The Celebrity

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “Would you excuse me a minute” Abby interrupted, with a meaningful look toward the downstairs lavatory. “The long drive—” She left Fanny in the middle of a syllable and went out to the hall. The telephone was in a deep recess, where the guests’ coats, one atop the other, hung thickly from hooks. She felt choked in cloth and fur as she made her way through them, but she pulled them together behind her into a partial screen and stooped to the instrument. She gave Thorn’s number, and begged Fate for two free minutes of time and a prompt answer to the ringing.

  “Cindy, thank God you’re in,” she began. “Listen—” She gave a succinct account of what was happening. “Tell Thorn to call back here, right away. Make up some emergency, some sort of crisis has come up, the movie deal is falling through, anything, and Gregory must dash to New York for a meeting. Will you, Cindy? Please?”

  Cindy’s big laugh was sympathetic. “On one condition,” she said, fairly shouting as she always did on the telephone.

  “What condition? Hurry—somebody’ll catch me.”

  Cindy laughed again and Abby could see her at the phone in New York, tall and handsome and redheaded and full of energy. “I won’t tell Thorn unless you come on over when you get out of there.”

  “Tonight?”

  “It’s only nine-thirty and we haven’t seen you for days. Drop Hat off at home and come and have a couple of swift drinks.”

  “I’d better ask Gregory. He looks dead already.”

  “Say yes, or I’ll forget to tell Thorn.”

  “All right. Somebody’s coming.” She hung up. It was easy to disapprove of Cindy, but you forgave her when she was so responsive and hearty. Through the forest of coats, Abby went back to the din. On the sofa, Gregory looked trapped, as an unknown young woman lunged at him with an open, fountain pen and a sheet of white paper. “Please, Mr. Johns, so I can paste it in your book when it comes out.”

  The telephone rang, but nobody moved, and Abby wondered if anyone but herself would hear it. It rang again. “The phone,” she called out to the room at large. “Didn’t I hear the phone?”

  Old Gerald turned and made his way through the crowd. A moment later he came back, paused at Abby’s side, and whispered, “If you arranged it, I don’t blame you. No, sir, not a bit.” He called across the room, loudly, as if he wanted everybody possible to hear, “Phone, Gregory, it sounds urgent.” Gregory jumped to his feet and Abby joined him in the hall.

  “Whatever terrible news Thorn has,” she said in an undertone, “don’t get scared. I put him up to it.”

  His eyes brightened and he pinched her arm.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AT THE BAR TABLE at the side of the living room, Thorn was preparing a second drink for Gregory and Abby and a third for himself and Cindy. He waved a half-filled glass at his brother and said, “You just weren’t cut out for it, Gregory, I’ll be damned if you were. Now if it were Cindy here—”

  Across the room Cindy shrieked, “Me? How about you!”

  “I’d get by,” he conceded and addressed himself again to Gregory and Abby. “We all know I like having a fuss made over me, but I’m discovering that God meant Cindy to go to parties or give them. That night we had the Hathaways here, and Fin Blacker of Imperial, and the Leonard Lyonses—”

  “Who thought of having the Lyonses?” Cindy said.

  “I didn’t have to urge you much. When Fin said he had a date with Lenny and Sylvia that night, you panted to rope them in.”

  “I s’pose you wouldn’t pant unless it was Walter Winchell.” She shrieked again, and Thorn thought, She’s getting tight. He didn’t mind. The description of the evening at Freeton had seemed uproarious to both of them and when Cindy ragged him about things she didn’t really disapprove of, she was always amusing. She was as pleased at meeting a columnist as he was, and as eager to meet others. It was remarkable how it spiced up a conversation to say you knew so-and-so, and equally remarkable how often it was perfectly apropos. Since he had begun to read Variety religiously, he had found himself irresistibly drawn to all the columns in all the daily papers, and was astonished at how much he now knew about Broadway and Hollywood, their stars, their plans, their purchases and options and cancellations, as well as their romances, either developing or dissolving. Cindy had become an equally avid reader of the columns; she was as familiar as he with the special vocabularies, internecine feuds, and worthy charities so zealously publicized by the progenitors of these vertical brainchildren.

