Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  IN HER drawing room, Leda decided to leave the door open. There might, after all, be a Coast friend on the train. If she wanted to play gin with him—or her—she could do it, or if she wanted to give her—or him—the brush, she knew how to do that, too. Her window was on the wrong side of the car to watch people on the platform, and she sat in a corner where she could get a good look at the passengers going by her door. She opened a high-class book and watched the public (no longer so completely hers) going by. They all had that beaten look of people trying to find their space, bent over—surely not from the weight of their jewelry boxes and briefcases—and then peering up at the initial on her drawing room, although they could plainly see that the room was occupied by a striking, stunning, chic, glamorous, sophisticated woman, who had spent most of the past week in New York City, wishing she were dead.

  She drove that little thought out of her mind. It would do no good to dwell on that visit, ending now as the train began to pull out—her first visit to New York in four years, and the unhappiest in all her life. What the hell was the use of thinking back to the young punk from one of the dailies who had got her confused with Renée Adorée? What difference the wrong tables in restaurants and the inconveniently timed appointments at hairdressers’ and the night of sitting alone in her hotel room while a forty-dollar pair of theater tickets went to waste? The benefit in Union City, New Jersey? The standup by Ken Englander, the aging architect, who had been glad enough in other days to get once around the floor with her at the Mayfair dances? The being made to wait on the telephone by the New York office of her agent, her own agent? The ruined Sophie dress and the lost earring at that South American’s apartment? Why think of those things? Why not think of the pleasanter details of her visit?

  Think, for instance, of the nice things that had been said about her on that morning radio program. Her appearance had been for free, but the publicity was said to be valuable, covering the entire metropolitan area and sometimes heard in Pennsylvania. Then there was the swell chat with Ike Bord, publicity man for a company she had once been under contract to. “Whenner you coming back to us, Leda? . . . . Anything I can do for you while you’re in town, only too glad, you know. I didn’t even know you were here. Those bums where you are now, they never get anything in the papers.” And it was comforting to know she could still charge things at Hattie’s, where she had not bought anything in four years. And the amusing taxidriver: “Lady, I made you right away. I siss, ‘Lydia Penley. Gay me an autograft fa Harry.’ Harry’s my kid was killed in the U.S. Marines. Guadalcanal. Sure, I remembered you.” And, of course, her brother, who had come down all the way from Bridgeport with his wife, bringing Leda a pair of nylons and a bona-fide cash offer, in case she had a clean car she wasn’t using. The telephone service at her hotel had been something extra special because one of the operators formerly had been president of Leda’s Brooklyn fan club. Through it all was the knowledge that her train fare and hotel bill were paid for by the company because she obligingly posed for fashion stills for the young-matron departments of the women’s magazines, so the whole trip was not costing her more than eight or nine hundred dollars, including the visit to Hattie’s. There were some nice things to remember, and she remembered them.

  THE train rolled through Chester County, and it was new country to Leda. It reminded her of the English countryside and of American primitives.

  She got up and closed her door once, before washing her hands, but reopened it when she was comfortable. Traffic in the passageway had become light. The train conductor and the Pullman conductor came to collect her tickets and asked for her last name. “Leda Pentleigh,” she said. This signified nothing to the representative of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but the Pullman conductor said, “Oh, yes, Miss Pentleigh. Hope you have an enjoyable trip,” and Leda thanked him and said she was sure she would, lying in her beautiful teeth. She was thinking about sending the porter for a menu when the huntin’-shootin’ type stood himself in her doorway and knocked. “Yes?” she said.

  “Could a member of Actors’ Equity speak to you for a moment, Miss Pentleigh?” he said. He didn’t so much say the line as read it. She knew that much—that rehearsal was behind the words and the way he spoke them.

  “To be sure,” she said. “Sit down, won’t you?”

  “Let me introduce myself. My name is Kenyon Littlejohn, which of course doesn’t mean anything to you, unless you’ve seen me?”

  “I confess I did see you in the station, Mr. Littlejohn. In fact, I almost spoke to you. I thought I recognized you.”

  He smiled, showing teeth that were a challenge to her own. He took a long gold case out of his inside coat pocket and she took a cigarette. “That can mean two things,” he said. “Either you’ve seen me—I’ve been around a rather long time, never any terribly good parts. I’ve usually got the sort of part where I come on and say, ‘Hullo, thuh, what’s for tea? Oh, crom-pits! How jolly!’” She laughed and he laughed. “Or else you know my almost-double. Man called Crosby? Very Back Bay-Louisburg Square chap from Boston. Whenever I’ve played Boston, people are always coming up to me and saying, ‘Hello, Francis.’”

