Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  When they drove up round the drive to the door, the first thing they saw was Tony and Max Hirsch sitting on the marble bench in the garden. “I’ll talk to them,” said Agnes. Margo rushed upstairs and started to dress. She was sitting looking at herself in the glass in her stepins when Tony rushed into the room. When he got into the light over the dressingtable she noticed that he had a black eye. “Taking up the gentle art, eh, Tony?” she said without turning around.

  Tony talked breathlessly. “Max blacked my eye because I did not want to come. Margo, he will kill me if you don’t give me one thousand dollars. We will not leave the house till you give us a check and we got to have some cash too, because Max is giving a party tonight and the bootlegger will not deliver the liquor until he’s paid cash. Max says you are getting a divorce. How can you? There is no divorce under the church. It’s a sin that I will not have on my soul. You cannot get a divorce.”

  Margo got up and turned around to face him. “Hand me my negligee on the bed there . . . nouse catching my death of cold. . . . Say, Tony, do you think I’m getting too fat? I gained two pounds last week. . . . Look here, Tony, that squarehead’s going to be the ruination of you. You better cut him out and go away for another cure somewhere. I’d hate to have the federal dicks get hold of you on a narcotic charge. They made a big raid in San Pedro only yesterday.”

  Tony burst into tears. “You’ve got to give it to me. He’ll break every bone in my body.”

  Margo looked at her wristwatch that lay on the dressingtable beside the big powderbox. Eight o’clock. Sam would be coming by any minute now. “All right,” she said, “but next time this house is going to be guarded by detectives. . . . Get that,” she said. “And any monkeybusiness and you birds land in jail. If you think Sam Margolies can’t keep it out of the papers you’ve got another think coming. Go downstairs and tell Agnes to make you out a check and give you any cash she has in the house.” Margo went back to her dressing.

  A few minutes later Agnes came up crying. “What shall we do? I gave them the check and two hundred dollars. . . . Oh, it’s awful. Why didn’t Frank warn us? I know he’s watching over us but he might have told us what to do about that dreadful man.” Margo went into her dresscloset and slipped into a brand new eveninggown. “What we’ll do is stop that check first thing in the morning. You call up the homeprotection office and get two detectives out here on day and night duty right away. I’m through, that’s all.”

  Margo was mad, she was striding up and down the room in her new white spangly dress with a trimming of ostrich feathers. She caught sight of herself in the big triple mirror standing between the beds. She went over and stood in front of it. She looked at the three views of herself in the white spangly dress. Her eyes were a flashing blue and her cheeks were flushed. Agnes came up behind her bringing her the rhinestone band she was going to wear in her hair. “Oh, Margie,” she cried, “you never looked so stunning.”

  The maid came up to say that Mr. Margolies was waiting. Margo kissed Agnes and said, “You won’t be scared with the detectives, will you, dearie?” Margo pulled the ermine wrap that they’d sent up on approval that afternoon round her shoulders and walked out to the car. Rodney Cathcart was there lolling in the back seat in his dressclothes. A set of perfect teeth shone in his long brown face when he smiled at her. Sam had got out to help her in, “Margo darling, you take our breaths away, I knew that was the right dress,” he said. His eyes were brighter than usual. “Tonight’s a very important night. It is the edict of the stars. I’ll tell you about it later. I’ve had our horoscopes cast.”

  In the crowded throbbing vestibule Margo and Rodney Cathcart had to stop at the microphone to say a few words about their new picture and their association with Sam Margolies as they went in through the beating glare of lights and eyes to the lobby. When the master of ceremonies tried to get Margolies to speak he turned his back angrily and walked into the theater as if it was empty, not looking to the right or the left. After the show they went to a restaurant and sat at a table for a while. Rodney Cathcart ordered some kidneychops. “You mustn’t eat too much, Si,” said Margolies. “The pièce de résistance is at my flat.”

