by Steve Fisher
“No. I meant it.”
She shook her head. “I slept on it. It couldn’t come true! It’s too nice!”
I grinned. “You wait, Vicky!”
The three of us went to lunch.
“Paul wanted me to go to the races,” Jill said, “but—to be candid—he leaves me cold.” She smiled. “Vicky’s afraid I’ll never fall in love!”
We had gone to the Bali, which was cool and intimate, and empty at this hour. The bartender was polishing glasses, and after a long time a handsome young Polynesian waiter came to our table and smiled, and fixed his pencil, waiting for our order.
We drank cocktails and had a fine lunch. Vicky was perfectly swell. She seemed kind of proud of me. But—I don’t know why—I felt strange with Jill there. She was quiet and reserved. The things she said were pleasant and her mood was gay. Yet there was something about her that haunted my imagination. Like a pretty song—she disturbed my emotions. She left early.
“I really must run,” she said. “The band rehearses at three. It’s been very nice meeting you.”
“I didn’t know there was a rehearsal this afternoon,” Vicky said naively.
“But there is, darling. Didn’t I tell you?” Then she was gone.
I was with Vicky all weekend and when I arrived at the studio at ten o’clock on Monday I felt fine. The story editor called me in and said the screen play they’d sent for me to polish had been temporarily shelved and he had a much better job. They had just bought a story. It was about winter in Paris. An American boy and a French girl are trapped in the city when the Nazis marched in. They were hungry they were haunted; the nights were cold and bitter. It was poignant and beautiful. In the end the girl died. It was magnificent! I was to do the shooting script.
The story editor blew his nose. He had reached the zenith of his emotions.
“I won’t see you any more,” he said. “From now on you’ll work directly with your producer. But I’ll always know what you’re doing. By option time,” he went on ominously, “there’ll be a dozen reports about you on my desk.
One thing more. Always remember that your conduct is unimportant. Nobody’s got a stop watch on you. You can play craps or go to the races or spend your time in Malibu. Writers in Hollywood work on the merit system. They know if their script is lousy that’ll be the end. Nothing counts except your dialogue, continuity and timing. Everything you write will be made up in carbons and read by a dozen people—and we can smell a phony or forced script a mile away. Out here we pay for and get the best writing talent in the world. But a lot of the boys think they don’t have to produce—they’re wrong!”
As I followed him into the hall, and up the stairs to the producer’s office, I felt all noble and full of stirring resolutions. The producer was in his shirt sleeves. He was short, with dark curly hair, and fairly young. Until three months ago he had been a writer. I had heard rumor that now, as a producer, he was the Front Office pet. The story editor went through very solemn formalities and the producer stood twirling a pencil in his hand and looking me over.
When the story editor was gone the producer lay down on his couch and crossed his legs and looked at the ceiling. “It’s hot as hell, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a scorcher.”
“This is a conference,” said the producer. “Did Al tell you about the story?”
“A little.”
The producer turned over on his stomach and began picking threads out of a cushion. “It’s a helluva sweet story. If we work it right I think we can get the best stuff out of A Summer Place and Farewell to Arms and work it all right in. I’ll get prints of these films and in a couple of days we’ll go to the projection room and look them over. They both grossed like hell, you know.”
“They had fine reviews.”
“Reviews and grosses ain’t always the same thing. You’ve got to pull in the sticks to make money. New York and all the rest of the big cities put together’d never make up production costs for you. We’re going to spend three million on this picture, and do it in Technicolor. We’re going to try and borrow Audrey Hepburn from Paramount and Marlon Brando, if he can get any free time, for the lead roles—but we probably won’t get them. My first idea was Debbie Reynolds. But I just talked to her on the phone and she said no soap. Maybe we’ll get Gina Lollabrigida for the part. It’s a sweet story.”
“It certainly is.”
He sat up and ran his hands through his curly hair and yawned.
“Well, you take the script and break it down and do me a forty-page treatment,” he said. “After that we’ll do a sixtypage treatment—and then a first rough draft of the screen play. Most screen plays are exactly a hundred and twenty pages. We’ll run ours to a hundred and fifty so the front office can cut it down without killing it.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do the treatment.”
