by Howard Fast
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, I’m not kidding.’
‘You’ll wait here?’
‘Absolutely.’
Her face changed and her body changed, as if a bottle of youth had been poured into her, and she raced down the beach, looking backward every few steps to see whether Max was still there. Her bag was an old AEF knapsack, and she plucked it from the sand and raced back to Max.
‘That’s it?’ Max asked her. ‘All your worldly possessions?’
‘That’s it.’
‘And suppose you don’t see me to follow, and suppose my head ain’t like a bowl of oatmeal tonight, what then?’
‘I don’t know. Something comes up. Someone pays me five bucks to go to bed with them if I’m lucky.’
‘You done that before?’
‘Once or twice. Sure, I could lie to you. What would you do if you were that hungry, Mr Britsky?’
‘Same thing.’
‘You still going to buy me dinner?’
‘Think I should dump you because you got laid for a few bucks? My goodness, Gertrude, I would have to dump maybe seventy-five percent of the ladies I know, and that’s a low percentage. At least you were hungry.’
They reached the car, a long, sleek, open-top Packard twin six, painted silver and black. Gertrude stared at the car in silent admiration.
‘Throw your bag in back.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It cost beautiful. Time was, I could have lived five years on what that piece of tin cost me. Get in.’
They had turned away from the beach, the Packard groaning in low gear as it climbed Sunset Boulevard up to Pacific Palisades, when she asked him where they were going to eat. ‘I keep thinking about it. I guess that’s because I’m so hungry.’
‘How hungry? If you’re actually starving, we can stop and get you a sandwich. Otherwise, you can wait and we’ll have dinner with a king. Come to think of it, that won’t be until maybe nine o’clock tonight. So maybe we’ll have a sandwich.’
Max parked alongside a small stand in Pacific Palisades, where a sign advertised FIRST-RATE NACHOS AND TACOS. ‘These are the best, north of the border. Believe me.’ The proprietor, a small man who walked with a limp, greeted Max enthusiastically.
‘Glad to see you, Mr Britsky. Long time. How are you feeling?’
‘Bueno, bueno, can’t complain, Pedro. This here’s Gertrude. She’s hungry, so make her a couple of fat nochos. Beer. You like beer, kid?’ he asked Gertrude.
‘Sure.’
‘Best Mexican beer there is, which is maybe the best in the world, I’ll have a beer, too, Pedro.’
Max put down a ten-dollar bill when the food came and told Pedro to keep the change. Gertrude wolfed down the two nachos and accepted a third.
‘They want to move me out, Mr Britsky,’ Pedro said.
‘What?’
‘They got a chamber of commerce now. Pacific Palisades is becoming a classy place. A little while ago, it wasn’t even here, but now they don’t want no cheap Mexican hotdog stands lousing up the scenery.’
‘You need a lawyer, give me a call, Pedro. I’ll put Freddy on it.’
Back in the car, she asked him, ‘You eat there a lot, Mr Britsky? A place like that?’
‘The food’s good, ain’t it?’
‘Sure, but you’re Max Britsky.’
‘Whatever he is now, girlie, little Pedro Sanchez, he used to be my vaquero foreman. In case you don’t know, vaquero is the Mexican word for cowboy, only they’re a damn sight better than cowboys. When we make a cowboy picture, we use them, and Pedro used to recruit them for me and then boss them until he took a bad fall with his horse and broke a hip. I put him into that stand because he can’t ride no more, and I tell you this, kid, you ate better there than you’ll eat with the king tonight.’
‘What king? You mean a real king?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope. This is the real thing, just like the Cinderella stories I turn out in my dream factory. One minute you’re on your ass on Santa Monica Beach, and the next you got a belly full of nachos and you’re on your way to have dinner with King Alfonso the Thirteenth. How about that, kid, thirteen Alfonsos, and this one, number thirteen, he’s king of Spain.’
‘You’re kidding, Mr Britsky. I’m not that dumb.’
‘Who is? On the other hand, I’m not even exactly sure where Spain is. It connects with France, right?’
‘I think so.’
‘You graduated high school, Gertrude?’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Funny thing, I can give you a rundown of the Spanish market. We do business with a Dom Francisco Sergova. He’s got thirty-three theatres, or whatever goes for theatres in Spain, and if Jake Stein was here, he could tell you what the theatres grossed last year. But that’s all I know about Spain except that they laid it heavy on Mexico until Mexico threw them out.’
Puzzled, Gertrude asked Max whether he was taking her home.
