“Matthew …”
“Christ, when was the last time you saw something made after Eisenhower was president? And before you answer, that one about the MGM musicals doesn’t count.”
“I can’t—”
“Neither does The Men Who Made the Movies.”
“I can’t make it tonight.”
“What?” The word was midway between a screech and a bark. “We planned this days ago.”
“I know, I’m sorry. There’s something I have to do.” Jim had re-entered, dressed now, the shock in his face mirroring that in Matthew’s voice.
“And what is that?”
She had the phrase rehearsed; she thought it sounded good and British. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“You’re—” There was a noise of him shifting the phone, and she heard him say, “Yes, hello there. Can you give me a minute, please? I’m afraid I have to take this.” His voice came back, lower but even madder. “You’re not at liberty? You sound like the White House press secretary. You stand me up—this is the only night I’m free this week, by the way—and you won’t even tell me why?”
“I said I’m sorry, didn’t I?”
“You don’t sound the least bit sorry.”
He was right. She was happy he was pitching a hissy fit.
“I have something I can’t do any other night. I’ll tell you about it when I can. I promise.”
He must have had the receiver right up to his mouth because she could hear him inhale. “Let me guess. The film. What is it this time? Are we exhuming someone at midnight to see if they got themselves buried with the print?” What kind of a person would do that? Well, there was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he buried a bunch of poems with his wife. “For god’s sake don’t ponder that, I was being sarcastic.”
“You sounded serious. It’s not like I left you cooling your heels at the Bleecker Street. I’m trying to give you some notice here.”
“You’re too good.”
“Call me when you get some time,” she said, adding maliciously, “I’m free Sunday morning.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.” Click.
Jim was sitting on the couch. He patted the seat next to him. “Come here. Sit.” She picked up her coffee and perched on the edge. “You just called in sick when you’re not. You went to work during Hurricane Gloria, but today you fake being sick. That’s surprising, but no problem, Lily deserves it.”
“I’m a little hungover, truth be told.”
“No kidding. Last night you were out till 3:00 a.m. And it wasn’t with Matthew. You disappear nearly every morning with a book bag. Most nights you barely say hello. You take the phone in your room and have conversations you don’t want me and Talmadge to hear. You never say who you’re calling. Yesterday I got the phone bill, and there’s $68 of calls to LA. I don’t know anyone there. Neither does Talmadge. I didn’t realize you did, either.”
Shit, where was she going to find $68? He paused, then went on.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you just canceled on Matthew. This time last month you’d have done that right around the same time you made us all watch Casablanca colorized.”
“He’s been taking me for granted.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m saying it’s unexpected, but go ahead. Cancel him like a postage stamp. By the way, you got a letter from California. I don’t think you saw it last night.” He pulled it from under the coffee table. She reached and he held it away. “Uh-uh. Nope. Not handing this over until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing shady, I promise.”
“So you say. But whatever it is, you’re going overboard.” He stuck the letter under his thigh and pulled out a cigarette. “No. Scratch that. You’re going ape-shit crazy. You’ve even lost weight. It isn’t like you were eating us out of house and home before, but now I never see you with food. You’re too busy making phone calls and writing letters. I never, I mean never, thought I’d say this, but thank god for Matthew, because at least when you’re with him I know maybe you’re having a meal.” He lit up, exhaled, and looked at her. She looked at her hands and tried to remember where her cigarettes were. “I don’t get it, honey. We used to talk.”
“It’s just not my secret to tell, that’s all.” She picked up his cigarettes and took one without asking. “And Talmadge, I love him, but he isn’t very discreet.”
“I am. You know that. Try me. We don’t have to tell Talmadge.”
She lit the cigarette, and she told him. A short version, but all of it, just the same. He listened without saying much, except when she finished telling him about Miriam and Emil, he did quote All About Eve: “What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.” She told him about the Brody and Fred and the Bangville Police Society. She told him about her still.
“Where is it? Can I see it?”
