Max

by Howard Fast

  ‘Set it up for the close pan on the dead!’ he shouted into the megaphone. ‘I want the dead in position. Take five, that’s all.’ And to his assistant, ‘Check those fuckers! I want them filthy dirty and bloody. Also, Pete worked out something for limbs torn off. I want at least three of them.’ He turned and saw Max for the first time. ‘Hello, Mr Britsky. Didn’t know you were here. I’m sorry about the confusion, but the goddamn extras are the dregs. Stupid shitkickers right out of the farms. They can’t look alive and they can’t look dead.’

  ‘They try,’ Max said softly. ‘They don’t work much. They got a hard time staying alive, just staying alive.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. You excuse me, Mr Britsky? This is a complicated shot.’

  Max nodded and left the platform. He walked slowly away from the quiet that now fell over the Western Front, thinking to himself, We dream bad dreams and good dreams, only when you’re in the business of dreams and you get older, the bad dreams make you uneasy. Still, people buy tickets, and that’s what matters.

  Sarah called him at the studio. ‘For a half-hour I tried to call you,’ she said. Time had not dimmed her eye or lessened the timbre of her voice. ‘So you know what they tell me? Tell me, do you know what they tell me?’

  ‘No, Mama, I don’t know,’ Max said.

  ‘They tell me, you should believe it, Mr Britsky ain’t taking calls. No calls. I should drop dead, I should have a heart attack right here talking on the telephone, I should, God forbid, have cancer, it don’t matter, because Mr Britsky is taking no calls!’

  ‘Mama, did you tell them who you were?’

  ‘You know what she tells me, this shiksa you got on the telephone? She tells me, “Save it, sister, I heard that before.”’

  ‘Mama, I’m so sorry. She’s probably a new girl.’

  ‘Tell her –’

  ‘Mama, please,’ Max begged her, ‘we got sixteen telephone operators here on the lot. Forget it. I’m talking to you now. Believe me, I’ll post a notice for the operators that if you call, to put you through, no matter What.’

  ‘All right. I’ll try to forget I’m nobody here in this fabissena place. I only called to tell you something important, that’s all.’

  ‘So tell me, Mama.’

  ‘Your son and daughter are here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah-hah. Now you’re interested.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mama, what are you talking about? Are you telling me that Richard and Marion are there, at your house?’

  ‘That’s right. And believe me, friendly they’re not. I tell you, it’s God’s curse gave me such grandchildren. Not even a kiss, and they call me Mrs Britsky.’

  ‘Where are they staying?’

  ‘At the Beverly Hills Hotel. Where else? After all, your wife is a rich woman – a millionaire, they tell me – not like your mother and your sisters, God forbid they should be comfortable.’

  ‘But they’re at your house now?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Mama, please. Ask them to wait there. I’ll send a limousine for them.’

  Then he was nervous as a cat, pacing back and forth, and then out to the reception room, where he told his secretary, ‘I want the table set for three for lunch in the private dining room. No one else in there today. I want to be alone there with my kids.’

  Miss Shelly Greene, his secretary, middle-aged and spinsterish, said, ‘Why, Mr Britsky, I didn’t know you had children.’

  He hardly knew himself. He had not seen either of them for eight, or was it nine, years. On their birthdays and every Christmas he sent them presents, but somehow Sally had managed to make their visits to California less and less frequent and finally to halt them entirely. Max tried to remember how old they were now. Richard would be twenty-four, or was it twenty-five? Marion would be a year or a year and a half younger, not children anymore, and what would they be like? How do you talk to them? Sally had always been too clever for him. Whenever he went East and tried to make contact, the children would be spoken for elsewhere; and then when they became their own masters, the decision was theirs. ‘They don’t want to come and I can’t force them,’ Sally would tell him. ‘They’re not children anymore.’

