At Georgetown my need was fulfilled. The polishing and Americanizing process had begun at the Prep, of course, but now that I was away from home I was able to concentrate on filling in the elements of a new identity, stealing this habit and that grace, this way of dressing and that way of acting from the hordes of refined, wealthy young gentlemen of fine old New England homes who came to the Georgetown campus to study. I learned that at football games one does not belch to signify approval of a sterling play, and that a gentleman shaves before a “tea dance”; that even a college sport does not wear a yellow tie with a blue suit and that young college girls must not be accosted in theater balconies. I became, in short, a patchwork quilt of the Georgetown student body, and I forgot that I had ever worn red velvet trousers. I breathed a sigh of relief.
But I had sighed too much, too soon. Like a doting Canterville ghost, Mama began haunting the Gothic old battlements of Georgetown, making incessant surprise visits to the campus and overflowing, as usual, with Middle Eastern essences and jars of Lebanese goodies.
The first time it happened was in the fall of my freshman year. I had just stepped out of the shower room and was rounding a corner on the fourth floor of the Ryan Hall dormitory, when suddenly I saw Mama bearing down on me full steam a grin on her strong, dark face and a shopping bag in each hand.
“Mama,” I roared, “you can’t come up here! This is a men’s dormitory!”
“Will-yam,” she shrilled, “I’m your mother!”
There was no denying it. And thenceforth I was once again the barrage balloon for Mama’s verbal cannon shots about Lebanon.
iii
My mother’s frequent raids plus the pressure of maintaining my scholarship combined to give me insomnia. Each night I would roll and toss in my hard bed in the Ryan Dorm, and would rarely lose consciousness until long after the bells of Healy Tower had pealed out the hour of three. A part of the trouble, I suppose, was the fact that my bed tilted rather alarmingly to the right, and I lived in constant dread of rolling out of it and awakening the corridor prefect, who was liable to give me demerits for “uncanny night noises.” At Georgetown, the range of offenses punishable by demerits was infinite, and we all lived under a gloomy, nerve-shattering tension.
My sleeplessness at night made it nearly impossible for me to remain awake during my early morning classes, and my fellow collegians took to calling me “The Sleeping Sheik.” My periods of consciousness were referred to as “The Arab Awakening.”
My mother, meanwhile, was getting no sleep at all, for she was lying awake nights dreaming up new ways to Lebanize me. Like the time I was standing with her under the famed “Georgetown Tree,” a campus landmark in front of the Foreign Service School. The Dean of Studies happened along, and I introduced him to my mother.
“Well, Mrs. Blatty,” smiled the black-robed Jesuit, “and what do you think of Georgetown?”
“Georgetown!” boomed my mother. “George-town! You ever hear of the American University of Beirut? My God, is that a university!” I waited for a shower of boiled potatoes to come whistling out of the sky and put us all out of our misery.
I plunged on with my college career, growing more and more urbane, more and more embarrassed by reminders of my alien upbringing. It got so that the word “Lebanon” made me cringe, for it always made me think of lead soldiers being crushed underfoot, and for this reason I elected to bypass a course in International Relations and take Greek instead. Greek was safe; it never forced me to come face to face with myself.
By my senior year, I was so polished that my old friends on the East Side would have thrown rocks at me. I had all the graces, and lacked only a freckled-faced, snub-nosed wench to appreciate the new me. But like my mother, I had faith, and in the year of my graduation, faith paid off: I found an Irish girl named Peggy. She knew nothing about Lebanon and cared even less.
5. Creepy Irish Girl, I Am Thine
I MET PEGGY while on my way to the men’s room at half-time of the Georgetown-Villanova football game of 1949, and maybe that’s pretty meager potatoes compared to Rochester’s first meeting with Jane Eyre, but don’t bug me, I’m just trying to give you the facts. And if you want another fact, she was on her way to the ladies’ room.
