hand all hours of the day. No hiding out around the economy galley back in row thirty-nine for good old Reuby Baby, nosiree. Lanny’s attendant’s attentiveness was quickly verified for me when the captain turned off the NO SMOKING sign some twenty seconds after the wheels left the ground, as was the general policy of most airlines. In almost the same instant, Reuben leaned forward and proffered a cigarette case and gunmetal Zippo lighter to Lanny, who reached behind him for the case without looking back. He simply knew the items would be there. I also recalled reading that the reason Lanny often had Reuben carry his cigarette case and lighter for him was that he couldn’t abide having any bulges in his pants that did not originate with him—joke. His pants had no pockets and were, like Reuben himself, made to order. To be fair, I must assert there was nothing haughty or imperious about Lanny’s manner. He didn’t snap his fingers. He said “Thanks” in a nice voice as he handed the lighter and case back to Reuben. This was, I guess, simply how they operated, and I’d read that Reuben was extremely well paid for his dedication to the maintenance of Mr. Morris, who was now seated a tantalizing forty-one inches in front of me.

Could you tell a great deal about a man simply by staring at the back of his chair for forty-five minutes? No, not really. The seats had high backs, so not even the nape of Lanny’s neck or his ears offered themselves up for any Conan Doyle ratiocination. I could see that he quickly received the requested Smirnoff on the rocks, because Helen (who’d bravely volunteered to become his personal stewardess) brought it immediately after takeoff, on a small tray along with a porcelain nut dish filled with almonds. I can visually verify that his left arm looked nice taking the tray from her. She leaned forward to hear something he was saying or requesting. Helen laughed a giddy laugh and stepped away, returning moments later with an American Airlines sleeping mask, even though it was only around four in the afternoon. His left arm took it from her, his seat reclined, and I assume he took a nap.

I wondered whether he’d asked for the mask in order to reduce visibility from his side of it or to reduce his own visibility to the surrounding passengers. He was certainly lucky in that those seated in the two rows ahead of him hadn’t seemed to have noticed his arrival just prior to takeoff. The leisure-suited gents on Lanny’s left seemed equally oblivious; perhaps Two Flatfoots from Flatbush had never played the movie palaces of Mumbai. The Brit and his Nordic model citizen were seemingly far more interested in themselves than anyone else, and it looked like a trip for the two to the loo to do the dirty deed was all but inevitable. For the moment, everyone in first class was by design or by ignorance playing it very cool about Lanny’s presence in their midst.

Stewardess Kim gifted me my complimentary headphones, which were simply hollow plastic tubes that sent sound stethoscopically to one’s ears. I put them on, heard the thrilling strains of Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra performing “Love Is Blue,” and wondered what, if anything, I should do about this unusual situation.

Introducing myself was an option, but it was hard to know where I ranked on Lanny’s hit list, based on our asymmetrical correspondence. Was I enemy, nuisance, rival? Did he really know of me or had this all been the doings of John Hillman, Esquire? I had never actually received a letter signed “Lanny Morris,” but surely I wouldn’t have been given access to his memoirs without his knowledge and consent.

For an instant, I entertained the narcissistic notion that Lanny was following me: that he’d pulled a few strings easily accessible to someone of his status, learned when I was flying back to New York, and booked these seats specifically to observe me—but if he wanted to have me shadowed, he could have hired someone to do it. I suddenly had a disconcerting thought accompanied by a chill, which I at first took to be the overhead air vent blowing directly upon me. I half-reached to adjust it before I realized that the frisson I felt was internal.

Forget thinking that Lanny Morris is following me. Much more likely he’ll think I’m following him. Like an obsessed fan, or the paparazzi, or the “journalist” Moe Cohn, whose Miami-based column had dug up dirt on people like Lanny right up through the late fifties, raking them into the muck with a sharp-edged hoe.

Here I am, having written repeated letters to Lanny and his representatives pleading my case, sent him excerpts from my published oeuvre, negotiated an agreement with Lanny’s ex-partner, pored over Lanny’s offered memoirs… and now a mere three days later I’m sitting in the midst of his entourage en route to New York. If I were Lanny, wouldn’t I be suspicious?

I tried to remember if any of the articles that I’d sent to Lanny’s lawyers carried byline photos of me. As best I could remember, they hadn’t.

I flipped audio channels and detected an anemic rendition of the Grieg Piano Concerto, to which I vaguely listened as I filtered the issues at hand through the wadded cheesecloth I laughingly call my brain.

Midway through the Adagio, senior stewardess Helen came back to Lanny and murmured some words in his ear. His seat back straightened and I saw his hand returning the sleep mask to her. She asked him a question and could not quite hide her simultaneous glance in my direction. Oh, Helen was very professional and the soul of discretion, but it certainly seemed as if she was talking about me. My favorite expression is “Even paranoiacs have enemies,” and I was about to be proven at least partially correct.

Helen nodded to whatever Lanny’s reply was and stepped back to me as if one thing led to another. “You’ll be having dinner with us today?”

I refrained from saying, “No, I’ll just go down to the corner and pick up a fried-egg-and-bacon sandwich,” and replied that yes, I would be dining in today. Helen recited, “As part of our American Admiral service this afternoon, we’re offering our exclusive in-flight table dining, which consists of two center tables seating four each. Will this be all right?” I assumed that Helen’s conference with Lanny had been to ask if he minded dining with a civilian (me), and since he apparently was fine about that, who was I to reject dining with Lanny Morris (him)?

“Fine by me,” I smiled.

