“Dr. Hardy.”
“Yes, Miss Mason.”
“I’ve been home from Europe two months and I’ve seen so many strange things happen here that I wouldn’t dare open my mouth about anything that wasn’t my business.”
—Just the wife for a doctor in every way, he thought.
“Miss Mason.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Miss Mason—naturally under the circumstances I haven’t been able—” He passed his hand over the new stubble of his beard, “—to complete my toilet. So I’ll ask you to—”
“Yes, doctor.”
“—say goodnight or good morning.”
“Certainly, I understand.”
“—with the privilege that tomorrow—or today—when I come back to see your mother—”
“Yes, doctor.”
“—of saying good afternoon.”
“That would be a pleasure.”
“Goodnight, Miss Brickster.”
“Goodnight, Dr. Hines.”
V
Bill arrived at the office in a state of irritation caused not only by loss of sleep but by indefinable objections to his situation that he lacked the alertness to analyze. One of them, though, he was sure of; it was that Doctor Hines never arrived till noon any more and that fact threw double harness, sometimes fire-horse harness, upon his assistant. Bill saw no justification for this growing laziness of a man in his middle forties.
—Maybe I’m just sore because I’m late myself this morning. Maybe I’m trying to switch it off on him.
Thus he tried to stay within bounds of equity, but as Dr. Hines arrived at the moment when Bill was regarding a mass of twenty obligations and twenty messages he lost his temper.
“It’s hard for me to do all this detail and keep reading,” he implied fairly faintly but fairly audibly.
Dr. Hines looked at him surprised, then fell back into vacuous placidity.
“But in these times,” he spoke with the imitation heartiness that he used for patients, “—it’s good to have anything to do at all, ha-ha.” He arrested the last “ha” on what he read in Bill’s face.
“I mean it, Doctor Hines. I don’t know why you don’t get down here and I don’t care, but it’s damned unjust considering the percentage I take. I suggest you get to bed earlier at night.”
Dr. Hines’ eyes widened; his lower lip dropped.
“All right,” he said, piling up his resentment, “But have you forgotten I picked you up as a raw interne and brought you into the practise that I had built up in this city—” He paused to blow and Bill said patiently:
“I admit that,” suddenly he added an afterthought that had been passed up to him from below the night before, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do about it and I’ll tell you quick.” Dr. Hines paused at this moment and, being no fool himself, examined his conscience and blew but with less wind, “I’m going to—”
He suddenly realized he was going to do nothing about it. After a big start he had let himself grow soft over a long period; lately he had handed over everything difficult, even his personal secrets, to Bill Hardy. With Bill no longer there the very structure of the firm collapsed. Dr. Hines simply sat and stared at the younger man.
Bill guessed the older man’s thoughts; he realized that he had gotten his point over, and granting his senior enough time to recuperate and preserve his dignity he retired; tossing the most necessary directions about the afternoon to the competent Miss Weiss as he went out the door.
He drove quickly north, and as he drove he thought, or concluded a thought he had been thinking for the last fatigued hours, that the little boy was fighting a battle with realities on his own, that there would eternally continue to be Mrs. Bricksters, that romance was for children and work and danger for men, and the best he could hope was that at day’s end something softer and different would be waiting at the turning of a lane.
It was only afternoon then, but Bill thought he saw just that across the shrill early afternoon with an entirely new opera of insect sounds and the trees’ shadows thrown a new way. He was not absolutely sure he saw it; then he was suddenly sure.
In a few minutes he said:
“I’ve got something to tell you. Unfortunately very quickly, because there seems to be a lot of stuff I’ve got to do at the minute—”
“Awll–ll right,” said the little boy sitting with them, “Awll–ll right—” And without even being told, “I can always take orders from a big shot—I’m gone.” And amazingly he was.
Bill looked after him with a faint touch of regret that he probably would never find out what the Bluga was and how it was that people looked at each other on Christmas. Then he turned to the girl.
