by Howard Fast
Feldman gulped down his glassful, choked, swallowed, took a deep breath, and managed to say, ‘Come on now, drink up!’
‘All right, to his honor,’ Max said.
‘And since you don’t know what his honor decided, let me tell you. First of all, he decided that National is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, and one or two other laws, not to mention conspiracy to fix prices, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and conspiracy to eliminate competition, and if that ain’t a bundle, what is? My friends, the trust is finished, done, castrated. And who did it? Nobody but Max Britsky Productions.’
They all clapped hands while Max stood up and took a bow. ‘I almost feel sorry for the poor bastards,’ Max said, ‘but what the hell! They never made a good picture, and for schmucks, they had a nice long run for their money. As soon as this gets out, every little cockroach who stayed under their thumb will be asking to be let into our film exchange.’
‘And we’ll let them in,’ Bert agreed, grinning. ‘Oh, maybe we’ll make them kiss ass a little, but we shall take them in. Freddy, pour. And this time, I make the toast. Max and me, we go back a long, long way – a long, long way to a place called Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade. Right, Max?’
‘Absolutely. Poor old bastard, I suppose he’s been dead these many years.’
‘And that is where it all began,’ Bert said, ‘turning the handles on the kinetoscopes, so my toast is to old Rowdy Smith, bless his Irish heart.’
‘I drink to that,’ Max said.
‘But with all this,’ Snyder wondered, ‘do we still go to California? A few days from now, we’ll have more business than we know what to do with.’
‘All the more reason to go – except that you got to hang in here, Bert. The distribution is your baby, and you got to sit on it. If we settle on something out there in the West, you’ll have plenty of sunshine in the years to come. Mean-, while, someone has to deal with those poor, liberated producers.’
Feldman remained in Max’s office after the other two had left, and he said to Max somewhat tentatively, ‘How about it, Max? Do you realise what you’re putting in Bert’s hands?’
‘Will you once and for all get off that! What the hell gives with you and Bert? Bert is like a brother – yeah, a damn sight more than those two worthless crumbs I call my brothers.’
‘All right, all right,’ Feldman said quickly. ‘Don’t bite my nose off. I only asked a question.’
‘Then stop asking that question. Now, before you said we have good news and bad news. Suppose we get to the bad news.’
‘Sally.’
‘I thought so. Tell me what she wants.’
‘A million dollars.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I wish I were kidding, Max, but I’m not. She wants a million dollars, and she wants the house on Sixty-sixth Street.’
‘I figured on that. She can have it.’
‘She knows we’re off to the Coast, and she knows that if you go, your mother will go, and she wants the right to buy your mother’s house for five thousand dollars.’
‘It’s worth four times that, but she can have it. The million I don’t understand. She wasn’t like that. She was never that crazy for money.’
‘She is now. And she wants custody of the kids and she wants alimony of twenty thousand a year.’
‘On top of the million dollars?’
‘That’s right, Max.’
‘That’s crazy. I don’t have a million dollars. You know that, Freddy. I don’t have a damn thing. Jake Stein pays my bills, and each month he gives me the cash left over from my pay, you know, seven or eight hundred bucks. I don’t even have a bank account.’
‘Max!’
‘What’s the matter? You think I’m conning you. You’re my lawyer.’
‘Max, who owns Britsky Productions?’
‘Me. Who else?’
‘Exactly. And Max Britsky Productions is the biggest theatre owner and the biggest moving picture production company not only in America but in the whole world right at this minute – that’s right, bigger than Biograph or any of the others – and do you know how many millions of dollars that adds up to?’
‘So what? Do I sell my company?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Then you’re out of your fucken mind!’ Max exploded.
‘Will you listen?’
‘If you got something to say, I’ll listen. But don’t tell me maybe I’ll sell this company, because if that’s the way you’re thinking, you can get to hell out of here.’
