Sweet Smell of Success

by Ernest Lehman

  He didn’t bother to look up at me. He just waved a hand at the chair beside the desk and muttered, “Sit down.”

  I sat, and I waited. Finally he turned the pale blue eyes on me and contemplated me for a long moment.

  “Harry,” he said, softly. His mouth drooped with gentle sadness. “Don’t you like it out here?”

  “Look, Mr. Wildbeck.” I edged forward on the chair nervously. “It isn’t my fault. I’m in there pitching. It’s —it’s—I don’t know what it is with those columnists. They print whatever I give them about our productions, and the stars—even the little nothings on the lot—but when I try to feed them anything about you, I get all kinds of resistance. I’m beginning to think they—”

  “My dear boy”—Wildbeck blinked at me with wounded surprise— “did I say anything? I only asked you, don’t you like it out here.” He took a deep suck on the cigar and unloosed a grayish cloud into the room. “In other words, Harry, I am inquiring do you enjoy the climate, and the convertible you drive, and the charge account at Dick Carroll’s, and the steaks at Chasen’s, and the wild rice at La Rue’s?” He took another drag. “And do you enjoy the comparative ease of existence between the hours of ten and five within the gates of this studio?” He shot a glance at me. “Eh? What’s that?”

  I jumped. “Well sure,” I nodded. “Yes, Mr. Wildbeck.”

  “Or do you hanker for the life you left behind as a reporter on that great New York newspaper—what is its name again?”

  “It suspended publication many years ago,” I said, looking away. “Ah yes, yes, of course. Pity.” He examined the tip of his cigar. “It is always a matter of great personal sadness to me to see men lose their jobs.”

  I swallowed the dryness in my mouth and stared down at my shoes.

  Suddenly his voice rang out sharply. “Look at me, Harry. Quick. Look what I’m doing.” My head jerked up and I saw him seize the framed photograph of his wife. “Now watch me.” He opened the top drawer of his desk, placed the photograph inside and slid the drawer shut. “Symbolism, Harry, the way we do it in pictures. The flickering candle that goes out, to show death. The glowing embers that flare up into flame, then die out, to show the course of passion.” He tapped the desk drawer. “What I have just shown you, in a traditionally artistic manner is Mrs. Wildbeck, my wife, boarding the Super Chief next week for her annual trip to New York.” His face broke into a smile that was devoid of humor. “How do you like that for imaginative symbolism, Harry? Perhaps I should have been a writer. Do you have a good imagination? You’re young. There’s still time for you to become a writer. You’d like that, wouldn’t you—to graduate from what you are doing and become a writer for the studio?”

  I swallowed. “Yes, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said, in a stunned voice.

  “All right, then.” He sat up in his chair. “Come over here, next to me.” I went to his side and saw the stills there on his desk—Mickey Van Kroll’s latest shots of the studio’s current crop of stock girls, hopefuls who had come to Hollywood with large dreams, only to wind up inevitably as glorified models for bathing suit and evening gown layouts in the fan magazines. Wildbeck’s pudgy hands were fondling the pictures like a poker player caressing a full house.

  He began to deal them onto the desk one at a time. “Nothing,” he grunted. The bathing-suit shot … the upside-down glamour shot … the all-American outdoor girl … the sweater stuff … “Nothing … nothing … nothing …” He dealt another. “Nothing,” he said, then looked up at me to catch the expression that had suddenly hit my face. “Eh, Harry?”

  “Jesus,” I breathed softly, reaching down to pick up the glossy. “Who …?” It was all so beautifully simple. Just a piece of black taffeta clinging to the body … the hair hanging carelessly, almost uncombed, to the bare shoulders … the teasing lighting, not enough of it, the kind that made your eyes strain to fill in details … and the face … lovely, but not smiling like the others … just sullen, to-hell-with-everybody sullen. She was magnificent. The caption said: “Rosemary Cobb.” I glanced at Wildbeck. I saw his face and suddenly I was back to earth again and the sick feeling was taking root in me. I tossed the photo back on the desk and tried to shrug it off with the others. “Not bad—”

  But he was already going into the speech. “… And the public is tired of the same old faces, Harry, just like you and I. They want new excitement, something to revive their fading interest. It is too long now since the studio has developed a new personality. …”

  “A year,” I said. “Laurie Sully.”

