Dear Mr Stahr,
In half an hour I will be keeping my date with you. When we say goodbye I will hand you this letter. It is to tell you that I am to be married soon and that I won’t be able to see you after today.
I should have told you last night but it didn’t seem to concern you. And it would seem silly to spend this beautiful afternoon telling you about it and watching your interest fade. Let it fade all at once – now. I will have told you enough to convince you that I am Nobody’s Prize Potato. (I have just learnt that expression – from my hostess of last night, who called and stayed an hour. She seems to believe that everyone is Nobody’s Prize Potato – except you. I think I am supposed to tell you she thinks this, so give her a job if you can.)
I am very flattered that anyone who sees so many lovely women… I can’t finish this sentence but you know what I mean. And I will be late if I don’t go to meet you right now.
With all good wishes,
Kathleen Moore
Stahr’s first feeling was like fear; his second thought was that the letter was invalidated – she had even tried to retrieve it. But then he remembered “Mister Stahr” just at the end, and that she had asked him his address – she had probably already written another letter which would also say goodbye. Illogically he was shocked by the letter’s indifference to what had happened later. He read it again, realizing that it foresaw nothing. Yet in front of the house she had decided to let it stand, belittling everything that had happened, curving her mind away from the fact that there had been no other man in her consciousness that afternoon. But he could not even believe this now, and the whole adventure began to peel away even as he recapitulated it searchingly to himself. The car, the hill, the hat, the music, the letter itself, blew off like the scraps of tar paper from the rubble of his house. And Kathleen departed, packing up her remembered gestures, her softly moving head, her sturdy eager body, her bare feet in the wet swirling sand. The skies paled and faded – the wind and rain turned dreary, washing the silver fish back to sea. It was only one more day, and nothing was left except the pile of scripts upon the table.
He went upstairs. Minna died again on the first landing, and he forgot her lingeringly and miserably again, step by step to the top. The empty floor stretched around him – the doors with no one sleeping behind. In his room, Stahr took off his tie, untied his shoes and sat on the side of his bed. It was all closed out, except for something that he could not remember; then he remembered: her car was still down in the parking lot of the hotel. He set his clock to give him six hours’ sleep.
* * *
This is Cecilia taking up the story. I think it would be most interesting to follow my own movements at this point, as this is a time in my life that I am ashamed of. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
When I sent Wylie over to Martha Dodd’s table, he had no success in finding out who the girl was, but it had suddenly become my chief interest in life. Also, I guessed – correctly – that it would be Martha Dodd’s. To have had at your table a girl who is admired by royalty, who may be tagged for a coronet in our little feudal system – and not even know her name!
I had only a speaking acquaintance with Martha, and it would be too obvious to approach her directly, but I went out to the studio Monday and dropped in on Jane Meloney.
Jane Meloney was quite a friend of mine. I thought of her rather as a child thinks of a family dependant. I knew she was a writer, but I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelt of cocktails and came more often to meals. They were spoken of the same way when they were not around – except for a species called playwrights, who came from the East. These were treated with respect if they did not stay long – if they did, they sank with the others into the white-collar class.
Jane’s office was in the “old writers’ building”. There was one on every lot, a row of iron maidens left over from silent days and still resounding with the dull moans of cloistered hacks and bums. There was the story of the new producer who had gone down the line one day and then reported excitedly to the head office.
“Who are those men?”
“They’re supposed to be writers.”
“I thought so. Well, I watched them for ten minutes and there were two of them that didn’t write a line.”
Jane was at her typewriter, about to break off for lunch. I told her frankly that I had a rival.
“It’s a dark horse,” I said. “I can’t even find out her name.”
“Oh,” said Jane. “Well, maybe I know something about that. I heard something from somebody.”
The somebody, of course, was her nephew, Ned Sollinger, Stahr’s office boy. He had been her pride and hope. She had sent him through New York University, where he played on the football team. Then in his first year at medical school, after a girl turned him down, he dissected out the least publicized section of a lady corpse and sent it to the girl. Don’t ask me why. In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,* he had begun life at the bottom again, and was still there.
“What do you know?” I asked.
“It was the night of the earthquake. She fell into the lake on the back lot, and he dove in and saved her life. Someone else told me it was his balcony she jumped off of and broke her arm.”
“Who was she?”
“Well, that’s funny too—”
Her phone rang, and I waited restlessly during a long conversation she had with Joe Reinmund. He seemed to be trying to find out over the phone how good she was or whether she had ever written any pictures at all. And she was reputed to have been on the set the day Griffith invented the close-up! While he talked she groaned silently, writhed, made faces into the receiver, held it all in her lap so that the voice reached her faintly – and kept up a side chatter to me.
