A View From a Broad Page 6

  I, of course, had my own special reaction to the frankfurter’s demise. In what I’m sure was some sort of psychological counterattack, I felt compelled to eat every wurst I saw. And in Sweden, you see a lot of wursts. In fact, they have as many different kinds of wursts as they do herring: fat wursts, skinny wursts, wursts with sauerkraut and wursts with potatoes, wursts with cucumbers and wursts with herring. Cold wursts and hot wursts, long wursts and short wursts, the best wursts and the worst wursts, I consumed them all.

  So it is not surprising that as I sat there in Jutebory, in that room redolent with jockism, terrified, freezing, and gnawing on the last wurst in town, I desperately needed something to lighten my spirits. But I could think of only one thing that might help: A victim. Someone, anyone, on whom I could vent my misery. But who?

  My musical director seemed an excellent target. His skin was as thick as a rhino’s. I was certain he could stand a bombardment that would send any normal human being fleeing for his life.

  . . the best wursts and the worst wursts, I consumed them all.”

  Unfortunately, as soon as I called him in, I saw that his right arm was in a sling and his left eye was covered with a large square of gauze which he had attached to his forehead with a length of black electrical tape. Clearly, he and his petite amie had had another row. Even for me, he was too lame a target to make any further injury enjoyable. “Do you want to go over some tunes?” he asked through a pair of extraordinarily swollen lips.

  “I want to kill,” I responded.

  He understood. “But I am already dead,” he said. And then, laying my music down before me, out he ran, bellyaching, into the frigid hallway.

  And still I had no outlet for my pent-up emotions. I tried singing my scales, brushing my hair, even running through stage one of my semi—classical semi-dance movements. Nothing helped. I had to have a victim. Just then my manager walked smiling into the room.

  One look into my eyes and he knew that his best move was a quick exit. But I had him. “Why an ice rink?” I screamed. “Why this town I never heard of? Why must my dresser and I be made to freeze like match girls in the snow?” I hurled each question at him like a knife, but he didn’t even flinch.

  “I’m going to go out there and turn that ice rink into a wading pool!”

  Clearly, words were not enough. Crazed with the need to do damage, I reached behind me for something to throw at that face of tempered steel.

  • • •

  When I came to, about fifteen minutes later, they told me I was lucky to be alive. I had somehow managed, in reaching behind me for a weapon, to stick my finger directly into the electrical converter that was lying on my table, waiting to receive my hair dryer. At first, as I lay sprawled out over the rouge and depilatories, everyone thought I was dead. Now they were concerned that I felt no ill effects.

  Ill effects? One look in the mirror and I felt terrific. The shock had lent a certain becoming color to my cheeks, curled my hair, and left me with a warm, tingling sensation where before there had been only chills and shivering. Furthermore, except for Miss Frank, who stood off to one side mumbling how this was only the beginning, everyone was standing around me, being so solicitous and attentive that every self-absorbed, self-centered fiber of my being was appeased and purring happily.

  Now I could go out and face those thundering, non-English-speaking Swedes. Let them walk out on me! Let them not understand! I had my friends! My family! I needed nothing more!

  “Come, Miss Frank,” I bravely cried, flinging my split ends over my shoulder, “cinch me in! And make it tight! I’m going to go out there and turn that ice rink into a wading pool! . . . If I only knew a little more Swedish . . .”

  • THE JUTEBORY SCANDINAVIUM •

  Good Evening Ladies and Germs and welcome to another breathless evening of Tit and Wit! I stand before you nipples to the wind, ready to please you in every way you hoped I might and some you hoped I might not. . . . Am I talking too fast? Am I talking too slow? . . . In honor of my first trip to the North Countries, I come to you tonight mean as Scrooge and twice as horny, full of stories, songs and little pieces of exotic information you might not have known had you not bought a ticket to see this demented demiblonde. Ain’t that right, girls? How many of you think I’m still talking too fast? . . . How many vote for too slow? . . . How many of you think I should just shut up and go home? . . . Where was I? Oh, the girls. Look at those girls. The new lot. Each and every one of them a former Miss Matjes Herring. New girls, but the same old drag. You know me, honey, I am the Queen of Recycling! We didn’t have auditions to find these three —we had fittings . . . but I tell you, I am as proud as a peahen over these three yentas. Notice I did not say peacock. My consciousness has been raised. But I suggest you take notice of it right away, as there will be less and less evidence of it as the evening wears on. . . . Am I talking all right now? . . . Is everything okay? . . .

