Hollywood

by Gore Vidal

At Edith’s end of the table, with a brother to her left and Blaise to her right, she could indulge herself while the President told Pat-and-Mike Irishman stories, to the delight of George Creel.

  “It’s sad about Colonel Roosevelt, who should be friendly, since he and Mr. Wilson have so much in common …”

  “Including the job.”

  “ … and a war. Though this one is going to be far more terrible than that little one with Spain ever was. But they always seem to misunderstand each other.”

  “They are rivals. That’s all,” said Blaise. Then he fished. “The Colonel’s pretty certain to be the Republican candidate in ’20—against Mr. Wilson, I suppose.”

  “Do you really think Mr. Wilson will run again?” Edith’s small dark eyes were suddenly mischievous. Did she know? Blaise wondered. Did Wilson know, for that matter.

  “Why not? He’ll have won the war.”

  “But General Pershing will get the credit, and the people always elect generals, if they get a chance. But never admirals. I wonder why.”

  “They might make an exception for Josephus Daniels.”

  Edith laughed. Blaise let her off his inquisitorial hook. Certainly, the President looked fit enough for a third term; and vain enough, too. For all Wilson’s charm and good manners, he was still an odd combination of college professor unused to being contradicted in a world that he took to be his classroom and of Presbyterian pastor unable to question that divine truth which inspired him at all times.

  After lunch, the President decided that he would like to take a walk, and the captain docked at a small island in Chesapeake Bay, with the exotic name Tangier. Blaise and Creel each escorted a Boiling lady ashore.

  The town itself proved to be two parallel streets with freshly painted wooden houses like so many white building blocks set side by side. At the back of each there was a garden and at the front, rather grimly, a family cemetery.

  There was no one in sight as the Wilsons led the way down the first street, their Secret Service man nervously looking to left and right: were they walking into an ambush? Even Blaise began to feel edgy, while Creel came right out with it. “There’s something wrong here. The paint’s fresh on that house there—someone’s still painting it, but there’s nobody in sight.”

  “Spies?” Blaise could not resist.

  “Or worse.” Creel was grim.

  One of the Boiling ladies said, “Well, this is a fishing village. So I expect everyone’s out fishing.”

  “Wives, too?” Creel started as a cat—brown—crossed his path.

  “The cats have stayed.” Blaise looked at the President, who stood, puzzled, in the middle of the street.

  “No cars, no buggies,” Creel began.

  “Not allowed,” said the ship’s captain, who had joined them. “That’s the charm of the place. Though where everybody is is a mystery to me.”

  Blaise moved to the head of the presidential procession, joining Mr. Starling of the Secret Service.

  “There’s somebody at last,” said Edith behind them. “On the curb there, the old man with the child.”

  In the shadow of a willow tree, an elderly man was seated, holding a small boy on his lap. “Good afternoon, sir,” said Edith.

  “Lovely day,” said the President, and, hand in hand, they moved across the street toward the old man.

  With genial suspicion, Starling said, “Hi, Grandpa.”

  “Say, mister,” the old man was equally suspicious and by no means genial, “who’s that man over there with his woman?”

  “Why, that’s Mr. Wilson. The President of the United States.”

  “This ain’t a plot like last time?”

  “Last time? A plot … ?”

  “That’s really him, the President?”

  “You’re squeezing me,” wailed the child. At which the old man dropped the boy in the dust and stood up. “We thought you was the Germans, coming to take Tangier the way the English did back in 1812. Come out!” he yelled. And the street began to fill with the good people of Tangier.

  “Tangerines, I guess we have to call them,” said Creel, journalistically stirred by so much human interest.

  Blaise suddenly remembered Creel’s name from long ago. “You worked for the Chief, at the Journal in New York.”

  “That’s right. I wondered if you’d remember me. Then I turned honest and went on to Kansas and from there to the Rocky Mountain News. But I am, forever, school of Hearst.”

  “So am I,” said Blaise. “It leaves a mark.”

