by Gore Vidal
“Charlotte Shelby. You’ve met her. Little Mary Minter’s mother.”
“Little Mary Minter,” murmured Caroline, staring at a large photograph of the golden-ringletted child with the large eyes and boiled-potato nose.
Then star faced director. “Bakersfield,” said Caroline in a voice that she had never heard herself use before: Lady Macbeth was now within her range. She could do it on stage. The dialogue that she could never learn would be glued to the backs of chairs and columns, and she would thunder the part as she strode, covered with blood, about Glamis Castle or wherever it was in Scotland. No, not Scotland again. She had left all that was celluloid if not mortal of Emma Traxler on the Argyle—Scotland again!—Lot.
“I think, even in Bakersfield, they will be happy.” William was comforting. “You’re too close to it. That’s all. I think the story works remarkably well.”
“It does, William. I don’t.” Caroline sat down at his desk, as if it were her own. “The calendar has caught up with me.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He said all that she wanted to hear.
“Do we open at the Capitol?”
William shrugged. “Why not? You’re popular in that house. It’s what they call classy, and so are you. I’m leaving the first of June.” William pressed his diaphragm. He had had for more than a year intermittent pains, as yet undiagnosed.
“Where to?” Caroline did not know whether or not she was being invited to go with him.
“London. I told you. Knoblock’s lent me his townhouse in London. I’m leaving him this. A swap. I’ll be back in the fall. I need a complete rest.” He looked harassed. Although everyone thought that William Desmond Taylor took drugs, there was no sign of it in his behavior, unlike that of Mabel Normand or Wallace Reid, whom the studio supplied with morphine on the set so that he could cope with the day’s shooting. Hollywood was growing more and more addicted and the salesmen of drugs—“dealers of cards,” as they were sportily known—were everywhere, disguised as Russian princes at dinner parties or as peanut-vendors selling brown paper bags containing cards of cocaine. Caroline often had the sense that she was living in an encoded society to which she alone lacked the key.
“What about Green Temptation?” This was to be the next Taylor photo-play, with no part for Caroline.
“Postponed.” He looked at her, somewhat anxiously. “Why don’t you come, too?”
William had led Caroline so many times down the cactus-strewn path of unrequited desire that she was reluctant to expose herself again to a desert that contained neither honey nor locusts—or was it a mess of herbs? “I’m not sure that I can. The paper …” She always mentioned her other life when the current one proved unsatisfactory.
“Of course,” he said, too quickly. “I quite understand. I simply thought you might enjoy London and the theater and your European fame …”
“In tatters, by now.” As Caroline made light of herself and Europe and the movies, she played nervously with a letter on the desk. Over and over again she read to herself the line—black ink on blue notepaper: “I will shoot you and that is a promise.” Yet so busy was she with her own performance that she did not take in the words. They were simply so many meaningless scrawls and loops, part of a different plot from the one that she was involved in, another keyless code. It was not until she had half-promised not to go, so much more tactical than a half-promise to go, that Caroline realized what she had been reading. But by then she was in bed with Tim for the first time in months. He had come home early from the studio. Héloise had let him in and he had fallen asleep in her bed. Caroline had seized her opportunity.
“What does he see in me?” she asked yet again: some of Tim’s answers to this old question pleased her more than others.
“Money.” Tim was brisk. He lay beside her, lean and hairy and self-absorbed.
“Why mine? There are so many other people here with more than I’ve got. He wants me to go to Europe with him. Why?”
“So that you’ll introduce him to your grand friends.”
“I don’t have any. Anyway, he’s got more. He already knows all the sort of people that—would know him,” she added with precise cruelty.
“He still hasn’t gone to bed with you?”
Caroline shook her head. “I assume that I’m too old. He who worships at the shrine of the Three M’s will not light so much as a candle to my aged effigy.”
“How you mock my religion!”
“Mine, too,” said Caroline. She saw herself in a nun’s habit, a vow of silence, doing good works in a leper colony. Then she remembered Lubitsch’s comment that every actress over forty wanted to play a nun to hide her neck.
