I’ll always think of that moment, when I felt Miss Doolan behind me with her pad, as the end of childhood, the end of the time when you cut out pictures. What I was looking at wasn’t Stahr, but a picture of him I cut out over and over: the eyes that flashed a sophisticated understanding at you and then darted up too soon into his wide brow with its ten thousand plots and plans; the face that was ageing from within, so that there were no casual furrows of worry and vexation but a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self-set struggle – or a long illness. It was handsomer to me than all the rosy tan from Coronado to Del Monte. He was my picture, as sure as if he had been pasted on the inside of my old locker in school. That’s what I told Wylie White, and when a girl tells the man she likes second best about the other one – then she’s in love.
* * *
I noticed the girl long before Stahr arrived at the dance. Not a pretty girl, for there are none of those in Los Angeles – one girl can be pretty, but a dozen are only a chorus. Nor yet a professional beauty – they do all the breathing for everyone, and finally even the men have to go outside for air. Just a girl, with the skin of one of Raphael’s corner angels and a style that made you look back twice to see if it were something she had on.
I noticed her and forgot her. She was sitting back behind the pillars at a table whose ornament was a faded semi-star who, in hopes of being noticed and getting a bit, rose and danced regularly with some scarecrow males. It reminded me shamefully of my first party, where Mother made me dance over and over with the same boy to keep in the spotlight. The semi-star spoke to several people at our table, but we were busy being Café Society and she got nowhere at all.
From our angle it appeared that they all wanted something.
“You’re expected to fling it around,” said Wylie, “like in the old days. When they find out you’re hanging on to it, they get discouraged. That’s what all this brave gloom is about – the only way to keep their self-respect is to be Hemingway characters. But underneath they hate you in a mournful way, and you know it.”
He was right – I knew that since 1933 the rich could only be happy alone together.
I saw Stahr come into the half-light at the top of the wide steps and stand there with his hands in his pockets, looking around. It was late and the lights seemed to have burnt a little lower, though they were the same. The floor show was finished, except for a man who still wore a placard which said that at midnight in the Hollywood Bowl Sonja Henie* was going to skate on hot soup. You could see the sign as he danced becoming less funny on his back. A few years before there would have been drunks around. The faded actress seemed to be looking for them hopefully over her partner’s shoulder. I followed her with my eyes when she went back to her table…
…and there, to my surprise, was Stahr talking to the other girl. They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.
* * *
Stahr had expected nothing like this when he stood at the head of the steps a few minutes earlier. The “sneak preview” had disappointed him, and afterwards he had had a scene with Jacques La Borwitz right in front of the theatre, for which he was now sorry. He had started towards the Brady party, when he saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.
Immediately things changed. As he walked towards her, the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality swelled up in him, and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.
The incumbents of the table were crawling back – Stahr and Kathleen danced.
When she came close, his several visions of her blurred; she was momentarily unreal. Usually a girl’s skull made her real, but not this time – Stahr continued to be dazzled as they danced out along the floor – to the last edge, where they stepped through a mirror into another dance with new dancers whose faces were familiar but nothing more. In this new region he talked, fast and urgently.
“What’s your name?”
“Kathleen Moore.”
“Kathleen Moore,” he repeated.
“I have no telephone, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“When will you come to the studio?”
“It’s not possible. Truly.”
“Why isn’t it? Are you married?”
“No.”
“You’re not married?”
“No, nor never have been. But then I may be.”
“Someone there at the table.”
“No.” She laughed. “What curiosity!”
But she was deep in it with him, no matter what the words were. Her eyes invited him to a romantic communion of unbelievable intensity. As if she realized this, she said, frightened:
“I must go back now. I promised this dance.”
“I don’t want to lose you. Couldn’t we have lunch or dinner?”
“It’s impossible.” But her expression helplessly amended the words to: “It’s just possible. The door is still open by a chink, if you could squeeze past. But quickly – so little time.”
“I must go back,” she repeated aloud. Then she dropped her arms, stopped dancing and looked at him, a laughing wanton.
“When I’m with you, I don’t breathe quite right,” she said.
She turned, picked up her long dress and stepped back through the mirror. Stahr followed until she stopped near her table.
“Thank you for the dance,” she said, “and now, really, goodnight.”
Then she nearly ran.
Stahr went to the table where he was expected and sat down with the Café Society group – from Wall Street, Grand Street, Loudon County, Virginia, and Odessa, Russia. They were all talking with enthusiasm about a horse that had run very fast, and Mr Marcus was the most enthusiastic of all. Stahr guessed that the Jews had taken over the worship of horses as a symbol – for years it had been the Cossacks mounted and the Jews on foot. Now the Jews had horses, and it gave them a sense of extraordinary well-being and power. Stahr sat pretending to listen and even nodding when something was referred to him, but all the time watching the table behind the pillars. If everything had not happened as it had, even to his connecting the silver belt with the wrong girl, he might have thought it was some elaborate frame-up. But the elusiveness was beyond suspicion. For there in a moment he saw that she was escaping again – the pantomime at the table indicated goodbye. She was leaving, she was gone.