‘Will you calm down and listen to me? I been working for you twelve years and I haven’t sold you out yet, so maybe you can accept the fact that I got a little loyalty and I try to do what is in your best interest. But sometimes I wonder whether you really know what Max Britsky Productions represents, because you still run it like that candy store on Clinton Street where you hung out when you were a kid.’
‘That’s bullshit, Freddy. There’s nobody knows this company like I do. It’s my life.’
‘Yeah, you know it and you don’t know it. Just let me run down what you got. There are nine large moving picture theatres that we built and own outright. There are seven hundred and twenty-one others that we either own or lease. We own this building, the Hobart Building. We got three studios, the ice house downtown, the studio in Harlem, and the studio we bought last year in Fort Lee. Right now, we have four pictures shooting, and the past twelve months, we turned out thirty-one features and God knows how many short subjects. There are more than three thousand people on the payroll, and trying to get some kind of a figure together with Jake on what we’re worth – you know, it’s got to be better than seven or eight million in pure equity, leaving out mortgages, and maybe a hell of a lot better than that.’
‘I still don’t have any million dollars to pay off Sally. What do we have in cash right now?’
‘About a hundred and sixty thousand. But I’m not thinking that way, Max. What I’m thinking is what Alvin Berry down at the Chase Bank has been talking about. We should put out a stock issue and turn this into a public corporation.’
‘No! Goddamn it, no! I built this company. I’m not going to give it away.’
‘You’re not giving it away. Whatever happens, you retain fifty-one percent of the stock, so you have control. You own it. And we can pay off Sally with five percent of the stock, which will be worth a damn sight more than a million in a very short time, if not now. Berry had his economist put together a graph on our earnings. We have been doubling them every two years and tripling our net worth. There’s never been anything like this, Max, and all the big boys, the old school, high-powered goyim, the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the Lamonts and the Carnegies, are eating their hearts out. With all their banks and steel mills and oil wells, they’ve never seen the kind of a money machine the moving picture business is, and they thought they could move in with the trust and eat us up, and now they found they can’t and they, never will. But this isn’t something you can continue to keep in your back pocket.’
‘I can’t figure Sally. She ain’t that kind of a person. Ain’t – you hear me, ain’t. Last time we spoke, she says to me, “Max, your language is rotten, and you forgot everything I ever taught you, and you forgot because bad English is your weapon against me,” and she’s right. She is absolutely right. She’s the smartest dame I ever knew, but not money crazy. She never was money crazy.’
‘Well, she’s insecure and she’s frightened, but believe me. Max, if this comes to a dirty court fight, she can take you for a lot more than a million. I don’t want that to happen. And let me tell you something else. You got people like Sam Snyder and Bert Bellamy, not to mention myself, and we been with you for years, and there’s nothing in the world means as much to us as this business, I mean outside of family –’
‘What the hell is it?’ Max demanded. ‘Don’t I pay enough? Sam Snyder makes forty thousand a year. There’s no other business in this country pays a
n executive that kind of money, and you know it. And you –’
‘Max, Max, I’m not saying we’re underpaid, but we got wives and kids. You own Britsky. I get a heart attack and drop dead, my wife’s got nothing. I never thought it would come down to my saying it, but we deserve a part of this business. Are you going to deny that we do?’
‘Does Sam Snyder feel like you do? And what about Bert? Does he feel I been giving him the short end of the stick?’
‘Sam wouldn’t say so if it meant his life, but you know the way Sam Snyder feels about you. He thinks you’re the greatest guy on earth. And where the hell would we be if it hadn’t been for Sam? As far as Bert is concerned, I can’t say, but I think maybe he does feel that way.’
‘You figure you can talk to me like that and get away with it, right, Freddy?’
‘What are you going to do, fire me? Go ahead! You know damn well I can do better on the outside with my own practice than with what you pay. Nobody else talks to you. It’s about time someone did.’
‘Take it easy. Don’t get sore.’
