Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “There’s a swimming pool out in the garden,” Klein said. “Come any time you like. You don’t have to call in advance. This is one house in which you’re always welcome.” There was a last affectionate little pat on the arm, and Klein turned to meet a new group that was arriving as Craig went into the salon.

  The room was crowded because it was too cold to go outside where the band was playing, and on his way to the bar Craig had to say, “Excuse me,” several times to get past guests clustered around easy chairs and small sofas. He asked for a glass of champagne. He had to drive back to Cannes, and if he drank whisky all night, the trip over the winding dark hillside roads would be a tricky one.

  Corelli was at the bar with his two girls. “We should have gone to the French party,” one of the girls was saying. She had a British accent. “This one is for the dodoes. I bet the average age here is forty-five.”

  Corelli smiled, offering the room the glory of his teeth.

  Craig turned his back on the bar and looked at the room. Natalie Sorel was seated at a far corner, deep in conversation with a man who was lounging on the arm of her chair. Craig knew that she was so nearsighted that she could never recognize him at that distance. His own eyes were good enough to see that no matter what the English girl said, Natalie Sorel was no dodo.

  “I used to hear about the parties in Cannes,” the English girl said. “Wild. Everybody smashing glasses and dancing naked on the tables and orgies in the swimming pools. The fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “That was in the old days, cara,” Corelli said. He had a heavy accent. Craig had seen him in some English films, and now he realized that Corelli’s voice had been dubbed. Probably, Craig thought, his teeth aren’t his own, either. The thought comforted him.

  “This is about as wild as tea at the vicarage,” the girl said. “Why don’t we just curtsy and say good night and leave?”

  “It is not polite, carissima,” Corelli said. “And besides, it is full of important people here who are not to be offended by young actors.”

  “You’re a drag, darling,” the girl said.

  Craig surveyed the room looking for friends, enemies, and neutrals. Aside from Natalie there was a French actress by the name of Lucienne Dullin, seated, as though by some unfailing instinct, in the exact center of the room, attended by a shifting honor guard of young men. She was one of the most beautiful women Craig had ever seen, in a simple, bare-shouldered white dress, with her hair pulled back severely so that the feline bone structure of her face and the long elegance of her throat descending to the perfect shoulders could best be appreciated. She was not a bad actress, but if you looked like that, it was unfair if you weren’t Garbo. Craig had never met her, and he didn’t want to meet her, but looking at her gave him enormous pleasure.

  There was a huge, fat Englishman, well under forty, accompanied, like Corelli, by two young women. They were laughing hysterically at some joke he had just made. He had been pointed out to Craig on the beach. He was a banker, and the anecdote about him was that the month before in the bank in the city of London over which he presided, he had personally handed over a check for three and a half million dollars to Walt Klein. Craig understood why the two girls flanked the banker and why they laughed at his jokes.

  Near the fireplace Bruce Thomas was standing talking to a hulking bald man by the name of Hennessy whom Craig recognized as the director of a film that was to be shown at the Festival later in the week. Thomas had a picture that had already played six months in New York and was still running, and Hennessy’s picture, his first hit, was doing record-breaking business in an art house on Third Avenue. It was already being touted for a prize at the Festival.

  Ian Wadleigh, not in Madrid, a glass in his hand, was standing talking to Eliot Steinhardt and a third man, portly in a dark suit, the face, bronzed by the sun, under a shock of iron-gray hair. The third man looked familiar to Craig, but he couldn’t exactly place him. Wadleigh bulged out of his dinner jacket, which had obviously been bought in better and thinner days. He was not yet drunk but was flushed and talking fast. Eliot Steinhardt listened amiably, a slight smile on his face. He was a small twinkly man of about sixty-five, his face sharp and foxlike and slyly malicious. He had made a score of the biggest hits in the business, going all the way back to the middle 1930s, and although the new critics now sneered at him as old-fashioned, he calmly continued to turn out one hit after another as though success had made him immune to defamation or mortality. Craig liked and admired him. If Wadleigh hadn’t been talking to him, he would have gone over to say hello. Later, when he’s alone, Craig thought.

