Feet on the Street Read Free Page B

her dwarf manservant Cupidon and her ominous maidservant played by Flora Robson—“the least likely mulatto,” as Kael noted, “in the history of cinema,” with kohl-surrounded gimlet eyes. Gary Cooper plays Clint Maroon, a gambler from Texas. (Cooper was drawn to the project by the fully sufficient circumstance that he and Bergman had started an affair on their previous picture,
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
in which she played a palpable but virtually mute blond Spanish revolutionary love-bunny. The noted harmonica player Larry Adler saw
Saratoga Trunk
and told Bergman she was miscast—she was a wholesome Swedish girl. Though this hurt her feelings, she had an affair with him.)
    To be precise, it is off a plate atop the hat on Cupidon’s head that Clio enjoys jambalaya, she and he both standing, in the French Market. Bergman eats! Later it’s fresh peaches submerged in champagne,
in the daytime,
after which she sleeps for two days.
    A lawyer sent by her relatives tries to bribe her into leaving town, but he can’t concentrate. Halfway through the business proposition in question, he blurts: “You’re beautiful!”
    â€œYes,” she says, “isn’t it lucky?”
    Clint, impulsively, to Clio: “I love hearing your voice. It goes over me like oil over a blister. Folks back home are fine but they got kinda squeaky voices.”
    Clio, manipulatively, to Clint: “I love you like the pig loves the mud.” Clint, or maybe Gary, looks a bit taken aback by this. But not so aback as Clio is taken when she learns that Clint isn’t rich. After making the most of her presence in New Orleans she moves on to Saratoga, New York, where just as her engagement to a boring man of wealth is about to be announced, Clint bursts into the party. In the course of a business matter he has been beaten half to death with a shovel, and he is
carrying the dwarf—
who may
be
dead—under his arm. Clint has made his fortune, two-fistedly, and of course he was the man for her anyway, and the dwarf comes to. It is a
great
bad movie, whose richness springs from New Orleans.
    C REATIVES
    Once, during some literary conference or another, the writer Molly Ivins, the artist Polly King, and I accompanied the former wife of David Bowie, who had a spicy memoir out, to a French Quarter apartment where “the widder Bowie,” as Molly would call her afterward, was staying with a friend who painted startlingly lurid figure studies. All I remember of the conversation is that the widder Bowie’s end of it was conducted at very nearly the top of her lungs, as if she were trying to be heard, or to hear herself, over a David Bowie concert; and that we all happened to agree at one point that we liked spring. I think it was spring. We all turned out to be pretty much on the same page there, causing our hostess to observe, “Well, we’re all creatives.” (Other creatives who had flings with New Orleans include Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Lowry, Sinclair Lewis, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Thornton Wilder, Pete Maravich, and Jorge Luis Borges, who subsequently wrote a story about a squeamish famished man who in trying to swallow his first oyster . . . no, I’m just making that up.)
    F ATS D OMINO
    The man who found a generation’s thrill on Blueberry Hill is long retired but still residing in his big pink-and-yellow-trimmed fifties ranch house in the Ninth Ward. He gives no interviews. Some years ago a famous local TV news guy, Phil Johnson, who was famous for his pretentious nightly editorial and the way he intoned “Good evening,” resolved to get Fats for his show. He knocked on Fats’s door. Fats opened it. “Hey, it’s Phil Johnson!” said Fats. Phil Johnson beamed. Said he was there to interview Fats. “Hey, say ‘Good evening’ for me,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but Fats said oh, come on. So Phil