Helen gave a go-ahead nod to steward Karl, who had moved up behind me. He gushed, “Well, then it looks like you’re having dinner with Lanny Morris!” as if this were a feature of American Airlines’ Admiral service along with carved roast beef. With that, he rotated my chair twenty-three degrees clockwise toward the center of the plane, where it locked in place. Likewise, Reuben’s chair was rotated by Kim toward me. Fleischmann was then quickly rotated by Kim in my direction. We were beginning to emulate the Mad Tea Party ride at Disneyland. Helen, of course, saved for herself the final honor of swiveling Lanny into position at our table for four. A large circular tabletop was snapped by Helen and Kim onto the smaller circular table that had been in front of me and on my right, which now served as the base of our dining table. Karl whisked a salmon-colored tablecloth around the table like an artful barber and fastened whatever kept it in place. Immediately a low weighty vase of silk flowers was plonked down in the center of the table, as matching dinner service was laid down… and there we were, as precise and compasslike a table for four as you’ll ever see.

Lanny turned and spoke to me for the first time. He neither smiled nor frowned.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” I returned. So far, I was every bit his equal.

He took the tabletop in both of his hands and gently tried to toggle it. It wobbled a bit. “Guess we should get the waiter to slide a matchbook under the airplane,” he smiled. He peered under the tablecloth, adjusted something that went snap, and reappeared. This time the table was steady. “That should hold. Guess we’re dining together. That okay with you?”

“Fine by me.” I’m just so fucking good in these situations.

Lanny nodded across the table. “This is my friend Reuben.” Reuben nodded graciously. “And this is also my friend—technically speaking—and business manager Irv. My name’s Lanny.” I was surprised to discover that Lanny had a very intelligent face. Quite sensitive, to be honest. Most of the simian expressions for which we’d come to know him, especially in cartoons and on posters, were not in evidence, at least for the moment. He looked a little like a Jewish Danny Kaye, except that of course Danny Kaye is Jewish. And of course his hair was not red. Then again, I assume neither was Danny Kaye’s. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Bonnie,” I lied just as natural as can be. “Bonnie Trout.” I listened to my voice lying to him with a keen but detached interest. I hadn’t consciously decided to lie until the moment in which I did. There was still time, I thought, to take it back, pretend it was some kind of joke, although one would be hard-pressed to find its punch line.

Ah, but now it really was too late to retract it. In the time it took me to remove the napkin ring from the linen at my place and spread the napkin upon my lap, the falsehood had jelled very nicely into an official regulation lie. I felt as if I were standing on the rear platform of a caboose, looking back at a switch in the tracks, and watching one pair of rails curving away from the other, out of sight, behind trees, now gone forever.

“Nice to meet you, Bonnie,” said Lanny simply. I thought about all the jokes that anyone named Bonnie Trout has heard from people to whom she’s just been introduced. I thought it showed some class that Lanny moved along without comment. I suppose when you’ve spent your life making and writing jokes, you have too much self-respect to hit lobbed pitches out of the park.

Over my shoulder, Kim inquired, “Would you like wine, a cocktail, or would you prefer to stay with the champagne?” As I was the woman at the table, apparently all questions and service would be directed first to me. Chivalry over celebrity. I opted for a Sancerre, as did Lanny. Irv asked for a Cutty and soda, which was made for him on the spot. Irv’s voice was like his looks: pinched, pointed, New York. Reuben waved away the offer of a drink and replied, “Just ice water, please,” in a low, mellow voice that hardly bore an accent.

“What do you do, Bonnie?” asked Lanny as they poured his wine.

“I teach,” I said.

“Where?”

“In Manhattan. P.S. 29 on Orchard Street.”

“What do you teach?”

“Second grade.”

“Really? How old is a second-grader these days?” he asked.

I tasted my wine and calculated. I’d been five in kindergarten, six in first grade… “Seven years old. Sometimes six or eight, for part of the year, depending on when they were born.”

“Well, we have a lot in common. You teach second grade, I went to second grade. Irv, you went to second grade, didn’t you?”

Irv buttered his club roll. “Many times. Tell me, Miss Trout, what do they pay a second-grade teacher these days?”

God, how would I know? Enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment on Thirty-Third Street on the East Side. How much would that go for, three seventy-five a month? You should never pay more in rent than one week’s salary. Fifty-two times three hundred and seventy-five is… “About twenty thousand a year.” I sipped some wine. “With tips.”

Lanny gave a pleasant single laugh at this. It was not his trademark cackle. As a matter of fact, except for the name, the general timbre of his voice, and certain aspects of his looks, I’m not sure I’d have recognized this man as being Lanny Morris.

Irv shrugged. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I was wondering how a second-grade schoolteacher affords to fly first-class.”

Lanny and Reuben both looked at me with interest. I used my knife to spatula one of the three petite medallions of smoked salmon that Kim had set before me and transfer it onto a round of toasted English Hovis bread. “Well, I have a pass that allows me free use of the subway on weekdays… and the hot lunches at school, while pretty deplorable, are only fifty cents… and I’m the mistress of a wealthy married man, and when he and his wife go on vacation, he treats me to a first-class trip in the opposite direction. But look at me, talking only about myself.” I turned to Lanny. “What do you do for a living?”

Lanny froze for a moment, then nodded his head, acknowledging my zing. Reuben and Irv both looked confused.

Lanny replied lightly, “I’m a French impressionist painter. Mainly out of Tahiti. But I just do that to pay the bills. My real ambition is to become a stockbroker in Paris.”

Irv shook his head disapprovingly. “Don’t get it,” he said.

I thought it might be politic to show that I did. “Paul Gauguin,” I enlightened Irv. “He gave up being a successful stockbroker to become a painter in the South Seas.”

Irv frowned at Lanny as if his client had made a bad career move. “You think the average person knows that?”

Lanny looked irritated. “I’m making idle conversation, Irv, I didn’t realize the meter was running. Okay, how about: Good evening, mesdames, messieurs, I’m a French impressionist, and for my first impression, let’s hear from my good friend Toulouse-Lautrec. I could drop to my knees for this, and if my sports jacket is long and thin enough to spread out on the floor, it’ll help the gag. Then I say, Ah l’amour, l’amour, I paint with Benjamin La Moore, usually in a shade of sacré bleu, and if I run out of that I use some Dutch Boy—not the paint, you understand, I mean I like to use some poor little Dutch Boy in my strange little Frenchie way—okay, Irv? You know, sometimes I actually go off duty.” This wasn’t said bitterly or venomously.

