Max

by Howard Fast

  ‘You don’t do a damn thing. You sit right here.’

  ‘Mrs Britsky wanted the car this afternoon.’

  ‘I told you what to do. You sit here!’

  Dr Traub met him in the corridor. ‘You have a very sick lady there, Mr Britsky. We’re doing our best, except that for pneumonia the best is practically nothing.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘Sure, sure. In a minute,’ Dr Traub said. ‘Tell me first, she’s not Jewish, is she?’

  ‘What the hell is the difference?’

  ‘The difference is, Mr Britsky, that I got to talk frankly. Has she got a family? Also, is she a Catholic?’

  ‘Goddamn it –’

  Dr Traub stopped mumbling. ‘Hold on! Just hold on, Mr Britsky! I’m saying something very important. If that woman is a Catholic, she must have a priest. This is a Jewish hospital, so we don’t have a priest in attendance, but if Miss O’Donnell should die without the last rites, that could be a terrible thing in the eyes of her family. That’s why I say her family must be notified and we must have a priest – if she’s Catholic’

  ‘She’s Catholic, but she’s not going to die! You hear me, Doc, she is not going to die.’

  ‘That’s in the hands of God, and with pneumonia He doesn’t do too well. Maybe she has a fifty percent chance of pulling out of this, and I wouldn’t even bet on that. I’m being very blunt, but her temperature is already one hundred and five degrees. Dr Solomon is with her now, and he’s our best man with lung infections, but I don’t know what he can do.’

  ‘Can I please see her now?’

  ‘All right. But don’t delay what I told you.’

  Max’s mind was a jumble of confused thoughts and tearing sensations, facing what he felt for Della O’Donnell and yet unable to face it, tempted to get down on his knees and plead with her to live and not to desert him, yet unable to do anything but stand by the bed with the tears running down his cheeks, the two doctors watching him curiously before they stepped out of the room.

  Della opened her eyes and saw him and whispered something. He bent close to hear it. ‘Please don’t cry,’ Della said, and the effort to speak brought on a fit of coughing, a froth of dark brown sputum coming out of her mouth. A nurse came into the room and wiped Della’s face.

  ‘Where are the doctors?’ Max demanded. ‘Why ain’t they here?’

  ‘They can’t help,’ the nurse said. She had a basin of cold water and she wet cloths, using them to cool Della. ‘We’re doing what we can.’

  Della’s eyes were closed now. She appeared to be breathing a little more easily. Max left the room and went to the floor desk and picked up the telephone. When a nurse tried to stop him, explaining that visitors had to use the telephone in the main lobby, he took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, threw it at her, and said, ‘I’m using this phone, lady.’

  He called Tammany Hall, to be informed that Boss Charles Murphy was at City Hall, where the mayor was handing the keys to the city to the new President-elect, Mr Woodrow Wilson.

  ‘Well, you damn well get over there and find him!’ Max shouted. ‘You tell him that this is Max Britsky, and I’m up at Mt Sinai Hospital up on One Hundredth Street, and that it’s a matter of life and death that he get up here and bring a priest with him!’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A priest, goddamn you! A priest!’

  It was nine o’clock that night before Murphy reached Mt Sinai, and by then Della had passed through delirium and had sunk into a coma. Max came out of her room to greet Murphy, and Murphy introduced the tall, heavyset man he had brought with him as Bishop Brady.

  ‘We need a priest,’ Max said.

  ‘Sure, I’m a priest,’ the bishop told him.

  Overcome with emotion, Max spoke with effort: ‘I think she’s near the end.’

  ‘Then we’ll waste no time,’ the bishop said, leading the way into the room. Dr Solomon was there, bending over the bed. He straightened up, nodded at Brady, and said, ‘Quickly, please.’

  The bishop administered the last rites. Shivering, bent over, his faced twisted with grief, Max watched and listened. When the doctor drew the sheet over Della’s face, Murphy put his arm around Max’s shoulders and led him from the room.

  Bishop Brady joined them in the visitors’ waiting room. Past visiting hours, the three men had the room to themselves. Murphy took a flask out of his pocket and handed it to Max. ‘Take a good shot. You need it.’

