Popcorn

something they imagined sounded neat. These mothers weren’t against death, they were against violence and murder. But that would have spelt MAVAM which was not neat, so they had had to become Mothers Against Death (by violence and murder), or MAD. Bruce knew some of them by sight. They had been with him for months, these mothers whose sons and daughters he was supposed to have killed.

‘ Hollywood glorifies murder’, said their placards. ‘Bring back family entertainment’.

‘Like incest,’ Bruce thought, but fortunately he did not say it. Even cool mavericks in pointytoed boots had to recognize the limits.

‘Mr Delamitri,’ shouted one of the MAD mothers, ‘my son was murdered. An innocent boy, gunned down on the streets. In your last picture there were seventeen murders.’

‘Yeah, and there was plenty of sex in my movie too, but I bet you haven’t had any for a while.’ Again he thought it but didn’t say it.

These people were beyond rational argument. Bruce turned away from them and waved at the rest of the crowd.

‘Where’s the old lady?’ one tasteless wag shouted.

Funny how some people seem to think it’s perfectly all right to be rude to the rich and famous, as if having a lot of money meant that breaking up with your wife was not a painful experience. Bruce had not got married in public, and he certainly wasn’t getting divorced in public, but the whole messy business was none the less public property.

‘Where are your manners, you pathetic little nolife?’ was what Bruce wanted to reply, but he didn’t, of course. He merely smiled a ‘what can I tell ya?’ sort of smile and for this small capitulation he was rewarded with a thumbs up from his interrogator and another ragged cheer.

The mirror Bruce held up was a twoway thing. Occasionally he caught his own reflection in it. He wanted that crowd to love him, to appreciate him. So he smiled and waved and in their faces were reflected his weakness and his dishonesty.

It began to rain. A summer storm was coming in. Bruce hurried up the red carpet and into the theatre. He was wearing the genuine original tux that had been worn by Bogart in Casablanca , but it was only borrowed and he didn’t want it to get wet.

*

North of LA the storm had already broken. The highway shone like black patent leather, the lights of the traffic shimmering on its surface.

Inside the 1957 Chevrolet the young man and the even younger woman peered out at the road as the ancient wiper blades struggled with the downpour.

‘Ya gotta sacrifice comfort for style,’ the man had said, explaining his choice of which car to steal. ‘Even broke down and with its engine up on blocks, this car is a better car than every heap of foreign tin between here and Los Angeles.’

‘Leastways the radio works,’ the girl said, and found a hardrock station. Personally, she liked her music a little softer and sweeter, but she knew his tastes. Besides, what she liked to hear was the news. She liked being famous.

‘Latter day desperados… Bonnie and Clyde for the millennium… a Mexican chambermaid found dead in a chalet room, clutching clean towels and soap…’ The girl thought how strange it had been, watching movies all that time with the dead maid lying there in front of the TV.

‘… motel shortorder cook shot fourteen times…’

She should never have told him about that guy flirting. She’d known what would happen and it had.

The radio moved on to showbiz news.

‘… live from outside the Oscars… I see Bruce Delamitri acknowledging the crowd.’

‘Way to go,’ murmured the man as he peered into the rain. ‘You make sure you win, now, Bruce. Just you make damn sure you win.’

Chapter Nine

‘Bruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All right!’ the impossibly cute blonde modelturnedactress almost shouted, making the most of her last syllable in the spotlight.

On the whole the people brought on to do the presenting at awards ceremonies are divided into two groups, the big names and the small. The big names are those who have been nominated for an award themselves and have been persuaded to muck in elsewhere during the evening to help things swing. They do not want to do this of course, since it considerably lessens a star’s impact when they finally appear themselves as a recipient if they have only recently been welcomed on stage to give some nobody or other the gong for ‘Best ForeignLanguage Lyric’. Nevertheless, big stars often agree to do the required chore because they are unable to avoid the tiny, unworthy suspicion that a refusal might somehow affect their own chances. Traditionally, big names who have not been nominated refuse requests to present. They are happy to turn up, of course, and sit in the stalls observing proceedings with a bemused tolerance, but they are not prepared to play John the Baptist to some hated rival’s Messiah. Which means that the organizers of these events are forced to fall back on the second group: small names, people who have been around for either a very short time or a very long time. The former are not yet famous enough to cause much excitement, and the latter are destined to provoke excitement only once more in their lives and that, paradoxically, will be when they die. It is these people who fill the gaps between the genuinely important names.

Bruce scored a notyetfamousenough.

It should not have been that way, of course. ‘Best Director’ is one of the jewels in the Academy’s crown, and under normal circumstances one of the pressganged biggies would have presented Bruce with his statuette. But Hollywood is a scared town. Nobody wants to be connected with any controversy, and with his placard-waving band of MAD camp followers Bruce was highly controversial. His presence on the list of nominees had been enough to cause all the glittering superstars originally approached to get headaches.

‘Bruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All right!’

Bruce leapt out his seat like an eager puppy at the sound of his name. He had intended to arch his eyebrows in surprise and then rise slowly and rather reluctantly. Instead it looked as if his backside was springloaded. Recovering slightly, but still grinning like a lunatic, he set off towards the podium. Behind him a tuxedoed extra slipped into his place; the Oscars ceremony is, when all is said and done, a television programme, and no seating gaps are allowed to mar the perfect picture.

The cute starlet beamed at Bruce as he approached her. Held firmly in her grip and pressed hard against her impossibly, absurdly perfect body was the twelveinch golden icon. If Bruce’s mouth hadn’t been so dry he would probably have dribbled. This felt good. All through the interminable earlier part of the proceedings his mind had been a jumble of possible things to say. He would speak out against the New Right and its creeping censorship, condemn the way hysterical outrage had replaced reasoned debate, call for freedom of speech, proclaim the sacred individuality of the artist in a democracy. Basically, just be a complete and utter hero.

In front of a billion people.

That was what he had been told: a billion people were watching. A billion. On the long walk up the aisle towards the beaming starlet, he tried to conjure up some kind of image of what that meant. He thought of all the faces outside the theatre, the ones staring into his limousine; he imagined the whole sky filled with those faces, a big sky, a desert sky, filled with gawping faces from one horizon to the other, all staring at him. He couldn’t do it. It didn’t mean anything. A hundred people, a billion people – either way it was a lot of people if they were all staring at you.

Now Bruce was on the stage, standing alone in a single spotlight, the Oscar in his hand.

Now was his chance. To tell it like it was. To rise above the sanctimonious emotional manipulation that had characterized the evening thus far. Like the ‘Best Actor’, who had won his award for playing a person with brain damage and who had actually carried a braindamaged child on to the stage and presented her with his award. Or