by Hugh Hood
“Shrewder than Rose,” said Callegarini, who might not have paraded it publicly, but who liked Rose a lot. Lenehan had introduced them at a party, and the banker had afterwards invented a lot of excuses to come out to the studio pretty often. His motive seemed clear, and the partners often snickered about it.
“When the bankroll loves the star, the producers grow fat,” Lenehan would say, although he was sure that the bankroll would never confuse love with money.
“She shouldn’t try these things, like poor Joe D.,” said Jasper.
Horler said, “Does anybody think she’s actually hurting the picture? She’s a pretty solid draw.”
“Let Jasper say what he thinks,” said Max.
“He has the most at stake,” said Horler.
“I would not want it thought that I was unable to stage these numbers properly.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Even if it were, you don’t want bad numbers in the film. A quarter of the footage will be devoted to them. They’re the most important aspect of the picture. I have my reputation to consider, and you have a big investment to protect. Rose is equally inept in all five numbers. Let me show you more.”
He went onto the narrow apron in front of the screen and his head and shoulders stuck up into the arrested picture so that he was in glorious colour almost to the waist, with the pompoms on Rose’s slippers projected on his upturned face. He had a pointer in his hand and with it drew attention to certain parts of Rose’s anatomy, as revealed in wide-screen aspect-ratio. He couldn’t quite reach the parts in question, but was able to lead the onlookers’ eyes in the right direction.
“Look at her bottom,” he said, pointing.
“What about it?” asked Max. “It’s cute.”
“Too much of it.”
“I think he’s right,” said Danny.
Callegarini kept silent.
“The whole point,” said Danny, “is that Rose can’t carry this picture. I blame myself for this. I’m only glad we’ve got something to fall back on, which I’m also responsible for and which partly gets me off the hook.”
The others went on listening to Jasper.
“Here again, just over the kidneys. Look at that bulge. No glamour, no sex. She doesn’t come across.”
“I can’t agree with that. I’ve seen many of Miss Leclair’s pictures, and she comes across to me,” said Callegarini.
“Paul, you’re a gentleman and a scholar,” said Horler with some impatience.
Callegarini knew that he was neither, but was pleased to be so described.
Horler went on. “Naturally she would appeal to you or me, safely married middle-aged men, and we buy tickets, but not enough tickets.”
“What is the audience of this movie anyway?” demanded Lenehan rhetorically. “It’s the audience that likes a little smut for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The sex audience. We have made market studies on each of our features before general release, and in our experience the predicted audience and the actual audience coincide.”
“He means that we know who we’re talking to,” said Horler.
“Yeah,” said Lenehan. “It’s not enough these days to say, ‘I’m making a woman’s picture,’ or maybe, ‘I’m making a surfing quickie for teen-aged jerks.’ You have to research your market precisely.’’
Max felt drained of all resources. He had been carrying much responsibility for several weeks now, and was looking around for somewhere to lay it down. It angered him to hear Danny going on like this, because in all ages and climates practical men of affairs have talked this way to artists, that is, through their hats. He knew that Rose had qualities that, properly handled, could make her a much bigger star than she had ever been, but that wasn’t his assignment.
“I have an extrapolation here, showing exactly what proportions the projected Goody audience will have,” said Lenehan, taking some papers from an attaché case.
“Don’t read them now,” begged Max.
“Let Mr. Saint John continue his story,” said Horler.
“Right,” said Callegarini, resenting their treatment of his views. He wasn’t a judge of talent, and he supposed he should mind his own business. And yet, his was certainly a reaction, not an expert reaction but a reaction nevertheless. Producers always said, “All we want is a quick reaction, Paul.” Then they would make their pitch and go away, satisfied or not depending on whether they got the money. The quality of your judgment doesn’t change, he thought, once the money changes hands. But he knew that effectively it did. As long as you retained coercive power your counsels were heeded, but only that long.