  Sure enough there was a big table set out with cold salmon and lobstersalad and a Filipino butler opening champagne for just the three of them when they went back there after the restaurant had started to thin out. This time Margo tore loose and ate and drank all she could hold. Rodney Cathcart put away almost the whole salmon, muttering that it was topping, and even Sam, saying he was sure it would kill him, ate a plate of lobstersalad.

  Margo was dizzygiggly drunk when she found that the Filipino and Sam Margolies had disappeared and that she and Si were sitting together on the couch that had the lionskin on it. “So you’re going to marry Sam,” said Si, gulping down a glass of champagne. She nodded. “Good girl.” Si took off his coat and vest and hung them carefully on a chair. “Hate clothes,” he said. “You must come to my ranch. . . . Hot stuff.” “But you wear them so beautifully,” said Margo. “Correct,” said Si.

  He reached over and lifted her onto his knee. “But, Si, we oughtn’t to, not on Sam’s lionskin.” Si put his mouth to hers and kissed her. “You find me exciting? You ought to see me stripped.” “Don’t, don’t,” said Margo. She couldn’t help it, he was too strong, his hands were all over her under her dress.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t give a damn,” she said. He went over and got her another glass of champagne. For himself he filled a bowl that had held cracked ice earlier in the evening. “As for that lion it’s bloody rot. Sam shot it but the blighter shot it in a zoo. They were sellin’ off some old ones at one of the bloody lionfarms and they had a shoot. Couldn’t miss ’em. It was a bloody crime.” He drank down the champagne and suddenly jumped at her. She fell on the couch with his arms crushing her.

  She was dizzy. She walked up and down the room trying to catch her breath. “Goodnight, hot sketch,” Si said and carefully put on his coat and vest again and was gone out the door. She was dizzy.

  Sam was back and was showing her a lot of calculations on a piece of paper. His eyes bulged shiny into her face as she tried to read. His hands were shaking. “It’s tonight,” he kept saying, “it’s tonight that our lifelines cross. . . . We are married whether we wish it or not. I don’t believe in freewill. Do you, darling Margo?”

  Margo was dizzy. She couldn’t say anything. “Come, dear child, you are tired.” Margolies’ voice burred soothingly in her ears. She let him lead her into the bedroom and carefully take her clothes off and lay her between the black silk sheets of the big poster bed.

  It was broad daylight when Sam drove her back to the house. The detective outside touched his hat as they turned into the drive. It made her feel good to see the man’s big pugface as he stood there guarding her house. Agnes was up and walking up and down in a padded flowered dressinggown in the livingroom with a newspaper in her hand. “Where have you been?” she cried. “Oh, Margie, you’ll ruin your looks if you go on like this and you’re just getting a start too. . . . Look at this . . . now don’t be shocked . . . remember it’s all for the best.”

  She handed the Times to Margo, pointing out a headline with the sharp pink manicured nail of her forefinger. “Didn’t I tell you Frank was watching over us?”

  HOLLYWOOD EXTRA SLAIN AT PARTY

  Noted Polo Player Disappears

  Sailors Held

  Two enlisted men in uniform, George Cook and Fred Costello, from the battleship Kenesaw were held for questioning when they were found stupefied with liquor or narcotics in the basement of an apartment house at 2234 Higueras Drive, San Pedro, where residents allege a drunken party had been in progress all night. Near them was found the body of a young man whose skull had been fractured by a blow from a blunt instrument who was identified as a Cuban, Antonio Garrido, erstwhile extra on several prominent studio lots. He was still breathing when the police broke in in response to telephoned complaints from the neighbors. The fourth mem
ber of the party, a German citizen named Max Hirsch, supposed by some to be an Austrian nobleman, who shared an apartment at Mimosa in a fashionable bungalow court with the handsome young Cuban, had fled before police reached the scene of the tragedy. At an early hour this morning he had not yet been located by the police.

  Margo felt the room swinging in great circles around her head. “Oh, my God,” she said. Going upstairs she had to hold tight to the baluster to keep from falling. She tore off her clothes and ran herself a hot bath and lay back in it with her eyes closed.