  Murray Sloan, the critic for one of the trade papers, whose tastes were surprisingly avant-garde and whose most intense emotions seemed to be experienced in darkened projection rooms, was seated on a big couch talking to a man Craig didn’t recognize. Sloan was a round, mahogany-tanned, smiling man whose devotion to his profession was so great that he had confided one evening to Craig that he had stopped sleeping with a girl he had picked up at the Venice Festival because she didn’t appreciate Buñuel sufficiently.

  Well, Craig thought, looking over the room, whether Corelli’s English beauty is intelligent or not, she’s right in saying it certainly isn’t the fall of the Roman Empire. It was rich and decorous and pleasant, but whatever cross-currents were flowing through the room and whatever corruption lay beneath the fine clothes, it all was well hidden, the loved and the unloved, the moneyed and the moneyless observing an evening truce, ambition and desolation politely side by side.

  It was very different from the old parties in Hollywood when people who made five thousand dollars a week would not invite people who made less to their homes. A new society, Craig thought, out of the ashes of the old. The movement of the proletariat toward Möet and Chan-don and the caviar pot.

  He saw the man who was talking to Wadleigh and Eliot Steinhardt look in his direction, smile and wave, and start toward him. He smiled tentatively in return, knowing that he had seen the man somewhere and should remember his name.

  “Hi, Jess,” the man said, putting out his hand.

  “Hello, David,” Craig said, shaking hands. “Believe it or not, I didn’t recognize you.”

  The man chuckled. “It’s the hair,” he said. “I get it all the time.”

  “You can’t blame people,” Craig said. David Teichman was one of the first men he had met when he first went to Hollywood, and even then there hadn’t been a hair on his head.

  “It’s a wig,” the man said, touching the top of his bush complacently. “It takes twenty years off my age. I’m even having a second run with the girls. That reminds me—I had dinner with your girl in Paris. She told me you were down here, and I told her I’d look you up. I just got down here this morning, and I’ve been playing gin all day. That’s some girl you got there. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Craig said. “Do you mind if people ask you why you suddenly blossomed out with a mane?”

  “Not at all, not at all. I had a little operation on my dome, and the doc left a couple of foxholes in my skull to remember him by. Not a very happy cosmetic effect, you might say. No sense in an old man going around frightening small children and virgin daughters. The studio hairdressing department fixed me up with the best damn hairpiece in the business. It’s the only good thing that goddamn studio has turned out in five years.” Teichman’s false teeth clamped fiercely in his mouth as he spoke about the studio. He had been forced out of control more than a year ago, but he still spoke of it as though it were his personal domain. He had run it tyrannically for twenty-five years, and the habit of possession was hard to break. Bald, he had been a formidable-looking man, his head suggesting a siege weapon, his features fleshy and harsh, half-Roman emperor, half-merchant skipper, the skin deeply weathered all year round as though he had been in the field with his troops or on deck in storms with his crew. His voice had matched his appearance, brutal and commanding. In his palmy days many of the movies that had come ou
t of his studio had been tender and wistfully comic, one more surprise in a surprising town. With the new wig he looked a different man, gentle and harmless, and his voice, too, as if to accommodate to the new arrangement, was soft and reflective.

  Now he put his hand affectionately on Craig’s sleeve and said as he looked around him, “Oy, Jess, I am not happy in this room. A flock of vultures feeding off the bones of giants. That’s what the movie business has become, Jess. Great old bones with little patches of flesh still left on it that the birds of prey are tearing off bit by bit. And what are they turning out in their search for the Almighty Dollar? Peep shows. Pornography and bloodshed. Why don’t they all go to Denmark and be done with it? And the theatre’s no better. Carrion. What’s Broadway today? Pimps, whores, drug pushers, muggers. I don’t blame you for running away from it all.”

  “You’re exaggerating as usual, David,” Craig said. He had worked at Teichman’s studio in the fifties and had caught on early that the old man was addicted to flights of rhetoric, usually to put over a shrewd and well-taken point. “There’re some damn good pictures being made today, and there’s a whole rash of young playwrights on and off Broadway.”

