by Howard Fast
And when Gertrude Meyerson, staring ahead of her down at the stygian darkness of the San Fernando Valley, had asked Max where they were going, he told her, ‘To my studio.’
‘The Max Britsky Studio?’
‘So they tell me.’
‘And you live there, Mr Britsky?’
‘Sometimes. I’ll have a place for you to sleep, so tomorrow you won’t need a pass after all. You’ll be inside, and I’ll call Melvin Dubberman, who’s our casting director, and lo and behold, you’re in movies. Meanwhile, I’m glad you stopped crying.’
At the studio gates, an armed, uniformed guard flashed his light into the car, recognised Max, nodded, and then opened the gates. Vaguely, in the headlights, Gertrude could make out the studio street, the towering stages and the bulk of other buildings, and then, a bit farther on, a sleepy village street, and then a white cottage, where Max parked his car. A switch on the porch flicked on the lights, and then Max led the way into his reception room.
‘In there,’ he told her, ‘is my private office. You become a big star, I’ll see you in my private office. Meanwhile, we go upstairs.’ He led the way up a staircase at one side of the entry, past the eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial furniture, past a needlepoint rug on the floor and a subdued striped wallpaper that followed the staircase to the second floor. There were two bedrooms on the second floor, each opening off the small landing, each with its own bath. Max’s bedroom had a hooked rug with a large turkey design on the tile floor, a toile wallpaper, a rather heavy post and ball bed, and two early eighteen-hundreds chests of drawers. The other room was furnished more lightly, a delicate fourposter with a canopy, another needlepoint rug, and a wallpaper of pastel pink and yellow stripes. Max watched Gertrude’s face as he turned on a lamp in this room. The tears and depression had given way to delight.
‘It’s so pretty,’ she said.
‘Yeah, so they tell me.’
‘And you live here, Mr Britsky, all alone out here?’
‘Actually, I live in Beverly Hills, my mother’s house. The way it works out, I mostly live here. It’s convenient. I don’t have to drive to work. I’ll find you a pair of my pajamas, and in the bathroom there’s toothbrush, cream – whatever you need.’ She was still standing where he had left her when he returned with a pair of pajamas. Then he left, closing her door behind him. He closed the door to his own bedroom and opened the window, letting in the cool night air. He loved the smell of night-blooming jasmine and had ordered a large stand of it to be planted outside his cottage. Then he undressed, brushed his teeth, put on his own pajamas, and got into bed. He selected a Cuban cigar, clipped the end, lit it, and lay back on two pillows, drawing the rich smoke softly and lovingly. He was amused by his experience with Gertrude Meyerson. His studio had just finished a very expensive film titled The Caliph. It was the story of a Middle Eastern potentate, a caliph of the Middle Ages, who donned the garb of a simple peasant and went among his people, having all sorts of violent and acrobatic adventures along the way. Like so many people with no training in or real knowledge of history, Max believed in the validity of his studio’s childish recreations, and to some extent he saw himself as the caliph. On the other hand, he had had no intention whatsoever of attending the dinner party at Pickfair. He possessed an intuitive sense of what was gross, tasteless, stupidly vulgar, and while he tended not to be judgmental of the stars and directors who had finally emerged from his nickelodeons to become the culture heroes and the popular kings and queens of the twentieth century, he avoided when possible their celebratory rites. He was not too given to the curse of loneliness, and he still dined at least twice a week at the dinner table of Sam Snyder, filling his stomach with heavy German food and sweet, dark beer. The few evenings he spent alone in his cottage, which was actually a part of the standing sets at the Britsky lot, he enjoyed. Sally had never permitted him to smoke in bed, and when he smoked in the Beverly Hills house, Sarah denounced his action with her customary fury, none of it tempered by age. This tiny cottage was actually his first home, the first home that was wholly his and in which his word was absolute law. Now and then he had been tempted to build or buy a home of his own in Beverly Hills, but with second thoughts, he discarded the notion. He had not married again, and he saw no need for a great empty house. Through the years, he told himself that someday he would find another woman who was at least a good deal like Della O’Donnell, but as the years passed, Della became increasingly wonderful in his memory and her replacement increasingly unlikely.
But perhaps it was the aphrodisiac of power that prevented him from ever again finding a Della O’Donnell, particularly that aphrodisiac that surrounds a moving picture tycoon. The dry fields of West Los Angeles, spotted with hundreds of oil derricks, had given way to a city that became a magnet for beautiful young women from all over America and indeed, the world. They poured into Los Angeles with the dream of becoming stars in this incredible new phenomenon called moving pictures, and such was their hunger and their frustration that they would have sold their souls to the devil if success came with the contract. In the center of this, as the reigning lord of the Max Britsky Studio and the thousand or so theatres that it serviced, Max had at the flick of his finger the sexual services of any one of a thousand beautiful women. In all truth, he went to bed with very few. His fellow tycoons outdid him, but whatever happened in this strange new world of Hollywood took on legendary proportions, and since Max was always at the center of the legend, the truth was submerged in the myth.
