In the noonday glare I saw Holt in green slacks circling the swimming pool on his way to join us. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, printed with a South Sea landscape. He waved both hands at me from the distance. I remembered just in time that he had ostensibly put one over on me with the Picasso sketches. "Hi, Bob."
"How do you do, Mr. Holt"
He slapped me on the back, something I detest "Still sore about those little drawings? Don't let it get you down. I've just bought a still life from your boss; that ought to make us quits."
"The one with the eels?"
"That's right Has he already told you?"
"No. But I could imagine. The best picture he's got."
"Glad to hear it."
He beat about the bush for a while, then he came to the point. He wanted me to check the script for mistakes and also act as a consultant on costumes and the Nazi background in general. "Those are two entirely different jobs," I said. "What do we do if the script is impossible?"
"Rewrite it. But first, take a look at it." Holt was sweating perceptibly. "Well have to work fast. We want to start shooting the big scenes tomorrow. Could you take a quick look at the script today?"
I didn't answer. Holt opened his dispatch case and took out a bright-yellow binder. "A hundred and seventy pages," he said. "Take you two or three hours."
I looked at the binder. Would I? Wouldn't I? But actually my decision had been made. "Five hundred dollars," said Holt. "For a thousand-word report"
"That's fair enough," said Tannenbaum.
"Two thousand," I said. If I was going to sell myself, at least I wanted to be able to pay my debts and put a few dollars aside.
Holt was almost in tears. "That's out of the question, he said.
"Okay," I said. "I wasn't too keen on it anyway. It's no joke having to think of those things."
"A thousand," said Holt. "Because it's you."
"Two thousand. What's two thousand dollars to a man with a collection of Impressionists?"
"That's hitting below the belt Bob. It's not my money. It's the studio's."
"So much the better."
"Fifteen hundred," said Holt, gnashing his teeth. "And three hundred a week as a consultant."
"Okay," I said. "Of course you'll put a car at my disposal. And it's understood that I'm to be free in the afternoon."
Holt bore it like a man. "Okay, Bob. I'll leave the script. Start right in; we're in a hurry."
"Sure thing, Joe," I said amiably. "I'll want a thousand in advance. Then I'll start right in."
"What do you mean? Don't you trust me?"
"I had my fingers burned with those Picasso drawings. Same as you with that game of backgammon."
"You don't forget anything, do you?"
"I can't afford to."
"Okay. You'll get your check this afternoon. I need your report on the script at eight in the morning. I expect you to be on time."
Holt stood up. He had come to plead for help, but now he was my boss. I had often experienced that sort of transformation; it takes place in a twinkling. In coming, the green slacks had sauntered around the pool; in leaving, they marched. It wouldn't have surprised me if they had grown top boots.
"Naturally," said Silvers, "if you can only work for me part time, I'll have to reduce your salary. Fifty per cent would be fair, don't you think?"
"That's the second time in one day," I said, "that I've heard the word 'fair' being taken in vain."
Silvers pulled up his feet on the light-blue chaise longue. "It seems to me that my offer is not only fair, but exceedingly generous. I'm giving you a chance to make a lot of money in another job. Instead of firing you, I let you work for me when it suits your convenience. You ought to be thankful."
"Sorry. I can't manage that."
The Renoir with the eels was still hanging on his wall. Which meant that Holt could still back out I had no intention of influencing him, but I made a note of the possibility. "I'd have expected you to give me a raise," I said. "Or at least a bonus for the things I sell for you. If you like, you can cut my salary and put me on a commission basis."
Silvers examined me as if I were a rare insect "Do you know the first thing about selling pictures? You'd starve on a commission basis."
Silvers liked to believe that selling pictures required no less genius than painting them. He was thoroughly exasperated with me for implying the contrary. "Here I persuade Mr. Holt to employ you in the movies and you . . ."
"Don't give me that, Mr. Silvers," I said calmly. "You're not trying to sell me anything; Mr. Holt is your customer. You've given him the impression that you're doing him a big favor. That's fine. I'm sure hell show his gratitude by buying more pictures from you. But don't try to make me feel grateful, when the benefit is all yours. It was very nice of you to teach me that the mark of a great dealer is that he doesn't just fleece the customer, but makes him feel grateful for being fleeced. I recognize your mastery, but you don't have to practice it on me."
All at once Silvers' face collapsed; in half a second he had aged twenty years. "Oh," he said. "I don't have to practice it on you. Think it over. What do I get out of life? You throw cocktail parties on my money, you're twenty-five years younger than I am. I sit around this hotel waiting for customers like an old spider; I train you as if you were my own son, and you get sore if I try to sharpen my tired claws on you. Can't I have any fun at all?"