  “Name them,” Teichman said. “Name one. One good picture.”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll name two. Three,” Craig said, enjoying the debate. “And made by men right in this room tonight. Steinhardt’s last picture and Thomas’s and that new fellow talking to Thomas over there, Hennessy.”

  “Steinhardt doesn’t count,” Teichman said. “He’s a leftover from the old days. A rock that was left standing when the glacier receded. The other two guys—” Teichman made a contemptuous sound. “Flashes in the pan. One-shot geniuses. Sure, every once in a while somebody shows up with a winner. Accidents still happen. They don’t know what they’re doing, they just wake up and find out they’ve fallen into a pot of gold. I’m talking about careers, boy, careers. No accidents. Chaplin, Ford, Stevens, Wyler, Capra, Hawkes, Wilder, yourself, if you want to include yourself. Although you were a little too special, maybe, and all over the place, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I don’t mind,” Craig said. “I’ve heard worse about myself.”

  “So have we all,” Teichman said, “so have we all. We’re living targets. But okay, so I made a lot of junk. I’m not too proud to admit it. Four hundred, five hundred pictures a year. Masterpieces don’t come in gross lots, and I’m not saying they do. Junk, okay, mass production, okay, but it served its purpose. It created the machinery the great guys found ready to their hand, the actors, the grips, the scene designers, the audience. And it served another purpose, too. It won the world for America. I can see by the look on your face you think I’m batty. No matter what the fancy intellectual critics said, in their dreams the whole world loved us, we were their mistresses, their heroes. Do you think I’m ashamed of having been in on that? Not for a minute. I’ll tell you what I am ashamed of. I’m ashamed that we pissed it all away. And if you want, I’ll tell you the moment we did it. Even if you don’t want.” He poked a strong finger into Craig’s shoulder. “The day we gave in to the yokels in Congress, the day we said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Congressman, Mr. FBI man, I will kiss your ass, you don’t like this writer’s politics or that actress’s morals or the subject of my next ten pictures, yes, sir, by all means, sir, they’re out. I will slit my best friend’s throat if you lift your pinky.’ Before that we were the lucky, beautiful people of the twentieth century, we made jokes the whole world laughed at, we made love the way the whole world wished they could, we gave parties the whole world wanted to come to. After that we were just a bunch of sniveling Jews hoping the guy next door would get killed in the pogrom instead of us. People turned to television, and I don’t blame them. In television they come right out and tell you they’re trying to sell you a bill of goods.”

  “David,” Craig said, “You’re getting red in the face.”

  “You bet I am,” Teichman said. “Calm me down, Jess, calm me down, my doctor would appreciate it. I’m sorry I came to this party. No, I’m not. I’m glad I got a chance to talk to you. I’m not finished yet, no matter how I sound. I’m in the process of putting something together—something big.” Teichman winked conspiratorially. “Some men of talent. With old-fashioned values. Discipline. Captains, not corporals. A man like you, for example. Connie told me you had something cooking, I should speak to you. Am I talking out of school?”

  “Not really,” Craig said. “I have something in mind.”

  “It’s about time. Call me in the morning. We’ll talk. Money is no object. David Teichman is not a maker of B pictures. I have to get out of here now, excuse me, Jess. I find it hard to breathe these days when I get angry. My doctor warns me against it constantly. Remember what I said. In the morning. I’m at the Carlton.” Rubbing his excellent gray wig, he marched off, defying ruin.

  Craig watched the stiff, erect figure, patriot of defeated causes, historian of decay, shouldering toward the door and shook his head. Still, he decided, he would call Teichman in the morning.

  Craig saw the man who was talking to Natalie Sorel get up and take Natalie’s glass and start toward the bar, threading his way through the crowd. Craig moved away from the bar in Natalie’s direction. But before he had covered half the distance, the door from the patio opened and Gail McKinnon came in with a small sallow man whose face was vaguely familiar. He was about thirty-five, with scruffy receding hair and unhealthy, grape-colored puffs under his eyes. He was wearing a dinner jacket. Gail McKinnon was wearing a cheap print dress, the skirt above her knees. The dress didn’t look cheap on her. She smiled at Craig, and there was no avoiding her. For some reason that he could not explain, he didn’t want her to observe him in conversation with Natalie Sorel. He hadn’t seen her since the lunch with the Murphys, but then he had stayed in his room most of the time nursing his cold.

