The Celebrity

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “Now, your President says you want me to tell you what started my brother writing. That’s one thing I can’t do, but I can tell you when he started and that takes us all back thirty years. My brother Gregory was nine then, and crazy about some books by Ralph Henry Barbour or Barber, or however B-a-r-b-o-u-r is supposed to be pronounced. Does anybody know for sure?”

  Thorn paused and looked around appealingly. A cross-hatched sound of Barbour and Barber arose from the tables in a demonstration of audience participation that told him the babies would not only take but give. He had to gesture for silence before he could go on. The word “plagiarism,” he knew, would bring the house down, and when he reached it, he spoke it almost in a whisper.

  “But luckily, Mr. Barbour or Barber never heard about my brother’s wholesale crime, so Gregory was never hauled up before the Authors Guild or the courts. I have noticed, though, that to this day a plagiarism case in the daily newspaper gets to him in a mighty peculiar way. He reads every word, goes livid with rage, and for the next week hides his manuscript even from his own mother.”

  As he again waited for silence, Thorn let his eyes wander to the tables reserved for the press. Its concerted gaze was upon him, a wary gaze, estimating, judging. His heart sank. These hard-boiled professionals were hold-outs; they were finding his speech a shade less newsworthy than they were supposed to. They might give it and Gregory and the book no more than a buried line or so!

  At this horrid notion, a deep necessity within Thornton Johns abruptly gave birth to a reckless invention. Turning squarely toward Jill Goodwyn, and finding her eyes on him, he deliberately blew her a kiss. In instant response, she blew one back at him, her arm describing a great arc as she did so. Then clasping both her famous hands high above the table, she gave him the gesture of public congratulation and accolade.

  A small gasp went up from most of the assembled ladies, and a sudden activity possessed the pencils of the press. In an effervescence of delight and regret, Thornton Johns told himself he shouldn’t have done it. It was folly—and not only because of Cindy, whose presence in the room he had momentarily forgotten. This was not the sort of thing one wanted in print, especially magnified and distorted, as it would be bound to be. Is Jill Goodwyn starting a new romance with a visiting New Yorker? Visiting New Yorker? Hell, they’d probably put his name in.

  Thornton Johns found himself suddenly cheered. He went on with his lecture and knew he was surpassing himself. By the time the long-ago puppy was putting in his scheduled appearance, another kind of regret bubbled up in Thornton Johns. His brief half-hour on the stage was drawing inexorably to a close.

  “For a non-pressagent,” Josh MacQuade said to Harry Von Brann the following Monday afternoon, “Thornton Johns does very well indeed.” As he spoke, he set an armful of beautifully mounted news clippings and pictures on the long mahogany table at one side of Von Brann’s office.

  “Very well indeed for the book, or the picture, or Thornton Johns?” Von Brann asked.

  “All three,” MacQuade said. “God knows the book and the studio are getting a huge play—no matter how much of it sticks to G. Thornton Johns en route.”

  “What’s the G stand for?”‘

  “Gerald, for his father. Now that he’s entered public life, he’s going to drop the G officially. When he told me, I remarked offhandedly, ‘Bernard Shaw did,’ and he didn’t get sore. He just nodded and said, ‘I know it.’”

  Both men laughed. Von Brann was past fifty, with an almost bald skull, a trim goatee, and a hint of sideburns. It was one of his characteristics never to let himself seem harassed or even very busy. “No coronaries or ulcers for me, thanks,” he would say. “If you’re any good at your job, you don’t have to have them.” This made him widely unpopular with other producers but he did not mind. Nothing mattered to him but his work, his children, and his wife. In that order.

  Now he said, “Peg says Thornton is very good on a platform, not just handsome. ‘The right mixture of syrup and sass,’ she said, ‘to panic a ladies’ club.’” .

  “I’ll say he’s good. The day after that little performance of his, he got himself signed up for two more, one next week, and one the last week they’re here. I don’t see why the hell you don’t can me and hire Thornton Johns.”

  Von Brann shrugged. “On the rest of our properties, he mightn’t put his heart and soul and sacred honor into it.”

