by Howard Fast
They sat on either side of him in the little electric cart. ‘I don’t like to bore you,’ he said, ‘but I want to tell you about this place. Of course, what we have here is like the tip of an iceberg, but a very important tip. It supplies our outlets, more than a thousand movie houses all over the United States. That movie house property alone is worth over thirty million dollars, and just the land here at the lot is worth another ten million. But it’s hard to add up a net worth. We got a weekly payroll of almost three hundred thousand dollars. Glenda Lane, our hottest star right now, gets six thousand dollars a week, much more than I take for a salary, believe me. They figured out once we got over ninety-three different professions practicing right here on the lot. Whatever you need – barbers, hairdressers, seamstresses, doctors, nurses, shoemakers, riding instructors, masons, carpenters – here, this is the carpentry shop. We’ll get out for a moment.’
It was an enormous shed, like a small lumberyard, one side of it open to the studio street. It was stocked as well as a lumberyard, with the addition of worktables, power saws, lathes, power jigs, sanding machines, and of course the men to operate them.
‘We can build anything that can be built of wood right here,’ Max told them. ‘And you’d be surprised how much iron and steel and stone can be built out of wood.’
They went on, past the great racks holding the flats of a thousand dead sets, pausing to watch World War I in progress, pausing again to see three elephants and a troop of Gurkhas marching through an India cane thicket, spending a few minutes in a viewing room to look at dailies, prowling through a warehouse filled with French, English and American antiques. ‘Most of them real,’ Max told them, ‘almost three million dollars right here.’
It was not a bad afternoon. Unfortunately, Richard and Marion appeared to have no innate warmth. They did the best they could to appear interested and friendly, but Max couldn’t help thinking of gentile acquaintances who bent over backward to be pleasant simply because he was Jewish. He did not press them to see him again the following day, and since they didn’t suggest dinner this evening, he made no mention of it. He tried not to feel relieved when they were back in the limousine and on their way to the Beverly Hills Hotel.
When he reached his cottage, Shelly Greene was powdering her nose in preparation for leaving. She was a gaunt, long-faced woman, unhappily misplaced in this welter of feminine beauty, usually unsmiling. After Della died, Max could not bear a secretary who was either attractive or inclined toward an emotional relationship; but that day he had the feeling that Miss Greene had glanced at him with something akin to compassion. When she said good-night, she added, ‘I hope it was a pleasant afternoon with your children, Mr Britsky. They certainly are a handsome young man and young woman.’
Max thanked her. She left, and Max went into his office and sat down behind his desk. I would like to cry, he said to himself. I wish I could cry.
A voice called out, ‘Are you in there, Max?’
‘It’s possible.’
Sam Snyder poked his head through the door and said, ‘I thought you’d like to look at the dailies.’
‘Also possible.’
As they walked across to the viewing room, Snyder wondered how the afternoon had been.
‘Lousy. They came here encased in ice, two sharp young eastern aristocrats to see what their ignorant Jew father had put together here in this vulgar shithole called Hollywood.’
‘Come on, Max. They both seemed to be pleasant kids.’
‘They turned pleasant when I mentioned that I had nobody else to leave the company to.’
‘You’re being hard on them.’
‘Why not? You know, Felix Upperman adopted them. Richard Upperman. Marion Upperman. A better name than Britsky. He mentioned that he might run for Congress.’
‘Who? Upperman?’
‘No, Richard. Well, why not? He’s probably no dumber than the others in there.’
‘A lot smarter, if you ask me.’
They watched the dailies. There was a battle scene, the soldiers going over the lip of the trench and then being mowed down by machine-gun fire. Brown, the director, had evidently been fascinated with this bit of action, for there were apparently an endless number of takes. After the second take, Max got up and walked out. Snyder followed him.
‘I hate that damn movie,’ Max said.
‘It’s going to be a big art thing, Max. That’s what everyone says.’