  In 1915, Sally had remarried. She was forty years old, but still slender and attractive, and, as her mother would have put it, she returned to her own, marrying the widower Felix Upperman, fifty-five years old and father of three children. The Uppermans were a German-Jewish family that had settled in New York in the eighteen-twenties; they controlled the Upperman-Lutze Bank and owned, some said, at least five percent of the best real estate in the city. Sally sold the two brownstones on West Sixty-sixth Street and moved into her new husband’s graystone mansion on East Seventy-ninth Street. It was by no means a marriage of financial opportunism on Sally’s part, for her share of stock in Britsky Productions had already appreciated to over two million dollars, not to mention her other holdings.

  As befitting her new position in New York City society, Sally sent her children off to the best private schools, Richard to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Marion to Miss Spence’s school in Manhattan. Richard went on to Harvard and Marion to Wellesley; and thus both of his children entered into worlds unknown to Max and beyond any experience that would enable him to construct these worlds in his imagination. Their coming so unexpectedly and unannounced to Los Angeles was an almost frightening shock to him, and the shock was compounded by the fact that they went, not to the studio, but to the house in Beverly Hills. Well, that was indeed his legal residential address, but by now, after his years working with Clifford Abel, Max had come to distinguish between the monstrosities performed by Beverly Hills decorators and good taste – a sense that he could add to his inborn instinct for what was right and what was wrong, what was beautiful and what was ugly; and the thought that his two children, these two strange and well-educated and well-bred products of New York society, should come to him after all these years via the gateway of Sarah Britsky’s huge Beverly Hills palace was almost more than he could bear. Now that the limousine had gone off to pick them up, he nervously anticipated their coming to the lot. Well, regardless of how classy they were, the lot would impress them. This vast institution for the making of moving pictures, the largest and most productive studio lot in the entire world, impressed everyone – kings, presidents, prime ministers, tycoons – they were all impressed with Britsky Productions.

  On the other hand, where should he meet them? Should he wait at the gate, where every strange car entering the lot was halted by an armed guard? No, he decided, that would be gauche. The limousine would bring them to his office in the cottage, best to leave it that way. His office was simply and beautifully furnished, and the cottage itself was modest, important without shouting its importance. But having decided on that, he was nervous as a cat, going to the window constantly to see whether the limousine had passed through the gates. And when finally it did appear, he leaped away from the window, unable to face the thought that they might see him peering out.

  He forced himself to sit quietly at his desk. The seconds ticked away, and then Miss Greene’s voice came over the intercom: ‘Mr Britsky, your son and daughter are here.’ She knew who he had been waiting for so nervously, yet her designation of them irritated him. The old fool! Why couldn’t she have said Richard and Marion Britsky are here.

  Should he sit or stand? ‘Send them in, of course.’ Then he stood up quickly and came around his desk.

  His first impression was of their height. Richard was easily six feet, perhaps an inch more, and the girl was quite tall too, perhaps five feet and eight inches in her heels. They were both of light complexion, and both of them had Max’s blue eyes. The boy was good-looking in what Max thought of as a goyisha manner, his head narrow, his nose thin and straight, and the girl was sternly handsome, too thin for Max’s taste, too flat-chested. But most of all, Max’s impression was of their height. They loomed over him, and in one of those flas
hes of third-person perspective that people occasionally have, Max saw himself as they saw him, a small, skinny, balding Jewish man, his face wrinkled, his nose hawklike, a reasonably ugly middle-aged man; and with the insight came a flash of recognition and remembrance of his beloved Della O’Donnell, who had said to him once, ‘You know, Max, you look like Saint Paul.’ ‘And who was Saint Paul?’ ‘Silly, he was a disciple of Jesus.’ ‘And suddenly you know what he looked like?’ ‘Everyone does, because it’s written down.’ But, he felt, it would not occur to these two children of his, not even that dubious honor, although perhaps they might know about Saint Paul. Max’s mother always insisted that German Jews were not Jews at all.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ Richard said.

  Neither of them smiled. Max smiled. What should he do? Embrace them? That was conceivable yet inconceivable. He held out his hand, and each took it in turn. Perhaps they were shy. It would be only natural for them to be shy with this father whom they hardly remembered.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Max said quickly. He couldn’t say any of the important things that he felt – his pleasure at their physical beauty, as rewarding as it was intimidating, his longing for them, his fantasies of closeness and love in which they participated, his hunger for them mixed with his bitterness at their unwillingness to see him or accept him – none of these things could be said, none of the profound, only the inane.