  “Oh, I’ve met Francis Crosby. He used to come to Santa Barbara and Midwick for the polo.”

  “That’s the chap,” said Kenyon Littlejohn, in his gray flannel Brooks suit, Brooks shirt, Peal shoes, Players Club tie, and signet ring. “No wonder you thought you knew me, although I’m a bit disappointed it was Crosby you knew and not me.”

  “Perhaps I did know you, though. Let me see—”

  “No. Please don’t. On second thought, the things I’ve been in—well, the things I’ve been in have been all right, mostly, but as I said before, the parts I’ve had weren’t anything I particularly care to remember. Please let me start our acquaintance from scratch.”

  “All right,” she said.

  He took a long drag on his cigarette before going on. “I hope you don’t think I’m pushy or anything of that sort, Miss Pentleigh, but the fact is I came to ask your advice.”

  “You mean about acting?” She spoke coldly, so that this insipid hambo wouldn’t think he was pulling any age stuff on her.

  “Well, hardly that,” he said. He spoke as coldly as he dared. “I’ve very seldom been without work and I’ve lived quite nicely. My simple needs and wants. No, you see, I’ve just signed my first picture contract—or, rather, it’s almost signed. I’m going out to California to make tests for the older-brother part in ‘Strange Virgin.’”

  “Oh, yes. David’s doing that, isn’t he?”

  “Uh—yes. They’re paying my expenses and a flat sum to make the test, and, if they like me, a contract. I was wondering, do you think I ought to have an agent out there? I’ve never had one, you know. Gilbert and Vinton and Brock and the other managers, they usually engage me themselves, a season ahead of time, and I’ve never needed an agent, but everybody tells me I ought to have one out there. Do you agree that that’s true?”

  “Well, of course, to some extent that depends on how good you are at reading contracts.”

  “I had a year at law school, Miss Pentleigh. That part doesn’t bother me. It’s the haggling over money that goes on out there, and I understand none of the important people deal directly with the producers.”

  “Oh, you’re planning on staying?”

  “Well . . .”

  “New York actors come out just for one picture, or, at least, that’s what they say. Of course, they have to protect themselves in case they’re floper-oos in Hollywood. Then they can always say they never planned to stay out there, and come back to New York and pan pictures till the next offer comes along, if it ever does.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” said Mr. Littlejohn.

  “‘That place,’ they say. ‘They put caps on your teeth and some fat Czechoslovakian that can’t speak English tries to tell you how to act in a horse opera,’ forgetting that the fat Czechoslovakian knows more about acting in his little finger than half the
hambos in New York. Nothing personal, of course, Mr. Little.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Littlejohn.

  “But I’ve got a bellyful of two-hundred-dollar-a-week Warfields coming out and trying to high-hat us, trying to steal scenes and finding themselves on the cutting-room floor because they don’t know the first thing about picture technique, and it serves them right when they find themselves out on their duffs and on the way back to their Algonquins and their truck-garden patches in Jackson Heights, or wherever they live. God damn it to hell, making pictures is work!”

  “I realize—”

  “Don’t give me any of that I-realize. Wait’ll you’ve got up at five and sweated out a scene all day and gone to the desert on location and had to chase rattlesnakes before you could go to bed. Find out what it’s like and then go back and tell the boys at the Lambs Club. Do that for twenty or fifteen years.” She stopped, partly for breath and partly because she didn’t know what was making her go on like this.

  “But we’re not all like that, Miss Pentleigh,” said Littlejohn when she did not go on.

  His speaking reminded her that she had been talking to an unoffending human being and not merely voicing her hatred of New York. But his being there to hear it all (and to repeat it later, first chance he got) made her angry at him in particular. “I happen to think you are, eef you don’t mind,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re Lunt and Fontanne or Helen Hayes or Joe Blow from Kokomo—if you don’t click in Hollywood, it’s because you’re not good enough. And, oh, boy, don’t those managers come out begging for us people that can’t act to do a part in their new show. When they want a name, they want a movie name. Why, in less than a week, I had chances to do a half a dozen plays, including a piece of the shows. What good can New York do me, I ask you?”

