The three receptionists looked at me in unison. Lucille, the head receptionist, scowled.
I’m sorry, Mr. Frank, but Mr. Krug asked me to reschedule you for two o’clock in his office.
The other two smirked as if they were all in on a joke.
Was that Myles Haywood going up in the elevator?
I couldn’t possibly say, Mr. Frank.
Guess I’m not eating in the Executive Dining Room today then, am I?
That seems like a sound conclusion, Mr. Frank, unless you know something that I do not.
See you later, then, Lucille.
Two o’clock, Mr. Frank. I wouldn’t be late if I were you.
Outside, streams of people were rushing back and forth to the commissary, from soundstages and dressing rooms, workshops, costume and property departments, saucer tank, transportation department and garages, film vaults and processing laboratories, studio zoo, airplane hangar, plant nursery and sod farm, billing and accounting offices, research department and library, on-site power plant and filling station. It was tempting to say it was a city within a city or a microcosm of the nation only it was neither of those things. The studio was a factory, but instead of airplanes or refrigerators or atomic bombs it produced two-dimensional stories that created an illusion of depth and movement through time. A disproportionate percentage of studio laborers were beautiful and most of them, even the unattractive ones, believed they were doing a job more significant and meaningful than putting together the products that moved people across continents, kept food cold, or threatened to annihilate every beating heart on the planet.
By the time I arrived, the commissary’s chrome-paneled dining room was heaving with five hundred people. It would be better to go on the run empty and light, but I ordered the chicken broth with matzo balls, grilled sea bass steak with sauce meunière, coconut cream pie, and a cup of coffee. There was so much commotion in the room the waitress struggled to hear my order.
As usual I sat at the writers’ table, although this was a misleading name, since it was a table only for the studio’s top writers, not the badly paid hacks who thought they had come west to get rich only to find themselves working on scripts that were never produced, or which were turned over to senior writers like me who received sole credit for doing nothing more than a final polish. It was only partly to do with talent. All of the top writers had been to college back east. Each of us had either published a book or written a play that had been produced in New York. Most of the junior writers at adjacent tables had only ever written for the screen, and would go on doing so as long as the studios employed them, ending their days alcoholic and embittered in Oildale bungalows pumping tall tales of stars they claimed once to have screwed.
Across the room John and Mary were hunched over a table with Helen but you were nowhere to be seen. I usually felt the cruelty of not being able to sit with you and do a thing as simple as eating in your company, but that day I was sick at your absence, concerned about what it might mean, and disappointed that even though I now had this chance to watch over you for another hour you had disappeared. You and I had only eaten together in the commissary a handful of times, always with Helen or your co-stars, but those were never happy occasions for me because in the presence of other actors you all became so actorly, so performative, switching from accent to accent and character to character, living out your anxieties and neuroses and desires through the personalities of countless invented people, not a few of whom I had created myself, and in which I could recognize the operation of my own preoccupations, distorted through the performances you and your colleagues paraded for your mutual pleasure. Was it pleasure, though, or self-protection, self-defense, even an effortful campaign against the exposure of your own vulnerabilities?
By observing such gatherings, whether in the commissary or at parties or premieres, I had decided some time earlier that acting was toxic. The imaginary registered too close to the boundaries of the real. How could body or soul tell the difference between actions of falsity and ones of truth? Performance became habit, and too frequently I had noticed the voices of past characters intruding into your speech. Fanshawe, piping and Victorian, would arrive unannounced at dinner, or a tough but tender-hearted kid trying to turn straight after a criminal childhood might snarl into my ear as we lay naked together, I ain’t afraid of you. There was no reason you should be afraid of me. Trying to corrupt me, ain’t ya, trying to make a man outta me, but I’m all the man I need to be, jocker. I’m nobody’s punk. In moments like that I worried that artifice might one day overtake us, that you would slip into some other character, remote from who you really were, and never find your way back to the self that I loved. There were other times when I wondered if the Myles I adored was himself a performance, one so convincing that I could not conceive of there being some other, genuine person hidden beneath the man who illuminated my days.
