“Heaven help me, I am writing about a boy scout – the boy scout.”
“Is it Stahr’s idea?”
“I don’t know – he told me to look into it. He may have ten writers working ahead of me or behind me, a system which he so thoughtfully invented. So you’re in love with him?”
“I should say not,” I said indignantly. “I’ve known him all my life.”
“Desperate, eh? Well, I’ll arrange it if you’ll use all your influence to advance me. I want a unit of my own.”
I closed my eyes and drifted off. When I woke up, the stewardess was putting a blanket over me.
“Almost there,” she said.
Out the window I could see by the sunset that we were in a greener land.
“I just heard something funny,” she volunteered, “up in the cockpit – that Mr Smith – or Mr Stahr – I never remember seeing his name—”
“It’s never on any pictures,” I said.
“Oh. Well, he’s been asking the pilots a lot about flying – I mean, he’s interested? You know?”
“I know.”
“I mean one of them told me he bet he could teach Mr Stahr solo flying in ten minutes. He has such a fine mentality, that’s what he said.”
I was getting impatient.
“Well, what was so funny?”
“Well, finally one of the pilots asked Mr Smith if he liked his business, and Mr Smith said, ‘Sure. Sure I like it. It’s nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones.’”
The stewardess doubled up with laughter – and I could have spit at her.
“I mean calling all those people a hatful of nuts. I mean cracked nuts.” Her laughter stopped with unexpected suddenness, and her face was grave as she stood up. “Well, I’ve got to finish my chart.”
“Goodbye.”
Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for a while. Years later I travelled with one of those same pilots and he told me one thing Stahr had said.
He was looking down at the mountains.
“Suppose you were a railroad man,” he said. “You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors’ reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to decide – on what basis? You can’t test the best way – except by doing it. So you just do it.”
The pilot thought he had missed something.
“How do you mean?”
“You choose some one way for no reason at all – because that mountain’s pink or the blueprint is a better blue. You see?”
The pilot considered that this was very valuable advice. But he doubted if he’d ever be in a position to apply it.
“What I wanted to know,” he told me ruefully, “is how he ever got to be Mr Stahr.”
I’m afraid Stahr could never have answered that one, for the embryo is not equipped with a memory. But I could answer a little. He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms,* with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously – finally frantically – and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.
The motors were off, and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific. However I happened to feel about these things – and they were home, after all – I know that Stahr must have felt much more. These were the things I had first opened my eyes on, like the sheep on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio; but this was where Stahr had come to earth after that extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him, but I don’t think so. I would rather think that in a “long shot” he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness.
Chapter 2
It was nine o’clock of a July night and there were still some extras in the drugstore across from the studio – I could see them bent over the pin games inside – as I parked my car. “Old” Johnny Swanson stood on the corner in his semi-cowboy clothes, staring gloomily past the moon. Once he had been as big in pictures as Tom Mix or Bill Hart* – now it was too sad to speak to him, and I hurried across the street and through the front gate.
There is never a time when a studio is absolutely quiet. There is always a night shift of technicians in the laboratories and dubbing rooms and people on the maintenance staff dropping in at the commissary. But the sounds are all different – the padded hush of tyres, the quiet tick of a motor running idle, the naked cry of a soprano singing into a night-bound microphone. Around a corner I came upon a man in rubber boots washing down a car in a wonderful white light – a fountain among the dead industrial shadows. I slowed up as I saw Mr Marcus being hoisted into his car in front of the administration building, because he took so long to say anything, even goodnight – and while I waited I realized that the soprano was singing, “Come, come, I love you only”* over and over; I remember this because she kept singing the same line during the earthquake. That didn’t come for five minutes yet.
Father’s offices were in the old building with the long balconies and iron rails with their suggestion of a perpetual tightrope. Father was on the second floor, with Stahr on one side and Mr Marcus on the other – this evening there were lights all along the row. My stomach dipped a little at the proximity to Stahr, but that was in pretty good control now – I’d seen him only once in the month I’d been home.
There were a lot of strange things about Father’s office, but I’ll make it brief. In the outer part were three poker-faced secretaries who had sat there like witches ever since I could remember – Birdy Peters, Maude something and Rosemary Schmiel; I don’t know whether this was her name, but she was the dean of the trio, so to speak, and under her desk was the kick lock that admitted you to Father’s throne room. All three of the secretaries were passionate capitalists, and Birdy had invented the rule that if typists were seen eating together more than once in a single week they were hauled up on the carpet. At that time the studios feared mob rule.