  “The satisfaction of a live audience,” he said, answering what was not a question. “Playing before a—”

  “A live audience! On a big set you play to as many people as some of the turkeys on Broadway. Live audience! Go to a première at Grauman’s Chinese or the Carthay Circle and you have people, thousands, waiting there since two o’clock in the afternoon just to get a look at you and hear you say a few words into the microphone. In New York, they think if they have three hundred people and two cops on horses, they have a crowd. On the Coast, we have better than that at a preview. A sneak preview! But of course you wouldn’t know what that is.”

  “Really, Miss Pentleigh, I’m very glad to be going to Hollywood, but I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to.”

  “That wasn’t your attitude. You sat down here as if you were patronizing me, me. And started in talking about agents and producers as if Hollywood people were pinheads from Mars. Take a good gander at some of the swishes and chiselers on Broadway.”

  “Oh, I know a lot about them.”

  “Well, then, what are you asking me for advice for?”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and got up and left.

  “Yes, and I think you’re a bit of a swish yourself,” said Leda to the closed door. She got a bottle of bourbon out of her bag and poured herself a few drinks into doubled paper cups and rang for the porter.

  PRESENTLY, a waiter brought a menu, and by that time Leda was feeling fine, with New York a couple of hundred miles and a week and a lifetime behind her. Dinner was served, and she ate everything put before her. She had a few more shots and agreed with her conscience that perhaps she had been a little rough on the actor, but she had to take it out on somebody. He wasn’t really too bad, and she forgave him and decided to go out of her way to be nice to him the next time she saw him. She thereupon rang for the porter.

  “Yes, Ma’am?” said the porter.

  “There’s a Mr. Applegate—no, that’s not his name. Littlefield. That’s it. Littlefield. Mr. Littlefield is on the train. He’s going to California. Do you think you could find ’im and ask ’im that I’d tell ’im I’d like to speak to ’im, please?”

  “The gentleman just in here before you had your dinner, Ma’am?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “Mr. Littlejohn. He’s in this same car, PA29. I’ll give him your message, Ma’am.”

  “Do that,” she said, handing the porter a ten-dollar bill.

  She straightened her hair, which needed just a little straightening, and assumed her position—languor with dignity—on the Pullman seat, gazed with something between approval and enchantment at the dark Pennsylvania countryside, and looked forward to home, California, and the friends she loved. She could be a help to Mr. Littlejohn (that name would have to be changed). She would be a help to Mr. Littlejohn. “That I will, that I will,” she said.

  [1947]

  PETER TAYLOR

  A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, in 1939, Jim Prewitt and I drove to New York City to spend our Thanksgiving holiday. Jim and I were then in our senior year at Kenyon College. There at Kenyon, which is located in the little village of Gambier, Ohio, he and I had for two years shared a room on the second floor of old Douglass House. I say “old” because at Kenyon in those days there was still a tendency to prefix that adjective to the name of everything of any worth on the campus or in the village. Oldness had for so many years been the most respected attribute of the college that it was natural for its prestige to linger on a few years after what we considered the new dispensation and the intellectual awakening. Old Douglass House was an oldish house, but it had only been given over for use as a dormitory the year that Jim and I—and most of our friends—came to Kenyon. The nine of us moved into it just a few weeks after its former occupants—a retired professor and his wife, I believe—had moved out. And we lived there during our three years at Kenyon (all of us having transferred from other colleges as sophomores)—lived there without ever caring to inquire into the age or history of the house. We were not the kind of students who cared about such things. We were hardly aware, even, of just how quaint the appearance of the house was, with its steep white gables laced with gingerbread-work, and its Gothic windows and their arched window blinds. Our unawareness—Jim’s and mine—was probably never more profound than on the late afternoon in November, in our third year at Kenyon, when we set out from Douglass House for New York City. Our plan was to spend two days in Manhattan and then go on to Boston for a day with Jim’s family.

  During the previous summer, Jim Prewitt had become engaged to a glorious, talented girl with long flaxen hair, whom he had met at a student writers’ conference somewhere out West. And I, more attached to things at home in St. Louis than Jim was to things in Boston—I had been “accepted” by an equally glorious dark-eyed girl in whose veins ran the Creole blood of old-time St. Louis. By a happy coincidence both of these glorious girls were now in New York. Carol Crawford, with her flaxen hair fixed in a bun on the back of her neck and a four-hundred-page manuscript in her suitcase, had headed East from the fateful writers’ conference in search of a publisher for her novel. Nancy Gibault had left St. Louis in September to study painting at the National Academy. The two girls were as yet unacquainted, and it was partly to the correcting of this that Jim and I meant to dedicate our Thanksgiving holiday.