Even before it happened, Sarah was something of a problem, no doubt about it. I’ve known her for years—we were at the University together, and even then she was something of a curiosity: she would get drunk on about two drinks, pass out stiff on the floor, and nothing, not even threats of expulsion, could get her off it. Many’s the night I’ve jumped in her bed to cover up for her when the housemother would come around checking to see who was and who wasn’t there, and Sarah would be out cold in somebody’s apartment. She wouldn’t remember a thing the next day.

  And another thing, she was a compulsive curser. I have never come across anyone with a finer command of language than Sarah Mitchell, nor anyone who used it more impartially: deans, beaus, waitresses, postal authorities, anybody who came within range if Sarah happened to be on a cursing jag. This habit earned her the eternal suspicion of the Dean of Women’s office, the denizens of which were just waiting for an excuse to ship her. In the due course of events, they did, for having a bottle of beer in her possession. That doesn’t sound so terrible, but it is when you learn it’s the University of Alabama I refer to. There, young ladies are expected to smell of nothing more than Chanel No. 5 and Lavoris for at least four years.

  Anyway, Sarah left the University under a thundercloud. Suspected: cheating, stealing, sneaking out of Calloway Hall at night, promiscuity, and an irreverent attitude toward the Dean of Women. Proven: one bottle of beer in her hand. Of course, she didn’t have to parade down University Avenue with it—that was rather indiscreet—but they shipped her for it.

  When she was packing to leave, Sarah was in a fury, the main point of her discourse being that that mealy-mouthed Georgine Faircloth only got six weeks’ strict campus for being caught buck naked in a rowboat on the Black Warrior River, and here, she, Sarah Mitchell, was being expelled because her father hadn’t had his money as long as Georgine’s had had his. Besides, Georgine was a Beta Nu, and everybody who so much as pledged Beta Nu was assured of a free pass through the University, since the sorority was founded by Mrs. Jefferson Davis’s sister. Sarah had been rushed by the Beta Nus and was dropped like a hot brick the first time she opened her mouth, but if it hurt her nobody knew it. She just set about becoming the most independent independent on the campus.

  In her second year she got secretly married, which was worse than drinking, and divorced, which was worse than getting married. He was an awfully peculiar boy from Birmingham who thought he was better than everybody else in general and Sarah in particular. Sarah’s father got her out of that one and never let her hear the last of how much it cost him. Mr. Mitchell was a rich man, but five dollars was a lot of money to him, because long ago he had been a poor man. Sarah’s mother was a gilt-edged horror. She was one of those women who laugh and say heehoo on the end of it, which passes for gentility in some parts of the state. Without actually saying anything, Mrs. Mitchell always managed to convey the impression that even the time of day was improper; she long ago admitted to herself that Sarah was her shame, the price she had paid for isolated acts of impropriety with her husband, and she treated Sarah accordingly.

  No wonder Sarah headed straight for New York when she left school. Her parents wouldn’t have her home anyway; they enjoyed their martyrdom far too much to have it destroyed by her presence: people in her home town were terribly nice to the Mitchells when it got out that Sarah had been shipped, and in two weeks they received more supper invitations than they had in a year.

  I hadn’t heard of or from Sarah Mitchell until two years later when I went to live in New York and ran into her on Fifth Avenue. You know how that is, sooner or later you meet everybody you ever knew on Fifth Avenue. Well, there she was. She greeted me with the usual questions and asked me if I would go home with her and see her boys. “Boys?” I said. “I didn’t know you were married again.”

  “I’m not,” she said. Same old Sarah.

  But there was something different about her I couldn’t figure out at first. Something physical. She’d put on weight, of course, as we all do two years out of college, and she looked tidier than I’d ever seen her, but with that coat on you really couldn’t tell. Finally I got it: her hands. She had big square hands, cotton-picking hands, she used to call them, but her fingers were long and they went out at the ends instead of tapering off. For the first time since I’d known her I became aware of how awkwardly she used them; she seemed to have trouble with the most ordinary things, like reaching into her pocketbook for bus fare. She kept her fingers straight when it would be natural to bend them. From time to time she would rub the heel of one hand down the side of her coat as though to remove perspiration, although the day was cold. In all other respects, Sarah was her old self.

