West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “You’ve done this before,” Alan said.

  Turning in the script was anticlimactic. He gave his messy final draft pages to his secretary, who gave the typed pages to Paramore’s secretary, who gave the script to Eddie, who gave it to Mank, who, several long days later, sent Scott a copy with an official Metro stamp declaring it APPROVED. His name still came first, but Paramore had completely changed the big hospital scene.

  To protect his work, he needed to be on the set. He made his case to Eddie, but Mank didn’t want either of them in his hair. There was no point complaining. He was getting a credit, his first in three visits, and on a prestige picture. It qualified as a triumph, except now he had nothing to do.

  My Dearest Pie, he wrote. I want to apologize for not making it up your way while I was in New York. I’d hoped to steal an afternoon and rescue you and Peaches from the horrors of the dining hall but got caught up in some nonsense in the city. Suffice to say I was overdrawn both physically and emotionally by then, and poor company. Your mother and I survived Miami and she was happy to be home. The doctor has her on a new medication meant to render her less excitable but which goes too far, I think. She was entirely pleasant yet entirely lacking the high spirits that make her the exceptional woman she is. My hope is that she will be more herself at Easter, and that you can join us then. Details to follow.

  As for your Latin, please stick it out. While it may seem a burden now, you’ll discover it is indispensable, and the better schools will expect it. You have three months left. For all of our sakes, please apply yourself. You’ll have the whole summer to loaf around. Think of June as a finish line. I wasn’t joking about Europe. The way things are going this may be the last chance to visit there freely, and while we’re not completely out of debt yet, I could happily see it as an investment. Everything, of course, depends on what you want.

  Let me know your thoughts when you have a chance. Sometimes I feel I’m talking to the air out here.

  He thought it was natural: after spending every minute with Zelda, he was lonely. Sheilah avoiding him as punishment only made it worse. The rainy season was upon them, mudslides cutting off the canyons. He had a story to work on, but woke up late, then wasted his days at the office dipping into Conrad and watching the wet hedges for Mr. Ito.

  Bogie understood. Those empty stretches between jobs were the most dangerous.

  “Idle hands,” he said, toasting him and pinching Mayo.

  It was true. As a boy, he’d always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors’ activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.

  The temptation was to start his Hollywood book. He knew his producer; it was the business he needed to learn. All along, in his own disorganized fashion, he’d been taking notes. He had a good enough grasp of that world to begin, but he’d only be pulled off it anyway.

  Joan Crawford saved him. She was nearing the end of her contract, and after flopping with The Gorgeous Hussy, she needed a hit. While she was the studio’s top female star, over the years her range had narrowed. No longer the wide-eyed flapper or plucky shopgirl, she lacked the youth and softness to be a romantic lead. Now she specialized in playing the scorned woman in her own brand of weepies, enduring mortifications in the second act to reap a bittersweet revenge in the third. Eddie came down to give him the good news in person. Hunt Stromberg wanted Scott to adapt a Cosmopolitan story for her, a love triangle teasingly titled Infidelity.

  “Sounds like typecasting to me,” Dottie said, and for a shocked second he thought she meant him.

  “She’s the wife.”

  “So it’s a fantasy,” Alan said.

  “She’s slept with everyone at Metro except Lassie,” Dottie said.

  “You’ll like Hunt,” Alan said. “He’s not like Mank. He doesn’t think he’s Shakespeare.”

  The story itself wasn’t much. A rich businessman invites his beautiful secretary to dinner at his mansion while his wife is away in Europe. The next morning the wife returns early and surprises them at breakfast, and as the three of them calmly sit there, served by the faithful butler, the man knows his marriage is over and imagines the great mansion empty and echoing. From these two scenes Scott was supposed to come up with a whole picture.

  He met with Stromberg that afternoon, not in an overpopulated conference room but privately, man-to-man, in Stromberg’s office, a mahogany den lined with bookshelves. He was young, of a different generation than Mank and the others, gangly in tweed, the new junior professor. As Scott suspected, he’d read Gatsby. He pitched the picture to him as if Scott might say no.

  “We want modern and adult but still warm. We need to feel sympathy for all three of them, that’s the only way it works.”

  Scott wanted to say it was impossible with Joan Crawford, but nodded, jotting notes.

  “The location’s open, what line the husband’s in, all that business. She doesn’t have to be his secretary, she can be a scientist or a concert pianist, we just have to like her, or at least understand why she does what she does.”

  “Love,” Scott offered.

  “Kick it around. I’ve got Myrna Loy for the girl.”

  He couldn’t think of a tougher combination. Somehow she had to be innocent—they all did, otherwise the audience would turn on them. In his experience, people in love were helpless, except, rather than pure of heart, it made them selfish, walled-off, so focused on their own happiness they’d let the rest of the world burn—a mistake he’d almost made with Lois Moran. He felt the same murderous indifference from Zelda that awful summer in Juan-les-Pins and recognized it in himself with Sheilah. How could he show that coldness overtaking the husband without making him despicable?

