by Gore Vidal
“Emma Traxler!” The voice was deep and convincingly upper-class, unlike that of Mrs. Smythe, whose diphthongs occasionally suggested sea-caressed Liverpool.
Caroline’s hand was engulfed in bear-paws, as bright small intelligent eyes stared down into hers. Task as a hostess accomplished, Mrs. Smythe welcomed other guests, who always arrived as the sun set, dined in the first hour of darkness and then, after an hour of charades, hurried home to bed in order to be able to present rested features to the benignly slanted early-morning sun.
“Miss Glyn. What a … pleasure. For me.” Caroline had selected the exact polite word. But then, from the human point of view, Hollywood was absolute pleasure. Real Russian grand dukes were to be seen alongside self-invented Russian grand dukes, and the con-men were usually more convincing than the Romanovs, thus explaining, Caroline had duly noted, the revolution. In any case, jammed together in a relatively small place, some of the most exotic creatures in the world could be found, panning furiously for movie-gold.
“Mrs. Kingsley tells me you have never been more superb! And according to Kine Weekly, Flower of the Night will gross three million domestically, and with your fans in poor little England alone … ma foi!”
Caroline mumbled modestly. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tim talking to a pretty girl whose famous three-not-two names she could never remember. She did know, as the world knew, that the girl was being groomed by Famous Players–Lasky to replace Mary Pickford, who, that day, had been married to her longtime lover and current partner in United Artists, Douglas Fairbanks, who had recently built an already-fabled—that is, publicized—love-nest for the two of them on one of the wilder Beverly Hills.
“I would so much like to create for you.” Miss Glyn was now all business. “You are that rare thing, a woman d’un certain âge … you speak French, of course?”
“Oh, as little as possible.”
But Elinor Glyn was now in full high-priestess flow. “A woman of a certain age,” she translated, helpfully, “but with allure. What I call, for want of a richer, more specific—for obvious reasons—word, ‘it’!”
“It?”
“It.”
“It.” Caroline offered Miss Glyn her Madonna smile instead of a contract at Traxler Productions. “I would have thought that only women of childbearing age could have ‘it.’ ”
“It is not a reference to menstrual flow.” Miss Glyn was sharp and, to Caroline’s delight, earthy. “But to that innate seductive power that some women are born with—like you, Miss Traxler—and that other women must acquire the hard way like me …”
“Surely not too hard,” Caroline murmured.
Miss Glyn was not used to listening. “Nay,” she said, as if the word were in everyday use and not a blossom plucked from the pages of a vivid fiction, “even a woman of my essential substance, willful, commanding, yes, in appearance and, perhaps, oh, the tiniest bit in real life, can still, when the moon shimmers in the sky and there is a scent of orange blossom upon the air, cause a dashing young Romeo to fall to his knees in an ecstasy of desire …”
“The position, I hope, is only temporary …”
“Romeo must start on his knees. The rest depends on—Kismet.”
“And it.”
“He would not have been on his knees in the first place without it.” Miss Glyn was patient. “Now I hear Mrs. Hulbert’s Mary Queen of Scots photo-play is a real revulsh.”
“Let us say,” Emma Traxler was now her legendary compassionate generous self, “that there are problems.”
“I am a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots.” Miss Glyn played the bold English card, which never failed to impress Americans, particularly the ones who worked in movies. On the other hand, the real thing was often viewed with suspicion like the young Austrian archduke who had just entered the room. Chinless, in the best Habsburg tradition, Leopold was thought to be inauthentic by half the hostesses of the Hollywood Hills.
“How they must fear you at Windsor, those German usurpers.”
“They are Stuart, too, though less than I. Frankly, I would like to have, as they say out here, a ‘crack’ at Mary. Of course, I’m under contract to Famous Players, but you could always lend yourself to them …”
“Or they you to us.”
“Alas, not now. Anon, perhaps. You see, they are capitalizing mercilessly upon my name, particularly Mr. DeMille, who is truly salacious, don’t you think?”