‘Screw the art stuff. For me, a picture should make people feel it’s worth something to be alive. God knows, it ain’t worth a hell of a lot when they come out of the movie house, and this guy, Brown, he’s got a thing with death. I don’t know why I don’t like directors. I never did, and now we got this shithead Freedman back on the lot.’
‘One picture.’
‘You think he’s some kind of goddamn genius, Sam?’
‘Who knows? That’s what they say.’
‘I can’t sleep, thinking about the sound movie. Just think – the first moving picture with sound in the whole goddamn world. You know, all the time newspaper guys, they say to me, how come in the industry every advance it comes from either the French or the British? Well, that’s bullshit, and you know it.’
‘I certainly do,’ Snyder agreed.
‘How many of them you worked out yourself, Sam – the trolley, the arcs, the zoom – Who put a camera on a cherry-picker? You, not no Frenchman or Limey, and this talking picture’s going to put them right on their asses, and we are at least a year ahead of anyone.’
‘We certainly are.’
‘You bet your sweet patootie. All right, now I got to go have dinner in my mother’s house and have indigestion and explain to her about why her grandchildren are the way they are, which I don’t understand any better than she does. And tomorrow, Sam, keep the afternoon free because we got to get over to Jake Stein’s house.’
‘Come on, Max, I’m loaded tomorrow afternoon. What’s so important about getting over to Jake Stein’s house? The poor bastard’s dead, and I never met any of his family.’
‘Me too. I never been to his house. But they’re sitting shiva, which is like a Jewish wake, and I want to get there. There’s something funny about him being on the payroll for three hundred a week right up to his death.’
‘It’s more than he was worth.’
‘Because you don’t like him,’ Max said. ‘He was a damn good bookkeeper. Anyway, you and me, we represent the company. We got to at least look in and say we’re sorry.’
‘I said it at the funeral.’
‘So we’ll say it again.’
Max knew vaguely that Jake Stein lived in Westwood Village, a thinly populated suburb of Los Angeles, whose only claim to fame was the fact that the new campus of the University of California was being constructed there. That part of Westwood to the north of Sunset Boulevard was called Bel Air by enterprising real estate promoters, but Max had never known anyone actually living in those low wooded hills, and his visit to Jake Stein’s home was his first venture into the neighborhood. He had heard something to the effect of Stein buying sixteen acres there, but he was not prepared for the seven-foot-high cement-block wall that surrounded the sixteen acres, nor was he prepared for the imposing iron gates to what lay beyond the wall. The gates were open, and beyond the lawns and plantings inside, at the end of a curving graveled driveway, there loomed a stucco-covered architectural monstrosity that was a cross between a Mediterranean chateau and an English country house.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Sam Snyder said.
‘Pool, pool house, two tennis courts, and a lawn like a golf course – all on three hundred a week.’
‘Max, Freddy’s been telling you for years that Jake steals.’
‘In this business, everybody steals a little.’
‘I don’t and you don’t, and this ain’t a little.’
‘I suppose not,’ Max admitted. ‘You do it on three hundred a week, the gardener takes most of it. The whole thing makes no sense
. He wasn’t exactly hiding. We didn’t come here, but other people did.’
‘I think he only finished building this place last year.’
‘Why the hell didn’t he raise his wages?’ Max wondered.
‘He could have had double what he was getting, and I wouldn’t have complained.’
‘He didn’t know that. He knew you didn’t like him, and maybe he figured that if he asked for a raise, you’d dump him. Then he’d have to take his hand out of the till.’
‘Miserable son of a bitch,’ Max said. ‘All right, no use cussing out the dead. Let’s meet the next of kin and get it over with.’