“Look,” he began, “You are so beautiful—practically unearthly. You—”
“Yes.”
“You have everything a girl could have—” He hesitated. “In short—”
And as she knew he’d be a long time, since he had said “in short,” she decided to speed up things.
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked.
Become impatient of all the explaining that seemed to be demanded in this household Bill Hardy took matters into his own arms and began a practical demonstration.
FSF mugs in a photo booth.
Fitzgerald and the young Baltimore-based writer, and later actor, Robert Spafford (1913–2000) collaborated on the movie treatment “Gracie at Sea” after Fitzgerald met George Burns and Gracie Allen in Baltimore in 1934, when they were on tour.
The scenario, or screenplay synopsis, is a short story in form, thoroughly characterized and thought out. “Gracie at Sea” tries hard to be the sort of farce that Burns and Allen were already becoming known for—that is to say, with Burns the straight man, and Allen the “dumb Dora”—but Fitzgerald couldn’t keep himself from real fiction writing. When George is described in the first paragraph as “a fundamentally lonesome and self-obliterating man,” it’s clear this isn’t just a cinematic “vehicle which will carry [Burns and Allen’s] stuff[.]”
Fitzgerald was upset that he’d spent the time on a screenplay that did not sell. He wrote to his cousin Ceci Taylor, late in the summer of 1934: “Everything here goes rather badly. Zelda no better—your correspondent in rotten health + two movie ventures gone to pot—one for Gracie Allen + Geo. Burns that damn near went over + took 2 wks’ work + they liked + wanted to buy—+ Paramount stepped on. It’s like a tailor left with a made-to-order suit—no one to sell it to.” When he was based in Hollywood at the end of the decade, Fitzgerald revised this screenplay synopsis one more time for a potential new cast. His revision is included in the explanatory notes to this story.
Gracie at Sea
The general idea of offering this story for George Burns and Grace Allen is dependent upon the thesis that farce and comedy do not hold attention over half an hour—and at the same time that there is great material in their personalities for full length pictures.
For the first half hour of pure farce, one laughs, for the second half hour one is amused; and for the third half hour one wants to hit the comedians on the head. Chaplin realized this when he decided to make longer pictures, as in Tilly’s Punctured Romance and The Kid, etc., and took a good deal of his purely farcical personality out of the picture to make way for counter means such as: Pathos of the Kid himself, to make way for this general principle, which has been well known to writers of light comedy for many years.
On this assumption, the authors who submit this story have tried to intersperse a vehicle which will carry George Burns’ and Grace Allen’s stuff, with touches of sentiment and emotions which are common to all and will arouse, we hope, the same feeling of recognition which has previously greeted only their farcical endeavors. The idea was first offered to George Burns in person and interested him enough so that he encouraged us to go on.
Herewith follows suggested story:
Gracie at Sea
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Robert Spafford
Poor George, at this moment on the basis of a small inheritance, had been just about to quit work as publicity man and retire to the country, when his boss called him into his office to speak of a case that had a strange and fascinating interest for George, for George was a fundamentally lonesome and self-obliterating man. In himself, he encouraged those qualities which contributed to the satisfaction of others and got his pleasure in that success rather than in any advance on his own part. Because of this very quality, he was considered the best publicity man in Manhattan, and perhaps that is why his boss had asked him to take this peculiarly difficult and intricate case.
In brief, the case, as the head of the agency explained to poor George, was to go into the environment of the rich and solve a strange situation that had arisen there.
It seemed that a Mr. Augustus Van Grossie, long identified with yacht racing in America, had an unusual situation with his two motherless children—that the elder daughter must be married before the younger daughter. And behold, the elder daughter was a mass of mistakes. Pretty enough, she, nevertheless, always gave herself away by some awkward blunder of speech or conduct, so that the correct young people of her environment fought shy of her. Therefore, since she could find no suitor it seemed that neither of the sisters would ever get married.