She’d been drunk when she got back last night, and she hadn’t looked at it again. She fetched it and they sat close.
“This is one of the sets?”
“Must be.” Her finger hovered over the man on the left, and she had to remind herself not to touch the picture. “I think the one with his arm on the camera is Emil.”
Oval shape to the face, small chin. High forehead—hair maybe receding a little—nose prominent, but in proportion. Big eyes. It was a good face. Not the face of a man who’d be cruel to Miriam, much less a man who would break his hand punching a wall. The smile wasn’t wide, but it was confident, a young smile.
The biggest electric-train set any boy ever had, Orson Welles said when he first saw a soundstage. Emil had the smile of a boy who just got his train set.
“Handsome guy.” Jim put a hand on her shoulder. “Do I need to get the toilet paper?”
She touched the corners of her eyes. “I’m all right.”
He leaned back. “You know I don’t like agreeing with Matthew about anything. But I don’t see how this is going to lead anywhere. Meanwhile you’ve got an awful lot invested in this, honey. Too much, if you ask me.”
“If I have to give up, I’ll know when it’s time.” She slid the still back into the paper bag. “Things keep happening, like finding this. It’s all signs. It all means I’m supposed to keep going.”
“You sound like Talmadge.” He sucked in his cheeks and worked his fingers through a bit of Talmadge’s manual-dexterity exercises.
She didn’t laugh. “It isn’t right.”
“What isn’t?”
“All those people. All that money, all that work.” She took another one of his cigarettes. “All that heartache. It isn’t right that it’s gone.”
“You think that’s what Miriam thinks? It’s not right?” She had borrowed his matches and as usual, she was breaking one after another. “What Miriam wants is for you to run around asking everyone where’s her movie? Only she doesn’t know that’s what she wants?”
“She’s always wanted to see Mysteries again,” said Ceinwen. “She told me that.”
He took the matches, and with one hand, he flicked one alight and held it out. She’d always known better than to try and learn that technique. “Then why haven’t you asked her for help?”
“Well …” She lit up. He blew out the match and waited. “She’s a pessimist.” Jim nodded, like a reporter waiting for an interview to continue. “She thinks it’s all dust now and she’s resigned to it. So if I tell her I’m looking for Mysteries, she’ll say everybody in Hollywood was an awful person and she wants nothing to do with them anymore.” She paused. “But if somebody finds Emil’s whole entire film, that’s different.” His mouth was shut tight. “She loved Emil so much. You should have seen her face when she was telling me about him. She’s still sad about what happened. She wants him to get his due, she said so. But that can’t happen just from an itty-bitty piece of the movie.” No movement. “You see?”
“I definitely think it’s a good idea not to get her involved,” Jim said.
“Until I actually find it.”
“Uh, yeah. Tell her then.”
She blew her smoke toward the ceiling, then sat up, alert again. “Hey. Gimme my letter.”
Jim pulled it out from under his leg. “Here you go. I have to run a few errands. When you’re done reading, for heaven’s sake take a nap. You’ve got trenches under your eyes.”
He told her he would be back soon. She took the envelope into her bedroom. The letter had a nice weight to it, but there was no name, just a return address in Fresno, and she didn’t remember writing to Fresno. She slid a finger under the flap and felt the edge cut a line of blood along her knuckle. She finished by ripping, and stuck the finger in her mouth. Sheets of airmail paper, folded neatly around a pamphlet. She picked up the pamphlet, which showed shafts of sunlight shining down on a neatly trimmed meadow. “First Apostolic Reformed Church of Fresno,” it said. Oh brother. She peeled off the last page of the letter and her attitude improved on the spot.
“Very truly yours, Lucile Pierrepoint Miller.”
Frank Gregory’s secretary, the one she had written to care of the Beverly Hills Women’s League. Praise be, the ex-debs had forwarded her letter. She’d have to be nicer about them. A little nicer. She fanned the pages slightly—seven, front and back, covered in a neat, prim hand, the letters round and upright like little balloons. I’m going to read it from the top, she scolded herself. If I try to skim, I may miss something.