  After our tremendous success in Jutebory I sensed a subtle change in my girls. Their worldly success had gone completely to their heads, and I thought that a walk through the tawdry carnival nightlife of Liseberry, the local amusement park, might remind them of what they once had been, and might easily become again—if they displeased the Gods (or Goddesses).

  It all began reasonably enough. As there were only two flights out of Gothenburg to Stockholm, one at 8 A.M. (too early) and one at 6 P.M. (too late), a private plane was hired to take The Divine and Miss Frank to the distant Swedish capital. The plane, a Cessna six-seater, was scheduled to leave at noon, and at noon (thanks to some incredibly deft work on the part of Miss Frank in arousing The Divine at such an ungodly hour), the bedraggled twosome arrived at a small airport in the woods just north of Gothenburg.

  Miss M took one look at the plane and swooned. She had heard that the Swedes were into suicide, but this was ridiculous. Still, there seemed to be no choice but to board the fragile aircraft. Wrapped to the point of suffocation in multifarious layers of unfamiliar animal skins, and still fighting off the effects of last night’s celebrations, Miss M was sullen but obedient as the pilot strapped her into her seat.

  “Now, you realize,” the pilot said, “there will be some bumping about. Perhaps even some yawing. . . .”

  “Yawing?” Miss M yawned in his face. “What’s yawing?”

  “The unpredictable lurching of the aircraft from side to side,” the pilot explained. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”

  Miss M regarded the pilot with his firm chin, his steel-blue eyes. She surveyed his immaculate blond hair, his strong, broad shoulders. And she was reassured.

  And indeed, the flight began pleasantly enough. The lovely Swedish countryside swept by below them in all its fall grandeur: immense stands of dark-green firs, broken hither and thither by orange maples and pale-yellow aspens. And everywhere the lakes, like so many compact mirrors, reflected the afternoon sun. Miss M looked down on the endless stretches of the by-now familiar wilderness and felt the pressures of the tour slide off her back like a fine chinchilla stole. She snuggled back into her seat and closed her eyes.

  She wasn’t asleep for long. The first hint of trouble was a sharp, definite yaw to the right as the plane flew into a line of mean-looking clouds dripping with rain.

  “Just a bit of turbulence,” the tall, broad-shouldered pilot shouted to his passengers in the back.

  But Miss M’s ears, sensitive as a hound’s, heard the trace of concern in the pilot’s voice. Still, he had such blond hair. Surely nothing could go wrong.

  The second sharp lurch, however, was more than a yaw. The plane moved not only sideways, but definitely downwards as well. Miss Frank looked angrily at Miss M and dolefully up to the Lord.

  “It’s just a bit of turbulence,” said Miss M.

  “It’s the engine,” the pilot called back. “I’m afraid we’ll have to land.”

  Miss M looked out the window, her mind racing through every aviation movie she had ever seen. Land? There was no place to land. O
nly more of those endless pine trees and those goddamn maples.

  “I’m going to try over there by that farmhouse,” the pilot said.

  Miss M peered down intently. Not far below, she could make out a small wooden-frame house with a large open field behind it. How pitiful, Miss M. thought, that after blistering my heels so badly on the ladder of success, I should come to my end on this little plot of ground in the middle of nowhere. The headline she would never see danced before her eyes:

  SUPERSTAR KILLS PIG IN FATAL PLUNGE

  * * *

  Began Career at Continental Baths

  The pilot shouted back orders: “Fasten your seat belts tightly. Re move all sharp or breakable objects from anywhere around you. Bend your heads towards your knees. Wrap your arms around your heads. Above all, relax!”