The two men parked their car, walked up to the house, and paid their respects to the relatives. Stein had left behind him a wet-faced, overweight wife, a daughter and two sons, and various less-affected relatives ranging from two sisters, a brother, and withered mother whose mind was mostly gone, to cousins, first and second. Apparently, his move to the West had brought his sisters and his cousins and his aunts trailing after him. Now they were all gathered together around a huge dining room table that groaned under its weight of food. One of Stein’s sons, Herbert by name, whom Max had met only once before but who nevertheless addressed him by his first name, said, ‘Max, I want you to do something about this. Pop had some little tramp he kept over in the Hollywood Hills, and I understand he dumped a fortune in jewels and furs on her, and I think that belongs to us.’
‘Oh? You do?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And how do you know this?’
‘I dated a friend of hers.’
‘It belongs to you, sonny, go ask her for it. Certainly, your father was a remarkable man to be able to dump a fortune on some floozie and still be able to pay his gardener.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Think about it, sonny.’
Back in the car, Max said to Snyder, ‘What makes me sick at heart is that they’re all Jewish.’
‘So what? You want a race of angels with no bastards? You want me to apologise for the kaiser? That’s bullshit, Max, and you know it.’
‘Sure it’s bullshit, and I still feel sick. That snotnose son of his – I should go recover what his father laid on some little whore.’
‘Yeah. Max, how much could he steal?’
‘That’s an interesting question.’
‘Wouldn’t we feel it?’
‘Do you know what our cash flow is, Sam? Four, five, six million a week, just in America – maybe as much foreign. You could steal enough to buy the British crown jewels every Montag and Dunnerschtick, and we’d never feel it providing somebody as smart as Jake Stein sits on top of the books and manipulates them.’
Snyder brooded over that. They were halfway back to the studio before he asked Max, ‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We got to do something.’
‘Yeah, we sure as hell got to do something. Personally, I’d like to dig Jake Stein up and beat the shit out of him, dead or not, but that don’t help. I think tonight we should sit down with Freddy and work something out.’
‘Can’t it wait? Alice’s sister and her husband just arrived, first time in California, and they’re expecting me for dinner tonight.’
‘It can’t wait, Sam. It’s like a stick of dynamite waiting to go off – if what I’m thinking is real.’
‘What you’re thinking is real,’ Feldman told Max soberly. ‘This kind of thing is the worst thing that can happen in a business.’
‘Just hold on,’ Sam Snyder said. ‘I know the condition of this company as well as you do, and the condition is good. In fact, it’s better than good. There isn’t a business in America has a cash flow better than ours. Our receivables are heavier than our credit line. Our cash on hand is good, and as far as Jake is concerned, the son of a bitch is dead. If we want restitution, we can sue his heirs. I don’t know, is that legal? Well, we don’t need it. We can write off everything Jake took.’
They were sitting in the private dining room in the commissary. The studio had closed down. The kitchen workers and the waiters and busboys had gone home, and only the guards were left, at the gates and patrolling the lot. Max and Snyder had lit cigars, and watching them through the murky haze, Feldman speculated that just breathing in their smoke all those years should have hooked him to nicotine.
‘So what are you and Max in such a sweat over?’ Snyder went on. ‘I say, write it off and the hell with it.’
‘You don’t write something like this off until you know what it is,’ Feldman said gloomily, ‘and then you don’t just write it off. You been around long enough to know that, Sam. We’re a public corporation. We’d have to call a meeting of the board and present them with the facts and figures, and then it’s up to them what kind of action they intend to take, and negligence and lousy management are bad enough, but there could be more than that.’
‘What do you mean, more?’
‘No matter what happens, we got to have an audit right away, and God only knows what we’ll turn up. Jake couldn’t be in this alone.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you can’t do it all with the books, not in this business. You have to have someone on the road, someone who deals with the theatre managers and with certain people on the lot. Jake couldn’t do that. For one thing, he was a little worm who nobody would play games with, and for another, he knew the books but he didn’t really know a damn thing about how pictures are made.’
‘Ruby,’ Max said hopelessly. ‘He’s talking about my son of a bitch brother.’
