Free Cat's Pajamas by James Morrow Page A

five lackluster attempts to become a major Hollywood director. In the early sixties, Powell dies of cancer. A decade or so later, you’re diagnosed with leukemia. Somewhere in between, John Wayne has a cancerous lung removed, telling the press, ‘I licked the Big C.’ And now the female lead of The Conqueror is dead of a brain tumor.”
    The epic in question had Susan playing a fictitious Tartar princess named Bortai (loosely based on Genghis Khan’s wife of the same name), daughter of the fictitious Tartar chief Kumlek (though the screenwriter was perhaps alluding to the real-life Naiman chief Kushlek), who slays Temujin’s nonfictitious father, Yesukai, offscreen about fifteen years before the movie begins. “The curse of The Conqueror,” I muttered.
    â€œHell, there’s no curse going on here, Angela.” Stuart used a grapefruit spoon to retrieve his ginseng tea bag from the steaming water. “This is entirely rational. This is about gamma radiation.”
    According to the Times, he explained, the military had conducted eleven nuclear tests on the Nevada Proving Ground in the spring of 1953, an operation that bore the wonderfully surrealistic name Upshot Knothole. The gamma rays were gone now, and civilians would soon be permitted to visit the site, but during the Upshot Knothole era anyone straying into the vicinity would have received four hundred times the acceptable dose of radiation. The last detonation, “Climax,” had occurred on the fourth of June.
    â€œAnd one year later, almost to the day, the Conqueror company arrives in the Escalante Desert and starts to work,” I said, at once impressed by Stuart’s detective work and frightened by its implications.
    My lover exited the breakfast nook, removed the cat from our coffee-table atlas, and opened to a spread that displayed Utah and Nevada simultaneously. “You were maybe only a hundred and thirty miles from the epicenter. Eleven A-bombs, Angela. If the winds were blowing the wrong way…”
    â€œObviously they were,” I said. “And the Atomic Energy Commission now expects tourists to show up?”
    â€œNever underestimate the power of morbid curiosity.”
    A quick trip through the back issues of Film Fan Almanac was all Stuart needed to reinforce his theory with two additional Upshot Knothole casualties. Unable to cope with his cancer any longer, Pedro Armendariz, who played Temujin’s “blood brother” Jamuga, had shot himself in the heart on June 18, 1963. Exactly eight years later—on June 18, 1971—cancer deprived the world of Thomas Gomez, who portrayed Wang Khan, the Mongol ruler whom Temujin seeks to usurp (thereby bestowing a throne on himself and a plot on the movie). Like Susan, Tom was only fifty-six.
    â€œWe are the new hibakusha,” I mused bitterly. The hibakusha, the “explosion-affected persons,” as the Hiroshima survivors called themselves. “Me, Duke, Dick, Susan, Pedro, and Tom. The American hibakusha. The Howard Hughes hibakusha. I’d never tell Duke, of course. Irony makes him mad.”
    Our obligation was manifest. We must contact the entire Conqueror company—stars, supporting players, camera operators, sound men, lighting crew, costume fitters, art director, special effects technician, hair stylist, makeup artist, assistant director—and advise them to seek out their doctors posthaste. For five months Stuart and I functioned as angels of death, fetches of the Nuclear Age, banshees bearing ill tidings of lymphoma and leukemia, and by the autumn of 1976 our phone calls and telegrams had generated two catalogues, one listing eighty Conqueror alumni who were already dead (most of them from cancer), the other identifying one hundred forty survivors. Of this latter group, one hundred sixteen received our warning with graciousness and gratitude, three told us we had no business disrupting their lives this way and