Thorn drank off half his martini and watched the door. Could Hathaway have misunderstood where and when they were to meet? Should he telephone and check up? Not yet; it would sound unsure and tense. He was unsure and tense.
Hathaway arrived then, apologetic, eager to make up for his seeming rudeness, but Thorn was unable at first to press this advantage, and constraint grew between them. Then he decided to plunge: “My brother not only has no real agent; he has no lawyer.” Hathaway smiled. He liked authors, he told Thorn, as people, as friends, as clients. Successful authors had dozens of interlocking problems that unsuccessful authors never faced, and since each subsequent success compounded those problems, the relationship between good author and good lawyer was usually one which went on for life. “On the phone this morning,” Hathaway then remarked, “you mentioned a possible movie deal.”
Thorn nodded, and deliberately fell silent, studying Hathaway’s face. He had forgotten how strong and intelligent it was; he saw too that there was something vain in the set of the mouth and the direct gaze of the dark eyes. Hathaway was a small, wiry man, about his own age, with quick gestures and a biting enunciation. Selling insurance taught one to estimate mood and character and Thornton Johns decided Hathaway would not be averse to feeling himself indispensable.
“Let me give you some background,” Thorn said, almost diffidently, “about my impractical brother and about me—and you’ll see why I screwed up the nerve to ask for your help again. Waiter, another round, please.”
Suddenly Hathaway slapped the table. “You’re the guy who insisted on paying my fee yourself, even though my work was for your brother. It’s just come back, that part.”
The whole atmosphere changed; warmth took the place of constraint; Hathaway abandoned his noncommittal air as Thornton, still using the voice of diffidence, confided in him about his fascination with publishing and writing and his desire to help the one author he really knew. He let himself sound eager, and not too sure about things, and eventually got to Gregory’s book.
“It’s got a political theme,” he said uneasily, “but there’s a love story and humor and so much else—”
“What kind of political theme?”
Thornton Johns hesitated. “World government,” he said, and let the words lie there between them.
Hathaway smiled broadly. “It hasn’t!” he said.
“Let me tell you his plot—no wonder B.S.B. grabbed it.”
But after a moment or two of it, Hathaway began to expound his own notions of world government and the cold war and the peril to the planet itself. Thorn remembered Roy Tribble’s warning and did not contradict him; by the time they got around to his, ideas of how Hathaway might help, the lawyer was obviously convincing himself to go ahead.
Thorn said, “Look, I’ve brought a copy with me. How about reading it yourself?”
In the week that followed, Thornton Johns was to tell himself often that this quick forward pass to The Good World was a brilliant stroke, a bit of perfect timing that had helped assure victory. The pass was completed overnight and Thorn saw Hathaway three more times in the next few days.
Then, excited, as he had not been, in twenty years, he went out to Martin Heights, unheralded, and in the middle of an afternoon. Cindy insisted on going with him; only that morning had he told her what he was up to, and nothing would have dissuaded her from tagging, along.
“Why, Thorn,” Abby cried when she saw them. “Cindy.”
“What’s wrong?” Gregory said.
Behind them in the living room, a voice, could be heard, and Thorn was annoyed at the need of delay until they were alone. Once inside he saw that it was no visitor, but an installation man from the telephone company, checking the new phone, but his relief was mild. “I’ve taken a certain step on my own initiative,” Thorn began, speaking in the low tone of conspiracy, “but a conference is now called for.”
“A step about what?” Gregory asked.
Thorn indicated the telephone with a jerk of his head and made a gesture indicating the need for discretion. The workman dialed a number and they all strained to hear what he said to his distant colleague as if they were eavesdropping on weighty matters. “Testing a new connection from Hanover—” The voice was deliberate and Thorn was annoyed. Couldn’t the oaf hurry? Hadn’t he seen people arrive? Each time the testing bell rang, Gregory winced and Thorn felt vaguely guilty, but could find no reason why he should. At last the intruder replaced the base of the instrument, gathered his tools, slung his kit over his arm, and departed.