“I have nothing further to say,” said Jasper from the stage apron. “I don’t want to knock Rose. Personally I like her much better than the other girl, but it isn’t a personal matter. With Rose starring in the musical sequences, without some change in their handling, the film will be a dull failure.”
“Do you agree, Max?” asked Horler, as Jasper sat down.
“I think we have to decide the bias of the picture once and for all,” said Max. “We can’t split it beween the two girls. Those who like one will hate the other. Maybe I should say those who love one . . .” He felt embarrassed and didn’t say anymore.
“Aha, aha, aha,” said Lenehan.
“Yes, what do we do about that? Should we give it to the press and ride it for all it’s worth, or do we try to sit on it for a while?”
“Is it good for us?”
“What do we think of it officially?”
“What will our predicted audience think of it?”
Callegarini, Max, and Jasper said nothing, feeling slightly disgusted. Two of them, at least, were subtle and sensitive men, who did not like to cause pain.
“He’s on the set daily, and everybody in town knows it. They’ve been seen together repeatedly,” said Lenehan.
“They make an attractive couple,” said Horler approvingly.
A strange, oppressive panic filled the screening room. Strong passion appalls us; we quail before it, cannot contain its effects. At the idea of that immense genie and that little bottle, at the notion of Seth, Rose, Charity, the newspapers and the wire services and the television broadcasts and the columnists, they became frightened and unsure of themselves. Callegarini was silent, but thought the more and felt profoundly disturbed. Max and Jasper were sorrowful. Horler was judicious and fearful, and Lenehan was exultant at the thought of all that space.
“Let’s sock it to them hard,” he said. “It could add millions to the gross.”
Everyone present felt the air of conspiracy and assassination around the producers—the dagger concealed in the fold of the cloak, the smiling handclasp before the sudden lunge and jab. In the dark ambiguous room, brilliancies of coloured light crossing above them, stilled music frozen on the glittering screen, the atmosphere of tragic betrayal thickened grotesquely.
Max thought: making movies is like that. It takes place in secrecy and darkness and is all illusion. The real moviemaking is when you sit in the dark and change the natural order of things by cutting and juxtaposing unrelated actions. It has nothing to do with real people who suffer. It is an art of excision and splice, like surgery or butchery, with the sadistic psychopathology of those arts, and with the incidental murderous blood. He would make cuts and excisions, and would tie in, with bold and safe ligature, new parts, new anatomies, and all would hold firm and be organically one; but what “drops horribly in a pail,” the excised part, would decompose and stink.
It is (he thought) a confusion of multi-reals, illusion laid on illusion, Rose’s bright slippers on Jasper’s anxious face. A film is an arranged reality, a composed reality, made in womblike darkness. The motor purrs, the dancers move and strut on the movieola screen, three inches high, Charity’s perfect swelling breasts little insignificant mounds not more than a millimetre in size, pris
oned in the mechanical device. Max thought of his masters and of certain bright mornings in 1927 in Berlin, where he had learned the craft, and he felt like crying for the great dead and for their broken promise.
There is something wrong with the cinema ab intrinseco, a lie built into it. Far from authenticating the real, from dragging phenomena into undeniable life, his cinema was turning out to be destructive. It crossed his mind that theologians have sometimes condemned acting as a profession deleterious to the personality, and he wondered if the cinema might not fall under a similar condemnation, as being in essence the product of lies, connivance, and darkness.
Meanwhile a banker lurked at Max’s left hand and Elizabethan assassins at his right, while outside there was October sunshine and the promised outing on Horler’s boat to follow the dark session of conspiracy. He waited quietly, and in the darkness his friend Jasper gripped his arm fearfully. Jasper would regret what he had started; he was innocent and honest, devoid of guile or malice, as the instigators of revenge tragedies often are. He would not want to harm Rose, but he had his reputation to think of, his wish to work in New York again, his own life. Jasper yanked at his sleeve, but Max wouldn’t face him.
“Enormous publicity,” said Lenehan, “and it will make Charity a star even before Goody opens. It’s like getting a four-hundred-thousand-dollar star for seventy-five hundred.”