I went on in. Nowadays all chief executives have huge drawing rooms, but my father’s was the first. It was also the first to have one-way glass in the big French windows, and I’ve heard a story about a trap in the floor that would drop unpleasant visitors to an oubliette below, but believe it to be an invention. There was a big painting of Will Rogers, hung conspicuously and intended, I think, to suggest Father’s essential kinship with Hollywood’s St Francis;* there was a signed photograph of Minna Davis, Stahr’s dead wife, and photos of other studio celebrities and big chalk drawings of Mother and me. Tonight the one-way French windows were open and a big moon, rosy gold with a haze around, was wedged helpless in one of them. Father and Jacques La Borwitz and Rosemary Schmiel were down at the end around a big circular desk.
What did Father look like? I couldn’t describe him except for once in New York when I met him where I didn’t expect to; I was aware of a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself, and I wished he’d move on – and then I saw he was Father. Afterwards I was shocked at my impression. Father can be very magnetic – he had a tough jaw and an Irish smile.
But as for Jacques La Borwitz, I shall spare you. Let me just say he was an assistant producer, which is something like a commissar, and let it go at that. Where Stahr p
icked up such mental cadavers or had them forced upon him – or especially how he got any use out of them – has always amazed me, as it amazed everyone fresh from the East who slapped up against them. Jacques La Borwitz had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone. Jacques La – oh my!
From their expressions I was sure they had been talking about Stahr. Stahr had ordered something or forbidden something, or defied Father or junked one of La Borwitz’s pictures or something catastrophic, and they were sitting there in protest at night in a community of rebellion and helplessness. Rosemary Schmiel sat pad in hand, as if ready to write down their dejection.
“I’m to drive you home dead or alive,” I told Father. “All those birthday presents rotting away in their packages!”
“A birthday!” cried Jacques in a flurry of apology. “How old? I didn’t know.”
“Forty-three,” said Father distinctly.
He was older than that – four years – and Jacques knew it; I saw him note it down in his account book to use sometime. Out here these account books are carried open in the hand. One can see the entries being made without recourse to lip-reading, and Rosemary Schmiel was compelled in emulation to make a mark on her pad. As she rubbed it out, the earth quaked under us.
We didn’t get the full shock like at Long Beach, where the upper storeys of shops were spewed into the streets and small hotels drifted out to sea – but for a full minute our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth – like some nightmare attempt to attach our navel cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation.
Mother’s picture fell off the wall, revealing a small safe – Rosemary and I grabbed frantically for each other and did a strange screaming waltz across the room. Jacques fainted, or at least disappeared, and Father clung to his desk and shouted, “Are you all right?” Outside the window the singer came to the climax of “I love you only”, held it a moment and then, I swear, started it all over. Or maybe they were playing it back to her from the recording machine.
The room stood still, shimmying a little. We made our way to the door, suddenly including Jacques, who had reappeared, and tottered out dizzily through the anteroom onto the iron balcony. Almost all the lights were out, and from here and there we could hear cries and calls. Momentarily we stood waiting for a second shock – then, as with a common impulse, we went into Stahr’s entry and through to his office.
The office was big, but not as big as Father’s. Stahr sat on the side of his couch rubbing his eyes. When the quake came he had been asleep, and he wasn’t sure yet whether he had dreamt it. When we convinced him he thought it was all rather funny – until the telephones began to ring. I watched him as unobtrusively as possible. He was grey with fatigue while he listened to the phone and dictagraph, but as the reports came in, his eyes began to pick up shine.
“A couple of water mains have burst,” he said to Father. “They’re heading into the back lot.”
“Gray’s shooting in the French Village,” said Father.
“It’s flooded around the Station too, and in the Jungle and the City Corner. What the hell – nobody seems to be hurt.” In passing, he shook my hands gravely: “Where’ve you been, Cecilia?”
“You going out there, Monroe?” Father asked.
“When all the news is in: one of the power lines is off too – I’ve sent for Robinson.”
He made me sit down with him on the couch and tell about the quake again.
“You look tired,” I said, cute and motherly.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve got no place to go in the evenings, so I just work.”
“I’ll arrange some evenings for you.”
“I used to play poker with a gang,” he said thoughtfully, “before I was married. But they all drank themselves to death.”
Miss Doolan, his secretary, came in with fresh bad news.
“Robby’ll take care of everything when he comes,” Stahr assured Father. He turned to me. “Now there’s a man – that Robinson. He was a troubleshooter – fixed the telephone wires in Minnesota blizzards – nothing stumps him. He’ll be here in a minute – you’ll like Robby.”
He said it as if it had been his lifelong intention to bring us together, and he had arranged the whole earthquake with just that in mind.
“Yes, you’ll like Robby,” he repeated. “When do you go back to college?”
“I’ve just come home.”
