by Irwin Shaw
“Look, where the youths are coming, lightly up they spring, and not for nothing, hark! It’s good to hear them sing, Hymen O Hymenaeus Hymen hither O Hymenaeus.”
It was a curious wedding reception. Conceivably, weddings like it took place all over the world, but while it was happening you had the feeling that it was special to Hollywood, that only in Hollywood would two hundred and fifty people gather to celebrate the marriage of two people who had divorced each other, married other mates, divorced them and then remarried. Anywhere else, you felt, the principals would at least have gone off to some obscure country town and been quietly (and, as it turned out, impermanently) joined by a justice of the peace and two witnesses. But not in Hollywood. Not in 1937. Two hundred and fifty guests, with photographers and newspapermen and heads of studios, and the full casts of the two pictures in which the bride and groom were working at the moment, and the bride in a dazzling white gown that had been made for her as a present by the wardrobe department of the studio.
Delaney was the host. He was married at that time to the wife who was later to shoot at him with a hunting rifle. She did not work in the movies, and to keep herself from being bored she gave parties. She was handsome and frivolous and, luckily, a bad shot. Delaney, who did not like parties, but who paid for them to keep peace in the family, spent most of the evening in the bar, playing gin rummy.
The groom, Otis Carrington, tall, courtly, rich-voiced, smiling, was sitting between two of his ex-wives on the sweeping Colonial staircase. He was sipping black coffee out of a large cup, because he was fighting the drink. He never even glanced at the woman he had married that afternoon, and said to his ex-wives, “I don’t have to go to a psychiatrist. I know what’s wrong with me. I was in love with my sister until I was thirty years old. The day I realized that I knew I could finally lick the bottle.” He also said, “The time I knew I’d eventually have to give up the drink was the morning I woke up in Naples. I’d gone to a party in Chicago two and a half weeks before and I woke up in Naples in a first-class cabin full of flowers and empty whisky bottles and I didn’t remember crossing the ocean—in fact, I didn’t remember getting to the Dearborn Station.”
When sober, he was gentle, witty and considerate and had the best manners of any man Jack had ever met. But when under the influence, he had been known to break up saloons, house parties, dramatic presentations, marriages, old friendships, political meetings. In later years, when, after months of abstinence, he felt a binge coming on, he hired a burly male nurse to accompany him and minimize the violence until he was too spent and sick to go on. Sometimes, the male nurse would be on duty two weeks on end. Carrington was of that old line of actors, disappearing even then, who behaved like actors, profligate, showily dressed, gallant, improvident, given to gestures. On the first day of the war in 1917, he had walked out of the theatre in which he was starring in New York, put a flower in the buttonhole of his expensive suit, and, swinging a cane, had strolled down to the nearest recruiting office to enlist as a private soldier. Born in a different era, brought up in other, less romantic schools, Jack nevertheless admired Carrington enormously, and when his own war came (it was in the middle of a picture), it took all of Delaney’s arguments and the pleadings of his agent to keep Jack from following Carrington’s example.
Once, on the set, a young actor had come up to Carrington and had asked him to tell him, in just a short sentence, what the secret was of being a good actor. Carrington had pretended to be thinking deeply, had rubbed the big, impressive nose judiciously and had answered, “Be delighted, my boy, be delighted.”
On this wedding night, Carrington also spoke of the night of his first marriage to the bride. “It was an even fancier party than this,” Carrington said to his ex-wives, as he sat between them, fastidiously sipping his coffee, “and I happened to pass behind a couch on which my new wife was sitting with an English earl whom I had met when I was playing in London, and she was saying, ‘Of course, my dear, everyone knows Carrington is impotent.’” He chuckled good-naturedly, thinking of those distant, vernal festivities.