  His favorite column was not a column in the ordinary sense, any more than its sire was a columnist in the ordinary sense. Because of something Hathaway had said, he had begun to read the Saturday Review of Literature every week at the office, and had soon discovered that “Trade Winds” held for him a charm unmatched by any of the others. Could it be because Bennett Cerf also knew the thrill of standing up before an audience and making it laugh?

  When he let himself daydream, he would sometimes imagine himself a columnist like Winchell or a lecturer like Cerf. He could see himself standing, easy and tall on a platform, not just at the Premium Club either—

  “Quit dreaming, Thorn,” Cindy yelled. “We all need drinks.”

  He distributed the new drinks and said, “There’ll be plenty of panting over you, Gregory, when you hit the Coast. Hathaway says they always make a fuss over a real live author. Just get set for it in advance, and then you won’t panic when it comes.”

  “I won’t, hey?”

  At the dry tone, Thorn slapped his thigh boisterously, but Gregory had not meant to amuse him. Describing what had awaited them at Freeton had made him wonder if it were not a small-town rehearsal of what might happen unexpectedly at any of his relatives’ or friends’ houses. The idea, Unexpected, added a new dimension to the idea, Party. This was a further little nightmare to sweat through.

  Thorn was still laughing and talking about giving authors a quick easy course in meeting strangers. Gregory thought, He probably wishes I’d let him try it before I get on the train. The fight’s all forgotten and he’s ready to help out in new ways if he could think of any. He’s always been ready. And me, I’ve always been ready to let him. When you get down to it, I’ve always been perfectly goddam ready.

  The tiny clever worm of guilt began to wriggle through him. Had he regarded Thorn’s help as his proper due, belittling it as he accepted it, with phrases about “the left hand”? Abby’s help? Ed Barnard’s? Whenever he heard somebody castigated as selfish and self-centered, he felt pleasantly superior, but had he the right to? He looked at his brother speculatively.

  All at once Gregory hated himself. He had offered Thorn commissions and cash payments and they had been fiercely rejected as he must have known they would be. But beyond that his mind would not go—except to a Cadillac, first cousin to the showgirl’s mink coat. His author’s mind, his inventive mind that could—such was the theory—create plot and devise incident! Break a deadlock in a story, yes, but one concerning a sort of moral debt to his own brother? (We’ll think of something later.)

  Gregory set his glass down too hard; the drink sloshed on the table. Thorn said, “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Sorry, no. I was thinking about something.”

  “Well, quit, and listen. I was telling Abby, if you do agree about the mail, it goes for California too. You’ll be swamped, once the columns say you’re out there. Just dump it on yours truly.”

  “Send it back from California?”

  “No use letting it pile up till you get home.”

  “Oh, Thorn,” Abby said, “out there, I could take over.”

  “Sure, but we’re just at the start of this interview and lecture racket, and it’s better to keep handling it from one central spot. Let’s try it while you’re away, and when you get home, we’ll decide whether I keep on.” He wasn’t boisterous now; he was intent, pleading for a favor. “I’ve been finding out about Hollywood, I tell you. The most unexpected things come up out there—you’ve got to be able to
hand out the brush-off and you can’t go antagonizing everybody either. Neither can Abby.”

  To himself, Gregory said, Unexpected. The most unexpected things. Perhaps the studio arranged things before a man even got out there to say yes or no. He picked up his glass again and took a long swallow from it.

  Unlike his brother, Gregory Johns was no follower of journalism’s chattier practitioners, and thus was not so expert about the accepted rituals west of San Bernardino. He had, however, read enough stories, articles, plays, and novels about Hollywood to be fully informed about the chauffeured limousines at the airport or railroad station, the hotel rooms filled with flowers, the arrangements with the press, and all the rest of it, though not once in all his life had he ever connected any of this with lesser lights than Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway or, say, Kathleen Winsor. Had he, he now asked himself, been naïve not to?

