by Howard Fast
“That kind of a man can’t accept life and live it. You wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he had.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. But we were talking about you—Dan Lavette sitting in the park with his grandchild.”
“He’s a damn fine kid.”
“You’re through with the empire syndrome? No more shipping lines, no more airlines?”
“Bobby,” Dan said, “I built three damned empires. That’s enough. It’s a fool’s game. Either you’re crazed by a hunger for money or you’re sick for power. That’s your brother’s disease. I’m very content. I draw plans for a yawl I’ll probably never build, and I’ve finally accepted the fact that the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, who happens to be my wife, actually loves me. That’s not bad for a kid from the Tenderloin. As for their lousy rat race, they can have it.”
“Talking of the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, where is mother?”
“Making the rounds with a real estate agent. She claims there isn’t one decent art gallery in San Francisco.”
“She’s probably right. But don’t tell me she’s going to open another gallery?”
“As a business this time. She’s still hell-bent on converting the city to modern art. It’s a good idea. It’ll fill in her days, and she always has been devoted to painting. Maybe I’ll learn something if she lets me be her assistant—I mean for the heavy work. She’s taking in Eloise as a partner, but I doubt that Adam will relish Eloise spending her days in San Francisco.”
“You two,” Barbara said, “you and mother, you’re like a couple of kids. You’re absolutely wonderful. You really adore each other.”
Dan smiled ruefully. “It wasn’t easy. It took forty years of tearing our guts out. We have more scars than a pair of professional fighters. The only thing we had going for us is that we were crazy about each other. Crazy is a better word than love. But if anything happened to her—” He shook his head. “Well, that’s hardly to the point. We were talking about you.”
“You’re forgetting, daddy. I have a date with a federal penitentiary. The last thing I want to do is to get involved with anyone now.”
“Well, what in hell are they doing? I called Harvey last week. The case hasn’t even been argued at the Appellate Division yet.”
“I’m in no hurry, daddy, although sometimes I wish it were over.” She leaped up and ran to head Sam away from the street, and Dan, watching the grace and ease with which she moved, wondered, as he had so often before, how he had produced her out of his loins. When he looked at Barbara this way, thoughtfully, really looking at her instead of simply accepting her, it always brought May Ling to mind. There was more of that slender, incredible Chinese woman in Barbara than there was of Jean; and it gratified him that he could think of both of them, May Ling and Jean, without guilt or sorrow. He was not inclined to live in the past, but there was so much of his past that he could never wholly escape. He felt a strange kind of perverse gratitude for the heart attack. He had looked at himself during that passage with death, and he had done so with the realization that he had never truly been able to look at himself before; and looking at himself, the whole structure of desire and power had collapsed. It had almost happened this way once before, when he had been a jobless derelict on the docks at San Pedro in 1930, but then it had been at a moment of misery and defeat and hopeless despair. This time, in the hospital, realizing that he might die, there was no defeat and no despair. He had turned to himself and discovered he was not afraid. He had escaped from desire. It was not that he didn’t want to live—he wanted very much to live—but if he had to die, that would be all right. In a sense, it was the answer to the question Barbara had asked him, but he had no words at his command in which he could frame that answer and explain to her why he had lost any taste for wealth or power.
She returned and sat down beside him again and said, “Daddy, what is prison like?”
He looked at her and smiled. “I don’t think you’re going to prison.”
“Nobody thinks so, except me.”
***
The next day, Barbara received a royalty report from her publisher. Her new novel had been published six months before, and the sales had not been exciting. The royalty statement informed her that half of the advance she had been paid was still unearned, and the accompanying letter from her publisher was part apology and part explanation. “It’s a damn good book,” Bill Halliday wrote. “Nothing has happened to change my opinion on that score. But it’s a very quiet book, a very gentle book, and you’ve made your reputation with two books that were anything but quiet and gentle. You only have to look at the best-seller list to see what the public is eating up today. On the one hand, The Naked and the Dead, and on the other hand, a piece of tripe by Lloyd C. Douglas called The Big Fisherman. We have a problem trying to figure out where your little book fits in and how to sell it. The story of a returned soldier in San Francisco falling in love and marrying a perfectly ordinary girl and making a decent life out of it is probably one of the most difficult things to bring off; and how you’ve done it so well, considering the hellish experiences you’ve undergone while writing it, I don’t know.
“But I do not want you to think that we’ve caved in under the pressure and that we’re not trying to sell the book. And there is pressure. I am not denying that. Some of it is very subtle, some isn’t. Two FBI men paid me a visit. Very polite. They simply said it was their practice to interview the employer of anyone convicted of a federal crime. I said that I couldn’t think of any crime you had ever committed, and they said that the record showed otherwise. Then they wanted to know whether I intended to continue publishing your books, and I told them I had every intention of doing just that.
