This Time We Love

by Reynolds, Mack

  But Max seemed to stroll through the job as carelessly as he did life in general. Not that he didn’t perform satisfactorily. In fact, both Manny King, the director, and Mike Rogers, the production manager, who among the whole staff producing Horatius were themselves on the calm and collected side, found him a perfect go-between in the multilingual conglomeration of talent which they were manipulating. With a joke in Italian, his easy grin and gentle voice, he could bring a screaming, arm-waving costume designer to sanity in a matter of moments. Max, in short, was a jewel.

  It became accepted around the studios that Max and Clara Lucciola were a team, although it was known that Nadine Barney carried a torch for the big American. It was also known that while Max and Clara were most often together, that both of them played the field and that the easygoing Max was an athlete who might be found doing push-ups in just about anybody’s bed, come evening.

  Max remained on friendly terms with Nadine, although the first few days after their evening on the town and its culmination in her apartment were on the difficult side. He’d found out, too late, that Nadine played for keeps. He hadn’t wanted to hurt the girl, but this just wasn’t in the cards, and the sooner he cut things off, he realized the easier it would be for her. Had he prolonged the affair, the eventual break might have been as shattering to her as her early marriage must have been. As it was now, Max felt, it wouldn’t be too long before she met another lover and, eventually, another husband, in this industry which she so obviously loved.

  Max himself had no intentions of remaining in the field, no matter how fascinating it was on a temporary basis. It was too frenetic for him. Too much cutthroat competition, not only between actors, but in every department. The top of the heap, in the cinema world, was a heady position, and the professionals were willing to pull off anything to reach that pinnacle. Not for Max, thank you; he desired neither wealth nor fame.

  But the spotlight can fall even on those who avoid it, and it came to Max Fielding after the actual shooting from Cinecittà to the north of Rome where a large set had been built on the Tiber River for the climactic scenes of the film.

  The shooting script called for Lars Porsena, King of the Etruscans who were trying to capture Rome, to march his overwhelming army toward the practically defenseless city. The Romans, their forces not yet fully mobilized, had only one chance, to desert that part of the city on the same side of the Tiber as the enemy, and draw back over the one bridge that connected Rome’s two halves. The bridge must then be destroyed before the enemy could overrun it. But Lars Porsena’s array appeared before the bridge could be chopped down and the city seemed lost. Clark Talmadge, playing Horatius, then made his climactic suggestion that he and two companions hold off the enemy while the rest destroy the bridge behind them.

  It was the big scene. The burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, the chariot race in Ben Hur, the battle of the Alamo in the movie of that name. It was the big scene.

  And it wasn’t coming off.

  The shooting script called for Horatius, flanked by Spurius Lartius and Herminius, to take on the whole Etruscan army in five to ten minutes of the most furious hand-to-hand combat the movie industry had ever attempted. The film’s publicity was zeroed in on this scene. It was going to make or break the production.

  And it simply wasn’t coming off.

  Clark Talmadge and the two featured players who did his companions looked nothing if not ludicrous facing up to the thousands of enemy warriors charging in on them. Reality simply wasn’t present. So they shot it again and again.

  Manny King was famed for his patience. While others were on the verge of cracking, he patiently continued to work, bring to bear his accumulated experience of a career that went back to the silents. He tried different angles at first, then brought in the writers for a different approach. That was out. You couldn’t shoot King of Kings without the crucifixion scene and you weren’t going to shoot Horatius at the Bridge without the featured star and two companions holding off the whole enemy army while the bridge was destroyed behind them.

  Max stood to one side, unobtrusively, awaiting a need for his services.

  They’d just finished running through one take. Manny King shook his white head and rubbed a palm over his mouth, sighing. He said gently, “Take a break. We’ll have to do it again. Clark?”

  The star, massive in his armor, approached him. “What the hell’s wrong now?” he complained, for once forgetting his fag mannerisms while off camera.