‘I’m taking you to dinner, kid. That’s our arrangement. We’re going to Pickfair, which is the classy home of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks over in Beverly Hills. I’m invited there tonight to meet Alfonso, the king of Spain. I couldn’t care less, except when you turned up on the beach, I decided to exercise what Clifford Abel calls my Haroun El Rashid complex and to bring you along.’
‘I don’t understand anything you’re saying, Mr Britsky. You said you were going to get me into the studio to see the casting director.’
‘That’s a promise.’
‘You’re not taking me to Mary Pickford’s house?’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, no! No. It’s a joke.’
‘Yeah, I agree with you. It’s a kind of Jewish joke, but that’s where we’re going, to have dinner with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and King Alfonso of Spain, who kicked us all out of there in fourteen ninety-two – did you know that? – and now he’s here, and he doesn’t mind if the industry’s practically all Jewish. He’s a very liberal character, this king, especially when it comes to eating in classy places like Pickfair, and he don’t even mind if maybe Fairbanks is Jewish, which I’ve heard said, but for myself I never asked him.’
‘Mr Britsky,’ Gertrude wailed, ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but you can’t take me to Douglas Fairbanks’ house the way I’m dressed. Just look at me!’
‘You look pretty good.’
‘This is my only dress.’
‘Nobody’s going to ask you for the others.’
‘I’m wearing sandals.’
‘They’ll think it’s very stylish. Believe me, darling, the people you’ll find where we’re going are too stupid to know what’s stylish and what isn’t, and that includes the king, believe me, and even if you come in a paper bag, they got to kiss Max Britsky’s ass.’ He glanced at her. ‘You’re better looking than most of them. Right away, they’ll make you a discovery. Max Britsky’s new discovery. Goldwyn and Mayer and Lasky, they’ll hear about it before they go to sleep tonight, and they got to believe that if you’re, my discovery, you ought to be their discovery, and maybe you won’t turn up at Britsky Studio tomorrow. Maybe you’ll have a real offer, because the world I live in is a sort of lunatic asylum. Also, about the way you’re dressed, it don’t matter. I have seen Tom Mix turn up stinking of manure with three days’ beard, and I’ve seen girls there with practically nothing on, so what does it matter?’
As they turned north from Sunset Boulevard into Benedict Canyon, Gertrude’s pleading simmered down to a final whisper, ‘Please let me out, Mr Britsky.’
‘You’re ready for any kind of unnatural act with Britsky, but Mary Pickford is scary. Why not? You been out here how long?’
‘Two years.’
‘All right.’ He stopped the car. ‘You want to get into this lunacy, you come with me. You want to get out, all right. But for God’s sake, go back to Milwaukee.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’ll go with you,’ she whispered.
‘Good.’ He started the car. ‘I’m not taking you to any drunken brawl. It won’t be a Fatty Arbuckle party. They don’t have orgies at Pickfair. Actually, they don’t serve liquor, not even wine. The worse can happen, Fairbanks, he gets down under the table and bites the ankle of some of the ladies.’
‘You’re kidding.’
There was a police car flashing its lights at the junction of Benedict Canyon and Summit Drive, and two private guards with rifles blocked the narrow dirt road that led up the hill to Pickfair, the home of America’s sweetheart and America’s super-athlete star. One of the guards peered into the car, and then waved him ahead. ‘They’ll park it for you at the top of the road, Mr Britsky.’
‘So now you got my name confirmed,’ he said to Gertrude as he drove up the narrow dirt road. ‘This place up here, it used to be a kind of a hunting lodge, when you went hunting in Beverly Hills, and now it’s an institution to put money into. If it wasn’t for Pickfair, what would they do with their money? A few years ago, Mary Pickford was making twenty-five dollars a week at Biograph in New York. Nobody knew her name. They used to call her the kid with the curls. Fairbanks used to be a guy, name of Ullman, a stage actor and pretty awful. He’s better when you don’t hear him talk. Both of them teamed up with Zukor, and now they gross better than two million a year between them. Don’t agonise. In a year or two maybe you’ll do as well or maybe you’ll be back in Milwaukee. I had a girl, Alexa Vasovich, who I named Natalie Love. She could have been the greatest of them all, but she was crazy for chocolate creams. She gained fifty pounds, poor kid.’
Running off at the mouth, Max thought as he parked the car. You pick up some poor kid at the beach, and you have to impress her with all you know about the business. She’ll do anything – degrade herself, humiliate herself, and probably let herself be whipped, or put out for hire, or any other variety of sickness or viciousness or brutality – only give her a part in a movie, any part. My God, he had to ask himself, what happened? Did I make this? That’s giving myself too much credit, too much credit.
