West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “They don’t have a clue. Know how many credits I got? A hundred forty-six. Know how many Huxley’s got? One. They’re paying him three grand a week, and they want to give me the ax.”

  Scott, who was making only twelve-fifty, didn’t say that Pride and Prejudice had won the Oscar. “You ever get one for The Louis Pasteur Story?”

  “Lousy bastards stole it from me. I handed them the set-up on a platter and they gave it to Goldwyn’s brother-in-law. Everyone talks about the unions. When it comes down to it, it’s a family business.”

  “What are you on now?”

  “Some godawful pug pic for Wally Beery. I got a beaut of a title for it though.” His hands framed an invisible marquee. “The Roar of the Crowd.”

  “Not bad. I’ll trade you Madame Curie.”

  “That piece of crap? No dice.”

  “So what do you do if they don’t extend you?”

  “Call my agent and wait for the merry-go-round to come around. It will, it just takes a while sometimes. Don’t worry about me, I got some rainy day money I can fall back on.”

  While they talked, Oppy kept peeking over Scott’s shoulder as if he was spying on someone. When they’d finished and were leaving, he stopped beside the table directly behind them. It hadn’t been cleared, and with no attempt to disguise his actions, as if he were a customer at a bakery, he plucked two hard rolls from a basket, wrapped them in napkins and shoved one in each pocket.

  Here, Scott thought, was his future.

  After dinner he left Oppy to his office and pecked away at Madame Curie, but there was no one to impress. He could only postpone going home so long. Eventually he had to pack up his briefcase, get in the car and drive over the mountains again, the city glowing in the rearview mirror as he climbed the pass, then absolute blackness. The store at the crossroads was closed, a pink neon clock guarding the darkened filling station. For miles the road was a straight shot. Beyond the sign for the dam the only landmarks were telephone poles. Twice he slowed for the gate before he finally turned in. He never remembered to leave a light on, and rubbed his thumb over the doorknob to find the keyhole.

  “Here I am,” he said to the living room. “Did you miss me?”

  Part of his disaffection was the holidays. For Christmas he’d arranged for Scottie to see Zelda in Montgomery, but he and Sheilah had no special plans. He had trouble summoning the mood when every day he expected Eddie Knopf to walk into his office and tell him he was finished. Ober said he didn’t know anything, and Scott armored himself against the inevitable. Instead of putting his last check against his debts, he told Ober to go ahead and pay Scottie’s spring tuition.

  The morning of the Christmas party he was deep in his easy chair, lost in Conrad, when there was a knock at the door. He thought that out of decency they would wait till next week, but closed the book and stood, ready to accept his fate.

  Before he could get it, Dottie burst in with the paper, Alan shutting the door behind him.

  “Did you see this?” she asked, shoving the front page at him.

  “We thought maybe you knew something,” Alan said.

  FOREIGN ENVOY LEAPS TO DEATH, the headline read, with a picture of the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena. It was a famous jumping-off spot, taller than the Hollywoodland sign. The city had erected fences. Scott skimmed the article, stopping on the name: Gerhardt Reinecke.

  “Not very original,” Alan said. “But effective.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Last night,” Dottie said.

  “Merry Christmas.” Alan made a heave-ho gesture.

  “Jesus.” His first thought was Ernest. He refused to believe he would execute someone in cold blood. He could see Mank walking with the German, patting his shoulder like a mob boss coddling a nervous accountant. Producers were men who knew how to solve problems. All the studios had underworld ties, not just Metro. It wasn’t politics, it was business. This is what happens when you cross Hollywood. After the riots in Berlin, there was no need to pretend anymore.

  “No more European market,” he said.

  “No more European censor,” Dottie said.

  “So they just picked him up and chucked him over,” Alan said.

  “I imagine he was dead by then.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dottie said.

  They hadn’t heard anything more from their sources, and told him to keep an ear out, as if the three of them might somehow be implicated. He’d never met the man, the connection between them tenuous at best, and yet he felt vaguely guilty.

  The news made the Christmas party stranger than usual, a ghoulish celebration. He wandered through the bacchanal in shock, stopping at the commissary to watch the grips and secretaries dancing, aware that in a safe in some producer’s office—if not here at Metro, then on another lot—there was likely a coded ledger akin to a bookie’s cryptic dib sheets that could testify to the industry’s collective and murderous intent.