  He was free to invent any solution, which in the beginning made the challenge harder, but also meant the script was all his. Working for Stromberg was a step up, everyone said, and Scott could see why. Where Mank pitted his writers against each other to get his way, Stromberg sat back and let him figure out how to tell the story.

  The first thing he needed to figure out was how to use Joan Crawford. He studied her like a test subject, skipping lunch to sit in the flickering dark of Thalberg’s old projection room with a Coke and a chipped ashtray, watching her arch her eyebrows and smirk her way through Possessed and Chained and Forsaking All Others, trying to discern her strengths. She had good cheekbones and her clothes showed off her figure, but she wasn’t a natural actress. In her wronged women there was no depth, no shading. When she was supposed to be happy, she smiled too brightly; when betrayed, she raged like a harpy, coming off not just false but ridiculous. She was consistently mawkish and overwrought, with one interesting exception.

  In every picture, for the bulk of the second act, she was asked to bear her heartbreak and carry on. Family and social standing lost, she was reduced to menial jobs to support herself. She clenched her jaw and wrung out laundry, did dishes, scrubbed floors, at first resentfully, but then, as she recovered herself, with an avidity and pride that struck him as genuine. This was why she was a star, not the maudlin hysterics. Beneath the sweeping, cantilevered gowns by Adrian, she was steely and practical. Her character would have to be strong, maybe stronger than her husband. Yes, and obviously stronger from the very beginning, a Lady Macbeth who drives him into the secretary’s arms—but with noble
r ambitions, a reformer or humanitarian.

  “When they break up, she doesn’t crumble,” he told Stromberg. “He does. Then when he realizes what he’s done, it’s her decision to take him back or not—which works, since it’s her picture. Her audience will understand either way.”

  “What about the secretary?”

  “The secretary really does love him, she’s just a kid. We have her play her a little wide-eyed, the small town girl with a big heart. It’s tougher on her than anybody.”

  Stromberg mulled it, drawing on his pipe.

  “How soon can you have a draft together?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “You’ve got eight. Give me something good.”

  He would need them. By the end of the first week, all he had was his opening, a long shot of a wedding reception in the Waldorf’s rooftop gardens, where he and Ginevra once danced under the stars. Through matching opera glasses, two older women in a neighboring building spy on the various couples, divining the state of their love lives. To distant music, panning, we get the candy figures atop the wedding cake, the newlyweds stepping out for their first dance, the proud parents clapping, a bridesmaid and her date strolling hand in hand among the rose beds, cherubs kissing atop a fountain, till we come to Crawford and her husband, off in the farthest part of the garden, the corner parapet, facing away from each other, looking down the dark canyons of Manhattan, lost in their separate thoughts. “Oh dear,” one of the grannies says. “What happened to them?”

  He liked the question, the way it set the stage, but then bogged down in false starts. The source material was so skimpy, it was like writing an original script. After wrestling with her profession for several days, he settled on her being a fashion designer, except he knew nothing of that world, and had to walk over to wardrobe and get filled in by one of the dressers.

  He already had the wife and the husband, they were easy. The secretary was trickier, stuck in the middle, and as he had with Vivien Leigh in A Yank at Oxford, he based her on Sheilah.

  They were back together after another campaign of poems and roses, another promise to stop, or at least try. He didn’t dare say that on average he hadn’t been this sober in years. Valentine’s was coming up, an opportunity to redeem himself. He made reservations at the Cocoanut Grove and hit Bullock’s for a new tux, taking a detour through the Women’s section with his notebook open.

  Bullock’s, Schwab’s, the Troc—everywhere he went he pictured Joan Crawford, imagined her character parsing the other women on the street. He began to pay attention to fabrics and hemlines, and to be dismayed at the epidemic of slacks.

  One noontime, walking over to the commissary after working all morning, he ran into her—unmistakable, with that great, haughty face. Up close she seemed smaller, her waist tiny from dieting. She didn’t recognize him, and he had to introduce himself.

  “I’m writing your new picture.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling as if he’d cleared up a mystery, and wagged a finger at him like a teacher. “Two things. I never die in my pictures, and I never, ever lose my man. Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  “I am,” he said, though he was already well behind schedule.

  He expected Stromberg to check on his progress, but the only memo he received had to do with the censors. Ever since the announcement in Variety, the Legion of Decency had been petitioning the Hays Office to do something. To placate them, Stromberg was changing the title to Fidelity.

  “Smart,” Oppy said.

  “He’ll have to do more than that to get it by them,” Dottie said.

  “There’s a tasteful kiss,” Scott said. “That’s it.”

  “Tasteful’s worse, actually,” she said. “The guy’s cheating on his wife. If you make him a heel, maybe, but then he’s got to come to a bad end. So does she.”

  “It woulda passed in the good old days,” Oppy said, meaning five years ago, before the Code.

  “I’ll be surprised if L.B. goes for it,” Alan said. “It sounds more like something Warner’s would do.”