‘No? Maybe it’s time I got sore. If you had hired one of those big downtown goyisha firms to fight this trust case, it would have cost you half a million, but I did it on salary with two law clerk kids helping me and working eighteen hours a day and Leah and the kids not seeing me for weeks at a time, and you screwing your head off with every piece of ass we cast in a picture –’
‘Shut up! You hear me, shut up! Who the fuck do you think you are to talk to me like that?’
‘I’ll tell you who. Your ex-lawyer!’
Feldman swung around to stride out of the room, but Max bounded from behind his desk and caught Feldman before he reached the door. He grabbed Feldman’s arm and swung him around, and when Feldman snorted, ‘Let go of me!’ Max replied, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, where are you going? You’re like a brother to me. You think you’re going to walk out on me? Like hell you are – if I got to beat the shit out of you to keep you here.’ He embraced the fat little man in a bear hug that made Feldman wince with pain. When Max let go of him, Feldman burst out laughing and Max joined in.
‘All right, all right,’ Max said. ‘Sit down and we’ll talk. But just let me tell you something, Freddy. In all the years I had something going with Della, I never touched another woman. Now I got what they call a biological need and that’s all. Is Sally going to let me see the kids?’
‘Sure, we can arrange that. But with Sally living here, if you settle out on the West Coast – Well, it’s a long train ride.’
‘I don’t know. The kids are like strangers anyway. I don’t know why, except that it was never real living with Sally in that brownstone. Well, I’ll manage.’
Feldman shook his head uneasily. ‘I got to talk to you about Ruby and Benny, and I hate to.’
‘Why? You talk to me about everything else. You even tell me what a bastard I am. Look, do it – and if Sally will settle for five percent of the stock, give it to her, and take the same thing for you and Sam and Bert. Now what about Ruby and Benny?’
‘I told you before, Max, and I hate to go through it again. They’re stealing from you.’
‘What can they steal? Peanuts. They skim a little and it makes them feel like big men. The hell with it! What does Jake Stein think?’
‘I told him to check it out. He says it’s nothing to worry about. He says he knows about it, and he does a little fancy bookkeeping to cover it. Sometimes I feel he does a little fancy bookkeeping on his own.’
‘All right. If it begins to hurt, I’ll read them a riot act. I’d throw them out, but it would break Mama’s heart.’
The thought of leaving New York City for a fuzzy destination somewhere out west was not an easy one for Max to deal with. He had never been to California, and if he thought about it at all, he thought of it as a bleak and inhospitable desert. New York City, on the other hand, was more than a geographical place; it was his roots, his origin, his language, his security.
Like Max, the city was flexing its muscle, expanding and living with boundless energy. In the Woolworth Building, it had just raised up the tallest manmade structure in the world. Its new, expanding subway gave you the longest, cheapest ride in the nation for five cents, and its great bridges had taken their place as one of the wonders of the world. Max had never felt diminished by the city; it was his place, his world, and elsewhere was so vague as to be practically nonexistent. Elsewhere, a war was being fought and millions of men were in motion, killing, destroying, ravishing. Far more important, in Max’s world, was the emergence of a young man named Charlie Chaplin, who had just finished a film called Making a Living, in which he was supported by an interesting actress named Marie Dressier. But elsewhere was also California, and standing in Grand Central Station, still brand new, its great arched expanse making it without a doubt one of the most grandiose railroad stations in the world. Max felt a shiver of fear, a sense that perhaps the glory was behind him and over. Not that he shaped his thoughts in such terms, but he was sensitive enough to know that things have a beginning and an end, and California was too vague, too uncertain, to add up to a valid continuation. Sam Snyder had come back from checking through their bags, and he joined Max and Fred Feldman.
‘All set,’ he told Max. ‘We got only ten minutes before train time, so we might as well get on.’
‘Cheer up,’ Feldman said to Max. ‘I always wanted to go to California. You know, we might enjoy it.’
