The House of Rumour (34 page)

This was only two weeks away! I didn’t know what to say to the studio. My shooting schedule had started to get hectic; there were big scenes coming up between Nancy and Adam Henderson. And Larry started to pester me about when we would visit his mother over Christmas. I told him: ‘How could any of this matter now?’ We had a row but after he had calmed down I told him that he could be one of the chosen ones too. You see, I really wanted to save him.

But he just got more and more angry with me. In the last few days I did everything I could to prepare us both for the coming of the Space Brothers, even though I was very busy recording
A Family Practice
. Dr Headley had told us to remove any metal from our clothing because he said that, while we were travelling in a flying saucer, contact with metal could produce severe burns. When Larry came home one night to find me cutting the zip fasteners out of all of his trousers, he went crazy. I tried to explain to him but this just made him worse. In the end I decided that I would stay at Martha’s until the solstice.

We all gathered together on the evening of that day. The final message had been sent through Martha, telling us that the flood would come on the twenty-second, and that we would all be picked up at the hour of midnight on its eve. There was a small crowd outside the house, some of them press reporters as there had been some reports of the Watchers’ prophecy in the newspapers and on the local radio stations. The phone kept ringing and Martha or Dr Headley had to answer all these questions from people about the coming flood.

Midnight came and nothing happened. We waited in silence for nearly an hour and then Martha stood up and said that another message was coming through. There had been a delay, it read. We must wait for a sign. As the hours passed some of the group got up and questioned Martha and Dr Headley. There were arguments and a few people left the house. Then, at six-thirty in the morning, Martha announced that something wonderful had happened.

She wrote out a communication from a supreme being called the Creator, of a higher power over the Space Brothers. He told us that the great cataclysm had been averted and earth had been spared by his intervention. The Creator and the Space Brothers thanked the Watchers for holding vigil and keeping faith. More information would follow but in the meantime the Creator and his astral brotherhood were sending a message of peace for all on planet earth. Martha went out to the few reporters that were left outside to give them this as a sort of press release. Everybody else started to get ready to go home. Some people were taking pictures. I didn’t want to be recognised so I put on a headscarf and dark glasses. Dr Headley gave me a ride back to my house.

Larry was in a silent rage when I got in. The studio and my agent had been on the phone all morning, wanting to know where I was. It was the day of the big scene between Nancy and Adam. I tried to explain to him the good news, that the whole city had been saved from disaster, but he just stared at me, dumbfounded. When I told him that this miracle proved the power of the Space Brothers and that the Watchers had been right, he lost his temper.

‘No, Sharleen, no!’ he shouted. ‘It proves the opposite, doesn’t it? It proves that the prophecy was wrong. And now you’ve lost your job with the studio and your agent says he never wants to see you again!’

Larry loved to think that he had been proved right about Martha’s prophecy. This sense of righteous anger was far more important to him than the possibility that the world had been saved from an apocalypse. But I had lost my job. So I promised Larry that I would find a new agent and not get too involved in anything like the Watchers for a while.

In the New Year we had some good news. A novelette of Larry’s that had run as a magazine series was reprinted in an Ace Double, a cheap paperback format where two stories are bound together. And, more encouragingly for him, a publishing house offered him a hardback deal for a novel he had submitted, with an option on a second.
The Translucent Man
got him a thousand-dollar advance and came out in June 1957. We still had to struggle that year but it wasn’t nearly as bad Larry made out. He was half in love with the idea of being the starving artist.

And I soon found myself another agent. For glamour photography at first, then later for these odd 8mm films. It would be me and another girl, both in corsets and suspenders. She would tie me up and gag me, then make out that she was spanking me hard with a hairbrush or a riding crop. In another one she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and I was on an examination table. She would put on rubber gloves and do all kinds of physical tests on me. I found that I could act in these scenes really easily, as if I was meant to do it. I secretly felt that the devil was punishing me, laughing at me for being a bad actress. I kept the truth about this work from Larry. I told him that I had been making ‘training films’.

I didn’t want to disturb him. He was working so hard trying to finish his next novel,
American Gnostic
. He would shut himself away for long writing sessions, fuelled up on amphetamines. He could go three, even four days without sleep. Then he would collapse into bed for forty-eight hours or so, occasionally waking to eat something or scribble notes, then he would be up and at it again. I worried about his health but Larry kept going, writing obsessively, convinced that this thing was to be a major work for him. It was as if there was some evil force driving him on. I suspected even then that there was something bad about this book.

And I felt lonely. I even considered making contact with some of the Watchers again, just on a social basis. But the group had completely split up. Martha had gone to join a Scientology centre in Arizona. Dr Headley had sold his house and was travelling the country, spreading the word of the Space Brothers. He had joined something called the College of Universal Wisdom and had spoken at a flying saucer convention at Giant Rock, California.

There was a kind of panic that October, when the Russians launched Sputnik. Fear that the Reds had beaten us into space. Along with many others, we went out to watch the night sky and try to catch a glimpse of this artificial satellite. Larry seemed pleased that the Soviets had been the first to put a spacecraft in orbit. He told me that it felt good to see the masses shocked out of complacency. And as he gazed up into the heavens I saw something of the Larry I had known when we had first met: a childlike wonder at the universe. He had just finished the novel and was happy and calm for once.

I remember being more affected by the second launch a month later. Sputnik 2 was sent up with a dog inside. Laika was a stray mongrel bitch that had been found wandering the streets of Moscow. She was chosen for the space mission because of her resilience. The American press called her ‘Muttnik’, but I didn’t see the joke. I felt a strange kinship with this poor creature. When I thought of her trapped in that metal capsule, hurtling through the cosmos, I was overwhelmed by despair and emptiness. When Larry asked why I was crying I told him: ‘Laika. I’m like her. I’m a bitch in space.’