  Wildbeck waved his cigar in annoyance. “You should go far, Harry. You have a fine memory for trifles.”

  As though I could ever forget …

  He cleared the phlegm from his throat and the memory of Laurie Sully with it. “Unfortunately for these young hopefuls, they are up against the cruel facts of life out here. In order to get the opportunity to prove themselves, they must know the right people and be liked by the right people, at the right time …”

  Two years ago—poor, bewildered Susan Delacross. …

  “… But if that is the way things are, that is the way things are, and sometimes it is far more sensible to adapt oneself to life than to fight it.” He tapped the photo with a well-manicured finger and breathed, “I think I would like to help this girl, Harry. She strikes me as having wonderful potentialities. Where are you going?”

  I stopped, halfway to the door. I didn’t have to hear the rest, really. I knew it all, right down to the chuckle and the tagline about discretion being the better part of valor, California community property laws being what they were. I turned, and our eyes locked.

  “I understand, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you smile, Harry? Let me see you looking like a young man with a future.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said in a hoarse voice, and went out fast.

  I guess in any industry that numbered thousands of decent, hardworking individuals, there always had to be a few people like Finn Wildbeck—and me. The amazing thing was, we always managed to find each other.

  Personnel gave me a North Hollywood address and a telephone number. I called her on the private line, gave her a short spiel, and set up a luncheon date at the Derby.

  She arrived five minutes early, and if it hadn’t been for the hair—it was red, and down to here—I might not have recognized her. The loveliness was there all right, fresh-air, soap-and-water, early-to-bed loveliness. But the sullen, to-hell-with-everybody look had been strictly Van Kroll. She was only a kid, a bright-eyed, beautiful kid who would someday crowd Ava and Audrey right off the screen if she made the smart moves. I grabbed my third martini at the bar, and a glass of sherry for her, and we took them to a table and gave the waiter something to worry about. Then I turned to her. “Why the look?”

  “I was just wondering,” she said. “I was wondering whether you drink that way because you’re celebrating something, or because you’re as hilariously happy out here as I am?”

  “Look,” I said quickly, “we didn’t come here to talk about me.”

  The smile faded from her eyes, and I knew then that she hadn’t wanted to come to the point so terribly soon. She snapped a breadstick nervously. “Okay, Mr. Bliss. You talk … I listen.”

  I clutched at my martini. “Well”—I took a swallow—“I really gave it to you all—at least most of what there is—over the phone. Finn Wildbeck is interested—”

  “Finn Wildbeck?”

  “—is interested in having you get a publicity buildup at the studio and I’m supposed to dig for the facts to get a campaign rolling.”

  She was eyeing me closely. “Why me?”

  I laughed, but it didn’t come off. “Well, you’re not exactly what we call a monster, honey, and—and Wildbeck feels that you’ve shown sufficient promise as a motion picture personality to—to warrant going all out for you.”

  “Is that right?” She took her time lighting a cigarette. “And where, exactly, did I s
how this great promise?”

  I looked for it somewhere in the martini glass and came up with an onion. “Your screen test,” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment. “You know something, Mr. Bliss?”

  “You can call me Harry.”

  “You don’t belong out here. You don’t know how to lie worth a damn. The eyes move around a little too much and you duck behind that glass as though it were a mulberry bush.” She blew a furious stream of smoke at me. “In the first place, my screen test wasn’t just bad, it was awful. And in the second place, even if it had been good it wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference with Finn Wildbeck because there’s only one thing that makes any difference with Finn Wildbeck. Now do you want to talk straight, or must we go on playing games?”

  I looked at her. I watched her trying to be as tough and hard as she talked. And I shrugged. “Okay, baby. You’re so hep I won’t have to draw diagrams then. I’ll just put it this way: sometimes, in the picture business, you have to know the right people, and sometimes you have to yes the right people.” I drained the martini down hurriedly. “Well, the time is now … the right people are Finn Wildbeck … and you, baby, happen to have been tagged ‘it’ … that is, if you want”—I waved a hand— “whatever it is that you want.”

