“Fade in,” he said. “1923. A twenty-two-year-old woman named Jessica Miles writes an autobiographical play called Jenny’s Room. It’s a big hit, it runs for three years here on The Stem. In 1928, it’s turned into a musical that opens and closes in a month. End of story, right? Not quite. My partner Connie-whom you met at the auditions Tuesday? She’s the one who smokes a lot?”
“The one I’m old enough to be her father,” Brown said.
“That’s the one. She dug up the original sheet music for the musicalthis was before there were such things as cast albums, you know-and guess what? ‘The score is terrific!’ The book was hopeless, of course, but that could be rewritten. So she convinced me we should do it together.”
“This is the same show you’re doing now?” Brown asked.
“Yes,” Zimmer said. “Well, I shouldn’t say that. It’s essentially the same show, yes. We’ve had the book rewritten, and there are several new tunes, but those are minor changes. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same show, yes.”
Brown was wondering why he’d want to produce a flop all over again.
“And it was based on this play called Jenny’s Room, is that right?” he asked.
“Still is based on it,” Zimmer said. “That’s why we had to go to Cynthia Keating.”
Brown looked at Carella. Carella looked back at him.
“To obtain rights to the underlying material,” Zimmer said. “The source material. Cynthia Keating owns those rights.”
Again the detectives looked stupid.
“We’d already acquired the other essential rights from the three people who’d written the musical’s songs and book, but we still neededwell, wait a minute, let me correct that. The original creators had all passed away a long time ago. In most instances we were dealing with grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, who’d succeeded to the rights by inheritance. But the underlying rights were another matter. When the musical closed in 1928, the rights to the play reverted back to the person who’d written the play-Jessica Miles. And without those underlying rights, we couldn’t proceed.”
“Is Cynthia Keating a grandchild?” Carella asked. “Is that it? Or a great…?”
“No, Jessica Miles never married.”
“Then how’d Cynthia get those rights?”
“Another long story.”
“We still have time.”
At first, Andrew Hale knows the woman only to talk to.
He sees her on his way in and out of the building, and they always exchange a friendly good morning or good evening, but that’s it. The woman is very old, far older than Andrew, who-when he first meets her-is in his early fifties. He is still married at the time. This is long before he suffers his first heart attack. In fact, this is shortly after he quit working at the hospital, or-to be more accurate-got fired from the hospital because they thought he was too old to be nursing, even though there were female nurses his age on the ward. Fifty-three, is that old?-talk about sexism. He guesses it’s because when a man reaches a certain age, they think of him as a dirty old man, and they don’t want him moving in and out of rooms where girls are wearing only surgical gowns tied up the back, their behinds all showing.
He supposes the woman is in her mid-eighties, a frail little thing who looks arthritic and possibly lame in one leg, maybe she’s diabetic, who knows? One morning, he comes across her struggling to get a bag of groceries up to her third-floor apartment. He asks if he can help her with that, and she says oh, thank you, I’d truly appreciate it. A British accent, he figures she’s originally from England. Well, one thing leads to another, and this and that, and the next thing you know they’re truly friends, he’s making tea for her in the afternoons, and running little errands for her, helping her hang photographs, put up screens, dust the apartment for her, little things like that. It makes him feel young again, taking care of her. It makes him feel wanted and needed again, nursing a frail old woman this way.
One day she tells him she was once a famous playwright, did he know that? He goes Come on, what are you telling me? She says No, it’s true.
When I was twenty-two years old, I wrote a play called Jenny’s Room, it was a big hit, may I drop dead this very minute if I’m not telling the truth.
He goes Come on, you’re kidding me. She goes Oh yeah? So look it up in the library. Jessica Miles. I’m in Who’s Who in America.
He is almost afraid to look in the book because suppose her name isn’t there? Suppose this is all some kind of fantasy? Then she’d be just a crazy old lady making up things, wouldn’t she? He doesn’t know if he can deal with that. But, hey, guess what! His friend up there on the third floor is a celebrity! Not only did she write the play she says she wrote, but it was also turned into a musical five years later, whatty a know about that? The play starred somebody named Jenny Corbin, who was a big star back then.
