One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  They parked on a side street and made themselves as presentable as could be done by the light of a candle. Then they strolled on Hollywood Boulevard, and into Sardi’s, one of the smart restaurants. They had to wait their turn, but they didn’t mind, for this was one of the sights of the land; people came from all over, even in wartime, just for the privilege of glimpsing in real life some of those faces and figures they had seen magnified and glorified upon the screen. The food would be good when they got it, and meantime it amused them to watch the flashily dressed crowd. They had no forewarning that it would be the beginning of an adventure.

  In due course they were seated at a table, and it happened to be near the door. They had finished studying the menu and deciding what they wanted when they saw a woman come in and join the waiting throng. She was clad in a full-length mink coat, which tells the world that its wearer is at the top of the heap, at least financially; she was a large woman and it took a lot of minks, even without the hat to match. She had some jewels too, and anyone could be sure that she was able to pay for her dinner. She was alone, which was unusual. Lanny glanced at the full and rather florid face and it seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. The headwaiter came in the nick of time to spare him embarrassment; the man bowed and said, “Just a few minutes, Miss Rector.” Then Lanny caught the woman’s eye and he saw that she recognized him. Good manners required him to make the first advance, so he rose and said, “How do you do, Miss Rector. I am Lanny Budd.”

  “How pleasant to see you here!” she exclaimed, her face lighting up. They shook hands—it was the custom for ladies to shake hands with gentlemen here in the West. “We are a long way from Paris,” she added. “And it must have been ten years ago.”

  “This is my wife,” said Lanny. “Laurel, this is Miss Roberta Rector, for whom I had the pleasure of selecting some paintings in Paris.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” said Laurel cordially. “Won’t you join us for dinner?” She couldn’t say less, since otherwise she would have left the lady standing.

  Roberta Rector sounded like a movie name, and Laurel guessed that she must be an actress—one of those who have passed the ingenue age and have to take roles as mothers and aunts. But no, there were other kinds of people in Hollywood. Lanny said, “Miss Rector is a cattle princess,” a remark which would have been crude in the extreme, except that Lanny knew his princess. He said it with his smile, and she took it with a still broader one.

  “No,” she explained. “No more cattle for me. I sold out and put my money into tax-free government bonds; so I have nothing more to worry about in this world.”

  “You are wise,” commented the man. “What have you done with the Monets and Cézannes?”

  “Oh, I got tired of them and gave them to the County Museum. I was living in the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel and had to have a separate room for them, and I was afraid the place might burn up or somebody might steal them. And then, you know how it is, so many people heard about them and wanted to see them; I was always being bothered with letters and telephone calls. So I said, ‘I’ll put them where everybody can see them without having to see me.’”

  “Mostly people wait until they are dead before they are that generous,” remarked the art expert, who had known the rich from babyhood.

  “Oh, well, I get tired of things, and I want something new to look at. I keep hearing about Detazes, and perhaps I might like to own some. Is there anywhere I could look at them?”

  “I showed you quite a number in Paris, Miss Rector.”

  “Oh, did you? I had forgotten. I see so many paintings. People try to sell them to me.”

  “Fortunately the Detazes are in this country now—what we have left. They are in charge of my old friend and associate, Zoltan Kertezsi, in New York. You met him, a Hungarian.”

  “Yes, I remember; he had a lovely soft brown mustache.”

  “It is gray now. He’ll be happy to show you the paintings whenever you are in New York.”

  “I expect to go this winter. My life seems so restricted since Paris or London are out. I do hate this war. Don’t you, Mrs. Budd?”

  “I hate all wars,” said Laurel. She had realized by now that here was a “character,” and as a novelist she took out her mental notebook and sharpened her pencil.

  “I had covered my signs with slogans against war,” continued the retired cattle princess, and a stubborn look came into her gray eyes. “Everybody objected to them, but I kept them, even after Pearl Harbor. Then people splashed tar on them, so I had to change them.”

  Lanny explained to his wife. “Miss Rector owns a hill in the heart of Hollywood, and on all four of her street corners she has billboards with her political opinions on them. You remember, you noticed one about India.”

  “I hope you agree with me,” said the propagandist lady. “I ask the world, what right have the British to talk about freedom when they refuse freedom to the people of India? Don’t you think I am right, Mrs. Budd?”

  “It’s a complicated question,” responded Laurel. “I am troubled by the possibility that if the British set the Indians free, they may soon be flying at one another’s throats.”

  “Well, let them; that’s their business if they want to.”

  “Don’t you believe in a police force, Miss Rector?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t want a British policeman in my home and neither would you, I am sure. I see that you haven’t thought these matters out, Mrs. Budd. You must let me introduce you to some of my Hindu friends and let them explain their cause.”

  VIII

  This meal was served and eaten—with great gusto by Roberta Rector. Lobster à la Newburg, and a pitcher of buttermilk, and then a coupe glacée—neither Lanny nor his wife had ever seen such a meal, and they observed with quiet amusement that the lady let the gentleman take the check without protest. Perhaps she was one of those many rich people who are extravagant in large matters and penurious in small. Certainly she was one of those many stout people who reiterate that they are “small eaters”; they want you to believe that they are able to manufacture embonpoint out of water and air. “I only eat one meal a day,” said Roberta, and failed to mention that she kept chocolates in her room and took a nibble every now and then, and visited her refrigerator for both buttermilk and beer.