  When we got to her apartment I met the boys. They were two huge dogs I took to be mastiffs, but Sarah said they were boxers. She had a two-room apartment: she occupied one room and the dogs the other. Around the walls of the dogs’ room crates of kibble were stacked to the ceiling. She said the boys devoured it like fiends, and that it took nearly all her salary to support them.

  Over drinks, Sarah brought me up to date: when she came to New York, her first job consisted of filing answers from contestants in soap contests—you know, sentences completed in twenty-five words or less. She set up housekeeping with one of her co-workers, who was from Albania originally, and his friends, who were mostly middle Europeans. She did this thinking that was the way most people lived in New York. At least, that’s what she told me. She moved when her friend and his companions became involved in a three-day brawl which was finally attended by the police. She was arrested for disorderly conduct and given a suspended sentence. Naturally she lost her job when she did not show up for work or even call in.

  Sarah moved into the YWCA until she could find an apartment, but left it and slept in Pennsylvania Station two nights because the YWCA reminded her so much of Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell. She soon found a job as secretary, receptionist, treasurer and librarian for some kind of free-thinkers’ organization, and because she could run things the way she wanted with no interference, she was happy with it.

  Thus she was when I first met her in New York. I soon renewed contacts with the people ahead of me at the University who had come to New York, and I was admitted to what was known as The Alabama Crowd. I tried to make Sarah go along with me to their parties and gatherings, but she would have none of them. She said those people were a bunch of aging, college-hot snobs and she wouldn’t go near them. Finally, I persuaded her to go with me one night, and once there, she had a thoroughly good time, except for one thing: she fell in love again, with a fellow who was the male counterpart of every Beta Nu that ever lived, who gave her a wild spin, and who had not the slightest intention of marrying her. It almost killed her. In fact, she told me she tried sticking her head in the oven, but couldn’t keep still because the gas choked her so.

  Well, I guess that affair, although brief, was a good thing in a way because it took her mind off those dogs for a while. Now I love dogs and all that, but I don’t love boxers in my lap and hugging me around the neck and filling up a tiny apartment. I was not long learning that one unkind word to those beasts meant Sarah in a rage, and such rages: I had thought her command of language would recede with time, but I couldn’t have been more in error—she had merely expanded her vocabulary to include a choice selection of Yankee indecencies, and you know nothing sounds worse than a New Yorker swearing. She told me her next-door neighbor hated her dogs, and had once threatened to call the police because they were making so much racket. “You can guess what I told her” Sarah said.

  It did not take me long to discover that Sarah had few, if any, friends. She could be as attractive as the next girl if she wanted to, but let her go out on a date and likely as not she’d gum up the works by getting blind and telling the story of her life before she passed out, thus cancelling anything to her credit. She had no women friends as far as I could tell, and seemed not to want any. For some reason she suffered me, and since I felt sorry for her, I was glad to oblige.

  Being Sarah’s friend was difficult, however. It meant listening to an endless repetition of her troubles—that is, things that had happened long ago. She had all her misfortunes packaged neatly and the blame affixed, but somehow she could not resist opening them and worrying the contents like her dogs worried their kibble.

  She was in the habit of calling me in the middle of the night with Georgine Faircloth’s superior connections on her mind, or that time she was jailed overnight in Montgomery because her date ran into another car, or how nasty her father was to her when he paid off her husband. The trouble was, she would keep me up until dawn with some running monologue. When I got tired of it and hung up on her a couple of times she accused me of not giving a damn about what happened to her. I’ve never seen anybody so obsessed with herself—

  Gracious, I’ve been running on so long about Sarah I almost forgot to tell you what she did. Well, it was one morning a couple of weeks ago. Sarah had a cold and stayed home from the office—at least that’s what she said—I think one of those dogs was sick and she was home nursing him. About ten-thirty someone hammered frantically on her door and Sarah opened it. There was her neighbor, Mrs. Fohlmer, the one Sarah had the run-in with over the dogs, standing in the door. Mrs. Fohlmer had caught herself on fire somehow, probably hot grease, and was in flames, so Sarah shut the door in her face and Mrs. Fohlmer burned to a crisp in the hall.