“Sorry,” offered Irv. He tasted his Scotch smoked salmon on Hovis and asked Kim if she could find some cream cheese. She went to see what they had in the galley.

I said to Lanny, “I guess people expect you to be funny all the time.”

“Not if they get to know me, they don’t. I’d much rather do your kind of work.”

I shook my head. “We all need a good laugh.”

Lanny grimaced. “Yeah, well, that’s what I tell my writers, but they keep coming up with the same bad jokes.”

Irv hastily explained, “Lanny doesn’t have any writers. He writes all his own material. I wish he wouldn’t, because it eats up his time, but that’s how he is.”

Lanny hissed, “Quiet, Irv, I’ve been blaming my bad jokes on my nonexistent writers for years now.” He mock-glared at me. “Don’t ever repeat what he just said or I’ll have to have you destroyed.”

Kim took away our hors d’oeuvres plates and laid down some lovely sea-blue china in the shape of fluted seashells filled with their rendition of coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Lanny continued in the most conversational of tones, “For nearly two hundred million years, the dinosaurs had dominion over this planet. We’ve been around for, oh how long has it been now, fifty thousand years? So Homo sapiens will have to survive until the year 199,950,000 A.D. before we can call ourselves as successful a race as your basic dinosaur. And yet, Bonnie, in all that time, not even once is there the slightest evidence that any dinosaur ever went into show business.”

He added gravely, “There is nothing, for example, to suggest that one dinosaur made all the other dinosaurs sit around the fire at night and watch him as he said, You know, I think if we ever met a stegosaurus, he’d look a little something like this… No tummling Triassics, no juggling Jurassics—a Tyrannosaurus rex was the closest they had to a stand-up act.” He reminded me a little of Vince talking about Euclid, which had reminded me a lot of Lanny. “But why second grade, Bonnie?”

“Well, my children don’t know how to use drugs or weapons yet. I can still take the kids in a fight, including even the most muscular of the boys. Some of them may be in love with me, but none of them want to have sex with me, including the most muscular of the girls. The disparity between the bright ones and the dumb ones is not so great yet, so the results of my work or lack thereof are not so depressing yet. They have no homework that I have to correct in the evenings. Some of their fathers are only a little older than I am, and some of those fathers are already divorced—those parent-teacher conferences can be an excellent way to meet eligible men in a private setting without having to sit around a bar all night. I get ten weeks’ paid vacation, excellent pension and medical plan. In one more year, I’ll have such solid tenure that I could molest the winner of a spelling bee with a field hockey stick and they still wouldn’t be able to fire me. The question isn’t why I decided to teach second grade, the question is why everybody else doesn’t.”

It played rather well. Especially with Lanny, who both laughed and eyed me with interest. I’d heard the above speech virtually word-for-word more than once, which is why I could recite it so well.

Down the aisle Helen and Kim wheeled the American Airlines beef trolley. Helen, obviously the Carver, now had on an apron and gloves and looked quite a lot like Sue Ann Nivens. The flight attendants asked us the searching questions they had no choice but to ask: “Rare, medium, well? Horseradish cream or au jus? Chives, sour cream, butter, and would you like any—” The plane bumped a hard bump, like we had gone over a very big log in the road. Only of course there was no road.

Then this huge plane made a collective noise like an old clock shop being hit on its roof by a giant’s hard fist. Helen, carving beef for the other center table, now looked down at her left hand. A neat line of blood appeared where the carving knife had sliced along it nicely.

“Shit,” said Helen, watching the blood racing out of her hand. “Oh shit. Karl?” The plane bounced (bounced? yes) down and up. The FASTEN SEAT BELT sign went bing.

We were rocked suddenly to the hard right, then hard left. If we’d been on a train, I suppose we would only have felt we were rounding two hairpin curves twisting around a mountain. But of course we weren’t on a train. A few drinks fell very quietly off the trays of those seated at the windows. We suddenly remembered that we were not in some pleasant Lawry’s The Prime Rib on La Cienega Boulevard but in a long metal tube, a javelin being self-hurled at a height nature had never intended any of us to achieve. We lurched again, this time a bit sickeningly to the stomach. Helen, Kim, and Karl raced the beef trolley up the aisle, hitting Reuben with a corner of the cart as they did so, and secured it somewhere near the galley.

The wall phone upon which Helen had been notified of Lanny’s arrival rang a series of bell tones. I remember once being told that six bells was the captain’s command that every stewardess must take a designated seat, even if it meant throwing a passenger out of it, so that they might be best positioned to save others after the crash. Had I just heard two sets of three tones or one set of six? Helen listened on the phone and nodded. She then spoke over the P.A., using the phone as her mike.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain says we are encountering unexpected turbulence and we ask all passengers to return to their seats.”

Making matters worse was the fact that the NO SMOKING sign immediately went on with a pleasant ding. I only associated “no smoking” with the first moments of takeoff and the last minutes of landing. Surely that couldn’t be good. I hated that ding. The people who manufactured the device that made that ding weren’t on the plane with me, damn them. Where was my upstairs lounge now? If anyone could have broken my fall, it would surely have been the overweight couple to my right.

Lanny, Irv, Reuben, and I were seated at a circular table that was turning and shuddering as if at a séance. I would have suggested we join hands and try to contact the dead, but I was afraid we’d have a more direct connection any second now. Reuben was no longer smiling but was doing his best to hold on to the tabletop. Irv just sat with a grim set to his mouth as if his teeth were clenched, which they most likely were. His fist was wrapped tightly around his glass. Most of his Cutty Sark and soda had spilled onto the tablecloth.