“He goes as far …”
“One ought not, ever, to be too obvious in appealing to the fiercer emotions. Certainly the man, the hero, the actor must always be smiling and yet, of course, not leering like the village idiot. He should smile with good cheer, and should he through—what shall I call it?—not it—youthful heedlessness make a mistake he does not do so deliberately.”
“As in life.”
“Yes,” said Miss Glyn, not listening, her eyes on the beautiful figure of Mabel Normand, one of the few truly amusing as well as erotic stars in the movies. A Boston girl, Normand was considerably sharper than the usual bovine American star. She was known to play jazz on the set, while her addiction to cocaine had given, as Tim had observed, a new meaning to the phrase “powder-room.” Someone was now at the piano, playing New Orleans jazz, and Mabel Normand, all in silver, kept the beat with her whole body; and electrified the room.
“I’m writing a series of little books, The Elinor Glyn System of Writing. In due course, I shall deal with photo-play writing, but first I must master this extraordinary medium, which Mr. Lasky won’t give me time to do as he is so busy having me pose with Mr. DeMille and whatever tart they happen to be promoting. How I long to do Three Weeks again, properly! To bring true sensuality to the screen with the kind of accuracy Mr. DeMille is incapable of, particularly when it comes to showing our aristocracy as they really are.”
“I know Lord Curzon.” Caroline delivered the knockout blow.
“How?” Miss Glyn was astonished. It was well known that Miss Glyn had had an eight-year affair with the onetime viceroy of India, and that he had then married a Mrs. Alfred Duggan, leaving Miss Glyn to read the news of his remarriage in the Times.
“London, I think. I can never remember where I meet people, do you?”
“In the case of so great a personage …”
“But that’s even worse. For me, anyway. If one has heard a great deal of the … the personage before one meets him, then it is all a muddle between what one has heard of him and what he is actually like. Anyway, everyone knows the Leiters …”
Miss Glyn sighed her relief. “The American Wife,” she intoned, as if it were a movie title card. “Yes, of course. So tragic her death. Is it true what they say of Mrs. Hulbert and your president?”
“What do they say?” The enchantingly unworldly Emma now took over from the tough-as-nails Caroline. “And who are they?”
“Rumors. Purloined letters. A passionate affair that almost brought to ruins the Ship of State upon the rocks of mad and unbridled desire in Bermuda.”
Caroline listened in awe as Elinor Glyn dictated to her a page of romantic conjecture. When she had finished, the lovers alone on Bermuda’s pink coral strand, it was Emma not Caroline who said, shyly, “I do hope you’re right. I hope they were able to seize some happiness. They say she was very attractive then.”
“No trace of it now,” was authority’s verdict.
At dinner Caroline sat next to the most attractive of the men, William Desmond Taylor, an English director of her own age. Across the table, Tim was flanked by Mabel Normand and the three-named young girl who had appeared in Taylor’s recent movie Jenny, Be Good. Although the press had predicted that she would never take the place of Mary Pickford, she and the movie were praised. “Did you go to the wedding?” Caroline asked the question of the day.
Taylor shook his head. “To my surprise I wasn’t asked, even though Mary and I have known each other forever. I used to direct her, not very well, I’m afraid …”
“Perhaps
that’s why you weren’t invited.”
Taylor laughed. “If that were to be a law out here, none of us would go anywhere. No. Astrology determined the day and the hour and probably the guest list, too.”
“Astrology?”
Taylor nodded. The Negro butler said, pointedly, “You better tuck into that guinea hen while it’s hot.”
“Thank you.” Taylor was as polite to butlers as to stars: the perfect extra man, he’d been called. “Well, at Doug’s request, Mary got her divorce from Owen Moore some place in Nevada, on a good day …”
“Isn’t she Catholic?”
“Only when it suits her. Then Doug’s astrologist told him that he could begin a new—a fabulous new life—thirteen days after the Ides of March, which is today, March twenty-eighth, 1920.”
“Do you believe in astrology?”
“Only when it suits me.” They laughed.
