The Celebrity

by Laura Z. Hobson

  A faint regret pinched Thornton Johns’ heart.

  Another beam began its ascent into the air, and he realized how earth-bound such regret could be. If he wanted a Park Avenue address, he could have a Park. Avenue address without the Hathaway-Johns Agency. He could move his own office; he could be an insurance-salesman-with-a-hobby on Park Avenue as well as anywhere else. The hell with the extra expense; the hell with holding back from anything he wanted.

  Behind him and to the north, a sundering of metal and stone tore through the noise of traffic, and Thorn looked around apprehensively. A wrecking gang was pulling down four old brownstones in a row. More new construction! Two great new buildings almost facing each other.

  Both sides of the avenue, Thornton Johns thought happily, as he began again to stride on toward Digby and Brown. Both sides of the street. The literary side and the insurance side. He hadn’t needed Jim Hathaway to meet Jill Goodwyn, and as for Maude Denkin and Nell Abbott and the rest of Jim’s big authors and playwrights, he had met them already. He could phone any one of them on his own, take them out, get to know them and their problems; he had only been holding back as a matter of discretion and timing. Adding another insurance policy didn’t mean breaking off written contracts or moral commitments, the way leaving an agency did; people, placed policies with different brokers all the time.

  Both sides of the street. It was like the title of a song.

  Whistling, Thorn entered the Digby and Brown building. Upstairs he paused at Janet’s sliding window. “Why, Jan,” he said, “you look like spring.”

  She turned square around in her chair, the board ignored. “I feel like spring. You like?”

  She was wearing a yellow dress and green earrings. “I’m crazy for it,” he said.

  “Here’s what I’m crazy for.”

  She held up her left hand. On the fourth finger was a ring; from the way she flaunted it, the tiny stone might have been four blue-white carats.

  “That damn boyfriend!” Thorn groaned.

  “Dick? I gave him the cut-off for good when I got back from my vacation. This”—she flashed the ring once more—“is from a fellow is Mr. Muncy’s assistant at Brentano’s.”

  “Tell him he’s got the top of the list,” Thorn said and went on down the hall.

  Luther Digby looked relieved when he saw him. “At last,” he said and stood up. “I thought maybe you’d misunderstood about it being today.”

  “Hi, Luther. I was held up.” Digby was still standing, but Thorn sat down. “What’s eating you?”

  “I’ve got an idea, Thorn, a big idea. I’ve talked it out with Jack McIntyre and he thinks it’s a great idea, if we can manage it. I want you to promise you’ll keep it in strictest confidence, whether you say yes or no. Alan Brown and Barnard haven’t an inkling of it.”

  Thorn studied him. Digby was excited. His face was repulsive again; the eyes bugging, the florid skin turning to scarlet. Obviously the answer would be no. Better yet: Well, I’ll turn it over in my mind a bit, talk it out with Gregory, and let you know tomorrow.

  “I promise.”

  “Not even to Gregory?”

  “What?”

  “You won’t even talk about it to Gregory?”

  “Now look here, Luther,” Thorn said with dignity. “I represent Gregory. Everything I do is for Gregory. Anything whatever that concerns his books or his contracts or his future work—”

  “This is about you.”

  “Me?” Digby was puffing up like a pigeon; having preened himself in public for ten months on The Good World, he couldn’t stop. At Thorn’s lecture in Stamford last week, Digby had got himself introduced to everybody; his voice was all over the place. The publisher of The Good World, the discoverer of Gregory Johns; Mr. Johns’ publisher, for twenty years an unwavering’ confidence—

  “What do you mean, ‘about me’?” Thorn said.

  “That lecture of yours,” Luther said, “bowled me clean over.”

  Thorn smiled. The old butter-up process while the knife was being honed. “Thanks.”

  “You could expand it,” Digby went on, “into a book.”

  “I could what?”

  “McIntyre heard you at the Waldorf and now I’ve heard you too. We compared notes. My God, Thorn, you’ve got enough material for two books. You would, anyway, if you put in everything about your own childhood too, and how you grew up, and the insurance business, and how you first decided to take on Gregory’s work. And the two movie sales and, ah, your good friends in Hollywood.”