  Her face went pale. “And … and where do you come in?” she asked in a faltering voice.

  “Me? I’m the maker of myths. I establish the legend that you belong to me. We get seen in the right places. I whisper to the right people who whisper to the right columnists and presto … Rosemary Cobb and Harry Bliss have quote discovered each other unquote. That takes the curse off you. You can be seen in the company of Finn Wildbeck and me without Mrs. Wildbeck’s gossipy friends getting the dangerous notion that I’m along merely as window-dressing. In fact, in some places you can be seen with Wildbeck without me, because after all, everybody knows that Rosemary Cobb and Harry Bliss are quote sharing the same soda-straw at Schwab’s unquote.”

  She examined her cigarette for a long time. “And after that …?”

  I played with the silverware. I searched the crowded room desperately for the waiter and another martini. I shifted the knot of my tie. But she was still waiting for an answer. And after that?

  “Look,” I blurted out, “I don’t write the script. I only dress the set.”

  She shook her head with a wry, bitter smile. “They must pay you an awful lot of money, Harry.”

  “Listen,” I snapped, reddening, “you don’t want it, say so, but don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou routine. There are plenty more where you came from, and maybe you don’t have what it takes anyway. A pretty face, sure, but it takes more than that. It takes a strong stomach, and if you just don’t happen to have it—or want it—okay. It’s a free country.”

  That got her.

  “Who said anything about not wanting it?” she shot back in a voice that was charged with anger—anger for me, anger for the system, anger for not having been spared the opportunity to make the choice. “I’d be a fool not to want it, wouldn’t I?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t I be the prize sucker to let a Finn Wildbeck be too much for me after all I’ve gone through to get this far, which is just about nowhere at all?” She crushed out her cigarette as though it were a poisonous spider and fought back the bitter tears. “Can you imagine me getting a weak stomach now, after all those auditions for near-sighted, leg-crazy Broadway producers, and the months in the model agencies where only some of the girls were models, and the beauty pageants where the judges fought with each other to see who would handle the tape measure?” Her lips were quivering and I had to look away. “I was fifteen when I found out that sugar and spice and everything nice were not what little girls were made of—so just don’t worry about me. Here I am, and there you are, and bring on Finn Wildbeck, wherever the hell he is!”

  I raised the empty martini glass and looked her in the shoulder. “To you, honey,” I said. “A big future.”

  “You’re darned right,” she said, swallowing hard.

  And a little later, when I saw Leo Stern, one of Louella’s legmen, heading for our table, I decided that now was as good a time as any to begin, so I said, “Smile, honey, quick,” and took her hand in mine, and it was cold—cold like the hand of any kid who whistles in the dark.

  Take it from me, there’s only one way to be on the town with a girl in Hollywood. Take her on the merry-go-round, with the expense account paying for the rides, and don’t strain yourselves reaching for the brass rings, because both of you are in it strictly for the angle and let the laughs fall where they may. Sure, it’s the only way to do it, strictly for the angle and strictly for the kicks.

  Sure.

  Like the afternoon we picked four out of seven at Santa Anita and blew it all on the eighth because who needed the dough and who really cared, as long as the neighboring boxes were filled with blabbermouths who didn’t need field glasses to spot red hair … and like the night I took her to the sneak preview at Riverside and we wrote “It stinks” on the card and didn’t care that it was a Wildbeck production because we managed to laugh so hard that Hedda Hopper couldn’t have missed seeing us even if the fruit-salad hat had slipped down over her eyes.

  Oh, it was a great routine, and I’m sure that we didn’t mind a minute of it. I guess all the terrible drinking was only because the night spots are smoky and the throat gets parched and you get an awful thirst.

