MASH 08 MASH Goes to Hollywood Read online

  “Wow!” Seymour G. Schwartz said. “A wristwatch. Just what I needed! This makes an even half dozen.”

  “They’re engraved,” Little Bunny said. “Don’s says, ‘From Little Bunny to Big Bunny.’ And yours says, ‘To Seymour, Who Made Me What I Am Today, Wesley St. James.’ ”

  “How nice!” Seymour said.

  At that point, Waldo Maldemer, one of the very few people who had access to Don Rhotten’s dressing suite, came into the room.

  There was an instant change in Wesley St. James. Gone was the gentle bunny.

  “I didn’t hear you knock, Hogjowls,” he snarled.

  “You remember Mr. Wesley St. James, don’t you, Waldo?” Seymour said.

  “Look at the watch he gave me, Waldo,” Don Rhotten said. “You push the button and it lights up and tells you what time it is. You don’t have to figure it out yourself.”

  “You ever consider a face-lift, Maldemer?” Wesley St. James said. “A little character, a few lines in the face, is one thing. But there’s such a thing as overkill.”

  “I didn’t know you were busy,” Waldo Maldemer said.

  “Since you’re here,” Wesley St. James said, “you might as well look at Seymour’s watch. Show him the watch, Seymour.”

  Seymour reluctantly handed the watch to Waldo Maldemer.

  “Very interesting,” Waldo Maldemer said and smiled his famous fatherly smile.

  “How would you like a watch like that?” Wesley St. James asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I like you, Waldo,” Wesley St. James said. “I do things for people I like.”

  “Well, that’s very kind of you,” Waldo Maldemer said.

  “And people I like generally do favors for me.”

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” Waldo Maldemer asked.

  “You think you could hold your show down for a couple of days without Don?” Wesley St. James asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Seymour G. Schwartz asked.

  “Answer the question, lardbelly,” Wesley St. James pursued, ignoring him.

  “I think I could probably manage,” Waldo said, somewhat huffily. “I was here before Don, you know.”

  “Yeah, and before Don you were so low in the ratings you’d have had to crawl up to get in the gutter,” Wesley St. James replied.

  “He’s got a point there,” Don Rhotten said. “You know that, Waldo.”

  “Don’s not going anywhere with you, Wesley,” Seymour said. He had finally figured out what Wesley St. James was leading up to.

  “Shut up, Seymour,” Don Rhotten said. “Nobody asked you.”

  “You and Don going someplace?” Waldo Maldemer asked.

  “Here’s the bottom line, Waldo,” Wesley St. James said. “You cover for Don for three, four days . . . until Monday, and you get yourself a watch just like that.”

  “Where are you going?” Seymour said.

  “You ever watch ‘One Life to Love,’ Waldo?” Wesley asked.

  “Every day,” Waldo said, firmly. “Could you tell me, off the record, Mr. St. James, whether Dr. Peterson is really the father of Mrs. McGovern’s unborn baby?”

  “I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you,” Wesley said. “But do you remember what happened on Wednesday?”

  “You mean when Mrs. McGovern came to Dr. Peterson and told him that she was going to have to explain to Mr. McGovern how come she was in the family way, after Dr. Peterson had personally sterilized him?”

  “Right,” Wesley said. “And what did Dr. Peterson say to her?”

  “He said he would need time to think,” Waldo Maldemer said. “When she told him she was in the family way, he stared into her eyes and said, ‘Penelope, I need time to think.’ ”

  “And then what?”

  “Tears ran down Penelope’s cheeks,” Waldo said. “And mine, too.”

  “That’s not what I mean, dummy,” Wesley said. “What else did Dr. Peterson say?”

  Waldo looked thoughtful and slightly confused. It was a well-known look. Millions of people had seen it. Waldo looked that way when someone in the production department screwed up and the big words on the Tele-PrompTer weren’t broken down into little words.

  “He said,” Waldo went on, remembering the exact words and then quoting them, “ ‘Penelope, I need time to think. There comes a time in every man’s life when he must get away from the mad merry-go-round of life and go off alone by himself and think.’ I thought that was beautifully put, Mr. St. James.”