  Max drank and handed back the flask.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come earlier. Max, but there I was with the President. You can’t just walk out. Still, we got here in time, poor child.’

  ‘May her soul be blessed,’ Brady said. ‘I knew her only moments, but I could see the mark of goodness and innocence upon her face. God will forgive her and receive her,’

  Max had never wept before, and he hardly realised now that tears were still sliding down his cheeks. He wondered what Della had to be forgiven for. In the six years that she had been his secretary and his mistress, he had never heard a word of anger or seen an act of petulance or hostility.

  ‘She has no family, poor child,’ Murphy said, ‘only me and my wife.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Max said. ‘Whatever the funeral costs, whatever you need.’

  Brady was watching Max with interest. ‘You must have loved the woman with all your heart,’ he said.

  I never told her that, Max thought. I never told her that I loved her. Why didn’t I tell her? He rubbed his eyes and felt the wetness of his cheeks, went into his pocket for a handkerchief and found two tickets there. He looked at them curiously, then handed them to Murphy. ‘Tomorrow night – maybe you can use them. George M. Cohan’s new show, Broadway Jones. She liked George M. Cohan.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Oh, shit! What a stupid, fucked-up, senseless world!’

  [ E I G H T ]

  Natalie Love, who had been born Alexa Vasovich twenty-three years before, stretched lazily, yawned, and smiled at Max. When she smiled like that, she reminded him of Della O’Donnell, and when anything reminded him of Della, a stab of pain went through him. There were other ways in which Alexa reminded him of Della. She had the same fair skin, blue eyes, and rounded limbs. Her hair was different, corn silk, and she was not quite as plump as Della had been, which prompted Max to remind her not to gain any more weight.

  ‘Max, I’m not fat, am I?’ She kicked off the covers and displayed her naked and very lovely figure.

  ‘Cover yourself. I don’t want you catching cold.’

  ‘Always worrying about someone catching cold.’

  ‘Never mind.’ He lit his cigar. ‘Cover yourself.’

  ‘It’s warm as toast in here.’

  ‘Never mind. Cover yourself.’

  ‘All right.’ She sighed. ‘Now what do you think my papa would have said? All them years he worked down by the docks, breaking his back for a lousy six, seven dollars a week until he killed himself under a chain that broke his back, and here’s his little Alexa, a movie star making three hundred dollars a week. And fucking Mr Max Britsky,’ she added.

  ‘Alexa, I don’t like to hear that kind of language from a lady.’

  ‘Fucking?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you say it all the time.’

  ‘For a man it’s all right. Not for a lady. I never knew about your father. What was he, a stevedore?’

  ‘What else for a Polack? The docks or the slaughterhouses. He hated the slaughterhouses.’ She stared at Max thoughtfully. ‘You like me, Max, really, truly?’

  ‘What do you think I made you a star for – for kicks? Two years ago, when we were shooting Slave Girl, I seen this kid with the yellow hair, and I ask Hook Mason who’s that pretty little kid? He tells me it’s some dumb Polack he’s hired on for three dollars a day. I don’t like that. I don’t like it when someone says dumb Polack or stupid Hunky or lousy Mick, because that same son of a bitch is going to turn around the next minute and call me a lou
sy Jew bastard, and that’s going to make me beat the shit out of him. The truth is, I’m getting too old for street fighting. So I said to Mason, one more crack like that and you can go to Philadelphia and make pictures for National. So Mason starts licking my ass and telling me he didn’t know I was interested in you.’

  ‘And you were, weren’t you, Max?’

  ‘No. Good God, Alexa, I never seen you before. Sure, I got interested. I made you a star, didn’t I? I pay you three hundred dollars a week. And I like you. What I pay you has nothing to do with me screwing you. I never went to bed in my life with a woman I didn’t care for. I got nothing but contempt for men who do that.’

  ‘I heard that Biograph pays Mary Pickford eight hundred dollars a week –’

  ‘What else did you hear?’ Max interrupted, ‘I hear the angels sing better than the chorus at the Metropolitan Opera House. You’re learning, cookie, but you ain’t no Mary Pickford. Not yet, and believe me, you’re a lot luckier to be with Britsky Productions than with Biograph. They never made a picture could compare with ours.’