I looked at Lanny, feeling panic rising within me. He smiled in a breezy manner. “You really don’t have to worry,” he said. “I know it feels scary, but try to keep in mind that the engines are lifting and sustaining a two-hundred-ton airplane—that’s the ridiculous part. A seventy-mile-an-hour headwind isn’t going to make this baby break a sweat.”

I guess I didn’t look convinced. He cupped my hand with his. “I’m a pilot myself, Bonnie. Believe me, we’re fine.”

Despite having researched Lanny a bit, I had not known he was a pilot. This I found more reassuring than the part about lifting two hundred tons of metal into the air. After all, for this technological hubris, surely the buffeting we were now receiving was God’s version of a good spanking. I was terrified about that last spank, the “one for luck.”

I thought about telling him who I really was. It would be nice to share a secret with him. An act of communion. “You know, I’m not a second-grade schoolteacher and my name is not Bonnie. I’m the journalist who wanted to do a book about you and Vince.” That’s what I would say. But I didn’t.

The glorious thing about turbulence is that it rarely ebbs away in incrementally smaller bumps and milder jostling. It usually just stops, like a poltergeist’s tantrum. This did just that. Suddenly all was calm, all was bright. The FASTEN SEAT BELT and NO SMOKING signs went out. Reuben immediately proffered Lanny’s cigarette case toward me, but I indicated that I had my own. He then offered it to Lanny, who snatched at a cigarette. Reuben slid Lanny’s lighter across the table to him and Lanny lit up shakily. “Jesus,” he muttered.

“What?” I asked.

“I hate flying,” he said.

“Well, how do you pilot a plane if you hate flying?”

He took another drag on his cigarette. “Who pilots a plane? I just said that to make you feel better. Sorry, didn’t mean to lie.” He put out his cigarette half-finished. “I hate flying.”

Irv called out, “Waitress?” to Kim, who was making the rounds. I could see by the galley that Karl was wrapping a bandage around Helen’s hand. Helen looked pale. I didn’t dislike her as much as I had.

Kim stepped over to us. Irv held his glass out. “Cutty rocks, please? A stiff one.”

She nodded acknowledgment of the order, then said in a low tone to Lanny, “Mr. Morris, I know this is a terrible imposition, but we could really use your assistance back in economy.”

Irv spoke up. “Mr. Morris is a passenger, miss, and his privacy is—”

“I understand and I’m very sorry, but we are permitted by FAA regulations to request any assistance that a passenger may be able to provide in an emergency. Physicians, technicians, amateur pilots—” She turned to Lanny. “We have a passenger who’s hysterical.”

“Great, she can be my head writer,” said Lanny. He unbuckled his seat belt and slid away from the table. “Fuck,” he muttered. He acted as if he’d had to do this before. He turned to me and beseeched, “Keep me company?”

I nodded and rose, somewhat unsteadily, owing to both the wine and the previous few minutes. Reuben also started to rise, but Lanny said, “No, Reuben, you see that Irv gets his drink and find out if the stewardess who cut herself could use some of your first-aid training.” (Lanny later explained to me that Reuben had been a combat medic attached to the Philippine Scouts during World War II.)

Kim led us quickly back to the crowded economy section. Toward the rear of the right aisle, a big, middle-aged woman was being pinned down by a stewardess, whose knees were planted on the woman’s shoulders. The passenger was disheveled and emitting grunting sounds as she struggled. “You have to calm yourself now,” said the stewardess, whose name tag read BARBARA. The passenger cried out, “I can’t breathe, my lungs have collapsed!” and tossed Barbara off her. Racing up the aisle, she screamed, “I have to get off the plane!” and rammed into Lanny, who’d placed himself in her way. He winced at the impact but embraced her. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s with all the commotion, missy?” he inquired in a fabulous impression of himself.

On the movie screen in front of us was the image of Michael Caine. The in-flight movie had obviously been started before the turbulence had hit. Lanny nodded toward the screen and whined in his trademark adenoidal voice: “Hey, usually I think when you make this much noise at the movies, you get thrown out of the theater, but usually I think the theater isn’t at twenty-eight thousand feet, huuuuh?”

The woman froze. “Lanny Morris,” she said. Starstruck awe suddenly outranked panic. She searched his face. “You’re the real Lanny Morris. You’re on this flight?” she asked somewhat redundantly.

“If I’m not, missy, the in-flight movie is in 3-D. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Dolores Kreutzer,” she said. “You’re my biggest fan.”

He smiled and said in his singsong voice, “You would be surprised how many nice people say that, although I think they mean it like the whole otherwise, huuuuh?” He did an upward portamento on the “huh.” He was no longer the Lanny Morris I’d been dining with.

Dolores clutched at his arm. “I got scared, I was afraid…”

“Of the bumping and the not nice with the hurting and bouncing, huuuuh?”

“You wouldn’t let me die, would you, Lanny?” she asked like a child.

He switched to his Vegasy, virile voice. “Sweetheart, I haven’t died with an audience since the Concord. You think the Lanny-Man would let anything happen to you? I’m your biggest fan, remember? C’mere, hug-hug. Hug-hug.” He embraced her. She trembled in his arms, in a completely different fashion than her thrashing hysteria. He patted her back and soothed, “Okay, Scooter, you gonna let Lanny get you to New York safe and sound now?”

Stewardess Barbara chimed, “There, Dolores, you hear that? Lanny said everything’s okay, so everything’s okay now, right?”

I thought it was wonderfully absurd that the stewardess voiced such credence in Lanny when he hadn’t been given barometric readings, weather updates, or the flight plan even, huuuuuh?

“If I crash with you, Lanny, it was worth it,” Dolores gushed. “May I have your autograph?” She reached into a nearby seat pouch and pulled out the plastic laminated card showing how to adopt the brace position and where to exit the plane in case of a landing on water. I could see Lanny anticipating a problem. He looked down the aisle and, of course, every eye was on him and everyone was murmuring, “That’s Lanny Morris” to each other, which sounded an awful lot like peas and carrots, peas and carrots.