‘Hollywood,’ Max muttered. ‘What in hell kind of a name is that?’
‘It’s a town, Max. It doesn’t have to be Hollywood. There’s plenty of room to put down a studio, from what I hear.’
Sitting in their compartment, the train plunging north along the eastern bank of the Hudson River, Max began to mutter again, and finally, almost angrily, he announced that he was going into the club car to smoke a cigar and that he would see them for dinner.
‘Freddy, what’s gotten into him?’ Sam Snyder asked after Max had left.
‘It’s been getting into him for a long time. Since Della died.’
‘That’s over a year now.’
‘I guess it’s not a question of time. Something happened to him. And the women – it’s like a drug. He has to screw every good-looking dame who works for us. I worry about that, because sooner or later we’re going to get a big, fat paternity suit.’
‘Funny thing is,’ Snyder said, ‘that he never looked at another woman, including Sally, while Della was alive. It must have been five or six years then. He used to bring Della to dinner at our house, and he was just as relaxed and happy as any man you ever saw. Not that we ever did anything special. My Alice is a great cook. I got to admit that. She does the best German food on this side of the ocean – good, heavy stuff, which is why I got this belly of mine. We’d just sit and eat and drink beer, and then Della and Alice would go into the parlor and Max and I would sit at the table and smoke a cigar and talk about the business. Mostly the technical side. I guess. I remember when I was working on some substitute for those damn mercury vapor tubes we had to use for lighting. They made everyone look sick. We had to paint the faces – what was I saying, Freddy?’
‘About Max coming to your house.’
‘It got to be a regular thing. Every Wednesday night. You know, the kids were crazy about him. He used to bring them presents until Alice had to beg him to stop because he was spoiling them, and he’d get down on the floor and play with them, but from all I hear, he could never get close to his own kids.’
‘That’s right. He says they’re like strangers to him.’
‘I don’t know, unless Sally has been feeding them stuff about Max.’
‘I don’t think Sally would do that,’ Feldman said.
‘Maybe not. But she knew what was going on and a couple of times when she had some excuse to pin him down, she called our house. Maybe she hired a detective to follow him, but she knew.’
‘Why didn’t he divorce her and marry Della? She’s di
vorcing him now. Why didn’t he do it while Della was still alive?’
‘Didn’t you know? First place, Della was married. She was a Catholic, so she couldn’t get a divorce from the bum she was married to. You know, I was talking to Steve Maguire a couple of years ago, I think it was about six months before Della died, and Steve said that Boss Murphy had enough influence in the Vatican to have Della’s marriage annulled, and that it would only cost two thousand dollars. But when I told Max about it, he said it was no use and that he just couldn’t face his mother if he left Sally to marry Della.’
‘That one – My God, people are strange. Well, he’s doing it now.’
‘Not him. Sally’s doing it.’
While this went on in Max’s suite. Max was in the club car, where he had selected an excellent twenty-five-cent Cuban cigar and ordered a rye highball. A dollar tip had engraved his name with the porter, and when the man handed him his highball and said, ‘Just tell me if you need anything else, Mr Britsky,’ a woman sitting facing Max regarded him with interest. Max had noticed her and guessed that she was either a buyer or someone in show business, since single women traveling first class who were not in those professions usually avoided the club cars. The woman was in her early forties, attractively but quietly dressed, and with less makeup than one would expect from someone in show business. She had even features, dark eyes and hair, and a good figure – attractive but hardly beautiful. After a few minutes of observation, the woman glanced around the car. It was not crowded, and the half-dozen men in the car were not watching her or Max, a lack of attention she evidently welcomed. She’s coming over here. Max thought, and she’s not used to this kind of thing. Then she rose and stepped across to the chair next to him and said without apology. ‘I heard your name, Mr Britsky, and I only saw that name in one other place, so even if this is most unwomanly – well. It’s such an unusual name. At least you must be his cousin.’
