She did not say anything, but by the time she had reached the sofa, he could see that she had managed to bring back a smile to her face, and she said, with too much composure, “You’re a dear, Mr. Kiplinger.”
He called Miss Delmar in. The chuckle was now the trace of a smile. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kiplinger,” she said, “but did you call me?”
“Get me Spindell on the phone,” he said, “and on the way out would you be good enough to close the door?” He had let her see enough of this particular picture. A scene or two was always sufficient. It was wonderful how you could always count on people without any imagination to do a lot of imagining. As soon as he left, she would call Harry Lyons’ secretary, and Lyons’ secretary would call that idiot over at Paramount, and on it would go until it became a feature-length film … perhaps, by the time it got back to him wrapped up neatly in applause, a double feature. That Kiplinger. I’m … telling … you.
The extension rang and he picked up the phone. “Max? Rob Kiplinger. … Swell, tootsie, swell. … Max, I … No, I mean it, Max, I don’t usually go overboard for farce comedy but this time … Yes, Max, a very lovely job. … Max, I have a girl sitting here next to me, name is Janice Barker … That’s right. … You haven’t, huh? Well, then you haven’t been reading the papers, tootsie, and you haven’t been watching that TV screen like you should. She’s been all over the place, and not just good, but great, and why should I tell you how beautiful she is when you’ll see that for yourself? … Just what you’ve been looking for, Max. … Of course I’ve seen her. … Sure. … I caught her in a show last year in Boston when I was … What? … (What was the name of that show, honey?)…”
“Louder and Funnier,” she said eagerly.
“Louder and Funnier, Max. … That’s right. … My idea was, give her a stock contract to start, put her through the works and let her carry the ball from there. … What? … Well, what do you think? You oughta know better than to ask that. … Sure … in water colors, too. … Uh huh. … Swell, that’s fine. … (Take this down, honey.)… Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. … Through Gate 3. … Ask for Miss Trueman. … Max, I love you. … Thank you, baby.”
“Oh, Mr. Kiplinger,” the girl squealed when he had hung up. “Ferdie Saxon was right. You are wonderful!”
“You don’t have to worry about a thing now, honey,” he said, without smiling. “Just look pretty, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, keep your ears open till you find out who’s important and who’s just acting important, and you’re in. And if you don’t follow my advice, that won’t matter either, because Max Spindell doesn’t know how to say ‘no’ to me.”
She laughed a little hysterically and said, “I know this sounds silly, but really how can I ever thank you?”
The door was closed, so Kiplinger just looked at her and said, “The first thing you can do is drag me out of this office.”
They stepped out into the anteroom.
“I’m leaving now,” he said to Miss Delmar, who tried, with little success, to take her eyes off the girl. “I had a tentative engagement with Lester Stiles for dinner to night. If he calls, tell him how sorry I am that I can’t make it. I’ll be at the hotel all evening if he wants to call me. But only if it’s urgent. I’ll leave that to you, Miss Delmar.”
He took the girl’s arm as they walked out, and he could hear Miss Delmar dialing her phone before he was half way down the corridor to the elevator, and without ever having heard her personal calls he was certain he knew what she’d be saying, for a producer can be a hero to his own secretary if he’s the wrong kind of man and she’s the right kind of secretary.
“Mr. Kiplinger,” the girl was saying, “I really don’t want you to break your dinner date and go to all this trouble just for me. Honestly.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” was all he said, though what he might have said was, don’t talk nonsense, I had no date with Lester Stiles. … I haven’t spoken to him in four weeks, and he is, this very minute, three thousand miles from here, in all probability having dinner at Lindy’s. …
Outside, the early evening air was toying with the idea of fireplaces and extra blankets, and Kiplinger stood with the girl for a moment before the entrance to the sprawling white building until Harry Davis, who drove one of the studio limousines, spotted them and pulled up to the curb. Harry had once been a studio stunt man and had gone over a cliff on a motorcycle once too often. And so now he clung to the payroll as semiprivate chauffeur to a favored few at the studio and there was a tacit understanding that he was to endure the agony of using his legs to jump out and open the door only for Max Spindell.
