West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “I had breakfast at the hotel, thanks.”

  “When’d you get in? Everything all right? How you liking the Miramar? Great crab salad, if you haven’t had it. You’ve got good timing. We’re supposed to be getting new pages by the weekend.”

  “Oh?” Scott said, because he’d assumed the script was finished. A Yank at Oxford, the picture was called. They’d brought him in, with his eye for campus life, to punch up the dialogue. It didn’t matter that he was forty, or that he’d never graduated.

  “Monday or Tuesday at the latest—Wednesday at the very latest. Don’t worry, you’ll have more than enough time, a pro like you. I’m actually thinking of you for another project we’re just getting started. Tell me what you think. These three soldiers, they come back from the war to their little town in Bavaria, and each of them has to find his way home, or figure out what home is now. There’s a girl that two of them are in love with, only one of them comes back a cripple. Great role for Tracy.”

  Scott didn’t volunteer that he’d never been to war and, unlike Eddie, was neither German nor crippled. He hadn’t planned on being pitched his first day back, which only showed how long he’d been gone, and how much he’d forgotten. He knew the novel, had considered it pat and maudlin when it was published a year ago. As Eddie spun out the story line, he smiled and nodded at the right places, chiming in with prescient questions so as not to seem too ingratiating, with the result that, as happened so often now, he felt utterly false, and, though it was his own doing, used. Even as he wondered if he’d ever possessed Eddie’s venal enthusiasm, he reminded himself that, just for sitting there listening to him, he was being paid. He thought the idea should buoy him more.

  Though he had nothing to work on, there was an office waiting for him. As Eddie led him down the hall, they passed the gilt-edged names of several old friends. Aldous Huxley was here, and Anita Loos, and Dottie Parker with her husband Alan Campbell—or not, since their offices were dark and the only typing he heard issued from an anonymous transom.

  “That’s Oppy,” Eddie said with a dismissive wave, as if the scrivener never left his cell.

  His own office had no name and a view across Culver Boulevard of a billboard in a vacant lot touting a coming subdivision artfully christened Edendale, and, in its shadow, as if in rebuttal, a string of flaking stucco bungalows and a corner drugstore, outside of which a wooden Indian chained to a downspout stood like a sentinel. On the desk sat an impressive new Royal, which, though he didn’t use a typewriter, he appreciated as a piece of machine design. Beside the desk stood a bookshelf, half full, and around the walls, as in a gallery, hung framed stills of Metro’s moneymakers. Garbo and Lon Chaney, neither known for their sparkling repartee, were both well-represented, as were Buster Keaton and John Gilbert, outmoded now, casualties of the talkies. In one corner a gooseneck lamp and end table attended a thronelike leather easy chair.

  “What’d I tell you?”

  “It’s plush,” Scott admitted, as the air-conditioning kicked in with a shudder. The vent on the wall exhaled a long, low bass note like the sigh of a leviathan.

  “It does that. Coffee and donuts are in the lounge, supply closet’s at the end of the hall. Anything you need, feel free. Settle in. I’ll come grab you for lunch.”

  “Thanks, Eddie.” Out of obligation as much as politeness, Scott shook his hand again. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “You don’t have to. Just write something great.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You will,” Eddie said, pointing at him.

  Left alone, he pawed through the desk and then the bookshelf, where he was surprised to find, among the latest masterpieces by Kathleen Norris and Edna Ferber, a coffee-stained copy of Nostromo. The chair was comfortable, but Conrad was too weighty an undertaking so early, and he soon gave up and stood at the window, watching traffic on the shadowless boulevard below, listening to the asthmatic vent wheeze. Down the block, across from a come-on for Oxydol, trolleys dropped off and picked up overalled workers by the side gate. Otherwise there wasn’t much action. From time to time cars parked in front of the drugstore, disgorging patrons who returned with their mysterious purchases, then went on their way. In St. Paul, as a boy, he used to spy on his neighbors from the third-floor gable. Now, regulating each breath like a sniper, he felt the same inner stillness. Between the bungalows, a postman tramped across the lawn. Scott watched their mailboxes like baited traps, and was rewarded when an old Japanese man in bare feet and an undershirt came out on his porch, then stood at the top of his stairs, calling through the megaphone of his hands “Eeee-to, Eeeeee-to.” Not long after he’d gone inside, a gray cat emerged from the weedy jungle behind the billboard and sauntered up the walk, at the last moment pausing to look back, stock-still, as if it was being followed.