  The director shook his head. “I don’t know. For one thing, could you look a bit — ah — madder at those chaps you’re supposedly butchering?”

  Talmadge registered impatience. “I’ll try, Manny.”

  Manny King was beginning to feel the pressure himself. Max suddenly realized the elderly director was looking at him. “Well, what are you shaking your head about?” he said to Max testily. It was the nearest Max had ever seen the man to being out of temper.

  Max hadn’t known he was shaking his head. He shrugged it off and said easily, “I don’t think any of these boys have ever been in combat.”

  The bit player who was playing Herminius snorted. “I was on Guadalcanal, buddy.” He shook the short spear he was carrying. “But I’ll be damned if I fought with anything like this.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” Max said amiably. “Trouble is, you’re using that thing like you suppose the Romans used to handle spears. Nuts. Who knows what kind of drill a Roman top sergeant used to put his recruits through?”

  Manny King was eying him speculatively. He said, an element of disgust in his voice, “All right, what’s the alternative?”

  Well, here was an interesting job shot to hell. However, Max was philosophical. Actually, he couldn’t care less. He was in this for kicks, it wasn’t important. So he lost the job. So what?

  He looked out over the score or so extras and stunt men who did most of the fighting in the bridge scene, representing the Etruscan leading warriors. Max said, “Any of you Italians served in the war in the infantry?”

  One husky, a ragged scar down his cheek, said, “The Bersagliere, best riflemen in the world.”

  Max looked at him. “Oh? How’s your bayonet drill?”

  The Italian scowled at him. “The best.”

  Max looked around for Alec, the special effects man. “You got a couple of those short spears, the ones where the spear head slips back into the heft when you jab it into somebody?”

  Alec looked at Manny King, who nodded impatiently. The two spears came and Max handed one to the Italian. They moved over toward the end of the bridge, on the river’s edge.

  “Okay,” Max said. “So I’m standing here. One of the Romans. And you come at me. But use that spear like it was a rifle with a bayonet on it, understand?”

  “I understand.”

  Max looked at him and sneered. “Best riflemen in the world, eh? Where were you captured, wop, in North Africa or Sicily? The Dagos were the lousiest soldiers in — ”

  The other was coming at him, the spear held in a double grip, reaching out juttingly for Max’s body. The Italian’s face was in a frenzy of rage.

  Max dropped his right foot back, went into standard Marine Corps bayonet drill routine. He grabbed his own spear, let it shift in his hands until he was using it somewhat similarly to a quarterstaff, that weapon of old of the British yeoman of Robin Hood’s day. He broke the other’s charge and went over to the offensive.

  The Italian’s training in the bayonet was a different style than American manuals taught. The action was fast, furious, and terminated in possibly fifteen seconds with Max tripping up the other man and throwing him to his back. Without pausing, he jabbed the spear, with its special effects head, into the man’s belly, immediately under his cuirass. Then he rammed his foot into the man’s chest and jerked, as though wrenching the spear free from the other’s rib cage. He twirled and presented his weapon as though ready to take on another foe.

  There were a hundred dropped
jaws, a thousand round pair of eyes.

  Max said easily, to Manny King, “That’s what combat looks like.”

  The director stared at him.

  Max said, uncomfortably, “I taught bayonet drill and judo once while I was doing a hitch in the Marines.”

  Manny King looked at Clark Talmadge. The actor shrugged.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” King said. “The army rejected you.”

  Max said, “You’ve got several thousand assorted extras here. What you want are the guys who have been American Marines, British Commandos, Italian paratroopers. Make them stop using those Roman short swords like swords and use them like they’d use a trench knife. They aren’t much bigger than the combat knives we used in Korea.” Max paused, then added, “Don’t rehearse the scene, let them really fight.”

  The elderly director looked at him for a long moment, his mouth twisting. Then he turned to his first assistant. “We’re going to have to do some reshooting of those earlier scenes where Horatius puts on his armor.”