“I’m afraid my pen won’t write on plastic,” said Lanny.

She reached over to a seat pouch for the airline’s magazine, Sky Trails, and held it out to him. “To Dolores,” she requested.

Lanny knew (and I could see that he knew) that the instant he reached for his Scripto Admiral, he was a doomed man. As he scrawled his signature on the magazine, it seemed like half the passengers rose and came at us. We’d made the mistake of backing up into the center front row, directly by the movie screen. Before we could rethink this strategy, they were closing in on Lanny and me from both sides, crushing us against the now-buckling projected image of Charles Bronson and Michael Caine.

Lanny looked at me grimly. “Won’t you join me in my worst nightmare?”

Stewardess Barbara, still in the aisle, was uselessly clapping her hands and asking everyone to return to their seats. I barked at her, “Tell the captain to turn on the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign.” Barbara nodded and retreated to a wall phone by the large emergency-exit door. I tore the seat cushion off a vacant chair in front of me, grabbed the life jacket beneath it, and found the vest pocket that had a standard-issue emergency whistle in it. I blew it hard and its shrill sound quieted the crowd for a moment. Above me, the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign went on with a pleasant ding. Barbara spoke over the public-address system: “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Anderson has again put on the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign. Please return to your seats now or be in violation of federal regulations and subject to arrest and prosecution.” Barbara put this over well, and the passengers moved back to their seats.

As they began to sit, Barbara undid all the good she’d just done by announcing, “Now if you’ll all remain seated, I’m sure Mr. Morris will be glad to sign any autographs by coming around the plane to you, starting with this left aisle and then back up the other!”

Lanny’s shoulders instantly went limp, and he gaped incredulously at the stewardess. Some part of his brain turned up a back burner of loathing in his eyes. Barbara actually flinched when she saw it.

As you can imagine, Lanny spent most of the rest of the flight making the rounds of the heavily booked plane. Everyone over the age of twelve had something to tell Lanny about what their cousin thought of him or how they had seen him at his first professional performance. Lanny was polite and feigned interest in each related story, but he didn’t seem to receive any inner gratification from the worship of the crowd. Walking this gauntlet was simply a professional obligation that he discharged honorably and without complaint. To him, things like this, regrettably, came with the deal.

If it was odd that I stayed with Lanny throughout his Grand Promenade of economy, he didn’t seem to think so. As a journalist, of course, this was great stuff for me to observe, seeing how Lanny dealt with his public on a one-on-one basis. But Lanny didn’t know I was a journalist. I guessed he was accustomed to having a woman at his side who was pleased to be photographed in the same frame with him, bearing the identifying tabloid caption of “current companion.”

Irv and Reuben eventually came back to see what had happened to us, and each tried in their own way to get Lanny out of signing autographs for every person on the flight. But Lanny said the usual things about harm having already been done and putting toothpaste back in the tube. (My greatest wish is to see the day when toothpaste is successfully put back in the tube, but then again, I’m a hopeless dreamer.) Irv returned to first class to talk with Helen and the captain and also to make sure the airline’s press office informed A.P. and U.P.I. of Lanny’s generous intervention with hysterical Dolores and autograph session with the other passengers.

I was able to pretty much be myself around Lanny, with the exception of every factual detail of my life. Lanny himself was a genuine surprise to me. His private humor turned out to be quite low-key, but for the occasional horrendous pun, and he could talk for as much as five minutes without feeling the compulsion to make a joke. He had that self-taught intellectualism common to many celebrities; “smart” words like egregious and ubiquitous were used and pronounced with pride, as if they’d been learned recently and were making a special guest appearance in his conversation. All in all, he was not only unlike his public image and what I would have expected… he was also nothing like the voice I’d heard in the memoirs I’d read. Why would that be?

As Kim was telling us over the P.A. to restore our trays and return our seats to their upright position in preparation for our arrival at JFK, Helen knelt at the side of my chair. The bandage around her hand bore a rust-colored stain.

“Hon, the captain wants the company to send you something as a thank-you for helping out Lanny and American Airlines during the flight.” She confided in a lower tone, “It probably will be something like a round-trip ticket somewhere, they usually do very nice things.” Helen had a notepad and she clicked the end of the pen, poised to write. “We just need your name, address, phone number…”

Lanny had switched seats with Reuben so as to better converse with me, and was now looking right at me. I took a breath. “Oh, sure… Bonnie Trout, that’s T-R-O-U-T, 235 East Thirty-Third Street.”

“That’s a nice neighborhood,” Lanny commented. “There’s a CBS recording studio right in the middle of the apartment buildings. Can’t record after ten P.M.”

I nodded agreement.

Helen asked, “Is there an apartment number or…”

“Apartment 4D,” I answered. “New York, New York, obviously. Zip is, uhhhh, one zero zero one six.”

“Phone number?” asked Helen.

I gave her a number and saw that Reuben was leaning around from Lanny’s seat and writing all this in a notebook. Lanny asked, “You don’t mind if Reuben takes down your phone number as well, do you?” I said of course I didn’t. He added, “Great. Anyone meeting you at JFK?” I said there wasn’t and he said he’d give me a lift home. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. He told me to give Helen the luggage claim check that was stapled to my ticket and I explained I just had my carry-on garment bag.

At JFK, we were allowed to exit before everyone else. The word security was invoked a few times to pacify the Brit and the businessmen, who were annoyed at having to wait until Lanny had “cleared the gate area.” There were cries of “Bye, Lanny” and “We love you!” from the economy passengers, and Lanny acknowledged them with a sideways wave of his hand.