  As he was fleeing, crossing the plaza in front of the Iron Lung, Oppy intercepted him, plowed and wearing an artfully crushed stovepipe hat. “You there, my fine fellow. Do you know if they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging at the poulterer’s?”

  “Why, Mr. Scrooge,” Scott played along. “I thought Christmas was a humbug.”

  “The hell it is. They picked me up for six months. Took ’em long enough, the dopes.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “How ’bout you?”

  “Not a word.”

  “That’s tough. Listen, if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thanks,” Scott said.

  He saved his consternation for the drive home, frowning as the radio burbled on. He didn’t blame Oppy, the old rummy was just trying to survive, and still Scott couldn’t believe it. He’d worked hard on all of the projects they’d given him and hadn’t touched a drop on the lot. It must have been something he’d said, an unintentional slight. Like Reinecke, he’d crossed the wrong person.

  Sheilah had heard the murder rumors, but not even the Hollywood Reporter would touch them. Every so often Dottie checked in with him, bringing news from Pasadena. Officially Reinecke was a suicide. There was no investigation, no formal inquest. Benchley never mentioned him, and as Christmas came and went, Scott understood the whole town was content to let his death remain, like Jean Harlow’s or Thelma Todd’s, an open secret.

  In Encino, so far out in the hills, the nights were quiet. The rainy season was underway, and when he couldn’t sleep, he took his chloral and waited, listening to the downspouts run and the cottage settle, conjuring from a single creak a dark figure on the stairs.

  He dreamed he’d killed a woman. Barefoot, wearing a white gown, she lay in the high, haylike grass of a field just beyond his headlights, her eyes open. He didn’t know how he’d killed her, or why, only that he had. He’d brought her here in his car. Her death was an accident, but he was afraid it would look suspicious. To save himself he needed to bury the body, which he did, digging her grave deep, sweating with the effort, terrified that eventually she’d be found, his life ruined. Within the dream, he had a creeping dread that it wasn’t a nightmare but a memory, his sin, like the woman’s identity, willfully forgotten. His fear was so strong that on waking—as if he were mad or an amnesiac—he couldn’t be sure it hadn’t happened.

  He asked Magda to lock the gate, and in the mornings remembered to leave a light on. In the store he watched the other customers, letting them check out first. Once, driving home, he turned early to see if he was being followed, but the other car went straight.

  He didn’t have to be a detective to know what was coming. Friday after lunch, Eddie called. Could he please come upstairs and see him? Scott was tempted to take his briefcase and leave. Sunday was New Year’s Day, and half the offices in his wing were dark. Oppy was tapping away, likely filling pages with gibberi
sh, but Dottie and Alan were in New York, Huxley on a beach in Mexico. Childish as it was, as Scott made the long walk to the elevator, he thought that now he’d never get his name on his door.

  Eddie was apologetic, shaking his hand, telling him how great he was, how much everyone loved Three Comrades. As of today, he was off Madame Curie. Whatever pages he had he should turn in to his secretary.

  “All I need is another week.”

  It wasn’t Eddie’s decision. For the last month of his contract, Scott was being loaned out to Mayer’s son-in-law, David O. Selznick. He needed all hands on Gone with the Wind.

  Only in Hollywood could you be simultaneously fired and put on the hottest property in town.

  “That piece of crap?” Scott said. “No dice.”

  But Monday he showed up on time.

  HANGOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  Selznick was of the new generation. Unlike Mayer and Goldwyn and Laemmle, he hadn’t sold buttons in Minsk or shirtwaists in Krakow on the narrowest of margins to leave the bosom of his family and endure weeks in steerage dreaming of streets paved with gold only to wash up in the shtetl-like tenements of the Lower East Side where daily he fought his neighbors, those same margins and the Italian rackets, earning a second fortune he used to bankroll a third and, as mere by-product, creating from the dusty foothills of West L.A. a gilded fiefdom called Hollywood. He was American, therefore soft, without Thalberg’s genius. To compensate he paid more, buying the talent he lacked, and put in longer hours than any of the old guard, aided by prescribed doses of amphetamines.

