Stars and bit players
Lloyd Evans
THE LAST HUMAN CANNONBALL
by Byron Rogers Aurum, .E12.99, pp. 2645, ISBNI845130413 111.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
Scoundrels and daredevils — these are Byron Rogers's preferred company. In this masterful collection of journalism he presents us with a bizarre crew of rascals, madmen, crooks and off-the-cuff heroes. Take Jack Greiner, a retired engineer. Bored one afternoon on his Saga holiday, Mr Greiller decided to swim the Amazon. The tour had reached a point 2,300 miles from the sea where the pirhana-infested river was only a mile wide. 'The tree trunks being carried downstream in its current looked like chewed pencils.' Mr Greiller, 65, took the plunge. Having been swimming for nearly an hour, and within sight of the far bank, he narrowly avoided being swept downstream when the river was engulfed in torrential rains. The locals were amazed. Not so his wife. When he dragged himself dripping and panting onto the shore, all she could find to say was 'Jack, would you please go up to our room and get an umbrella for me.'
As a reporter Rogers is blessed with good fortune and unusual diligence. It must have taken days, if not weeks, of arduous research before he found a Hollywood extra who could recall the filming of Spartacus as vividly as this. The man had been hired to hang from a cross on the Appian Way. He was crucified at six in the morning. It was February, freezing cold. 'The props people had put bicycle seats on all the crosses. You parked a cheek on one
and when that got sore you turned the other cheek, as it were,' he remembered. His cross began to lean forward and he found himself having trouble breathing. 'Then I realised what was happening. I was actually being crucified.' He couldn't cry for help. That might have ruined the shot. `Jobs are scarce for extras,' he added bravely. Rogers brings out the tawdiy comedy of the hit-players' lives with an amused and sympathetic melancholy. Like many chapters in this book, it felt like the kernel of a screenplay.
The ordinary are just as fascinating as the eminent. This is Rogers's guiding principle, but he deviates from it slightly to create a penetrating study of Burt Lancaster. Lancaster was rarely filmed except in character and Rogers met him socially many times. He records the slovenly dress, the air of physical menace and the features that looked 'like a piece of stone only the winds have forgotten'. Glimpsing him in a shadowy hotel once, he felt that 'the great jaw muscles seemed to belong to some earlier stage in human evolution'.
With James Hill and Harold Hecht, Lancaster broke free of the studios in the 1950s. Together they made a string of hits including Trapeze, Elmer Ganity and The Birdman of Alcatraz. But their company had no collateral. One flop could break them. Then came Sweet Smell of Success. There were problems from the start, but it was one of those rare movies where every setback generated unheralded bonuses. The screen-writer Clifford Odets was suffering from block. With no dialogue to shoot the crew were sent off every day to film New York street-scenes. Those exteriors are now regarded as one of the high moments in American cinema. Odets was concerned that Tony Curtis's character seemed too sycophantic towards J. J. Hunsecker, the tyrannical columnist played by Lancaster. 'Why in hell does he just sit there and take it from this guy?' James Hill gave the answer: 'Come on, Clifford, this is a man who tells presidents
what to do.' The line made it into the script. Famously, however, the movie bombed. The company went down with it. Yet Lancaster's career survived. Rogers offers a final glimpse of him, aged and stuck in a wheelchair, but still capable of terrifying and mesmerising everyone who came into his orbit. The collection abounds with such poignant and intimate portraits. This is an exquisite work by one of the quiet maestros of the English language.
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