Jack spent most of the evening arguing. In fact, it seemed that ever since he had come to Hollywood two months before, he had spent almost every evening arguing. There were many things to argue about, of course, but for the most part what people argued about in the drawing rooms of Beverly Hills during that time was how good or bad the movies were and about the Spanish Civil War. “Making a good movie here,” Jack said, out of the ripeness of his two months’ experience as a featured player, “is a pure freak of luck. If anybody ever says an honest word in a movie it’s the craziest kind of accident. Nobody must be offended—not the rich, not the poor, not labor, not capital, not the Jews, not the Gentiles, not mothers, not priests, not politicians, not businessmen, not the English, not the Germans, not the Turks, not anybody. The word above every studio gateway is COWARDICE, written in letters of fire. So nobody ever says a word of truth on any subject. Since I’ve come out here I’ve hardly met anybody over the age of twenty who hasn’t been married at least twice and yet every picture that comes out is a poem in praise of monogamy. Just about everybody between the Pacific Ocean and the Los Angeles City Hall is chasing the dollar so hard they only have time to breathe on Sundays, and yet if you believed the movies, you’d be sure the only way to be happy is to live in a garret on twelve dollars a week. Ninety percent of the people here are so scared of Hitler they have nightmares about him every night of the year, and there hasn’t been a whisper yet in any picture I’ve seen suggesting that he might be more dangerous than my Aunt Milly. There’s more talk against Franco in Lucey’s Bar during one lunchtime than there is in the trenches before Madrid and every time somebody announces he’s going to make a picture about the Spanish Civil War, one letter from a follower of Father Coughlin stops it dead. Christ, this room is full of people who’ve spent most of their lives cheating and breaking laws and sleeping with other peoples’ wives and they’re all as fat and happy and respected as can be, and yet they keep making pictures in which crime never pays, in which the evildoer is always punished, in which a girl has to die or wind up in a life of shame if she as much as sleeps with her fiancé before she gets married. This is the first time in the history of any art that so many people, so much wealth, so much talent and machinery have been collected in one place to create a total disguise…the billion-dollar mask, the great big happy American smile…”
Standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a new dinner jacket made for him by a tailor to whom Delaney had introduced him, surrounded by handsome, tanned, perfumed, well-dressed people whose names were constantly in the newspaper, Jack rattled on happily, high on the unaccustomed wedding champagne, enjoying himself, orating, laying down the law, confident of himself and careless of consequences. He had a scornful feeling of superiority over the well-known people who were listening to him, some of them shamefacedly agreeing with him, others flushed and hating him. They were hungry for money, he felt, and would do anything necessary to gain it or hold onto it, while he, with no bank accounts, no stocks and bonds, no real-estate holdings or interests in oil companies, with only his youth and his talent at his disposal, believed that he didn’t care a damn whether he was rich or poor. It was like being invincibly healthy and walking through a hospital ward for the incurably ill, the incurably ill who gluttonously kept feeding on the poison that was killing them. While he was talking, too, with the glass in his hand, and the good feel of the new suit on his shoulders, he was conscious of Carlotta Lee standing among the others, watching him with a hidden, tiny smile on her lips. The smile seemed to say that she had been judging him and had finally made up her mind this evening and that the judgment would please him. He had kissed her that afternoon—but only on the set, before a hundred actors, extras, grips, and he hadn’t said more than a few words to her, outside the demands of the script, since he had started working on the picture, but he had decided that afternoon that he was in love with her and the smile, secre
t and inviting in the swirl of celebration, seemed to say, “Yes, of course.”
It was the kind of evening that he had dreamed of for himself all through the awkwardness and hesitations of adolescence, and he was making the most of it. It was frivolous and garish and the arguments, at a time and in a place like that, were mere verbal exercises, and he knew after three or four evenings like this they would bore him forever more, but tonight he was making the most of it.
“Now, look here,” said a man by the name of Bernstein, who had produced dozens of movies and who had been listening to Jack with a sullen pout on his heavy, sunburned face, “you’re shooting a picture right now, with Delaney, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Jack said, nodding at Delaney, who had come up to join the group.
