Private Entrance, by Anthony J. Mohr

Before he hugged me, my father always put down his cigarette. That was a relief. I adored his embraces but reeled from the smoke. Too often the stench kept me away, because he rarely passed a waking moment without a Virginia Rounds between his fingers. Our house reeked. Ashtrays everywhere. Matchbooks on the mantel, more on his bedstand.

*

 It was the end of May 1968, almost three weeks since my twenty-first birthday. My father and I were at a coffee shop in Hollywood. Between puffs on his cigarette, sips of coffee, and bites of his favorite breakfast—burnt toast and burnt bacon—he reminisced about his career as an actor, playing Philip Marlowe on the radio, then migrating to television and B-list movies. At times he raised his voice to counter the clatter of dishes in the kitchen.

 Fourteen years earlier, he’d starred in Foreign Intrigue, a Swedish television series in which he played the owner of the Frontier Hotel, a place where gangsters and spies from both sides of the Iron Curtain bumped into each other. He moved our family to Stockholm for a year. While there, he met a Swedish woman, the studio’s “script girl.” He brought her back to California, divorced my mother, and married her. Foreign Intrigue left the air after a year, and since then, he’d failed to land another series.

As my father spoke, I ate my scrambled eggs and did my best to avoid the fumes from his cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his plate. I’d heard my father’s stories before but appreciated his need to retell them. His narrative served as a prelude to what was coming: another trip to Stockholm, with his Swedish wife (that same “script girl”), to film Private Entrance, a pilot for a TV series the two of them had nursed for several years. He wanted to return to Sweden because he enjoyed working with Europeans. My father reveled in all things foreign.

 The concept was ideal for him. He’d play Jeff Landers, an international lawyer who inherits a castle in Geneva, Switzerland, and turns it into an apartment house, a kissing cousin to the Frontier Hotel. My father’s tenants hail from everywhere. According to the teaser, the place teems “with the hopes, fears, and disappointments” of people from all over the globe. He describes his building as “the world packed into small containers.” But since Jeff Landers is too busy with his law practice, he hires a motherly German lady to manage the property. She comes with a too-cute-for-words grandson and a talent for making strudel. Like the way he treated his hotel guests in Foreign Intrigue, my father avoids getting too close to his tenants.

*

Our waitress, an older lady who wore her hair in a bun, came by to top off the coffee, which I appreciated because the aroma masked the smell of my father’s cigarette butt in the ashtray. She never let his cup fall below full, an obvious excuse to view him up close. Six-two, lanky and tan, blessed with a high-voltage smile, my father was handsome enough, some said, to rival Humphrey Bogart. His black hair had started to turn gray, which made him look even more suave. I’d grown used to women staring at him, the braver ones in search of his autograph, sometimes more than that.

“Thank you, darling,” my father said to the waitress as he lit another cigarette.

*

“Wish me luck. This is probably my last chance,” my father told my mother over the telephone the night before leaving for Europe. Despite the divorce, she was gracious enough to listen before handing me the receiver. My father was fifty-four, almost too old for Hollywood’s A-list, but young enough for the character he’d play in Private Entrance.

*

My father’s chain-smoking drives the Private Entrance plot. The story opens aboard an airplane at the moment my father needs a smoke, and a stranger in the next row hands him a matchbook. One problem: On the cover, the man has written an important phone number.

 My father unwittingly pockets the matchbook. Outside the terminal, the man realizes what’s happened. He hails a cab and tells the driver to follow my father.

Hardly a scene goes by without my father pulling matches out of that booklet to fire up one cigarette after another, oblivious to the stranger from the plane who’s desperate to catch up with him. My father checks in to a hotel. In walks the stranger seconds after my father has left for a stroll. In the next scene, my father meets a woman. He lights a cigarette. They eat dinner. They have dessert. My father strikes another match. More smoke. They leave for her place.

*

Cigarettes were not a novel movie prop back then. Many screenwriters, especially in the noir genre, used them to flesh out characters and score plot points. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Lady from Shanghai (1947), and The Maltese Falcon (1941) come to mind. Double Indemnity (1944) ends with an insurance adjuster lighting a cigarette for the confessed murderer, who, supine and bleeding out, awaits an ambulance and the police. Rita Hayworth smoked in Gilda (1946), a film in which my father appeared but didn’t smoke. Now I wonder how many of those actors relished the habit as much as my father did.