I watched him closely. I knew his tricks. One of them was to be sick in bed, at death's door, as it were, when a customer called. Since a dying man couldn't take even the tiniest picture with him, he preferred to sell, even at a loss, to someone he had taken a shine to. I had arranged the medicine bottles myself. His wife made him up to look like a ghost Thus reclining in a blue dressing gown—the blue dressing gown was my idea; it accentuated his pallor beautifully— he had sold the most hideous monstrosity, an enormous jockey lying dead beside his horse, to a Texas oil millionaire, "at a loss." I had even interrupted the negotiations twice to bring Silvers his medicine, consisting not of whisky, as Silvers wished, but of vodka—also my idea, because vodka was odorless, whereas a good Texan nose would have smelled whisky a mile off. In a dying voice Silvers had finally dictated the sales contract, giving himself a net profit of twenty thousand dollars. I knew this trick and a dozen more—bis own special brand of artistic expression, Silvers called them —but this note of petulance was new to me. And the look of weariness that had come over him seemed genuine.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Doesn't tide climate agree with you?"
"Climate, hell! I'm dying of boredom."
I looked at Renoir's eels. I was sure he had made a profit of eight thousand dollars on them, not a fortune, but nothing to despair about either.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell you my troubles. From sheer boredom I pick up a girl by the swimming pool, a pretty, insignificant little blonde. I invite her to dinner, and she accepts. Champagne, shrimps with Thousand Island dressing, sirloin steak, and so on, all served here in my pretty little dinette. I cheer up, I forget my miserable life, we go to bedroom, and what happens?"
"She leans out the window and starts shouting 'Rape! Police!' "
Silvers let that sink in for a second. "Does that happen?" he asked.
"Sure. So my neighbor Scott tells me. Seems to be the standard way for a girl to pick up some easy change."
"Interesting. No, it wasn't that. I wish it had been. This was worse. She asked for money."
"Yes," I said, "that's very depressing, for a man who's used to being loved for his own sake. How much? A hundred?"
"Worse."
"A thousand? She had her nerve with her."
Silvers made a disparaging gesture. "She asked for a certain sum, but it wasn't that." He stood up, bared his teeth, and spoke in a high, girlish voice. " 'What will you give me if I climb into bed . . .' " and then, exploding: " 'Daddy!' "
I had watched his performance with admiration. The bared teeth gave it a touch of virtuosity.
"Daddy," I said. "Yes, that's quite a blow for a man over fifty. But it doesn't mean very much. It's just a term of endearment. like darling. It has nothing to do with age."
Silvers looked at me eagerly, trying to find comfort in my words. But then he shook his head. "No, this was different. I could have kicked myself for not holding my tongue. But I was too upset. Not by the money. I'd have made her a present anyway. It was her calling me 'daddy.' To me it sounded like 'grandfather.' I asked her what she meant. She thought it was the money I minded. 'Well,' she says, in that tinny little doll's voice of hers, 'if I'm going to shack up with an old man, I expect to get something out of it. I saw this genuine camel's-hair coat at Bullock's Wilshire and . . .'"
Silvers' voice failed him. "What did you do?" I asked.
"What any gentleman would do. I paid her and threw her out."
"The full price?"
"All I could lay hands on."
"Painful but understandable."
"You don't understand a thing," said Silvers. "The money didn't bother me; it was the psychological shock. That little tart calling me an old goat But you wouldn't understand. You're unfeeling, that's what you are."
"That's a fact. Besides, there are some things that can be understood only between people of the same age. And it seems that the gap between age groups increases as we grow older. I once heard a man of eighty refer to a seventy-year-old friend as a young whippersnapper, still wet behind the ears. A strange phenomenon."
"A strange phenomenon! Is that all you have to say?"
"Yes," I said firmly, "that's all I have to say. You can't expect me to take this nonsense seriously."
He was going to flare up, but then a spark of hope appeared in his art-dealer's eyes—as though a dubious Pieter de Hooch in his possession had just been declared authentic by a leading expert. "You mean . . ."
"Why, of course. It's absurd for a man like you to worry about such nonsense."
He thought it over. "But what if I think of it next time? It'll make me impotent. I felt as if a bucket of ice had been . . ." He paused.
"Dashed over your head," I completed.
"Not my head—my cock," he said, with a shameful look. "Now I've got this fear hanging over me. What can I do?"
I pondered the problem for a while. Then I said: "One way is to get drunk and forget all your fears and inhibitions. The only trouble is that drinking makes some people impotent. Or you could do what a racing driver does after an accident. Before shock has had time to set in, he hops into another car and steps on the gas."
"Yes, but in my case shock has already set in."
"Pure imagination, Mr. Silvers. You've read about it, you know what's supposed to happen, so you imagine it's happened to you."
A look of relief, almost gratitude, crept over his face.
"You really think so?"
"Definitely."
He was clearly on the road to recovery. "Strange," he said after a while, "how a silly little word spoken by a silly little tart can take the soul out of everything—money, success, social standing. As though the whole world were secretly Communist."
"What!"