  A knock at the door startled him, as if he’d been caught. He sat down at the desk and fumbled for a pencil. “Yes?”

  It was Dottie Parker, with Alan in tow. He rose to greet them.

  “Scott, darling. Sorry to barge in—Eddie said you were here. Welcome to the Iron Lung.”

  “Thank you,” he said, stooping to receive her kiss. She looked tired, lined around the eyes and a little thicker, almost matronly, not the dark pixie he’d known those incoherent years in New York. Once or twice, drunkenly, they’d ended up in bed, though now, perhaps mercifully, he could barely recall the details. They remained friends, partly because he admired her wit and courage, and partly because they never spoke of it.

  “Good to see you again,” Alan said. His grip was supposed to be manly but came off as a butch imitation. He had the lean build and generous features of a leading man. It was a curious sort of Boston marriage. They both preferred younger men, and fought like mongooses, yet were inseparable.

  “Eddie says you were here at eight,” Dottie said. “You know you can’t do that.”

  “You’ll make the rest of us look positively slothful,” Alan finished.

  “And you’re not.”

  “Only milkmen do their best work before ten.”

  “He speaks from experience,” Dottie said. “Where do they have you staying?”

  “The Miramar.”

  “No,” Alan said, scandalized.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want to be there,” Dottie said. “It’s not near anything.”

  “It’s near the beach.”

  “The beach is for people who can’t read,” Alan said.

  “The beach is for people who can’t afford a pool,” Dottie said. “We have a pool where we are, and it’s cheaper than the Miramar.”

  “I like that.”

  “Who comes all the way to Hollywood to live in Santa Monica? You really shouldn’t be out there by yourself. We’ll talk at lunch. We just wanted to say hi. You know Ernest’s going to be in town tomorrow.”

  God, no. “I didn’t.”

  “We’re having a little fund-raiser for Spain at Freddie March’s. Ernest’s going to show his film, but that’s no reason not to come.”

  “‘To grow the harvest,’” Alan intoned gravely, “‘the farmers of the village need rain.’”

  “It’s ghastly, but it gets the big fish to write big checks.”

  “It sounds like they need more than checks over there.”

  “I wish Hollywood made airplanes,” Dottie said. “They barely make movies, which is what we have to go do.”

  “Back to the salt mines.” Alan waved playfully. “Glad you’re back.”

  Scott resumed his vigil at the window. The cat was gone. A Cord roadster with a bottle blonde in the passenger seat idled outside the drugstore. The paradise of Edendale beckoned. The vent soughed.

  It was like Dottie to adopt him, but why of all people did it have to be Ernest visiting, and why had his initial reaction been alarm? He was the one who should b
e angry, after that crack about him and the rich in Ernest’s story—a shrill, predictable story at that. They all were now. The precise quietude that excited Scott in his early work had given way to broader, more blatant gestures. His last novel might have been written by Steinbeck or any of those New Masses copycats, and yet, because it outsold Tender Is the Night, he was the one who told Max that Scott had betrayed his gift. It was this judgment, partly true yet wholly unfair, coming from Ernest, which kept Scott from wanting to see him.

  He was reading Nostromo when the noon siren blew, summoning the lot to lunch. Doors opened and the hall filled with voices as if class had let out. After the quiet, the noise was intimidating. He waited for Eddie to come get him, thinking he’d been too much by himself lately.

  Eddie had with him a squat, balding man in a pumpkin-colored muumuu of a sport shirt—Oppy: George Oppenheimer. He was an old pro, Eddie said. Been around since before Ben-Hur. Scott didn’t remember him.