  ‘Max, I’m not going with Biograph. You know that.’

  ‘I know it and my lawyer knows it.’

  Alexa began to cry.

  ‘Why are you crying? What did I say?’

  ‘Lawyers, that’s what you said. You think I’d walk out on you, so you throw lawyers right in my face.’

  ‘Honey, honey, I look at things the way they are. That’s the name of Max Britsky. People go around saying Max Britsky’s a son of a bitch. Maybe yes, maybe no. I got to look after Max Britsky because nobody else is going to. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Let me explain. For years, Vitagraph and Biograph kept the names of their actors secret so the actors shouldn’t have no handle on them to push up their pay. Mary Pickford had to squeeze blood to break through that. I never did that. I made my actors famous because the more famous they got, the more people packed into my houses to look at them. I got nine Clifford Abel theatres around this country and every one’s a palace like no king ever had a chance to live in, and I’m packing them in. All right, you’re telling me Mary Pickford makes eight hundred a week. You know I do business with the Chase Bank down at One Seventy-seven Broadway. Berry down there manages the bank, and they pay him forty a week less than I pay you. But I’ll tell you something else. Mary Pickford makes eight hundred – you got eight hundred and fifty, starts next week.’

  ‘Max –’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘Max, you don’t mean that. You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nope. I’m not kidding you. I go back to the office now and I talk to Jake Stein, my comptroller. He says to me, Max, you’re crazy. I say to him. Yeah, crazy like a fox. Then I call in Barney Enfield, and I tell Barney, We got the highest paid movie star in the United States of America No, in the world, because the French pay peanuts, and now with this schmuck war starting in Europe, even peanuts they won’t pay. So Britsky Productions has Natalie Love, who’s not only more beautiful than Pickford or Gish, and more talented and sexy, but paid more. That’s the whole emmes with Americans – more pay and you got to be better. With that kind of thing, Barney begins feeding stories to the newspapers and the magazines, and we get maybe fifty new photographs of you, and I sign Oscar Bitterman, who just has a new hit play opening on Forty-second Street, to write a scenario so that Barney can tell them that the most expensive star in America stars in the most expensive picture. So I got a couple of million dollars of publicity and maybe fifty million dollars of new business, and all it cost me is five hundred and fifty dollars a week to a young lady, and I couldn’t think of a better place to put it –’

  Alexa leaped out of bed, flung her arms around Max, and covered his face with kisses. ‘Oh, Maxie, I love you, I love you, I love you.’

  He disentangled himself and agreed. ‘For that price, why not?’

  ‘Tomorrow, Max?’

  ‘Tomorrow, honey, I’ll be sitting in a double bedroom suite, on my way to Chicago and from there to Los Angeles, and there maybe making the biggest decision of my life. Who knows?’

  He had thought about it on and off, but it only began to take shape as a real possibility when he had lunch with Irving Lunberg in Café Coronet two weeks before. Lunberg was a small producer, a man who made half a dozen moving pictures a year and who depended entirely upon Max for his distribution. He made his pictures in a place called Hollywood, a district in Los Angeles County, where he had set up a studio in an old barn on a road called Gower Street. Lunberg had been pushing during the past twelve months for Max to buy him out, a move which Max resisted. Lunberg, to Max’s way of thinking, made third-rate films, and since the man came with the company, Max had no desire to own either. On the other hand, he liked Lunberg and took him to lunch whenever he was in New York.

  On this day, it was pouring, the third day of uninhibited rainfall, and when Max mentioned that a crew working on an outdoor film had been sitting on its hands for three days, Lunberg observed that it couldn’t happen in Hollywood.

  ‘Why, it don’t rain there?’

  Lunberg was a fat, bald little man with fluttering eyelids that gave him an appearance of constant excitement. His hands shook, which added to the impression; and evidently Jewish food had not yet made its appearance in Hollywood, for he ordered a bewildering assortment of blintzes, sour cream, potato pancakes, and a pasta-buckwheat concoction known as kasha-varanashkas. On the side, he ordered bagels and cream cheese. ‘An empty stomach makes me nervous,’ he explained to Max.