“The more subtle pressure comes in the shape of returns. The cartons in which some early orders were shipped have been returned unopened. I am only itemizing these things because I don’t want you to feel that we have just dropped your book by the wayside. I think I can say with a touch of pride that there is still no blacklist in publishing, as there unquestionably is in network television and in films. We have every intention of continuing to publish your work.”
Barbara put the letter down with a wry smile. There was no blacklist in publishing, but there was no mention in the letter of an advance for her next book or even a note of curiosity as to what she might be working on. It was a full year since any magazine had asked her to do a piece, and an unsolicited article she had written about her experience in Washington had been turned down by every magazine she had sent it to. When she followed it with a story about Saudi Arabia and places where no other American woman had ever been, that too was rejected.
Well, she would manage. She had her salary from the foundation, and she still had a substantial amount of money in the bank, money that her mother had banked for her as trustee of Barbara’s inheritance from her grandfather. She would not starve or have to turn to her father for money. At the same time, to feel a sort of invisible net tightening around her was not pleasant.
Yet she would not indulge her anxieties. To create her own company of ghosts in a self-manipulated nightmare was the way of madness. She remained cheerful not because she consciously created a mask of cheerfulness and not because she was indifferent to her own fate, but simply because she was alive and in good health and because the sun rose in the morning and set at night. If it was not the best of all possible worlds, it was one that provided no alternative.
***
Speaking in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy said, “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful, potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthi
est nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department…In my opinion the State Department is thoroughly infested with communists. I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.”
***
It is held by many that November is the best month of the year in Southern California. The summer heat is gone. The hot Santa Ana desert winds have ceased to blow. The air takes on a delicious crackling quality, the sky is as blue as anywhere in the world, and very often the cool Pacific wind liberates the Los Angeles basin from its coat of smog.
All this was in the mind of Alexander Hargasey as he drove west on Sunset Boulevard from Hollywood to Beverly Hills. He opened the windows of his Rolls-Royce, breathed deeply, and reflected on the best of all possible worlds.
It must be said in Hargasey’s favor that he never forgot his origins, which is more than could be said of most of his colleagues. He was born in the slums of Budapest, apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a primitive filmmaker, drafted into the Hungarian army, captured by the British in 1917, and at last he found himself in Hollywood in 1922 with no capital except his wits. Now, in 1949, he was regarded as one of the bastions of the film industry in its defense against the increasing encroachment of television.
In Beverly Hills, Hargasey turned left onto Rexford Drive and then into the driveway of a handsome home, built after the manner of a French château. A Chicano maid opened the door, and a voice from upstairs called out, “Is that you, Alex? I’m up here. Come on up.”
He climbed the stairs and entered a bedroom that was thirty feet square and decorated in blues and pinks and pale greens. Flowered chintz and expensive brocade—Sally Lavette’s taste was nothing if not Catholic. She was sprawled on a chaise longue reading a script. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt, and her long yellow hair was tied with a ribbon behind her neck. She wore no make-up, a plus in Hargasey’s opinion and an indication of the complexity that confronted him.
Once in an interview, in reply to a question about what he considered his greatest achievement, Hargasey had replied, “An understanding of the psychology of the movie star.” His reply was taken as facetious, but it was not so intended. For twenty-five years, Hargasey had witnessed and frequently manipulated the elevation of boys and girls from Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, Utah, Texas, and a dozen other places into stardom. He had seen shy, small-town, high school graduates turned into rapacious monsters; he had seen simple, hard-working, ranch hands become egomaniacal tyrants; he had seen soft, apparently gentle and pliant men and women become hard and vicious; and he had seen people who once never drank become alcoholics in the space of months. He had seen virgins turn into promiscuous women, and he had seen seemingly decent men turn into brutal wife-beaters. It was not a nice process. There were exceptions, but these he could count on the fingers of one hand and still have a finger or two to spare, and his only consolation was that each case was sufficiently different for him always to hope for an exception to the rule.
Certainly, Sally Lavette was different, but in what way Hargasey was as yet unable to say. At least she was not stupid or insensitive. Stupidity and insensitivity were the two aspects of a human being that Hargasey dreaded most. They worked to set up an impenetrable wall, against which neither reason nor emotion could prevail. Quite to the contrary, Sally was bright and sensitive. Unfortunately—as a part of Hargasey saw it—she had starred in two films that were both brilliant successes; the other part of him found her success both fortunate and rewarding. There are people who cannot act. Years of dramatic school, the best of coaches, the best of teachers, leave them untouched. There are others who fall into acting as if some mysterious gene had transmitted the talent at birth, and it was in this latter category that Sally belonged. A suggestion was sufficient; Hargasey had only to indicate what he desired of her, and she could do it and even carry it a step further. She had that very necessary thing for a great actor, an instinct for what was right, and she gave Hargasey that rare feeling of creation and triumph that comes to a director who discovers a natural in the art.