“Has it occurred to you that he’s one of the boys?” Tim was always quick to separate everyone into one of two strict sexual categories, which, Caroline knew, was not possible in the real world, at least not amongst Parisian ladies whose life work was to keep in perfect equilibrium husband, lover and beloved woman friend.
“Perhaps he is. Some of the time. But do boys write you letters in a woman’s handwriting on scented note-paper, threatening to kill you?”
Tim sat up in bed. “Not my kind of boy.”
“I shouldn’t think anyone’s kind of boy. No, the letter was from a woman. You can always tell. I don’t know how. The color of the paper, the exclamation marks.… Anyway, it was lying on his desk, and I was sitting at his desk. I didn’t mean to read it but of course I did, right in front of him, too, not paying the slightest attention to what it said.”
“Did it say ‘kill’?”
“ ‘Shoot,’ actually.”
“Only a man would write ‘shoot.’ ”
“Well, this woman wrote ‘shoot.’ ”
Tim frowned. “Taylor’s supposed to be pretty deep into the drug world. A fellow dealer, maybe?”
“I don’t know. All I know is—I want to be with him.” Precisely why Caroline would want to be at all hours of day and night in the company of a man with whom she had not had an affair was a mystery not only to the patient Tim but to herself. She had now lived quite a long time in the world and she had always managed through luck—bad or good?—or instinct to base her life securely upon herself and not upon others. From Burden to Tim, she had been able to conduct as pleasurable a relationship as she could with men while not allowing any of them into her life beyond, as it were, the bed. Now, bedless, again, as it were—how they had mocked Henry James’s elaborate elderly style!—and how useful it was when it came to gathering up contradictory emotions in order to sort them out. Bedless, she was jealous in a way that she had never known before. She had, subtly she hoped, quizzed everyone about Taylor. She had flattered the Three dismal M’s at parties, and she had responded warmly but wearily to Mabel Normand’s charms, which were, like those of so many of the natural stars, calculated to ensnare both sexes. But at the center of all this desire was William Desmond Taylor, a perfect enigma. He was liked by “real” men, even Chaplin was a friend, to the extent that that odd world-spirit could be said even to notice anyone in any guise save audience. The professionals regarded Taylor with admiration; and women were drawn to him. Yet she was quite unable to touch him, much less know him. Good manners—his—kept her from flinging herself upon him. Taylor was a master of distance, who always kept her just out of reach. Ordinarily, if frustrated, Caroline had known enough to move on. But this time she stayed on. He talked to her, constantly, of Mary and Mabel, and she listened, with sympathy, as if she were their mother.
“I don’t think Mr. Eyton likes Mary Miles … I mean, Mary Queen of Scots.” Caroline put on her dressing gown.
“Do you like it?” Tim lay on the bed, wearing only a single garter which he had forgotten to take off.
“I look very old.”
“Probably not as old as you think you do. Remember, you look at yourself a lot closer than the audience will. You over-react.”
“I over-act.”
“I would’ve stopped that.”
&
nbsp; “William tried.” She was defensive of her passion. “I suppose I suspected I looked wrong, like Miss Glover, a teacher I had in school. Perhaps,” she looked into her dressing-table mirror, “I should bob my hair.”
“Then you wouldn’t look like Emma Traxler.”
“That’s the point.”
“Forget it. Go to Europe with him. Get away from here for a while. Don’t read the reviews. See your friend Mrs. Wharton and try to buy her new book, the one you like and I can’t read. All those rich people … you’ll need long hair for that.”
Tim cheered her up both physically and morally. It was curious that as she got older the act of love seemed more and more necessary to her than when she was young; yet morale tended to weaken with each new year, winged years, she thought of them, gliding by ever faster, like bats at sundown.