  “I wrote that myself,” Wesley said. “But you left out the important part, Waldo.”

  “I did?”

  “… and go off alone by himself and commune with nature and think,’ ” Wesley corrected him. “That ‘commune with nature’ is the important part, Waldo.”

  “I can’t imagine how I forgot that,” Waldo said. “Probably because I was crying.”

  “Well, that’s it,” Wesley said. “It started me thinking. I realized that I had to get off the mad merry-go-round of life myself and commune with nature, and do some thinking.”

  “I certainly can understand that,” Waldo said.

  “So that’s why I want to borrow Don for a couple of days,” Wesley said.

  “So the two of you can commune with nature?” Seymour said. “That’s ridiculous. I remember the time you two got lost in the experimental cornfield at the Cedar Rapids County Fair.”

  “Don’t make me sorry I gave you that solid-gold- plated, five-hundred-dollar watch, Seymour,” Wesley said.

  “Where do you plan to go?” Waldo Maldemer asked.

  “Deep in the Maine woods,” Wesley St. James said.

  “You’re kidding!” Don Rhotten said.

  “No, I’m not. It’s all laid on. We got a guide and canoes, the whole bit.”

  “I get seasick in boats,” Don Rhotten said. “Look, Wesley, why don’t we go to Miami for a couple of days? Or Vegas?”

  “What’s in Miami? What’s in Vegas? I’ll tell you what’s in Miami and Vegas: booze and broads. That’s what’s in Miami and Vegas.”

  “Right,” Don Rhotten said. “We’ll get us a penthouse at the Fontainebleau and have a ball! Seymour can arrange for the broads like always, right, Seymour?”

  “Big Bunny, I thought you, of all people, would understand,” Wesley St. James said. His eyes filled with tears.

  “Little Bunny,” Don Rhotten said, “if you want to go deep in the Maine woods, Big Bunny will go with you!”

  “You mean that?” Little Bunny asked, choking off a sob.

  “Sure, I mean it,” Don Rhotten said. “Would Don Rhotten lie to you?”

  Wesley St. James said nothing in reply.

  “What’s this, ho-ho-ho, Little Bunny-Big Bunny business?” Waldo Maldemer asked, ho-ho-ho-ing his famous ho-ho-ho.

  “What are you doing, writing a book?” Wesley St. James snarled. “Mind your own business, hogjowls!”

  “Sorry,” Waldo Maldemer said.

  “When are we going?” Don Rhotten said.

  “Right now,” Wesley St. James said.

  “Right now?”

  “I got a helicopter waiting on the roof,” Wesley St. James said. “And we’d better get up there before the girls start wondering what happened to me.”

  “Girls?”

  “Sure, girls. Big Bunny didn’t think Little Bunny would go commune with nature in the deep Maine woods alone, did he?”

  “Of course not,” Don Rhotten said. “But if there’s going to be girls, I’ll have to wear my wig.”

  “So?”

  “So when I wear my wig in the woods, it attracts flies. It’s the glue, I think.”

  “So don’t wear the wig,” Wesley St. James said.

  “How can I be Don Rhotten without a wig?”

  “You got it. You won’t be Don Rhotten. You’ll be a simple nobody, Don. think of that. What a change!”

  “Wesley, you really are a genius,” Don Rhotten said. “What shall I call myself?”


  “John Smith,” Wesley replied immediately. “John Smith. It has a nice ring to it.” He pushed Don Rhotten toward the door and then turned to face Waldo Maldemer. “A word to the wise, hogjowls,” he said. “My people will be taping your show. You try to stick a knife in my buddy’s back when he’s gone, you’ll be back reporting on ship arrivals and hog prices before you know what hit you!”

  “Trust me!” Waldo Maldemer said.

  “Ha!” Wesley St. James said, and then he and Don Rhotten were gone.

  “Can I see your watch again?” Waldo asked. Seymour G. Schwartz threw it at him. Waldo tried to catch it and missed. When it had bounced off the wall, Waldo bent and picked it up, put it to his ear, and then announced, “It’s still ticking.”