“We’d have to shoot additional footage, for which she isn’t contracted,” said Horler.
“What kind of additional footage?” asked Max sharply.
“Just a little bit of promotional footage, Max. We aren’t telling you what to do.”
“Spell it out, or is somebody afraid to say what he thinks?”
“Not on this unit,” said Horler softly. “None of us need be afraid to say what he thinks. We think that Seth is seriously involved with Charity. And you can’t blame us . . .”
“. . . we certainly can’t be criticized for wanting all the publicity we can get,” said Danny. “If Charity is going to be the best thing in the picture, I don’t see that we have any choice.”
“That’s right,” said Jasper, “they don’t have any choice.”
“So you propose to leak to the press, or simply perhaps to publish in a publicity handout, a story of stories glorifying a romance between Charity and Seth. In short, you intend to break up Rose’s marriage to publicize the picture.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Danny.
“Max, all you have to do is make the best possible picture,” said Horler.
“I can make a good picture around Rose. Or I can make a good picture, which will make more money, with Charity as the star.”
There was a short, nasty silence.
I ought to come off the picture, he thought. These men are killers; they don’t care what they do to anybody. But he had never come off a picture in his life. Once started, it rooted itself and flourished in his mind so that he couldn’t bear to quit it.
“What about it, Max?” said Horler levelly. “We will shift the emphasis of the production,” said Mars all at once. “In any future conferences or shooting or editing, I will treat Miss Ryan as the center of attention, apart from Tommy.”
The projectionist switched on the lights in the screening room, and the screen went blank.
6
“They that live by the sword shall perish by the sword,” said Peggi Starr to Charity. “I used to hear that and a lot of other proverbs all the time on WWVA, ‘The Voice of Wheeling,’ when I was growing up at home.”
“I wonder what it means,” said Charity. They were waiting to be called for their big scene together in which Peggi, playing a blond whore, hard as nails, named Daisy Fay, finds little Goody sitting on a gritty bench in Washington Square, deciding to go into prostitution on a professional basis because of a fight with her sister over the love of dog-walking Dino.
Charity, as Goody, opened the scene with a new song that had been written into the script for her, “All I Do On This Green Earth Is Dream,” during which she wandered around the arch and the park benches, holding the hem of her miniskirt in her fingers and trying to look like a lost little girl. The track had been recorded several weeks before, and was currently moving well as a pop single on 45. As the scene looked as though it would be much more important in the exploitation of the picture than had originally been estimated, it had been left almost till the end of the shooting, with the idea of building it up, perhaps writing in some additional dialogue, and giving Charity major exposure early in the print.
Peggi didn’t like the scene, for rather unprofessional reasons. The script made her Goody’s buddy, as over against her sister Barbara, whereas their real relationships were the reverse. Still, laugh-clown-laugh, and all that sort of thing. She tried to look as if she loved little Goody, her coat being so warm and all, and as though she greatly mistrusted her coolly worthy elder sister Barb.
Off camera, she spent a lot of time needling Charity, who didn’t get the message half the time. It wasn’t so much that she was unperceptive; she was simply flushed with triumph, so full of her access of good fortune as to pay attention to nobody but Seth. She and Rose had no more of those awful scenes together. Rose was effectively out of the picture, her scenes complete, her dubbing finished, and the problem of Seth apparently decided. It was now established that when he appeared at lunchtime it was Charity he came to see.
“It means that those who screw other people get screwed themselves in the end,” said Peggi.
“That’s the place,” said Charity brightly. They had both spotted Seth waiting for her.
Peggi asked, “Are you satisfied with the scene? This is key dialogue. Do you think we’ve got it right?” With all her assets, Charity wasn’t in the same league as Peggi where comedy dialogue was concerned. A slight adjustment of tone in Peggi’s lines could make the scene quite disagreeable. Once or twice, reading through the lines, Peggi had caught Max gazing at her over the rims of his glasses. He hadn’t said anything, but she got a distinct impression that if she could get the scene away from Charity, it was hers for the taking. The opening part was Charity’s by default; she had the song and the pathetic situation, and was alone on camera. When Peggi came on, it was possible for the scene to take a different and much more acid turn, so that pretty little Goody seemed like a spoiled brat. Peggi could insinuate in her lines that prostitution was honest hard work and that Goody wasn’t equal to it.
