Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “He showed up at my house—the way he did last night—in a rage. He stalked all around the living room. I tried to calm him down, but I don’t think he heard a word I said. He kept ranting about how he was going to get even, how he was going to make them all pay. And he meant it, too. You could see it in his eyes. He had the look on his face of someone who knows what is going to happen, knows that things are going to work just the way he imagines, knows it with such absolute certainty that he has already begun to enjoy the way it is going to make him feel. Stanley Roth had been told—told by everyone, everyone who counted—that he didn’t have the talent to make a movie on his own, and yet there he was, convinced, and jubilant in the conviction, that he was not only going to make a movie on his own but that he was going to make that movie, the one they had all turned down. That was his idea of revenge: to make them feel what fools they had been, to make them sorry they had treated him the way they had. That’s what I mean when I say he has too much ego, that he’s too selfish.”

  Griffin’s eyes roved around the room, like someone looking at things he had not seen in a very long time.

  “Stanley Roth doesn’t want to hurt anyone; he wants them to know they made a mistake, that they underestimated him, that he now has the power to ruin their lives, or at least destroy their careers. The last thing he would ever do is kill someone he really wanted to hurt.”

  The way he said it made me wonder whether Stanley Roth had ever done anything like that to him. If Roth was too selfish to commit an act of violence; if he had too much ego to give anyone the satisfaction, such as it was, of believing that it was the only way he could deal with them; then what about all those people, like Louis Griffin, who were required constantly to submit to whatever the great man decided he wanted to do? Was there a point at which any of them ever had enough; a point at which they were willing to risk his displeasure and tell him what they really thought about the way he treated them and the others around him? Or were they all, except for those like Michael Wirthlin who could always buy his way into another studio, another project, afraid to do anything that might jeopardize their chance to remain a part of that Hollywood life they thought everyone wanted to have?

  I lay there, in that silk and satin bed, watching in the stillness how the light filtered through the shutters behind Louis Griffin and placed him in the shadows, softening his features, making him seem somehow near at hand and yet far away. It was that distance I had noticed about him from the very first, that sense that he was someone you could trust, someone who would help you any way he could, but someone who had too much pride ever to ask you to do anything for him.

  “Did he make that movie?” I asked for no other reason than to break the silence.

  Griffin smiled. “Yes, he made it. He won the Academy Award for it.” He paused. “He gave quite an eloquent acceptance speech. ‘Not everyone thought this could be done.’”

  It amused him, the way those few quoted words sounded when he spoke them out loud in the quiet privacy of this room, years after he had heard them.

  “‘Not everyone thought this could be done.’ That was the first line, the very first thing he said that night when he stood there on the stage, holding the Oscar for Best Picture. He must have felt this tremendous sense of satisfaction, had this incredible feeling of vindication, but the only people who felt the full sting of what he said were the ones who had turned him down, the ones who ridiculed him, told him he would never make it in their business—yes, ‘their business.’ No one else, only them, because he immediately added, ‘Which makes my debt to those who did believe it could be done, who not only believed it but helped make it possible, all the greater.’”

  Smiling to himself, Louis Griffin rubbed the back of his hand with his other thumb.

  “That night Stanley Roth owned this town, and everyone knew it. They knew something else as well,” said Griffin, looking up. “They knew he was going to own it for a long time to come.”

  I was feeling a little better and found that if I did it slowly I could raise my head without any appreciable discomfort. As carefully as I could, I sat up in bed.

  “You better not try to get up just yet. The doctor said you should stay in bed all day. Why don’t I leave? Perhaps you can get back to sleep. It would do you good.”

  “No,” I said as he started to get up from the chair. “I’m sure the doctor is right, but stay a while longer if you can. I know you have other things to do, but I’m interested in what you have been telling me.”

  “A few more minutes; then you better rest,” said Griffin as he let himself back down into the chair. He began to glance around the room, a pensive expression in his eyes, until he got to the picture of his daughter. He seemed to stop still. Raising his hand to his mouth, he pressed his fingers together, his face a blank stare.

  “I used to come in here sometimes late at night,” said Griffin wistfully; “when my daughter was still a child. I’d sit here, in this chair, and watch her sleep. Not for very long, just a few minutes; but it was for me the best time of the day, those few minutes in the nighttime quiet, watching her sleep, knowing that there was nothing better in the world. I would have liked for it to last forever, having a child in her childhood, a young—well, perhaps not really a young—father. I was nearly forty when she was born.”

  He looked again at the photograph of his daughter. From what he had just said, it must have been taken some years before, yet it was the only photograph in the room. There was nothing to show what she looked like later, nothing to commemorate any of the events that mark the normal stages in a young girl’s life. Perhaps they were in some other part of the house, her parent’s bedroom for example; but then why was everything else—the pink satin comforter, the white lacquered dresser, the simple mirror—the way a girl of that age would have wanted it and not what she would have wanted when she was older, a young woman beginning to lead a life of her own?

