When he sees her the next time, he says Well, well, well, grinning at her, and she says Was I lying? and he says I’d sure love to read that play sometime, I’d be honored.
She tells him it was originally called Jessie’s Room, not Jenny’s Room, because it was all autobiographical, about her coming to the city here from England and all, and her first years here working for Beneficial Loan, and the experiences she’d had with various beaux and all, and her disastrous love affair, which resulted in her vowing never to marry, all of which was in the play. But when Jenny Corbin, who was a tremendous star of the day, agreed to take the role, she also insisted they change the title to Jenny’s Room, to make it her play, you see…
“That’s terrible,” Andrew says.
“Well, no, not really,” Jessica says. “Because she made it a tremendous hit, you see. I mean, no one would have come to see something about me, but they thought the play was about her, you see, about Jenny Corbin the star, so they all flocked to the theater and I made a lot of money.
And, oh, she was so very beautiful.”
She does not have similar kind words for the producers of the musical five years later. She tells Andrew that they took a sensitive play-well, a play about Jessica herself-and turned it into something cheap and crass, with a libretto by some person born in Liverpool who’d previously written a comedy about soccer, can you imagine? And the words and music weren’t much better. Everything had an insistent ragtime beat to it, with obvious rhymes and the crudest sort of innuendo. As an example, they took one of the play’s most sensitive scenes-which Jenny performed like an angel, by the way-and turned it into a dance number! “The scene where she breaks up with the one true love of her life though she doesn’t realize it at the time? A truly wonderful, touching scene, the audience cried every night when Jenny did it. But in the musical, they had colored boys and girls dancing in the background in the most suggestive manner, it was just dreadful. If I’d known what was going to happen to my little play, I’d never have given them permission.”
“I would love to read it sometime,” Andrew says, and Jessica goes briefly into the other room and returns a moment later with the leatherbound copy her producer presented to her on opening night.
That night, Andrew cries when he reads the scene in the play where Jessie breaks up with the one true love of her life without realizing it, though the audience does. His wife tells him to please be quiet, she’s trying to sleep.
Not long after that, Jessica Miles becomes desperately ill.
He cares for her at home until it becomes apparent she must be removed to a hospital. And then, he visits her every day, often lingering by her bedside from morning to night, and sometimes throughout the night. She dies within a matter of weeks.
In her will, she leaves to him the leather-bound copy of her precious play, and something even more precious: the copyright to the play itself.
“How do you know all this?” Carella asked.
“Hale told me. A hundred times over,” Zimmer said. “Of course, no one at the time expected the musical would be revived. Jessica died fourteen, fifteen years ago. For all intents and purposes, the play she left him had only sentimental value.”
“Until your partner rediscovered the musical.”
“Yes. We did a copyright search, found that all renewals had been made, located the current owners, and proceeded to license the rights. You can imagine how thrilled these people were! The bookwriter’s grandson works in the mail room of a publishing house in London. The lyricist’s granddaughter sells real estate in L.A. And the composer’s great-grandson drives a taxi in Tel Aviv! This revival is a godsend to them, an opportunity to make some very big bucks indeed. If the show is a hit, of course. Which I’m sure it will be,” he said, and rapped his knuckles on his desk.
“When did you discover Hale had inherited the underlying rights?”
“When our lawyers did the search. We weren’t expecting a problem, why would there have been a problem? In fact, we were already proceeding, assuming that rights to the play would follow as a matter of course. A new bookwriter was already working, we’d commissioned new songs and hired a director and a choreographer, everything was in motion. But finding Hale was another matter. As it turned out, he was right under our noses here in the city, but he’d moved around a lot in the past several years. Apparently he got fired from a nursing job in a hospital somewhere in Riverhead, molested a young girl in her room, or so she later said, who the hell knew? Or cared, for that matter? What we wanted were the rights to the mawkish little play Jessica Miles had written and inconsiderately willed to him.”
“Are you saying it’s not a good play?”