  The assistant looked at him. “Why, Mr. King? You okayed those scenes last week. The rushes were beauties.”

  Manny King said gently, “Because we have to change the type of helmet Horatius wears. It’s got to cover the face.”

  Clark Talmadge said hastily, “See here, I don’t need a stand-in for this scene.”

  The director looked at him and for once used profanity. “The hell you don’t,” he said. Then: “Max, you’ve just become an actor.”

  The Italian extra Max had just finished off was sitting up now and rubbing his stomach ruefully. “Hey,” he grinned at Max, “that was a good idea, eh? Getting me mad. We make a good fight, eh?”

  The set broke up into chattering discussion of the new situation and Manny King dispatched his assistants to go through both the Roman and Etruscan armies, locating extras who had experienced hand-to-hand combat.

  For a moment, Max Fielding stood alone. He snorted in self-deprecation. He’d stuck his neck out and now look what he’d come up with. He had a sneaking suspicion that in the next few days, in spite of body armor, he was going to wind up with many a bruise, many a lump, many a black and blue spot. Well, it all came under leading the full life and accumulating as much experience as you could cram into the sixty or seventy years allotted you — and that was his philosophy, wasn’t it?

  A messenger boy said, “Signore Fielding? Miss McEvoy would like to see you.”

  “Oh? Where is she?”

  “In her dressing room, Signore.” The boy leered.

  Max grunted. Marcy’s reputation was all-embracing. He wondered if even this half-pint Italian kid had experienced her bed.

  On this set the featured stars had American house trailers converted into dressing rooms. Max knew the one Marcia McEvoy occupied. He knocked at the door. Her voice called, “Max? Come on in.”

  Marcy McEvoy sat at her dressing table, nonchalantly doing her hair. Her eyebrows went up quizzically as she looked at him. Max shot a glance up and down the length of the three-room trailer. No one else was present.

  “What’s the matter?” she said throatily.

  Nothing was the matter except that La McEvoy, Hollywood’s most notorious nympho, wore nothing above her waist. And her eyes were slumberous.

  Max swallowed. Marcy McEvoy, the sex symbol. The woman ten million single men dreamed about each night. Marcy McEvoy — Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and Sheba all wrapped up into one. Her breasts, he decided, had lost nothing to the years, and reached an acme of perfection, but he had already known that. He’d seen the McEvoy figure being “blond all over” as a pin-up girl in one of the men’s magazines, back before she’d become big enough that she didn’t need such publicity.

  She said now, as though innocently, “Oh. Do you mind my being like this? We get so used to dressing room informality in this business, you know.” She picked up a nylon dressing gown and slipped it over her shoulders. It accomplished exactly nothing, being utterly transparent.

  She looked at him archly in her mirror, even as she continued with her comb and cosmetics. “I thought Bert said you were in toys — or something.”

  “A great kidder, Bert,” Max said. “You sent for me, Miss McEvoy?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and for a split second Max was reminded somehow of a mink. “Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way,” she murmured. “I wanted to talk to you. Sit down, Max.”

  He found room on a small couch and looked at her, wondering what was coming now. Max Fielding’s nature was such that he could view a Marcy McEvoy and completely appreciate her desirability as a woman, without feeling the need to sample. Sex wasn’t that important to him. It never had been. For that matter, he had a certain aversion to a jug that had been to the well as often as this one. He might be on the promiscuous side himself, but it wasn’t a mania with him. He felt no compulsion to bed every woman he met. And he felt no desire to be one more cipher in Marcy McEvoy’s lengthy lists of bedded males.

  La McEvoy’s forehead wrinkled in the slightest of frowns. She could evidently sense that she wasn’t getting through to him as expected. She said, finally, “Your performance with that Italian clod was quite impressive.”

  Max shifted in his seat. “He was a pretty good boy,” he protested.

