Graus Menzies likes being insulted!
Elsa stops. She pushes me. I stumble back, stunned. I approach her again, puffing my chest out, daring her.
“Go on. Or haven’t you got the guts?” I say.
This time, she slaps me right in the face.
The sensation is startling. My cheeks are on fire. But it’s not the only thing reacting. I have become engorged.
Graus Menzies likes being beaten up!
Elsa has hidden a feather duster in her bag. She takes it out, waves it in my aching face. Then she turns it around and knocks me in the head with its handle.
I fall against the bed, dizzy and dazed. But I don’t get up. I choose to stay down.
She takes another object from her seemingly bottomless purse. It is an old-fashioned paddle, the kind you use on naughty boys.
Graus buries his face in the nasty bedspread, his behind in the air. He closes his eyes.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
This is more pleasure than Graus has ever known! I am big enough, proud enough, to provoke such a punishment! The maid pummels her master until the sun comes up, until it’s time to go back to work for Jerry Lewis. It is the greatest night of my life!
Later, before we leave, we sit on the bed, side by side, like children.
“How’s your career going?” she asks, adjusting her apron.
“My what?”
“Your career, how is it—”
“How do you think?” I bellow, jerked back to real life. “I’m Concentration Camp Prisoner number three forty-eight in a Jerry Lewis movie! How do you think it’s going? And what is Jerry doing, anyway? ‘Dying is easy. Comedy is hard’—isn’t that what they say?”
She didn’t reply.
“I have no money, I have no agent—how do you think it’s going?!”
I don’t mean to scream at her, but it’s a sore point. Why does a man of my caliber have to struggle so? It has set me off.
Elsa lets me rave on and on. She strokes my hair, compassionately. Then she pulls on my ears until I moan with excitement—and stop complaining.
“Maybe things will change now,” she says.
I have no idea what she’s talking about. It just seems like a thing one says. But there is no time to discuss it. I hastily agree. I beg her for one last good hard smack. Then I am off to Jerry and she is off … where?
She won’t say. Elsa enters my disgusting bathroom. When she emerges, she has changed into a fetching sundress. The chambermaid is just a memory.
And what a memory it is! I keep Elsa in my mind as I slog through my final paces on the film. During lunch, I cannot sit down without wincing, then weeping, then smiling. The other extras stare at me. But I don’t care! I flip them off. Let them get their own wonderful pain!
She never returns to the set. I hear a producer or some big shot complain about his errant girlfriend, who’s left town without a word. It must be her.
But Elsa has been right. From that moment on, there is no more extra work for Graus. My talent and my legend only grow (see Chapters 15–27). There will be Wenders, Fassbinder, Macaroon Heart (with that hideous brat, Gratey McBride, who was dubbed by a dwarf).
Accepting myself, what I am, what I need, makes it possible for me to force other people to accept me, too. The realization makes me a finer actor. A bigger star. A better man.
I begin to re-create the original Elsa with other chambermaids. While it is usually good, it is never the same. I can never forget the woman who made me grovel and made me great.
Elsa doesn’t forget, either. Years later, I am in Paris, staying in the best hotel, playing a leading role.
When I return to the hotel at night, there is a package waiting. No return address.
“Who left this?!” I demand of the mousy clerk who calls himself a man.
“A beautiful woman,” he says. “She didn’t give her name.”
As if it’s the finest heroin, I clutch the package to my breast. In my room, my fingers trembling, I rip it open.
It is a tape. A copy of all the footage shot on The Day the Clown Cried.
My eyes fill with tears. It is her way of remembering.
Over the years, the legend of Jerry Lewis’s film has grown, as has Graus’s. It has never been finished or released, only gossiped and dreamed about. I had read that the studio in Stockholm owned the negatives. Now Elsa has given me this priceless object as a gift.
I know it would be a windfall, but I have no interest in making money from it. I will never give it up. Telling no one, I will take it with me wherever I go. It will matter to me only as a memento of that wonderful woman, of that first spanking hand.
It may have been the day the clown cried. But it was also the day Graus Menzies cried out—in wonderful, unforgettable agony, truly, for the first time: “I am Graus!”
“NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER SEEN THIS?” I SAID, EXCITEDLY, LAYING DOWN THE last page.