  This meeting solved a problem for the two travelers. When they mentioned that they were living in a trailer and had been unable to find a place to keep it, their guest said, “For heaven’s sake, come and park it on my grounds. There is all the room you want, and I’ll be delighted.” They accepted, and the woman took them out to her big limousine with a waiting chauffeur, and drove them to the place where they had parked. They followed her car, and on the way Laurel exclaimed, “What a curious human! What do you know about her?”

  Lanny said, “I know that her father was one of the big cattlemen in Texas. You see the signs ‘Rector Ranch Products,’ and he was it. Also, I know that she bought half a dozen paintings that cost ten or fifteen thousand dollars each. I was told that she has never been married, but has a grown son.”

  “What did she do that for?”

  “I don’t know; probably she’s a feminist and thinks the child should belong exclusively to the mother. She consorts with anarchists and other radicals, and no doubt is considered a dangerous character out here.”

  “I’m curious to know what’s in her mind,” declared the novelist; to which the husband replied, “That ought to be easy. She’s certainly a free enough talker.”

  After they had climbed “Rector Hill” in the heart of Hollywood, they parked their trailer alongside Roberta’s house and connected up the electric light with her back porch and their water line with her garden hose. They went inside and were shown through the house and were besought to occupy one of the guest rooms. But Laurel said no, they had promised themselves that this was to be a camping trip and they didn’t want to spoil their record. They were told about the house, which had been designed by the man whom ad
vanced and art-loving Americans considered the greatest architect of the time; the roof was so built that water didn’t always run off it, and the chimneys smoked, and the kitchen was inconveniently placed—but it was one of the most original and beautiful of designs, and everybody wanted to come and see it.

  Roberta said this without the faintest trace of a smile. Whatever great architect had designed her mentality had left out the sense of humor. If you made any sort of joke in her presence, she would stop and look disconcerted, as if you had stuck a stick between her legs while she was walking. Then she would resume the conversation as if nothing had happened. Her manner of talking seemed to say that she had always had money and therefore other people had to learn to listen.

  First she told about her house, and then she told about her hill. She had deeded it to the city for a park, and the mansion on top for an art museum; but the city had not kept its part of the bargain, and now she was bringing lawsuits, and was tied up in quarrels with the politicians; she talked at length about these most evil men. Then, too, she had the problem of her dogs; she had eighteen water spaniels—they kept multiplying, after the way of nature, and what could she do about it? The dogs raced all over the house, and when they were turned outside they bit somebody, and that, too, was a cause of lawsuits, and Roberta had had to appear in court, and worse yet, in the newspapers.

  One more proof of the ancient thesis that the possession of wealth multiplies cares. Everybody knew about those tax-free bonds, and all wanted some of them, or at any rate some of the interest. In the beginning Roberta had been generous, but gradually she had come to realize that nobody was interested in her for herself, only in her money, and that hurt her feelings; so she had made up her mind to refuse all requests. It had become a sort of phobia with her, and she said no even before she was asked. Certainly neither Lanny nor Laurel had any idea of asking her for money, but she appeared to be including them when she sounded her defiance. “It’s no use to ask me, for I won’t give! I am sick and tired of giving! My father killed himself earning that money; he broke his heart valves. He left it to me, and I am guarding his fortune and his good name!”

  IX

  The Budds retired to their tiny nest and sat for a while discussing this strange human soul which had fallen, as you might say, like a ripe peach into a novelist’s lap. They spoke in whispers, for they were sure that curiosity had not been left out of the make-up of this intensely personal person, and it might be that she was standing in her garden trying to hear what these suddenly acquired friends might be saying about her. In the morning they were invited in to breakfast—anything they fancied, for there was a Chinese cook whom Roberta described as “the dearest old thing you could imagine,” and a Filipino boy who was too delicate for the Army and who watched everything that went on with a pair of quick dark eyes.

  Lanny went off in the car to look up a couple of his clients and tell them about art works he had discovered in London and Stockholm and Rome, for the Americans were soon going to take that last-named city and perhaps the Nazis wouldn’t have time to sack it. That left a woman writer to pursue the subject of psychology in what might be called field work. When Lanny came back toward evening he found that Laurel had decided to move into the house. The two women had become fast friends and were deep in a conference, which consisted in the cattle king’s daughter telling everything that had ever happened to her, and what she thought about it, and what she knew, or thought she knew, about life. There were men, and a few women, who called themselves psychoanalysts and would charge you as much as fifty dollars an hour to let you do that; but here was a highly intelligent woman who would let Roberta do it free of charge—or so Roberta hoped and believed. Laurel Creston Budd hadn’t said much about herself, and surely not a word about being Mary Morrow.