"I mean, as though, when you come right down to it, all men were equal—without exception."
"Time is a Communist," I said. "Regardless of money or social standing, regardless of whether you're a saint or a stinker, it just adds day to day and year to year. An interesting idea, Mr. Silvers, though not exactly new."
"An antiquarian has no use for new ideas."
A faint smile spread over his face. "I guess that no one believes that he's getting old. He knows it, but he doesn't believe it." I could see he was his old self again.
"What about this cut in my salary?" I asked.
"Forget it. Just so you're available in the evening."
"With time and a half for overtime after seven."
"At your normal salary. No extra pay for overtime. Right now you're making more than I am."
"I see you've recovered from your shock, Mr. Silvers."
XXVI
I spent a few hours studying the script. A third of the situations were impossible. The rest could be straightened out. I worked until one in the morning. A good many of the scenes had been taken over from Westerns. The script-writer had undoubtedly picked the crudest, most violent incidents he could find, but compared with what was really happening in Germany they looked like sugar candy and harmless fireworks. The strangest borrowing from the Westerns was their code of honor: the two adversaries always reached for their guns at the same time. This was obviously an experienced writer, who had done gangster pictures as well as Westerns, but the reality of the Third Reich was quite beyond the scope of his imagination.
Luckily, Scott was giving one of his all-night parties. As usual, it had drifted out to the swimming pool. I went down and joined the merrymakers. "Knocking off?" Scott asked me.
"Yes, for today. I need a drink."
"There's Russian vodka and every known brand of whisky."
"A short whisky," I said. "I don't want to get drunk."
Scott laughed. "No pictures to sell, eh?"
Silvers had given me two Renoir drawings, one in pencil, the other in sanguine. He had forced them on me with the observation that small fry shit, too."
"I've got two Renoirs," I said. "You're just in time."
"Renoirs?" asked Scott. "Real ones?"
"Yes," I said. "That seems to be unusual in Hollywood."
"What kind of character is this Silvers?"
"A public benefactor in spite of himself. His customers are always happy, because even if they've been overcharged, their pictures keep increasing in value. The best investment in the world."
"Better than stocks?"
I laughed. "That's what Silvers always says, though he doesn't really believe it himself. The funny part of it is that it's true. It's like the crook who sold worthless land in Florida, claiming there was oil on it. Years later, he bumped into a group of his victims. He expected to be skinned alive. Not at all. They welcomed him as their benefactor. They really had found oil; they were millionaires."
Scott filled my glass. "Do you know, Bob, I wish you'd taken vodka, a big tall glass. Maybe I'll buy a drawing myself tonight. I've just received my check."
"Take the sanguine. It's better."
I stretched out in a deck chair and put my glass down on the ground. I closed my eyes and listened to the music of the little radio someone had brought with him It was a pretty tune, something called "Sunrise Serenade." I opened my eyes again and looked up into the California sky. For a moment I felt as though I were swimming in a soft transparent ocean without a horizon. Then I heard Holt's voice beside me. "Is it eight o'clock already?" I asked.
"No. I just thought I'd look in and see what you were doing."
"I'm drinking whisky. Any more questions? Our contract doesn't start until tomorrow."
"Have you read the script?"
I turned around and looked into his worried face. I didn't want to discuss what I had read, I wanted to forget it. "Tomorrow," I said. "I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."
"Why not now? Then we can get everything ready. Well be saving half a day. We're in a hurry, Bob."
I saw there was no chance of getting rid of him. Why not now? I thought finally. Why not here amid liquor and water and girls, under this serene night sky? Why not chew it over right here instead of going to bed with a bellyful of memories and having to take sleeping pills. "Okay, Joe. Let's just move off to one side."
An hour later I had finished showing Holt the mistakes in his script. "I wouldn't worry about the uniforms and props," I said. "Those things are easy to fix. What really bothers me is the atmosphere. It shouldn't be melodramatic, as in a Western. What's really going on over there is much worse than melodrama."
For a while Holt hemmed and hawed. Finally he said: "Don't forget that movies are a business."
"What do you mean by that?"
"The studio is investing almost a mill
ion. Which means that we need receipts of more than two million before we make our first dollar. "We've got to have audiences."
"I know that. But . . ."
"Nobody would believe these things you've been telling me. Is it really like that?"
"Much worse."
Holt spat into the water. "Nobody'd believe us, Bob."
I stood up. My head ached. I had really had enough. "Then leave it the way it is, Joe. But isn't it ironic? Here's the United States in a war with Germany, and you tell me that no American would believe what the Germans are doing."
Holt wrung his hands. "I believe you, Bob. But the studio wouldn't and neither would the public. Nobody would go to see the kind of picture you're suggesting. The subject is risky enough already. I'm all in favor, Bob, but I'd have to convince the big shots at the studio. What I'd like best is to do a documentary; it would be a flop. The studio wants melodrama."
Shadows in Paradise Page 27
