Hollywood

by Gore Vidal

  “Lansing is having his problems with Clemenceau.” Creel was direct. Then turned to André. “I assume you aren’t his nephew, or a member of the Cabinet?”

  “No. I am idle. I have always been idle. But I like nothing more than watching the ants run about after their hill has been kicked over.” Blaise was delighted that his old-world connection made not the slightest effort to accommodate the new world.

  “That’s one way of looking at it.” Creel was indifferent to malice. “Clemenceau would like to wait until things have settled down before the haggling starts. Lansing wants to start now, but leave the League of Nations until after the treaty is signed.”

  Blaise nodded. “Since the President is more interested in the League than in the treaty, Lansing shouldn’t be surprised at the influence of the third floor.” House always supported the President, to his face. Lansing dared argue, up to a point.

  “Certainly,” said Creel, vibrant in his own malice. “The Colonel is well supported by his family. They outnumber the delegation.”

  “A loving family man is everywhere admired.” But Blaise had been surprised by the Colonel’s unexpected recklessness when it came to his private arrangements. Save for Edith, Wilson had brought none of his own family, including his son-in-law Francis Sayre, who had worked for the Inquiry. Wilson had also discouraged everyone except the highest officials from bringing wives. Yet House had brought his sister as well as his daughter and her husband, Gordon Auchincloss, who had, in turn, brought along his law partner and his wife. Currently, House was trying to assign Auchincloss to the President as a secretary during the conference, and Mrs. Wilson was taking a darker and darker view of the less and less gray eminence of House. Wilson himself was sphinx-like, pursuing his own high destiny in his own eloquent way. There were storm warnings everywhere.

  “Clemenceau used to live in America.” Creel waved to a departing group from the Inquiry. Tonight would be an easy night for everyone. The next day the conference would begin at ten-thirty, January 18, the forty-eighth anniversary of Bismarck’s declaration of the Second Reich in the fallen capital of France. With grim pleasure, Clemenceau had picked the date. “He was married to a New York girl, and then divorced.”

  “That,” said André, eyes glittering, “explains his love for America.”

  “The divorce,” asked Blaise, “or the marriage?”

  “The experience.”

  “Did you see your … uh, sister’s photo-play?” Creel knew there was some relationship between André and Caroline.

  “My half-sister. No. I’ve never seen a photo-play, actually. I play bridge. One can’t do both. But I have read about Les Boches de l’Enfer, and I see that someone has taken our grandmother’s name, Emma Traxler. Is it Caroline?”

  “No,” said Blaise, not certain whether or not Creel was in on the game.

  “No,” said Creel, smiling to show that he did know. “She only produces movies.”

  “It sounds,” said André, “like a magician, producing something from a hat.”

  “It is.” Blaise took out his watch. The mistress of his youth had invited him for ten o’clock, the new fashionable hour in war-time Paris, a city still luxurious despite ration books and shortages. Creel saw the watch; and got to his feet.

  “I have a late dinner or an early supper,” said Blaise. “You’ll be there tomorrow, for the opening?”

  Creel nodded. “I’ll watch until I’m thrown out.”

  “I’ll do the same, I suppose.”

  House had told Blaise that it could be arranged for him to attend. But if a place had not been arranged for Lansing’s Creel, Blaise was not about to provoke wrath by letting it be known that one had been arranged for House’s Sanford. Actually, the preliminaries were open to a variety of privileged observers, while the actual conference was closed and secret—if seventy-two delegates from twenty-six nations could be relied on not to tell the world more than it wanted to know on the subject of new boundaries. The entire map of central Europe was being redrawn and, theoretically, Wilson held the blue pencil that would create new countries like Czechoslovakia while dismembering, if not erasing, ancient empires like that of Austria.

  “I hope Colonel House is recovered.” Creel said farewell to André.

  “Oh, the flu came and went, like the President.” When Wilson had come to the Crillon to visit House, he had passed Lansing’s office but he had not stopped to greet that great officer of state. There had been scandal.

  “But the gallbladder is still full of stones.” Creel was gone.

  “I don’t understand Americans.” André did not sound deprived.

  “I wouldn’t bother. You don’t need to understand—us.”

  “Yes. You are one. Is Caroline?”

  “Most of all. She has gone native.”

  “Our mother did, too. And brought us home your father, and you, too, of course.”

  “Yes. She is the link, Emma de Traxler Schuyler d’Agrigente Sanford. But no blood of mine.”

  “Tant pis,” said André, reverting to their first language. Blaise wondered why Emma’s descendants were all so proud of a woman who, Caroline had discovered, had deliberately allowed Blaise’s mother to die giving birth to him so that she could then marry his father and the Sanford money. Of course, they all enjoyed their left-handed descent from Aaron Burr through Emma’s father, who had been one of the many natural sons of that brilliant vice president who was now known only for the killing of Alexander Hamilton. In youth, Blaise had been excited and somewhat horrified to have two murderers, by marriage, in the family. But the arbitrariness of so many recent deaths from war and plague had quite erased murder’s glamour in a flood of statistics that could only be grasped when one realized that Plon, say, was no longer there to talk to, ever again.