  “Good evening, Mr. Craig,” Gail McKinnon said. “I see we make the same stops.”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “May I introduce …?” she started to say, turning to her companion.

  “We’ve met,” the man said. His tone was unfriendly. “A long time ago. In Hollywood.”

  “I’m afraid my memory isn’t as good as it should be,” Craig said.

  “My name is Reynolds,” the man said.

  “Oh, yes,” Craig said. He recognized the name, although he didn’t remember ever having met the man. Reynolds had written movie reviews for a Los Angeles newspaper. “Of course.” He extended his hand. Reynolds seemed to have to make up his mind to shake it.

  “Come on, Gail,” Reynolds said. “I want a drink.”

  “You go have a drink, Joe,” Gail McKinnon said. “I want to talk for a minute with Mr. Craig.”

  Reynolds grunted, pushed his way toward the bar.

  “Whats the matter with him?” Craig asked, puzzled by the man’s open antagonism.

  “He’s had a couple too many to drink,” Gail McKinnon said.

  “On all our tombstones,” Craig said. He took a sip from the champagne glass he was carrying. “What’s he doing so far from Los Angeles?”

  “He’s been in Europe for a wire service for two years,” the girl said. “He’s been most helpful.” For some reason she seemed to be defending him. Craig wondered briefly if she was having an affair with him. Reynolds was an unprepossessing, sour-looking man, but in a place like Cannes you never could tell what a girl would turn up with. Now he remembered why the man’s face had seemed familiar to him. Reynolds had been the man who had sat down at the table with Gail McKinnon on the Carlton terrace the other morning.

  “He’s a nut on movies,” Gail McKinnon went on. “He remembers every picture that’s ever been made. He’s a treasure for me. He’s seen all your pictures …”

  “Maybe that’s why he’s so rude,” Craig said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “He likes them. Some of them.”

  Craig laughed. “Som
etimes,” he said, “you sound as young as you look.”

  “That lady over there is waving at you,” the girl said.

  Craig looked at the corner where Natalie Sorel was seated. She was beckoning him to come over. He had come within myopia range. He waved back. “An old friend,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me …”

  “Did you get those questions I left at your hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I tore them up,” Craig said.

  “Oh, that’s mean,” the girl said. “That’s the meanest thing I ever heard. I’ve heard a lot of bad things about you, but nobody said you were mean.”

  “I change from day to day,” he said. “Sometimes from moment to moment.”

  “Joe Reynolds warned me about you,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I don’t care. You’ve got enemies, Mr. Craig, and you might as well know about it. You know why Joe Reynolds was rude to you?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. I never saw the man before the other morning,” Craig said.

  “Maybe not. Although he says you did. But you once said something about him.”

  “What?”

  “He’d written a very good review of a picture of yours, and you said, ‘That man writes so badly, I get angry at him even when he gives me a rave.’”

  “When did I say that?” Craig asked.

  “Eight years ago.”

  Craig laughed. “There’s no animal more thin-skinned than a critic, is there?”

  “You don’t exactly go out of your way to be lovable, you know,” she said. “You’d better leave now. That pretty lady is practically breaking her arm waving to you.” Brusquely, she made her way through the crowd toward the bar where Reynolds, Craig saw, was waiting and watching.

  How easy it was to make someone hate you for life. With one sentence.

  He turned toward Natalie, dismissing Reynolds from his thoughts. Natalie stood up as he approached her, fair-haired, blue-eyed, luxuriously shaped, with dainty legs and feet, all like a lovingly made doll, too pink, white, and curvy to have any true semblance of reality. Despite her appearance and the soft, bell-like tone of her voice, he knew her as a woman of courage, determination, and lust.