Radiance

Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

Places, Everyone!, 4th May, 1924

Column #431: The Man in the Moon

Greetings and salutations, cats and kittens, darlings and dear hearts, galactic apples of my all-seeing eye! What have I got in my pockets for you this week? A little sex, a little decadence, a dash of illicit never-you-mind, a lashing of underage naughtiness? YOU BET.

Yours truly secured an invitation Saturday last to what is sure to be remembered as the shindig of the century, or at least the week: the wrap party for Percy Unck’s newest flickie, The Abduction of Proserpine! Don’t ask how I came to be in possession of my invitation (engraved in silver, naturally, on black paper—our man Unck omits no detail!) for I shall never tell.

I am your eyes and ears on the Moon—I see all and hear all! And what did I hear and see on Saturday?

Well, you already know, loyal readers, that Mr Percival Unck was turned down flat by the Americans when he tried to pop out to the nether quarters of the solar system to shoot his little Gothic trifle in the actual ruins of poor Proserpine. People are so funny about tragedies! So what did the King of the Silver Screen do? He built Pluto on the Moon. That’s right, all that hush-hush hustle and bustle out on the Endymion Flats beyond Grasshopper City, all those trucks bouncing out of the Virago lots, all that grumbling and rattling you heard from the Oxblood and Plantagenet offices? All of that was to whack us up a little Pluto of our own. Oh, it’ll be gone by the time you read this—that’s just how the celluloid crumbles—but it’ll be alive forever up there on the cinema screen come autumn. The camera eats the world: points itself at everything, and sucks it right up into Movieland.

But on Saturday, oh, on Saturday, we all danced the Charleston on Pluto’s night-drenched shores! We drank pomegranate smoke out of stained-glass snifters and wriggled into paper buffalo suits left lying all over the sailcloth glaciers like party hats. Mickey Hull himself played the evening away with his twenty-man band. Miss Mary Pellam, half out of her dress by nine p.m., brought the house down with “It Never Rains on Venus.” Mickey H. belted out “I Left My Heart on Halimede,” and, I tell you, there wasn’t a dry eye.

But I get ahead of myself.

Our host set the soundstage up like a labyrinth—the flats and mattes arranged so that we revellers got quite lost, plunged into the mixed-up world of Unck Brand Patented Instant Pluto—Just Add Cameras! The interior walls—all painted windows with real curtains, candelabras and mantelpieces concealing the triggers to hidden stairways—stood at ninety-degree angles to broad landscapes of the frozen Plutonian tundra: wild silver-tailed buffalo prancing, Charon looming huge and sinister and shimmering with what I could only assume was enough glitter to entirely coat the island of Madagascar. Expanses of the ruined city of Proserpine had been swept aside to make room for sets of the city at its rough-and-tumble height. No one could find their way; we stumbled over each other, giggling like children at a slumber party. Tucked into every turn of the maze were caches of drink and delicacies—usually tipped over and scattered by the time I found them. But all roads led to Unck, and the winding, wriggling paths eventually emptied out into a great central stage where Talmadge Brace’s gargantuan ice-dragon puppet wrapped around Mickey Hull’s band and a ballroom floor the colour of blood. The red positively throbbed in my eyes after all that gentle silver and black and grey and white.

And who did I see on the dance floor but beefy Capricorn Studios golden boy Thad Irigaray putting the moves on Mary P, the current Mrs Unck! Not that the chap was doing much of a job of it. And what’s this? Old Wadsy canoodling with Richard Boreal over by the vampires’ chiaroscuro hideout, my my! Quel scandale—or it would be, if I hadn’t told you all about it months ago. Our leading lady and gent, Miss Annabelle August and Mr Hartford Crane, kissed grandly in public view, but went to the bar separately, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. The birdies say those two kids can’t stand each other, and Annie’s looking to jump ship to Capricorn with Thaddy-boy—but who’d let a dove like that go? I smell a skirmish coming, so batten down the hatches and hold on to your hats.

Percy himself held court in a dashing green suit, so unusual for the monochrome mishmash of the Virago homestead! And don’t think I missed the sidelong looks he dished out to that pretty little ballerina we’ve been seeing in the chorus lines in Grasshopper City. I miss nothing.

More troubling to my eyes was the sight of little Severin Unck, but ten years old, weaving in and out of the labyrinth with more ease than any of us, darting into the flats to sling back vodka and Callisto bourbon like a bad wee fairy child, some wastrel by-blow daughter of Puck. By midnight she could be found curled up on the massive snout of the ice-dragon puppet that features so prominently in the film, her fingers tangled in its tinfoil whiskers, stocking feet tucked up under her petticoat, a crystal af-yun atomizer clutched in her fist. She would not be the first child to go that way on our Pleasure Island in the sky, but it hurt my heart all the same.

When the rumpus wound down and the confetti had been thrown, the poor girl woke with a start and found herself alone but for myself and a few of the catering staff tidying up. She climbed up onto the face of that glitter-caked dragon, standing on her tiptoes, surrounded by the funhouse-mirror Pluto, ruins, drawing room, and glacier, and began crying plaintively: Papa! Papa!

And for one moment—the only moment of the whole Proserpine shoot, I’d wager—I felt as though I stood on Pluto in truth; right there at the end of it all in the terrible chill and emptiness of that very real and very dead city, of which all that remains is a ghostly voice crying out one word to the night, over and over, without a reply.

Algernon B

Editor-in-Chief