  Thornton Johns stared across the desk at a vision. The sincerity in the man’s eyes! The urgency in his voice! Luther might be an ass at times, and a knave—it certainly was knavish for a man to grow famous on another man’s talent, though Digby could never see that. But when it came to handling a runaway, he was a master. Thorn remembered publication day. “Me write a book? I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

  “A tape recorder,” Digby said “or a stenotype machine. We’d pay for it, arrange it, have an operator there taking down every word, at four or five lectures. After that it would be an editing job, a patching job; writing in transitions. It would be a natural, I tell you, a sensation.”

  Thorn thought of the white cards and the fountain pen. Wherever he lectured now, the ladies implored him for autographs. He wasn’t as old-fashioned mulish as Gregory, but he hated the white cards. Filing clerks’ cards—that’s just what they looked like. Probably that was just what they were. To autograph a real book, your own book—Thornton Johns quickly lowered his lids against Digby’s scrutiny.

  “We’d like you to rush it,” Digby went on. “In this bad slump, nonfiction’s the only thing selling—apart from one or two novels a year. We have nothing big on the list for 1950, and with that title—”

  “What title?”

  “Why, the same as on your lecture.”

  As if he were in his own office, Thorn rose and began to pace the room. Behind him Luther Digby sat motionless, watching the swing of his long legs, noting the tight muscles around his mouth. If this wasn’t constructive, creative editorial thinking, what was? Ed Barnard hadn’t the only editorial mind in the place, as Ed Barnard; seemed to think. Barnard was always saying an editor shouldn’t parcel out ideas; that an editor should only discuss, talk, encourage, listen, and then edit.

  If people like Barnard headed publishing houses, there’d be no money for editors’ salaries. Barnard was forever citing Max Perkins as his ideal; yesterday Barnard came back from lunch and went around telling the whole office that Scribner was preparing a collection of the Perkins letters to Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe and everybody else. Well, Barnard and Max Perkins and all the other great editors could have their theories and try to sign checks with them.

  Thornton Johns halted before his desk, and Digby had to tilt his head back to meet his glance. “If I did say yes, Luther, how much of an advance would you give me?”

  “Advance? I hadn’t even thought of an advance.”

  “I have. A thousand ought to be a safe bet on a thing like this.”

  “A thousand! Good God, we never gave Gregory a thousand.”

  “You never had The Good World before either.”

  Now it was Luther Digby who paced the room. And for one moment, after Thorn finally had left, just before Mr. Digby’s rage died away, he wished wanly that he had never had this burst of editorial creativeness. One thousand dollars! A straight fifteen per cent from the first copy. No extra rights. Maybe Barnard was right.

  Luther Digby sank back into his chair and sat quite still. Minute passed after minute, and he did not move. Nowadays Thornton Johns always treated him like a subordinate. Up at Vermont, those authors had flocked around, asking a thousand questions about The Good World and about methods of leading publishing houses like Digby and Brown; he was invited back for next summer, and he probably would go out to Montana for the Western Writers’ Conference right afterwards. At the seminar in Columbia’s School of
Journalism a couple of weeks ago, they had kept him sitting there for three full hours. He might write to old Johnny Backing at Yale and tell him about it; Johnny gave the same sort of course.

  And that gorgeous blonde, Evelyn Larkin, who seemed to prefer literary men and who had dined with him twice, had opened her blue eyes wide and said, “Why, Mr. Digby, you’re becoming a regular Dean of American Letters.”

  Subordinate indeed. For a moment he hated Thornton Johns and Gregory Johns as well. A piercing clarity came to Luther Digby and he realized he never had liked authors. Authors piously prattled about self-expression; how many of them would write books if their names were left off? Hypocrites! A ravenous greed for fame drove them; every last one was a celebrity hound, and a doting public threw them great juicy hunks of it while publishers and editors starved for any recognition at all. Scribner might do well enough with the Perkins book next spring, but that would only prove the rule.