Without ado, Thorn began his story about Hathaway. As he neared the climax, he found himself avoiding Gregory’s and Abby’s eyes, and speaking too loudly. “So all I did alone was have myself some fun and engage a hundred dollars’ worth of an expert’s ideas and instructions and contacts in Hollywood. That’s over, as of now. We can forget the whole thing.” But before anybody spoke, he went on.
“Only yesterday, Hathaway made some calls to the Coast, getting a line on things from another big lawyer who’s in with everybody at the studios. And what do you think?”
“What?”
“There’s interest starting up out there already on The Good World! A reader for Goldwyn got the galleys air-mail, and he’s talking it up, and a story editor at Twentieth has sent in a good report to Zanuck.”
“Galleys?” Gregory asked. “Where? From whom?”
“Oh, that,” Thornton answered knowingly. “It’s a sort of black market operation—happens all the time on big books. Maybe some hard-up linotyper at the printer did it, or a secretary at Digby and Brown. Anyway, Hathaway started right in, shaping up our plans. We wouldn’t waste time on minor story editors and readers, of course. His connections would get us right through to the guys at the head. But we can’t do one thing more without your permission. It’s your book.”
Abby and Gregory looked awed. Even Cindy watched Thorn with a kind of proud astonishment, never interrupting once. Then in a funny, halting way, Gregory spoke of gratitude. Thorn’s desire to help him on so bold and creative a scale moved him deeply, he said, but could he accept all the work and nervous tension and risk of failure and disappointment? This wasn’t something that could be tossed off with the left hand, like royalty statements and general business detail, and even that was too much year after year. “What’s more”—here Gregory sounded disturbed for the first time—“if anybody did buy it, they’d leave out everything important unless I was there every minute to watch them.” It was not until this moment that Thornton Johns, who was rarely uncertain of his ability to persuade others into what was good for them or their dependents and heirs, realized he had been in a considerable panic that Gregory would stop him in his tracks. At Gregory’s last statement, panic fled and Thornton Johns had a vision of green lights from Martin Heights to Beverly Hills.
“It took the whole of my first meeting with Hathaway,” he said, “to get him interested enough to read the manuscript, but then he sat up most of the night over it. That turned the trick.”
“Really?” asked Gregory and Abby together.
“Absolutely. I never could have persuaded him, for all my talk. The book did.”
“Why?”
The phone rang and everybody jumped. Thorn said, “Damn that thing,” and Gregory looked at him while Abby answered it. She said, “Yes, just a while ago,” and listened. “That’s fine, thank you.” She turned back and said, “The switchboard girl at Digby and Brown, wanting to know if it’s in yet.”
“Oh, God,” Gregory whispered.
Thorn went back to Hathaway. “With his other big authors, he charges about three thousand a year, and we’re going to need a lawyer like Hathaway from now on anyway. Lawyers are deductible, you know.”
“I didn’t,” Gregory said.
“If Hathaway puts over a big movie sale, his fee goes up to five thousand for the first year, because of all his extra time and work. Of course if there’s no sale, you’re not committed in any way.”
/> “You mean he’d be willing to gamble on this for nothing?” Gregory asked, grasping at the one thing he had understood completely.
Thorn nodded emphatically. Cindy was nodding with him, but he ignored her. “Now that he’s read The Good World, yes. Suppose it sold for fifty thousand dollars. A regular agent’s commission would be five thousand dollars just for selling it. But if Hathaway and I sold it, you would pay him that same five thousand and get a whole year’s legal work and tax counsel thrown in. If we sold it for a lot more, like a hundred thousand, you’d still be paying him only that same five thousand, instead of ten to a regular agent, so you would save a lot of money too.”
“Mr. Hathaway says he couldn’t take commission, even if there was a movie sale,” Cindy put in. “It’s unethical for lawyers.”
“You could take the commission, Thorn,” Gregory said quickly.
“From your money?”
“Why shouldn’t you? Marilyn Laird would.”
“She’s not your brother,” Thorn said.