He tipped his cap, turned the scar tissue of his face toward the girl, smiled happily and said, “Evening, Chief. To the hotel?”
Kiplinger said, “No, Harry, Romanoff’s,” and Harry’s smile collapsed. Kiplinger added, “We’ll go there first.” The smile returned.
The girl was staring silently out of the window, and finally Kiplinger said, “Does that sound all right to you, honey? A few martoonies … a little chatter … early dinner … and then up to my place to get that pretty little nose of yours down on paper. …”
“That sounds fine to me, Mr. Kiplinger. I’d love to,” he heard her say to the window, but he did not analyze the tone of her voice too carefully, nor did he look right at her as she spoke. For he was afraid that she’d turn toward him and he’d have to look into her eyes so instead he watched Harry adjusting the rear-view mirror to go with the sound track. …
They sat at a table near the door and ordered drinks, and everyone who walked past the table looked first at the girl, then at Kiplinger, then back to the girl, and many whom Kiplinger knew only casually, and who usually had nothing to say to him, came over to the table and said it.
“Is there anyone you don’t know?” the girl asked. “Is it always like this?”
“Not always,” he said, thinking: It won’t be like this the day after they preview The Velvet Glove in Pasadena. It wasn’t like this for two whole weeks after Wherever You Are was reviewed in the trades. It wasn’t like this last night, either. Last night he had dined alone.
One martini was enough to de-ice her, and during dinner she told him of a young man named Larry who wrote unsuccessful popular music and who had asked her three times to marry him, and she spoke of him just as though she were not fond of him and Kiplinger knew it was because she thought he would like that, and all the time, though he was listening to her, he was thinking only that she was painfully beautiful and ridiculously young and that if she stopped talking for a moment she would probably feel like crying. And it did not make him feel any better to know that he would not blame her.
Sam Winston sat down at their table, swallowed two aspirin tablets, and asked Kiplinger to tell him something funny for the column—but he did not look at Kiplinger as Kiplinger recited a few anecdotes, and when he left he had not taken down a word. A British, second-malelead came over and was charming and drunk, and a visiting Broadway producer was honest and said simply, “I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Barker,” but he let slip a few inappropriate Anglo-Saxonisms in talking with Kiplinger, so the girl excused herself from the table to powder her nose. Then Abner Good, a small, scholarly looking man, ambled over.
“Rob,” he said, “it’s nice to see you wallowing in this protoplasmic ooze again. Where you been? Gimme some thing on The Velvet Glove, anything you want. I’ll work it into Friday’s column.”
Kiplinger said, “Abner, I could tell you that it’s going to be a sleeper … a great psychological thriller with more hitch than Hitchcock. … But I won’t tell you that because you’ll know I’m lying, and besides you printed that last week. So let’s not waste time. Get out your pencil.”
Abner Good took out a small leather-bound pad and a little gold pencil. He wrote a Hollywood column for a New York racing paper and Broadway columnists appropriated his scoops regularly.
“Her name is Janice Barker,” Kiplinger said. “B-a-r k-e-r. Actre
ss, nineteen, will be signed by Spindell tomorrow. I met her this afternoon.” He watched Good scribble on the pad.
Good looked up at him. “And?”
“And what?” said Kiplinger, as though he didn’t know.
“And?” said Good.
“And I promised her I’d do her portrait for her tonight. After dinner.”
Abner Good smiled at his pad. He put it back carefully in his pocket and said, “Thanks, Rob.” Kiplinger watched him walk away and he wondered whether Ferdie Saxon would be the first to mail him the clipping.
When the girl returned to the table with fresh makeup and each hair in place, he called the waiter.
“I’m leaving, Paul,” he said to the smiling white teeth, “but I was expecting a call here from a Mr. Nick Grandy. Would you please tell the switchboard operator that if anyone by that name calls for me, I’ll be at my hotel all evening. She has the number. Remember that— Nick Grandy … my hotel.”