“You get the whole summer?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go back as soon as I can.”
I was in a mist. It hadn’t failed to cross my mind that he might have some intention about me, but if it was so, it was in an exasperatingly early stage – I was merely “a good property”. And the idea didn’t seem so attractive at that moment – like marrying a doctor. He seldom left the studio before eleven.
“How long,” he asked my father, “before she graduates from college? That’s what I was trying to say.”
And I think I was about to sing out eagerly that I needn’t go back at all, that I was quite educated already – when the totally admirable Robinson came in. He was a bow-legged young redhead, all ready to go.
“This is Robby, Cecilia,” said Stahr. “Come on, Robby.”
So I met Robby. I can’t say it seemed like fate – but it was. For it was Robby who later told me how Stahr found his love that night.
* * *
Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland – not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway at night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire. I never lived in a house with an attic, but a back lot must be something like that, and at night of course, in an enchanted distorted way, it all comes true.
When Stahr and Robby arrived, clusters of lights had already picked out the danger spots in the flood.
“We’ll pump it out into the swamp on Thirty-Sixth Street,” said Robby after a moment. “It’s city property – but isn’t this an act of God? Say – look there!”
On top of a huge head of the Goddess Shiva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river. The idol had come unloosed from a set of Burma, and it meandered earnestly on its way, stopping sometimes to waddle and bump in the shallows with the other debris of the tide. The two refugees had found sanctuary along a scroll of curls on its bald forehead and seemed at first glance to be sightseers on an interesting bus ride through the scene of the flood.
“Will you look at that, Monroe!” said Robby. “Look at those dames!”
Dragging their legs through sudden bogs, they made their way to the bank of the stream. Now they could see the women, looking a little scared but brightening at the prospect of rescue.
“We ought to let ’em drift out to the waste pipe,” said Robby gallantly, “but DeMille* needs that head next week.”
He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, though, and presently he was hip-deep in the water, fishing for them with a pole and succeeding only in spinning it in a dizzy circle. Help arrived, and the impression quickly got around that one of them was very pretty, and then that they were people of importance. But they were just strays, and Robby waited disgustedly to give them hell while the thing was brought finally into control and beached.
“Put that head back!” he called up to them. “You think it’s a souvenir?”
One of the women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol, and Robby caught her and set her on solid ground; the other one hesitated and then followed. Robby turned to Stahr for judgement.
“What’ll we do with them, chief?”
Stahr did not answer. Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight, the eyes
he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead; the smile lingered, changed a little according to pattern; the lips parted – the same. An awful fear went over him, and he wanted to cry aloud. Back from the still-sour room, the muffled glide of the limousine hearse, the falling concealing flowers, from out there in the dark – here now warm and glowing. The river passed him in a rush, the great spotlights swooped and blinked – and then he heard another voice speak that was not Minna’s voice.
“We’re sorry,” said the voice. “We followed a truck in through a gate.”
A little crowd had gathered – electricians, grips, truckers – and Robby began to nip at them like a sheepdog.
“…get the big pumps on the tanks on Stage 4… put a cable around this head… raft it up on a couple of two-by-fours… get the water out of the jungle first, for Christ’s sake… that big ‘A’ pipe, lay it down… all that stuff is plastic….”
Stahr stood watching the two women as they threaded their way after a policeman towards an exit gate. Then he took a tentative step to see if the weakness had gone out of his knees. A loud tractor came bumping through the slush, and men began streaming by him – every second one glancing at him, smiling, speaking: “Hello, Monroe… Hello, Mr Stahr… wet night, Mr Stahr… Monroe… Monroe… Stahr… Stahr… Stahr.”
He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking, I suppose, a little like the Emperor and the Old Guard.* There is no world so but it has its heroes, and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time – through the beginnings and the great upset, when sound came, and the three years of depression, he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyalties were trembling now, there were clay feet everywhere, but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went by.
Chapter 3
Between the night I got back and the quake, I’d made many observations.
About Father, for example. I loved Father – in a sort of irregular graph with many low swoops – but I began to see that his strong will didn’t fill him out as a passable man. Most of what he accomplished boiled down to shrewd. He had acquired with luck and shrewdness a quarter-interest in a booming circus – together with young Stahr. That was his life’s effort – all the rest was an instinct to hang on. Of course, he talked that double talk to Wall Street about how mysterious it was to make a picture, but Father didn’t know the ABCs of dubbing or even cutting. Nor had he learnt much about the feel of America as a bar boy in Ballyhegan, nor did he have any more than a drummer’s sense of a story. On the other hand, he didn’t have concealed paresis like —; he came to the studio before noon and, with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle, it was hard to put anything over on him.
The Last Tycoon Page 3