  Luther Digby gazed at the ceiling. He gazed at the rug. He was mesmerized by the perforated wing-tip of his right shoe. Then he buzzed for his secretary. “Joyce,” he said briskly, “bring in all the Gregory Johns correspondence right away, please.”

  “All of it? Did you say all?”

  “And then tomorrow I’ll want to start going through my correspondence with our other authors. Even the ones who have gone to some other house.”

  “Yes, Mr. Digby. Did you say all of the Gregory Johns correspondence?”

  “Every letter I ever wrote him or he ever wrote back. Starting with 1928 or ’29, before he was out of college.”

  For the next few weeks, an invading bitterness swept the soul of James Whitcomb Hathaway every time he passed the corner of Park and Fifty-Seventh. For Thorn to back out at this stage, after Ephraim, Farley, and Jonathan had discovered the plan, for Thorn to have signed a five-year lease on an office for himself the day before announcing he was backing out, for Thorn to have dug up that preposterous lie about writing a book to explain kicking him aside—all of it sent acid gushing through Hathaway’s veins.

  “Digby came after me, Jim, with such a huge advance, I owed it to my family to accept it. So there just won’t be the time now.”

  Hathaway had argued, cajoled, offered to delay for a full year, had even notched up the profit ratio another three per cent in Thorn’s favor. Thornton Johns scarcely heard him. Thorn seemed encased in some new armor of his own, against which Hathaway’s words went ping-ping-ping. When Thorn told him he had already borrowed three thousand dollars from Gregory for office furniture—“I want light woods and dark walls, something like Von Brann’s at Imperial”—Hathaway had withdrawn into an armor of his own. Most of the time he was still in it.

  Ambition, nerve, dissatisfaction with one’s lot, an unwavering admiration for fame and success—long ago it had been clear that these traits would take Thornton Johns far. But who could have suspected that in less than a year Thornton Johns, so naive then, so diffident, would be demolishing the beautiful edifice of the Hathaway-Johns Agency, and stand immaculately apart from the rubble on the sidewalk?

  “You’ll get somebody else, Jim, somebody far better than me. ”

  That air of modesty—wormwood with the acid!

  This phrasing bothered James Whitcomb Hathaway but he did not pause to change it. The gall of the man, the unspeakable calculating gall of him, to crawl out on the person who had launched him into the Big Time.

  Nobody could criticize Thornton Johns for wanting to be well known. To defeat the awful gray anonymity of life—it was natural for any man to want that. But Thornton Johns wouldn’t be satisfied until his name was a household word from New York to California.

  Damn it, Hathaway thought, it will be. This is the country for people like. Thorn, this is the age. It may take him another year or two, but he’ll get there. Fifty thousand a year minimum income and a household word with every family that reads or goes to a lecture or has a radio or television set.

  Radio and television. James Whitcomb Hathaway winced at the syllables. Two days after the crawl-out, Thornton Johns had suggested lunch at Le Persiflage. Perhaps he’s changed his mind, Hathaway had thought; perhaps something’s made him ashamed of himself. I’m glad I covered up enough so he thinks we’re still friends.

  “Say, Jim,” Thorn had said, after the preliminaries were over, “I’ve been wondering about these personality programs on the air, and on television. Like the Tex and Jinx Show, Faye Emerson, Mary Margaret McBride—don’t they have lecturers quite often? Couldn’t you fix me up on some?”

  Hathaway dropped his fork. The headwaiter retrieved it himself, bawling at a busboy, “New fork for Mr. Johns’ table.”

  “Not just as a favor, Jim,” Thorn had continued with his magnificent smile. “Except at first, maybe. The moment you do team up and become Hathaway-Somebody, Incorporated, of course we’d switch to the usual commission basis.”

  Hathaway had wanted only to reach across the table and hit him. He remembered Gregory’s law work and chose withering sarcasm instead.

  “Are you seriously suggesting, Thorn, that I’m going to end up being agent to the great Thornton Johns?”