I had apparently become part of Lanny’s entourage. Reuben insisted on carrying my garment bag and looked as if it would offend him if I didn’t allow this. Halfway up the gangway, an American Airlines employee opened a door in its side and the four of us descended a portable flight of stairs that had been rolled up to this side door leading down to the tarmac. A Lincoln Continental stretch limo was waiting not far from the very DC-10 we’d exited.

A big-chested driver stood with his hands clasped together. “Hi, Mr. Morris. Mr. Fleischmann. Hi, Reuben.”

Fleischmann handed his carry-on bag to the driver. “You’re uhm…?”

“Michael Dougherty. From Dav-El. I’ve driven you a number of times. The airline says they’ll bring your bags by hand over to the limo, you probably would like to wait inside the car. I kept the A.C. on. You remember me, Mr. Morris?”

Lanny looked at Michael. “Your mother is a typist for Senator Javits, right?”

Michael nodded proudly. “That’s really nice you remember, Mr. Morris. I have no bigger fan than you.”

Michael had opened the car door for us, and we scooted in. It was nearly midnight in the late summer, and even minus the sun the evening was still warm. It was nicer in the limo. Cool and dark. Through the tinted glass, I saw a uniformed American Airlines worker pull up in a mini-train. He had a load of luggage and quickly set about putting some of it into the trunk of the Lincoln Continental under the supervision of Reuben and Mike Dougherty.

Irv needled Lanny, “You should have let me set up a press conference here. It would have been good publicity.”

Lanny rolled his eyes. “It’s not like I landed the plane, Irving. Please. You’ll get the word in a couple of columns that I’m a good scout, okay? End of story. To hold a press conference would imply I’d done something heroic. That would be ostentatious.” He produced this last word with some pleasure.

Mike sat himself down in the driver’s seat and called back through the dividing window, “The Plaza, folks?”

Lanny looked at me. “First we’re taking Miss Trout to…”

Two thirty-five was the number I had given Helen. “Two thirty-five East Thirty-Third,” I said.

“And thanks for dealing so nicely with the luggage, Michael,” said Lanny.

“All I’d ever ask back is one question, Mr. Morris,” said Michael.

“What’s that?”

Michael steered the limo onto the Van Wyck Expressway. “When are you and Vince Collins gonna kiss and make up?”

“Make up what?” asked Lanny.

We all laughed, but a look of displeasure fluttered across Lanny’s features.

No matter how excited I may be whenever I return to New York, the drive from either of its airports into Manhattan—past abandoned tenements, overcrowded cemeteries, and decrepit warehouses with rotted wooden facing only an arsonist could love—is enough to make me pine for the Santa Ana Freeway. At this hour, though, darkness served as a drop cloth over the worst of the view, leaving to be seen only the lovely cliché of the illuminated Manhattan skyline, promising absolutely everything.

“I hate New York in June, how about you?” Lanny asked, staring out the window. It was August, but I assumed he was paraphrasing the song.

“I like it,” I said. “What’s the matter with it?”

He shrugged. “My life here, as a kid in Brooklyn, wasn’t very pleasant. I was brought up as a nice, middle-class Jewish boy, which was not the greatest idea since we were extremely poor and lived in a rough Puerto Rican slum. A handful of Italians, a few tough Irish. My aunt couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. I owned two always-clean white shirts, two pairs of corduroy pants, two black yarmulkes, and one green corduroy zippered jacket. Imagine if in Nazi Germany there had been only one Jew, and he was me. There you have my childhood.”

He reached into a small ice bucket by the decanters, tossed a couple of cubes into a cut-glass tumbler, took out a decanter of vodka, and poured it over the ice. “This isn’t vodka, it’s bottled water,” he advised. “You want some?”

I was dehydrated from the flight and joined him. As he fixed me a water on the rocks, he continued, “Look, I’ve met a few Jews I didn’t like. My second wife, for example, was Exhibit A for the defense at the Nuremberg trials. What I minded was that not only did everybody in my neighborhood hate me, but they all tried to do something about it. Cheers.”

I clinked water glasses with him.

“Every part of my career has been an effort to escape that neighborhood, those gangs—You ever have the dream that you’re back in high school?”

“Once or twice a year,” I confirmed. “Usually naked.”

The limo slipped into the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The lighting was so brightly fluorescent that it penetrated our tinted windows, turning Reuben a sickly color and making Lanny pale. He mused, “Every week or so, I dream I’m a kid again, and I’ve made the mistake of coming back to New York. They’ve got me. All of them, in the alley behind the chop shop with the high wall and barbed wire on top, and this time they’re going to use knives, not fists, and this time old man Quinn isn’t going to see what’s happening, so he won’t run to get a cop.”

We sipped our water until we came out of the tunnel and turned up a dark, narrow street of nondescript apartment buildings. There were no storefronts, restaurants, or (at the moment) pedestrians. There were only a few streetlamps, and one of those had burned out. Imagine if you had waited all your life to see Manhattan and someone told you this was it.

I could hardly see Lanny’s face now. He was lost in another borough, another time. He downed the last of his water. Michael Dougherty lowered the divider window and asked over his right shoulder, “Number 235, miss, is that between Third and Second Avenue?”

“Mmmmm,” I said in what I hoped was a noncommittal voice that might be taken for affirmation or negation, because I honestly wasn’t sure of the answer.

Lanny continued softly, “One of the reasons I’m telling you this is because sometimes when you talk about something, you don’t dream about it.”

He didn’t have my full attention. I was straining to see which side of the street 235 was on. I saw 217. It was a Laundromat. The next doorway led to apartments above the Laundromat.

“Along here?” asked Lanny.

A lit sign in an opaque storefront window read THE VELVET TOUCH—MASSAGE $12 AND UP and below it the words Let our fingers do the walking. (The presence of a massage parlor was, by the way, no indication that the neighborhood was bad; they had sprung up absolutely everywhere in the last few years.)

“I see 237, but not 235,” Lanny murmured.