  Now, Sarah keeps calling me up with that on her mind. I tell you, it’s beginning to get me down.

  The Viewers and the Viewed

  AMONG THE MANY PLEASURES OF living in the Yorkville section of Manhattan is that in the several large motion picture houses interspersed among the sausage establishments, travel agencies, and beer halls of 86th Street, one finds the most subtle and discriminating audiences in the United States.

  Bold is the movie company executive who arranges a preview at one of these theatres: before his picture is ten minutes old, there will be no doubt in the executive’s mind what the audience thinks of it. Silence is approval; disapproval is expressed by a shower of small unidentifiable objects flung in the direction of the screen, and if one has been foolish enough to sit downstairs one is likely to be inundated by paper bags full of water descending from above. The loges and balconies of these theatres are better organized than any college football cheering section I have ever seen: let one mawkish or fraudulent line, gesture, or sigh be conveyed to the congregations therein, and such unwisdom will be met by several hundred voices replying in even tones, “Aw, come on.”

  I remember one exchange between hero, heroine, and audience that lasted for eleven minutes by my Bulova. For reasons known only to whoever wrote the script, the hero was against sin, drink, the enemy (it was a war picture) and women. If several hundred persons can be said to have groaned in astonishment at such information, let it here be said. Holding these hard views, naturally the hero was confronted with huge doses of everything he was against, and naturally there ensued a scene in which the hero worked himself up to the brink of kissing a young lady of debatable character on the forehead, of all places, and funking it at the last moment. True to the established doctrine of putting a major point across to the masses, the scriptwriter suffered the actors to repeat the business three times. This was a mistake. The first goof met with an organized intake of breath, the second with a sound like air escaping from a tire of International Harvester’s biggest tractor, the third with a great double clap-and-stomp the rhythm of which was indiscernible from a single wing T-formation. When our hero finally accomplished what he had no idea of setting out to do, sustained cheering lasted long into the next scene, which, of course, was a battle scene.

  No sooner had the audience settled down, than another crisis arose which demanded its comment. The sub-hero, who was meant to be a coward but who did not fool the audience one minute, was confronted with an enemy tank full of the enemy, and he single-handedly dispatched it and its contents with a sedateness that can only emanate from the West Coast. After having been shot at and missed by cannon ball and machine gun bullets from a range not exceeding 20 yards in the aggregate (he used the Old Indian Trick and the Moving Target idea to elude his tormentors), the sub-hero crept up behind the tank and, if anyone will believe me, placed a huge rock in its wheel and rendered it motionless. Then, with cold-bloodedness unequaled since Sherman’s march to the sea, this coward opened the hatch of the tank, dropped a live grenade into it, and held it down.

  Unscathed by the explosion, the sub-hero strolled casually across a mined area and hoisted his unfortunate brother, the hero, onto his shoulders. The hero had been lying on the ground for some time regretting that he had ever been against sin, drink, the enemy, and women. I think this is correct, because his subsequent gestures seemed to convey that impression. The gestures of the audience were by no means ambiguous: it took the combined authority of the management and two representatives of the police department to restore order.

  In the past several months, however, a new game has sprung up in 86th Street which keeps its audiences reasonably attentive to the efforts of the scriptwriters. I’m not sure I approve of it: it tends to lessen the general fun because the audiences are so busy listening they sometimes forget to watch, but in spite of my efforts to go in the opposite direction, I find myself reluctantly swimming with the tide. I refer to the sport of trying to reconcile the titles of a rash of movies with their subject matter, titles that give one the impression of their having been plucked at random from the Pentateuch by an executive vice-president. Although curious titles have been common attention-getters for centuries, Hollywood cannot fail to accept its share of responsibility in a matter that has gotten out of hand.