Because I was late arriving, the only free seat was between Margaret Brookes and Stuart Carmichael.
Wandering on the desert, Frank? Margaret asked.
Harrowing hell.
Conversation is a balm for misery.
How do you know I’m miserable?
From the way you’re staring across the room I’d take odds on lovesick or lovelorn. Who’s the girl?
You’d never guess.
Bet I would. She wears an anklet, and she’s married.
Right as rain.
I can pick them every time. Come on, tell Auntie Mags who she is.
And read about it in the morning papers?
If you weren’t a man I’d call you a bitch.
If the coat fits…
Lord, have you always been such a honey? I bet you were born with a whole chest of silver in your mouth. You know people whisper that your mother is Italian nobility?
Does it make me easier to hate?
It’s not so tough already, Frank.
I love you, too, Maggie.
Final reel, Desmond. Only in the final reel.
Of the senior writers, Margaret and I were the youngest and she was my closest contemporary, just past thirty. Everyone else was over forty-five and some had been on the lot since the silent days. Apart from Margaret they were all married, a few on their second or third marriages, all hard drinking, chain smoking. If there was another man who loved men or a woman who loved women at the table I didn’t know who it might be. It was not a circle that put me at ease, and as I began eating my chicken broth and matzo balls I wondered how much I would actually miss it. Across the room a well-dressed man glanced in my direction and frowned. It took me a moment to recognize my own reflection.
The politics of the men and women at our table ran the spectrum from McCarthyite to several Trots left of Lenin, and the only thing uniting us was the craft we claimed to practice and a belief that the writer was the least appreciated gear in the whole cinematic machine. Some days that was enough to keep a bantering peace but that day in April 1950 was not one of them. Jason d’Estes was across from me and never a slimier fascist have I met. Behind his back we called him the Monologist for his long, unfilmable speeches. Like his characters he was given to pontificating.
I was looking at my nephew running around my sister-in-law’s house last weekend, d’Estes said, and here’s this little kid, plump and healthy as Shirley Temple in her apple-blossom years, and I thought, Goddammit boy, you were born to rule. There is an innate aristocracy that arises from the comingling of the right families and when they reproduce they generate natural leaders. You all know I’m a bastard—
And how, Margaret jeered.
—I wasn’t lucky enough to be the child of wedlock, but my mother, however fallen she might have been, could trace her ancestry back to the Pilgrim Fathers. Can’t buy that kind of pedigree. My mother was a maid and my father president of a bank. On his deathbed, with no other sons to carry his name, he adopted me and I got everything in his will. My half-sister inherited nothing, but I didn’t care. You know how goddamn rich I wa
s? Could have bought this studio if I’d had the sense. Only then came the crash, and me, a kid, I was as poor as I’d been at birth, with nothing but this tony name around my neck.
That name’s a fake and we all know it.
It’s as legitimate as my paternity, Stuart.
And what about that girl you left? Margaret asked. What about her kid? You call that legitimate? She’s still scrounging Poverty Row trying to find a job. Like father like son I guess.
From across the table, Alice Lane, who was rumored to have had an affair with Jason, piped up, Don’t be so mean, Maggie. Jason doesn’t know how to stop himself loving someone. He has a heart of gold, that’s all.
Fool’s gold.
He fixed up that girl with a nice little settlement, didn’t you, Jason?
She got more than she deserved.
And how much does a person deserve, d’Estes? How do you reckon what deserving is? What about the kid? Will you adopt him on your deathbed when there’s no one to carry on your so-called tony name? Your mother was a maid, so maybe you got more than you deserved.
But there you’re wrong, Brookes. My mother might have been a maid but as my father was the president of a bank I got exactly what I deserved when he left everything to me, only the Reds took it when they swindled the market.
