The Other Side of Midnight
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
When I did, he said, “They’re too sensitive. My God, they’re only maids and housekeepers.”
The actress in Jorja was enchanted by Harris’s talent. She kept asking him about the theater. At dinner one evening she said to him, “You know, there was a moment in The Crucible when Madeleine Sherwood walked off the stage, and it was a magnificent exit. What was her motivation? What did you tell her to think?”
He looked at Jorja and snapped, “About her paycheck.”
That was the last time he called Jorja by name.
The following day the three of us left for Baden-Baden, the luxurious spa in the middle of Baden-Württemberg, in southwest Germany.
Jed hated it.
From there we went to the beautiful Black Forest, a fantastic mountain range in southwest Germany that extends ninety miles between the Rhine and Neckar Rivers. It is covered by dark pine forests and cut by deep valleys and small lakes.
Jed hated it.
I had had enough. Our play was coming along much too slowly. Instead of working out a story line, Jed would concentrate on one scene we had written, and go over it endlessly, unnecessarily changing a word here and there.
I said to Jorja, “We’re going back to Munich without him.”
She sighed. “You’re right.”
I looked over the notes that I had made on the play. They seemed very banal.
When Jed came to my suite to go to work, I said, “Jed, Jorja and I have to get back to Munich. We’re going to leave you.”
He nodded. “Right. I wasn’t going to do the play with you, anyway.”
A few hours later Jorja and I were on a train, heading for Munich.
When we arrived at our hotel, I reached for the phone to telephone Laci and my disc slipped out. I fell to the floor in terrible pain, unable to move.
Jorja was frantic. “I’ll call a doctor.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’ve had this before. If you can help me get into bed, all I have to do is lie still and after a day or two, it will go away by itself.”
She finally managed to help me get into bed. “Let me call Laci.”
An hour later, Laci was in our hotel room.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I had big plans for us.”
He looked at me and said, “I can help you.”
“How?”
“I know a man here, Paul Horn.”
“Is he a doctor?”
“No, he’s a physiotherapist. But he’s worked on some of the most famous people in the world. They come here to see him. He can fix you up.”
I spent the next two days in bed and on the third day, Laci was walking me into an office at 5 Platenstrasse, the offices of Paul Horn.
Paul Horn was in his forties, a tall, tousled man with a mop of wild hair.
“Mr. Bush-Fekete told me about you,” he said. “How often does this happen to you?”
I shrugged. “It’s very irregular. Sometimes it happens twice a week. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for years.”
He nodded. “I can cure you.”
An alarm went off in my mind. The doctors at Cedars of Lebanon and UCLA had told me there was no cure for what I had. Put off the operation as long as you can. Finally, when you can’t stand the pain, we’ll have to operate. And this man who was going to cure me was not even a doctor.
“You’ll have to stay here for three weeks. I will treat you every day. Seven days a week.”
It did not sound promising. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should forget this. I’ll see my doctors at home and—”
Laci turned to me. “Sidney, this man has worked on rulers of countries. Give him a chance.”
I looked at Jorja. “We’ll see.”
The treatment began the following morning. I would go in and lie on a table with a heat lamp warming my back for two hours. Then I would rest and repeat the procedure. This went on all day.
On the second day, something was added. Paul Horn helped me into a kind of hammock he had devised, which let all the muscles of my back relax. I lay there for five hours. Every day was the same procedure.
The waiting room was always crowded with people from all over the world, some of them speaking languages that I could not even identify.
Three weeks later, on the last day of treatment, Paul Horn asked, “How do you feel?”
“I feel fine.” But I knew I would have felt fine without the treatments.
“You’re cured,” he said, happily.
I was skeptical. But he was right. In all the years that have passed since that time, I have not had one attack. It turned out that Paul Horn, who was not a doctor, had cured me.
It was time to return to Hollywood.
Returning to MGM was like going home again.
“You have a homecoming present,” Dore said. “We’re previewing Dream Wife at the Egyptian Theatre.”
Dore saw my grin and said, “This is going to be a big one.”
It was customary for the trade papers, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, to review movies before the other reviews came out. We were all looking forward to the reviews with great anticipation. They could make or break a movie.
The Egyptian Theatre was filled with people anticipating the pleasure they were about to have. The picture began and we watched the screen, happily listening to the laughs in all the right places.
Jorja squeezed my hand. “It’s wonderful.”
When the picture ended, there was applause. We had a hit. We went to Musso & Frank’s to celebrate. The only reviews would be in the trade papers, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. We were making bets about which one would be better. Early in the morning, I went out and got the trades.