The task requested of the publicity agency was to send the most competent man that they had down to Newport to see if during the sequence of the cup races, Gracie’s carefully, if unsuccessfully manoeuvered gifts could be exploited to the extent of marrying her off. This was a last possible expedient on the part of her father.
At first George objected vehemently. He had already picked out his little cottage where he would enjoy his small patrimony in making plants into onions instead of onions into orchids. But his professional instincts re-asserted themselves. The task fascinated him and off he went.
On the train, he was still baffled at his own weakness. Nevertheless, he had with him a typewriter, all of the data on the cup races and all he could dig out of newspaper morgues about the Van Grossies and their traditions. At the moment when he was thinking of turning back, he saw upon a satchel which was being deposited together with his own bag in the wrong place across the aisle the name of Gabrielle Van Grossie. With instinct for rising to such a situation he crossed the aisle and under the excuse of clearing up the confusion of the baggage, introduced himself as a friend of her father’s who was going down to see the races and had been invited to stay in her house. Gabrielle, or Gay as she soon explained to him her nick-name was, sounded gay like her name and looked much more young and impetuous than her whole name would indicate.
During the ride, George managed to draw out from her innocence a few facts about the family with whom he was going to spend his next week—one of which was that she felt a vast impatience with the tradition which made it necessary for her sister Gracie to marry before herself. He guessed with his trained prescience that maybe she had a lover for whom she yearned and that this tradition forbade their union; and yet that she did not blame Gracie for it, but only the spirit that moved her father.
At about this same moment, the young man who, unknown to George, was the object of this young girl’s affection, was visiting the, as yet, unlaunched competitor to represent America in the cup races of the following Saturday. He was a fine young man in every way and a great favorite of Mr. Van Grossie’s, who hoped that sooner or later he might fall in love with the elder daughter, Gracie. They were looking at the yacht, from a technical standpoint. Little did they know what strange function it was to fulfill in both their lives during the next week.
And about an hour after the twilight that brought George into Newport, another scene was taking place which was equally to affect the destinies of the people concerned.
A girl in the garden of the enormous Van Grossie villa at Newport was feeding a pool of avid gold fish. She had finished her last throw of the proper food from a container and was saying good-bye to her favorite gold fish—a large mouthed and particularly taciturn specimen. But as she turned away, there was a curious answer. She turned back. “What did you say, Noah?”
Noah made no answer. “Oh, you silly thing!” she said, and turned away again.
Then she heard the strange cry the second time. She turned back and laughing, said, “Noah, I bet you say that to all the girls.” But laughing out loud as she did, she nevertheless could not neglect the fact that the unexpected sound which had attracted her attention came from a little inlet some distance away, off toward a little patch of woods. It was a curious sound. It was a sound that had been for a long time in Gracie’s heart—even though she did not recognize it. It was a sound of something new and unfound and fascinating, and she stopped in her tracks looking up at the sky for a moment, upon the chance that it might be a bird that she had never heard before. Yet she knew in that same heart that it was not a bird, and a minute later found her following a repetition of that sound to its source.
Its source was a dark arbor in the corner of the inlet, its source was the sea. Its source was God knows where. To be more specific, its source seemed to be from a small, very broken, utterly unseaworthy-appearing little dory in which was a laundry basket and turned out to be a little boy who even in the fast growing darkness caused her to snatch him out of the dory and nurse him with cries of delight. The child had probably come from some derelict tramp steamer, but Gracie was not thinking of it in those terms at the moment. She was merely delighted and started up through the little woods.
At the other end of the little woods another scene which would have surprised Mr. Van Grossie was taking place. Little Gay, scarcely off the train, was rushing off into the woods to keep an appointment with Mr. Van Grossie’s hand-picked candidate for Gracie’s hand. In a bower in the woods, the two met and embraced passionately, while in the big house George was getting more explicit details of his assignment.