“I suppose that’s the big holy exception,” Bernstein said, sneering. “I suppose that’s a big fat work of Art.”
“No,” Jack said. “It’s a piece of crap, like everything else.”
There was a little hush and then Delaney laughed and everybody, with the exception of Bernstein, laughed with him. Delaney patted Jack on the shoulder. “The lad’s only been out here two months,” he said. “His vocabulary is still vigorous. He’ll tone down.”
“What the hell are you doing out here, if that’s the way you feel?” Bernstein asked pugnaciously. “Why don’t you go back to Broadway with the rest of the Communists?”
“I’m out here to make my pile, Mr. Bernstein,” Jack said, taunting the man, enjoying his anger. “Then, in a year or two I’ll buy a ranch and raise cows and orchids and retire from the public eye.”
“A ranch,” Mr. Bernstein said. “That’s a new one. I’ll wait to see your picture, young man. Maybe you’ll be able to retire from the public eye sooner than you think.” He stalked off, an outraged patriot of the magic and beautiful country created each day on the sound stages he loved and dominated.
“How old are you, Jack?” Delaney asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“Good,” Delaney said. “You can still talk the way you’re talking. But get it all in now. Because at the age of twenty-three, it will be insufferable.” With a grin, he went off, small, tough, knowing, to investigate the report that an English poet was drunk on crème de menthe in the kitchen and was making improper advances to the butler.
Carlotta was smiling more openly, the judgment in her long, green eyes clearer and clearer.
“I think this party is over the hill,” Carlotta said. “I think it’s time to take me home. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
And that was all he did that night. Take her home and leave her at her door. That night.
“I had a peculiar sense of honor. In those days.”
Another night. They had been working on exteriors on the back lot and it was past eleven when they finished and once again Carlotta had asked Jack to drive her home, because her own car was in the garage getting a new grille put on it after a crash. She drove well, but too fast, and her car was constantly laid up, being repaired.
They drove in silence, up the winding canyon road toward Carlotta’s house. From time to time Carlotta’s dog, a huge Belgian shepherd that she took with her almost everywhere, leaned forward from the back seat and licked the back of her neck and she pushed him away impatiently, saying “God damn it, Buster, control yourself.” The dog would then sit back, hurt, his mouth open, panting, his tongue lolling, until he could contain his love no longer and would repeat the gesture.
Carlotta kept looking obliquely over at Jack as they drove, an expression composed of curiosity and amusement on her triangular, vivid pale face. Again and again since the night of the wedding, Jack had surprised that same look, disturbing, mocking, inviting, all at the same time, on Carlotta’s face. For his own reasons, Jack had avoided, whenever he could, being alone with her or looking at her too closely, but the face, with its flooding vitality, its violent blond sensuality, its hint of malicious amusement, haunted his dreams and tormented his waking hours.
“You don’t seem to have any trouble controlling yourself, do you?” Carlotta said. “Not like poor old slobbery, heart-on-his-tongue Buster here, at all.”
“What do you mean by that?” Jack asked, although he knew what she meant well enough.
“Nothing,” Carlotta said, laughing. “Nothing at all. What did you do back East—take a holy vow to be rude to movie stars?”
“If I’ve been rude,” Jack said stiffly, “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”
“You’ve been rude to everybody out here,” Carlotta said carelessly, “and you’re well loved for it. This is Masochism Alley out here. The harder they’re hit, the better they like it Don’t change. It’ll ruin your charm.”
She had a strange way of talking. She had been brought up in Texas, one of seven children of an oil-rigger who had wandered all over the state like a gypsy with his brood, but there was no remnant of her native drawl in her speech. She had worked ferociously with speech teachers for two years and now when she spoke she sounded like a girl who had been to the best Eastern schools and who had consciously corrected all the more affected mannerisms of the language she had learned there. The voice itself was low and controlled and she made the men she knew uncomfortable and hesitant in her presence, as though she were ready at any moment to ridicule any stupidity or pretension. On the set she was concentrated and intelligent, selfish, ferocious in defending her interests, confident of her talent, merciless to fraud. Delaney had told Jack in the beginning, “I’ll do my best to protect you from her, but you’ve got to watch out for yourself, too. She’ll sweep you off the screen if you relax your guard for a minute.”