“How soon’ll you have it done—about six weeks?”
“In about ten days,” I said.
“You’re nuts to write that fast, but it’s okay by me.”
I went to the commissary for lunch. I had the original story with me, and I wasn’t in the commissary at all. I was in a sidewalk café on the Boul’ Mich. I was in an attic overlooking the Seine and I held Vicky up to the window because Vicky was sick, and I told her it was our Paris out there and if she listened she could still hear the chimes in Notre Dame Cathedral. I glanced up then and Vicky was really there. She was sitting at a table with two secretaries. I went back to my office and wrote at white hot speed on a typewriter until it got dark outside and the studio cop came around locking doors, and the switchboard girl asked me if I wanted a night trunk line.
I called Vicky and told her I was going to be busy. But I didn’t do any more work after all. I was restless and excited and I drove down to Los Angeles and walked the streets, thinking about the story. I was on Main Street and I stood in front of a burlesque show for a while, debating whether I could think better inside; but then I moved on and pretty soon I was looking into a hock shop window. I saw a pair of ancient brass knucks. They might have had value, or a history of which the pawnshop keeper was unaware, and remembering a friend in New York who collected items like this it occurred to me that these would make a good Christmas present. So I went in and bought them and put them in my pocket. I got back into my new Lincoln and drove to Vicky’s apartment on Franklin Avenue.
There was a kid at the switchboard half asleep. He was big, and he had a face like cold cream. He wore heavy thick-lens glasses, and his eyes were monstrous—or so it seemed—behind them. They were round, yellow eyes, and he turned and stared at me blankly. I looked over my shoulder to see whether it was me he was looking at or an escaped gorilla. It was me.
“Well?” he said. His hands were huge and hairy.
“I’d like to see Vicky Lynn.”
His face worked. “At this hour?”
I said: “What do I need—your permission?”
He plugged in angrily. But when Vicky came on his voice was honey. I whispered my name just in time. “Shall I throw him out?” he asked.
“Try it, you son of a bitch,” I said. But I had my fingers crossed.
He jerked out the plug. “You can go up,” he said. The way he looked at me you would have thought I was going upstairs and crawl in bed with his mother.
I found out later that this guy’s name was Harry Williams. “So long, Toots,” I said, and I started up the stairs.
Vicky had been preparing for bed and she wore a beautiful black gossamer nightgown and a robe and slim white mules. She said Hey, It’s Midnight; then she said But It’s All Right, Honey, I’ll Keep a Light in the Window and You Just Come Any Hour You Want. So I kissed her. That’s a Fine Reward, Baby, she said, I’ll Keep Two Lights in the Window, and I kissed her again. I held her very close to me, and kissed her hair, and her neck.
“Oh, baby,” she said, “I love you like anything!”
I said: “Some fun, huh, kid?” a
nd she said, “Mmm, boy, I’ll say,” and I said: “Now to roast some marshmallows.”
At one A.M. or a little after we were in the kitchenette sopping up coffee and pushing conversation around. I told her about my run-in downstairs on the switchboard with The Skinny Creep.
“Oh, you mean Harry Williams,” she said. “Baby, he isn’t quite bright.” Then she laughed. “Night before last the manager came home and found him asleep on the board. Poor Harry! You should’ve heard him crying in his beer. He said he didn’t have to work in a joint like this. Let them fire him!”
“Sure. Or let the draft get him.”
“No. He said he’d had a card from a distant cousin up in Doris and, by God, he could always get a job up there, by God. A man’s job.”
“You mean like crocheting sweaters for the Red Cross?”
“Huh-uh. Picking grapes off the vine.”
“Oh, Lord!”
Vicky grabbed my hand. “But, listen—this’ll kill you dead, baby—Jill thinks Harry has a crush on me!”
“Competition, eh?”
Vicky laughed. We talked a while longer. I was ready to go—had my heart in my hand and everything—when Jill came home. She wore a blue evening gown and she looked terrific in it. Her figure was nice and even. She took my hand.