  “Oh, Margie,” wailed Agnes from the other room, “your lovely new gown is a wreck.”

  Margo and Sam Margolies flew to Tucson to be married. Nobody was present except Agnes and Rodney Cathcart. After the ceremony Margolies handed the justice of the peace a new hundreddollar bill. The going was pretty bumpy on the way back and the big rattly Ford trimotor gave them quite a shakingup crossing the desert. Margolies’ face was all colors under his white beret but he said it was delightful. Rodney Cathcart and Agnes vomited frankly into their cardboard containers. Margo felt her pretty smile tightening into a desperate grin but she managed to keep the wedding breakfast down. When the plane came to rest at the airport at last, they kept the cameramen waiting a half an hour before they could trust themselves to come down the gangplank flushed and smiling into a rain of streamers and confetti thrown by the attendants and the whir of the motionpicture cameras. Rodney Cathcart had to drink most of a pint of scotch before he could get his legs not to buckle under him. Margo wore her smile over a mass of yellow orchids that had been waiting for her in the refrigerator at the airport, and Agnes looked tickled to death because Sam had bought her orchids too, lavender ones, and insisted that she stride down the gangplank into the cameras with the rest of them.

  It was a relief after the glare of the desert and the lurching of the plane in the airpockets to get back to the quiet dressingroom at the lot. By three o’clock they were in their makeup. In a small room in the ground floor Margolies went right back to work taking closeups of Margo and Rodney Cathcart in a clinch against the background of a corner of a mud fort. Si was stripped to the waist with two cartridgebelts crossed over his chest and a canvas legionnaire’s kepi on his head and Margo was in a white eveningdress with highheeled satin slippers. They were having trouble with the clinch on account of the cartridgebelts. Margolies with his porcelainhandled cane thrashing in front of him kept strutting back and forth from the little box he stood on behind the camera into the glare of the klieg light where Margo and Si clinched and unclinched a dozen times before they hit a position that suited him. “My dear Si,” he was saying, “you must make them feel it. Every ripple of your muscles must make them feel passion . . . you are stiff like a wooden doll. They all love her, a piece of fragile beautiful palpitant womanhood ready to give all for the man she loves. . . . Margo darling, you faint, you let yourself go in his arms. If his strong arms weren’t there to catch you you would fall to the ground. Si, my dear fellow, you are not an athletic instructor teaching a young lady to swim, you are a desperate lover facing death. . . . They all feel they are you, you are loving her for them, the millions who want love and beauty and excitement, but forget them, loosen up, my dear fellow, forget that I’m here and the camera’s here, you are alone together snatching a desperate moment, you are alone except for your two beating hearts, you and the most beautiful girl in the world, the nation’s newest sweetheart. . . . All right . . . hold it. . . . Camera.”

  Newsreel LXIII

  but a few minutes later this false land disappeared as quickly and as mysteriously as it had come and I found before me the long stretch of the silent sea with not a single sign of life in sight

