THE MENACE by Daphne du Maurier

 

THE MENACE by Daphne du Maurier

“I’ve lost my rib.”

An alternate world story where a British actor called Barry from Herne Bay grows up to be a very big film star in Hollywood, the archetypal strong and silent type, with a suitably located small facial scar, an inscrutable heartthrob called The Menace — porridge loving, eventually experimenting his fancies successfully with rice pudding, after donating spam to us in Britain during the hard days of the war. Strong and silent, but with his own genuine lack of emotions that suited the parts he played. Until, in 1959, the cinema industry brought out ‘feelies’, with similar teething problems affecting already established actors as had been the case with the earlier invention of ‘talkies’.
Barry’s ‘feely’ force field turns out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, extremely low, thus threatening his career. His wife is scuttled off for the weekend while his minders take him to a beach where they trust to stir his loins with “coloured boys and girls”, none of them over 17, provocatively in “nude parade”. When that doesn’t work (he refers to them with the N word), the minders take him to a night club with other provocations for his loins, more stiffeners for his sinews. It is here he meets by chance an old female friend back home from Herne Bay who once failed a film test in Hollywood, now a grey-haired lavatory attendant…one with memories of home and the old days.
I will not let on the results of this meeting, but I found the ending predictable.
The story’s moral? Its context with the rest of this book’s gestalt? Your guess is as good as mine. But my guess is that it’s an alibi for another story. Think about it.
(Or a counterpart for Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 gorilla story?) 

My full review of THE BREAKING POINT: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/the-breaking-point-stories-by-daphne-du-maurier/