The Man In The Seventh Row Read online

  There is no twinkle in his eyes, the whites of which are bloodshot with fatigue and worry. There is no mischievous grin, none of the confidence and arrogance of the revisionist interpretation of Ben Braddock. He seems no more than a washed-out remnant of the man on the screen, but there is no doubt that he is, or was, the man in the movie. He presses his hands to his face and lets out a sound that is part sigh and part sob.

  He returns to the cinema hoping Dustin Hoffman too has returned. But it is his own image that stares down at him as he makes his way along the seventh row once more.

  Ben is explaining to Mrs Robinson's daughter Elaine that ever since he graduated he feels this compulsion to be rude. She says she knows how he feels. They go to the Taft Hotel for a drink. The desk clerk greets Ben as Mr Gladstone and asks if he is there for an affair, a question that had originally thrown Hoffman and had resulted in him ending up by mistake in a private function.

  But the inquiry does not disconcert the new Ben.

  'Good idea,' he says, 'I'll just check that the young lady's up for it.'

  'Any luggage or just the toothbrush, Mr Gladstone?' asks the clerk.

  'Just the toothbrush,' says Ben, patting his jacket.

  Elaine asks why the hotel staff call him Mr Gladstone. He explains about her mother wanting him to drive her home and asking him in. He admits they were lovers and had assignations at the Taft, where he used the name Gladstone.

  Ben and Elaine are silent. Both are clearly thinking about their situation. Ben eventually breaks the silence.

  'Ever done three in a bed?' he asks.

  The man in the seventh row grimaces.

  Elaine is shocked and goes off to college in Berkeley. Ben tells his parents he is going to marry her. They are delighted, until he admits that not only has he not told Mr and Mrs Robinson, but he has not discussed it with Elaine. He drives up to Berkeley and takes a room in a cheap rooming house. The other residents include a young Richard Dreyfuss who has enrolled on the Shark Studies course, and will himself come into conflict with Mr Robinson when the latter refuses to close Amity's beaches just because a great white shark is eating the holiday-makers. By this time Mr Robinson will have changed his name to Mr Vaughn but is clearly still a very bitter man after his treatment by Mrs Robinson.

  Mrs Robinson has told Elaine that Ben raped her. She wants Elaine to marry a rich medical student, whose peers include a young Ryan O'Neal. He looks puzzled when Ben says that he hopes Ali gets better soon. Ben looks momentarily sombre and shakes his head sadly as he walks away. Elaine tells Ben she does not care if he raped her mother; she loves him and wants to marry him. But for some reason that is not entirely clear, Ben is late for the wedding. He does not know where they are getting married, his Alfa Romeo is out of petrol and when he starts to run the last few blocks he seems to be running without getting anywhere.

  Ben is wearing a hooded jacket of the type that used to be called a windcheater. Underneath he is wearing a plain black shirt. There is a look of tremendous relief on Elaine's face as he arrives at the church. She is dressed in a traditional white wedding dress, including the usual crumpled-up net curtain on her head. He joins her at the altar and the priest begins the service.

  In the original it had not been this way. Oh no, not like this at all. This is wrong, very wrong. Ben had an affair with Mrs Robinson, but there was no affair with Elaine. Ben followed her to Berkeley and discovered she was about to marry another student. He set out to track them down and ran out of petrol on the way to the wedding. By the time he reached the church the minister was concluding the ceremony. Elaine was married to someone else. He screamed her name. After a moment's hesitation, she responded with his name 'Ben'. Angry bitter faces crowded in on them. Mrs Robinson slapped her daughter's face. Mr Robinson tore a sleeve off Ben's windcheater. Ben grabbed a crucifix and swung it madly as he and Elaine retreated towards the church doors. They escaped together on a passing bus. That's the way it happened. That is the way it should be.

  The man in the seventh row knows that in real life Anne Bancroft, who played Mrs Robinson, was only ten years older than Katherine Ross, who played her daughter. Anne Bancroft was 35, much the same as the man in the seventh row is now. Katherine Ross was never one of the favourite actresses of the man in Row 7. Pretty rather than sexy. She was a bowl of strawberries and cream to Anne Bancroft's bottle of rich red claret. Katherine Ross was the prim schoolteacher never able to lure Sundance away from the wise-cracking, kick-them-in-the-balls, let's-make-a-run-for-it Butch Cassidy. Butch was more fun. It was probably nothing sexual. That was the problem – nothing sexual. There was something missing between Ben and Elaine.