  Whippoorwills call

  And evening is nigh

  I hurry to . . . my blue heaven

  LINDBERGH IN PERIL AS WAVE TRAPS HIM IN

  CRUISER’S BOW

  Down in the Tennessee mountains

  Away from the sins of the world

  Old Dan Kelly’s son there he leaned on his gun

  A thinkin’ of Zeb Turney’s girl

  ACCLAIMED BY HUGE CROWDS IN THE STREETS

  Snaps Pictures From Dizzy Yardarm

  Dan was a hotblooded youngster

  His Dad raised him up sturdy an’ right

  ENTHRALLED BY DARING DEED CITY CHEERS

  FROM DEPTHS OF ITS HEART

  FLYER SPORTS IN AIR

  His heart in a whirl with his love for the girl

  He loaded his doublebarreled gun

  LEADERS OF PUBLIC LIFE BREAK INTO

  UPROAR AT SIGHT OF FLYER

  CONFUSION IN HOTEL

  Aviator Nearly Hurled From Auto as it

  Leaps Forward Through Gap in Crowd

  Over the mountains he wandered

  This son of a Tennessee man

  With fire in his eye and his gun by his side

  Alooking for Zeb Turney’s clan

  SHRINERS PARADE IN DELUGE OF RAIN

  Paper Blizzard Chokes Broadway

  Shots ringin’ out through the mountain

  Shots ringin’ out through the breeze

  LINDY TO HEAD BIG AIRLINE

  The story of Dan Kelly’s moonshine

  Is spread far and wide o’er the world

  How Dan killed the clan shot them down to a man

  And brought back old Zeb Turney’s girl

  a short, partly bald man, his face set in tense emotion, ran out from a mass of people where he had been concealed and climbed quickly into the plane as if afraid he might be stopped. He had on ordinary clothes and a leather vest instead of a coat. He was bareheaded. He crowded down beside Chamberlin looking neither at the crowd nor at his own wife who stood a little in front of the plane and at one side, her eyes big with wonder. The motor roared and the plane started down the runway, stopped and came back again and then took off perfectly

  Architect

  A muggy day in late spring in eighteen eightyseven a tall youngster of eighteen with fine eyes and a handsome arrogant way of carrying his head arrived in Chicago with seven dollars left in his pocket from buying his ticket from Madison with some cash he’d got by pawning Plutarch’s Lives, a Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and an old furcollared coat.

  Before leaving home to make himself a career in an architect’s office (there was no architecture course at Wisconsin to clutter his mind with stale Beaux Arts drawings); the youngster had seen the dome of the new State Capitol in Madison collapse on account of bad rubblework in the piers, some thieving contractors’ skimping materials to save the politicians their rakeoff, and perhaps a trifling but deadly error in the architect’s plans;

  he never forgot the roar of burst masonry, the flying plaster, the soaring dustcloud, the mashed bodies of the dead and dying being carried out, set faces livid with plasterdust.

  Walking round downtown Chicago, crossing and recrossing the bridges over the Chicago River in the jingle and clatter of traffic, the rattle of vans and loaded wagons and the stamping of big drayhorses and the hooting of towboats with barges and the rumbling whistle of lakesteamers waiting for the draw,

  he thought of the great continent stretching a thousand miles east and south and north, three thousand miles west, and everywhere, at mineheads, on the shores of newlydredged harbors, along watercourses, at the intersections of railroads, sprouting

  shacks roundhouses tipples grainelevators stores warehouses tenements, great houses for the wealthy set in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hills, hotels churches operahouses auditoriums.

  He walked with long eager steps

  towards the untrammeled future opening in every direction for a young man who’d keep his hands to his work and his wits sharp to invent.

  The same day he landed a job in an architect’s office.

  Frank Lloyd Wright was the grandson of a Welsh hatter and preacher who’d settled in a rich Wisconsin valley, Spring Valley, and raised a big family of farmers and
preachers and schoolteachers there. Wright’s father was a preacher too, a restless illadjusted Newenglander who studied medicine, preached in a Baptist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and then as a Unitarian in the middle west, taught music, read Sanskrit and finally walked out on his family.

  Young Wright was born on his grandfather’s farm, went to school in Weymouth and Madison, worked summers on a farm of his uncle’s in Wisconsin.

  His training in architecture was the reading of Viollet le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stonemasonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis Sullivan in the office of Adler and Sullivan in Chicago. (It was Louis Sullivan who, after Richardson, invented whatever was invented in nineteenthcentury architecture in America.)

  When Frank Lloyd Wright left Sullivan he had already launched a distinctive style, prairie architecture. In Oak Park he built broad suburban dwellings for rich men that were the first buildings to break the hold on American builders’ minds of centuries of pastward routine, of the wornout capital and plinth and pediment dragged through the centuries from the Acropolis, and the jaded traditional stencils of Roman masonry, the halfobliterated Palladian copybooks.