“There,” said Wylie White with malice, “goes Cinderella. Simply bring the slipper to the Regal Shoe Company, 812 South Broadway.”
Stahr overtook her in the long upper lobby, where middle-aged women sat behind a roped-off space, watching the ballroom entrance.
“Am I responsible for this?” he asked.
“I was going, anyhow.” But she added, almost resentfully, “They talked as if I’d been dancing with the Prince of Wales. They all stared at me. One of the men wanted to draw my picture, and another one wanted to see me tomorrow.”
“That’s just what I want,” said Stahr gently, “but I want to see you much more than he does.”
“You insist so,” she said wearily. “One reason I left England was that men always wanted their own way. I thought it was different here. Isn’t it enough that I don’t want to see you?”
“Ordinarily,” agreed Stahr. “Please believe me, I’m way out of my depth already. I feel like a fool. But I must see you again and talk to you.”
She hesitated.
“There’s no reason for feeling like a fool,” she said. “You’re too good a man to feel like a fool. But you should see this for what it is.”
“What is it?”
“You’ve fallen for me – completely. You’ve got me in your dreams.”
“I’d forgotten you,” he declared, “till the moment I walked in that door.”
“Forgotten me with your head perhaps. But I knew the first time I saw you that you were the kind that likes me…”
She stopped herself. Near them a man and woman from the party were saying goodbye: “Tell her hello – tell her I love her dearly,” said the woman. “You both – all of you – the children.” Stahr could not talk like that, the way everyone talked now. He could think of nothing further to say as they walked towards the elevator except:
“I suppose you’re perfectly right.”
“Oh, you admit it?”
“No, I don’t,” he retracted. “It’s just the whole way you’re made. What you say – how you walk – the way you look right this minute…” He saw she had melted a little, and his hopes rose. “Tomorrow is Sunday, and usually I work on Sunday, but if there’s anything you’re curious about in Hollywood, any person you want to meet or see, please let me arrange it.”
They were standing by the elevator. It opened, but she let it go.
“You’re very modest,” she said. “You always talk about showing me the studio and taking me around. Don’t you ever stay alone?”
“Tomorrow I’ll feel very much alone.”
“Oh, the poor man – I could weep for him. He could have all the stars jumping around him and he chooses me.”
He smiled – he had laid himself open to that one.
The elevator came again. She signalled for it to wait.
“I’m a weak woman,” she said. “If I meet you tomorrow, will you leave me in peace? No, you won’t. You’ll make it worse. It wouldn’t do any good, but harm, so I’ll say no and thank you.”
She got into the elevator. Stahr got in too, and they smiled as they dropped two floors to the hall, cross-sectioned with small shops. Down at the end, held back by police, was the crowd, their heads and shoulders leaning forward to look down the alley. Kathleen shivered.
“They looked so strange when I came in,” she said, “as if they were furious at me for not being someone famous.”
“I know another way out,” said Stahr.
They went through a drugstore, down an alley, and came out into the clear cool California night beside the car park. He felt detached from the dance now, and she did too.
“A lot of picture people used to live down here,” he said. “John Barrymore and Pola Negri* in those bungalows. And Connie Talmadge* lived in that tall thin apartment house over the way.”
“Doesn’t anybody live here now?”
“The studios moved out into the country,” he said. “What used to be the country. I had some good times around here, though.”
He did not mention that ten years ago Minna and her mother had lived in another apartment over the way.
“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.
“I’ve lost track – almost thirty-five, I think.”
“They said at the table you were the boy wonder.”
“I’ll be that when I’m sixty,” he said grimly. “You will meet me tomorrow, won’t you?”
“I’ll meet you,” she said. “Where?”
Suddenly there was no place to meet. She would not go to a party at anyone’s house, nor to the country, nor swimming, though she hesitated, nor to a well-known restaurant. She seemed hard to please, but he knew there was some reason. He would find out in time. It occurred to him that she might be the sister or daughter of someone well-known who was pledged to keep in the background. He suggested that he come for her and they could decide.
“That wouldn’t do,” she said. “What about right here? The same spot.”
He nodded – pointing up at the arch under which they stood.
He put her into her car, which would have brought eighty dollars from any kindly dealer, and watched it rasp away. Down by the entrance a cheer went up as a favourite emerged, and Stahr wondered whether to show himself and say goodnight.
* * *
This is Celia taking up the narrative in person. Stahr came back finally – it was about half-past three – and asked me to dance.
“How are you?” he asked me, just as if he hadn’t seen me that morning. “I got involved in a long conversation with a man.”
