The lights went out again. The unit manager squatted by Stahr’s chair to be out of the way. The take was run again.
“Do you see now?” asked Stahr. “And there’s a hair in the picture – there on the right, see it? Find out if it’s in the projector or the film.”
At the very end of the take, Claudette Colbert slowly lifted her head, revealing her great liquid eyes.
“That’s what we should have had all the way,” said Stahr. “She gave a fine performance too. See if you can fit it in tomorrow or late this afternoon.”
Pete Zavras would not have made a slip like that. There were not six camera men in the industry you could entirely trust.
The lights went on; the supervisor and unit manager for that picture went out.
“Monroe, this stuff was shot yesterday – it came through late last night.”
The room darkened. On the screen appeared the head of Shiva, immense and imperturbable, oblivious to the fact that in a few hours it was to be washed away in a flood. Around it milled a crowd of the faithful.
“When you take that scene again,” said Stahr suddenly, “put a couple of little kids up on top. You better check about whether it’s reverent or not, but I think it’s all right. Kids’ll do anything.”
“Yes, Monroe.”
A silver belt with stars cut out of it… Smith, Jones or Brown… Personal – will the woman with the silver belt who—
With another picture the scene shifted to New York, a gangster story, and suddenly Stahr became restive.
“That scene’s trash,” he called suddenly in the darkness. “It’s badly written, it’s miscast, it accomplishes nothing. Those types aren’t tough. They look like a lot of dressed-up lollipops – what the hell is the matter, Lee?”
“The scene was written on the set this morning,” said Lee Kapper. “Burton wanted to get all the stuff on Stage 6.”
“Well – it’s trash. And so is this one. There’s no use printing stuff like that. She doesn’t believe what she’s saying – neither does Cary.* ‘I love you’ in a close-up – they’ll cluck you out of the house! And the girl’s overdressed.”
In the darkness a signal was given, the projector stopped, the lights went on. The room waited in utter silence. Stahr’s face was expressionless.
“Who wrote the scene?” he asked after a minute.
“Wylie White.”
“Is he sober?”
“Sure he is.”
Stahr considered.
“Put about four writers on that scene tonight,” he said. “See who we’ve got. Is Sidney Howard* here yet?”
“He got in this morning.”
“Talk to him about it. Explain to him what I want there. The girl is in deadly terror – she’s stalling. It’s as simple as that. People don’t have three emotions at once. And Kapper…”
The art director leant forward out of the second row.
“Yeah.”
“There’s something the matter with that set.”
There were little glances exchanged all over the room.
“What is it, Monroe?”
“You tell me,” said Stahr. “It’s crowded. It doesn’t carry your eye out. It looks cheap.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know it wasn’t. There’s not much the matter, but there’s something. Go over and take a look tonight. It may be too much furniture – or the wrong kind. Perhaps a window would help. Couldn’t you force the perspective in that hall a little more?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Kapper edged his way out of the row, looking at his watch.
“I’ll have to get at it right away,” he said. “I’ll work tonight and we’ll put it up in the morning.”
“All right. Lee, you can shoot around those scenes, can’t you?”
“I think so, Monroe.”
“I take the blame for this. Have you got the fight stuff?”
“Coming up now.”
Stahr nodded. Kapper hurried out, and the room went dark again. On the screen four men staged a terrific socking match in a cellar. Stahr laughed.
“Look at Tracy,”* he said. “Look at him go down after that guy. I bet he’s been in a few.”
The men fought over and over. Always the same fight. Always at the end they faced each other smiling, sometimes touching the opponent in a friendly gesture on the shoulder. The only one in danger was the stunt man, a pug who could have murdered the other three. He was in danger only if they swung wild and didn’t follow the blows he had taught them. Even so, the youngest actor was afraid for his face and the director had covered his flinches with ingenious angles and interpositions.
And then two men met endlessly in a door, recognized each other, and went on. They met, they started, they went on.
Then a little girl read underneath a tree with a boy reading on a limb of the tree above. The little girl was bored and wanted to talk to the boy. He would pay no attention. The core of the apple he was eating fell on the little girl’s head.
A voice spoke up out of the darkness:
“It’s pretty long, isn’t it, Monroe?”
“Not a bit,” said Stahr. “It’s nice. It has nice feeling.”
“I just thought it was long.”
“Sometimes ten feet can be too long – sometimes a scene two hundred feet long can be too short. I want to speak to the cutter before he touches this scene – this is something that’ll be remembered in the picture.”
The oracle had spoken. There was nothing to question or argue. Stahr must be right always, not most of the time, but always – or the structure would melt down like gradual butter.
Another hour passed. Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed – to be dreamt in crowds, or else discarded. The end was signalled by two tests, a character man and a girl. After the rushes, which had a tense rhythm of their own, the tests were smooth and finished; the observers settled in their chairs; Stahr’s foot slipped to the floor. Opinions were welcome. One of the technical men let it be known that he would willingly cohabit with the girl; the rest were indifferent.