“What is he doing – killing time between appointments?… He’s asked me every one of these questions ten times… that’s all on a memorandum I sent him…”
And into the phone:
“If this goes up to Monroe, it won’t be my doing. I want to go right through to the end.”
She shut her eyes in agony again.
“Now he’s casting it… he’s casting the minor characters… he’s going to have Buddy Ebsen… My God, he just hasn’t anything to do… now he’s on Harry Davenport – he means Donald Crisp…* he’s got a big casting directory open in his lap and I can hear him turn the pages… he’s a big important man this morning, a second Stahr, and for Christ’s sake I’ve got two scenes to do before lunch.”
Reinmund quit finally or was interrupted at his end. A waiter came in from the commissary with Jane’s luncheon and a Coca-Cola for me – I wasn’t lunching that summer. Jane wrote down one sentence on her typewriter before she ate. It interested me the way she wrote. One day I was there when she and a young man had just lifted a story out of The Saturday Evening Post – changing the characters and all. Then they began to write it, making each line answer the line before it, and of course it sounded just like people do in life when they’re straining to be anything – funny or gentle or brave. I always wanted to see that one on the screen, but I missed it somehow.
I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She made three thousand a week, and her husbands all drank and beat her nearly to death. But today I had an axe to grind.
“You don’t know her name?” I persisted.
“Oh…” said Jane, “that. Well, he kept calling her up afterwards, and he told Katy Doolan it was the wrong name after all.”
“I think he found her,” I said. “Do you know Martha Dodd?”
“Hasn’t that little girl had a tough break, though!” she exclaimed with ready theatrical sympathy.
“Could you possibly invite her to lunch tomorrow?”
“Oh, I think she gets enough to eat all right. There’s a Mexican—”
I exp
lained that my motives were not charitable. Jane agreed to cooperate. She called Martha Dodd.
We had lunch next day at the Bev Brown Derby, a languid restaurant, patronized for its food by clients who always look as if they’d like to lie down. There is some animation at lunch, where the women put on a show for the first five minutes after they eat, but we were a tepid threesome. I should have come right out with my curiosity. Martha Dodd was an agricultural girl, who had never quite understood what had happened to her and had nothing to show for it except a washed-out look about the eyes. She still believed that the life she had tasted was reality and this was only a long waiting.
“I had a beautiful place in 1928,” she told us. “Thirty acres, with a miniature golf course and a pool and a gorgeous view. All spring I was up to my ass in daisies.”
I ended by asking her to come over and meet Father. This was pure penance for having had “a mixed motive” and being ashamed of it. One doesn’t mix motives in Hollywood – it is confusing. Everybody understands, and the climate wears you down. A mixed motive is conspicuous waste.
Jane left us at the studio gate, disgusted by my cowardice. Martha had worked up inside to a pitch about her career – not a very high pitch, because of seven years of neglect, but a sort of nervous acquiescence, and I was going to speak strongly to Father. They never did anything for people like Martha, who had made them so much money at one time. They let them slip away into misery eked out with extra work – it would have been kinder to ship them out of town. And Father was being so proud of me this summer. I had to keep him from telling everybody just how I had been brought up so as to produce such a perfect jewel. And Bennington – oh, what an exclusive – dear God, my heart. I assured him there was the usual proportion of natural-born skivvies and biddies tastefully concealed by throw-overs from Sex Fifth Avenue,* but Father had worked himself up to practically an alumnus. “You’ve had everything,” he used to say happily. Everything included roughly the two years in Florence, where I managed against heavy odds to be the only virgin in school, and the courtesy debut in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a veritable flower of the fine old cost-and-gross aristocracy.
So I knew he would do something for Martha Dodd and, as he went into his office, I had great dreams of doing something for Johnny Swanson, the cowboy, too, and Evelyn Brent, and all sorts of discarded flowers. Father was a charming and sympathetic man – except for that time I had seen him unexpectedly in New York – and there was something touching about his being my father. After all, he was my father – he would do anything in the world for me.
Only Rosemary Schmiel was in the outer office, and she was on Birdy Peter’s phone. She waved for me to sit down, but I was full of my plans and, telling Martha to take it easy, I pressed the clicker under Rosemary’s desk and went towards the opened door.
“Your father’s in conference,” Rosemary called. “Not in conference, but I ought to…”
By this time I was through the door and a little vestibule and another door, and caught Father in his shirtsleeves, very sweaty and trying to open a window. It was a hot day, but I hadn’t realized it was that hot, and thought he was ill.
“No, I’m all right,” he said. “What is it?”
I told him. I told him the whole theory of people like Martha Dodd, walking up and down his office. How could he use them and guarantee them regular employment? He seemed to take me up excitedly and kept nodding and agreeing, and I felt closer to him than I had for a long time. I came close and kissed him on his cheek. He was trembling and his shirt was soaked through.