  “You’ve been wondering why—or perhaps even how—I’ve stayed on such apparently good terms with Stanley; why, given the way he behaves, we have managed to remain friends,” said Griffin, his eyes coming slowly back to mine. “It’s because of her, my daughter. Stanley saved her life. You won’t find that in any of the biographies or any of the magazine articles about him. He never told anyone; he made me promise I’d never tell anyone. She was three years old. We weren’t living here then. We lived in Pasadena on a residential street. She was playing in the front yard. It was fenced, but she went out on the sidewalk. A dog—just a puppy—had gotten loose and was running down the street. She went out in the street to touch it, to pet it. She ran right in front of a car. Stanley had just pulled into the driveway. He saw it all happen. He went after her, dove in front of the car, shoved her out of the way. The car hit him and broke his shoulder, but he saved her life. So, you see, Stanley Roth can come over here and throw a dining room chair through my window; he can in one of his frequent fits of temper say things to me I wouldn’t take from another human being on the face of the earth; he could even—though I don’t for a moment think he did—murder his wife, and I would still do anything I could to help him; because, you see, Mr. Antonelli, there are some debts that can never be repaid. Ever.

  “But I should also tell you, that even if that had never happened, even if he had never saved my daughter’s life, I would probably still consider myself fortunate to be his friend. Talent doesn’t excuse everything, but it excuses a lot. I mean real talent, the kind that Stanley Roth has. Yes, yes, I know: it’s Hollywood we’re talking about; it’s not really art. The strange thing is, I tend to agree with that. Most of what’s done here is a travesty: crude, moronic, the kind of thing no sensible person would waste his time watching; or, if he mistakenly began to watch, would immediately walk out of, embarrassed that anyone would stay.”

  Lifting his chin, Griffin studied me for a moment.

  “Do you ever read the newspaper accounts of a trial you’re in? Have you read, for example, what’s been writte
n in the L.A. papers during this trial? If you read that you conducted a ‘brilliant’ cross-examination of a witness, don’t you find yourself, if only just for a moment, thinking perhaps just a little more highly of that particular cross-examination than you did before? We all do that, don’t we?—think of ourselves the way others think of us; or, rather, think of ourselves in terms of what others say about us. It’s a strange phenomenon when you think about it: we may think someone a fool, a liar, a person who wouldn’t tell the truth even on the offchance he figured out what it was—but let him tell you that he thought something you did was great and he becomes immediately the embodied voice of all the intelligence, all the wisdom in the world.”

  Folding his arms across his chest, Griffin leaned against the side of the chair, striking a languid pose.

  “We all do it—believe the things we want to hear and invent a thousand reasons why the things we don’t want to hear are wrong. But if it’s always difficult not to be influenced by the opinions of others, it’s almost impossible here, in this town, especially if you become successful. You don’t make good movies, or pretty good movies: you make great movies, some of the greatest movies ever made. And you are not—if you’re Stanley Roth—a perfectly capable, or quite a competent, director, someone who can bring out the talent of the actors with whom you work. No, you’re a great director, and everything you do is something no one else could have done as well.

  “There is no sense of proportion here, no sense of the small degrees of difference that make up the distinction between better and worse. Stanley Roth is one of the few men—maybe the only one when you really get down to it—who doesn’t believe any of it. And do you know why? Because he knows he’s better than the rest of them, and because he also knows that he isn’t anything like as good as he should be.”

  Griffin drew a breath. His eyes moved slowly from side to side as he thought about the implications of what he had just said.

  “Didn’t something like that happen to you? When you realized you were better than other lawyers, but that you also made mistakes? When you knew the mistakes you had made, the things you could have done better, in that cross-examination the newspapers called brilliant?”

  Griffin smiled as he remembered what he had said to me himself.

  “The cross-examination of Detective Crenshaw, the one I thought was so great: You would have seen flaws in it, thought of things you should have done differently; perhaps even become angry with yourself for not having seen something you only thought about when it was too late. That’s what I’m trying to tell you about Stanley: He doesn’t depend on what other people think, because he knows more about it than they do. It doesn’t make him very easy to be around sometimes, but then I don’t imagine you’re always very easy to be around all the time, either. I don’t think it’s very easy for Stanley to be around himself. It’s the price he pays for being what he is; it’s the price he pays for that astonishing talent he has. I admire that; I wish I had some of it myself. So I sometimes put up with things perhaps I shouldn’t. So what?”

  With a slight shift of his shoulder Griffin seemed to dismiss any suggestion that Stanley Roth could ever done anything that would make him reconsider the loyalty he felt toward him.

  “Was Wirthlin right?” I asked, touching the lump above my eye. There did not seem to be quite so many sutures as I had thought before, and the stitched path they formed not nearly so jagged. What I had feared might be disfigurement now felt no larger than a minor cut.