  Marcy looked him up and down again. “This production is a farce,” she said, “with that Clark Talmadge pansy playing opposite me. Suppose I put pressure to bear on Manny and Mike King to have you take his place in the whole film, not just the battle scenes?”

  Max was on his feet. “I keep telling people …” he began, but then broke it off and started over again. “Miss McEvoy,” he said, “thanks a million. However, I’m no actor and Mr. Talmadge is. Just because I know hand-to-hand combat doesn’t mean I’m an old pro like Talmadge in the acting game. If you’ll excuse me, I’d better be getting back to the set.”

  Half a dozen yards from the trailer, on his way back to the set, he ran into Nadine Barney, marching briskly about her business. She stopped, looked at him, darted a glance in the direction from which he’d come and flushed. Max came to a halt before her, knew what she was thinking but said nothing.

  Nadine said, “Congratulations.”

  He wasn’t sure how she meant it.

  She said crisply, looking him in the face in her old manner, “Mr. Rogers tells me you have been promoted from errand boy to technical adviser. There should be quite a difference in pay.” She looked at her overgrown watch. “Mr. King told me to ask you to be back on the set for rehearsals by a quarter past.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Max said. He wanted to explain the Marcy McEvoy situation to her, for some unknown reason, but didn’t know how.

  She took the problem out of his hands, saying briskly, “You might think this none of my affair, but anything that fouls up production comes under the head of Production Department business. And of all things that can make a company go to pot, the pressures of emotional explosion brought on by … romantic intrigue are tops.”

  He looked at her wryly. “I’ll remember that, honey. See you later.”

  She turned abruptly to go, but then suddenly had turned again and the business-like outer shell that was Nadine Barney’s front had melted away. She was in his arms, wailing, “Max, Max, what happened to us?”

  He held her, in embarrassment, patted her back. Her efficiently neat hair was buried in his shoulder, and he cast his eyes upward as though in silent prayer. He said, “Honey, honey, cut this out.”

  “But, Max …”

  He said gently, as gently as he could make it, “Nadine, let’s face facts. I’m just not the marrying kind.”

  She took a deep breath, evidently to keep from crying. “Then … then I don’t care. If that’s the way you are, it’s all right with me. I …”

  He was shaking his head, even though she couldn’t see the gesture. “No, it isn’t, honey. It’s just not your game. You’d just get increasingly upset. I’m a — well, what you said, a Good Time Charley. You�
�re a gal who wants a home, kids, that sort of thing.”

  She muttered something despairingly which he couldn’t make out.

  He pushed her out to arm’s length and looked into her tear-filled eyes. He took out his breast pocket handkerchief and wiped them. He felt like a heel, at the same time knowing he was doing the only thing possible. The girl was bewilderingly attractive like this. Every instinct he had was raging for him to move in on her, make her his mistress for the balance of his Rome stay. At least they’d have a couple of months together. But he shook his head. That was the easy way, but it wasn’t the fair way. He could easily louse her up emotionally so that she’d never recover a normal outlook. Nadine Barney didn’t need an affair, she needed a permanent relationship.

  Max said, “Look. I’m going to pretend this never happened. Things are exactly the way they were this morning, between us.”

  All of a sudden she was weary. “All right, Max,” she said. “Sorry.” She looked down at her watch, turned and walked away at half-speed, as Nadine Barney’s walk went.

  Max explained the day’s developments to Clara Lucciola that evening in her apartment. She was impressed. “But why didn’t you take Marcy up? It was your big chance. Everyone, especially Manny King, is disgusted with Clark Talmadge. He is becoming so — how do you say — flagrant that it is beginning to show up in the rushes. Half the footage he appears in has to wind up on the cutting room floor just to protect him from the public finding out what he really is.”

  Max was seated on the side of her bed, gently stroking her lower back, a caress Clara Lucciola evidently appreciated more than any other, save one. He said now, half in irritation, “I don’t want a big chance. Certainly not in movies. Nobody seems to believe me.”