Secretly Peggi thought that Goody might not have what it took for big-time whoredom, but that her live equivalent had already made it big in the business, on a high level of accomplishment for one so young.
“Where did you get a crazy name like that?” asked Charity offensively. “Peggi Starr. That’s a joke name.”
Ostensibly without knowing it, she had touched Peggi’s sorest point.
“I got it because I was young and stupid,” she said, only just not adding the obvious “like you.” “Young and dumb as they come. When I got out here, I had this crumby agent, a real nothing. He’s running a used-car lot in North Hollywood now, so you can imagine. He thought he was pretty smart, the way some of us do. He didn’t like my real name, which was Marge Stoner in case you want to know, and he changed it. He said, ‘We’ll call you Peggi Starr. Starr by name and star by nature, get it?’ That was a long time ago, when I still thought you could get something for nothing.”
“Of course you can get something for nothing,” said Charity.
“Don’t be a silly little bitch. Everything costs. I got some cheap publicity and I turned myself into a joke. Maybe if I’d stayed a bit thinner, and didn’t have a whisky voice and dance-hall-girl looks, I’d have got better parts, but I don’t think so. It was the name that did it. In the end everything evens up.”
“You could have changed it back,” said Charity, alarmed by her tone. ‘
“Some things you can’t change b
ack. They who live by the sword shall perish by the sword. You may steal and cheat and lie your way to the top, but it all comes back on you sooner or later.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Look, I asked you a question. Are you satisfied with the scene or not?”
“Sure I am.”
Then you’re crazy, Peggi thought, because I’m stealing your pantie girdle off and you don’t even know. Wait till you get into a movie with your darling Seth, he’ll crucify you. Without expecting any results, she said, “Why don’t you leave Seth alone?”
“What an optimist.”
“No dice?”
“Nope.”
“We’ll go over the dialogue,” said Peggi, and they began to throw lines at each other like BB shot. Peggi did better with her lines than Charity. It was a mismatch.
7
One afternoon before Christmas, when she’d been safely back in the city for several weeks, Rose came in from a quick shopping trip to find Seth, just in from the Coast, standing in the hall with Macha helping him to hang a picture, a big black and yellow abstract oil which she liked on sight; it made her want to laugh. When Rose came in, Macha smiled adoringly at her and disappeared, leaving her to handle Seth.
“I like that a lot. Where did you get it?”
“Over on Fifty-seventh Street on my way uptown; it’s an early Christmas present,” he said quietly. This alarmed her because Seth, though not at all ungenerous, had never been exactly lavish in his gifts to her, and the painting was obviously expensive, maybe very expensive. They had several paintings in the house, but until now nothing sensational.
“What’s it called?”
“‘The Lights on Saint Hubert Street.’” He smiled at the incomprehension in her eyes. “He’s the hottest ticket in town. I’m doing you a favour.” He stepped down from the folding kitchen stool which Macha had given him, and standing back he gave his gift a thorough assessment. “I hope you get a lot of pleasure from it,” he said, and she felt greater alarm. What he was saying had a valedictory air about it. As she had for weeks, she felt now as though she were being torn from him bodily, flesh ripping. He had never been a philanderer. There had been a couple of trivial side glances at sexually stimulating girls in his pictures, but she had refused to take offense. He was an attractive man—she knew better than anyone how attractive and in what ways—in a peculiarly exposed position. It would have been demanding too much to look for total fidelity and chastity. Yet till now his chastity had been total, or nearly—she had never conducted any investigation of the facts. There might have been flickers in his brain but not bodily extravagance; they had loved each other. She had helped him, and she was utterly certain that he would sometime remember that, perhaps at great cost.