  The plane lurched about more helplessly than ever in the wind and rain. They descended rapidly toward the field below. When they were twenty feet above the ground, the pilot cut the engine completely. The silence was terrifying. But Miss Frank was brave. The pilot was brave and tall and broad-shouldered. Miss M was none of the above. The plane landed in a field of clover as if nothing were wrong.

  “We are in Paradise,” Miss Frank announced. “Praise the Lord.”

  “Actually,” the pilot said, “we’re in Weldmere. About one hundred miles southeast of Stockholm.”

  “We’re up Shit’s Creek is where we are,” The Divine chimed in with her usual eloquence. “And what, may I ask, do we do now?”

  The pilot was about to respond when a loud Hallo! drew everyone’s attention outside. Running toward them through the field was a wild-eyed, white-haired man accompanied by two beautiful young women and a gaffer. Waving what appeared to be a megaphone, the man and his companions approached the battered plane.

  Imagine The Divine’s surprise when she saw that the man, whom she had taken to be some crazed pig farmer, was in fact the renowned film director Vilmos Angst. Imagine his surprise when he saw it was The Divine who had fallen out of the sky into the middle of his location. Miss M threw off her restraining straps, dashed out of the plane and embraced the genius madly.

  Miss Frank, who had never heard of Vilmos Angst, thought the forced landing had driven Miss M loony and shouted for her to get back into the plane and behave like a lady.

  But Miss M was beyond hearing, so delirious was she over this opportunity to meet, albeit under peculiar circumstances, the world-famous genius of cinematic art. Who knew where this could lead?

  It led, almost immediately, to a large barn located near the farmhouse Miss M had seen from the air. There Mr. Angst was filming his newest epic in total secrecy.

  The barn’s interior had been renovated to resemble a medieval sauna, complete with giant crucifix and plenty of fir boughs.

  “This film, which I shall call Thighs and Whispers,’ Angst explained, “represents a departure for me. It will be a comedy of manners, in which pain and guilt and man’s inborn need for humiliation and despair will play only a minor part.”

  “That’s too bad,” Miss Frank interrupted.

  “Actually, the plot is quite simple, since, along with other things, I am eschewing the convolutions of my past work: A young nun, who has run away from a sadistic Mother Superior and a string of petty thefts from the convent treasury, arrives in the middle of the night at the home of a rich and titled dwarf. She begs sanctuary. The dwarf, who has been a recluse for most of his life, preferring the company of his books and pet baboon to the hurly-burly of the world at large, believes the nun to be a messenger, the instrument of God, sent to him for his salvation, and so agrees to provide the exhausted and kleptomaniacal nun with shelter, hoping to learn, during the night, of the mysteries of her mission. Although somewhat dismayed by the sight of the clearly vicious baboon, not to mention the somber intensity of the dwarf, the nun thanks him for his hospitality and comes into the castle, closing the door on the night and the world outside.

  “There, you see? The situation is rife with comic possibility, is it not?”

  “It is genius. Sheer genius,” Miss M replied, tuned-in as ever.

  “And you,” Angst continued, “you must be in it. Now that you are here, for you not to be part of my work would be unthinkable.”

  “But what would I do?” Miss M asked. “You seem to have developed a two-character plot. Three if you count the baboon.”

  “You shall be Urtha, Goddess of Fire!” he cried. “Urtha, who figures so largely in the dwarf’s dreams. I did tell you the dwarf has dreams, did I not?”

  “No, I don’t think you did,” Miss M replied.

  “Well, then, let me explain. . . .”

  But at that very moment, the pilot returned dripping with grease and announced that the engine was repaired and the weather fine. They would have to leave immediately if Miss M was to get to Stockholm for her performance.

  “But you can’t leave now!” Angst cried. “Now that I have seen you, no one could possibly play Urtha for me but you, darling, you! If you go, I shall have to cut her out of the film altogether. And then what shall I do? No dreams; no movie.”

  “Well then,” Miss M replied, “let the baboon dream. Of his goddesses.”

  “Why . . . why, that’s brilliant!” the world-famous genius exclaimed. “Brilliant! Frieda! Bring me the script!”

  As Miss M left the barn, Vilmos Angst was scribbling furiously in the tattered pages of his notebook. “The baboon must dream,” he cried again and again. “The baboon!”