  “That’s the damnedest part of it. Everything he does or says is focused on Gregory.”

  “The kiss,” said Von Brann quickly, “wasn’t.” He crossed the room to examine the publicity. The Sunday papers had taken up lavishly where the dailies had left off and the dailies had been lavish enough. Two papers had large pictures of Thornton Johns, one alone and one with Cindy, who had managed to look as smiling and proud for the photographers as a contented wife should. In adjacent columns were larger pictures of Jill Goodwyn, who looked smiling and proud and not contented at all.

  “I wish,” Von Brann said, “that he’d blown his kiss at an Imperial Century star, that’s all.”

  “Give him another week.”

  “He’s giving me another week. He wants me to buy any or all of Gregory’s earlier books, or let him offer them to Dore or Darryl next Monday.”

  “Are they any good?”

  “Partial Eclipse might make a picture. The synopsis came down yesterday.”

  “He’ll sell all of them,” MacQuade said glumly.

  “Not if this damn slump keeps up, he won’t. Nineteen more theaters closed last week.”

  “Give him time. That one could talk his way right through a national depression.”

  “I thought you were so keen about him,” Von Brann said, returning to his desk.

  “I was. I am. But God, the man’s changing by the minute. He grabs off everything in sight—last Friday he damn near got me to take out more life insurance, through him. I bet if he cuts a finger, hot brass comes out, and he’s becoming so damn calculating, you see logarithms when you look at him.”

  Von Brann laughed lazily. “I wonder how Gregory’s taking all that.” He nodded to the table.

  “I asked Hy, and Hy said that Gregory just clammed up after the lecture and is still clammed up.”

  A buzzer sounded and the intercom on the desk nasally told Von Brann that Mr. Bernstein was on One One Three. He pressed a button on the single telephone instrument before him, picked up the receiver, and said, “Yes, Hy?”

  “Could we see you? Gregory’s got a notion for that airplane argument—maybe it will play this way.”

  “Come on in. How’s he feeling?”

  “Pretty rotten, like the start of last week, but he’s in.”

  “Did you put him on to my man, Hy? Goodman’s the only doctor in town is any good with these recurrent cases.”

  “Gregory says he’s leery of fancy doctors.”

  “Well, it’s too bad he had to miss Alice Cohen’s shindig Saturday night. It was a beaut.”

  Through the receiver Hy’s laugh was audible all over the room.

  “Virus P,” Hy said. “That’s what he’s got I’ve diagnosed it at last.”

  “Virus T?”

  “Not T. I said P. P as in Parties.”

  Cindy had seen the Sunday papers while Thorn was still asleep. Her first impulse was to murder Thorn plus Jill Goodwyn plus William Randolph Hearst. Then the room service girl told her she “took just lovely,” and the waiter with her breakfast tray asked her how it felt to be famous. By eleven, she had had three phone calls, had accepted invitations to a luncheon party for herself and two dinner parties for herself and Thorn, and had given up all ideas of forcing Thorn to change his tactics. It was wrong to interfere with your husband’s career.

  To be bitter and happy at the same time is no mean feat for the human heart, but long before Thorn was awake, Cindy was managing it nicely. She was sorry she had gone at him tooth and nail after the lecture, considered returning his penitential present of half the fee
, and vetoed that notion as quixotic. She ordered additional stationery and twelve airmail stamps from the front desk, and called the newsstand for two extra copies of each paper, deciding it might be wiser to get the other copies she would need from newsstands on the street later on. “Now, Mother Johns,” she would write, “don’t go bragging all over Long Island about your other famous son.” She would write the boys, too, and the rest of the family. She wondered if Leonard Lyons or Walter Winchell ever saw the California papers, and wished Thorn hadn’t dropped postcards just yesterday to Oscar Hammerstein and Rex Stout. “Thought you’d liked to know I’ve taken to lecturing about world government and Gregory’s book out here,” the cards had said, but if they hadn’t gone off, the clippings could have been sent instead.

  She looked at the papers once more. That old hag, she thought. Her face has been in the papers a million times, but mine is news. There was a knock at the door; she folded the papers quickly, picked up a magazine, and called, “Come in.”