  With a sinking heart, Gregory Johns replied with a stout affirmative. The studio was already talking of The Good World as a Property; suppose they regarded him as a Property also, and meant, with the natural instinct of property-owners, to make him appear Valuable and Gilt-edged regardless? Suppose their publicity experts had already arranged for photographers at the hotel, suppose they took it for granted that he would be—what was their word?—cooperative with Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons? For all he knew there might already be lecture dates accepted for him, party invitations sent out.

  As was his custom under implacable stress, Gregory Johns took off his glasses, drew out his handkerchief, and wiped his face. “I’ve half a mind to call the whole trip off,” he said.

  “What?” Thorn yelled, forgetting the mail, remembering only his own prediction to Hathaway. “You can’t back out now.”

  His anguish roused Gregory. “Take it easy,” he said hastily, “I just said it off the top of my head.”

  “Well, don’t fire things at people that way.”

  Cindy said, “Oh, Gregory, once you’re there, you’ll love every minute of it.”

  Gregory made a gesture of apology, and did not challenge her verb. He had not confided his liveliest forebodings even to Abby, and certainly not to anybody else. “I’m really looking forward to it in lots of ways,” he said, making his voice convincing. “It’ll be a big experience—new ideas, new scenes, all sorts of new material.”

  “You’re so lucky,” Cindy said. “I wish we were going too.”

  “Now, Cindy,” Thorn said.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun, though, if we were? The four of us on the train together, and having champagne cocktails the way they do on ships?”

  “It would be nice,” Abby said.

  Thorn stirred uneasily. He looked at Abby and Gregory and then back to Cindy. Her always high color was intensified so that she looked sunburned; her hair had become a little disarrayed and one reddish strand fell over her right eye. Her rollicking good humor was gone; she frowned and clutched her glass.

  “I mean, if we could afford any vacation, you know, like Florida or any other place, why, I’d rather it was Hollywood than all the rest put together.”

  “Afford—” Thornton Johns rose to his full height. His eyes were blazing blue triangles; his cropped hair seemed to leap off his head. “Don’t, for God sakes, start on that again.”

  “Start what?”

  “You know exactly what.”

  “Why, Thorny, I wasn’t even thinking about that” she said, raising her eyebrows. A hush fell; nobody moved. Thorn flushed; Abby stared at the floor; Gregory closed his eyes.

  Behind his eyelids, he could still see the painful humiliation on his brother’s face. An odd sensation came to him, that he himself was the older, the taller, the heavier of the two, the one who could defend and protect. He despised Cindy for lashing at Thorn. She was a nag, for all her virtues, and she would never understand Thorny’s delicacy about things like this. If it had been to Cindy that the commission had been offered—

  Gregory Johns gulped. If it had been to Cindy! He had talked only to Thorn, argued only with Thorn, fought only with Thorn—

  Suddenly he wanted to go home. He had to go away and be quiet and begin to think all over again. He looked at Abby, signaling an appeal.

  Through the silence in the room, Thorn’s breathing was still audible. “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing,” Cindy said in a small voice, like a child’s. She looked embarrassed, regretful; unexpectedly, Gregory was sorry for her. “About the mail,” he heard himself saying, too heartily, “I guess we’ll work something out. We’re too tired, all of us, to make any sense. Thorn, I’ll drop in at the office tomorrow, and we’ll settle it. What do you say?”

  “I’ll be at the office.”

  The good nights were stilted, and as the door closed behind them, Gregory and Abby heard Thorn say, “Damn it, Cindy, you absolutely are becoming a—”

  They moved out of earshot.

  Next morning, Gregory Johns was up early. At the dot of nine he was at his bank, doing something he had never done in his entire life: cashing a check for a thousand dollars. As he left the uniformed guard at the front gate and walked toward the bus stop, he felt strangely uneasy, and though he called himself neurotic for thinking of robbery in the familiar daylight of Martin Heights, his right arm stayed close to the pocket where his wallet lay. In New York he went straight to the Air Terminal Ticket Office on East Forty-Second Street, and when he emerged, he crossed into Grand Central. By ten he was ringing the bell of Thorn’s apartment. Hulda answered his ring and he greeted her in a low voice. “Mr. Johns has left, hasn’t he?” Her nod pleased him. “And the boys?” She nodded again. “Please tell Mrs. Johns I’m here, will you?”

