by Howard Fast
‘Oh, no!’ she shouted. ‘No! Love? You can’t love anything except your wretched moving pictures – and you wouldn’t have those if I hadn’t shown you how to make them. I’ll tell you what happened. You beat me down. You forced me to marry you – dirty little Max Britsky from Henry Street, who lived like an animal with his family of animals – and I threw away my life and now I have nothing. Nothing.’
He left, and he didn’t get to see his children after all, and when he had dinner that evening with Fred Feldman, the session with Sally became something that he could not deal with at all.
‘You did see her?’ Feldman asked.
‘Oh, yeah. I saw her.’
‘Did she raise the question of the children’s stock?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did it go, I mean the meeting?’
‘OK.’
‘She was friendly?’
‘Well, not exactly friendly.’
‘Oh?’ Feldman shook his head. ‘That’s too bad. I was hoping the two of you might hit it off, at least for an hour or so.’
‘Freddy, are you crazy?’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. I tried to convince her that one five-percent piece of the stock would be worth about five million in a year or two.’
‘Did she believe you?’
‘I don’t think so. But I did get her agreement to put the kids’ stock – providing you agree – into an irrevocable trust, with the voting right retained by you until the kids are thirty. And that’s not such a bad idea, Max. You know, you’re still a young man, and you could marry again and have more children, and well, well, this protects Sally and her kids.’
‘Do I look like a schmuck who puts his hand in the gearbox twice?’
‘Well, that’s up to you. But we got to work out something about the kids, visitation rights. If you’re living in Los Angeles and Sally remains here, well, it won’t be easy.’
‘I hardly know the kids. They’re like strangers to me. I don’t even know what I feel for them, and they look at me funny.’
‘What do you mean, funny?’
‘Like I’m some kind of animal, I don’t know. I guess Sally tells them things about me. I tried to kiss Marion last time I saw her. She pulled away. God knows what kind of an animal those kids think I am!’
‘Max, you have legal rights.’
‘I got no rights, Freddy. None. What do I do, tell the kids I’m not a murderer and that it’s legal for them to believe it? Ah, the hell with it. Give her whatever she wants and get it over with.’
If Max had possessed the word ‘quintessential’ in his vocabulary, he would have termed Clifford Abel the quintessential goy. Where Max was short, Abel was six feet and two inches; where Max was dark, Abel had a shock of blond hair and pale skin; and where Max was tightly knit, Abel had a big-boned and fleshless frame. Only their eyes were alike, bright blue, and kindred dreams united them. Abel loved Max. In his mind, Abel clothed Max in a high jeweled turban and silken robes, one who came out of the East, with many beasts of burden carrying fragrant spices, wondrous bales of cloth, and priceless jewels.
Max, on the other hand, thought of Abel in some such terms as the duke of Milan had once considered Leonardo. In terms of business – buying and selling and pricing – Clifford Abel was witless, and it fell to Max to set his wages and fees. But as an artist, Max had supreme confidence in him, assuring him that once his building projects were over, he and no one else would be the art director of the Britsky studio, instead of the young Yale and Carnegie Institute graduates that Max hired and fired and cursed out endlessly.
Clifford Abel understood Max. When Max brought him out to Southern California to look at the three-hundred-acre tract of land in the San Fernando Valley, Abel licked his lips in delight. Where there were only orange trees and pecan trees and weeds, Max said, ‘Right here, the gates. Large enough. Twelve feet wide.’
‘Twenty feet wide,’ Abel said.
‘Wood?’
‘Cast iron,’ Abel said.
‘Absolutely. Maybe seven feet high?’
‘Ten feet high.’
‘And on top, the name,’ Max said.
‘Polished cast brass letters.’