  It was a bellhop with the stationery, stamps, and extra papers. He also had a package for which he asked her to sign. “It came last night,” he said. “There was a mix-up downstairs.” He threw her a shy glance and looked away. She gave him a dollar, and as he started to get change, waved her hand graciously and turned aside.

  The package was heavy and addressed merely Johns, with the name of the hotel. She opened it and wondered when Thorn had found time to go to a bookstore or when he expected to read. Not only did he attend to Gregory’s mail, phone calls, and requests for donations, not only did he collect and deposit Gregory’s weekly pay check, pay his bills, keep him supplied with pocket money, not only did he spend hours talking to people about Gregory’s old books—as if all this weren’t enough, Thorn also kept in almost daily touch with his own business in New York. That sinister-looking Diana Bates sent him a letter by every mail; every few days she wired or phoned about some client who was miffed by his absence. Miss Bates, Cindy thought, certainly believes in keeping in contact with the boss.

  I wonder if he’s ever blown her a kiss. What do I mean “blown”?

  It wouldn’t be a Diana, nor even a Jill Goodwyn, Cindy decided stonily, who could damage Thornton’s attitude toward home life permanently. But it could be women in the mass, all tittering over his darling jokes and looking up at him adoringly and clustering around asking questions afterward, until the janitor swept them out.

  For a disloyal moment, Lucinda Johns wished her husband had never mounted that platform, or that he had proved a dud once he had. She glanced at the folded newspapers and was instantly cleansed of this treachery, but she gave rapid thanks that there were only two more lectures to come. She had asked if he were going to make the next two different in any way, and he had replied, “If you have a hit show, why search for new lyrics?” For one, the fee was only fifty dollars, but already he could no more have said “No” than a snowball could roll up a hill.

  Snowball and hill, she thought wanly; he’d make a joke out of that and have them in the aisles. Well, once we’re home, he’ll be limited to the platform of the Premium Club. Talking to men about annuities and term insurance and liability, even Thorn can’t be so goddam darling.

  Comforted, she turned her mind back to the package of books. There were a lot of them and she picked them up one by one. Joe Miller’s joke book, Chic Sale’s joke book, Bob Hope’s joke book, two books, by Bennett Cerf and two by John Mason Brown.

  “No!” exclaimed Cindy aloud, and hurled John Mason Brown halfway across the room.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE ALICE COHEN SHINDIG was the last big event planned around Gregory and Abby Johns during that month in the City of the Angels. Immediately thereafter, word got about, as word will, about Gregory’s second untimely relapse, and though everybody was sad that he should be so frequently ill, it was as true in Hollywood as anywhere else that a hostess finds it calamitous to have her guest of honor drop out just as the canapés are being prepared.

  “Anyway, I bet he isn’t as much fun as Thorn,” Alice Cohen was heard to remark that night, “authors are so stuck on themselves.”

  Thus the only social life which Gregory and Abby Johns experienced on the Coast was an occasional evening where the word “party” would not have been a mot juste. To have dinner with Hy Bernstein and his wife could scarcely be called a party, and this they did several times. They also spent two evenings with the Moroskys and their four children, and one, slightly stilted apart from the good shop talk, with Harry and Peg Von Brann. Each of these occasions was singularly free from sequins, plastic ice, or rooms bubbling with brandy glasses.

  On most of their evenings, Gregory and Abby stayed at home, or went for a drive, or went to the movies.

  Because of their new wealth, each of these activities held new and seductive charms for them. At the movies they always sat in the loge. At the hotel, they slowly trained themselves not to refold damp towels for further use. On mild evenings they had dinner on their awninged balcony, against which blew the spiced air of eucalyptus, sycamore, and pepper trees. They accustomed themselves to buying cigarettes a carton at a time instead of a pack, and gradually lost their guilt at paying thirty cents for an air-mail Herald Tribune on weekdays and sixty on Sundays. Twice they telephoned Hat—at night rates.