  Then they gathered about the President, who saw fit to address not only his island constituents but the yachting party as well. “Tangier is the logical place from which to invest Baltimore by sea. So the British fleet arrived here a hundred and five years ago, and took the island. But the local parson, one Joshua Thomas, told them that they would fail to take Baltimore because the Lord of hosts was not with them, and, as it turned out, he was not with them then, and I promise you,” the conversational voice of Woodrow Wilson had now become the magical voice of the great seducer of the imagination, the evoker of the higher spirit, the very essence of the virtuous republic that he had been chosen to personify, “that the Lord of hosts is not with the Germans now, and never will be as long as we are true to that great covenant we made with the spirit of all mankind when we made ourselves independent of the old world with its intrigues and inequalities, and all of us as one, e pluribus unum, embraced a freedom for all that was truly something new under the sun.”

  It was like a tap, thought Blaise, which these orators could turn on and off at will. Did they, he wondered, actually listen to themselves? Or were they simply conduits for a kind of mass energy to which they were attached in some mysterious popular way, able to articulate instinctively the emotions of the mute and the many? “That,” said Woodrow Wilson, turning off the tap, “is enough sermon for any Sunday afternoon in Tangier.”

  The President was enthusiastically cheered.

  THREE

  1

  Caroline lay tied to the railroad track, the hot sun in her face while in her ears the ominous sound of an approaching steam engine.

  A high male voice called out, “Look frightened.”

  “I am frightened.”

  “Don’t talk. Look more to the left.”

  “But, Chief, she’s got too much shadow on her face. You can’t see the eyes.”

  “Look straight ahead.” The slow-moving steam engine was now within a yard of her. She could see it out of the corner of her right eye. The engineer stared down at her, hand on—what?—the brake, she prayed. A stone pressed into her back, just below the left shoulder blade. She wanted to scream.

  “Scream!” shouted William Randolph Hearst; and Caroline obliged. As she filled the air with terrified exhalation, a man on horseback rode up to the railroad engine and leapt into the engine room, where he pulled a cord, releasing a quantity of ill-smelling steam from the engine’s smoke-stack. As the train ground to a halt, he ran toward Caroline and knelt beside her.

  “Cut!” said the Chief. “Stay right where you are, Mrs. Sanford.”

  “I have no choice,” said Caroline. The sweaty young man—a cowboy belonging to Hearst’s ranch—smiled down at her reassuringly. “It won’t take a minute, ma’am,” he said. “He’s got to change the camera so he can get a real close look at me untying you.”

  “Why doesn’t he just show a card on the screen, with the information that two weeks after Lady Belinda’s eleventh-hour rescue she was home again in London, pouring tea. I think I can do that rather well.”

  Hearst was now standing over her, his vast bulk mercifully blocking the sun. “That was swell. Really,” he said. “Joe’s rolling up the camera now. It won’t take a minute. I never knew you were such a pro.”

  “Neither,” said Caroline, “did I.”

  “Actually, there’s nothing easier than movies,” said Millicent Hearst, whom Caroline had known since she was the younger partner of a vaudeville sister act. �
��Either you look nice on the screen or you don’t. If you do, they’ll love you. If you don’t you can act your butt off and nothing’s going to happen.”

  “You’re certainly very effective on the screen.” Caroline spoke brightly, still flat on her back, with the dusty cowboy to one side of her while, to the other, Mr. and Mrs. Hearst gazed down on her, observing the social amenities with a flow of good talk.

  “Actually if Millicent weren’t so old, I could make a star out of her.” Hearst was his usual kindly, tactless self.

  “I’m not all that much older than Mary Pickford.” Millicent’s voice had never ceased to be Hell’s Kitchen New York Irish. “But it’s a mug’s game, acting, and the hours they keep here in the movies you wouldn’t believe.”

  “But I do. In fact, one of those hours has passed,” said Caroline, “since I was tied up.”

  “We’re ready,” said Joe Hubbell, the cameraman, just out of Caroline’s range.