They understood each other. Given his own preference, Abel would have called the studio Xanadu, but Max, leading the way for those more timid than he, Lasky and Zukor and Laemmle and Warner and Mayer, would have none of the ambiguous. The studio would be called the Max Britsky Studio. There was a barn behind the cottage where Max took up his California residence, and with a few renovations and the introduction of electricity, Clifford Abel turned the barn into his studio. He hired two bright young draftsmen from San Francisco, and he sat with Max for hours, poring over the drawings. Max wanted a fifteen-foot-high brick wall to surround the entire three hundred acres; but Abel convinced him that even the wealth generated by Britsky Productions could not easily afford six or seven miles of masonry wall. Prices had changed since the time of Kubla Khan, and they compromised with the inclusion of about twelve acres with the wall and the rest with a nine-foot-high chain-link fence. New York had demonstrated to Max the kind of spectator insanity that surrounded the making of moving pictures, and while by his lights the San Fernando Valley was still an undiscovered wilderness or Garden of Eden – depending upon how one regarded it – he was all too aware of the speed with which cities grew and changed. There would be two large gates into the studio, each well guarded, and inside Abel would construct six stages, each with five thousand square feet of floor space, each capable of holding four good-sized sets. In addition, Max suggested a city street, and Abel felt that it might well be done in the Potemkin manner.
‘Which means what?’ Max demanded.
‘Well, this Potemkin was a sort of administrator for Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia at that time, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and. I suppose he wanted her to feel that she ruled over something a bit better than the real thing. So when she traveled, he had pretty little villages constructed along her route, but since it would have been too expensive to build the real thing, he only built the fronts – sort of outdoor sets.’
‘Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.’
‘We might have a, little country village too –’
‘Yeah, but if you do that, Cliff, make the houses real. We start bringing out actors and technicians, and where do we put them?’
‘Do you know what it’s going to cost you, Max?’
‘Don’t worry about money. Freddy’s turning us into a public corporation, and we’ll have more money than we know what to do with. Anyway, the banks are breaking down the door wanting to lend me money. With this crazy war going on in Europe, we got the kind of prosperity nobody ever dreamed about. So you just build, and let me worry about paying for it.’
By the spring of 1915, Clifford Abel’s plans had evolved sufficiently for him to receive bids from the contractors, and by the beginning of May of that year, ground was broken for the Max Britsky Studio.
[ N I N E ]
There were some facets of a changing world that Max observed and were of great importance to him, and there were other things that he dismissed. The Great War in Europe was a madness beyond his comprehension, and the fact that his youngest brother, Benny, had enlisted once America joined the Allies and was actually shipped over to France did not serve to upgrade his opinion of either Benny or the war. And since Benny returned from Europe unwounded and more intolerable than ever, Max gave no points to the benefits of army life.
It was easier to block out the war as a piece of lunacy totally apart from him than it was to escape the local insanity called Prohibition. Yet unlike war, the Volstead Act could be tempered by money, and a few financial adjustments renewed the studio’s access to the best imported liquor.
In the area of wardrobe, Max eschewed the changes. A Southern California style of dress was coming into being – the Hollywood style, as it was called – but Max never accepted the validity of sport cloth
es. And with reason.
He possessed no personal historical antecedents for either sport clothes or leisure clothes. His first purchase of a suit that did not come from a ragpicker’s bundle or from a sidewalk dealer of secondhand clothes had been a three-piece outfit of blue serge. He had paid four dollars for it at Barney Schlochter’s Haberdashery on Canal Street. His most recent acquisition of blue serge had been made to order by Mort Singleton, whose tailoring shop on Vine Street in Hollywood was the most exclusive in Los Angeles, and the price had been a hundred and ninety-five dollars. Aside from the fact that both the cloth and the fit were better, it was not very different from Max’s first suit. Max was not terribly interested in clothes. He owned two dozen suits, but they were all of either blue serge or dark gray worsted, and he wore them with black shoes, white shirts, and ties whose diagonal stripes were always of various shades of blue and gray. He also wore Homburg hats. He had purchased his first Homburg in imitation of Boss Murphy, and since then he had seen no reason to change to any other kind of headgear.