Caroline reciprocated, and they had an early dinner at the Sunset Inn on Ocean Avenue, where she tried to talk him out of a movie about a lynching in the South. “You’re getting typed, as they call it,” she said, watching an early near-full moon start its showy progress across the gray Pacific sky. Beneath them, the tide swept slowly in and out, swirling about the restaurant’s fragile wooden piles set like stilts upon the sand. Across the dining room, eating heavily and drinking deeply, were a half-dozen comic actors, and their girl friends, known as starlets.
“There should be at least one … typed director.” But Tim did not look too pleased with his distinction. It was said that he had quarrelled with Ince. As there were not many other studios where he would have so free a hand, and as he had refused to allow Traxler Productions to be “typed,” too, that left only Europe, which was not his sort of thing. “The poison-pen letters have stopped,” he observed.
“My poor child,” Caroline sighed.
“Emma now sends me poison-pen pamphlets. How did she get the way she is?”
“As she has no father, I suppose I’m at fault. But I don’t know how.”
“Washington?”
“Perhaps. It’s hard for us—well, me—to believe that all those speeches our friends make in the Senate and we never listen to, they listen to …”
“The public?”
Caroline nodded. “The senators who give them, too. They keep making so much of Bolshevism that, I suppose, they believe it all. Like the Huns.”
“Just like the Huns.” Tim looked up, and his eyes grew round. “Here she comes.”
Caroline turned, as Elinor Glyn made her entrance, with three young men, of whom one was a rising star whose name Caroline could never remember.
Miss Glyn’s eagle-like eye took in the entire restaurant. When she saw Caroline, she left her own party, swept past the table of comics who paused in their routines to gaze with awe upon a legend. “Dear Miss Traxler!” Caroline and Tim both rose. “Do sit. Please. We’re celebrating. I have just received what is called a ‘go-ahead’ for my second picture …”
“Sit down,” said Emma Traxler, all business, irony expunged at the thought of trade.
“I shall be making it near you, Mr. Farrell, in Culver City, with the charming Mr. Goldwyn, who has just told the press that my name is anonymous with sex appeal. A bit of a revulsh, I suppose, but beggars cannot be choosers.”
Caroline asked briskly for all details. “I produce,” said Glyn. “Mr. Sam Wood directs for me yet again. He is aptly named but no matter. I shall have even greater freedom than I had with Lasky. There is a Mr. Gibbons in the art department who has actually seen a great house from the inside and is nearly a gentleman himself. No more dried palms and elephant feet in the drawing rooms of Mayfair …”
“So unlike Sandringham and Osborne,” said Caroline, playing the royal card.
“You have stayed in those houses?”
“In the old days of Queen Victoria.” Caroline had once spent a weekend at Sandringham when the Prince of Wales, not the Queen, was in residence. There were, she recalled, a number of elephant feet containing canes and umbrellas. “But who plays the lead? Gloria Swanson again?”
“That is undecided. But I’ve got him! It, personified. Rudolph Valentino. He’s joining us tonight with his two ladies. So charming. Do you speak Italian?”
“Oh, yes!” Caroline or, rather, Emma lied. In the last year, Valentino had become a world star with The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“Rodolfo is essentially unspoiled, untouched by the Californian Curse, as I call it. The Evil Fairy that spoils everything, finally, for everyone who comes here in pursuit of fool’s gold …”
“But the gold’s actually pretty real,” said Tim, somewhat recovered from his first alarm at the sight of Elinor Glyn.
“But then so are the fools.” Caroline smiled radiantly, aware too that, as she did, her face had become a spider’s web of lines and so, thanks to this suicidal—tic?—she should not be appearing opposite Rodolfo in Beyond the Rocks.
“A tale of innocence meeting sophistication. Of young fresh trusting Theodora …”
If not the part of Theodora, then perhaps she could play her mother, thought Caroline wildly, allowing her smile to fade as quickly as was plausible.
“With Rodolfo as the world-weary Lord Bracondale …”
Glyn gave her a suspicious look. “The Lambtons are a lot darker than adorable Rodolfo.”