He parked the car, guided by the flashing lights of the red-jacketed attendants. ‘Gladys Smith,’ he said as he helped Gertrude out of the car.
‘What’s that?’
‘Mary Pickford’s name. We can’t leave you Gertrude Meyerson.’
They were being guided and greeted into the house. Gertrude was staring at the golden curls of America’s sweetheart. Fairbanks embraced Max. ‘Max, Max, it’s always a pleasre to welcome you here. And who is this enchanting creature?’ He greeted Gertrude and kissed her. If Mary Pickford noticed the dirt on Gertrude’s feet in the worn sandals and asked herself who was this slut in the three-dollar dress Max Britsky picked up somewhere and brought to her house, inserting her among the silks and minks and sables, a skinny little blond kid shivering in blue cotton – if indeed she thought that, she gave no sign of it. She was glazed and animated at the same time. The dark little man who was Alfonso, king of Spain, descendant of the grandees and the conquerors – Cortes and Pizarro and Ferdinand and Isabella and Torquemada – then appeared, honored to be invited to a renovated hunting lodge in a city that had not existed ten years before. He bowed back to those who bowed before him, mumbling his delight. He was honored to be introduced to another small man whose name was Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin, ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ the king said in very broken English, ‘I see your picture.’ He returned to Spanish to say that he had seen The Kid. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! Such is the accolade of royalty. Tom Mix towered over the little king. Hoot Gibson stood next to Tom Mix, and as a backdrop to these two large, masculine ranch hands, the sparkling colored lights of Pickfair illuminated the smooth lawns arid the splendid semitropical plantings. Did the little king recall that once all of California had belonged to his ancestors? Max said to him in Spanish, ‘This is Tom Mix and this is Hoot Gibson. They are the famous Western actors. En español, vaquero. Comprende usted?’ His face lit up. The crowd around them applauded. Extraordinary! Max speaks Spanish. Actually, it was very little and poorly, only what he had picked up.
The enormous table was set for sixteen, seven on each side and one at each end. Host and hostess took the ends, the king sitting gratefully next to Mary Pickford, his interpreter next to him. The king was very democratic. Everyone remarked at how democratic the king was. They whispered to him. They whispered that everyone said he was being very democratic. He nodded his own approval. He was delighted with all the beautiful women. At every other place at the table, a beautiful woman was seated, and all of them were smiling at his majesty.
Fairbanks made a fuss over Gertrude. His exaggerated movements made him appear either a graceful dancer or a ridiculous actor, depending on what one approached with, either reverence or mockery. Max had neither. He observed without judgment. Somehow, the theme and passion of his life had created this and so much more, but why and how was not for him to decide. Fairbanks kissed Gertrude’s hand. Her nails were dirty, and as she looked at her hands, her gaze directed there by Fairbanks’s gesture, her whole body winced with an agony that Max understood very well indeed. Fairbanks winked at Max, the wink indicating the actor’s approval for what a sly old devil Max was. At the table, Max was seated on one side of Gertrude, and on the other side, a tall, handsome actor, recently imported from England. He had been offered to Max, but his height turned Max off. He was six feet and two inches. Max accepted people who were reasonably tall, but six feet was a sort of limit – and the man was also a womanizer. The word was used then, and defining it, Max said that the Englishman would fuck the squirrels in the park if he could catch them. Max never moralised on sexual matters, but he had contempt for a man who went to bed with a woman he didn’t care for deeply. Now the English actor introduced himself to Gertrude by sliding his hand across her thigh toward her cleft, and when she whispered a plea to Max, he pointed out that she who would sit in the seats of the mighty and the beautiful accepted certain risks. Then he leaned across her, whispering to the English actor, ‘Listen, you fucken Limey, you touch this kid again and I’ll blacklist you in every studio on the Coast.’ He smiled as he said it, and the actor pleaded instantly that it was inadvertent, done without malice or motive. ‘Of course, you shithead,’ Max whispered, smiling again.
A large, stout Frenchman, white hair and white mustache, introduced as the Comte de Poicte and utterly without a word of English, was seated opposite the king. ‘I think,’ Max whispered to Gertrude, ‘that he gets the dribble glass. I could be mistaken, but – No, he’s got to be the mark.’
‘Who is he, and what’s the dribble glass?’