  He was rather surprised when Seymour G. Schwartz snatched it from his hand, threw it on the floor, and jumped up and down on it. He stamped and jumped on it for a full minute and then, out of breath, picked it up and held it to his ear.

  There was a muted buzz. The damned thing really was unbreakable. Seymour G. Schwartz began to weep.

  Chapter Five

  Across the wide Atlantic at just about this time, a moment that would live forever in the annals of opera was about to take place. The Paris Opera, conveniently located on the Place de l’Opera in Paris, France, was presenting Wagner’s opera Siegfried.

  Presenting this opus anywhere is always a major undertaking and generally a very expensive one. Often, presenting Siegfried costs the opera house a lot of money. There is an enormous cast and elaborate sets, and it has even been suggested that the opera itself is a little too long, a fact which discourages the sale of tickets to all but the most dedicated opera lovers.

  This performance, however, had been sold out for three months, even though the tickets carried a one-hundred-percent surcharge as a “Performance Magnifique.” A “Performance Magnifique” differed from a “Performance Ordinaire” in only one detail. That was the appearance of Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, who was, by his own admission, the greatest living opera singer and possibly the greatest opera singer of all time.

  This opinion was shared, fortunately, by many people and by the government of France itself, which had three years previously declared the singer to be an Official National Treasure of the French Republic.

  It wasn’t only that Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov was, in fact, possessed of a truly splendid set of pipes. He also had an unparalleled stage presence, possibly because he stood six-feet-four-inches tall and carried 250 pounds, with not an ounce of fat, on his frame. He habitually wore a thick, curling beard of dark black, matching his curly black locks. He had large, deep, piercing eyes.

  For some reason, this combination aroused in the bosoms of women generally, and in those of French women specifically, a strange emotion. All it took was for him to appear on the stage and face the audience to cause a pregnant hush broken only by feminine sighs. When he opened his mouth and sang a bar or two, the sighs became moans of unrequited passion, and if he sang with his chest partially bared, women all over the audience gasped, groaned, moaned, and slipped glassy-eyed out of their seats onto the floor.

  Whenever a “Performance Magnifique” was scheduled, it was necessary for the management of the opera house to erect what was known as the Korsky-Rimsakov shield. The purpose of the shield (a pipe and cyclone fence affair, rising from the footlights to the top of the proscenium arch) was twofold. First, it protected the cast and Cher Boris Alexandrovich, as he was affectionately known, from a hail of hotel keys, perfumed notes, and intimate items of feminine apparel that invariably sailed stageward whenever the singer was on stage. (The shield was first used after the prompter was knocked unconscious by a rather substantial foundation garment tossed onto the stage by a Madame Marie-Antoinette Juvier, 55, wife of the deputy president of the Paris Bourse, or stock exchange.)

  Secondly, the shield protected the singer from females who, literally beside themselves with passion, came racing down the aisle to leap onto the stage and throw themselves at Cher Boris Alexandrovich’s feet. The shield was, of course, impenetrable, but many a performance in which Cher Boris appeared had to be interrupted while ushers and gendarmes pulled overwrought fans off the shield where they accumulated to the point that the other, merely glassy-eyed, female fans and the sprinkling of male spectators could no longer see the stage.

  He was, of course, not only a great artist but a genius as well, and had to be treated as such. His little excursions from the straight and narrow path of righteousness were never condemned, at least by the feminine portion of the population. The complaints of the male population were dismissed, not without reason, as sour grapes. Cher Boris Alexandrovich had only, as Madame le President de la République told Monsieur le President, only a couple of little faults.

  These may be succinctly categorized as booze and broads.

  The booze fell under the category of recreation. The broads were not, as he himself frequently pointed out, his fault. It was God’s fault. God had made him so attractive to the opposite sex. It was his own private cross to bear.

  He would have much preferred, as he often told his close friend and constant companion, His Royal Highness Prince Hassan ad Kayam, to have spent his life in the company of one devoted woman in a small house by the side of the road being a friend to man and lifting his voice in song only with the boys at the neighborhood bistro.

