Read Online Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison - Free Book Online

filmmakers. Using volunteer actors and technicians, Crowley had written and directed the story of a young busboy at a swank restaurant who becomes fascinated with an older woman who patronizes the restaurant. The woman, about forty, wealthy, still with a certain hard need to her face, finally notices the unnecessary attentiveness of the busboy and allows him to think he is seducing her, until the last scene when—I skipped on. Simon Crowley’s work was marked, the articles generally agreed, by characters who lived their lives on the margins of the city, who inhabited the urban noir. Crowley himself had grown up in Queens, the only son of an older, working-class couple. Father repaired elevators, mother volunteered in a Catholic school, both lived small lives of habit and devotion. Mother died early. Father
dutiful. Simon had been a strange and unruly boy, bright but bored with all his classes except art, hooking up with the underground party scene as a teenager, working as a busboy in various restaurants while he went to NYU film school, having his second film, Mr. Lu , discovered by an agent from the most powerful Hollywood talent mill at one of the film festivals, arcing his way upward through layer upon layer of fame. The black-and-white photos by Annie Leibovitz in Vanity Fair revealed him to be short, with a skinny, caved-in dissolution to his posture, as if he had been smoking cigarettes since the age of eight (which was the case, said the article), and beneath a mop of black hair and black eyebrows a face that appeared to dare one to describe its ugliness. It was not so much that he looked deformed; rather, his features seemed large and mismatched, as if they had been scissored out of three or four rubber Halloween masks from a costume shop. The effect was a face that was grotesque, carnal. “Several hours into the interview,” an article in GQ read, “I came to the realization that Simon Crowley doesn’t smile—or at least not like most people. His grin, when it rarely occurs, is usually in regard to the sad illusions held by some other person; his mouth—sort of a dark gash—flies open, revealing many unfortunate teeth. Next, a cynical rasp of laughter. Then the mouth snaps shut tightly and Crowley stares at you with unblinking concentration. The effect is purposeful and disconcerting. He is not a nice person, particularly, and he doesn’t care if you know it. In his pursuit of great movies, woman upon woman, and cigarettes—in about that order—niceness is irrelevant and manners mask the desperate chase of existence; one may conclude that Crowley’s conceitedness has not yet been adjusted by life’s disappointments and suffering, but then, a humble, selfless person would not have made the brilliant movies that Crowley has.”
    I looked up. Caroline was watching me.
    â€œGo on,” she said.
    So I did: Despite the fact that Crowley had come to dine in the company of stars and Hollywood executives, reported another piece, he still remained notorious for his late-night
“investigations” into the city, and kept a small, trusted retinue of fellow debauchers with whom he traveled, one of them apparently a paroled murderer, another the dissolute son of a billionaire. After his nocturnal sojourns, Crowley was sometimes discovered passed out—in a locked limousine, naked on the Italian-marble floor of an apartment house lobby, etc. Actresses clamored to be in his movies, even those who publicly proclaimed themselves unimpressed by “asshole macho directors.” Crowley’s third big-budget movie went over its planned cost by thirty percent, and there were rumors of fighting on the set, of studio executives screaming at him in private lunchrooms. It was reported he’d spat back that he didn’t fear any of them, and to prove his determination had picked up a steak knife and drawn a cut three inches long in his forearm, which later