Gertrude Meyerson believed the myth and pursued it, and knocked timidly at the door to Max’s room.
‘Come in.’
Max was a small man, but she was smaller in his pajamas. The sleeves covered her hands; the trousers were rolled up. She walked in barefoot. She stood by Max’s bed, staring at him.
‘Smoke bother you?’
‘No. My father smoked cigars.’
‘He’s dead?’
She nodded.
‘Sit down.’
She sat on the edge of the bed and asked timidly, ‘Why don’t you think I’m attractive?’ She had washed the cheap, badly done makeup from her face. It was a broad, open face, pale and sad, the blue eyes widely set, the mouth full and well shaped.
‘You’re a nice-looking girl. You came from a farm, didn’t you?’
‘It’s near Milwaukee.’
‘You never studied acting.’
‘No.’
‘Just come here and do it.’
‘Because I can,’ she cried. ‘I know I can.’
‘Sure.’
‘Let me come to bed with you,’ she said flatly. She had no artfulness, no tricks, not even an intuitive sense of feminine enticement.
‘You know, kid,’ Max said to her, ‘my own daughter, Marion, she’s just about your age. Some men like that. It makes them feel young. I look at you and think about how I don’t see my own kid since maybe eight years ago. That stinks like hell, don’t it? So I screw a little farmgirl who don’t know which side is up, and that makes me feel better? I got to have shit in my blood to think like that.’
Tears welled into her pale blue eyes.
‘That kind of language you’re not used to,’ Max said. ‘My mother used to say my mouth should be washed out with soap. Brown horse soap. Listen, kid, you’re not an actress. That’s something I know. You’re sweet-looking, but you don’t look the way they want girls to look right now.’
She began to cry.
‘Don’t do that, please. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Tomorrow, I’ll find you a job. Can you type?’
She shook her head.
‘What can you do? Can you sew?’
She nodded.
‘All right. I’ll put you in the wardrobe department. We’ll start you at thirty-five dollars a week, which is very good money, believe me. We got half a dozen rooming houses over here on Ventura Boulevard, and I’ll find you a room in one of them, clean and decent, and you get breakfast and supper for fifteen d
ollars a week. Then we got a coach on the lot here, he has a class in the afternoon three times a week. You go to his class, and maybe you learn something, because even if most actors are brainless schmucks, still, it’s not something you get born with. You got to learn.’
The tears were pouring down her cheeks now.
‘Please, stop crying.’
‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ she managed through her sobs.
‘Because I’m a schmuck. Now stop the goddamn crying and get out of here.’
‘And you don’t want me?’
‘Jesus, Gertrude,’ he snapped, ‘tonight I don’t want to get laid – not by you, not by the queen of Sheba. Now get the hell out of here and go to sleep.’
It was remarkable how lighthearted he felt after she had left the room. He got out of bed, found a bottle of imported sherry in a commode, poured a small glass, and then went back to bed, lying propped up on his pillows, smoking his cigar, and sipping the sherry. There was no sharing a cigar; it was a foul, filthy thing to everyone except the man who happened to be smoking it; and the brief presence in the room of the wide-eyed girl from the beach served to underline the fact. Max felt better than he had felt in a long time. The sherry was sweet and pleasant. He had a serious and reliable bootlegger who did business only on the Britsky lot, and in return for the concession he brought in the very best. There were two scenarios on his night table that were waiting to be read, but Max was in no mood for reading tonight. He was full of a poignant sadness, content and discontent at once, thinking of the little blond farmgirl asleep in the next room, half regretful that he had not taken her to bed, but at the same time placing Sally in bed with him in his fantasy, the Sally of long, long ago.
Max slept late the following morning, and when he had shaved and dressed and glanced in the room next door, he discovered that Gertrude had left. But she had taken pains to put the bed together neatly. He went downstairs. The studio was already alive and working, and his secretary was at her desk in the reception room of the cottage.
‘Did you –’ he began.
‘Yes, Mr Britsky. She came down about fifteen minutes ago. She said she wanted to look around outside.’
‘She comes back, tell her I’m in the commissary, having breakfast. Tell her to go into the VIP room and ask for my table.’
He stepped out into the hard, brilliant California sunshine. This was his domain, his world, his creation, this vast cluster of buildings, stage shops, castles of papier-mâche, desert hovels and suburban streets, cranes, cameras, and generators. And on the streets of this great enclosure called the Max Britsky Studio, hundreds of men and women -Indians, cowboys, gamblers, exotic dancers out of the Arabian nights, British hussars, grips, carpenters, cameramen, electricians, writers, directors – and standing entranced, bewildered, a small blond girl named Gertrude Meyerson.
