The Celebrity

by Laura Z. Hobson

  They had met Hathaway just once. It was an odd evening; they were so grateful for his belief in The Good World, and for everything he had done about it, that they had expected to like and admire him immensely. But they found him somehow glib even about his political convictions, and they thought him vain and too ready with mentions of well-known people.

  “Knowing Hathaway has changed Thorn a lot,” Abby said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “He started changing before he ever saw Hathaway.”

  “Before?”

  “Something got boiling up in him that night Digby phoned from Chicago.”

  She tried to remember anything significant in the way Thorn had behaved at the anniversary party. When Gregory pocketed impressions for further examination, he usually drew them out later, one by one, for her to examine with him, but he had said nothing about this.

  “I’ve sort of been wondering,” Gregory went on slowly, “whether Thorn wouldn’t really like to chuck his whole life and start over.”

  “His whole life?”

  “Let’s say, just the insurance part of it.”

  “Do you mean just the insurance part?”

  “I’m not sure what I mean.”

  Two hours later, Gregory Johns, both overcoat pockets bulging, opened the door of his editor’s office. Ed Barnard waved a pencil in greeting, made an infinitesimal x in the margin of a manuscript, dictated to his secretary, “page 430, pearly again,” and made a gesture indicating, “No more now.” Gregory Johns knew that some young author would soon be listening to one of Ed’s best little lectures, on the over-polished phrase, the burnished, lacquered, curved perfection that so often was mistaken for something to say. Except for those specks of crosses in the margins, Ed never marked up a manuscript; he held that editors who felt free to track over an author’s work were exhibitionists and vandals, besides being victims of a jealousy they would angrily deny.

  When his secretary left, Ed began to put the manuscript into its box and said, “I’ll have fifty pages of notes on this one. Hello, Gregory.”

  “Hello.” He waited, watching the care with which Ed did it. No curled and dog-eared pages either, he thought, anymore than ringed words and long annotations. The dictated notes were for Ed Barnard’s eyes only, mnemonic tricks to guide him later on. To the author of the manuscript, Ed would never say, “pearly again,” or anything else that could wound or depress; Ed never forgot the uneasy pendulum of self-distrust and self-confidence which made the arc of most writers’ lives.

  Ed Barnard covered the box, said “There,” and turned toward his visitor. Without speaking, Gregory Johns dumped the contents of both pockets on the desk. Ed glanced through the letters, one by one, a smile of recognition on his face. When he finished, he said, “I wish they wouldn’t all use twenty-pound rag-content bond with engraving that scratches your thumb,” and handed the letters back.

  “Does this kind of thing really sell books?” Gregory asked.

  “Some of it does.”

  “For instance, what?”

  “For instance, lecturing. I don’t mean a sporadic speech here and there, but an arranged tour, almost certainly.”

  “Not one dinner at the Waldorf?”

  Ed shook his head for no. “But on a country-wide tour, there’s a lot of preparation and build-up. Bureaus like Zoring Smith send out leaflets, put ads in the local papers, and get the chief bookstore in the town to send over a stack of books for display in the lecture hall. Then the worshiping ladies in the audience are told they could get an autograph if they had a book.”

  “Does anybody fall for it?”

  “Sure. Sometimes fifty or a hundred copies go at one clip. It depends on how famous the author is.”

  Gregory said, “What about radio and television appearances? Does that sell books?”

  “Some people think it doesn’t and others think it does.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. It ties in, though, with everything else—it makes the author more famous, so his lectures draw more people, so he autographs more, so the radio and television people want him on more shows, so the publisher sells more books.”

  He laughed but Gregory Johns did not.

  “How many books?” he said.

  “There’s no telling. I’d guess a few thousand extra.”

  “Three thousand? Ten? What’s a few thousand extra?”

  “It varies so, it’s hard to say, even with a B.S.B. selection, and a movie coming. Of course a dud wouldn’t sell one extra copy if the author stood on his head in Brentano’s or Kroch’s.”

  “But with B.S.B., and the movie, would you guess the extra sale at five thousand, if I did all the things?”