“Somebody sent up a test of that girl two years ago. She must be getting around – but she isn’t getting any better. But the man’s good. Can’t we use him as the old Russian Prince in Steppes?”
“He is an old Russian Prince,” said the casting director, “but he’s ashamed of it. He’s a Red. And that’s one part he says he wouldn’t play.”
“It’s the only part he could play,” said Stahr.
The lights went on. Stahr rolled his gum into its wrapper and put it in an ashtray. He turned questioningly to his secretary.
“The processes on Stage 2,” she said.
He looked in briefly at the processes, moving pictures taken against a background of other moving pictures by an ingenious device. There was a meeting in Marcus’s office on the subject of Manon* with a happy ending, and Stahr had his say on that as he had had before – it had been making money without a happy ending for a century and a half. He was obdurate – at this time in the afternoon he was at his most fluent and the opposition faded into another subject: they would lend a dozen stars to the benefit for those the quake had made homeless at Long Beach. In a sudden burst of giving, five of them all at once made up a purse of twenty-five thousand dollars. They gave well, but not as poor men give. It was not charity.
At his office there was word from the oculist to whom he had sent Pete Zavras that the camera man’s eyes were 19–20: approximately perfect. He had written a letter that Zavras was having photostated. Stahr walked around his office cockily while Miss Doolan admired him. Prince Agge had dropped in to thank him for his afternoon on the sets and, while they talked, a cryptic word came from a supervisor that some writers named Tarleton had “found out” and were about to quit.
“These ar
e good writers,” Stahr explained to Prince Agge, “and we don’t have good writers out here.”
“Why, you can hire anyone!” exclaimed his visitor in surprise.
“Oh, we hire them, but when they get out here, they’re not good writers – so we have to work with the material we have.”
“Such as what?”
“Anybody that’ll accept the system and stay decently sober – we have all sorts of people – disappointed poets, one-hit playwrights – college girls – we put them on an idea in pairs, and if it slows down, we put two more writers working behind them. I’ve had as many as three pairs working independently on the same idea.”
“Do they like that?”
“Not if they know about it. They’re not geniuses – none of them could make as much any other way. But these Tarletons are a husband-and-wife team from the East – pretty good playwrights. They’ve just found out they’re not alone on the story and it shocks them – shocks their sense of unity – that’s the word they’ll use.”
“But what does make the – the unity?”
Stahr hesitated – his face was grim except that his eyes twinkled.
“I’m the unity,” he said. “Come and see us again.”
He saw the Tarletons. He told them he liked their work, looking at Mrs Tarleton as if he could read her handwriting through the typescript. He told them kindly that he was taking them from the picture and putting them on another, where there was less pressure, more time. As he had half-expected, they begged to stay on the first picture, seeing a quicker credit, even though it was shared with others. The system was a shame, he admitted – gross, commercial, to be deplored. He had originated it – a fact that he did not mention.
When they had gone, Miss Doolan came in triumphant.
“Mr Stahr, the lady with the belt is on the phone.”
Stahr walked into his office alone and sat down behind his desk and picked up the phone with a great sinking of his stomach. He did not know what he wanted. He had not thought about the matter as he had thought about the matter of Pete Zavras. At first he had only wanted to know if they were “professional” people, if the woman was an actress who had got herself up to look like Minna, as he had once had a young actress made up like Claudette Colbert and photographed her from the same angles.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
As he searched the short, rather surprised word for a vibration of last night, the feeling of terror began to steal over him, and he choked it off with an effort of will.
“Well – you were hard to find,” he said. “Smith – and you moved here recently. That was all we had. And a silver belt.”
“Oh, yes,” the voice said, still uneasy, unpoised, “I had on a silver belt last night.”
Now, where from here?
“Who are you?” the voice said, with a touch of flurried bourgeois dignity.
“My name is Monroe Stahr,” he said.
A pause. It was a name that never appeared on the screen, and she seemed to have trouble placing it.
“Oh, yes – yes. You were the husband of Minna Davis.”
“Yes.”
Was it a trick? As the whole vision of last night came back to him – the very skin with that peculiar radiance, as if phosphorus had touched it – he thought whether it might not be a trick to reach him from somewhere. Not Minna and yet Minna. The curtains blew suddenly into the room, the papers whispered on his desk, and his heart cringed faintly at the intense reality of the day outside his window. If he could go out now this way, what would happen if he saw her again – the starry veiled expression, the mouth strongly formed for poor brave human laughter.
“I’d like to see you. Would you like to come to the studio?”
Again the hesitancy – then a blank refusal.
“Oh, I don’t think I ought to. I’m awfully sorry.”
This last was purely formal, a brush-off, a final axe. Ordinary skin-deep vanity came to Stahr’s aid, adding persuasion to his urgency.