  Blaise had been an adolescent when he first became the lover of Anne de Bieville, whose son, older than he, had then become his closest friend. Blaise had maintained the affair even at Yale, careful never to let on to his loud, loutish, virginal classmates that while they got drunk and babbled of girls, he was practically a family man.

  The affair had ended quietly, thanks to the width of the Atlantic Ocean as much as to that of passing time. Blaise now looked into her face for the first time in a dozen years and found her the same but old. She was at least sixty-five. Since she had allowed her figure thoroughly to go, she was dressed like an odalisque in a sort of robe that did not try to reveal where her waist had been or even such details as the precise whereabouts of the breasts as they responded, as did all flesh, to inexorable gravity.

  Anne met him in the foyer outside her drawing room, where twenty people were cheerily gathered. The house was shabbier than he remembered. The complaisant husband was long since dead, as was his friend, her son, swept away in the war. “We won’t talk about him.” Anne was firm. She held Blaise at arm’s length so that her pale, far-sighted eyes might get a good look at him. “You’ve kept your figure.”

  “Yours …”

  “Say nothing, my love. I am retired. But you’re still like—what did Caroline always call you?—a furious pony. My style—once. Now I no longer ride.”

  “Outside the battle?”

  “Outside the war. We can’t talk now. But come tomorrow, or any day at five. I want to know so much. I saw Caroline in that film. She photographs so well.”

  “You’re one of the few who recognized her. She’s thrilled to be both famous and unknown.”

  “Emma Traxler is a magic name in Paris this season. Tell me about Frederika. No, don’t. Save that. The Jusserands are here. My fault. You obviously see them every day in Washington. But they want to see you. There are also old friends from our old life. I almost got M. Clemenceau. But he is saving himself for tomorrow.”

  For the first time in years, Blaise felt entirely at home: but then, for the first time in years, he was in a room filled with people he had known all his life and for whom nothing ever changed. Their ranks could be—indeed had been�
�decimated by war but they still continued to be what they had always been and everyone was in correct relation to everyone else. There was no one present, no matter how vigorous and young and even rebellious, who could not “place” everyone else and himself in a web of family and history. In Blaise’s chosen land, only Boston was like this; but he was not a Bostonian. He was French because he had spent the first twenty years of his life in Paris and at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, and no one had forgotten him.

  Blaise plunged into the warm bath; swam gracefully but swiftly through the Jusserands and those concerned with the Peace Conference, which now seemed a minor distraction. Here was the world, as they called it; of family, as they called it, of which he was forever, like it or not, a member.

  “You know my mother.” The young man looked literally familiar. Generation after generation, family resemblances could be, like butterflies, identified by inherited markings, not to mention traits of character.

  “I am the right age.” Blaise did not even mind being taken for middle-aged when he was, moment by moment, becoming younger and more like his—what had Anne called him?—furious blond pony self. Blaise identified the young man, correctly, as a Polignac. He was then presented to a dark, rather plump young woman, whom he did not immediately place though the name was a famous one, Charlotte, born Duchess of Valentinois as she wore no wedding ring. Blaise was amused at the ease with which he could re-enter the abandoned world of youth. Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of an actress—with Negro blood, some said; Arab, said others—and the bachelor Prince Louis of Monaco, whose absence of issue had so alarmed his father, the reigning Prince of Monaco, that the girl had recently been legitimized and recognized as heiress to that convenient principality by the sea. Pierre de Polignac was at the Foreign Office. “Though I won’t be in attendance tomorrow. I am seriously outranked. But I hear that you will be present.”

  “How?” Blaise was surprised. There had been nothing in the press.

  “We have a list at the Quai d’Orsay that no one is supposed to see so of course I saw it.”

  “Very sensible. I shall watch the opening, anyway.”

  “We’ve all enjoyed,” said the actress’s daughter, “your sister in Les Boches de l’Enfer.”

  “Everyone recognizes her here, and no one at home.” Blaise was delighted.

  “Actually, Figaro gave away the secret,” said de Polignac. “We get no credit. How I long to go to America!”

  Blaise spoke easily, without thinking, a principal pleasure in this society where, if one wanted to think, one could enjoy the most exhausting dialogue in the Henry Adams style; otherwise, conversation engulfed one warmly and the on-going narratives of each person in the world continued to unfold with sufficient surprises and odd turnings to keep boredom at bay.

  Etienne de Beaumont was a spirited master of what Blaise liked to think of as the salon narrative. He was an elegant vivacious contemporary of Blaise, and they had known one another as boys. “Who would have thought you’d become an American!”

  “Who would have thought that I was ever anything else?”

  “I would.” There was a mild excitement in the salon as the Queen of Naples made her entrance. She had lost her kingdom years before and now her brother-in-law, the Austrian emperor, was about to lose his empire to Woodrow Wilson’s blue pencil. But the Queen was still as serenely beautiful as legend maintained, living a quiet life at Neuilly, undaunted by poverty. The ladies curtseyed low, as she passed. The men bowed.

  “I was influenced by your relative, the Beaumont who went with Tocqueville to America, and wrote the book …”

  “That Beaumont was a passionate monarchist like me, though I lack the passion. Anyway, Pierre de Polignac, who needs employment, is going to marry the Grimaldi girl, and become the prince consort of Monaco. After all, he has failed in literature. What else is there?”

  “The Foreign Office?”

  “He is only a decoration there.”

  “In Monaco?”

  “A better-paid decoration. We have missed you. Are you going to open up Saint-Cloud?”

  “It’s not me but my house everyone misses.”

  “We are honest people. Oh, my God, the newlyweds.” A middle-aged couple were moving purposefully in their direction, accompanied by a sturdy rather thick young woman of great vivacity and plainness.

  Blaise recognized the man, who was a few years his senior; but neither woman was familiar. Apparently, it was the older of the two who had just been married to Louis de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duke of Montmorency.

  “May I congratulate you?” Blaise shook hands formally with the groom, who seemed pleased to be remembered by their world’s American now returned in triumph; the new duchess appeared energetic, if plain, while the plump young woman was alive with vivacity. To Blaise’s amazement, she was American.

  “I’ve met you a hundred times, Mr. Sanford, but you wouldn’t remember. I’m a friend of Elsie de Wolfe.” Names, mostly sapphic, were set off like fireworks.

  Etienne was enjoying himself. “How,” he asked the Duchess, “is your charming son?”

  “Very well, thank you.” But she was after bigger game; she turned to Blaise. “I’ve seen your beautiful residence at Saint-Cloud so many times from the outside …”

  “You must see the inside …”

  “Come back to us!” the lady exclaimed. “Our old world needs new blood. Of course, you are so busy with your newspaper. You know, my husband, the Duke, subscribes. Of course, all the papers come at once. So we have stacks of New York Timeses everywhere in our home.”

  Etienne’s smile was of Cheshire-cat proportions.

  The young American woman came to the rescue. “Cecilia,” she boomed, her voice very deep. “It’s not the New York Times he publishes.”

  “I know, Elsa, I know.” The new duchess smiled upon Blaise. “I must go and pay my respects to the Queen of Naples. She must be so depressed by that boring republic in Germany and her poor father, the Kaiser, a prisoner in Belgium!”

  The three swept through the room to where the Queen stood, back to a gilded mirror, Anne beside her. “Cecilia’s marvelous. She gets everything wrong! A work of art.” Etienne looked as if he had somehow invented the duchess. “You don’t remember her?”

  Blaise shook his head.

  “She was not so much received in the old days when she was Madame Blumenthal born Ullmann …”

  “Very rich. I remember.” It was beginning to come back. “She wanted to have a salon …”

  “And a name. Now she has both. She also has a grown son by M. Blumenthal, and one of the conditions of her marriage to our friend Louis was that he pass on his title to her son, which he agreed to do in exchange for some of the Ullmann-Blumenthal millions.”

  “How nice to know nothing changes here.”

  “Well, some things change.” Etienne frowned. “He would never have married her in our youth, no matter how hard up he was.”

  “The Dreyfus case?”

  “That was only a passing symptom. The world changes, I’m afraid. Anyway, our poor Louis, now our rich Louis, is known as the Duke of Montmorenthal.”

  Although Blaise felt comfortably at home here, he was more stimulated by the anarchy of social relationships in America, where nearly everyone was a new arrival and blatantly self-invented. “I am more surprised by the fat girl,” said Blaise. “She wouldn’t have been here when we were young.”

  Etienne shrugged. “There have always been court jesters. This one is very energetic. She accompanies singers at the piano, professionally. Her name is Maxwell, Elsa Maxwell, and I should say she will be permanently unmarried. Is the family known in America?”

  Blaise pleaded ignorance. Then he bowed low to the Queen of Naples; kissed Anne ceremoniously on both cheeks. “If you would like to be presented to Edith Boiling Wilson, queen of the United States, I can do it.”

  “I should like nothing more.”

  Blaise brooded upon physical attraction as the tax
i drove him from the Faubourg Saint-German across the Seine to the nearly invisible rue de l’Arcade, which was just that, a covered sidestreet where, at number 11, the Hôtel Marigny occupied a narrow building two rooms and a staircase wide and five stories high.

  In youth, Blaise had been totally absorbed by Anne; then one day he was not. He had changed his tastes; he now preferred girls to women. Happily, she had always understood that she was simply a gate through which he would pass en route to his own maturity—whatever that might entail. He had liked her, but in time she would have become the mother that he had lost at birth, and though he was sometimes curious about this personage her absence had caused him no distress. He wanted no surrogate.

  Blaise walked the few yards from square to hotel. The night was intensely cold, and his breath was a dark gray cloud in the light from a single street lamp.