It was secret too – he cared that much about it.
“I took him for a drive,” he went on innocently. “I didn’t realize how much this part of Hollywood had changed.”
“Has it changed?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “changed completely. Unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell you exactly, but it’s all changed – everything. It’s like a new city.” After a moment he amplified: “I had no idea how much it had changed.”
“Who was the man?” I ventured.
“An old friend,” he said vaguely, “someone I knew a long time ago.”
I had made Wylie try to find out quietly who she was. He had gone over and the ex-star had asked him excitedly to sit down. No: she didn’t know who the girl was – a friend of a friend of someone – even the man who had brought her didn’t know.
So Stahr and I danced to the beautiful music of Glenn Miller playing ‘I’m on a See-Saw’.* It was good dancing now, with plenty of room. But it was lonely – lonelier than before the girl had gone. For me, as well as for Stahr, she took the evening with her, took along the stabbing pain I had felt – left the great ballroom empty and without emotion. Now it was nothing, and I was dancing with an absent-minded man who told me how much Los Angeles had changed.
* * *
They met, next afternoon, as strangers in an unfamiliar country. Last night was gone, the girl he had danced with was gone. A misty rose-and-blue hat with a trifling veil came along the terrace to him and paused, searching his face. Stahr was strange too, in a brown suit and a black tie that blocked him out more tangibly than a formal dinner coat, or when he was simply a face and voice in the darkness the night they had first met.
He was the first to be sure it was the same person as before: the upper part of the face that was Minna’s, luminous, with creamy temples and opalescent brown – the cool-coloured curly hair. He could have put his arm around her and pulled her close with an almost family familiarity – already he knew the down on her neck, the very set of her backbone, the corners of her eyes and how she breathed – the very texture of the clothes that she would wear.
“Did you wait here all night?” she said, in a voice that was like a whisper.
“I didn’t move – didn’t stir.”
Still the problem remained, the same one – there was no special place to go.
“I’d like tea,” she suggested, “if it’s some place you’re not known.”
“That sounds as if one of us had a bad reputation.”
“Doesn’t it?” she laughed.
“We’ll go to the shore,” Stahr suggested. “There’s a place there where I got out once and was chased by a trained seal.”
“Do you think the seal could make tea?”
“Well – he’s trained. And I don’t think he’ll talk – I don’t think his training got that far. What in hell are you trying to hide?”
After a moment she said lightly: “Perhaps the future,” in a way that might mean anything or nothing at all.
As they drove away, she pointed at her jalopy in the parking lot.
“Do you think it’s safe?”
“I doubt it. I noticed some black-bearded foreigners snooping around.”
Kathleen looked at him alarmed.
“Really?” She saw he was smiling. “I believe everything you say,” she said. “You’ve got such a gentle way about you that I don’t see why they’re all so afraid of you.” She examined him with approval – fretting a little about his pallor, which was accentuated by the bright afternoon. “Do you work very hard? Do you really always work on Sundays?”
He responded to her interest – impersonal yet not perfunctory.
�
��Not always. Once we had… we had a house with a pool and all – and people came on Sunday. I played tennis and swam. I don’t swim any more.”
“Why not? It’s good for you. I thought all Americans swam.”
“My legs got very thin – a few years ago, and it embarrassed me. There were other things I used to do – lots of things: I used to play handball when I was a kid, and sometimes out here – I had a court that was washed away in a storm.”
“You have a good build,” she said in formal compliment, meaning only that he was made with thin grace.
He rejected this with a shake of his head.
“I enjoy working most,” he said. “My work is very congenial.”
“Did you always want to be in movies?”
“No. When I was young I wanted to be a chief clerk – the one who knew where everything was.”
She smiled.
“That’s odd. And now you’re much more than that.”
“No, I’m still a chief clerk,” Stahr said. “That’s my gift, if I have one. Only when I got to be it, I found out that no one knew where anything was. And I found out that you had to know why it was where it was, and whether it should be left there. They began throwing it all at me, and it was a very complex office. Pretty soon I had all the keys. And they wouldn’t have remembered what locks they fitted if I’d given them back.”
They stopped for a red light, and a newsboy bleated at him: “Mickey Mouse Murdered! Randolph Hearst* declares war on China!”
“We’ll have to buy this paper,” she said.
As they drove on, she straightened her hat and preened herself. Seeing him looking at her, she smiled.
She was alert and calm – qualities that were currently at a premium. There was lassitude in plenty – California was filling up with weary desperados. And there were tense young men and women who lived back East in spirit while they carried on a losing battle against the climate. But it was everyone’s secret that sustained effort was difficult here – a secret that Stahr scarcely admitted to himself. But he knew that people from other places spurted a pure rill of new energy for a while.
The Last Tycoon Page 9