“Unclean! Unclean!” I shouted as I tried to cut a swath through a collegiate montage of elbows, pennants and flasks and was mightily chagrined when the two Georgetowners wedging with me stopped to make small talk with some girls in the stands, although little did I ween, I trow, that Destiny’s bride was among them. Yes, my buddies introduced me to Peggy, but we merely nodded to each other and then were still. Between hot, desperate glances in the direction of the men’s room, I did manage to fling several adoring looks at this lovely, and when she returned them I thought it meet indeed that I set it down in my tables. Yet not a word had passed between us when at last my friends in the coonskin coats and khaki leggings cut short their chit-chat and joined me in a race to the white-tiled nirvana behind the bleachers. And this is the meeting that we had at the grandstand in the floods.
Peggy and I began dating, and in the first reckless flush of joy that we each experienced upon discovering that the other could speak, Peggy confided to me that I had attracted her during our classic meeting for a reason that bordered on exotica. “You were the only quiet one in that group of boys,” she said, and “Wondrous strange!” thought I, pregnant with the bizarre knowledge that our romance was based on my inability to converse with a full bladder. But to Peggy I gave no hint of this weighty intelligence.
Meanwhile, Peggy was cloaking still another delusion: she thought I was a Cherokee Indian. She had been “thrown off,” as she later explained, by my dark complexion and my penchant for playing “Pale Moon” on the piano. It was certainly a magnificent obsession, I’ll grant you, but I had already experienced the classic of this type, in which a Miss Gladys Odone had once harbored the conviction that I was Irish because I had blue eyes and frequently hummed “Too-ra-Loo-ra-Loo-ra.” The notion of dating a Cherokee Indian, meanwhile, had impressed Peggy as being rather glamorous and it demolished her to learn that I was merely an Arab. I reluctantly tried wearing a turban for a while, and although it caused a considerable amount of comment at the Senior Prom, it didn’t seem to console her. I sighed and let it pass. My experiences with Mama had taught me to accept people, no matter what their crotchets.
For a while, though, there was some worry that Peggy’s parents might not accept me. Peggy’s father was a cautious Pennsylvania banker, and “A-rabs might have some funny traits we don’t know about,” he would gloom darkly in his gun room. My mother had a few funny traits, all right, but if you think I was going to tell Peggy’s father about them, well, you’re crazy.
When Mama learned that I was serious about a “creepy Irish girl” she let loose a bellow that carried clear across the East River to the floor of the U.N. Security Council, where the Western delegates instinctively turned down their earphones and glared accusingly at Vishinsky. It was one of Mama’s typical contributions to international understanding, but believe me, it was a mere bagatelle compared to her first meeting with Peggy.
“Mama, this is Peggy,” I intoned fatuously, bringing the two women in my life face to face in our Brooklyn apartment. Mama added rare spice to the occasion by looking Peggy smack in the eye and responding to the introduction in Arabic.
“Mama, speak English,” I prodded gently. “How do you do, Mrs. Blatty?” said Peggy sweetly, but we were both playing with my mother’s jasmine-scented dice and for fifteen minutes Mama addressed Peggy in Arabic. I was ready to take the A-train in my underwear.
“Mama, for heaven’s sake, she doesn’t understand Arabic!” I blurted in exasperation, and “How’s Mary McArdle?” asked my mother abruptly in English. I mentally took the gas: Mary McArdle was an old flame. Peggy eyed me severely, and Mama smiled craftily. She had struck another blow for the Arab nation.
Six months prior to my graduation from Georgetown, I struck a blo
w for the “new” Bill Blatty by plighting my troth to Miss Incipient Pocahontas in Washington’s Holy Trinity Church. A seemingly reconciled Mama was there, but just as the priest prepared to give us Communion she lumbered out of her pew and began to advance menacingly toward the altar. I felt almost certain that she wouldn’t assassinate her own son, but I was a bit concerned for Peggy, although I remember reflecting that at least she would have a happy death, what with the priest handy and all. As it turned out, though, the entity marching down the aisle was “Major” Blatty. She knelt at the altar and asked to receive Communion with us.
ii
After graduation, Peggy and I moved into an Arlington, Virginia, apartment where we lived happily, for a while, on sorghum and fronds. Then Bedouin ghosts began spooking my tent.