“But you’re the only agent Gregory has,” Abby said. “The ten per cent would belong to you, even if you are his brother.”
“If it came to an awful lot,” Cindy said, thoughtfully, “Thorny could pay Hathaway’s fees out of it.”
“I’m not in this for money,” Thornton Johns said stiffly.
Cindy gazed into distant space; Gregory and Abby looked from her to Thorn and then at each other. The phone rang again.
“Damn it to hell,” Thorn said, and because he was nearest it, tore the receiver off the hook and shouted, “Yes?” He listened, and then in his most gracious voice said, “Let me put him on for you. He’s right here.” He covered the mouthpiece, and turned to Gregory. “It’s somebody from some organization of women politicians.” He held out the receiver.
Gregory began to get up, looked embarrassed, and then sank back in his chair. “Ask them for their number, will you? No, never mind, I’d better take it now.”
Shortly thereafter, Thornton Johns decided that further discussion was needless, perhaps hazardous. “Well,” he said, “Hollywood’s a million to one shot, so don’t think about it too much.” He rose and took Cindy off. At the drugstore on the corner, he stopped to telephone Hathaway, and before the evening was out, the siege of Hollywood began.
Three weeks later, the motion picture rights to The Good World were acquired by Imperial Century Studios for $150,000, a price which was destined to be known as “the last big-time money before the slump.”
A subsidiary agreement stipulated that the author, “to ensure the basic integrity of the film to be made from his work,” should be present at all preliminary story conferences, for a term not to exceed four weeks, at a weekly salary of two thousand five hundred dollars. The author’s travel and hotel accommodations were to be arranged and paid for by the studio.
Though final contracts were not yet signed, the studio’s publicity machine began rolling out daily releases about “Imperial Century’s Greatest Picture of the Year,” and in some two thousand newspapers, daily and Sunday, obliging gossip and movie columns co-operated by printing every morsel of official news, as well as conjecture, guesswork, and rumor, collected from sources known only to gossip and movie columnists. In this manner, it quickly became known throughout the nation that the two leading male roles would be played by Gregory Peck and Ronald Colman or by Gregory Peck and Clark Gable, or by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, or possibly by Spencer Tracy and Sir Laurence Olivier. The heroine was to be Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or Celeste Holm, though Irene Dunne was also a possibility, as was Greer Garson. The screenplay was being assigned to Robert E. Sherwood or Moss Hart, and negotiations for a Big-Name Director were under way with Elia Kazan or Joshua Logan. The budget was set at two million dollars, though some informed executives had stated, in strict confidence, that it would more nearly approach three. Or perhaps four.
It was left to the excellent reporting of Variety, however, to dig out and publish the exclusive human-interest story that the deal had been “agented” by the author’s own brother, and for the first time since June of 1928, when he had shared the honor with several thousand others of his graduating class at college, Thornton Johns saw his name in newspaper print. Variety also stated that “a New York attorney, who desires to remain incog for now,” had been active in the negotiations, but the syndicated and local columns of the U.S.A. saw fit, when they rewrote Variety’s piece, to ignore this mundane detail and give Thorn a solo role. During the ensuing fortnight, if any interested New Yorker had sent regularly to the Times Square newsstand which carries papers from the entire country, he might have seen Thornton Johns’ name in print well over a hundred times.
Thorn was not that New Yorker. He would have blushed to send Diana forth regularly on such a mission. Even when Hathaway had called one. Wednesday morning to say, “You’re in this week’s Variety, page four,” it had been surprisingly embarrassing to send her for it at once instead of waiting until lunchtime to get it himself. He still flinched when he remembered that he had blurted out, “Better get about three copies,” and then, hastily, “Young Thorn and Fred like the damnedest things for souvenirs.” Diana had brought back six copies, each folded back to reveal page four.