  But that was not, so to speak, in the cards. God had obviously intended him to be what he was. Otherwise, he reasoned, God wouldn’t have “seen him safely through shot and shell and near death in the Korean war.” *

  (* This is not one of what have come to be known as one of Cher Boris Alexandrovich’s “colorful little exaggerations.” U.S. army records indicate that Pfc. Bob Alexander (his nom de guerre) served with distinction with the 223rd Infantry Regiment, 40th Division, as a Browning automatic rifleman, earning the Distinguished Service Cross and other medals for carrying a Sergeant J.-P. de la Chevaux off Heartbreak Ridge under a “murderous hail of fire, and while himself grievously wounded.” The details of Maestro Korsky-Rimsakov's distinguished military service have been chronicled for posterity in the highly acclaimed volume M*A*S*H GOES TO PARIS (Pocket Books, New York, 1975).)

  Instead of a small house by the side of the road, there was a fourteen-room duplex apartment on the Avenue de la Grande Armee, which Cher Boris modestly referred to as his little pied-a-terre, or “foot on the ground.” This made reference to the fact that he did not confine his art to France and appeared, whenever the mood was upon him, at opera houses in Vienna and Salzburg, Austria; Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, Germany; all over Italy; and, less frequently, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

  And instead of the company of one devoted woman, there were women in Paris, France; Vienna and Salzburg, Austria; Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, Germany; all over Italy; and New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

  The latter explained the friendship and constant presence of His Royal Highness Prince Hassan ad Kayam. His Highness had learned some years before that Cher Boris’ feminine discards were of far greater variety and much higher quality than those which came to an Arabian prince, even one with an income conservatively estimated at $30,000 per day.

  Theirs was a mutually rewarding relationship. Hassan, to reiterate, got the discards, and Cher Boris was relieved of the mundane drudgery of paying for things. The fleet of Royal Hussid Embassy limousines was at his disposal, as were the aircraft of Air Hussid, the Hussidian national airline. Hussid, whose petroleum reserves were second only to those of Saudi Arabia, provided thirty-eight percent of the petroleum needs of France. Air Hussid was thus the only airline in the world that could afford to operate the supersonic French transport Le Discorde, that graceful, droop-nosed aircraft whose operating costs ran to some $6,000 per hour.

  His Highness, of course, was a devout teetotaler, which provided fine counterpoint to Cher Boris, who generally began the day wi
th an eye-opening four fingers of Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon before proceeding to the breakfast champagne.

  His Highness, moreover, had found in Cher Boris and in his career a worthy vocation. Although he was heir apparent to the Royal Hussidian throne and AmbassadorExtraordinary and Plenipotentiary to both the French Republic and the United States, he really had little to do in France except endorse checks for deposit.

  He had become, over the years, the de facto manager of the singer. His Highness was the man to see, for example, if you were the manager of La Scala and wished the singer to perform. And it was His Highness who took care of the little details that went with an appearance of Cher Boris. He personally approved the cast, the orchestra and chorus director, and the stage settings and ensured that the Korsky-Rimsakov shield was in place and that the maestro’s dressing room was equipped with a sauna bath, a well-stocked bar, a supply of the maestro’s own recordings, flowers, and exercise partners.

  Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov exercised regularly. He had three years before become a devotee of the physical-culture principles advanced by Dr. T. Mullins Yancey, whom he referred to as the Sainted Guru of Manhattan, Kansas. *

  (* For further reading: Sexual Intercourse as Exercise (498 pages, illustrated, $9.95) and Health and Strength from Constant Coitus (469 pages, annotated and illustrated, $9.50). Both by Theosophilus Mullins Yancey, M.D., Ph.D., D.D., D.V.M., Joyful Practice Publishing Company, Manhattan, Kansas.)

  “I always sang magnificently,” Boris had said, “but until I came to follow the tenets of that sainted man, never quite so superbly, with such feeling and insight.” Cher Boris invariably exercised before a performance, and if the performance went well, as it usually did, afterward as well. His Highness kept the roster of volunteers. He and Boris both considered it a part of His Highness’ responsibility to audition the volunteers. Art demanded it. An entire performance could be ruined if the pre-performance exercise had been less than satisfactory, and as Cher Boris so often said, “You can’t tell a broad by its cover.”