Remake

He didn’t remember her, even after I’d plied him with chooch, and he refused to give me the student list for her class. I could get it from Heada, but I didn’t want her looking sympathetic and thinking I’d lost my mind. Charles Boyer in Gaslight.

I went back to my room and took Billy Bigelow’s drinking and half the plot out of Carousel, and went to bed.

An hour later the comp woke me out of a sound sleep, making a racket like the reactor in The China Syndrome, and I staggered over and blinked at it for a good five minutes before I realized it was the watch-and-warn, and Brides must be out of litigation, and another minute to think what command to give.

It wasn’t Brides. It was Fred Astaire, and the court decision was scrolling down the screen: “Intellectual property claim denied, irreproducible art form claim denied, collaborative property claim denied.” Which meant Fred’s estate and RKO-Warner must have lost, and ILMGM, where Fred had spent all those years covering for partners who couldn’t dance, had won.

“Broadway Melody of 1940,” I said, and watched the Beguine come up just like I remembered it, stars and polished floor and Eleanor in white, side by side with Fred.

I had never watched it sober. I had thought the silence, the raptness, the quality of still, centered beauty was the effect of the klieg, but it wasn’t. They tapped easily, carelessly, across a dark, polished floor, their hands not quite touching, and were as still, as silent as they were that night I watched Alis watching them. The real thing.

And it had never existed, that harmless, innocent world. In 1940, Hitler was bombing the hell out of London and already hauling Jews off in cattle cars. The studio execs were lobbying against war and making deals, the real Mayer was running the studio, and starlets were going pop on a casting couch for a five-second walk-on. Fred and Eleanor were doing fifty takes, a hundred, in a hot airless studio, and going home to soak their bleeding feet.

It had never existed, this world of starry floors and backlit hair and easy, careless kick-turns, and the 1940 audience watching it knew it didn’t. And that was its appeal, not that it reflected “sunnier, simpler times,” but that it was impossible. That it was what they wanted and could never have.

The screen cut to legalese again, ILMGM’s appeal already under way, and I hadn’t seen the end of the routine, hadn’t gotten it on tape or even backed it up.

It didn’t matter. It was Eleanor, not Alis, and no matter what Heada thought, no matter how logical it was, I wasn’t the one doing it. Because if I had been, litigation or no litigation, that was where I would have put her, dancing side by side with Fred, half turning to give him that delighted smile.

MONTAGE: Tight close-up comp screen. Title credits dissolve into one another: South Pacific, Stand Up and Cheer, State Fair, Strike Up the Band, Summer Stock.

Eventually I ran out of places to look. I went down to Hollywood Boulevard again, but nobody remembered her, and none of the places had Digimattes except A Star Is Born, and it was closed for the night, an iron gate pulled across the front. Alis’s other classes had been fibe-op-feed lectures, and her roommate, very splatted, was under the impression Alis had gone back home.

“She packed up all her stuff,” she said. “She had all this stuff, costumes and wigs and stuff, and left.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Last week, I think. Before Christmas.”

I talked to the roommate five weeks after I’d seen Alis in Brides. At the end of six weeks, I ran out of musicals. There weren’t that many, and I’d watched them all, except for the ones in litigation because of Fred. And Ray Bolger, who Viamount filed copyright on the day after I went out to Burbank.

The Russ Tamblyn suit got settled, beeping me awake in the middle of the night to tell me somebody’d won the right to rape and pillage him on the big screen, and I backed up the barnraising scene and then watched West Side Story, just in case. Alis wasn’t there.

I watched the “On the Town” routine again and looked up Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, convinced there was something important there that I was missing. It was a remake of Gold Diggers of 1933, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. I put all the routines up on the array in order, easiest to most difficult, as if that might give me some clue to what she’d do next, but it wasn’t any help. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was the hardest thing she’d done, and she’d done that six weeks ago.

I listed the movies by date, studio, and dancers, and ran a cross-tabulation on the data. And then I sat and stared at the nonresults for a while. And at the array.