Now she tossed the script aside, rose, and kissed him lightly. “Dear Alex—what brings the mountain to Mahomet?”
“So now you’re Mahomet? A small mountain I have always been. I’m here because you don’t answer your telephone.”
“Because an unlisted number doesn’t remain unlisted for ten minutes in this stupid place. Why don’t you sit down instead of standing there and glaring at me? You make me feel more uncomfortable than my mother does, and that’s going some.”
“Am I glaring?”
“You’re glaring. Sit down.”
He was aware of the change in position. There was a point where it always happened, where the pupil became a star, and then the pupil became the master.
“Glaring is thinking,” he said. “I am thinking about the script on the floor over there. Expressive is when you’re not acting too. You don’t throw a script on the floor you have regard for.”
“Alex, I love you and I love your syntax. Don’t be angry at me.”
“Have I ever been angry at you?”
“I can remember once or twice.”
“All right. So what about the script?”
“Do you remember what you said to me fifteen months ago when I came into your office after I sent you my screenplay? You said it stinks. This one stinks. It’s a rotten screenplay. I could do better.”
He remained judiciously silent, thinking that the screenplay she had just thrown aside had an overwhelming male lead. He didn’t have to remark on this; she was entirely aware of it.
“Well? No comment, Alex?”
“Comment? What’s with a comment? We try something else. We find something you like.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, Sally.”
“I know you by now. When you sit like that without even crossing your legs, with your arms folded, you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry. I’m unhappy. Where’s Joe?”
“Oh, Alex,” she said with annoyance, “why don’t you stop that shit and stop treating me like a little girl? You know damn well where Joe is. He’s in the clinic where he always is, and at night he sleeps on a cot in his office, and if you think that makes me happy, you’re crazy. And do you know how I know that you know where Joe is?”
“No, tell me,” he said mildly.
“Because Joe came here to see May Ling yesterday, and he told me the whole story about how you went over to Boyle Heights and tried to give him five thousand dollars for his clinic. He was burning. My God, Alex, that was a stupid thing to do!”
So a girl of twenty-three who I pick out of nowhere is telling me I’m stupid, Hargasey thought. Well, that’s the way it happens. It happens.
“Why was it a stupid thing to do?” he asked. “Joe is doing something wonderful. So I appreciate what he’s doing. I don’t have a heart? I can’t put some money there?”
“If you had thought twice about what you were doing, you would have known that Joe’s first response would be to decide you were trying to buy him off.”
“Buy him off from what?”
“From me!”
“What? What are you telling me? Joe thinks we’re having an affair? I don’t play with children!” Hargasey’s voice rose. “I won’t even tolerate an insinuation to that end. You know me more than a year. Have I ever—”
Sally went over and put her arms around him. “Alex, stop that. I won’t have a fight with you. Joe thinks I’ve turned into some kind of superbitch. I will not have you thinking that.” She stepped away from him, her pale eyes intense and angry. “He does not think I am having an affair with yo
u because I told him I was not, and in no uncertain terms. I told him I was having an affair with no one. You know that! You know what kind of filthy gossip this industry feeds on. Has there been any gossip about me? Have you seen me make a play for anyone? Do you really think I want any of those pretty-boy, brainless studs? What do you think has happened to me? Don’t you know? Can’t you understand that when you pay someone who grew up on a farm in the Napa Valley half a million dollars in a period of fifteen months, it’s going to do something to them? I’m not suffering. I love this. I love being a star. I love acting. I don’t know whether I’m happy. There are times when I’m just miserable. But I’m always alive, and when I lived in that wretched little house at Silver Lake, I was never alive.”
Listening, watching her, Hargasey could only think of a performance. What a splendid performance! But that was the nature of it; that was why she was what she was.
“I don’t want to divorce Joe,” she told him. “I don’t want to. I love him. I’ve always loved him, since I was twelve years old. But he has this cursed poverty complex. And then, God help us all, I earned the money. If he had earned the money—well, I don’t know. But for him to live in a house that I bought with my money—oh, no, he has his pride, that disgusting bullshit pride that goes with having a pair of balls. And don’t look shocked, Alex. I was swearing just as eloquently before I ever met you and Paramount Pictures.”
“Can’t you understand how Joe feels?”
“Alex, what is this to you? Why should you give a damn about what happens between Joe and me? Do you know anyone in this business who makes it and stays married to the one who was there first?”
“You think that’s good?”
“I think it stinks. But what do I do? Tear up my contract with you? Burn down this house? Buy a house in Boyle Heights? I’ve been writing poetry. Does that surprise you? I’ve written over fifty poems this past year, and I’ll have them published. It’s a gesture of largesse on my publisher’s part. They will pay me an advance of one hundred dollars, and over the next few years I’ll earn another hundred. I am not going to get down on my knees to Joe and plead for forgiveness. What have I done?”