  “I might.”

  “More than five?”

  “Let’s say five.”

  “How much does Digby and Brown make on a copy?”

  “That varies too, with size of printings, production and paper costs, the amount of advertising, the price the book is sold at—”

  “Will mine be three dollars or two seventy-five?”

  “I don’t think they’ve set that yet.”

  “If it’s three, I’d get forty-five cents royalty on a copy, wouldn’t I?”

  “Once you’re past a certain sales figure—and you’ll go past this time.”

  Gregory tilted his head to one side and looked like a man doing arithmetic. “So if I said yes to everything and sold five thousand extra copies, I’d earn about two thousand dollars more and D. and B. somewhere about the same.”

  “About.” Ed Barnard looked at him judiciously. “You’d have to say yes to lecturing too, though. A few radio shows, and television, wouldn’t do it.”

  Gregory Johns nodded, three or four times, and then fell silent. He did not notice the pack of cigarettes Ed shoved toward him across the desk. He began to hum “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and quit sadly after two measures; it came out sounding like the opening of “The Barcarole.”

  “Ed, does Digby feel I owe him every possible co-operation now, after all these years of small sales?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Does Alan Brown?”

  “Probably.”

  “And McIntyre and everybody?”

  “I imagine they do.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  The word fell neatly, a small round stone. Gregory Johns sat back in his chair and smiled for the first time since he had come in. Ed reached forward and slid the pack of cigarettes closer; this time Gregory saw it and began to smoke. A minute went by. Then he said idly, “Do you ever listen to ‘Author Meets the Critics’?”

  “It’s on television now. You can watch it, as well as listen.”

  “That must be worse.”

  “You can see the author squirm.”

  Involuntarily, Gregory Johns closed his eyes. “It’s a survival of human sacrifice rites, isn’t it?”

  “Except that the human sacrifice chooses to be sacrificed,” Ed Barnard said affably. “He walks in on his own two feet, with nobody prodding him in the behind, and submits to being slaughtered.”

  “Why does he? Why would any author do it?”

  “I’ve been telling you why, a lot of why’s.”

  “Practical ‘why’s’—but they don’t explain all of it.”

  “Wanting to be famous might. Our national god is Celebrity, isn’t it? To be recognized by shopgirls and headwaiters and taxi-drivers—isn’t that glory?”

  “We worship money and success just as much,” Gregory Johns said.

  “How many people would collect at Grand Central to see Rockefeller or Ford or Du Pont come through the gates?”

  Gregory Johns said, “Touché.” It was the only French word he ever spoke aloud, being the only one of whose pronunciation he was fully confident. “Our national god? Is Europe any different?”

  “Of course not. But we have more radios and more television sets and more picture magazines and more newsreels a
nd movies and signed photos and ads endorsing beer and cigarettes—shall I go on?”

  He laughed and this time Gregory joined in. “And more best-seller lists,” Ed went on. “In England and France there’s no such thing, or anywhere in Europe. Book ads don’t shout ‘Number One Best Seller’ at you or even print total sales figures. There’s not half the super-duper tub thumping about a successful book that you get over here. I’m not saying they’re right and we’re wrong, mind you.”

  “But look, Ed, it’s a pretty universal trait, to want success for your work, to admire it in others and even long for it yourself.”

  Almost severely, Ed Barnard said, “Who’s talking about success in your work? But Robert Oppenheimer, say, or Fermi, or Urey, would any of them thrill a necktie clerk in a store if he bought a tie? I don’t know why I hit on nuclear physicists.”

  “I can hit on authors myself,” Gregory Johns said. He sounded comfortable and relaxed. They both thought of authors.

  Then Ed Barnard said, “No, we don’t go haywire in this country over success itself or over money itself. But Celebrity?” Unexpectedly, he bunched his fingertips and blew a kiss toward the ceiling.