‘Comeon, Ruby? Ruby’s a –’
‘Go ahead, say it. Ruby’s a cheap tin horn sport. Ruby’s a nickel drifter. Who’d ever believe that Jake Stein, little Jake Stein, would keep some tramp in a house in the Hollywood Hills and shower jewels on her? One thing you got to say about Ruby – he’s got more class than Jake Stein. And something else you can be sure of, if Ruby’s got his hand in the till, my brother Benny’s right in there with him.’
‘Max, you don’t know that,’ Snyder protested.
‘Don’t be kind to me, Sam. We been together too long to bullshit each other. We got us some real trouble, and the question is, what do we do?’
‘What we do,’ Feldman said, ‘we have to move very quickly. For the moment, Joe Klepper has taken over Jake’s job. He’s young and ambitious, and if he wasn’t in this with Jake, it won’t take him long to find Jake’s tracks. There are five other men and women in the accounting department who might be in this or who might smell it out. If anyone else blows this open, our position will be untenable. We have to do it ourselves. As far as Ruby is concerned, I’ve warned you for years, Max, that he has sticky fingers; but we don’t know yet that he’s guilty, or Benny or anyone else.’
‘How do we find out?’
‘It’s two weeks before the board meets, and I think that gives us enough time. My wife’s cousin, Arnie Greenberg, has gone into business here in LA. His partner is Mike Hendon, a local boy. They’re both certified public accountants, and they’re young and honest and trustworthy. I think we should hire them immediately, pay them a fat bonus to drop everything else and work on this day and night. They’ll do an audit that only we have access to. It can’t possibly take in everything in that time, but it may well point in the main directions.’
‘At least we won’t be blowing off in the dark,’ Snyder said.
‘Max?’
Max nodded tiredly. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
The others left, and Max walked back to his cottage. Fritzie Cooper, with whom he had a date that evening, was waiting for him. Max never dated his stars. For one thing, he felt great distaste for the stories about his contemporaries in the other film companies, of them browbeating poor, defenseless, and innocent stars into bed with them. While he had yet to find a defenseless and innocent star, the stories left a bad taste in his mouth. And for another, stars were simply too skinny. Fritzie Cooper was a round and pleasant one hun
dred and thirty-five pounds, a good-natured, easygoing woman from Findlay, Ohio, who tired of the smell of oil wells and small-town morality and betook herself and her high school acting ability to Hollywood. Max discovered her waiting counter in a hash joint on Hollywood Boulevard and gave her a job as a contract supporting actress. There was no question of a quid pro quo, and it was not until a month or so after she had come to work on the lot that Max encountered her and asked her to have dinner with him. After that, he took her to dinner and bed perhaps once a week. Max had always found it difficult to believe that women could like him for himself. When he looked into the mirror, he saw a thin, worried Jewish face with a receding hairline; but looking into a mirror he never saw his warmth, his generosity, or his pleasure in women. And in turn, women enjoyed him. Fritzie was only twenty-five years old, and Max was only two years short of fifty, but she mothered him. Most of the women Max took to mothered him.
It was a warm evening, the area lying under the benign heat of the Santa Ana desert wind, and they dined in the garden at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Max was glum, and Fritzie said to him at least five times, ‘Come on, Maxie. Cheer up, old chap.’ She had been dating some of the British actors who had swarmed into Hollywood and, chameleon-like, she mimicked them without being aware that she was doing so. Looking at her round, pink-cheeked face and her blond curls, Max grinned in spite of himself, and she in turn began to laugh in real delight. He was quite aware of the absurdity. But then, from the very beginning, his world had been totally absurd.
‘Why don’t you get it off your chest, old dear, and tell me all about it.’
Max thrust a finger at her. ‘Right out of Sanderson’s Girl.
‘How did you know?’
‘Sweetie, I own the studio. I read the scripts. I see the movies.’
‘Oh, Max, you must think I’m very stupid.’
‘I think you’re delightful.’
‘Do you? Truly? Then I want a big fat New York steak with french-fried onions and french-fried potatoes.’
‘You shall have it.’