  But their greatest pleasure came from the drives they took along the curving coast, generally going north, with the shining roaring ocean on their left, and the leather-colored hills of the Malibu chain on their right; in other moods they drove inland through the lush green fertility of the Valley. During their last two weekends, with Gregory in perfect health again, they took two long trips: the first to San Francisco, which they found so glorious a city that they broke through their tight schedule and had to drive most of Sunday night to get home again in time for the studio on Monday; the second, to the desert, past the honky-tonk look of Palm Springs to the small town of Indio, where they stayed at a de-luxe motel at the edge of a date ranch.

  “A date ranch,” Gregory said. “Can you tie it?”

  “What about that carrot ranch in the valley, and the beet ranch?”

  The desert astonished and moved them. They had always pictured it as a flat dead expanse of white sand, like movies of the Sahara; they were charmed by the soft scattering of spring flowers, by the sage green of tamarisk trees and the tender fluff of smoke trees. They looked far off to the snowcapped Santa Rosa Mountains, and at bare, iron-streaked Mt. Gorgonia and Mt. Jacinta, towering, it seemed, just over them. Once during the night, they left their cottage and walked along the road, looking up at the close shining web of the stars. Across miles of space, a cold wind blew, persistent, against their faces. “I guess,” Gregory said, “it used to be like this on a sailing ship at night, halfway across the ocean.”

  And often during the week, they drove just before going to bed, impulsively, just for a half-hour or so. They would wind up at some neon-lit drive-in, refuse the speedy discomfort of car service, and go inside to sit lazily in a booth over coffee and doughnuts or cornflakes and milk. Here they talked about Thorn and Cindy and the newspaper stories and the parties they were no longer invited to, but which they could never wait to have meticulously described.

  “I suppose I could stop him from lecturing about me,” Gregory said uncertainly, the night after the Sunday splash of pictures. “Thorn’s got the bug so hard, it would kill him, but I could just stop him.”

  “Don’t go through it all again,” Abby said.

  “It’s one thing to say you feel philosophical and remote, and another to feel it.”

  “It doesn’t affect you in any basic way, though. You were right on that. If you made him cancel the two new dates—”

  “He wouldn’t cancel. We’d have a bloody row and he’d go lecture about God knows what anyway and maybe get even sillier publicity.”

  “About ‘Modern American Writing,’” Abby said.

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Gregory said sharply. “Not until h
e’d studied up on it first.”

  “I’m sorry, darling.”

  “Today he told me all over again he was leaving the puppy out, and that he’d never dreamed it had hurt me when I was a kid.” Gregory hesitated. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I suddenly felt a fool for having jumped him so hard on it.” Abby didn’t answer. “And I turned right around and told him to go ahead and use it every time, if it got him any laughs.”

  They both picked up their coffee cups and sat on in silence. Then Gregory said, “Come on, let’s get back to the car.”

  Most of their driving was done not in the big rented Buick but in a small rented Ford. This was due to no distaste for Dynaflow Drive, Valve-in-Head Engines, Pushbutton Window Control, or Bodies by Fisher, but to frustration too often repeated. It would have been impossible to say anything but “yes” when, nearly every evening, Thorn and Cindy asked in worried voices, “Is it all right for us to take the car tonight, since you’re not going out?” Yet when the late impulse for a drive did arrive, both Gregory and Abby found it depressing to have to squelch it because no vehicle was available. That it was a vehicle for which they were paying made it neither more nor less depressing, but they could not bring themselves to date up the car in advance when there was no guarantee that at the last moment they might not both prefer to get into bed and read. Ultimately, they rented the Ford, and Thorn’s and Cindy’s nightly worry was abolished.

  With so much practice Gregory became expert at the wheel for the first time in his life. He found rhythmic, soothing satisfaction in the act of driving, and Abby never grew weary at his side. “We’re born tourists,” she said one evening as they returned to the hotel and began to undress. “We never knew it, but we are.”

  Gregory lighted a cigarette and snapped the match across the room. It missed the ashtray he had aimed at, and he walked over to rectify his error with what can only be described as a swagger of pride. “We sure are. The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose. Walt Whitman. The oiled macadam road, the concrete six-lane highway—someday we’re going to drive right across the U.S.A.”