  “Welcome aboard, pal.” Oppenheimer wore a ruby pinkie ring like a Brooklyn bookie. His grip was soft and moist, and as they walked the half-block to the commissary he dabbed at his forehead with a rumpled handkerchief. While Scott was tempted to ask what project had him bashing away at his machine at eight in the morning, he obeyed the professional courtesy of letting the writer volunteer that information. As he’d hoped, Oppenheimer didn’t make him confess he’d left a sick wife and budding daughter to doctor A Yank at Oxford.

  The commissary wasn’t new, the exterior had just been remodeled. Unlike the rest of the world, Metro had done well this last decade, and, like any triumphant regime, hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to decorate itself. So many buildings had been redone in sleek Streamline Moderne, the lot looked like a harbor full of ships at anchor.

  The first familiar face he saw in the Lion’s Den was Joan Crawford’s, on her way out with a box lunch. From habit he played the doorman for her, earning a smile and a nod. Once she would have known his as well, but that had been fifteen years ago, in the silent era, and she passed without a word.

  While the interior of the commissary had changed to a deco chrome-and-pale-green-Formica scheme, the layout was the same, and the smell—the salty steam of chicken broth and dishwater. Dottie and Alan had saved them space at the writers’ table, against the far wall, a perfect spot to watch the producers at the main table in the center of the room. Sleeves rolled to his elbows, the molelike L.B. Mayer was holding forth on some matter of import to a group that included George Cukor, but Scott was more interested in gimlet-eyed Myrna Loy, in the powdered wig and heavy pancake makeup of a courtesan, picking the hard-boiled egg out of her chopped salad.

  “How’s Louie Pasteur treating you, Oppy?” Dottie asked.

  “The guy’s a pain in the keister. Go ahead, laugh, it’ll be your turn next. You try and sell an old French fart as your lead.”

  “Oppy’s our resident romantic,” Alan said. “When your producer asks, ‘Where’s the love interest?’ Here he is.”

  “Boy meets germ, boy loses germ,” Dottie said.

  Dottie and Alan were working on Sweethearts for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, cast as a beloved song-and-dance team who hate each other offstage.

  “How’s it coming?” Eddie asked.

  “Very well, thanks,” Alan said.

  “It’s absolute shit,” Dottie said. “You’ll love it.”

  Having nothing to add, with a view of the whole room, Scott lost himself in stargazing. Right beside Ronald Colman, Spencer Tracy was tucking into a triple-decker club; next to him, her famous lips pursed, Katharine Hepburn blew on a spoonful of tomato soup. Mayer and Cukor were showily spinning an hourglass-shaped cage of dice to see who’d pay. It was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. The rest of them were extras.

  Since he’d been on the wagon he relied on sweets to give him a midday boost. He decided on the ham salad sandwich and was mulling ordering the tapioca when a portly Fu Manchu in a red silk cape and kimono, long black braids and stiff lacquered mustache pulled out the chair opposite him.

  “Would you look what the Depression dragged in,” Fu Manchu said, extending a hand.

  Scott gathered his napkin and stood, then realized with dismay that it wasn’t an actor under that getup but Dottie’s old Algonquin partner Bob Benchley. Years back, Scott had taken him and all the Round Table to task in the New York World for not producing anything serious. Now he’d become a kind of minor celebrity, starring in his own zany short subjects.

  “How’s business?” Scott asked.

  “Grand, just grand. Actually, Hem and I are having lunch tomorrow. He wanted me to see if you’d like to come along.”

  “I don’t know that I can get away.” He looked to Eddie.

  “It’s fine. We won’t have pages for you till Monday anyway.”

  “Perfect,” Benchley said. “Come by my place around noon.”

  They were all staying at The Garden of Allah in Hollywood, right on Sunset. Everyone was there—Sid Perelman and Don Stewart and Ogden Nash. Dottie knew of at least two villas that were open.

  “She gets a finder’s fee,” Alan said, so deadpan that Scott wasn’t sure it was a joke.

  When the waitress came to Benchley, without consulting a menu he ordered the sea bass meunière with mashed potatoes and corn, and the tapioca. Scott had just the sandwich, which was dry, and watched as Fu Manchu gobbled everything down.