  On screen, Ben turns to look at Mrs Robinson as the minister concludes the ceremony and the crash of the organ alerts Ben to what he has just done. He and Elaine are man and wife. He does not kiss the bride. For a moment he stands frozen. Then he shouts. The church echoes with his words, two words, loud and separate.

  'Missis Robinson'.

  She jumps to her feet and her response cuts through the shocked silence.

  'Benjamin'.

  Angry, bitter faces crowd in on them. Mr Robinson tears a sleeve off Ben's windcheater. Elaine slaps her mother's face. Ben grabs a crucifix and swings it madly as he and Mrs Robinson retreat towards the church doors. He uses the crucifix as a bar to hold the doors shut. Ben and his new mother-in-law dash towards a passing bus. They struggle onto it and make their way to the back seat. They collapse, exhausted, happy. Nothing is said. Ben's face is expressionless. A smile creeps across his face. It grows into a grin, a big mischievous grin, and then he winks.

  ***

  The first time it happened, the first time Roy experienced this business of someone he knew being sucked into a movie, it was his father. He turned up in The Magnificent Seven. Or Roy thought he did. Roy wanted to join him, but he couldn't. He couldn't see himself up there on the screen, not at that time. It was just a fleeting appearance, one of the Mexican peasants, not one of Brynner's little band of gunfighters. His father was never really the sort of man who would ever have been so presumptuous as to take a starring part. He only really ever had a supporting role in life.

  4

  Woody Allen's Manhattan opens with the sound of Gershwin and a black and white shot of an urban skyline fills the screen. The film the man in the seventh row is watching also opens with the sound of Gershwin and a black and white shot of an urban skyline. Well almost urban, not countryside anyway.

  'Chapter one,' declares the voice-over with authority. 'He adored North Berwick. He idolised it out of all proportion.' The skyline of slate roofs and chimney pots, the clock on the council chambers and the modest spire on St Andrew's Church is succeeded by a series of evocative, haunting monochrome images. The caravan park in Tantallon Road. The bowling greens in Clifford Road. The square utilitarian library block that looks like a public toilet in Forth Street.

  'Uh, no, make that: He ... romanticised it all out of proportion,' says the voice. 'No matter what the season was, North Berwick always existed in summer, it always existed in the Sixties (at a push the Seventies) and it pulsated to the great tunes, not of Gershwin, but of Donovan, Marmalade and the Bay City Rollers.'

  'Chapter One.' North Berwick is seen framed in the whale's jaw bone on top of Berwick Law, the hill behind the town. And Gershwin is replaced on the soundtrack by Donovan declaring that 'first there is a mountain'. The town's vernacular, individualistic buildings cling to the narrow strip of land between the hill and the grey waters of the Firth of Forth.

  'He was too romantic about North Berwick,' says the voice-over.

  A small white motor boat carries visitors towards a gigantic plug of rock that rises sheer from the sea. Sunshine dances on the ruins of an ancient castle. Children build castles in the sand and watch the sea come in and knock them down, pulling away just a little more of the foundations with every incoming wave, until at last they collapse and are lost forever. Like tears in the rain.

&n
bsp; 'He thrived on the holiday crowds. To him North Berwick meant ice-cream cones and beach huts, games of putting on the sea-front, staying up late to go to the cinema, and pokes of chips afterwards.'

  Rows of villas stare across the road at a long stretch of beach, empty but for one distant figure.

  'Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the town he loved. Behind his blue eyes was the steely sharp edge of an easterly wind blowing in from the North Sea and sweeping down the High Street. North Berwick was his town. It was a metaphor. A metaphor for the way we were. North Berwick was his town. And it always would be ...'

  The narrator pauses. 'Well, either North Berwick or Los Angeles.'