“I’d like to see you,” he said. “There’s a reason.”
“Well – I’m afraid that—”
“Could I come and see you?”
A pause again, not from hesitation, he felt, but to assemble her answer.
“There’s something you don’t know,” she said finally.
“Oh, you’re probably married.” He was impatient. “It has nothing to do with that. I asked you to come here openly – bring your husband if you have one.”
“It’s… it’s quite impossible.”
“Why?”
“I feel silly even talking to you, but your secretary insisted – I thought I’d dropped something in the flood last night and you’d found it.”
“I want very much to see you for five minutes.”
“To put me in the movies?”
“That wasn’t my idea.”
There was such a long pause that he thought he had offended her.
“Where could I meet you?” she asked unexpectedly.
“Here? At your house?”
“No – somewhere outside.”
Suddenly Stahr could think of no place. His own house – a restaurant. Where did people meet? A house of assignation, a cocktail bar?
“I’ll meet you somewhere at nine o’clock,” she said.
“That’s impossible, I’m afraid.”
“Then never mind.”
“All right, then, nine o’clock, but can we make it near here? There’s a drugstore on Wilshire…”
* * *
It was a quarter to six. There were two men outside who had come every day at this time only to be postponed. This was an hour of fatigue – the men’s business was not so important that it must be seen to, nor so insignificant that it could be ignored. So he postponed it again and sat motionless at his desk for a moment, thinking about Russia. Not so much about Russia as about the picture about Russia which would consume a hopeless half-hour presently. He knew there were many stories about Russia, not to mention The Story, and he had employed a squad of writers and research men for over a year, but all the stories involved had the wrong feel. He felt it could be told in terms of the American thirteen states, but it kept coming out different, in new terms that opened unpleasant possibilities and problems. He considered he was very fair to Russia – he had no desire to make anything but a sympathetic picture, but it kept turning into a headache.
“Mr Stahr – Mr Drummon’s outside, and Mr Kirstoff and Mrs Cornhill, about the Russian picture.”
“All right – send them in.”
Afterwards from six thirty to seven thirty he watched the afternoon rushes. Except for his engagement with the girl, he would ordinarily have spent the early evening in the projection room or the dubbing room, but it had been a late night with the earthquake, and he decided to go to dinner. Coming in through his front office, he found Pete Zavras waiting, his arm in a sling.
“You are the Aeschylus and the Diogenes of the moving picture,” said Zavras simply. “Also the Asclepius and the Menander.”*
He bowed.
“Who are they?” asked Stahr smiling.
“They are my countrymen.”
“I didn’t know you made pictures in Greece.”
“You’re joking with me, Monroe,” said Zavras. “I want to say you are as dandy a fellow as they come. You have saved me one hundred per cent.”
“You feel all right now?”
“My arm is nothing. It feels like someone kisses me there. It was worth doing what I did, if this is the outcome.”
“How did you happen to do it here?” Stahr asked curiously.
“Before the Delphic oracle,” said Zavras. “The Oedipus who solved the riddle. I wish I had my hands on the son-of-a-bitch who started the story.”
“You make me sorry I d
idn’t get an education,” said Stahr.
“It isn’t worth a damn,” said Pete. “I took my baccalaureate in Salonika and look how I ended up.”
“Not quite,” said Stahr.
“If you want anybody’s throat cut anytime day or night,” said Zavras, “my number is in the book.”
Stahr closed his eyes and opened them again. Zavras’s silhouette had blurred a little against the sun. He hung on to the table behind him and said in an ordinary voice.
“Good luck, Pete.”
The room was almost black, but he made his feet move, following a pattern, into his office and waited till the door clicked shut before he felt for the pills. The water decanter clattered against the table; the glass clacked. He sat down in a big chair, waiting for the Benzedrine to take effect before he went to dinner.
* * *
As Stahr walked back from the commissary, a hand waved at him from an open roadster. From the heads showing over the back he recognized a young actor and his girl, and watched them disappear through the gate, already part of the summer twilight. Little by little he was losing the feel of such things, until it seemed that Minna had taken their poignancy with her; his appreciation of splendour was fading so that presently the luxury of eternal mourning would depart. A childish association of Minna with the material Heavens made him, when he reached his office, order out his roadster for the first time this year. The big limousine seemed heavy with remembered conferences or exhausted sleep.
Leaving the studio, he was still tense, but the open car pulled the summer evening up close, and he looked at it. There was a moon down at the end of the boulevard, and it was a good illusion that it was a different moon every evening, every year. Other lights shone in Hollywood since Minna’s death: in the open markets lemons and grapefruit and green apples slanted a misty glare into the street. Ahead of him the stop signal of a car winked violet and at another crossing he watched it wink again. Everywhere floodlights raked the sky. On an empty corner two mysterious men moved a gleaming drum in pointless arcs over the heavens.
The Last Tycoon Page 7