‘He’s a Frog count. Doug collects them. Anything with a title, look,’ pointing on the tablecloth, ‘up there, the little guy, Charlie Chaplin.’ Max glanced at the count. Chaplin nodded. ‘He agrees with me. Watch.’ A uniformed footman was pouring the wine. All eyes of those who knew were on the count, and then Tom Mix rose and drawled a toast to their host. ‘It ain’t wine,’ Max whispered. ‘Grape juice in a wine bottle. Watch now.’ They drank. The king of Spain grimaced at the sweet gop in his glass, but the Comte de Poicte never tasted it. As he raised his glass, he grape juice poured through a slit onto his waistcoat. Great laughter, while he stood at the table, dumbfounded.
‘How could they do that?’ Gertrude asked.
‘Learn, kid, learn. You want to join the tribe in the jungle, so learn.’
Another uniformed footman wiped the grape juice from the count’s clothes. He sat down, smiling foolishly. There was no interpreter, no one who spoke French. No one explained how he had gotten there. The meal went on under an unwavering din of talk. ‘Most of them,’ Max explained to Gertrude, ‘get tanked up before they come to a dinner at Pickfair. They come here drunk and they keep reserves out in their cars. It’s a kind of an idiot game.’
She couldn’t forget the dribble glass. ‘Is that poor man a real count?’
‘I guess so. You’d be amazed h
ow many of these schmucks with titles come here, and it’s their big moment to get invited to Pickfair. Now take it easy. You’re going to get your ankle bitten.’
‘What?’
Max nodded at the head of the table. Douglas Fairbanks had disappeared, and the inner circle of Pickfairians, up and down the table, paused in their consumption of mounds of strawberry ice cream topped with Alpine slopes of whipped cream laced with heavy syrup and maraschino cherries to await the heady result of Fairbanks’s humor.
‘He’s under the table,’ Max whispered into Gertrude’s ear.
She screamed, and the inner circle burst into convulsive laughter.
Later, in Max’s car, Gertrude Meyerson was weeping and she wanted to know where Max was taking her.
‘I would take you home, but you tell me you got no home, so I’ll give you a place to sleep tonight. Why are you crying? Does it hurt where he bit you?’
‘No. It didn’t even break the skin.’
‘So what’s the tears? It ain’t every kid from Milwaukee gets bitten by a great movie star.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What don’t you know?’
‘I don’t know why I’m crying, except that I feel crazy and I got no home and no money and I don’t want to think how terrible those people are, because maybe that’s the right way.’
‘What right way?’
‘I don’t even know what I mean. I don’t even know why I’m frightened, because I don’t think I’m frightened of you. I don’t know why I’m crying.’
‘Don’t you feel lucky?’ Max asked her. ‘After two years of breaking your heart, you got a chance to be in the movies.’
‘Have I? Really?’
‘I told you.’
‘I’ll try to stop crying.’
Then she sat quietly while he guided the car over the pass and down into the San Fernando Valley and along the palm-lined dirt road that led to the studio. He had planted the palms himself along this approach road, four hundred of them, lining what would one day be a broad avenue. Palm trees fascinated him. Max was not a reader. In all his life he had never read a real novel, and the readers used as textbooks during his first years of schooling were only a dim memory. He had read many scenarios, but this was an act of discipline, performed without pleasure. Without any background of reading and with his religious education truncated at a very early age, Max had only the vaguest notions of a place where Jews had once originated. Yet he connected it with palms and the dry dust of desertland. He loved palms and century plants and Morocco ivy and the marvelous variety of cactus plants obtainable in Southern California, while Southern California itself became astrange love-hate place. During the nine years he had been here in Southern California, Los Angeles had changed from a sleepy backwash of a village into a place that urbanised itself overnight, growing with explosive force. After his purchase of three hundred acres in the valley, studio after studio appeared, each producer purchasing a large tract of land – in Culver City, in West Los Angeles and Hollywood, and in the San Fernando Valley – and with the studios came surfaced roads and houses and thousands of people to operate the studios, and more thousands of working people and merchants to build the houses and sell the goods that the people in the studios required, and the raw, dry tracts that Harry Culver and Burt Green had cornered and euphemistically titled Culver City and Beverly Hills had each in turn, in the space of a few years, become an actual city, Culver City a sprawling mélange around three film studios, and Beverly Hills, the residential paradise of the new industry that threw up stars and directors and producers with the speed of mushrooms after a rain, most of them paid more than most tycoons of American industry had ever dreamed of earning.