  ‘I made arrangements for lunch,’ Max said. ‘It’s after twelve already. You’ll have lunch with me?’

  They nodded. They were as ill at ease as he.

  ‘I’m so happy you came here. It was thoughtful of you.’ He was listening to every word he spoke. God, let me talk grammatically, he prayed. ‘After lunch, I would like to take you around the lot by myself. It’s very interesting. Would that be all right?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ Marion said. She had a deep, rich voice.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Beverly Hills Hotel,’ Richard said.

  ‘The studio keeps a suite there. Sometimes, I stay there myself.’ Now why had he said that? They’d think he used it as a one-night stand, which he had. Hurriedly, he went on. ‘You can have the suite as long as you want to stay. It has two bedrooms. It won’t cost you a cent.’ Again, the wrong thing to say. They were Uppermans. They had been formally adopted by Felix Upperman years ago, and as wealthy as Max was, the Uppermans were wealthier. What possible difference could a rent-free suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel make to them?

  ‘Thank you,’ Richard said, ‘but, you know, we’re checked in and unpacked and all that, and we’re only staying a day or two.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Of course. Why don’t we go to lunch now.’

  They nodded their agreement, and Max led them outside into the hot sunshine. Max pointed to the electric cart parked outside the cottage. ‘We use that if it’s any distance. After all, you can go three miles from here and you’re still on studio property. That, we call the back lot. But the executive dining room ain’t far.’ He had slipped. He caught himself on the point of amending it to ‘isn’t far.’ That would only make it worse. ‘That building over there. The building is called the commissary, a cafeteria set-up where we can feed three hundred people at a sitting. You see, here it –’ He caught himself this time. ‘Well, it’s not like New York. No restaurants in walking distance. For the executives, the stars, the directors, we have a special dining room with service, but the food is just as good in the cafeteria, believe me, and there’s also a small dining room if we want to discuss with privacy while we eat.’ He glanced at his son and daughter. Why couldn’t they comment? Why couldn’t they at least say that it was impressive? That goddamn fat pig of a Felix Upperman had nothing like this in his Nassau Street skyscraper. He didn’t dispense food without making a cent of profit out of it so that his workers could eat decently.

  The studio street was thronged in the lunch break. Though he had seen it a thousand times, Max never tired of the parade of costumed actors – the cowboys and Indians and doughboys and German officers and Pilgrim Fathers with their big bell-nosed guns and pretty girls in long skirts and short skirts and tights and bangles – but as far as Max was able to tell, it made no impression on his son and daughter. They reacted as if every street in New York was populated in the same manner, never exclaiming in delight or astonishment. At least, Max thought, the fact that so many people went out of their way to say, ‘Hello, Max’ or ‘Hello, Mr Britsky’ must impress them; and then Max saw Sam Snyder and called him, ‘Sam! Hey, Sam, over here!’

  Richard and Marion saw a burly, white-haired man approach, his heavy paunch protruding over his belt. He wore a grease-stained blue work shirt and old jeans and, around his waist, a tool belt with hammer, screwdriver, and pliers thrust into it. He came over grinning, his hand thrust out. ‘You’re Max’s kids. Shelly told me,’ he explained to Max. ‘By golly, I wouldn’t recognise you. Last time I saw you, you were a couple of little shavers. Now – cast them both, Max. Leading man and leading lady.’

  There was no way Max could stop Sam Snyder. He was genuinely delighted to see these two handsome people. Max said quickly, ‘This is my friend and associate Sam Snyder. This is my son, Richard, and my daughter, Marion.’

  Richard took Snyder’s dirty hand tentatively. Marion’s hands remained at her side.

  ‘Truth is,’ Max said, ‘that Sam Snyder here really runs the lot. He makes it function. Anything happens to him, I close down.’

  ‘Bull, bull, bull,’ Snyder said good-humoredly. ‘I’m an exalted handyman. I spent the morning trying to talk our main generator out of breaking down and quitting on us.’