  On the following evening, Gregory and Abby borrowed Thorn’s car and drove out to Freeton, to say good-bye to Gerald and Geraldine, whom they had not seen for a month. They took Hat with them and were delighted that she was apparently becoming reconciled to being left behind. Gregory looked at her from time to time, grateful for this tardy development, and thought, She’s becoming a little beauty, all that curly blond hair and tipped nose and good color; I wonder whether she secretly enjoys her new troubles? Do I? he promptly asked himself, but was sidetracked from this uncomfortable notion by his daughter’s next remarks. Hat said softly, “Timmy Murton phoned this afternoon and asked me to the spring dance. He says the other boys are dying to meet me.”

  The Murtons were Martin Heights dwellers also, and though the senior Murtons had never appealed strongly to Gregory and Abby, nor Gregory and Abby to them, Timmy was clearly destined to go down in Hat’s memory as “the first man I ever loved.” He was ten months younger and in a horror of shame about it, but at sixteen was a head taller than she, and the captain of his school tennis team. He was a good dancer, was given plenty of money for movies and banana splits, read comics and movie magazines exclusively, and could borrow his father’s Ford for an hour every time he had gone an entire week without swearing, smoking, or ducking his share of the dishes. His courtship of Hat had not become notably intense until recent weeks but thus far neither of her parents had speculated aloud about the sudden change.

  As Hat went on about the dance, and what she would wear, Gregory Johns found himself thinking, The complications, the collateral results. You remain what everybody considers a failure and your life is uncomplex and quite manageable; you become what everybody considers a success and the ramifications go on and on. Not only for you, but for everybody connected with you. He thought of his sister Gloria and her husband Harry Brinton, and in the semidarkness above the glowing dashboard, he grinned widely.

  Gloria had managed to endure the endless nuisance of babysitters until Thorn had phoned her the news of the movie sale. Almost within the hour, though the logic of the act was revealed only to Gloria herself, she had hired a full-bosomed English governess, who, it soon transpired, needed a minimum of four highly starched, perfectly ironed white uniforms a week. Harry Brinton, an assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department, and hard-pressed enough before this wanton extravagance, had angrily taken on secret free-lance work for a department store in Brooklyn, only to discover that he enormously enjoyed making a lot more money and that his righteous indignation quickly dissolved into a heartfelt gratitude he could not admit to his wife.

  Gregory Johns cherished the memory of the phone call in which Harry had confided these confusing matters. There had been other phone calls, from Gracia and Georgia or their husbands, and a couple of letters from Gwen and Howie Chisholm in Wyoming. Only the Chisholms failed to report new difficulties in their private lives that could be traced to his own changed fortunes.

  The news, in each case, had gone forth from Thornton on the very day Imperial Century had met the terms. Thorn had wired Wyoming, not having learned as yet from Hathaway that the telegram, like the letter, was obsolete even for personal communication, and had telephoned everybody else in the family. “I’ve sold Gregory’s book to the movies for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—isn’t it great?”

  “How do you mean, Thorn, you sold it?” One by one his dazzled listeners had got around to this question, and Thorn had immediately ripped off half of his laurels to make a crown for Hathaway—

  “It’s the next exit,” Abby said.

  “What?” Gregory glanced around him. “I hadn’t realized we were this far out.”

  Hat was silent at last, and Abby glanced up at her husband. He was driving slowly, as he always did, what with his bad eyes and the fact that he could only keep in practice with a borrowed car. This trip was his idea; his parents would be hurt, he had said that morning, if they went off on anything so impressive as a transcontinental trip without dropping in to say good-bye. His mother’s delight and gratitude, when Abby had phoned to ask if it was “convenient,” had been touching. Abby tried to think of herself as a woman of seventy, and prayed she would not be so dependent on a kind gesture from Hat.

  The car was turning into the small street where Gregory had grown up. Both curbs were lined with cars; he had to drive a block east and another block south before he could find a place to park. They walked back slowly. Apart from the traffic and the well-paved street, little was different since Gregory had left, home twenty years ago. The trees still bent in the wind off the bay, their bare branches glistening in the night dampness as if they had been brushed with a thin black oil. White picket fences shone against the empty space of winter lawns and far behind loomed the high square old-fashioned houses, with dormer windows breaking through the steep slope of their roofs. Yet, Abby thought, change had touched the old town. Television’s metal scarecrows perched on chimneys, gardens had been sliced in half for garages, over Main Street the sky was not the blue black of a country sky but the yellowish pink of a neon-tubed, bulb-spiked city.