  The game in 86th Street began with The High and the Mighty. It started innocently enough, when several persons including myself overheard this remark in the balcony: “They’re all high, but where does the mighty come in?” said a girl to her companion. For the remainder of the picture there was a small island of quiet in the balcony composed of people listening intently to find an answer to her question. We never did.

  With each Something and the Something offered on 86th Street, the game gained momentum until now there is absolute unanimity in the higher ranks. We lost the first few matches. Although Hollywood cannot claim credit for it, The Proud and the Beautiful eluded everyone, there being nothing in the dialogue, acting, photography, or general tenor of the movie to suggest its title. But Hollywood moved two-up on us with The Bold and the Brave and The Proud and the Profane and remained so until The Power and the Prize came along.

  I am happy to say that, according to the rules of the game, The Power and the Prize was a success. However, Hollywood tried to swing one across on us by having Mr. Burl Ives remark early in the first quarter, “That’s the prize you’re going after, son,” or something close to it. A large, “Oh no,” went up from loges and balcony followed by individual comments ranging from, “Interpolation, that’s what it is,” to, “You got it backwards, Big Daddy.”

  Complete reconciliation of the picture with its title was a long time coming: quietly and hopefully the audience (the humblest of which takes Haydn and Schumann with his beer) watched a vile-tempered young woman play something terribly classical terribly on the piano, it assimilated unprotestingly a bizarre proposition that the British love pride more than they love money, it was assured that Presbyterians no longer burn people at the stake, and it sat unmoved through some distressing hints that the heroine was a prostitute and a communist, until Big Daddy wrapped things up by saying he was a creature of Power. When this was revealed, jubilation knew no bounds in the balcony. We had won.

  But I am afraid that 86th Street audiences are doomed to eventual disappointment. Fewer pictures are coming out with thought-provoking titles: the trend nowadays is to make everything abundantly clear to prospective customers, like The Ten Commandments, Attack, The Opposite Sex. Such titles, I believe, are the result of Hollywood’s recurrent cycle of fear that if anything is left to its imagination, the public is somehow less entertained. I trust I have made sufficiently clear the fact that there are more ways of entertaining audiences than are dreamt of in this philosophy.

  I notice from Variety that there is only one picture in production whose title remains unguessed at. It is called The Cunning and the Haunted, and if this title is meant to be the last of its kind, let me prime the pump by respectfully submitting some titles of my own invention with appropriate story-lines. They might keep the game alive and give added enjoyment to the multitudes, who, as we all know, have an average intelligence of twelve-year-old children. I have not registered these titles with any organization, so they are free to anyone who cares to use them:

  The Quick and the Dead, a Western

  The Knock and the Need, expose of charity rackets

  The Dope and the Fiend, hospital drama

  The Block and the Tackle, football story

  The Venetian and the Blind, 15th-century costume drama

  The Web and the Footed, nature film or title change for The Thos. Wolfe Story

  The Base and the Vile, murder at the Philharmonic

  The Clawed and the Rains, jungle feature

  The Good and the Ready, small-town documentary

  The Beyond and the Pale, Air Force story

  The Pigeon and the Toad, a fable

  The Water and the Closet, story-line optional

  These suggestions should be enough for Hollywood to mull over for a while, but if they are insufficient, I recommend that the proper motion picture authorities conduct a survey of any 86th Street audience for additional ideas. Their efforts will not go unrewarded.

  This Is Show Business?

  THE ONLY REASON I DID it is because Gerald Gray and his wife are my best friends and I told him I would do it, but I shall never do it again. Become involved with a fashion show, that is. Gerald is vaguely in show business—no, no, no, Gerald is in show business; it is I who am vague about what he does: all I know is that he writes and produces fashion shows and he makes a lot of money at it. We never discuss his work, so I had not the faintest idea of what constituted a fashion show until he called me one day and asked if I would help out the girl who does his lighting for him. I was glad to.