  Stromberg told him not to worry. Scott saw it as a challenge—irresistible, really—but as he blocked out the first act, he kept in mind Mayer’s puritanical streak, and second-guessed his effects, doubling back, working slower and slower till he was nibbling at the stage directions when he needed to be bashing out scenes.

  Late one afternoon as he was fixing a playful exchange between Myrna Loy and the husband, Dottie burst in without knocking, Alan at her heels. They gathered close about his desk, whispered as if someone might hear them through the vents. They’d just seen the Nazi in the elevator.

  The car was going up, and stopped to let a messenger off. The Nazi stayed on, headed for the fourth floor.

  “I’ll bet he’s come to watch your dailies,” Dottie said.

  “Already,” Scott said, since they’d only begun shooting.

  “He knows what he’s looking for,” Alan said. “He’s had the script since you turned it in.”

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Just hope it’s Mank that’s showing him,” she said. “He may be a dumb son of a bitch, but he’s still a Jew.”

  “Unlike L.B.,” Alan said, “who’s a Jeunuch.”

  “You know his secretary,” she said, pointing to the phone. “See if he’s in.”

  Scott hesitated, wondering why she couldn’t call, and then felt cowardly. He thought of Ernest during the air raid, bumping his head.

  Mank’s secretary verified it. They were headed over to the projection room.

  “Come on,” Dottie said, and raced down the hall to their office, which faced Main Street. There, below, crossing the broad, palm-lined plaza toward the commissary, Mank and the man called Reinecke were engaged in conversation, Mank gesticulating with both hands. Scott’s first thought was that the German was older, and slight—hardly a threat. He wore a bowler and a black suit like a Charing Cross banker, and carried a briefcase, the contents of which Scott ridiculously imagined included top secret documents and a gun.

  As they neared the newsstand, Mank stopped Reinecke to make a point. The German tossed his head back and laughed, and Mank patted his shoulder like an old friend.

  “First rule of business,” Dottie said. “Start ’em off with a joke.”

  They turned the corner of the payroll office and disappeared. Scott thought she might want him to shadow them like a detective, sneaking into the booth to eavesdrop, but she had a simpler solution: call Harry the projectionist and have him hold on to the cans.

  “I take it you’ve been doing this a while.”

  “We like to know what’s going on.”

  “Not that it does any good,” Alan said.

  “Don’t be naive, darling. The most important thing in the world is knowing who’s on your side. Isn’t that right, Scott?”

  She turned a feline smile on him, and what could he do but agree?

  They broke up, going back to work, though now he couldn’t concentrate.

  They reconvened after Mank’s secretary tipped them. It was a quarter to six. In the shady alleys between soundstages, grips and day players loitered, waiting for the siren. Dottie cut through the production office and out the back, as if they were being followed.

  Harry had propped open the side door for them. He was grandfatherly, gaunt and bald as a light bulb, and wore a vest like a Wild West barkeep. Scott knew him from watching Joan Crawford’s catalog, though they’d barely spoken. He was one of those studio functionaries who resented any attempt at chit-chat. Alan gave him five bucks for staying late, and like moguls, they took the front row.

  The lights died, the projector whirred, and the screen glowed white. A numbered header snaked past, replaced by a chalk-marked slate, the lens racking, pulling focus. Though he’d worked on it for months, seeing the title made the film suddenly real, and for an i
nstant he was inordinately proud. The clapper boy snapped down the gate and stepped out of frame, revealing the interior of Alfonso’s Café.

  The scene was an early one between Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan. He and his two mechanic friends had raced her rich boyfriend’s Buick on the way to town and beaten it with their jalopy, and now, while the others were carousing in the background, Taylor was making a play for her. The tone was light, Sullavan breezily parrying each advance, which only made him want her more. Scott had brought his script to see if they’d changed anything. There was only one line that might be objectionable. Of the three veterans, Erich was the rugged, apolitical one, but she purposefully confused him with Franchot Tone’s crusading Communist. The dig was: “You’re the one who was so upset about the state of the country.”

  “You’re the one who was so upset about the state of the country,” she said.

  It was all there exactly as Scott had written it.

  “For now,” Dottie said. “Make a note. The bastard wasn’t here for his health.”

  The next scene also took place in the café, though it came much later in the script. They’d probably shot them all at once, using the same set-up. Franchot Tone was telling Sullavan that Erich needed her more than he did. It was a speech Scott and Paramore had battled over, and as it played out before him on the screen, with a creeping sense of disbelief he realized the whole thing had been rewritten. They hadn’t kept a single line of his.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s Mank,” Dottie said, as if he should have expected it.

  “He’s still the good guy though,” Alan said. “Comrade Franchot.”

  “That’s exactly what they’ll want changed,” she said. “The Communist can’t be the hero.”

  “Then they’ll have to change a lot,” Scott said. “Especially the ending.”

  The next scene had been gutted as well, and the next, just stray scraps of dialogue left.

  “Christ, why does he even need a script?”

  “Welcome to Hollywood,” Dottie said.