  “I wish I could stay,” Benchley announced, dabbing at his mustache and pushing back his chair, “but I have a dynasty to maintain.”

  “The Dong Dynasty,” Alan said, because it was rumored to be prodigious.

  “That rises and falls,” Dottie said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Personally I’ve never heard it,” Benchley said. “But if it starts speaking, Alan, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Back in his office, reading Conrad, Scott was unsure whether Ernest wanting to see him was good or not, and yet he was flattered that he’d asked after him. He liked to think he had a sensitivity to and unselfish reverence for talent—or was it just a weakness for success? All his life he’d been attracted to the great, hoping, through the most diligent exertion of his sensibility, he might earn his place among them. It was harder to believe now, and yet, if he could still count Ernest as a friend and rival, perhaps he wasn’t the failure he accused himself of being. He’d never had any doubts about Ernest’s powers, only his misapplication of them, a judgment he trusted was reciprocal.

  Despite the air-conditioning, Nostromo was putting him to sleep. He needed a Coke and snuck out the side gate and across Culver to the drugstore. Waves of heat played over the trolley tracks and the road, making him think of summer in Montgomery, the shuttered houses and deep shadows beneath the trees. In the evenings he buttoned up his dress grays like the other young lieutenants and set off for the country club, where the local belles chose among them, dancing so close beneath the colored lanterns that their perfume clung to him through the next morning’s inspection, a giddy memento. To always be favored so, that had been his dream as a young man. Walking the weedy block in the heat, knowing that on the third—or even fourth—floor of the Iron Lung someone was watching to see if he would come out of the drugstore with a bottle, he wondered when he’d stopped seeing life as a romantic proposition.

  As if in answer, the same gray cat from before vaulted onto the windowsill of his house and, tail twitching, watched Scott pass.

  “Hello, Mr. Ito. Yes, I agree, it’s too hot.”

  The store sold Gordon’s, his brand. The price they were asking seemed high, as did his Coke and the Hershey bar he couldn’t resist. Everything was inflated because of the location, right by the gate. He paid, declining a bag, and walked back across the street and the train tracks, the Coke bottle
in his hand visible proof of his virtue.

  The sugar gave him the lift he needed to get through the afternoon. Left alone in the cold room, he managed to sketch out the story of a reserve halfback who fumbles to lose the big game and becomes a campus outcast. He knew it was slight, a pat magazine piece, but it felt good to work, and when the siren blew at six he had four solid pages. Even more satisfying was the knowledge that today he’d made two hundred dollars.

  He bade Eddie and Dottie and Alan and Oppy good night on the steps of the Iron Lung and turned up Main Street, against the tide of technicians and day players streaming for the gate. The studio was emptying out, like a city evacuating. The deeper he ventured into the lot, the fewer people he saw, until, taking a left on Fifth and passing beneath the water tower, he was alone. Above the door of Stage 11, a caged red light wheeled, warning away any intruder who might disturb the creation of the dream. The director was BEVINS, according to the slate, but exactly what production was a mystery, and though it was likely the shallowest of melodramas, starring actors he’d just witnessed chowing down meatloaf and chicken divan, he had to admit that from the outside the process still possessed a glamour and excitement he’d found nowhere else save Broadway. It was more than the simple collision of money and beauty, those commonest of ingredients. His late, lamented patron Thalberg knew what the robust L.B. Mayer never would. Gross as moving pictures were, in the best of them, as in the best writing, undeniably, there was life. Twice he’d journeyed west and failed to capture anything approaching that spirit. Now, standing outside the closed set, he resolved that instead of exile, he would accept his time here as a challenge.

  His car was waiting, stifling inside. When he turned the key, nothing happened. He had gas, that wasn’t the problem. He pulled out the choke, deliberately depressed the clutch to the floor. Nothing. He tried again, quickly this time, as if he might surprise the engine—in vain. He’d only owned the blasted thing a day. He thought of the salesman on Wilshire, saw him smile, sizing him up, an eastern rube in a wool suit. He rubbed his face with both hands as if he were washing, got out, slammed the door and, already sweating, started walking back to the main gate.