  “All right. Let’s get started.” The Hearsts withdrew. The cowboy and Caroline waited, patiently, to be told what to do. As they did, Caroline admired, yet again, Hearst’s instinct, which had now drawn him to the most exciting of all the games that their country had yet devised. As he had invented “yellow journalism,” which obliged reality to mirror not itself but Hearst’s version of it, now he had plunged into movie-making, both amateur like this film and professional like the Hearst-produced The Perils of Pauline, the most successful serial of 1913. Now in summer residence at San Simeon, a quarter-million-acre ranch to the north of Hollywood, the Chief was amusing himself with a feature-length film in which he had gallantly starred his houseguest, Caroline, who was several years older than Millicent, and by no means as conventionally pretty. Once Caroline had accepted George Creel’s assignment to be the Administration’s emissary to the moving-picture business, she had started her embassy by paying a call on her old friend Hearst, who disapproved of the war in general and Wilson in particular. Nevertheless, he was most lavishly a host not to mention meticulously a director.

  An hour later, Caroline, no longer Lady Belinda, was freed from her track by the cowboy, whom she was directed to kiss full on the lips. He had blushed furiously, and she had been intrigued to find how soft a young man’s lips could be, not that she had had much experience with young men or, for that matter, old; she also noted that he smelled, powerfully, of sweating horse.

  Caroline and her maid, Héloise, shared a tent close to the wooden house of the Hearsts atop Camp Hill. Since there were always a dozen houseguests as well as an army of servants, gardeners, ranch-hands, the hill was now a city of temporary tents, surrounding the elaborate wooden house, which was taken down in winter and put up in summer.

  “And here, right here,” said Hearst, “I’m going to build a castle, just like the one you and Blaise have at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.”

  They were seated in the Chief’s principal sitting room, with its rough-hewn beams and unfinished pine walls on which were hung perhaps the largest collection of false old masters that any American millionaire had ever accumulated. But then it was always said of Hearst that after thirty years of the wholesale buying of art, he could always tell a good fake from a bad one; and of the world’s forgeries, he chose, invariably, the ones with the most accurate brushwork. “He has,” the art merchant Duveen was supposed to have said, “an excellent cocked-eye.”

  While Caroline drank sherry, Hearst stood over a round table on which was placed what looked to be a wedding cake covered with velvet. Like a matador, he removed the covering to reveal the model of a castle with two towers, all meticulously detailed in plaster. “This is it,” he said. “What I’m going to build up here.”

  “It is,” Caroline was guarded, “like nothing else.”

  “Nothing else in California, anyway. Can’t wait to get started.” Hearst’s major-domo of twenty years, George Thompson, was now as round as an owl and as rosy as a piglet; for more than twenty years he had appeared at the same hour with Coca-Cola in a silver-embossed mug for the Chief; and now sherry for Caroline. “Good evening, Mrs. Sanford.” She smiled upon him. After all, it was George who encouraged the Chief to traffic with fashionables like herself in addition to the Chief’s own preference, politicians and theater folk, while the friendly Millicent tended to keep her distance from her husband’s friends. She preferred New York to California; motherhood to glamour; respectability to Hearstian fame; and Roman Catholic strictness to Protestant easiness. She was said to be quite aware that she had been superseded in the Chief’s affections by a showgirl, who was either twenty years old or seventeen; if the latter, she was the same age that Millicent had been when she and her sister had danced their way off the stage of the Herald Square Theater, where they had been two of the many maidens in The Girl from Paris, and into Hearst’s great heart. Now history was repeating itself with Miss Marion Davies, the daughter of a Brooklyn politician named Bernard Douras. Blaise had approved the Tribune story of the romance, which Caroline had read with delight and promptly spiked as a Matter of Taste, all important for the Tribune as the war-time President’s favorite Washington newspaper now that Ned McLean’s Post was known as “the court circular.” Actually, the vaudeville-loving President would probably have enjoyed very much the highly suggestive but never absolutely libellous story of the young showgirl for whom the fifty-year-old Hearst had, if not forsaken his wife, abandoned her to the rigors of respectable domesticity while he squired, without cigarettes, alcohol or bad language, his chorus girl through the only slightly subdued night life of war-time New York. Miss Davies had left her convent—always a convent, Blaise had decreed—when a mere girl to join the chorus of Chu Chin Chow, Oh, Boy! and now her apotheosis in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. There were whispers at San Simeon that when the Missis left, the Miss would arrive. But Hearst was silent on all personal matters; and Millicent seemed unperturbed.