*

The pilot’s final chase scene ends at the hotel’s check-out counter, where my father uses his last match and leaves the empty matchbook behind. While he flags down a cab to the airport, the stranger rushes in and retrieves his phone number.

*

In 1968, long-distance calls to Europe cost about twelve dollars for three minutes. That’s a hundred dollars in today’s currency. I called my father once. He promised to screen the pilot as soon as he came home. I was eager to see it with him, like the day in 1956 when my parents and I sat in our living room and a projector beamed one of my father’s shows onto a screen he’d set up across from the fireplace. I was eight then. I watched my father play a scene; then I turned and looked at my real father, who was probably evaluating his performance. As he did so, his cigarette remained in the ashtray, smoke keeping me away as it coiled toward the wooden beams of our ceiling. I shifted my gaze back to the screen, back to him, back to the screen, until my father became an amalgam of reality and fantasy.

*

On November 9, 1968, six months after my twenty-first birthday, one day after the editors finished their final cut of Private Entrance and, as they say, put the film “in the can,” my father and his second wife ate oysters for dinner and talked into the night until a massive heart attack killed him. According to my father’s second wife, he’d spent “three ecstatically happy months” filming this pilot. Especially, I’m sure, because the studio paid him to smoke his beloved Virginia Rounds.

*

It took two decades before I was ready to search for the pilot. By then, my father’s second wife was gone—killed in a car accident. I was out of touch with her two children. The production company no longer existed, and I didn’t know anyone connected with the film. Chasing down the print took years. It turned out the half-brother of one of my father’s stepsons had the reel, still in its original metal container bearing the label Svensk Filmindustri. I held the can in my arms as though it were an urn.

Nobody had thought about transferring the film to a modern format. The company I hired to do so said it was corrupted, almost beyond repair. It took them weeks to salvage it—not completely but well enough. I wanted to see my father as he’d been a few days before he died, when he was “ecstatically happy.” I guess I wished to find my own private entrance into the end of his life, my best alternative to saying goodbye in person.

But in too many scenes, the smoke made it hard to enjoy a clear image of my father. The sound stage must have stunk, but I’m sure he found it easy to cope. Surgeons general be damned; he’d chosen a life with cigarettes.

What’s more, I only saw the finished product. How many times did the director yell “Cut” and order another take? How many times did my father have to keep lighting and puffing and breathing the smoke?

*

In the pilot, my father wore the same trench coat he’d used in Foreign Intrigue. Not a surprise. He loved that piece of clothing. Nine years earlier, on a cold weekend in 1959, my first in the house he and his second wife had rented in Hollywood, he draped it over me and tucked me into a pull-out bed. As he did so, I realized that no cigarette fouled the air. I felt warm, safe.

*

Virginia Rounds. The original filters of this Benson & Hedges creation consisted of cardboard along with a small wad of cotton. With the packs came the description “plain ends” or “corn tipped.” I never wondered which type my father preferred. All I knew was he smoked them. “More pleasure,” Benson & Hedges wrote on every cigarette pack, “and they’re all-American.” Just in case their customers didn’t get it, the company’s advertisement went on to say, “…many Americans are finding out that the worship of everything foreign is of fictitious value. … There is no foreign tobacco in Virginia Rounds—the all-American cigarette.” Ironic—my father’s favorite cigarette brand came from the USA.

*

How much longer would my father have lived had he not made Private Entrance? Long enough to see me graduate from law school, become a judge, and manage a tobacco case? Not a chance. Not with five decades of chemicals coursing through his lungs and arteries, thickening his blood along the way.

Yet just another month might have left him with enough life to fly home from Sweden, put down his cigarette, and hug me one last time.

–

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Anthony J. Mohr’s work has appeared or is upcoming in, among other places, Commonweal, DIAGRAM, Hippocampus Magazine, Los Angeles Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Superstition Review, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. His debut memoir Every Other Weekend—Coming of Age With Two Different Dads (Koehler Books) was published in 2023. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is on the staff of Under the Sun and is also a senior editor of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative’s Social Impact Review. For over twenty years, he sat as a judge on the Los Angeles Superior Court. Once upon a time, he performed with the LA Connection, an improv comedy theater.

© 2023, Anthony J. Mohr