An American Fable

AN AMERICAN FABLE is about ambition, luck, and death. Set in New York in the early 1950’s -- post World War II and just before color television -- the story follows Aris Bellerophon, a boy who loves horses and who claims a gypsy told him he’d be famous at twenty-five, and Big Brim Oscar Birmingham, a famous radio personality who’s charming, erratic, overweight, and childless after many years of marriage.
One afternoon after his top-rated morning radio show, Brim has his chauffeur drive out into rural New Jersey where, as if appearing from out of the sky, Aris and his huge red horse, Pegasus, just miss crashing into Brim’s red limousine. Later, when Big Brim and Aris meet at the Watchung stables, Aris is eager to impress Brim and tells Brim he was adopted at six and dragged around Mexico with his new mother and her various boyfriends. Aris tells Brim that in that southern desert, his blondness stood out as different from everyone else who was dark. Brim, with boyhood scars of his own, sees and hears Aris' dreams and wonders how much of Aris' story is true. As the young man speaks to Brim, he has to fight with himself to communicate because sometimes he stutters which makes him self-conscious and vulnerable. But Aris is also limber, photogenic, filled with hope because today, the day he meets Brim, is his twenty-fifth birthday and Aris believes in the gypsy's promise. Brim sees the boy as star bright and charismatic while Brim still feels himself as the refugee who as a teenager escaped the isolation of his father's dirt farm in Illinois and fled to big city Chicago. Vibrant and driven as a young man, Brim had hustled himself into vaudeville, became a barker, a bouncer, a talker who loved an audience. Later, moving east, Brim broke into big time New York radio and climbed to the top.
Brim takes Aris back to his huge apartment in New York City and introduces him to his wife, Vera, a skittery alcoholic with a fake British accent and a dark past who still genuinely loves Brim. Aris' girlfriend, Tulip, becomes drunk at their dinner party for four and passes out leaving Vera to investigate Aris. The next morning, she agrees with Brim that Aris is astonishing and Brim arranges a screen test for Aris at a film studio in New York. The filmed Aris, big, colorfully bright, startlingly good looking and alive up there on the huge screen, is joltingly watchable. Sometimes he just stands there looking into the camera, or looks at something out of the frame, or sometimes he just breathes – and the test results break records. Aris is rushed into a cowboy movie with his big, red horse, Pegasus, and Brim manipulates the press by staging a stunning publicity event which appears to go wrong but at the last minute Aris saves that little girl, is hailed by the media, and becomes an overnight sensation. It is the great American fable.
Each character in this story wants magic and passion. But the people in AN AMERICAN FABLE make very different choices and, because their lives are powerfully intertwined, their choices intensely affect each other and change each of them forever.