“Every crossroads sheet from here to the Coast,” Hathaway had told him a few days later, “is picking up the story.” Thorn had not even considered putting Diana into daily Times Square service. Instead, he abandoned the homeward route he had complained about for years in favor of one twice as mutilating. Each evening, he would leave the East Side subway at Grand Central, fight the mangling mobs on the platforms, shuttle across to Times Square, and there acquire the newest arrivals from the printing presses of faraway cities and towns. He began to look forward to five o’clock and the strange-looking papers with their wonderful names: the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, the Youngstown Vindicator, the Canton Repository, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the San Antonio Light, and sometimes didn’t mind when he could find no mention of the movie sale.
As he collected his nightly armful, he would imagine himself in these distant places, buying each of these papers in the lobby of the best hotel, as if he were at home all over the large world beyond the Hudson River, beyond the highways of dutiful weekend driving with Cindy and the boys.
He would leave the newsstand in a pleasing haze, hail a taxi for the final lap of his trip, and in the jolting dimness turn page after page in eager search of the item to tear out and hide in his wallet. If he had too many papers to examine before reaching his house, he would halt the cab under an electric light in Central Park or at a corner of Fifth Avenue and sit on comfortably, while the meter ticked and the driver cast questioning eyes at the mirror over the dashboard, wondering, perhaps, at this madman with a paper-tearing psychosis. At home, Thornton Johns never mentioned his changed itinerary; he could not have said why.
By the end of February, a special scrapbook at his office held nearly seventy versions of the story, and a manila folder a larger number of repeats or duplicates. Diana alone knew of the existence of all of them; she assumed that Hathaway cut them out and sent them along, and this happy error permitted Thorn to keep free of explanations. She read each one word for word and Thorn found himself unaccountably pleased by her gentle astonishment and delight. “Oh, Mr. Johns, isn’t it wonderful to be famous?” Or, “I’m so thrilled—a scrapbook about my own boss.” Or, just as satisfying, “Oh, Mr. Johns.”
Occasionally he would show one or two, no more, recent clippings to Cindy and the boys, or to a client, or to a couple of members of the Premium Club, surreptitiously watching their faces as they read. And each time he was singingly happy.
Yet, as day succeeded day, he began to be aware of a sharp, irrational fear biting into these delicious moments, and suspected that as long as the contracts remained unsigned, he would be unable to escape it. He called himself “superstitious” and “ridiculous,” but he continued to sleep badly, eat sketchily, and smoke e
ndlessly. Over and over, the experienced and composed Hathaway pointed out that the deal could not fall through, that the ceaseless publicity from Imperial Century constituted contract enough for any court of law, that there would not be a change of mind, a withdrawal of the offer, a lessening of the price. Thorn would listen, but no word in the English language had yet evolved which could convince or reassure him.
Thornton Johns came to feel, quite simply, that if anything went wrong he would die. He could not bear life if it were to force him down from the pinnacle to which, through courage, persistence, and the nonprofit motive of brotherly love, he had at last climbed. He would have sworn on twelve Bibles that this pinnacle had nothing to do with personal glory. He would have insisted that newspaper publicity, however “amusing,” was basically unimportant to him, that people who worshiped public mention were rather vulgar, and that when he had longed to Be Somebody, he had never given a thought to anything so crass as getting his name in the papers.
For Thornton Johns, in common with most human beings, could discover within himself a depth and purity of purpose that had no relation to the gross results. Thus he never doubted that his chief reward for engineering (with some help, of course) one of the most unlikely sales in movie history came from a sense of flexing, stretching growth when most men his age were beginning to pull in, to repeat, to conserve, to die. He had wanted a hobby and he had found life.
A larger life, a larger Thornton Johns. The persisting fear that something might again reduce him to the lesser Thornton Johns was a nightmare, to put it politely, of amputation. Already it was impossible to remember a time when he had felt himself merely an insurance salesman, devoting a few hours once or twice a year to his brother’s interests. He could no longer have given a coherent recital of the mental processes that had led to his impulsive decision about phoning Hathaway six weeks ago. But where, he often asked himself, where would the Imperial Century deal be today, if I hadn’t had the inspiration and the initiative and the skill to arrange that first appointment with Jim and to make him do what I wanted?
The Celebrity Page 9