  “Was he right that Stanley Roth is finished? No, I won’t believe that until it happens. Is he right that Blue Zephyr is finished? Probably.” He paused. “I suppose it was finished the day we started. Bringing Michael in. I was against it. I thought we should wait a while longer, until we could finance it on our own. I could tell Michael wouldn’t be content with letting Stanley—or anyone else—run the show. He said all the right things; he insisted he understood that Blue Zephyr was Stanley’s studio, that Stanley would decide what pictures to make and how to make them; but—well, you’ve seen Michael enough to know—he wasn’t going to let anyone do anything if he disagreed with it, not if there was any way he could stop it. I think Michael really thought that once Stanley got to know him, he’d start to see that Michael knew what he was talking about. The problem was that the more Stanley got to know him, the more convinced he was that Michael didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. And as you can imagine, Stanley wasn’t shy about telling him so.

  “Stanley knew that it was only a matter of time before Michael would decide to pull out; but he thought by then we wouldn’t need him anymore: that the studio would be making enough money that we wouldn’t need much in the way of outside financing.”

  “What do you know about Stanley’s screenplay, Blue Zephyr?”

  Griffin’s eyes lit up.

  “The next Citizen Kane? I know it’s what Stanley has always wanted to do. I know the rough outline of the story, but if you’re asking if I’ve ever read it—no, I haven’t. Have you?”

  He did not seem surprised when I told him that I had, and even less surprised when I told him how good I thought it was.

  “Has he told you what he’s working on now?” inquired Griffin, more than a little curious.

  “No, I have no idea. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that he was working on anything in particular. I know he works, at night, after the trial, in that bungalow of his; but I just assumed it was on the routine business of the studio.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Griffin with a sigh, “it isn’t routine. He won’t tell me what it is, except that he’s thoroughly engrossed in it and he’s determined it’s going to be the next movie he makes. How did he put it? Yes, even if it’s the last movie he makes. He’s spending all his time on it, all the time he isn’t in court or otherwise occupied with the trial. Every night, sometimes till three or four in the morning—and all weekend long. I don’t know when he sleeps. I think the only rest he gets is when he’s sitting next to you in court, when he can’t do anything else. Whatever he’s working on, he seems to think it can’t wait.”

  I thought I understood the sense of urgency, the fear that he did not have much time. He was on trial for murder, and these might be the last days of freedom he had left. But when I suggested that to Griffin, he disagreed. He assured me that Stanley Roth could not possibly be convicted.

  “That’s what Stanley believes; that’s what he hopes,” I said, attempting a clarification.

  “No, it’s what he’s convinced of. He knows he didn’t do it,” said Griffin before he added with a slight, deferential nod, “and he knows what you can do.”

  A glance passed between us and for a moment we were both reminded of what he had been telling me earlier about believing ourselves to be what others said about us.

  “In Blue Zephyr,” I said presently, “the head of the studio has a partner—just one partner—who has an affair with his wife, because his wife, a movie star he created out of a minor actress, wants the partner to have a studio of his own where she can do what she wants.”

  “And does he? The partner, I mean. Does he leave Blue Zephyr and set up a studio of his own?” asked Griffin pensively.

  “Yes, and the actress goes with him, and Blue Zephyr is about to go under and William Welles—that is the name of the character, the name Stanley Roth gave himself—makes one last picture, the picture that will tell the truth about Hollywood and save the studio. He calls the picture... ”

  Griffin had been following intently.

  “Blue Zephyr.”

  He said it in a way that startled me. He knew it, and not because he had known, as he put it, the rough outline of the story. He knew it with a kind of inevitability, as if he had known Stanley Roth so well, understood him so thoroughly, that he knew instinctively what he would have called—what he would have had to have called—the movie made inside the movie.

  “Nobody but Stanley Roth could have done that,” said Griffin, calmly sha
king his head in admiration. “Even if they had thought of it, nobody else would have had the guts. Blue Zephyr. Astonishing, isn’t it? How simple it seems, after it’s been done.”

  Griffin sat straight up. His nostrils flared as he took a short, decisive breath.

  “You want to know if I think Mary Margaret was having an affair with Michael Wirthlin. You want to know if she was going to leave Stanley and leave Blue Zephyr. She might have had an affair with Michael, but it wouldn’t have meant much if she had, at least not to her. I’m sure you’ve been told lots of different things about Marian, but... ”

  “You called her Marian?” I asked, unable to hide my surprise. There was a brief, awkward silence, and in the shadows of that dimly lit room I thought I saw a slight flush of embarrassment on Louis Griffin’s finely sculpted cheek. He closed his eyes and began to run the fingers of his right hand over his forehead, slowly, back and forth, the weary gesture of someone remembering something he would have given anything to change, something he tried not to think about, because each time he did it broke his heart all over again. He stopped rubbing his forehead and opened his eyes, disappointed in himself for exposing, if only for the moment, what he had intended to keep private.