Caroline congratulated him on being elected president of the new Screen Directors Guild and he said, politely, that without Tim’s help he would have lost. As they spoke of their common business, she noticed that he was attractive to her, something that men, by and large, were not any longer. Tim had become less lover than younger brother in a relationship that had always been based upon a mutual fascination with the telling of stories through enlarged moving pictures. She was addicted now to this shadowy fictional life; and he was in love with it. She had noticed that the few times, lately, that he had found her physically attractive was after a long day in the cutting room, looking at Emma Traxler, whose haunting autumnal beauty aroused him in a way that the forty-four-year-old Caroline Sanford did not in life.
Caroline was pleasantly amazed at the tranquillity—or was it numbness?—with which she had accepted what seemed to be the end of the affair. It was rather as if she were watching a photo-play, starring Emma Traxler, whose genius as an actress was never, never to surprise an audience. They wanted her noble and magnanimous and brave, and she gave them exactly what they wanted with, as Marion Davies would say, bells on. What Caroline Sanford wanted was something of a puzzle. Naturally, she wanted to watch the movie to the end; and perhaps gasp once or twice into a damp handkerchief in the dark as, on the screen, Emma strode off, resolutely, through machine-made mist, across the moors, which meant from the first hole to the second hole of the Burbank Golf Club. But after the lights came on, what next? Golf?
“I play golf at least once a week,” Taylor was saying, his words matching her thoughts, rather the way dreams, at their end, adjust so neatly to the real world’s noises. “Do you play?”
“Not for years. I must take it up again. I have a membership—or Tim does—at Burbank.” Tim was plainly smitten with Taylor’s Jenny, Be Good girl. Caroline wondered how many times he had been unfaithful—a word that made no sense if one lacked all religious faith. She herself had said no to quite a number of young men whose interest in her, she suspected, had more to do with her power to project their images onto a screen than her own faded allure. Perhaps she should try someone her own age, she thought, looking at William Desmond Taylor, who gave every impression of being, in his bright English way, the man—as well as director—for her.
“I thought your death scene wonderful,” he said in a low voice, as if there was already some subtle intimacy between them. “Your eyes, in the close shot—and the way the light fades from them, to darkness …”
Caroline and Emma simultaneously knew ecstasy. This was what being “understood” meant. “Tim and I quarrelled for days over that scene. To die with eyes open or shut. So we did it both ways. My way won, I’m happy to say. How vain,” Caroline remembered in time to laugh, “one becomes.”
“Hardly vanity. It’s a business. The things you do well you should be grateful for. Looks, too. I was an actor for years before I started directing. You must build on what’s there.…” Happily, they talked shop.
After dinner, Caroline and Taylor sat in Mrs. Smythe’s Tudor drawing room, and she confided to him her difficulties with Mary Queen of Scots. He knew, he said, an excellent writer. He himself would love to direct her in so distinguished a film—if, of course, Tim was not interested. She said, quite accurately, that Tim had never been much interested in historical studies of a romantic nature. Taylor’s handsome graying head nodded thoughtfully over the pre-Prohibition brandy that the butler had brought him. “We could make it at Doug’s studio. Doug and Mary’s studio.” He smiled; the eyes were boyish, a quality Caroline did not highly esteem in men but in Taylor’s case it was understandable as he had made a number of highly successful movies about such bucolic American figures as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and other lads from the nation’s not so distant Arcadian past. “We could release through United Artists,” he said, staring at her mouth.
Caroline felt herself flushing. “I have,” she whispered, erotically, she hoped, “a four-picture contract through Traxler Productions with Lasky, and any loan-out arrangement of Emma Traxler must be agreed to by Mr. Zukor.” Honeyed words, she knew.
“Tom Ince’s Associated Producers Incorporated could, through Mr. Zukor, arrange a loan-out against a fifth Lasky picture and then, with me, we could set up a separate unit at Pickford-Fairbanks with distribution through United Artists at fifteen percent less than Mr. Zukor charges for a Paramount release.” Was ever woman in such manner wooed? thought Caroline, besotted. If only Elinor Glyn could hear the real language of courtship, Hollywoodstyle.