“Moors, they say—the Lambtons, that is. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s dark lady related to them?”
“That was before my time.” Wig held high, Elinor Glyn joined her table. No mention had been made of Mary Queen of Scots.
“Well, that decides it,” said Caroline. “The Californian Curse is upon me. I must flee.”
“Where to?”
“Washington? Where else?”
“I thought you were finished with newspapers.”
Caroline wondered if, perhaps, she was finished with everything; life, too.
“I could always retreat to France and become an old lady.”
Tim shook his head. “You would kill yourself first. Why don’t you take all this more seriously?”
“All what?”
“Movies. Why do you think I keep trying to make movies about real life?”
“Because you don’t know any better. This is not real life. This is … amusement.”
Tim shook his head. “No, there’s more to it than that. You remember your first picture.”
“I was incredibly noble. And I looked marvelous.”
Tim sighed. “Actresses. But don’t you know what you—what we did? The government wanted every American to hate every German, and we—you and I—pulled it off.”
“With some help from a thousand other movies, and the press, and George Creel, and the Germans …”
“That’s not the point. At a certain moment we made a … connection with the public, with the … the Zeitgeist. We were able to make everyone feel what we wanted them to.”
Caroline stared at Elinor Glyn, who was staring at her watch: Rodolfo was late. “You sound like Chaplin when he talks about movies as a Force for Good.”
“He’s right. Though I don’t know what he thinks is good. As it is, we are now supplying the world with all sorts of dreams and ideas. Well, why don’t we shape those dreams, deliberately?
Caroline heard Tim at last, through the great velvety cloud of self-pity in which she had been encased. “You are ambitious,” she heard herself saying as she began to emerge from the cloud. “But I see what you mean. There is no country here … no real country anywhere, I suppose, except in dreams. But what do you want them to dream?”
Tim shrugged. “Eugene V. Debs?”
Caroline shook her head. “That’s just propaganda, and most people know how to ignore special pleading. A dream is something subtle—universal, unnoticeable at the time but then unforgettable. The way Richard Barthelmess walks in Broken Blossoms. But I don’t see how you—we—anyone—can calculate what will work.”
“Then don’t calculate. Simply do it. Show things the way they are but carefully angle
d, the way the camera is, to make the audience see what you want them to see …”
“Which is what?”
Tim laughed; and looked very young indeed. “If we knew the answer to that we would know everything and so die happy. Just do it.”
Caroline was beginning to get the range. “Up till now,” she began to improvise, “we’ve let the government tell us what to do and pretty much how to do it. So why not,” Caroline set her foot with great deliberation upon the road to Damascus, “reverse the procedure and make the government do—and be—what we want them to do and be?”
Tim was delighted. “Years of writing stupid capitalist editorials have trained you well.”
“I’m not so sure about the stupid part.” Caroline was serene. “But where Hearst invented the news about people, we can …” Involuntarily, she shuddered and did not know why.
“We can what?”
“I was going to say we can invent the people. Can we?”
“Why not? They’re waiting to be invented, to be told who and what they are.”
Caroline suddenly realized that she—and everyone else—had been approaching this new game from the wrong direction. Movies were not there simply to reflect life or tell stories but to exist in their own autonomous way and to look, as it were, back at those who made them and watched them. They had used the movies successfully to demonize national enemies. Now why not use them to alter the viewer’s perception of himself and the world? Thus, she would be able to outdo Hearst at last. Self-pity was now replaced by megalomania of the most agreeable sort. She even fell in love with Tim, yet again. What work they could do together now that they knew what the work was! Then, as if blessings could not cease to flow, it was quite clear to her and to Elinor Glyn that Rudolph Valentino had stood her up, while the comedians at the next table made more and more noise until one of them, a very fat man who had been a plumber before stardom, made a trip to the toilet, imitating, as he walked, Elinor Glyn, to all the room’s delight save the inventrix of passion, who scowled. Caroline laughed a care-free laugh. Under the table, Tim, unexpectedly, held her hand.