  * * *

  “What was that all about?” Miss Frank asked as the two women plodded across the meadow to the waiting plane.

  “That is the climax of two thousand years of Western civilization,” Miss M answered proudly.

  “That’s our punishment, if you ask me” was all Miss Frank said.

  And perhaps Miss Frank was right. As we shall see in Part Two of The Continuing Saga of The Divine Miss M.

  • DRIVER TO THE STARS •

  Let us talk for a moment about chauffeurs. When you’re out on tour, wherever you may be, the native with whom you come in contact most is the man whose job it is to drive you to and from the airport, hotel, hall an restaurants, the man who also tends to be your guide on sight-seeing junkets and shopping sprees. In other words, your chauffeur.

  For a chauffeur, enthusiasm, patience and a keen sense of the ridiculous are very important, especially when driving folks who are longing to see the sights but haven’t the vaguest notion what the sights are, or why, indeed, they are sights at all. Couple this ignorance with the fact that such grimly uninformed travelers are invariably in a hurry, and you can readily understand why the life expectancy of chauffeur, especially in the non—English–speaking countries, is much shorter than that of almost any other worker involved in a service industry. In fact, one of my chauffeurs explained to me that many of the stone markers one sees along the highway are not kilometer signposts, as one might think, but rather dainty gravestones marking the spot where various chauffeurs have dropped by the wayside. I myself saw such a stone engraved: “HERE LIES LARS SCHAV. HE DROVE JOEY HEATHERTON. R.I.P.”

  My driver in England was named Bert, and he was quite extraordinary. Overweight, but underwhelmed by anyone of any station. The only thing Bert ever really tipped his hat to was a good dirty joke. Or a bad one. In fact, Bert preferred the bad ones, which made me like him even more. To show you what I mean, here’s Bert’s all-time favorite:

  * * *

  BERT’S FAVORITE JOKE

  Have you heard the one about the fat little boy who was so dumb he thought “sex” was the past tense of “six”? He finally earned his dunce cap when a teacher who thought he was getting too plump asked him how many slices of bread he ate each day.

  “Oh,” the lad replied, “I have sex in the morning, and I have sex at night. Sometimes I even have sex for luncheon.”

  Well, word got around that the little chap did not want to be dumb anymore, so a very enterprising schoolma
te picked up some rabbit droppings and put them in a jar. He went to see the dunce and said, “You want to be smart, heh?”

  The dumbo nodded.

  “Tell you what,” the rascal said, “I have some smart pills here. You can have ’em for a quid.”

  Well, the little boy was ecstatic. He paid the chap a quid and started to chomp on the pills. “Holy mackerel,” he cried, “these taste like shit!”

  “You see?” the other replied. “You’re getting smarter already.”

  * * *

  How could I help but be charmed by a man who told with the greatest enthusiasm jokes even older and more gruesome than mine?

  Another chauffeur I will never forget was Josef, my driver in Copenhagen. In his late forties and about five feet tall, he was a pint-sized version of a classic Viking god.

  One day on a sight-seeing drive around Copenhagen’s famous harbor, Josef stopped in front of an old and graceful yacht that was tied up in the notorious Sailors’ Quarter.

  “She’s beautiful, no?” Josef smiled at the boat like an old lover.

  “Definitely, beautiful,” I said, “and what a wonderful name it has—Englen med Sorte Vinger. What does it mean?”

  “The Angel with Black Wings,” Josef answered.

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s a sort of scary name for a boat, don’t you think?”

  “Not really,” he said, turning around in the front seat and gazing at me with his calm blue eyes. “It’s from an old Danish fairy tale about a baby mouse who steals up into the attic to nibble on some cheese he’s swiped from the family larder. Tired and full, he’s just about to fall asleep when a bat flies in the window, directly over his head. In a flash, the little mouse is up and racing downstairs to his mother. ‘Oh, Mama, Mama’ he cries, his heart beating with excitement, ‘guess what I just saw!’ ’What, dear?’ Mama Mouse asks her little baby. ‘Something wonderful,’ the little mouse exclaims. ’An angel with black wings!’