  Los Angeles. Los Angeles was bigger. Los Angeles, the city where the man in the seventh row now sat. He had once calculated that Los Angeles was 1,500 times bigger than North Berwick, in population terms. Los Angeles, City of Angels, city of lights, city of dreams, city of nightmares. He felt a lump in his throat.

  5

  Los Angeles, March 1996

  In the lobby of the Chinese Theatre, Roy pauses at the display of stills from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In his mind it takes him back to…

  Scotland, some time in the 1960s

  Eight or maybe nine years old, Roy stood on the pavement outside the Playhouse in North Berwick, considering the large colour photographs depicting scenes from the film. Seven little men, with big noses, big eyes, big white beards and big, floppy colourful caps. Not at all like the Magnificent Seven, Roy thought. He preferred westerns to cartoons. At least he liked to pretend that he did. But Snow White looked funny and he had heard it was a bit scary. It was from Walt Disney, who made Greyfriars Bobby, which was a true story that happened in Edinburgh in the old days, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, with the spidery Cruella De Vil, who wanted to skin the little puppies for a fur coat, but who wasn't real, just a made-up character for the film. Disney also made Lady and the Tramp, with the fight between Tramp and the fiery-eyed rat to save the baby, and the injustice when Aunt Sara thinks Tramp is trying to harm the child. The dog-catcher takes him off to the pound, which has already provided the film's most poignant moment when one stray is led off on 'the long walk', wagging his tail, not knowing he will never come back. All these moments imprinted themselves on Roy's young memory. What his parents remember most about Lady and the Tramp is having to move seats three times – once because a big man with a pipe sat right in front of Roy, then because his mother's seat seemed damp, and finally because Stephen's third seat seemed sticky. Stephen was much smaller than Roy and had difficulty in positioning himself to stop the seats tipping up with him in them. He said his seat was sticking to his legs. His mother could not feel anything sticky, but they moved again, with Roy complaining that he was missing the film.

  And they remembered Roy asking if it was a true story, was it really all made up, how did they know it was all made up, and did people really take dogs away to be killed? His mother told him that they would never take a dog away to be killed unless it was a nasty, vicious brute that bit people or had those mysterious, menacing, invisible little beasties called fleas. Later, when his parents thought Roy was asleep in bed, Roy heard his father say to his mother that he couldn't understand why they had to pretend that innocent animals never got killed.

  'After all,' he said, 'I'm a butcher.'

  'Well,' said his mother, 'that's nothing to be proud of.'

  Roy definitely wanted to see Snow White. It was different from other Disney films Roy had seen, which were all about dogs. This one was about human beings. In one still outside the cinema Snow White was considering the red apple given to her by the evil witch. Roy knew she was an evil witch, because he had seen excerpts on television. Even so, he would have recognised her as a witch from the wart on her long nose. She looked a wee bit scary, with bony fingers and a black hood. Snow White on the other hand looked disappointingly dull and sappy. Maybe it was because she was a girl and she was wearing the weirdest dress with puffy shoulders and a white collar that stood up by itself.

  'Next week,' said the sign, a special sign for this unusual week-long run. Roy would have to wait until the second half of the holidays to see Snow White. But his parents had promised to take him to Batman tonight. It had the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler and Catwoman, all together in the one film. Of course Roy had a particular affinity with Batman. He was Batman. That was his nickname. Batty, hence Batman.

  He quite liked being called Batman. As nicknames went, it was one of the better ones. 'Come on Batman.'

  'Just coming.'

  'Fats?'

  'What about you, Minger?' And Minger would reply with the sound of a deflating balloon. 'Are you coming Spit?'

  Spit was a very fast runner and 'Spit' was short for 'Spitfire'. When Miss Donaldson, their teacher, asked why Spit was called Spit, Fat Bob told her it was because he spat all the time and she gave Spit a stern lecture about what a disgusting habit it was. Years later there was a boy at Roy's secondary school nicknamed 'One Per Cent', not because he did badly in exams, but because Domestos, at the time, claimed to kill 99 per cent of all known germs.

  Roy's nickname entitled him to the principal role when they played at Batman in the back green on a summer's day, with Roy in swimming trunks and a towel around his neck, held by a safety-pin and flapping behind him as he ran, going 'Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee; dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee, Bat-man!'. Batman was a great influence for good on their lives. Not only did he represent law and order and justice, frequently summarised in brief on-the-job tutorials for Robin the Boy Wonder, but it was difficult for the game to get out of hand if you had to stop to say 'Pow' and 'Ker-unch' between each pretend blow.