“Hello, Pegasus. How are you, Peg?”
“That’s a hell of a name,” I said. “I—I was just going, Jill.”
“Don’t,” she said. She talked about the band. “Vicky, the band’s going to break up. I don’t know how soon.” She looked at me. “Don’t go yet.” But I turned around and kissed Vicky and left. The only hell of it was, it was Jill I was thinking about.
The next morning I looked for Lanny Craig, but his office was empty. The switchboard girl said he was in projection room five and I could either phone him there or go over and see him. He was looking at the old print of a picture called Hell’s Back Door. I left the building with explicit instructions as to how to get there.
I saw Lanny as soon as I opened the projection room door. There were five rows of seats, all of them empty, and Lanny was sitting in the producer’s leather chair in the back of the room. His feet were cocked up, he had a cigar in his mouth, and his hand was operating the control board by which he could signal to have sound volume increased, the picture stopped dead in its frame and re-run, or anything else that struck his notion. At the moment he was experimenting by running the volume up and down just for the hell of it.
He looked over at me just as an old-fashioned gangster scene flashed on. He turned up the sound until it was a roar—on the film it was the shrieking staccato of machine gun bullets. He cut the volume down.
“You’re dead,” he said. “This morning I am a junior G-man.”
I flopped down in a chair beside him.
“I’m doing an epic about gangsters,” he said, “or at least with gangsters in it. Stoopenfetchit insisted I sit through this. He said there may be bits we can snip. You know— good old budget. A dime here, a dime there.”
“Who’s Stoopenfetchit?”
“My producer. You must someday meet the gentleman.” Lanny’s face was flabby. He was big, over-grown. He dressed in sloppy clothes, and he wore wrinided scarfs. But he was a guy I could talk to. He was nuts about women. He could show you addresses and phone numbers. He had each name rated. He was married to an aged, neurotic old woman who had a million dollars and spent half her life in a wheel chair. Lanny said that marriage license was his unemployment insurance policy. The phone from outside rang now and he answered. He placed two bets on the horses and hung up. He had turned the volume on the screen so low that it was like a silent film. The projectionist stuck his head through the square hole behind us.
“Hey—what is this?”
“I’m just looking for long shots we can dip for quick shots in a montage,” Lanny replied. “I don’t have to listen to that stinking dialogue to do that, do I?”
“I’m looking for a long shot myself,” the projectionist said, “—at Santa Anita.”
“That’s very funny,” said Lanny. “You can pull your head back in through that rat hole now if you want.”
That was another thing about Lanny Craig. He licked the hand of any man he thought made ten dollars a week more than himself, but he was crushing and dirty to inferiors.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “The guy was just trying to be friendly.”
“To hell with him,” Lanny said. “Resurrect a Willie Bioff and the projectionists and props men’ll be making more than the writers and actors. Comrade, has no one told you of the revolution?”
The film kept flashing grimly from the screen.
“Lanny,” I said, “I’m in love.”
“Now that Rhonda is single, you mean?”
“It isn’t Miss Fleming.”
“Poor you!”
I began telling him my idea about sponsoring a girl in pichires. I didn’t tell him she was Vicky. But I raved. He puffed on his cigar and kept his eyes on the film. I outlined a few of the plans I had for the campaign and asked him for suggestions.
“What do I get out of it?”
“Nothing, you lecherous bastard. But she has got a sister.”
“Continue,” Lanny said.
I went on and on. We could do this and that. Finally I told him it was Vicky.
”What?”
“Yeah. Vicky Lynn. But keep it quiet or she’ll get canned.”
He didn’t believe me. So I showed him the class ring Vicky had given me. He stared. He reached around and patted my back. He asked me how it was. I swore to hell I didn’t know and he said I was a liar, but that was all right. “You’re a gentleman and a boy scout,” he said. And he was interested in the idea. We sat there talking and he got the fever. The picture went off, the screen was blank, the projection room closed up; but we kept talking. We tried to analyze Vicky’s defects. We couldn’t remember any. She was perfect—merchandise. All we had to do was wrap her in glamour. Lanny picked up the phone and put through an inter-studio call.
