Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from the March 1953 issue of Galaxy. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE OLD DIE RICH
By H. L. GOLD
Illustrated by ASHMAN
It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen timesa year, wonder about briefly, and then promptly forget—butthe real story is the one that the reporters are unable tocover!
ou again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily.
I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feelingof hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get theanswer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places—thequavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shakychair, tottering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, theflaking metal bed.
There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enoughto show the tight-drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that theflesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was goingover her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a federalgrade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape,who had brought me here.
"When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases,Sergeant?" the M.E. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and hismorbid curiosity!"
For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is afriend of mine—I used to be an actor, too, before I joined theforce—and he's a follower of Stanislavsky."
The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "ARed?"
let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was,while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavskywas the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea wasthat actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayedso they could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about acharacter right up to the point where a play starts—where he wasborn, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood,adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money,success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension ofthe life history created by the actor.
How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd hadthe cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing oldmen ever since. I had them down pretty well—it's not just a matter ofshuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice,which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are likeinside—and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on werestudies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made themdo what they did, feel the compulsion that drove them to it.
The old woman on the bed, for instance, had $32,000 in f