  We’d have dinner at Romanoff’s and ringside at Ciro’s and do a wobbly rhumba at the Crescendo and refuel in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel and show ourselves at the Mocambo and some of the Sunset Strip joints whose neon by that time would be only a blur, and one night when we were halfway back to her apartment in North Hollywood I discovered that she was driving and I was reciting poetry and trying to recall the name of the last picture Susan Delacross had made before taking the sleeping pills, and when I woke up I was on the sofa in her living room with the morning sunshine in my face and a stiff neck and a velvet jacket on my tongue and my hundred-andfifty-dollar suit looking like a rumpled potato sack, and the note on the table said: “There’s some coffee in the Silex. If Benny Thau or Buddy Adler should call, I’m at Jax buying a new dress for the pace that kills.” But we made the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety.

  We made them all.

  How could we miss, with my know-how, her flaming red hair, and the Jax necklines? In fact, maybe my know how had nothing to do with it.

  I knew we were over the hump when people on the lot were using my first name who had never even known my last. And when we made Louella for the second time, I decided we could relax and take a breather for a night, so I took her to dinner in the quiet atmosphere of the Bel-Air Hotel.

  The only trouble with that was, the crackling log fire was so convincing it made you think of places where it snowed in January, and that meant New York, which was home to both of us. And when you sit at one table for too long you find you can’t keep the laughs going all the time and you can’t just sit there and stare at each other, so you talk, and when you run out of gossip you talk about each other and it just doesn’t seem like the time or the place for a lot of drinking. Maybe that was the trouble, too. That … and the talk about each other.

  “Two of a kind, aren’t we, Harry?” I could feel her eyes on me, as they had been all evening.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, watching the dancing flames in the fireplace, “aces back to back.” And what I didn’t say was: “And Wildbeck deals.” I turned to meet her gaze. Every time I looked at her it was like coming upon her loveliness for the very first time. “You have to know what you want and go after it, kid,” I said, too insistently, as though trying to convince myself as well as her. “It’s the ones who don’t know what they really want, or who know but don’t know how to get it—they’re the schnook of the world. They’re the ones who’ll be paying the price of admission to see the pictures you’re
going to star in, and I’m going to write. Isn’t that right?”

  She looked away. “Of course.”

  “Sure, and they’ll be sitting in the balcony, too,” I said. “The squares … the cornballs … sitting in the balcony holding hands and waiting for the five-dollar raise to come through.”

  “But not us,” she said to the fire.

  “Hell, no. Not us.” I doused my cigarette in the water glass. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  We drove most of the way back to her place in silence. It was warm, and I had the top down, and the sky full of blue-white diamonds looked almost as real as a studio backdrop.

  The silence began to weigh too heavily.

  “I bet it’s snowing in New York right now,” I said.

  “I wonder,” she breathed.

  “Sure, we don’t know how lucky we are. Just think if we were in New York now we’d probably be cold and and wet and bundled up to our ears … probably sneezing and coughing, too. And look at us … with the top down.”

  I looked at us. I looked at her.

  “We’d be riding in a subway or a bus … not a convertible,” I said. I flicked my cigarette away and exhaled slowly. “Let’s say we’re married, you and I. We’re probably just coming home from a neighborhood movie. Can’t afford the big downtown houses because I’m just a hook-and-ladder chaser for one of the local papers and you … you’re selling perfume behind a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue.” I turned to her. “That’s an awful thing—hiding those legs behind a counter—but I’m sorry, honey, we need the salary.”

  She smiled. I guess you would call it a smile.

  I shifted into low speed at the foot of the hill for the long climb to the top where she lived, and I wondered whether Finn Wildbeck’s car would make in high. “And instead of nearing your three large rooms and the balcony overlooking half of southern California, we’d merely be on our way to a one-room apartment in Washington Heights overlooking a nice brick wall and smelling of steam heat and your amateur cooking.” I made the last hairpin turn “And you know what I’m thinking right now as I sit in that bus or subway, shivering and coughing and sneezing? I’m thinking … just like a schnook of the world … I’m thinking I can’t wait to get home, because I know there’s some of that Italian salami from the corner delicatessen waiting for us in the refrigerator, and a couple of bottles of beer. And when we get through polishing that off we’ll browse through the papers, tomorrow morning’s papers, and read in the columns how many Hollywood marriages went on the rocks since the day before. And then we’ll go to sleep, congratulating ourselves.” I shuddered. “Pretty grim … pretty awful picture, huh, baby?”