Mabel Normand jittered over to them, toes turned inward, hands outward, her trademark. “Deal me a card? I’m strung out. Hi, Miss Traxler.” Mabel spoke rapidly in a manner that Caroline was quite used to. Cocaine-users were edgy and in constant need of the sudden rush of energy to the brain which—Caroline had experimented—lasted no more than a quarter of an hour. Morphine was more benign and dreamy, and preferred by Washington’s ladies while opium was the stuff of dreams in Paris. Caroline could easily have got used to opium; her half-brother André was a two-pipes-a-day man. But at this hazardous stage of her life she preferred her senses unclouded.
She noticed that Taylor was displeased by Mabel Normand’s request. “No cards for you, my darling.” He opened his cigarette case, and she removed a gold-tipped black cigarette. Was that how it was done? Caroline wondered. Mabel frowned, and hurried away. Caroline was aware that Taylor was watching her intently.
“Yes,” said Caroline. “I understand.”
“You don’t understand how tough it is to get her off the stuff. Mabel!” he called after the star, who was now at the entrance hall.
“What?” She turned at the door.
“… Be good.” She was gone. “ ‘Mabel, be good’ is a private joke, and not much of one, I suppose.” He looked suddenly attractively haggard. In the popular movies that Mabel had made with Chaplin as her co-director, her name had often been in the title: Mabel’s Busy Day, Mabel’s Married Life, Mabel’s New Job. Now Mabel’s Cocaine Habit was becoming a problem.
“There are cures, aren’t there?”
“For some people. Not for others. Like drink.”
“I must get to bed at the usual early hour.” Caroline was on her feet. Most elegantly, Taylor kissed her hand.
“No!” a voice tolled. “For the full romantic effect, you must kiss the palm of her hand.” Elinor Glyn loomed over them.
“Perhaps, Miss Glyn, the full romantic effect is inappropriate.” Caroline glittered from the sheer force of Emma’s habit.
“It is always appropriate in the best society.”
“Oh, what worlds you have seen, Miss Glyn, beyond my wildest daydreams.”
“I’ll ring you,” said William Desmond Taylor.
Caroline was mildly disturbed that Tim was not in the least jealous. They sat in her sitting room with its view of Griffith’s Babylon by moonlight. “I wouldn’t,” said Tim, “let Miss Glyn near Mary Queen of Scots.”
“Of course not.” Caroline looked at the three photo-play scripts that she had already acquired on the subject. The w
orst, predictably, had been Mrs. Hulbert’s, but then Mary had only used the script as an excuse for long conversations with Caroline about herself, with the odd request for a small loan. The collapse of President Wilson had disturbed her far less than one of her son’s recent financial misadventures. It had been with relief that Emma Traxler had, gently, cast her off. But not before Caroline had acquired sufficient material for a movie about a woman of enormous charm and perfect self-absorption who throws away every possibility in life because she has never noticed that anyone else exists.
Caroline turned on the gas-fire. The night was damp and cold. “I’m getting arthritic,” she heard herself say. “I must go to your Bimini Baths. Where are they again?”
“Third and Vermont.” Tim wore only underwear; the thin body looked discouragingly boyish. Taylor was as elegantly thin but hardly boyish. “It’s built over an artesian spring. You know, he dopes.”
“Who what?” Caroline pretended not to understand, as she poured tea from a Thermos bottle prepared by Héloise, who had taken to Hollywood’s hours like the proverbial chicken.
“Bill Taylor. Mabel Normand says he was the one who got her on cocaine.”
“Surely she was born with a … sniffer, or whatever they call it, in her nose, like a silver spoon.”
“Are you thinking about him for Mary?”
“Yes. After all, he’s had so much success in period. Like Huckleberry Finn,” she added for her own amusement. “We could do Mary Queen of Scots on the Mississippi on a raft.”
“I’ve got a rough cut of the Wilson footage.”
“I must talk to Blaise.” Mention of Wilson reminded her of neglected duties, of her displaced if not lost self, Caroline Sanford. Of the Washington Tribune. Of the coming election.
“Are you interested?” Tim was drinking quite a lot of whisky, she noticed.
“No. Not really. The paper is well run without me. But we must take some sort of position. Blaise is bound to be far too Republican. I’ll be—”