  “So George Creel wants you to organize the movie business.” Hearst sat in a throne opposite Caroline while George lit the kerosene lamps. The electricity at San Simeon was home-made and unreliable. “Stories about Huns raping Belgian nuns?”

  “Surely your papers have told us all that we want to hear on that subject.” Caroline was smooth, relaxed by sherry. “I thought, perhaps, Huns raped by Belgian nuns, to encourage women to resist the beast.”

  “I always said,” Hearst did not even smile, “that you were the newspaperman, not Blaise.”

  “Well, I did buy the Tribune, and I made it popular by copying faithfully your Journal.”

  “No. You’ve got a better paper. Better town, too. Particularly now. I’m thinking.… You know, Creel worked for me on the Journal Ambitious. Movies.” Hearst stared at a Mantegna whose wooden frame sported worm-holes only down one side; thanks to Hearst’s usual haste, there had been no time for the forger to drill holes in the rest of the frame. “I think movies are the answer.”

  “To what?”

  “The world.” Hearst’s glaring eagle eyes were fixed on Caroline and the hair that had been blond when they first met was now gray. “I always thought it was going to be the press. So simple to print. So simple to transmit with telegraph. But there’s the language problem. By the time Jamie Bennett’s stolen all our stories for his Paris Herald, the news is old hat. The beauty of the movies is they don’t talk. Just a few cards in different languages to tell you what the plot is, what they’re saying. Everyone in China watches my Perils of Pauline, but they can’t read any of my papers there.”

  “You’re going in?”

  Hearst nodded. “I do this for fun, what we did today. Though if it looks okay, I’ll distribute it. I’ve got my own company. You don’t mind?”

  “I’d be thrilled, of course.” Of all professions that Caroline had ever daydreamed of for herself that of actress had not been one. As a girl, she had been taken by her father back-stage to see Sarah Bernhardt; and the sweat, the dirt, the terror had impressed itself upon her in a way that the splendor of what the public saw from
the front of the stage had not. As for movie-acting, Millicent, an old showgirl, had grasped it all. Either the camera favored you or it did not. At forty, Caroline assumed that she would look just that; after all, there were, officially at least, no leading ladies of forty. She herself was interested only in the business end of the movies; she had also been commissioned to investigate the propaganda possibilities of this unexpected popular novelty. It had not been until such movie favorites as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks had taken to the market-place and sold Liberty Bonds to millions of their fans that the government had realized how potent were the inventors of Hollywood; and Creel had agreed.

  But Hearst, as usual, was idiosyncratic. “Distribution companies, theater chains, those are what matter. The rest is a bit like the theater, a gamble. Except you almost can’t lose money on a film unless somebody like the director—what’s his name—the two girls, the initials?”

  “D. W. Griffith.” Caroline knew all the names from her own paper.

  “Decides he wants to make the biggest movie in the world by spending the most money, building things like all of Babylon. I hear he’s broke. And Triangle wants to sell out. I’ve made a bid. But Zukor and Lasky have got more cash than I do—in hand, that is. This business is like a cornucopia, like Alaska in ’49. A million dollars just for Mary Pickford. Incredible. Only danger is these Griffith types. Stage-door johnnies who start to think big once you give them a camera to play with. Though,” the thin lips widened into a smile, “it is the best fun there is, making a movie. Sort of like a printer’s block, the way you can keep rearranging all the pieces. But without a paper’s deadline. You can keep at it until you get all the pieces in the right order. They call that part—just like we do—editing. Then it just doesn’t lie there dead on the page, it moves.”

  “Let’s sell our papers and go to Southern California.” Caroline was always easily fired by Hearst.

  “If I were younger I would. But,” Hearst frowned, “there’s New York.”