“Dear Miss Reilly,
“My old friends at the Women’s League were kind enough to forward your letter to me. It has been a long while since anyone asked about the old days at Civitas. I do not know how much help I can give you on your proposed freelance article, but I will answer your questions as best I can. And I hope that my doing so can reinforce your thesis about Mr. Gregory and the influence of the great studio heads. He certainly was one, and I applaud your desire to clarify the record and give him his due.
“However, I must say that The Mysteries of Udolpho”—Lucile had underlined the title, the way they taught Ceinwen in high school—“does not strike me as the best topic for a look at Mr. Gregory’s life work, and I can’t help wishing you had picked something else. Still, it does show some of his unique qualities as an executive, so I will go along.
“The project was a difficult one from the beginning. It is an old-fashioned and not terribly exciting book. I believe Mr. Gregory had wanted to take on a work with more obvious literary merit, such as The House of the Seven Gables or D’Ri and I.”
D’Ri and I? What in the world?
“But when he brought Emil Arnheim over from Germany (at considerable expense, Civitas paid his way) Arnheim was most insistent about the choice of book. And even though the screenplay was by one of the best writers Civitas had, Arnheim also demanded extensive revisions.”
No “Mr.” for Emil.
“It was the first, but by no means the last time that Arnheim would make trouble for us all. I am sorry to say that he was a thoroughly distasteful person, with all of the bad parts of the German character and none of the good. He did not have much experience, but he was far too cold and arrogant to attempt to benefit from anyone’s advice, not even Mr. Gregory’s. I experienced this first-hand.
“It was my task to type Mr. Gregory’s memos to Arnheim, concerning things that needed to be done in order to make a movie that people would want to see, which in the end of course, he did not manage. I would send the errand boy over to the set and tell him to wait for the message back from Arnheim. The boy would come back in an hour or so and I’d ask what Arnheim had to say. Had he read the memo? Oh yes ma’am, the boy would tell me, I watched him read it just like you told me. And what was the reply? He said to tell Mr. Gregory ‘thank you,’ the boy said.
“Now what was I supposed to do with that? I would go back to Mr. Gregory and tell him the memo had been delivered, but we never knew if Arnheim was paying them any mind. Mr. G. was seeing rushes, of course, but the high-handedness of Arnheim was still incredible.
“One day I got so angry that instead of sending the boy I went myself. And I walked in and they were setting up a shot and there was Arnheim. I marched over and handed him the paper and said ‘This time, Mr. Arnheim, I am waiting for the reply myself, because I am sure you will have something to say other than thank you.’ He sat down and made a show of unfolding and reading it. He asked if I could wait another minute, because he wanted to re-read and make sure he had the reply just right. So he read it again, while I stood there on that boiling hot set. And he folded it up again and said, ‘All right, Fraulein Pierrepoint. Please tell Mr. Gregory I said danke schoen.’ Then he turned his back on me and walked away.
“So you can see what kind of a man we were all dealing with.”
I certainly do, thought Ceinwen. She looked to the still, in its paper bag on the table, and gave it a thumbs-up.
“And you can see also what Mr. Gregory had to endure from a man who should have been nothing but grateful to him. Probably you will hear and read a great deal of nonsense from people about Mr. G. But surely you can see how patient he was. Arnheim was very smooth and reassuring, and Mr. Gregory trusted him, and he should not have. That was clear when we held the preview. I went to take notes, as always. And the movie was quite dreadful. The lead actress had never made a picture before”—why, you lying old bat—“and she simply wasn’t up to it. Most of the movie was just Arnheim showing off, moving the camera for no reason at all. Putting up a shot of something nonsensical, like dust, if you can believe it. A shot of dust! I assure you, Arnheim didn’t have that in the dailies when I was there with Mr. Gregory.”
Dust. On a piece of furniture? In the air? Blowing across something? Should she write back and ask?