  ‘I can see that. About the rain?’

  ‘Sure, it rains. It has to rain, but it rains intelligently, so you can put together a schedule of shooting that won’t drive you into the poorhouse, like this,’ he said, pointing outside.

  ‘Tell me how it does that.’

  ‘All right. From April until November, you can be pretty sure it won’t rain and it won’t cloud up. From May until October, you can be absolutely sure it won’t rain. You got sunshine like you never seen – clear, pure, beautiful light. Max, have some,’ pushing the platter of potato pancakes toward Max.

  ‘I’m not hungry. Tell me more.’

  ‘They’re not like my mama used to make.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The potato latkes.’

  ‘You were talking about Hollywood.’

  ‘Like I said, sweet air, clean, none of the soot, like you have here, hills covered with cactus and that kind of stuff, plenty of room. It’s like nobody ever been there except the oil companies, and already they found some oil in my back yard, would you believe it, right there on Gower Street. You ever read books by Zane Grey?’

  ‘I don’t read much. I know the name. My wife was talking about him.’

  ‘Oh? Yeah, sure. How is Sally?’

  ‘I guess she’s fine. We’re getting divorced, Irving.’

  ‘No. Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Let’s get back to Hollywood and this Zane Grey writer.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Well, I read a couple of his books – he writes books about the West, with lots of cowboys and gunmen, you know, the Buffalo Bill kind of stuff – and I put together a scenario. I wouldn’t say I stole it from Mr Grey, because if he sees it he’ll never recognise that it had anything to do with his book. There’s this Mexican ranch down in the southern part of Los Angeles County, and we took the cameras down there with our cowboy actor, who ain’t really a cowboy but comes from Pittsburgh, a Hunky named Frank Lutzman, except that we call him Don Durango. We shot a pretty good picture, Max, and I think you’ll like it. But also, I think there’s going to be a real craze for these cowboy pictures.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because everyone’s looking for cowboy stars.’

  ‘They didn’t have to go to Hollywood to make The Great Train Robbery.’

  ‘Max, this is different,’ Lunberg said. ‘You got space and hills and scenery like you never dreamed.’

  ‘When can we see it?�
�� Max asked him.

  ‘This afternoon. I got it with me at the hotel.’

  The Western film that Lunberg had made and which was not exactly a steal from Zane Grey was the final argument that convinced Max that Los Angeles had to be seen and seriously considered as a place to make moving pictures. The Lunberg film was not very good, but it was the first thing of its kind that Max had ever seen, the first Western film shot, not on Long Island or in the piny wastes of South Jersey, but actually in the West. The splendid, chaparral-covered mountains, the expanse of land and sky, the marvelously skilled Mexican vaqueros – all of this combined to fill Max with a strange, romantic longing as well as a sense of what good pictures made in this background could mean at the box office. As he said to Alexa, he might well be facing the most important decision of his life.

  That morning, he went from her apartment to his office in the Hobart Building, where Fred Feldman awaited him. Feldman said, ‘I got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?’

  ‘We’ll take the good news.’

  ‘Is Sam in the building?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Then call him in and Bert Bellamy as well. I want to make it in the form of an announcement. Take out the bottle of schnapps you keep in your desk. Max, and line up four glasses.’

  Max smiled as he listened to Feldman. The lawyer was even smaller than Max, which made it even easier for Max to like him. He was short and prematurely bald and fat, and he got stouter each year, and right now he was so excited that he had to restrain himself to keep from hopping and dancing. Max buzzed his secretary – a new girl, Josie Levy, in her middle twenties and needle-nosed and efficient – and asked her to find Snyder and Bellamy. When they entered Max’s office, he had finished filling four shot glasses with Golden Wedding Rye Whiskey.

  ‘Drink up,’ he said.

  ‘What are we drinking to?’

  ‘Felix Chapman.’

  ‘And who the hell is Felix Chapman?’

  ‘Nobody except a federal judge,’ Feldman said smugly. ‘Just a little old judge in the Federal District Court, Southern District of New York, who decided a case. And you know what he decided?’