The millionaire and the publicity agent strolled down through the gardens. As they reached the edge of the little woods, the same cry that Gracie had heard some minutes earlier reached both their ears. “What was that?” said Mr. Van Grossie, but George, in this new environment, was giving no opinions. He wanted to use his own judgment and while he knew very well the direction from which the cry had come, he wanted to pause a minute and consider. Again the cry sounded. This time he said to himself; “Well, if that isn’t the cry of a baby, I never heard one” and “look here” he said to his host, deliberately pointing the way in an opposite direction, “you go down that direction and investigate and I will go this way.” No sooner had the older man, considerably puzzled, started off in the indicated direction, than George darted toward the sound. In an instant he had come upon the young girl he had met on the train, a strange young man and an elder girl carrying a baby in a wash basket. The two pairs of human beings had evidently just come in contact, and being no laggard in intruding upon strange situations, he introduced himself into the general excitement which followed upon the discovery of the baby.
The advices of what to do about it were various, but George, seeing for the first time the girl he was to publicise and hoping for more story and more mystery, agreed that the baby should be concealed from her hard boiled father for the time being and given over to the charge of an old nurse, and it was obvious that Gracie had decided immediately to adopt the child.
Thoughtfully, George went in search of Mr. Van Grossie, thinking that he would be more able to make up his mind about Miss Gracie next day.
And well he might, for the next day, he saw Gracie in her natural element.
She had been commissioned to christen her father’s boat, and from far and near people assembled upon the ways to watch and applaud. It seemed a sure-fire stunt to George who did not see how she could possibly go wrong. But Gracie’s talent for going wrong re-asserted itself, for at the moment that she was to smash the bottle on the bow, and the boat was
to slide down the ways, she stopped her swing, holding the bottle aloft, to wave to the crowd. The boat began to move and the hurriedly completed swing which she had directed toward the bow missed fire, swinging Gracie around in an acrobatic circle. Nothing defeated by this, she took a mere second in the arms of sympathizers to murmur “Where am I” and then set off in a mad run, with skirts flying, in pursuit of the boat sliding rapidly down the ways. Just as the yacht slid into the water Gracie arrived at the end of the ways. Nothing daunted she reached the boat only by a daring leap through mid-air in esthetic pose—and attained her aim at the sacrifice of sinking gently into the bay. George made a quick dive and brought her to the surface, but with the idea recurring to his mind even at his first reappearance on the surface, that he had a difficult venture. His task as a publicity man was to show that Gracie was a mature and gracious, and accomplished woman. The papers the next day said nothing of the incident except for sly remarks, but the implication was enough to make him grind his teeth and decide that next time, things would not be as heretofore.
He decided that perhaps since most musicians were considered eccentric, any curious departure from convention on Gracie’s part in that line might be excused. So he decided that he would concentrate to the best of his ability on rehearsing Gracie for a hard number. It happened that was one of his many accomplishments and he was careful to call rehearsal in the morning several days before the event. It was held in the drawing room of the Van Grossie mansion. The baby had still been kept under the supervision of a confidential nurse, but Gracie had dared upon this occasion to sneak it into the music room for rehearsal. George played the piano and found that Gracie had certain talents. He concentrated therefore on her following his own piano accompaniment. Gracie, however, was torn between her supposed love of music on the harp and her interest in the child playing about her on the floor. When the baby decided to climb up the slanting slope of the harp, she obligingly began to tip the harp, all unknown to George, so that the baby would have something more solid to climb and George at the piano, all unknowing, kept on playing and admonishing and advising her without sensing what made an increasing series of extraordinary discord. He got madder and madder, while the child got more and more interested as it found it could climb. So did Gracie. Correspondingly, her interest in the music decreased. Her harp had now tilted so that Gracie was practically underneath it at a dangerous angle and playing it as no known instrument had ever been played, her body slanting dangerously backward.
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