“When the screening was over, and it seemed to go on for hours, Mr. G. went to talk to Arnheim. Instead of apologizing for refusing his guidance and asking how the picture could be fixed, Arnheim proceeded to insult the audience. He said they were dull people in a dull town, compared them to that book, Babbitt, and said that the movie was never aimed at them. That was when Mr. Gregory let him have it. He told him that a movie was made for whoever had the means to pay for a ticket, and since Arnheim couldn’t turn the movie into something this or any other audience would like, he would have his own people cut it in half if that was what it took.
“That finally shook up Mein Herr a little. He told Mr. Gregory not to do it, that he could cut it himself. Mr. Gregory didn’t want to do it, good money after bad he said, but he finally gave Arnheim two weeks. You see how kind he was? Who else would do such a thing? Why, Mayer would have had the man locked out of the studio.
“So he recut it, and it still wasn’t right, and Mr. G. had his editors go in and take out things like the dust and the candles and the mirrors and everything else that was boring people to death. We released it and I believe we did manage to break even, barely.”
So what are you complaining about?
“After all that, Arnheim thought Mr. Gregory should just up and give him another picture. For a few months it seemed as though I was fielding a call from that man every day. Then he started coming to the office. I would tell him Mr. Gregory was otherwise engaged, and he would say he’d wait, and he would sit there doing nothing but reading and giving me those cold German stares until he decided it was time to leave.
“At first he thought he could still ask for the projects he wanted. When it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to get those, he got off his high horse and said he’d do whatever Mr. G. asked. But we knew he couldn’t be trusted. For one thing, everyone knew he was running through his salary, still maintaining a big fancy car and the same house and spending on gambling and drink, which I smelled on him more often than not. Mr. G. gave him a loan against his salary on the contract, just to get him to go away. And Arnheim ran through that too, and Mr. G. advanced the next year’s salary, thinking maybe he’d get it back if Arnheim turned out to be a decent director of Bs or something, I suppose. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for him. I
n any event, by the time Arnheim died, he owed the studio the equivalent of another full year’s pay.”
Sort of like sharecropping, she thought. Lovely.
“But I am afraid that I am sounding harsh and unforgiving, when that is not so. I could see only how selfishly Arnheim was behaving. It wasn’t until a few years later, when Mr. G. had retired and I was no longer working, that I began reading the Bible and I realized that Arnheim deserved my pity. He was a very sick person, sick in his soul. All I could see was how he took advantage of Mr. G., and how bad his behavior was, with all that extravagance and drinking and rudeness. I didn’t realize that people turn to alcohol when they must fill a great emptiness inside. That was also the reason he was carrying on with that actress, the one he forced on poor Mr. G. She was a stuck-up little thing, too, no time for anyone but Arnheim. If she had known the love of God, I believe she would have been a far different person.”
Don’t bet on it.
“It is for that reason that I have enclosed a tract for you. I don’t know you, but I always try to spread the word. We can never know who among us might be in need of comfort.”
She better read the tract before she tossed it, in case it had real information. Like, “We believe it’s a sin to throw away nitrate.”
“And that is why, later on, I also felt regret that Arnheim died before he could find the spiritual fulfillment he needed so badly. At the time, I am sorry to tell you, all that I and just about everyone else thought was that his chickens were coming home to roost at last.”
She laid the letter down on the bed, went into the kitchen, got a glass of water from the tap, chugged it, set the glass in the sink, and went back. She lit a cigarette and picked the letter up.
“You ask me about what went on at Arnheim’s house the day after he died. No, Mr. Gregory did not go. He sent me and Myron Badgley to look through Arnheim’s papers. As I said, he owed Civitas a good bit of money and Mr. G. very properly wanted to see if the studio had a way to seek repayment. He also wanted to make sure any studio correspondence didn’t fall into the wrong hands. There was no point in damaging Arnheim’s reputation any further.
Missing Reels Page 26