“Find a job,” said Peggy after several months of marriage. I interrupted my sixth re-reading of the Studs Lonigan trilogy in order to brood upon her daring suggestion. A job? What sort of job? I thought. After twenty-two years with Mama, what was I qualified for besides listening?
“I’m not qualified to work,” I persisted. “I’ve got no experience.” But Peggy was adamant and I went out looking.
I wanted desperately to assert my Americanism so I applied for a position with the F.B.I.
“Mr. Blatty,” squealed the examiner unbelievingly, “have you actually lived at all these addresses?” He was clutching my questionnaire plus several additional sheets that I’d had to ask for so I could list all the places where I’d lived. “It would take us years to complete a security check!”
“Years?”
“Years!”
“I see.”
At the Central Intelligence Agency it was the same story, and at the National Security Agency they had a policy against hiring second-generation personnel. I heard there was a writing job open with a local magazine called Ordnance, but when the editor asked what I had to offer besides a college diploma, I said, “I speak Arabic fluently,” and he threw me out of his office. Then I got an offer to work as an aide to the Lebanese Consul. My response was to bomb the Consulate with reverse Nike missiles. It was the least I could do for them.
I was frustrated, all right, and angry, all right, and there seemed to be but one way out: escape into the world of fantasy. You guessed it, Schwartz—I enlisted in the United States Air Force.
I went directly from civilian life into OCS, and there I immediately acquired something of a reputation. I was the only officer candidate who wore rhinestone daggers in place of bars on his collar, and as you may well suppose this caused more stir than a congressman in the Pentagon, but the training officers at Lackland Air Force Base decided to overlook this little symbol of my rebellion and resentment. “He talks A-rab,” they would say, “and we need him.” By this they meant that I was “needed” in Japan. But fate foiled them. My background of studies in English literature, plus a demonstrated skill at “guts” poker, won me an assignment in psychological warfare and I was shipped in a sealed railway car to Washington, D.C., where I became Policy Branch Chief of one of the psychological warfare divisions. That was fine. Everything was fine. At least I was in the American Air Force, and for four wild years I gloried in my uniform and thumbed my nose at the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Then it was back to civilian life and my old job-hunting problems.
Now perhaps you think that four years in psychological warfare constituted the sort of experience that would impress a civilian employer, and I hate like hell to disabuse you of that idea, but would you like to hear a fragment of my Air Force job description? It read in part: “… Analyze Soviet Propaganda strategy on the world-wide front and devise suitable countermeasures.” My rank at the time was First Lieutenant.
Back in the real world, in 1955, I dreamed one night that I had taken my vocational problems to a professional counselor.
iii
“You have a very long life-line,” the mysterious woman with the gay-spangled earrings crackled at me as she held my upturned palm within an inch of her crafty eyes.
“Yes, yes, I know,” I snarled, puncturing her ear with my pen-knife for emphasis. They’re a flighty bunch, these gypsies, and you have to take a strong hand with them.
“The crib-line near your wrist signifies that you’re a college man. What did you prepare for?”
“Life.”
“Ah, an English major,” she rasped and then abruptly fell to inexplicable muttering and cursing, finishing off her jovial performance with a savage bite at my wrist watch “You must take a long trip across water,” she announced finally, spitting out broken bits of glass and a bent minute hand. “A very long trip—perhaps to—Lebanon.”
“Arrgh!” I croaked, and grasping her nose firmly between thumb and forefinger, I ripped off the lifelike rubber mask. “So—it’s you!”
“Yes—it’s me,” said my mother.
iv
I awoke in a cold sweat and rubbed the freckles on Peggy’s nose to reassure myself that they were real. For a ghastly long while, I lay there soaking up memories of boyhood like an eggplant soaking up olive oil. And suddenly I felt that old need to be somebody else.