  Almost before he had settled himself for waiting, Cindy appeared, tying the belt of a flowered dressing gown as she came. She had not stopped to put on make-up, and the pale puffiness of her face, as well as her ungirdled ampleness, made her seem older than usual. He wondered if they had stayed up as late as he and Abby, and again he found himself sorry for her. But when she spoke, it was with a flippancy that was almost pugnacious. “Hi, Gregory, are you going to tear me apart too?”

  “No, I’ve got an idea I want to talk over.”

  “At the break of dawn?” She sat down and said, “Would you like more coffee? I would. I’m in a frazzle.” In her strong voice, she called out, “Hulda,” and without lowering it asked, “Gregory, what’s got into Thorn, anyway?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Now don’t get all wary and cautious with me,” she said crisply. “The man’s driving me mad, and you know it.” Hulda came in, and Cindy asked if there were any coffee left from breakfast. Hulda said “No,” in a flat, unhelpful way. “Well, please make some fresh. Mr. Johns would like a cup, and I’ll have one with him.” She waited until Hulda, who had made no reply whatever, was out of the room, and said, as she had said once a week for years, “I ought to give Hulda the gate, always grumpy and put upon. What kind of idea, Gregory?”

  He reached into his breast pocket, drew out an envelope, and tossed it over to her. “Look at that,” he said, and sat back to watch her. He and Abby had agreed last night that the oblique approach with Cindy was bound to fail. She was too blunt, too intelligent; whether or not she would openly ridicule an artful dodge depended on her mood, but that she would spot it, in any case, was clear.

  Cindy was examining the pair of airplane tickets with care. They were for a round trip between New York and California, leaving La Guardia Airport on the morning of March 6th, with the return date still open. She read them, turned them over, and then looked up inquiringly. “What made you decide to fly out?”

  “They’re for you and Thorn. Can you get ready in three days?”

  “For me and Thorn?” Her hand fell open and the tickets dropped to the floor. She picked them up and set them on the table beside her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Partly fun and partly business. Good, hardheaded business, and you’re going to help me get it going.”


  “What business?”

  “Thorn could get away for a while, couldn’t he?”

  “He has, other winters, but he’d never, never—” She reached out and pushed the tickets farther away from her. “Never in a million years, especially now when he thinks I’ve been bitchy enough to hint at it. Bitchy, that’s what I am, it turns out, vulgar, needling you, dropping hints, practically begging. I’m quite a tasty character, I’ve just discovered.” She threw her head back and laughed.

  “He was sore, Cindy. Forget it.”

  “Men kill me. They’re nothing without other people’s ideas and support, but they never let themselves know it. And here I’ve been thinking all along that I’ve been a good helpful wife to Thorn, bolstering him up, being a fine hostess for his clients and prospects, even giving him pretty useful notions of people to see and things to do. It was who urged him on about the idea of a movie sale—did you know that?”

  “No, but look, Cindy, I’m sure he appreciates—”

  “He was so positive fantasy was out, and I kept at him about Here Comes Mr. Jordan and The Bishop’s Wife and Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street until I was blue in the face. I simply wouldn’t let him give up—I even suggested talking to some qualified people, and that’s what put him on to Hathaway. He’s forgotten all that. Needless to remark.”

  Gregory waited. Whenever Cindy got wound up, there was nothing else to do. He felt battered by her violence; he also felt that she was not unhappy about Thorn, only outraged, as one is over an ungrateful child.

  “Let’s talk business for a bit,” he said, and she suddenly laughed and said, “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

  “Cindy, you’re a good tough honest girl, and it’s damn healthy.” He grinned at her. “Now listen to some arithmetic on this movie money. We’ve always talked in grand totals, but now we’re going to take just one year at a time. This year.”