Whereupon this day in 1923, walking slowly along the sidewalk that paralleled Santa Monica Beach, he was dressed in a blue serge vested suit and he wore a Homburg. It was about half-past five in the afternoon, and he had driven from the studio to the point where Sunset Boulevard embarks on the Pacific Ocean, and then he had parked his car and begun his slow, lonely walk along the beach. He liked this part of the beach better than the section to the south, where his contemporary tycoons were building their great beach houses. Here it was still untouched and unspoiled. Max had no lust for a monumental personal home, for the strange castles his colleagues had built on Sunset Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, and on the beach. He had built a large and substantial house for his mother, Freida, and himself; but he rarely slept there. He preferred the small cottage on the studio property.
Clifford Abel had remodeled the cottage to Max’s specifications, and he had decorated it to his own taste. The bottom floor contained Max’s office, a receptionist’s desk at the entrance, and a small office for Max’s secretary. Since the cottage was a sort of modified Spanish Colonial stucco building, Abel had decided to do it in a simple, almost severe Spanish Colonial style: the floors tiled, the walls white, the furniture ordered in Guadalajara from friends of Abel’s who operated a small furniture factory there. There were three baths in the building, and on the second floor, two rather large bedrooms. Max loved the building. In a way, it was his first real home, the first place that was entirely his, to his taste and not shared by another. He had thought of dividing the second bedroom in half so that his children might use it if and when they visited him, but then he decided that a studio lot was hardly a place for them. But they came only once and stayed in his mother’s house, and they hated it, playing the role of two surly, silent kids, hating their grandmother, their Aunt Freida, and perhaps Max as well. It was no use for Freida to whisper to Max that Sally had poisoned them against the family; Max suffered as he had never suffered over anything before. Marion was twelve and Richard was almost fourteen when they came to spend two summer months with their father. They were beautiful, healthy, blue-eyed children, and they made Max more miserable than he had ever been before in all his life. They were bright kids, and they mimicked Max’s English, his ghetto inability to pronounce a t or an ng properly, his use of ‘ain’t,’ his misuse of pronouns; but it was done subtly, as were their other hostilities, without ever creating a situation that Max could pick up on. Not that he had any desire to confront them or discipline them. For all Max’s comprehension of them, these two children might have come from another planet. Sally had been sending them, for the past three years, to an exclusive private school on New York’s Upper East Side.
After two painful weeks in the house in Beverly Hills, which included an unpleasant scene with their grandmother, the two children decided that they wished to return to New York. Max did not protest, but called Sally, made the arrangements, and sent the children back along with a treasure trove of expensive presents. The following year, Sally informed Max that the children were protesting the visitation, whereupon he relinquished it without argument. So the problem of an extra bedroom in his studio cottage never had to be faced.
Other things had to be faced, and one of his necessities in facing other things was to be with himself. He would have said, if anyone had asked him why and if he had been capable of articulating the answer, that all his life had become a dream and the only way he could awaken, at least for a moment or two, was to be alone, preferably by the sea. There, with the soft, cool wind blowing in from the water, he could achieve a kind of sanity. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his black Homburg tilted back, his head thrust forward, a small, forlorn figure meticulously dressed.
Tonight, as he walked, Max became conscious of being followed. The person following him kept about forty feet behind him. When Max walked, the person, the shadow, walked, when Max stopped, the shadow stopped, and when finally Max stopped, turned around, and faced this person following him, the person following stopped as well, and the two of them stood there in the early twilight, confronting each other.
The person following him was a girl of about twenty years. She had straight blond hair cut in a bob, large blue eyes, and a wide, pretty face. She was quite thin, wearing a plain blue cotton dress and sandals, and she stood her ground with a sort of pathetic defiance; she was like enough to a thousand other girls Max saw each day in the streets of Los Angeles to be their sister.
Max walked up to her. She stood her ground.
‘Following a strange man can get a girl like you into a lot of trouble,’ Max said.