“You bet, Mr. Kiplinger, I certainly will do that,” said the bright teeth. Kiplinger walked out, holding the girl by the arm, and pretended not to see Paul whispering to one of the captains, and he thought what a wonderful joke it would be if Nick Grandy called him at Romanoff’s that night, because he did not know a Nick Grandy.
The limousine was waiting for them.
“I got back just in time,” Harry explained as they stepped in. “You know them two wise guy actors, the funny fellahs what’s always makin’ trouble on the lot? Well, tonight, they’re so knocked out from playin’ touch football all day I hadda lug ‘em over to the Turkish baths. But I got back in time, hey, Chief? Leave it to Harry. The hotel, Chief?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I says to myself, Mr. Kiplinger’ll be wantin’ me in an hour or so, so I hustle them two guys out there in a hurry and beat it back just—”
“I’m glad you did,” Kiplinger said. Harry knew practically everyone in the industry and he had a big mouth. “You’re a good man, Harry.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said Harry, adjusting the mirror.
After they had gone several blocks in silence, Kiplinger finally asked the girl, “Happy?”
And she said, “Of course.”
He looked out of the window at the far-off lights twinkling up in the hills, for there was no place else to look except at the girl or at the back of Harry’s head, which was at alert attention, or at Harry’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. So he looked out of the window and wondered whether it was really true that Harry knew more about what went on at the studios than Louella Parsons, and then they were pulling into the driveway, past the wide green lawns, now decolored by the darkness, up to the entrance of the hotel.
“This is it, Chief,” said Harry. “Twelve minutes flat, and I coulda done it in ten if that shomiss wasn’t giving me the hawk-eye when I was gettin’ set to jump the light.”
“Nice work, Harry,” Kiplinger said, handing him a ten-dollar bill as they got out. “Buy the wife a new mink coat.”
“You bet, boss. Much obliged.” He grinned once more at the girl, and then he drove off.
They stood on the walk before the hotel until the car was out of sight, and then Kiplinger turned suddenly to the girl and took hold of her hands and he didn’t mind now that they were cold.
“Honey,” he said, smiling, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
She laughed a little nervously. “I’m afraid I don’t quite get it. Thank me for what?”
“Oh … let’s just say … for walking into my office this afternoon, for having dinner with me tonight, for sitting at my table, for riding by my side in Harry’s limousine … for coming here …”
It was too dark to be certain, but he imagined that her eyes were more bewildered than frightened.
He said, “You did enjoy yourself, didn’t you?”
And she said, “Well, yes, Mr. Kiplinger, of course.”
“And you did want to get into pictures more than anything else in the world, didn’t you?”
“Why … yes … and you don’t know how grateful I am, really. I—”
“Oh, but I do, honey,” he said. “I certainly do. You told me yourself. You said that you once told Ferdie Saxon you’d do anything to get into pictures.”
She looked away, and he said, “You know something? I was that way once myself. I wanted something very badly. That is, there was a somebody I wanted to be. Well, for a while I was young enough and stupid enough to think I was going to get where I wanted, and then I found out it just wasn’t going to be. So I made up my mind I’d do anything to get there. And you know what? I got there. Only, I found out something that no one ever told me: getting what you want isn’t worth a damn unless the way that you get it is good. And holding onto it is even worse. …”
“Don’t … Please …” she blurted out. He wouldn’t know if there were tears in her eyes. It was so long since he had seen anything but glycerine. “Mr. Kiplinger, I—”
“No, let me finish,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you are going to be given a small job in pictures. It won’t be much, but it’ll be a beginning. Whether you get anywhere, or lose out, will be entirely up to you. You are beautiful, but out here that’s nothing. If you also have talent, or good luck, you will get where you want. But I want you to promise me something.”
“All right,” she said, in a very small voice.
“I want you to promise me that if you turn out to be without talent or good luck, you will fail.”