  Thorn had looked hurt. By God, Hathaway had thought wearily before Thorn could answer, by God, I suppose I am.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE GOOD WORLD CLOSED its record-breaking run at the Palladium the last week in October, and during November it was playing, as Variety put it, The Nabes. It played Poughkeepsie early; it played Martin Heights, Roslyn, and Freeton; out in Wyoming it played Greybull, Lovell, Cody, and Sheridan before the great snows began.

  To virtually everybody in the Johns orbit, the tempo of life stepped up once more.

  Hat’s letters from Vassar were, for the first time, ecstatic. For a while, like her occasional weekends at home, they had been so casual that they had worried her parents; they had sounded guarded, too filled with details about courses and teachers and not enough about friends and fun. Now they became lyrical; a lilt of joy ran through every one of them. “It’s playing right on campus at the Juliet, and I gave a party and took ten girls, and then on up to the Pub on the Hill afterwards. I’m stony but I don’t care. This is the most wonderful place in the world, and I’m so happy living at Cushing, I could die. Could you possibly send me fifteen dollars extra right away?”

  From Freeton, Gerald or Geraldine telephoned nearly every day for a week, and only when The Good World was replaced by Pinky did Geraldine sound subdued. “You have to do something for me,” she told Gregory one morning. “Maybe it’s silly of me, looking way ahead to January, but your father and I want our next anniversary party to be out here in our house and you have to promise you’ll come.”

  Gregory said mildly, “Now look—” but his mother’s voice trembled a little as she interrupted and went on.

  “When you get old, even your close friends neglect you,” she said, “but I think your father blames me. I told him long ago that people never like it if somebody else’s child gets famous, and then when Thorny started to get famous too, it just broke their nerve.”

  Gregory restrained an impulse to discuss the point.

  “Anyway,” his mother said, “an anniversary would be a real reason to invite everybody in again. And they’d all accept if they knew you and Thorny were both coming.”

  “Of course we’re coming,” Gregory said heartily. “We’ll throw the biggest anniversary party you ever saw. You go right ahead and ask all of Long Island.”

  By Thanksgiving, Harry Brinton was pulled in for the art work on his first national advertising account. The president of one of the largest hat companies in America wanted a testimonial campaign on Distinctive Hats for Distinguished Men, and was told that Brinton not only had an A-1 art service, but also great influence with his brother-in-law, Gregory Johns. And since Gregory Johns had never yet signed any known testimonial, his photograph wearing a Distinctive hat, and his signature to a Distinctive statement, would clearly be even more distinguished th
an most of the distinguished signers they could line up more readily.

  Upon hearing from Gloria of Harry’s latest and greatest new account, both Gracia and Georgia turned upon their respective husbands and demanded why they couldn’t show a little red-blooded American ambition.

  “We belong to a famous family,” Gracia said, “and look at all the good it. does us.” Georgia’s remarks paraphrased her sister’s.

  Up on Morningside Heights, Thorn Junior ran for the presidency of his two clubs. His fellow students, having mellowed considerably since their Shakespeare class at the close of the spring session, elected him unanimously, and young Thorn got gloriously drunk for the first time in his life.

  “The trick,” young Thorn decided boozily, “is keep your, trap shut. The fellows know who’s Big Man on Campus anyways.”

  In a beauty parlor at the Ritzy Mrs. Luther Digby repeated stubbornly, “Not even a rinse. Don’t touch it up at all. That’s why I changed from my old place—they won’t let me let it grow out. I like it gray.” She stared bleakly at the mirror before her. She had known it wouldn’t do any good; with Luther buried up to his ears in musty old letters whenever he did condescend to stay in for an evening, he wouldn’t notice it if her hair were dyed lime green.

  At Digby and Brown, the switchboard came under the ministrations of a girl named Mabel, tall, angular, and inefficient. Janet married Mr. Muncy’s assistant, and, as she was leaving to do so, earnestly told two of the secretaries that if they’d only realize how high-class it was to work for a big successful publishing house instead of, say, for some hardware company or button manufacturer, they’d begin to feel and act glamorous and improve their position in life the way she had.