I looked back and barely perceived an unlit doorway, very old-fashioned, that looked like it was part of the massage parlor. “We overshot it,” I said casually. “It’s not very well lit, I’m afraid. But, well, it’s home.”

Michael Dougherty backed up the limo a few feet, popped the trunk, and hustled out and around to open my door. I got out and followed him back to the trunk, where Lanny was already standing, my garment bag in his right hand.

“Let me see you inside,” he offered.

“It’s not necessary.”

“I’d feel bad if I didn’t.” He strode toward “my” apartment building, leaving me no chance for debate. I followed as he pushed open the outer door, which was not locked, and stood by the inner glass-and-steel doorway, which was. He nodded toward the lock. “Your turn, I think.”

I started fumbling in my bag, making much of looking for a set of keys. Lanny smiled, in no particular hurry.

On the other side of the glass door, from a street-level apartment, came an old man in his eighties with a nicely manicured poodle on a short leash. He had on a plaid tam-o’-shanter (the man, not the poodle, although it would have looked quite a bit better on the dog). The old man wore a thin trench coat that he’d belted, not buttoned. The front of the trench coat flapped as he walked, and I could see he was wearing only blue boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt beneath it. His feet were tucked into long, thin white socks and fluffy blue slippers. He opened the door, and I made a big deal out of keeping it open for him as he got the poodle out of the building.

“Hi there!” I chirped. “It’s still pretty warm out tonight for you, thank goodness.”

Any old man will talk to any reasonably attractive girl who smiles at him. He sighed. “Thank goodness. Pepé doesn’t keep banker’s hours.”

“Don’t I know!” I said as if I did know, and as if I knew him and Pepé as well. I knelt down and scruffed up his head. The dog’s, that is. “Pepé, have you been a good dog while I was away? Have you? Have you?” Pepé barked. Having established my longtime relationship with Pepé, I stood and warned the old man, “Don’t be out there too long, now. Is the elevator working?” The question spoke of a familiarity with the place, and there could be no wrong answer unless (my heart jumped) the apartment was a walk-up. Luckily, I saw a lone elevator at the end of the drab hallway.

“Yes, thank goodness,” he said as he left the building. “Took them long enough. Night,” he added to Lanny, who kept his head down—to avoid an “Aren’t you Lanny Morris?” scene, I assumed.

Lanny stood in the hallway with me. “Bet he’s nuts about you.”

“Oh, we’re only acquainted by that kind of exchange; I don’t even know his name,” I replied with absolute accuracy. I looked up at Lanny. He was virtually the same height as Vince, which surprised me because in their movies it seemed as if Vince was always looking down at Lanny. “Well, this has been a remarkable day in my life.”

“I’m seeing you inside your apartment door.” He smiled, pressing the button for the elevator. Immediately I heard it start to descend. It was loud, like the conveyor belt in a silent melodrama’s sawmill that is bearing the heroine to her certain doom.

“There’s really no need,” I said.

“Don’t be silly—I won’t try to come in, promise. But you’ve been away from your apartment for—how long now?”

“Ages,” I admitted with that candor for which I’m known.

“Okay, well, you don’t know if someone has broken in while you were gone. Let me just see you to your door. Believe me, I’m not trying to seduce you. I have to do the Today show at seven A.M. and they want me in makeup by six-fifteen.” This was surely the first time anyone had ever used that particular line on me.

The elevator door opened and we stepped inside. It had the faint aroma of boiled cabbage, sautéed onions, and cigarette smoke. Lanny’s hand poised over the buttons. “Which floor…?”

For a second I couldn’t remember. “Why, um… four.” That was right, 4D, I’d said, and I saw that the elevator only went up to four. “The penthouse.” I tried to make my hesitation seem like I’d been formulating a joke. He pushed the button and the elevator rose slowly as if being cranked up by hand. It had been designed for a maximum of only four people. My garment bag guaranteed we were fairly close to each other.

Lanny said, “I’m going to be in town for about a week. I’d like to see you again. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Well, look, okay, I’m old enough to be your father but only just barely. And for it to have been legal, I would have had to have been married in the state of Georgia, with my parents’ written consent at that. Is the age difference a big problem for you? We could double-date with the old fellow and his poodle downstairs. I’ll seem like a spring chicken by comparison.”

“How old are you?” I asked, knowing from his current press kit that his official admitted age was forty.

“Forty-two,” he answered.

I liked that a lot. That he was honest with me, not that he was forty-two.

“No, I’m okay about that,” I said.

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. We stepped out into a short hall that went both left and right. “Which way?” asked Lanny. I looked for a helpful sign indicating which way 4D might be. There was none. But of course, if I really lived in apartment 4D, I wouldn’t need a sign to know which way it was, would I?

“Guess,” I said coquettishly.

“Why?” he asked reasonably.

I leaned against the wall. “Oh, because if you have to search, we’ll have another minute to talk.”

He pulled my bag over his shoulder and trudged down the hall. I stayed by the elevator, looking all cutesy-poo. I must have been setting back the cause of women’s rights by about twenty years.

“This it?” Lanny asked.

“You tell me,” I moued.

He looked at the door. “4G. So it must be this way?”

He pointed in the other direction. I tried to look like I was playing the cutest little game, but actually I felt like a complete imbecile. He located a door at the far end of the hall. “4D,” he said. “Last stop. Now let me just see you get in the door okay and I’ll leave you alone till tomorrow.” He looked at his watch and corrected himself. “Or actually, later today.”

I saw that there were two locks on the door. I pulled out the keys I’d been fiddling with since we’d walked into the building. “This could take some time. I never get which key goes in which lock the first time.” God, I was depicting myself as a total ditz here. One key was new and brass-colored and I fitted it into the upper lock of the door, which was new and brassy as well. The key turned and I felt the lock give. Hosanna. I tried a duller key in the much older lock below it, and the door opened. Well done, O’Connor.