That morning, after breakfast, I committed an act of desperation, something at which I excel on a full stomach. I was also driven by the fact that I now had three children, named Christine, Michael and Mary Jo, who had appetites that would have made Henry the Eighth’s look sick. That’s right: I needed identity and money and there was only one magic paradise left where I might find them both, one cloud-cuckoo land where I might even convince someone that I was Irish: Hollywood!
Taking phobias in hand, I wrote a “Dear Virginia” letter to Paramount Studios, asking them whether it was true that good little boys got Hollywood contracts. With a brashness born of despair, I explained why I thought I was the most sensational undiscovered acting discovery since Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston, listing the “Park Avenue lawyers” as one of my credits. And the impossible then possed—the studio answered my letter, and for shame you who say that Hollywood has no writers!
A bay-leaf-scented message came wafting in from Paramount informing me that “an audition would be arranged.” “Sniffing a dramatic finish to my career problems, plus a chance to submerge my own identity forever under a thousand and one characterizations, I joyously packed my Air Force duffel bag, distributed some surplus V-mail stationery to the wife and children, and climbed aboard a chugging choo-choo for Hollywood!
6. Biblical Is Out
“YOU TWITCH too much.” This was Monk Lewis, Paramount’s elf-like assistant talent chief analyzing my preliminary reading.
“I what?”
“You twitch too much. Here, like this,” he said, and began screwing up his face like a Camembert cheese rind. “You don’t have to scrunch up your mug like that to convey emotion. Did you ever see Gary Cooper scrunch up his face like that? Or Turhan Bey?” I had to confess I hadn’t.
“Right!” he growled, his wise, dark eyes glittering triumphantly. “But that’s okey-dokey, kid. Aside from that, you were good—good enough to read for—the Chief!”
The “Chief” was talent head, Bill Meikeljon, and now I was ushered into the Paramount “Fishbowl”—a closed stage with boom microphone and one wall all of glass, with lighting so arranged that you could be closely examined from without, but could not see the auditioners.
“Begin!” I was commanded over the inter-com, and I whipped into Yank’s tough-talking monologue from the very dramatic curtain scene in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. But after a minute of surrealistic arm-waving, I was interrupted by a disembodied voice that said “Hold it!” The ensuing pause struck me as being about as peculiar as a moose in Capri pants, and suddenly I was all a-tremble like a frightened Christmas pudding. Later I discovered that during the interruption, more VIPs were being summoned to hear me read, but I didn’t know that then. “Start from the beginning again!” said the disembodied voice. And rather sensibly, I thought. So I started. Then I finished. And suddenly p
eople were crawling up onto the tiny stage, and “How do you do?” said the Chief, but by the time I realized that he was talking to me, Bert McKay, the unit casting director for The Ten Commandments, had grabbed hold of my head and was tilting it upwards into an overhead “baby” spot.
“Want to see the color of those eyes,” he said. “Mr. De-Mille wants only brown-eyed people in his Biblical pictures.”
“Yeah, realistic,” grunted a talent department underling.
“But I’m of Arabic descent and my eyes are blue!” I protested.
“Show a little respect!” growled the assistant, his face up close to mine.
The Chief was now regarding me from a distance of about ten scenarios. “Look here,” he grunted to the casting director, grabbing him by a sleeve and then pointing to me: “See? The eyes will photograph dark.” He nodded toward the assistant: “Okay, you know where to get hold of him, right?”
“Right!”
ii
Right. And cut. Let’s move along to the next set, the assistant’s office after the moguls have left. You will notice that one of the characters seems hesitant about his lines:
ME:
How did I do?
THE ASSISTANT:
(CLOSE-UP) Terrific! You didn’t twitch!
ME:
Do I get a screen test?
THE ASSISTANT:
They want to cast you in a picture. That’s better than a screen test.
ME:
When do I start?
THE ASSISTANT:
Ten months.
ME:
TEN MONTHS? (fumbles for cue sheet) Do I get a contract?
THE ASSISTANT:
Nope, just this part.
ME: