by Gore Vidal
“Don’t you believe it!” said the Duchess. “That Jimmy Cox is treacherous as can be. George, you check—” But everyone else in the room was now too busy cheering and applauding as a crowd of journalists and photographers surrounded the President-elect.
Daugherty drew Jess to one side and gave him an envelope. “She’s on the seven-A.M. from Chicago. She’ll go straight to the Marion Hotel. Meet her by eight.”
“Is she … alone?”
“Say your prayers, Jess. Just as I say mine. I’m going to bed. We done it.”
“We done it,” Jess repeated. Then he wondered what on earth they were going to do with Nan Britton for the next four years.
Jess found Nan in the coffee shop of the Marion Hotel. Except for a tired woman behind the counter, there was no one in sight. Nan was reading the Chicago Tribune, which she must have brought with her: yesterday’s headline predicted a Republican victory. Jess had a copy of the Marion Star, with the great news: Harding Sweeps the Nation. Jess said, without thinking, “Whaddaya know?”
Nan said, “I know it’s wonderful! I was so worn out I actually slept in that Pullman car and it wasn’t until I was getting up at six-thirty that I asked the porter who won and he said, ‘Harding’s the man, miss.’ ”
“You want your usual waffles with jam, Jess?” The old woman behind the counter regarded them without curiosity.
“With a side order of chipped beef.” That had been W.G.’s breakfast election day. While breakfast was being assembled, Jess gave Daugherty’s note to Nan, who read it, and nodded and put it in her handbag. She was certainly pretty, Jess decided, but for a president who could have his choice of Mary Miles Minter or Gloria Swanson or, maybe, why not, Mary Pickford, newly married though she was, Nan was a bit on the plain and unglamorous side. As if to emphasize the fact, back of their booth stacks of Photoplay magazine featured the marriage and home life of Mary Pickford.
“I guess you’ll be staying in Chicago.” Jess fished, not subtly.
Nan nodded, a sad expression on her face. “My sister’s willing to adopt Elizabeth Ann if …” Nan sighed.
“I’m sure they’ll fix it real fine because, ‘My God, How the Money Rolls In!’ ” He hummed a line from that popular song and started in on his waffles. Nan picked at toast.
“What’s happened to Carrie Phillips?” she asked, with an unsuccessful attempt at casualness.
“Well, she and Jim list out this summer for Japan and points east to find some new silk specialties for the store and they’re still travelling last anybody’s heard.” It was said that Albert Lasker, on orders from Will Hays, had given the Phillipses fifty thousand dollars to get lost until after the election. Jess suspected that the sum was probably less. Carrie loved to travel, while Jim was too important a man to be involved in something so crude as a payoff.
“Look.” Nan removed a large glossy photograph of W.G. from her handbag. “I’m going to ask him to sign it for me.”
“You do that,” said Jess. After all, this was now Daugherty’s business, not to mention that of the Secret Service. He had done his job as courier.
“I suppose they’ll go on straight to Washington.” Nan was wistful.
“No. Texas. The McLeans are joining them, with their own private car and two or three senators and Doc Sawyer, who’s going to be surgeon general now so’s he can come to Washington and look after the Duchess’s kidney.”
“Doc Sawyer? A general?” Nan laughed, and it was a comical thought: the local doctor was a small insignificant wisp of a man whom no one ever noticed except the Duchess, who had given him the run of her remaining kidney. He had saved her life a dozen times.
“Then they plan to go on to Panama. You know how W.G. likes to travel.”
“Do I know? Why, even out on Chautauqua, no sooner would we hit one town than he was already phoning on ahead to the next. ‘Can’t you ever stay still?’ I’d say, and he’d say, ‘Dearie, I’m a travellin’ man.’ He’ll love being president, don’t you think?”
“Who wouldn’t?” said Jess, thinking how much he and Daugherty were going to enjoy the Harding Administration. But as for W.G., Jess was not so certain. He wouldn’t be able to just slip away from the Duchess, say, and take the train to New York and meet Nan or Theda Bara at the Biltmore. The July trip on the Chicago elevated to see Nan was probably the last public train that he would ever set foot on again. From now on, he was national property, guarded by the Secret Service and watched by the press, who had a lot more and better eyes than even the Duchess. Jess suddenly felt sorry for W.G. “He’ll be able to go anywhere he likes,” he told Nan, “with his own railroad car and his own yacht.”
“But I’ll never be with him, will I?”
“No, honey, you never will be. In public, anyway.”
Will Hays, still master of the Republican National Committee, entered the coffee shop. He looked, even this early, like a fresh, wide-eyed mouse asearch for cheese. “Good morning,” he said to Jess, instantly recognizing the face if not the name of a part of the presidential entourage.
“Whaddaya know?” Jess greeted Hays, who then sat at the counter, and ordered coffee, and read several newspapers all at once. Everyone said that he would be in the Cabinet. According to Daugherty, even Jess could have an important job somewhere high in the government, but Jess thought he preferred the freedom of anonymity. There was a lot of business to be done during the next four years, and he had never liked the idea of going to an office on any regular basis.
2
Through the steam, small figures could be observed like midget ghosts. Blaise blinked his eyes to accustom them to the heat and the mist; thus blurring his vision all the more. Then he found his host. With only a towel wrapped about his head, this small muscular man was talking to another small less muscular man, with no towel. Although Blaise was hardly tall, he towered over Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, who were discussing their joint enterprise, United Artists.
“Mr. Sanford. Blaise.” Fairbanks greeted him as formally as a naked man could. With his right hand he shook Blaise’s hand; with his left he covered his genitals in a pro forma gesture of modesty, which he then quickly forgot. Blaise and Chaplin shook hands gravely and Blaise could not help but note, again, how much smaller than real life, in every way, these larger-than-life world fantasies were. He also noted that Chaplin was not, as everyone seemed to think, Jewish.
“You do yourself very well,” said Blaise. As a part of the Santa Monica Boulevard studios, Fairbanks had built himself a private gymnasium as well as a Turkish bath, with professional trainers and masseurs on constant duty. Now that Fairbanks had come into his supreme own as an athletic star with The Mark of Zorro, he worked constantly on his body. In fact, over the entrance to the gymnasium hung a sign, Basilica Linea Abdominalis, to remind the star and his friends that the waistline was, for Fairbanks at least, center not only of his body but his world. As a result, Fairbanks’s hips were easily the narrowest that Blaise had ever seen on a man close to forty.
Suddenly, as the Puck-like Chaplin proceeded to do a small dance, depicting an adulterer caught by an angry husband in a hot shower, they were joined by Fairbanks’s trainer, tall and out of place among the small stars, and a handsome Army flier who had been an all-American football player at West Point. The fact that the West Pointer had three testicles of equal size delighted the stars and in no way embarrassed the Army officer, whose body looked like a sculpture meant always to be seen in the nude and in the round and in every detail perfect save for the genital joke. As a result of the heat and the curious company, Blaise’s susceptibility to his own sex was abruptly switched off. Also, the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac, Fairbanks wanted to talk politics to the publisher of the Washington Tribune.
“I was asked to join Al Jolson’s group, when they came out for Harding. But I’m the original T.R. man, and even though Harding was finally their choice—the Republican choice—I just couldn’t. I suppose I should’ve. Mary was tempted, too. But
then we were really rooting for Mac, and of course he didn’t get nominated. So we sat it out.”
“Just as well, I’d say.” Blaise had not voted because as a resident of the District of Columbia, he could not. But now that he was established at Laurel House on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he would no doubt register as Frederika had done with unexpected rapture in finding herself, at last, Woman Enfranchised. She had then forgotten to vote.
“I know,” said Fairbanks, “how people object to movie actors talking politics. But why shouldn’t we speak out? We’re citizens, too. We pay a lot of tax.”
“It’s very simple, Dougie.” Chaplin’s voice was curiously light, and very English. “We don’t talk in the movies, and they love us. But if we start chattering in public, they might hate us.”
“You,” said Fairbanks thoughtfully, “never stop talking.”
“That’s only in private with you. With those I love. Anyway, I speak only to instruct and delight my friends. But for the world, Charlie is forever silent.” With that, he did his curious shuffle-walk out of the steam-room, and even without the famous large shoes, the effect was weirdly comic.
After the hot dry room, cold plunge, massages, they were draped in towels and arranged upon wooden chaise-longues, while a waiter served tomato sandwiches and Chateau d’Yquem, which Blaise loathed and their host, a natural teetotaller, did not drink. Blaise contented himself with soda water.
Fairbanks discussed football with the Army officer and Chaplin discussed Caroline with Blaise. “She’s about to work with an old friend of mine, William Desmond Taylor, a real gentleman, of what used to be called the old school. So unlike the new school. I myself am self-educated.” In imitation of a rabbit, Chaplin nibbled one corner of a tomato sandwich.
“Like me.” Blaise was agreeable. “I quit Yale …”
“For us of the new school of gentlemen, Yale is just another lock to be picked. Of course, I’m from the London streets, poor but never, ever proud. Now, Taylor’s a real gent. Irish, I think. Protestant, of course. He enlisted in the war, aged forty-one or so, while Doug and I, young and the stuff of which cannon fodder is made, were exempted if we sold Liberty Bonds.”
“You financed the war.”
“The thing is this.” Chaplin suddenly looked at Blaise, who found it highly disconcerting to be looked at by a face that he himself had looked at for so many hours over the last seven years. Without the toothbrush moustache, Chaplin did not even look like Charlie Chaplin; yet there was something about the eyes that held Blaise’s attention in much the same way that the eyes of the face on the screen did. The little man was all energy and force; and perfect coldness. “Poor Taylor’s got himself into a terrible position with two stars and one lady, or so the last-named would depict herself. I wonder if beautiful Emma—your Caroline—knows what she’s getting into.”
“I had the impression that he was simply going to direct her in Mary Queen of Scots.”
“He’s one of the best directors we have, which is saying nothing at all since anyone can direct and just about everyone does. But he’s better than most.”
“Better than Timothy X. Farrell?” If Chaplin knew so much, Blaise saw no reason to hold back what he himself knew, which was obviously less than any of Caroline’s Hollywood coevals.
“Different. I like Farrell. But he’s going to be in trouble if he keeps on making political movies. This country is far, far too dedicated to freedom to allow freedom of speech.” Chaplin’s rabbity smile was sudden and entirely engaging. “I’m joking, of course,” he said.
“Of course.”
Fairbanks was now walking on his hands, towel fallen to the floor. “Doug is very vain, you know. All those muscles. You’ve heard of Mary Miles Minter? My favorite name after Pola Negri.”
Blaise nodded. “She’s supposed to be the new Mary Pickford.”
“So the great furrier Zukor decreed. But her nose is top large for our screen, and her talent too small. Worse, she has a mother, the lady I referred to. The mother was once an actress called Charlotte something. She put baby Mary on the stage, and baby Mary, who is still only nineteen and gloriously nubile, in due course found her way here. Guided by Charlotte, she attained stardom in a trice, and a huge salary of which thirty percent goes to her mother.”
Blaise wondered why he was being told all this; and why Chaplin should care. “Thirty percent is high.”
“Very high. Now when little Mary Double M was about fifteen, already a star, she had an affair with a friend of mine, a director, by whom she got pregnant. Charlotte warned the director that if he ever saw the child again she would have him jailed for tampering with a minor, who was also a hot screen property. Then Triple M underwent an abortion. Now Mary Miles Minter is in love with my friend Taylor, as is her mother, Charlotte. So you see, what Emma Traxler, born in war-torn Alsace-Lorraine of noble yet haughty stock—”
“I think it was Unterwalden …”
“No matter. She wears, at all times, an invisible coronet to which even the vilest Jacobin doffs his Phrygian hat. Although the Three M’s are presently locked in their room in a palace on New Hampshire Boulevard—rather the way one does with a cat in heat—the child sometimes escapes to see Taylor. Meanwhile, Charlotte, in constant, scorching heat, throws jewels through his window, emitting heart-rending howls of unslaked lust.”
“Who,” asked Blaise, aware of the menace in this lightly rendered saga, “is the second star?”
“Mabel Normand.” With a look of mild distaste, Chaplin watched Fairbanks do a back-flip. “He’s going to break that thick neck of his one day or have a heart attack or both.” He turned back to Blaise. “We all love Mabel. I most of all. I’ve acted with her, directed her, and she’s directed me. She’s superb in comedy. In everything. But she’s falling on hard times. Goldwyn just fired her and she’s gone back to Mack Sennett, a step down in this business. She’s also in love, or thinks she is, with William Desmond Taylor. How he directs all the traffic in that bungalow of his, I dread to think. Now Emma Traxler, the Transylvanian princess, has been added to the … story.”
“My sister is a superb manager of traffic,” said Blaise truthfully.
“I would hate for anything to happen …”
“To Taylor?”
“No. Men can take care of themselves. To Mabel Normand. What brings you here, Mr. Sanford?” The transition was swift.
“I had heard that my old friend Hearst was trying to buy the Los Angeles Herald. So I thought I’d put in a bid, to keep things lively.”
“I keep telling Doug we should use all this money we make to buy the press. All of it. Then there’d be no more of those sordid scandals about us. None of it, let me assure you, Mr. Sanford, remotely true. Every star, male as well as female, goes to his marriage bed a virgin, and it is because of this prolonged chastity that our performances …” With a crash, Fairbanks fell to the floor.
“How satisfying!” Chaplin clapped his hands. “Poor Doug,” he called, “did you hurt yourself? Was something small but essential to United Artists broken?” A swift glance at Blaise, and Blaise was hot with embarrassment: Chaplin had read his mind in the steam-room.
“My son.” Chaplin was now an old-world gypsy crone, swirling about the collapsed Fairbanks. “It is the gypsy blood! I know. I know. The Tokay. On the steppes. The balalaika. Then the hot gypsy blood like quicksilver in your veins.” Chaplin snapped his fingers like castanets, and danced over Fairbanks. “You cannot deceive a loving gypsy mother. I know for whom you wait, hanging upon a mere tenterhook. It is the glorious young Englishwoman who has set atingle all your senses. Oh, my poor son! Born for the priesthood! A catamite at Mount Athos for lo! these many years. Now lost to God by a pair of saucy blue eyes!”
The aged crone suddenly became a haughty English girl. “I cannot, don’t you know? leave my father the Duke of Quimsberry, now aboard his magnificent yacht moored not a stone’s throw from this moonlit gypsy camp in the Vienna Woods.” Chaplin became a Ru
ssian Cossack dancer. He leapt in the air. “Dance, little fool! Dance!” he roared. “My gypsy blood is aflame. You madden me! So if it’s a fuck you want, it’s a fuck you’ll get, Lady Sybilla.” Then, as Lady Sybilla, he cried, “I thought you were a gentleman! True, gypsy blood runs through you yet—” A gasp. “Runs through both of us now. Oh, may this night never end. But hark! What is that, coming toward us, through the Vienna Woods? Oh, God! It is the yacht of my father the Duke.” With that, Chaplin, before their eyes, turned into a very large, steam-powered yacht, making its way slowly through the Vienna Woods, just missing the odd tree in its stately progress.
“Charlie,” said Fairbanks, “has found his voice.”
Although Caroline had insisted that Blaise stay with her, he had moved into the brand-new Ambassador Hotel, midway between Hollywood and Los Angeles, where the Herald was located. The hotel itself was very large and modern and somewhat reminiscent of an armed camp, with private guards and public policemen everywhere. Currently, Los Angeles was in the midst of what the press called a crime wave, partly the work of transients who had come to this new El Dorado only to find the best gold already panned, and partly the work of local criminals at war with one another over the various drug territories, none particularly lucrative since a card—or gramme—of cocaine cost two dollars. Morphine was expensive but less popular. In any case, when it came to serious crime, the police stayed aloof; either paid off or frightened off. But transients were dealt with brutally.
The Coconut Grove of the Ambassador resembled its name. Here, later in the evening, among false palm trees, popular singers would sing and a full orchestra would play, over and over again, “Look for the Silver Lining,” while those movie stars who did not have to work the next day would dance. Caroline had warned Blaise gravely that Saturday night at the Grove was the one place where Blaise and Frederika must be seen if they wanted to be accepted as forever young and fashionable.
Frederika sat comfortably beside a palm tree, while Blaise drank gin and coconut milk from a hairy coconut shell, all beneath the gelid gaze of plainclothes police and uniformed hotel guards. The Grove was half filled with serious diners; the orchestra played soothing dance music; a few couples danced.