“Well, thank you so much for everything.” I smiled, stepping into the doorway. It was totally dark in the room. I reached for a light switch and didn’t find one. I made the mistake of reaching for it on the other side of the door and found nothing there. I was afraid I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by looking like I didn’t know where my own light switch was—I didn’t—so I did the obvious thing, which was to kiss him.

I probably would have kissed him anyway. He took my kiss as if it were the most natural thing—maybe it was—and reciprocated very nicely, I want to tell you. It was a good kiss as these things go, something of which we could both be justifiably proud.

In this particular epoch of American culture, it would have been the expected thing for us to now have sex.

He set down my garment bag in the still-dark apartment and said, as if giving instructions to himself: “Okay, I’m going to leave now because I have Reuben and Irv sitting in the limo downstairs, and I also really have to get some sleep for the Today show or I’ll look old enough to be your grandfather when they get me on camera. So I’m going to be well-behaved now. But I want you to know that I have never hated Barbara Walters until this particular moment… and you should definitely not feel so safe with me again.” Barbara Walters was cohosting the Today show at that time, and I took this statement to be a compliment.

“Do you need my number?” I asked.

“Reuben has it, remember? He’s my human Rolodex, I’m terrible with numbers. If you want to call me at the Plaza—not tonight but anytime thereafter, I’m putting a ‘Do not disturb’ on my phone until five A.M.—you call and ask for ‘Lenny Merwin’ and they’ll put you through to me. Or you might get Reuben, but you can leave a message with him. He likes you.”

How Lanny knew Reuben liked me I wouldn’t know, but it was nice to hear. I repeated the name he had told me. “Lenny Merwin.”

“Right. If you forget, it’s my character’s name in my first movie with Vince.”

“Smithereens,” I said reflexively and foolishly.

“Yeah.” He looked at me. “Hey, you’re a bigger fan than you let on.” His expression was almost one of disappointment.

“I’m afraid I’ve never seen it,” I lied. “One of the people on the airplane mentioned seeing it when he was a kid. The name stuck in my head.”

Lanny looked relieved. “Oh. I guess I didn’t hear that. You get numb after a while. Well. I’ll call you tomor—” He looked at his watch again. “I’ll call you later. Lovely to meet you, Bonnie.” He hurried down the hall, stepped into the elevator, and was gone.

I fumbled around, finding that the long-lost light switch was on the other side of a portal leading to what had once surely been a decent-sized linen closet and now was an indecently minuscule kitchen. That innovation only a New York landlord could have envisioned, the combination refrigerator-stove, took up most of the space. I moved past the kitchen-bath experience and into the living quarters, if you could call this living. Some prints of flowers, some photos of someone else’s babies, and the scent of potpourri that managed to mask the dark odor of roach spray. Across half the room at a height of not quite six feet was a loft bed, a very full-sized one accessed by a ladder. It looked like an inviting expanse, but sitting up in bed would have to be negotiated very diplomatically with the ceiling. The underside of the bed also served as a ceiling for the area below it, where the occupant had a beanbag chair, a footstool, a gooseneck lamp, and what I sought more than anything else: a phone.

I picked up the Princess phone, whose best feature was a nightlight beneath the rotary dial in its base. Here in the darkness “under the arches” of the platform bed, its glow helped me find the switch to the gooseneck lamp, and at last I could see a bit better around me.

I sat down in the beanbag chair and dialed the operator, who asked how she might direct my call. I told her I wanted to make a collect call to Los Angeles, and when asked, I gave the operator my own West Coast number. I heard a few rings on the line through the steady surf-noise of a transcontinental call. I knew those rings were sounding now on my own telephone. I imagined it purring in my somewhat overplush bedroom, filled with art nouveau prints and myriad decadent little touches, multicolored miniature perfume bottles, unusual drapery, perfect peacock feathers, leaded amber glass hanging in front of the window with an uninteresting view of the pool, a fountain gurgling just outside my kitchen window, and everywhere the lightest scent of Jungle Gardenia. Despite how pleasantly most of the day had gone, from this grim little Manhattan garret I envied the person who would be answering that phone in L.A. My phone.

On the fifth ring, Beejay, my roommate from college, picked up the receiver of my phone, told the operator she’d accept my call, and said hello.

“Hi, it’s Kerry,” I said, thrilled to make use of my name once again. “I’m in.”

We’d remained friends after we left college and had always tried to see each other whenever I came back to New York. After I’d learned that Neuman and Newberry wanted to meet with me, I’d immediately called her to make plans. To our mutual chagrin, Beejay told me she’d just that afternoon taken advantage of a price war between American and TWA and bought herself a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, good for the next twenty-one days, excluding Fridays and Sundays. That was when I suggested we swap apartments for a week, which would give her free use of my place in Studio City (which she had sort of planned to have anyway) while I would use her place in Fun City, which would give me Neuman and Newberry’s sizable, Manhattan-calculated per diem to spend on something other than a matchbox-sized hotel room whose nightly cost was equal to the price of a Dunhill lighter.

She had flown into L.A. just the day before. I’d shown her how to open the valve to the gas fire under my ceramic logs and how to open the gas tank of my convertible. We’d exchanged keys and had dinner at Yamashiro, a restaurant some 250 feet above Hollywood Boulevard. It was a replica of a Kyoto castle of the same name and served not only as a restaurant but as a de facto Hollywood standing set, frequently used for TV and movies and as close to a Japanese fortress as you were likely to find within three miles of the Burbank Studios.

We had the most wonderful time at dinner, and I picked up the tab. I wasn’t about to let Beejay pay any part of her first night out in Los Angeles. I knew what a big expenditure the discount plane ticket had been and how little her job paid, probably little more than sixteen to twenty thousand a year. I called her Beejay, because her initials were B.J. and she hated her full name, which was Bonnie Jean Trout. She was a public-school teacher at P.S. 29 on Orchard Street. Second grade.