“Hurd? Lanny. Meet me in my office, will you, pappy?” He hung up.
“Who’s that?”
“Hurd Evans. He directs the pictures I write and he’ll go for this idea. He’s in a hell of a slump and it’ll get him publicity.”
“Listen, not him—”
“Why not? He can help us.”
“He’s a wolf,” I said.
“I belong to that club myself,” said Lanny.
“Well, he tried to make Vicky.”
“And didn’t?”
“No. He fell on his face.”
“All the better then,” Lanny said. “We’ll tell him she’s your personal property and to lay off. You stick to this virgin story and I’ll back you up. It’s strictly a business deal. No casting couches. It’s damn good business when you can pick up a natural and don’t you ever forget old Uncle Lanny told you that.”
“How much does Hurd make?”
“Only about two-fifty a week. The guy still carries scissors in his back pocket.”
“Scissors?”
“That’s right. He was a film cutter last year and he can’t break the habit. He knows you were imported from New York and he’ll think you’re hotter than Tennessee Williams. Tell him you cast your own play on Broadway.”
“Okay.”
We got up and left the projection room. Lanny spified cigar ashes on his slacks and stopped to brush them off.
3
HURD EVANS WORE a three-hundred-dollar gray suit and a white turtle-neck sweater instead of a vest. He was a dandy little guy, with slicked-down brown hans and an angelic face. I would have said he was about twenty-six. He didn’t want it kept a secret that he was a big “Moom Pitcher” director and he dressed to look as Hollywood as possible—but with the select masculinity of a pint-sized Clark Gable. On his wrist he wore a heavy slave bracelet— suggesting that its owner was a glamour girl with whom he was currently sleeping. I had an idea if
you asked him about it he would have given you a blueprint of her bedroom with her in it.
“This is my New York writer friend,” Lanny said. He told him my name.
Hurd Evans glowed with correspondence school personality. He pumped my hand warmly, grinning from ear to ear. “I caught the road show of your play,” he said. “It was a darb!”
“Thanks,” I said.
But I didn’t like him. He was scrubbed so clean you could smell the Lifebuoy. Lanny told him about the proposition, and I kept stifi. Lanny sat on the corner of his desk and waxed with extravagant eloquence. Finally he revealed that the Little Lady we had in mind was Vicky Lynn. Hurd Evans looked as though he had swallowed an avocado pit. His polished face reddened. He glanced at me.
“There’s a fence around her,” I said.
“Oh, sure.” He laughed.
“Barbed wire,” Lanny added. “The girl’s as clean as a Johnson Office pamphlet to producers.”
Hurd didn’t believe this, and if he had he probably wouldn’t have been interested; because Vicky would have had neither the oomph nor the heart for the hard fight that was ahead of us. But he only nodded.
“She’s a fine girl,” he said.
You would have thought from his tone that we intended billing her as an evangelist.
“So how about it?” asked Lanny. “It may mean putting up coin, you know.”
“Hell, I’ve got a nickel saved,” Hurd replied.
“Oke. You’re in.”
“Right.”
“If it turns out good you get the glory for having ‘discovered’ her,” Lanny said.
We all shook on it, and then the three of us went over to the commissary for lunch. It was a low, long white building with a bulletin board of the studio’s latest publicity clippings posted in front. Bing Crosby, in make-up, sat on the front steps exchanging chit-chat with messenger boys. Bing’s bike was propped against the building. He rode it all over the lot whenever he was working. Actresses were going inside, wearing evening gowns, hula costumes, and one group, from the Old New York set, were garbed in dothes of the Gay Nineties.
There was a smaller commissary adjoining this one where the props, electricians, messengers and like company ate. But this main dining room was called the European Room, and it had no windows. It was designed on the order of the salon on the old Queen Mary, with murals on the wall, and music playing softly through a loud speaker. It was kept cool by air conditioning, and the tables were all crowded. The people sitting at them were laughing and talking.