Gently, Max tapped her arm. ‘Come on, kid, I’ll buy you some breakfast and then we’ll find you a job.’
[ T E N ]
The day started with a writer. He was a young writer, twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, a graduate of Syracuse University – Syracuse, out of Max’s frame of reference, vaguely indicative of the ancient world, of the chariot racetrack on the back lot. Max asked him where the college was, and he replied that it was in upstate New York. The writer had an air of poorly concealed superiority, the patience one exercises in conversation with the ignorant, the uneducated, the culturally deficient; but Max was familiar with the attitude and did not resent it. The writer, whose name was Dudley Langham, had published a novel and two short stories in the Atlantic, and he had also done a skit for one of Ziegfeld’s reviews. He had come to Los Angeles because he felt, as he told Max, that the film was the art form with the greatest potential, and Fulton Hazig, Max’s studio editor, had taken him on with a salary of two hundred a week. ‘He’s pretty snotty and wet behind the ears,’ Hazig told Max, ‘but at least he can write his own name and spell it correctly – which, considering the level of writing we get out here, is something.’
Max had read his first scenario and asked to talk to the man, a long-legged gangling man, heavy glasses, tweeds.
‘Personally,’ Max said to him, ‘I write my own name, but not so good, so I don’t try to pretend to be a critic. Everybody else is a critic, so I figure the society can operate without me joining it. For criticism, I hired Mr Hazig. That’s his business.’
‘But I want very much to know what you think about it.’
‘Ah-hah, that’s criticism. I say it stinks, that’s criticism. I say it’s wonderful, also criticism. All I can say is I like it or I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I’ll tell you why. For me, a movie should do one of two things. Either the hero, which can be either a man or a woman, is somebody you like so much, you’re ready to die if he dies and bleed when he bleeds, or it should be somebody you hate so much you’d like to kill him yourself, you could only get into the screen. This here’ – tapping Langham’s scenario – ‘this don’t do it to me. I don’t love and I don’t hate. You come right down to it, I’d rather play the Victrola.’
‘Aren’t you applying your own subjective judgments, Mr Britsky? You pose a very simplistic approach to literature.’
That took nerve, Max admitted to himself. Mayer or Zukor would have booted Langham right out of the room. ‘Only it ain’t literature,’ Max said, not unkindly. People like Langham always loused up Max’s grammer. In spite of himself, he couldn’t control it. It was his defense. ‘Maybe it ain’t even drama, the way it’s done in the theatre. You see, boychik, movies are something else, stories told in pictures. Think about that – stories told in pictures. Try it again.’
He handed Langham the script, opened the door to his office, and ushered the young man out before Langham could think of an appropriate retort. Then he called Hazig and shouted at him, ‘Don’t send me no more of your goddamn geniuses with their scripts!’
‘Langham?’
‘That’s the shithead’s name. Yes.’
‘He’s got something, Max, and you have a gift for putting your finger on it.’
Max softened.
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘I talked to him.’
‘Did you tell him what was wrong? I tried, but I couldn’t get through to him.’
‘I told him,’ Max said.
‘Thanks.’
Max put down the phone, grinning and shaking his head. Fulton Hazig handled him with great skill, and Max appreciated anyone who handled him with great skill. Out in the reception room, Sam Snyder was waiting for him. At least Sam didn’t have to handle him. They let each other know exactly what was on their minds, and now Sam said to him, ‘I don’t want you to blow up at Mike Benson. He’s a brilliant engineer, and he’s been working sixteen hours a day on this.’
‘I don’t blow at him,’ Max snorted. ‘If I get pissed off, it’s because this should have been done twenty years ago, right at the beginning. If Edison cared one stinking bit for art instead of his goddamn machines all his life, he would have done it.’
‘Max, you’re too damn high strung. You lose your temper at the drop of a hat. You never were that way.’ Snyder never lost his temper. Through the years he had become heavier, his belly larger, his tangled hair snow white. Now he bought his dark sweet beer by the case from a brewery in Seattle. Alongside of him, Max seemed to contract, to become smaller and skinnier, regardless of how much beer he consumed.
‘You’re right,’ Max said.
They started off down the studio street toward the Sound Shop. The Sound Shop was a laboratory of sorts that Max had set up five years ago in an attempt to conquer his pet hate, the dialogue card. As the years passed, his distaste for the device of breaking a film again and again with dialogue cards and for the lip motion that produced no sound had increased, finally reaching a point where he decided that if he didn’t solve the problem, no one would. Whereupon he built a sound laboratory on the studio ground and staffed it with a research staff of
sound engineers. At this point, early in 1927, they were very close to success, almost at the point of embarking on a feature film to be developed with dialogue cards replaced by the actor’s speech. The screenplay – for it had to be a play rather than a scenario – had been written. A number of actors who could actually act had been hired, and one of the large stages on the lot had been soundproofed.