She smiled and said, “I promise.”
“Good,” he said. “And now that I’ve gotten you a low-paying, nerve-racking job with a talentless studio run by a barbarian named Max Spindell and have exposed you to an evening of brilliant boredom, topped off by my own Grade B speech, I am going to ask you to do me a favor. That is, I want you to keep a deep, dark secret for me. Every girl I’ve ever asked to keep a secret has managed to do it.” He walked her over to a cab parked in the driveway. “Be at Spindell’s office at ten sharp. Miss Trueman likes people who are punctual. Get plenty of sleep tonight. Wear your hair loose, the way you’re wearing it now, and for Pete’s sake, smile when you walk in.”
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to the cab.
“That’s your cab home,” he said. He opened the door.
“Go on, honey. … In.”
She got in the back seat and held the door open. “But … but I thought there was a secret? And aren’t you going to do my portrait? I thought …”
“Sure, I’m going to do your picture. I always do.”
“But how—?”
“That’s the secret, honey, and all I ask is that you please be good to it.” He shut the door and looked down at her through the open window. “I’m going to do your portrait from memory,” he said. “Just like I’ve done them all. From memory.”
He looked into her eyes and they were smiling now with the rest of her face and she was even more beautiful than he had thought.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” he said.
And she said, “Yes, Mr. Kiplinger, I believe you,” and somehow he felt that she really did and he was glad that she did, though he knew that it did not matter one way or another.
He said, “One more thing, honey. If your friend Larry asks you a fourth time, why don’t you say yes while the music he’s writing is still bad? Think about it, will you?”
He started walking away, and she called to him: “It’s a deal.”
He walked through the lobby to the elevator, and already he was thinking of what brush he would use and what colors he would mix for her hair and how he would capture her eyes as they had been a moment ago. He was no longer tired, and he had an idea this was going to be a good one, perhaps even better than any of the others— and they had been fine jobs, too. And as he went up in the elevator he thought how nice it would be to stay in his apartment for weeks—no, forever—and do nothing but paint, but he knew that that would never be, so he started thinking of the note of appreciation to Ferdie Sax
on that he would dictate in the morning, and how Miss Delmar would be able to thrive on it for days, and how he would have nothing to worry about now until The Velvet Glove was released, and how even then he would not have to worry because by then there would be another wonderful subject walking in. …
The Comedian
I STOOD IN THE LOBBY OUTSIDE the door of the studio watching for him, not knowing what I would say if he showed up. There was really nothing you could say to change things now. It was too late for words. Somehow, as I stood there being jostled by the people crowding in, I knew that whatever was going to happen was out of my hands, beyond my control. I had done everything I could; I was exhausted; and besides, it no longer mattered to me, one way or the other.
I went inside and watched them scrambling for seats, mixing their little yelps of eagerness with the discordant sounds of the orchestra warming up in the pit. The studio had been built to accommodate a thousand, but a hundred thousand seats wouldn’t have been enough to take care of all who had wanted to be here tonight to see Sammy Hogarth make television history.
I looked at the faces—old ones, young ones, applecheeks from the sticks, know-it-alls from midtown Manhattan—all of them wearing the same look of anticipatory enjoyment. They had come here with the laughs already compressed inside of them, knowing with a confidence born of years of pleasurable experience that Sammy would not fail to set off the explosions.
I thought of the countless millions just like them in millions of living rooms all over the land, pulling the chairs up closer, making the last minute adjustment of the knob, watching the flickering screen of the magic box with that same expression, that same inward smile of impending delight as they too got ready to be titillated into joyful release.
This was it, then. This was what it was all for.
The waiting laughter of a nation.
For this, to detonate this rollicking explosion, to wrap up and deliver vast and waiting audiences such as this one, men lied, cheated, stole, sweated and fought over foolish words in dank-smelling, smoke-filled rooms, grew old before their time, and finally destroyed themselves and everyone around them.
Sweet Smell of Success Page 13