Oh boy, here we go. It’s always the Reds with you, d’Estes. You see chaos and collapse and it’s the goddamn Reds.
Tell me it isn’t! Prove to me the Reds had nothing to do with every disaster for the last hundred years. It was Reds behind the Civil War, Red Indians behind the Indian Wars, that imperialist Red Spaniard Sagasta behind the Spanish-American War, Communist rebels behind the Philippine Wars. Reds in South America trying to undermine American interests were behind the Banana Wars, Mohammedan Reds were behind the Moro Rebellion, Mexican Reds backed the Border War, Balkan Reds fomented World War One, home-grown Reds triggered the crash of twenty-nine and the Great Depression, Soviet Reds forced Hitler to defend his country and drag us into an artificial war against our natural ally, and now look, the Soviets have the bomb, and they’re fighting to infiltrate this country with fifth columnists and nuclear spies and sleeper agents to start a second Civil War! If we don’t track them down – and I’m not saying any one of you is among them, oh no, of course not, but I do think if you’re a liberal who calls yourself anti-fascist you have a duty to clear your name and say what you know and who you know – then we might as well turn the country over to the Reds and give up on the whole idea of America because America was founded as the first and last bastion of capital economy and freedom…
When d’Estes was not around, Margaret and Stuart joked that the Monologist had never met a historical fact he could not falsify. In writing a picture about the Mayflower he had the Pilgrims fleeing early English socialism rather than religious persecution, and thriving in the New World because they saw how to impose a market economy on the American Indians. The studio didn’t care if the history was accurate so long as the picture made money, which it did.
I feel like I learn so much from you, Jason, every time you open your mouth, Alice said, simpering.
The only thing a person learns from Jason d’Estes is how to crap through the teeth.
Come now, Carmichael, there are ladies at the table.
I’m with Stu, said Margaret.
I never said you were a lady, d’Estes smirked. It’s Alice’s ears I’m trying to protect.
Walter Simon, one of the most senior of our group, snuffled his soup and cleared his throat. We are all ignoring the issue at hand, he said. We are refusing to discuss the matter of greatest concern to each of us, with the exception of those of you – here he looked at Jason and Alice, the only known Republicans at the table – who have happily danced with the devils of fascism and failed even in the hour of international crisis to see what was apparent. If you’d had it your way America never would have entered World War Two and would eventually have formed an alliance with Hitler and Hirohito. As far as I can see it, you are the real enemies at this table, not us, although the tide of history is already forgetting which moon draws it to shore. Since the Supreme Court has failed to support the cause of our friends and colleagues we must each acknowledge that our own day of reckoning is very likely at hand, because we will be the easiest to target and smear. You understand what I am saying. They will not go after the stars, at least not the big ones, only those who demonstrate their own vulnerability and in the whole dark process who is more vulnerable than the secondtier star, the message-picture director, the writer who has tried to live as a person of conscience, supporting the democratic causes and principles without which his or her life and career would be a mockery of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Jason d’Estes threw his napkin on the table and rose, taking his plate of beef kidneys with him. I’m not listening to any more of this Communistic propaganda. The unfriendly, untalented Ten are getting exactly what they deserve in going to prison. If anyone asks me whether I know the names of Communists on this lot, yours will be the first out of my mouth, Simon, he said, and strutted off to find an empty seat at a neighboring table.
Alice Lane glanced at the other writers and after hesitating for a second took her ham omelet and went to join d’Estes.
Walter pushed back his chair. Good riddance to them. Spread out a little. Let’s make room.
But what are you proposing, Walter? What can we do but wait and see what happens?
We have to be more aggressive, Walter said. Offensive rather than defensive. We need to buy our way out of it.
How do you propose we do that? You can’t buy the Feds.
No, but you can most certainly buy the studio, in a manner of speaking. It’s a question of saying to Krug, ‘Listen, I’ll work for free for a year, give you whatever you want, and you tell the Feds to get lost.’