‘You’re not a strange man.’
‘Oh? We’ve been introduced?’
‘No.’
‘So how is it I’m not a strange man?’ Max asked her.
‘You’re Max Britsky – or I think you are. Are you?’
‘Is that why you’re following me? Because I’m Max Britsky?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you figure you follow Max Britsky, maybe you can meet him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then you ask him for a job.’
‘It ain’t just asking you for a job, Mr Britsky. You are Mr Britsky?’ with just a shadow of a doubt in her voice.
‘Maybe it’s somebody looks like me.’
‘Nobody looks like you, Mr Britsky.’
‘Nice, nice. That’s the way to make friends.’
‘Oh, no,’ she begged him. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t mean it that way at all. You’re a very nice-looking man, Mr Britsky. It’s just the way you dress, with that funny hat. I seen it in pictures. Nobody else out here wears a funny hat like yours. I don’t mean a funny hat, I mean –’
‘Take it easy,’ Max said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Are you Mr Britsky?’ she asked pleadingly.
‘Yes. You want two hats like this in one place?’
‘I’m an actress.’
‘Like I didn’t know,’ Max said. ‘I’m surprised, honey. Like I didn’t know that every kid with blond hair and blue eyes who wins a high school beauty contest, or maybe they just tell her she’s beautiful, and off she goes to Hollywood like ten thousand other kids, so it’s a big surprise to me you’re an actress. My advice is, stop being an actress and go home.’ Delivered of that, Max turned to continue his walk. ‘And don’t follow me. It makes me nervous.’
‘Please.’ She plucked at his sleeve, then tightened her grip on it. ‘Please, Mr Britsky.’
‘Please what?’ Max demanded, pulling away.
‘Anything you want, Mr Britsky. I’ll go to bed with you. I’ll do anything you want me to do. Anything.’
Max turned and stared at her curiously. ‘Anything?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘For what?’
‘To give me a part – any part. I must. I can’t go on like this. Please –’ She began to cry.
‘Oh, God,’ Max said. ‘I hate to see a woman cr
y. Maybe I’m not Max Britsky after all. I’m not too sure myself.’
‘You’re making fun of me.’
Max gave her his handkerchief and said, ‘Come on, dry your eyes and stop the crying. What’s your name?’
‘Gertrude. Gertrude Meyerson.’ She dried her eyes and handed the handkerchief back to Max.
‘Where are you from, Gertrude?’
‘Milwaukee.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Yeah. Well, now you tell me where you live, and I got my car here and I’ll take you home, and don’t go stopping people on the street and telling them you’ll go to bed with them. Maybe it’s not Max Britsky. Maybe it’s someone who’ll cut your pretty little throat for that gold chain you got around your neck.’
‘It ain’t gold. It’s just imitation.’
‘Mazeltov! It ain’t gold.’
‘And you can’t take me home.’
‘Why?’
‘I ain’t got a home. I had a job waiting tables and I lost it because I wouldn’t go to bed with the ape who owned the place, and then my landlady threw me out. I spent last night on the beach. I got my bag there on the beach.’
‘So him you won’t go to bed with, but with Max Britsky –’
‘I’m an actress.’
‘So, for a part, it’s different?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I suppose you think I never got such an interesting offer before?’
She stared at him for a long moment, then she pressed her palms against her cheeks and closed her eyes. For a few seconds she stood like that; then her hands dropped and she turned and began to walk away. She had taken a dozen steps when Max called after her, ‘Gertrude!’
She paused and turned.
‘Gertrude,’ Max said, ‘go get your bag from the beach.’ She approached Max as if she were walking on glass. ‘I’m going to take you to dinner, and after dinner, I’ll give you a card that’ll let you in to see the casting director, Britsky Studio, and maybe he’ll hire you for something and maybe he won’t, and for this I should have my head examined. Also, I don’t go to bed with little girls who follow me on the beach. That’s your first lesson, you want to stay around Max Britsky.’