Her body, which was justly famous, and which seemed lithe and soft and girlish, she kept hardened to an athlete’s pitch, and she watched her food and drink like a heavyweight champion at a training table. She was twenty-six years old and when she wanted she could pass convincingly as eighteen. She read a great deal, without much plan or discrimination, as though making up for the lack of education in the oil-rigger’s wake, and her mind was a grab bag of facts and quotations from the most surprising places. Fiercely intent on her career, she had never been married.
All these things, as they had been revealed to him in the past few weeks, had pushed Jack swiftly through the stages of admiration, desire, and finally, love. But he had said nothing yet.
Jack drove up to the sprawling white house set on the hillside and stopped the car. The dog began to whimper in back, eager to get out.
“Oh, Christ,” Carlotta said.
“What’s the matter?”
Carlotta indicated a Cadillac parked in her driveway. “I have a guest,” she said. “You can’t come in.”
“Why not?” Jack asked.
“The guest would be jealous.”
“Who is he?” Jack peered speculatively at the car. It was large, new, and rich, but in Hollywood that meant nothing. All it might mean was that somebody had scraped together a thousand dollars for the first down payment and was hoping for the best. He himself had an open Ford that he had bought second-hand.
“Who is he?” Carlotta asked incredulously. “Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Am I supposed to know?”
Carlotta laughed and leaned over and kissed his forehead swiftly. “For ignorance,” she said, “above and beyond the call of Hollywood.” Then she told him the name of the owner of the Cadillac. It was Kutzer, the head of the studio, the man who had dubbed Jack, James Royal. “I thought everybody knew,” Carlotta said carelessly. “It’s been going on since two days before the Flood.”
“Do you like him?” Jack asked.
“Stop whining, Buster,” Carlotta said to the dog.
“Do you like him?” Jack repeated. Kutzer was at least forty, married, with two children. He had thinning hair and a small paunch, and was the object of fear and ridicule at the studio, like all other men in similar positions in Hollywood. Jac
k had never heard anyone say that he liked the man.
“Let’s put it this way,” Carlotta said. “I don’t like him tonight”
“Well, give him my regards,” Jack said flatly. “Good night.”
Carlotta opened the car door, then closed it defiantly. “I don’t want to say good night,” she said. “I want a drink.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to find a bottle in there,” Jack said, indicating the house.
“I want a drink with you,” Carlotta said. “Alone with you. And don’t be so godamn twenty-two-year-old stuffy. Sit down and keep quiet, Buster.” She settled against Jack’s shoulder, “Do you know the way from here to your place, Jack?” she said.
Jack looked once more at the house, secret and dark with its drawn curtains, and at the shiny expensive car in the driveway. Then he started the Ford and turned it around swiftly and drove back down the winding canyon road.
Jack lived on the wrong side of Beverly Hills, below the trolley tracks, in a section of what were called patio apartments. The building was in the form of a hollow square, with an entrance through an archway and a big, fussy garden traversed by gravel walks.
As he stopped the car, he saw that the owner of a bungalow across the street was standing in front of his house in shirtsleeves and suspenders, gravely watering his lawn. It was hard to know what love of the earth or what detestation of his own fireside had driven his neighbor to this midnight ceremony.
They got out of the Ford and, with the dog sniffing before them, went through the arch into the central garden. There were lights on in some of the windows and from one of them came the strains of “Valencia” being played by a dance band on the radio. A damp fragrance of laurel and eucalyptus came up from the garden. Jack opened the door to his apartment and pulled the curtains so that when he put on the light his neighbors would not be able to see in. Before he could turn on the switch, Carlotta moved between him and the wall, and stood there, waiting, in the darkness. “Well, now,” she said.