  Roy preferred the nickname Batman to his surname – a word he knew could be used to mean 'not quite right in the head'. When his family moved to Learmonth the local kids experimented with 'Nutty', but Roy told them he already had a nickname and that it was Batman and they stuck to it after that.

  'What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?' asked a little, ginger-haired girl, who had appeared at Roy's side, gazing at the Snow White pictures too. She was slightly younger than Roy and spoke with the harsh, intimidating Glasgow accent common to many of the children on holiday in North Berwick.

  Roy knew about Bing Crosby. Crosby was his father's favourite singer. His father had a 78 of 'White Christmas', which Roy played over and over again on the old gramophone at his grandfather's house. Roy could hear Crosby's voice pouring over the words like honey. His grandparents had a television too and it was there that he had seen Bing Crosby in some funny films that always had the word 'road' in the title. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope did a little routine, like a child's game, where they clapped their hands against each other and said 'Patty-cake, patty-cake' and then the last move was punching the baddies. Roy's grandfather sat in the grandest armchair chuckling and puffing on his pipe. In future years whenever Roy saw mention of the Road movies he would smell the rich aroma of tobacco that lingered in the house long after his grandfather.

  'Walt Disney is the man who makes the cartoons,' Roy explained knowledgably to the little girl. 'And Bing Crosby is in films that aren't cartoons, and he sings songs.'

  'Bing sings,' chirped the little girl, in apparent confirmation. She paused instinctively for dramatic effect. 'And Walt disnae.'

  Roy looked at her blankly. She looked at him and smiled one of those big warm Glasgow smiles that can send a shiver down a middle-class Edinburgh spine.

  'Bing sings and Walt disnae,' she repeated, sensing perhaps that he was a little slow on the uptake. Only then did he realise that it was a joke.

  'My name is Roy Batty,' he said.

  The little girl did not say her name. She turned and walked away. Roy watched the little figure in the yellow summer dress hurry to catch the grown-ups who were ahead of her. Roy looked for her at the Playhouse the following week, when his parents took him to see Snow White. But she was not there. Maybe it
was too scary for her. Roy didn't find it scary, but he could see how littler children might be frightened. Some things in the film worried him.

  'Is it a true story?' he asked.

  His father assured him it was not.

  'How would I know if someone had poisoned my apple, Dad?'

  'No one will poison your apple, Roy.'

  'But what if a witch got it?'

  'There's no such thing as witches,' he said. 'Witches are just an old wives' tale.' And he laughed at his own wit.

  Roy was far from reassured. 'But they burned witches down beside the swimming pool, Dad. They do exist. Definitely. There's a sign down at the swimming pool.'

  'That was in the old days, Roy,' said his father impatiently.

  'Do you believe in magic, Dad? Do you believe in ghosts? What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?'

  Roy remembered the little girl and looked for her the following summer. And the summer after that. But he never saw her again. Sometimes he imagined that she had died after eating a poisoned apple. He saw her only once, but he often thought of her and her joke about Bing Crosby and Walt Disney.

  He spent a long time just standing looking at the pictures in the display cases outside the Playhouse. Every time the family went along the High Street he would stop and admire the pictures, like an art aficionado reconsidering a favourite Van Gogh or Monet in the National Gallery.

  Only occasionally did his parents take him to the pictures in Edinburgh – it was usually 'going to the pictures', rarely 'going to see a fill-um' and certainly never 'going to a movie,' which was an American term Roy started using only as an adult. On holiday in North Berwick, however, they would go two or three times in the fortnight. North Berwick is only 20 miles from Edinburgh, but the train took forever as it strained to pull itself free of the city's stony grip, across the green countryside and past the old villages with lazy green squares, tall-spired churches and Belfry Cottages taken over by lawyers and surveyors from the city. East Lothian is as close as Scotland comes to the Home Counties. There is something safe, permanent and reassuring about streets called Windygates Road, Station Hill and Quality Street.