  “When I was eight or nine,” Gregory said to Hat, “I used to run all the way home from the library after dark. There weren’t even street lights down this way, and that house there”—he pointed to a huge dark shape—“with all those gables and porches, and cupolas used to give me fits.”

  “I’d run even now. It looks like an Addams cartoon.”

  “Here we are,” Gregory said, looking up. He used to think his house was huge too, though later he wondered how six children had ever been packed into it. It was a shingled house, square under its mansard roof, with a high unrailed porch running the width of it. Each spring, he and Thorny used to paint that porch with battleship-gray paint; their father gave them a dollar apiece for their labor, and always complimented them on doing it “like a couple of pro’s.” Once they had kicked over a can of paint; the thick grayness had poured over jonquils and lily-of-the-valley planted just below the edge of the porch, and Thorny and he had tried, with benzine, to wipe the flowers free of the oily viscous gray.

  “There’s a party,” Hat said.

  Gregory suddenly noticed that every window on the first two floors was lighted and that voices were drifting out to them. “There couldn’t be,” he said. But the front door was already opening, and his father was calling out welcome. As they greeted each other, Gerald said apologetically, “Your mother asked a few people over and somehow—” He waved to the rooms behind him.

  The whole floor was mobbed. Geraldine appeared, bubbling with joy, kissing each of them, talking through everything they said. “So many people want to have a look at you, Gregory—”

  “But, Mother,” he began. Unlike Hat, he never said “Mother” except when he was angry, and Abby threw him a warnin
g look.

  Geraldine said, “Now, Gregory, be good. I just asked Fanny and Edith and one or two, but everybody called up all day. We know so many new people now, who’ve never laid eyes on you, and they’ve been entertaining us, and I had to ask them back, didn’t I?”

  She was in a new dress, not the old black taffeta but an electric blue of a stiffish material that made her look plumper than ever. Her curly white hair no longer reminded one of a child’s; it was marcelled and rigid and faintly blue. Under it her eyes sparkled, her color was high, and as she ushered them into the parlor, she laughed with pleasure.

  Fanny and Jim Heston rushed up, and behind them came their two married sons and their wives. George and Edith Markham were there, and Amy and Jud Persall. Seated on sofas and chairs, but already rising to their feet, were Hiram Spriggins and his wife, and the old Blairs, and the Conroys. Other names flew about—somebody Simmons, a woman named Linda Peck, the McGills, Antons, Smiths, Garsons.

  Oh, heavens, Abby thought. Mother Johns had firm hold of Gregory’s arm, and was piloting him about the room. From each knot that formed about the pair, phrases drifted back to Abby and she implored Fate to help her devise some quick escape. “Why, Gregory Johns, I remember that day you fell out of the second branch of—”—“Deeny, how does it feel to have a famous son?”—“I declare, I said to my husband, I’d never have dreamed that such a peaky child—”

  Gregory was nodding, forcing smiles to his lips and words from his throat. “Thanks, Mrs. Heston, yes, it is wonderful”—“No, Horace, I never expected it at all”—“I don’t know when a movie takes a long time”—“It’s being published in late April”—“Yes, thanks”—“No, thanks—”.

  Abby, too, was the center of admiring, congratulating, questioning faces, and off in the dining room, leaning back against the sideboard, the only one of the three thoroughly enjoying herself, Hat was surrounded by younger people. Abby caught her father-in-law’s eye. He at least feels guilty about this, she thought, he knows, he’s ashamed. But Mother Johns! She’s become the queen of Freeton, the Dowager Mother, the female Ward McAllister! Into Abby’s unheeding ear, Fanny Heston bubbled frothy joy. “Twenty years younger, I told Deeny, just made over. It’s true—she’s the most popular thing and so sweet and—”