“You’re not well,” I said, “or you’re in some sort of stew.”
“No, I’m not at all.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, it’s Monroe,” he said. “That goddam little Vine Street Jesus! He’s in my hair night and day!”
“What’s happened?” I asked, very much cooler.
“Oh, he sits like a little goddamn priest or rabbi and says what he’ll do and he won’t do. I can’t tell you now – I’m half crazy. Why don’t you go along?”
“I won’t have you like this.”
“Go along, I tell you!” I sniffed, but he never drank.
“Go and brush your hair,” I said. “I want you to see Martha Dodd.”
“In here! I’d never get rid of her.”
“Out there then. Go wash up first. Put on another shirt.”
With an exaggerated gesture of despair, he went into the little bathroom adjoining. It was hot in the office as if it had been closed for hours, and maybe that was making him sick, so I opened two more windows.
“You go along,” Father called from behind the closed door of the bathroom. “I’ll be there presently.”
“Be awfully nice to her,” I said. “No charity.”
As if it were Martha speaking for herself, a long low moan came from somewhere in the room. I was startled – then transfixed, as it came again, not from the bathroom where Father was, not from outside, but from a closet in the wall across from me. How I was brave enough I don’t know, but I ran across to it and opened it, and Father’s secretary, Birdy Peters, tumbled out stark naked – just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of stifling, stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor, with the one hand still clutching some clothes, and lay on the floor bathed in sweat – just as Father came in from the bathroom. I could feel him standing behind me, and without turning I knew exactly how he looked, for I had surprised him before.
“Cover her up,” I said, covering her up myself with a rug from the couch. “Cover her up!”
I left the office. Rosemary Schmiel saw my face as I came out and responded with a terrified expression. I never saw her again or Birdy Peters either. As Martha and I went out, Martha asked: “What’s the matter, dear?” – and when I didn’t say anything: “You did your best. Probably it was the wrong time. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take you to see a very nice English girl. Did you see the girl that Stahr danced with at our table the other night?”
So at the price of a little immersion in the family drains I had what I wanted.
* * *
I don’t remember much about our call. She wasn’t at home was one reason. The screen door of her house was unlocked, and Martha went in, calling “Kathleen” with bright familiarity. The room we saw was bare and formal as a hotel; there were flowers about, but they did not look like sent flowers. Also, Martha found a note on the table, which said: “Leave the dress. Have gone looking for a job. Will drop by tomorrow.”
Martha read it twice, but it didn’t seem to be for Stahr, and we waited five minutes. People’s houses are very still when they are gone. Not that I expect them to be jumping around, but I leave the observation for what it’s worth. Very still. Prim almost, with just a fly holding down the place and paying no attention to you, and the corner of a curtain blowing.
“I wonder what kind of a job,” said Martha. “Last Sunday she went somewhere with Stahr.”
But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here – producer’s blood, I thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the placid sunshine. It was no use – I felt just black and awful. I had always been proud of my body – I had a way of thinking of it as geometric, which made everything it did seem all right. And there was probably not any kind of place, including churches and office and shrines, where people had not embraced – but no one had ever stuffed me naked into a hole in the wall in the middle of a business day.
* * *
“If you were in a drugstore,” said Stahr, “having a prescription filled—”
“You mean a chemist’s?” Boxley asked.
“If you were in a chemist’s,” conceded Stahr, “and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick—”
“Very ill?” queried Boxley.
“Very ill. Then, whatever
caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures.”
“A murder outside the window, you mean.”
“There you go,” said Stahr, smiling. “It might be a spider working on the pane.”
“Of course – I see.”
“I’m afraid you don’t, Mr Boxley. You see it for your medium, but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us.”
“I might as well leave,” said Boxley. “I’m no good to you. I’ve been here three weeks and I’ve accomplished nothing. I make suggestions, but no one writes them down.”
“I want you to stay. Something in you doesn’t like pictures, doesn’t like telling a story this way—”
“It’s such a damned bother,” exploded Boxley. “You can’t let yourself go…”
He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow – that they were talking in the always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an open sea. Or else – it seemed at times – they were in a huge quarry – where even the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half-obliterated inscriptions of the past.
“I keep wishing you could start over,” Boxley said. “It’s this mass production.”
“That’s the condition,” said Stahr. “There’s always some lousy condition. We’re making a life of Rubens – suppose I asked you to do portraits of rich dopes like Bill Brady and me and Gary Cooper* and Marcus when you wanted to paint Jesus Christ? Wouldn’t you feel you had a condition? Our condition is that we have to take people’s own favourite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won’t you give us some sugar, Mr Boxley?”
Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood* and he recognized that Stahr, like Lincoln, was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a point where the content of the “A productions” was wider and richer than that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only, as Mr Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman.
The Last Tycoon Page 12