  ‘And?’ Max asked him.

  ‘It promised. But sooner or later we’ll have to replace it. That’s a big one, Max.’

  ‘What can we do? You see,’ he explained to Richard and Marion, ‘we generate our own power because we use as much electricity as a small city. It pays us in the long run, but there’s just about nothing in the world costs as much as a generator. We’ll talk about it, Sam.’

  At lunch, Richard and Marion opened up. Neither of them pinned his or her heart on his or her sleeve, but they did convey a certain amount of information. Marion was engaged to be married to one Peter Cogsall, who was the son of the Cogsall who was president of the Merchantman Bank of New York, not quite as big as Chase or Morgan, but not too much smaller. Richard had just taken his bar exam. Since Upperman-Lutze was a private banking and investment house, he would probably find a proper niche there.

  ‘And if they don’t find it for you,’ Max said, trying to put but what he had been thinking lightly, offhandedly, ‘you might find it here. My old friend Freddy Feldman heads up our legal department, but it’s not just a legal department. We put out maybe a thousand contracts a year, not to mention bad debts, collections, and a hundred other things. Fred has six young lawyers in his department. We could sure use someone in the family.’

  Richard smiled. He was very polite and well bred, Max realised, concerned less with an unwillingness to hurt his father than with whatever was the proper and gentlemanly response.

  Perhaps a bit more sensitive, Marion explained, ‘We have always been so very curious about Hollywood. I mean, who isn’t? And we had heard so much about this marvelous studio, we had to see it.’ As an afterthought, ‘And to see you, of course.’

  ‘You are a legendary figure,’ Richard added.

  ‘Legendary? No, hardly.’ He wanted to ease their awkwardness, they were such healthy, beautiful people. Why shouldn’t he be proud of them and take pleasure in them? They were his kids, he told himself, but they couldn’t call him Father or Dad or Papa. ‘Call me Max,’ he said gently. ‘After all, you’re both grown up.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Very well,’ Marion said.

  ‘She sends you her best,’ Richard said.

  ‘Did she? That’s nice. Thank her. Do you like California?’ for want of anything else
to say. They did not make conversation easy.

  ‘Well, we haven’t been here long enough –’

  ‘I can’t believe the palm trees,’ Richard said. ‘Everything’s like a movie set. You expect it to come down if you look the other way. The weather’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, the weather’s nice,’ Max agreed. ‘Would you like to meet some of the names out here – stars, big directors? John Gilbert, Mary Pickford, Garbo, Crawford – I could arrange a little dinner tomorrow night or a party, if you’d prefer?’

  ‘I think we’ll be leaving tomorrow,’ Richard said. ‘We’ve been trying to get out here for months, but it was so hard to find a time when we’d both be free.’

  ‘Of course. I understand,’ Max said. ‘But this afternoon you’re my guests. I’ve canceled all my appointments, and I would like to show you what we have here. After all, someday it will be yours.’

  Richard and Marion stared at Max in amazement.

  ‘Didn’t that ever occur to you?’ Max asked them.

  ‘But, well, you have brothers and sisters,’ Richard said. ‘And it’s a public corporation. I know Mother has large stock holdings –’

  ‘You’re my children, my only children. Sure, it’s a public corporation, but I hold fifty-one percent of the stock. My brothers and sisters got enough, believe me. None of them will starve. But this stays with my own blood. Well, I ain’t dead yet. We’ll talk about it later.’

  Their attitude changed after that, and they became more pleasant. Yes, of course they wanted to see the studio.

  ‘We’ll take an electric cart,’ Max said. ‘After four o’clock, it cools off, but now it’s too hot to walk for miles. Myself, I like to walk. It’s the only exercise I get. Golf –’ He shrugged. ‘My colleagues who played golf had a little difficulty, since most of them are Jewish. The golf clubs around here are very exclusive when it comes to Jews, which is not so different from anyplace else, is it? So we bought land and built our own club, of which I am one of the founding fathers. But I don’t play golf, and mostly I live my life right here. I can’t think of myself without the lot.’