  The session went on for two days and might have gone on forever if Lanny had consented. This woman of “independent wealth” was independent of everything on the whole earth; she had no obligations, no ties, and apparently no friends; she was frantic with loneliness, yet afraid to meet anybody, because that person, male or female, old or young, rich or poor, would sooner or later try to get her money. The poor would want it for themselves, and the rich would want it for causes, charities, ideas, whatever it might be they were interested in and desirous of promoting. Roberta Rector lived alone with her Chinese cook and her Filipino houseboy and her eighteen water spaniels, and apparently she saw nobody but her lawyers and the people who served her in restaurants, stores, and banks.

  X

  Driving with her husband, Laurel retold a pitiful story. Roberta Rector had not had a baby in order to defy society; just the other way round, she had defied society because she had a baby. A rich man’s daughter whose mother had died young, she had been brought up in a splendid but lonely home. She had been a beauty, and Laurel said, “She really was, for she showed me the photographs; and you mayn’t believe it, but I do, she hadn’t been told a thing about sex and hadn’t the remotest idea what it was. At the age of eighteen she came here from Texas, and she met a Russian stage director, a brilliant and fascinating man, who seduced her. She was mad about him, and thought he loved her, and found out little by little that all he wanted was to get her money to finance the world’s most startling stage productions. When she learned that she was going to have a baby she was terrified; but then she happened to meet Emma Goldman, who talked Anarchism and Libertarianism, and advised her to make having a baby into a crusade, and say that she had done it as an act of defiance. She said that, and so the radicals all thronged about her and got her money; but she doesn’t really understand any social theories—she just accepts what the last person has told her, until she decides that that person, too, has had too much of her money.”

  “What became of the man?” Lanny asked.

  “He has his career, and once in a while he shows up here. Roberta is still in love with him, but she also despises him. She used to give him money, but now she has shut down on him as she has on everybody else. She has never loved any other man, and never could; she fears them, because they all want her money. She gets something over thirty thousand dollars a month and hasn’t any idea in the world what to do with it, but she can’t bear to give it away; she wants to be loved for herself alone, and she can’t find anybody who will do that.”

  “What about the son?”

  “The son is like everybody else: he wants money, more and more of it. He was sent to a so-called “progressive” school, and was allowed to do whatever he pleased because the head of the school wanted money from the mother. The son ran off with one of the girls in the school and married her and got a baby; then he couldn’t get along with’ the girl, so he divorced her and married another girl, and both girls and the boy are living in the same house—one of Roberta’s. When I asked her about that she said, ‘What can I do? The first girl has no other place to live.’ She summed up her maternal feelings in one sentence: ‘I wish the whole lot of them would go to China and stay there.’”

  So there was the story of a retired cattle princess who had an income of nearly half a million dollars a year, tax-free, and was the most frustrated and unhappy human being the novelist Mary Morrow had ever described. She was in a position to gratify her every whim, and got up every morning with no idea what she was going to do with herself that day. She would employ a name architect to build her a lovely home, and when she had got tired of it she either sold it or just left it; she had done that half a dozen times, and gone to live in a hotel. She had had a fine sailboat built on one of the mountain lakes in Southern California, and when it sank at the dock, in a storm, she hadn’t troubled to have it raised. She had taken up “causes,” and then decided that they were mistaken. She had put up a fortune to help free Tom Mooney, labor leader jailed on a frame-up, and when he had got out he divorced his loyal wife and married a younger woman—and had come to Roberta Rector for more money!

  Said Laurel, “Someday she will die, and then I will write the story.
She is a living sermon on the evils of wealth inheritance.”

  Said Laurel’s husband, “It wouldn’t do any good, because nobody would believe it. They would say you had made it up to fit your propaganda.”

  XI

  Lanny took his wife to meet his old friends, the De Lyle Armbrusters, wealthy people who had a sumptuous villa on a hill slope above Hollywood. They were the opposite of Roberta Rector—instead of shutting themselves off from all the world, they gathered all the world about them and aspired to be everybody’s best friends. They were rather commonplace middle-aged people who sought distinction by surrounding themselves with celebrities. Lanny had known them of old on the French Riviera, and two and a half years ago, when he had come to Hollywood for the first time, he had made something of a hit with them because he had met Hitler and Göring and was able to tell about the private lives of these undoubted celebrities.

  When they heard where Lanny and his wife were staying they were somewhat shocked. “Why do you tie yourself to that dreadful woman?” And when Lanny pretended not to know what they meant, De Lyle went on, “A woman who consorts with Reds and Pinks, and Hindu and Irish revolutionists, and all sorts of riffraff: Why don’t you come and stay with us?”

  “We are traveling in a trailer,” explained the son of Budd-Erling apologetically.

  “But that’s quite all right, Lanny; people do what they please nowadays.”

  “But it’s such a wee little trailer, made of aluminum.”

  “That’s all right too; we can put it behind the garage.” De Lyle, like Roberta, talked without the faintest trace of a smile. He had a round, bland face, and was stout and growing stouter; he was just as money-conscious as the cattle lady, but had much more than she, and he was willing to spend it for value received, that is to say, for social prestige and publicity in the society columns.