Larry decided that we should go away that Christmas. I think it was because he felt that the previous December had been so traumatic and he was determined to avoid any memory of it. He also had delivered his novel and had received part of the advance. So we spent two weeks in Honolulu. The time passed like a dream: warm sea and cold cocktails, the palm trees fracturing the sunlight. But I felt a static charge, a fuzzing in the head; the distant surf was like TV interference in the next room. Anxiety in paradise. A growing fear of going home.

I don’t know quite what made me so dread the publication of Larry’s next novel. Maybe it was because he didn’t talk to me about it while he was working on it. Larry would usually show me something of what he was writing or read out sections to me. But not this one. Oh no, this one was a big secret that he wanted to keep from me. And when it came out in the spring of 1958 I could see why.

American Gnostic
is as confused and rambling as any other of Larry Zagorski’s works but there were whole chunks of it I got straightaway. The mystery of Seth Archer, the rocket scientist with occult knowledge assassinated in a laboratory explosion; Lucas D. Hinkel, science-fiction writer and founder of the now-established state religion, the Cult of Futurology; obvious ‘borrowings’ from his past. As usual it was hard to understand what Larry really believed in. He portrays John Six, a humanoid visitor from another planet, arriving at the Sunday Mass of a ‘flying saucer chapel’, using language and information similar to that of the Watcher meetings. It was as if all along he had known that the Space Brothers existed, but he could deal with it only on his own terms. Worst of all for me was the character of Bella Berkeley, a naive and credulous actress in a ‘holovision blip-opera’ who falls in love with Six. It seemed a malevolent transformation of my personality. Bella is a constant victim of cruel comedy, of morbid sexual fantasy. And I realised with horror that this was what Larry really thought of me.

Of course he insisted that it was fiction, that he had merely used some aspects of my life, that Bella wasn’t me at all. Writers think that they can write what they like and just by changing the names they can get away with it. And they actually think that they can control it all. Whatever you might think of Martha and her automatic writing, at least she was honest, admitting that she just wrote what came to her. As I said before, Larry stole. He took all these ideas and experiences and claimed it as his own work. His own fiction. His own great novel.

And we had terrible arguments. He shouted at me that he had to be free to write what he wanted. So I told him what this freedom had cost. I told him what I had done to pay the rent and the bills. I saw the look of disgust on his face.

I couldn’t bear to be with him any more after that. I told him I was leaving him but he said that I should stay. He would go and live with his mother until he found a new place. It was pathetic.

So he left. He took a few things, put them in his car and drove away.

I was alone.

I started to feel scared. Someone was watching the house.

Someone was listening in.

I took some of Larry’s pills that he had left behind. Nembutals. They helped me sleep but when I woke up it took me a long time to work out where I was. What time was it? The sun was going down. I had the vision of an inhuman horizon. A star descending on a distant planet. A dead planet.

I went for a drive downtown. Bright lights. Messages. A movie-house marquee spelling out:
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
. I had to get out of the city. I kept driving. I didn’t know where I was. There was a bright light in the sky. Following me. I had that same feeling that I’d had when I saw the saucer over the Hollywood Hills. A message beamed into my brain from the spaceship. Except that it wasn’t the Space Brothers. Oh no.

Oh no.

It was the Greys.

They had come for me. I drove faster but the light kept up with me. Hovering. Waiting. I knew then that I had to get out of the car. I swerved off the road and got out. I was in the desert, running, running. Then I fell. I blacked out.

I woke up three days later in Camarillo State Hospital. I was told that I had been found wandering by the side of the highway by a state trooper. I had been examined by a doctor and was diagnosed as suffering from ‘involuntary psychosis and paranoid-type schizophrenia’. I had been sedated and brought to Camarillo as a mentally ill person.

It was awful there. I was kept in a locked ward. They fed me with liquid medicine that made me feel like a zombie. They gave me electric shock treatment. They were trying to make me forget what had happened to me. I found out later that one of the doctors there was a memory expert and had been a chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg trials where he tested these top Nazis who claimed to have clinical amnesia. He was part of MK ULTRA, a secret CIA research project into mind-control techniques. It all came out a couple of years ago, in 1975. A congressional committee revealed that the CIA had experimented on ordinary citizens in state institutions without their knowledge or consent. They used truth drugs and brainwashing techniques on them. I was one of these guinea pigs, I’m sure of it.

But they didn’t stop me from remembering what had happened to me before I had been found by the side of the road. You see, there was all this time unaccounted for, twenty-four hours or so. It came back to me slowly, like all these memories do. There was a beam of light. Then I was inside the alien ship. I was naked and on this sort of platform. All around me was a group of Greys. God, I was scared. The chief Grey came forward and spoke to me telepathically. He told me that they were going to do some tests. They put tubes in my mouth and in my ears. They put these suction cups over my breasts. They stuck probes in my vagina and in my anus. Then the chief Grey picked up a long needle and pierced me right through my navel. I screamed with pain, then he put his hand in front of my eyes. The pain went. I blacked out.

I was in Camarillo for three months until Larry came to take me home. I was released on ‘extended home convalescence’, given some drugs and a prescription to take to a doctor. When he drove me back Larry said: ‘I can’t go on, Sharleen. It’s all too much. I’m the one who should have been committed, not you.’ He was a weak and useless man in so many ways, but at least he was honest about it.

We finally divorced in 1960. By then Larry was a big success. The paperback edition of
American Gnostic
was a best-seller. I saw the cover everywhere. A mock-up of that famous painting of the farmer with a pitchfork, standing next to his spinster daughter, their heads replaced with those of aliens. So Larry could afford alimony. It took a while, though, before I got regular payments, so I had to find work to make ends meet.