They’ll never do it, Stuart said, finishing his bean soup. A drop of liquid dangled from his left nostril and I had to stifle the urge to wipe his nose for him as he sat slumped over the table, chin extended, a red carbuncle weeping from the lower lid of his right eye. They don’t care about us. They’ll just hire other people, or promote the kids who’ve been doing our work for us.
And even if Krug could be bought I wouldn’t want to be part of it. It would be demeaning and – here Margaret lowered her voice – it would be a betrayal of what I think most of us at this table actually believe. Can’t you see that, Walter?
I can see that I don’t want to die a poor man or a man shut out of the only business he’s ever known. I have bills, I have debts, you all know I have a wife who drinks and needs time away in expensive places. There are personal matters that might force us to think about the whole situation not just in political terms but also as one demanding private sacrifice, and if that sacrifice comes at the expense of our principles, then maybe it’s worth the price. And anyhow, let me ask you this, all you wise and principled people: Why does this movement in which we supposedly believe insist on secrecy? Why should its members wish to conceal themselves? If it was a truly democratic movement, why isn’t it out in the open?
It was in the open, Walter, Margaret whispered, until the U.S. government started prosecuting its members. Communism is fundamentally American – it existed long before the Soviet version! The capitalists have been trying to call us foreign agents since the Tories tried to tar and feather Jefferson. Jefferson who said, God forbid we should ever be twenty years without a rebellion! Does a secret organization publish pamphlets telling the country what its policies are? Of course not!
Then we should be fighting in the courts.
What do you think has been going on in New York for the last several years?
That’s not what I mean.
Forgive me, Walter, but I don’t think you know what you mean.
At that, Walter rose and left the table, abandoning his stuffed bell pepper. Walter, come back! Don’t be so sensitive! Margaret called after him.
Let him go, he’s
a dinosaur, said Stuart.
Bert Scully, who had been twisted around chatting to one of the junior writers at the adjacent table, turned his head to join our conversation without shifting his body so that he had the uncanny appearance of his head being on sideways. Though he was only in his late forties his hands shook with a palsy most of us believed was the result of a bottle-a-day gin habit. You can’t buy your way out of this, he said. Believe me, this whole sorry business hasn’t even started. The nineteen subpoenas in forty-seven, that was only the first course in their poisonous feast. They were just getting warmed up. Although, really, they were setting the table back in the thirties, we all know this, and they’d been planning the menu since 1919. So let’s say forty-seven was the fish course, but they haven’t even cleared the plates and we’ve still got a very long main course to come and then dessert. Now that they’ve won the Hiss conviction they know they can do whatever they want. We’ll see other high-profile arrests before the year is out, every one of the Ten will go to prison, mark my words. Plus all those originally subpoenaed who weren’t called to testify will get subpoenaed again next year, and scores of others will follow. They’ll find a way to start another war that will make the masses go along with whatever purges they insist are necessary, and even if the studios don’t call it a blacklist, we all know there already is one. Any of us who have been implicated and refuse to cooperate will find ourselves unemployable. Even if we comply with whatever demands they make, I don’t think that’ll change anything. All we can do is hunker down, write while we can, find ways around the system, go into another line of work, or leave the country. That’s as plain as it gets. I have seen the future, my friends, and you would be wise to heed my warning. As for myself, I don’t have a passport and I imagine they’d find a way to refuse me one if I applied. I’ve never done anything in my life that could be called real work, so I will probably end up a bum or a suicide.
You should become a fortune-teller, Scully, or an astrologer.
You have to be half-magician to do that, Margaret, and I’ve always been a realist. When Disney called to ask if I’d work on Snow White I said I was only interested if we could make it a picture about a young heiress who comes to the aid of struggling miners in West Virginia. He said no. Then he phoned a few years ago asking me to rewrite Aldous Huxley’s script of Alice in Wonderland. I said I’d do it if I could turn it into a message picture about junkies in the urban jungle. He hung up on me.
Night for Day Page 20