  Scott’s job for him on Gone with the Wind was to polish the previous polish of Sidney Howard’s script, a task that changed from moment to moment as Selznick, distracted by every fleeting notion and under pressure to start shooting, produced a gusher of memos.

  Scene 71: Wouldn’t Scarlett be mad when Rhett laughs at her? Would she really let him get away with it without saying something? One good kicker here.

  Scene 75: We should feel badly for Charles but also understand it’s not Scarlett’s fault her trap has caught the wrong man. She can’t laugh at him for falling for her and neither can we. It’s a comic misunderstanding but he has to keep his dignity.

  Scott was further hamstrung by Selznick’s dictum that he use only Margaret Mitchell’s dialogue. It was like trying to finish a vast, intricate puzzle with the wrong pieces.

  The novel wasn’t awful, as he’d feared. When it had first come out he’d dismissed it as a bloated costume drama, all hoopskirts and magnolia blossoms. Now, having to read it closely, he found it shallow yet compelling, staying up late and closing the fat book with satisfaction. In Scarlett he saw Zelda’s wildness and pride, in Rhett his own rage and dissipation. They weren’t innocents like Romeo and Juliet. Their love was undeniable for the same reasons it couldn’t survive. It would end in ruin, which, thematically, fit with the backdrop of the Lost Cause, doomed from the start. Selznick was right, it would make a great movie, if he’d ever let go of it.

  Gone with the Wind was his. He’d personally acquired the rights while the novel was still in manuscript, staking fifty thousand dollars on a first-time author. The casting of Scarlett had taken over two years, becoming a public sweepstakes, with stars like Lana Turner and Joan Bennett openly campaigning for the role, which, in Cinderella fashion, finally went to a Brit, Scott’s leading lady from A Yank at Oxford, Vivien Leigh, scandalizing the book’s fans.

  Like Mank, what Selznick really wanted was to write the script himself. Scott was the ninth writer he’d hired, and he was still sending out dozens of notes on each scene. Like Ahab, he thought of nothing else, but he was trying to turn over drafts too fast and his mind wasn’t organized. Often Scott was asked to restore lines Selznick had ordered cut that same day.

  The process was made harder by the fact that he didn’t sleep and expected his writers to keep the same hours, pulling all-nighters with him on the top floor of the production office while in the soundstages graveyard shift was finishing the sets. Afraid of taking pills, Scott relied on his insomnia and his Cokes to keep him going, fixing lines with a broken-backed copy of the novel open beside him like a dictionary while his secretary catnapped, shoeless, on the couch. Every couple of hours Selznick called them in for a story conference, going over the last set of changes scene by scene, reading the dialogue out loud in his Yiddish-tinged Pittsburgh accent while chomping on a cigar so that Suellen and Melanie and Prissy all sounded like two-bit fight promoters.

  “Whaddya think?” he asked the room, making the secretaries look up from their dictation. “I know it’s right outta the book, but something’s off. I want her to say something stronger, like, ‘I could never love a man like that’—not that exactly, but close. Scott? Carolyn? Anyone?”

  Thalberg, when Scott had worked with him, said almost nothing, instructing by his silences. At the end of a story conference, after listening to everyone’s pitches, he would simply nod to anoint the winner or shake his head and make a single oblique suggestion reframing the main difficulty. He didn’t worry about dialogue or costumes or music. He had people to do that. Selznick lacked his trust and bogged down in the small stuff, going round and round.

  Technically they were already in production. Back in December Selznick had shot his climactic scene, the burning of Atlanta, torching RKO’s old exteriors from King Kong. Instead of Gable and Vivien Leigh, their stand-ins drove a buckboard through the flames, doubled over to hide their expendable faces. Since then Selznick had been paying his contract players—most, like Scott, on loan—to wait around while he fiddled with the script. Unlike Metro, the studio was too small to absorb so much overhead, and the trades knew it, speculating on his downfall and questioning Mayer’s judgment. “The Son-in-Law Also Sets,” Variety taunted.

  For Scott it was like watching a mad king hold court as the castle was laid siege. Night after night they leapfrogged along, finishing one draft and starting another, addressing questions Selznick had forgotten he’d asked the last time. Scott’s contract was up in two weeks. Though he had no shot at a credit, the longer he hung on the better chance he had of being hired by another studio, and he matched Selznick’s maniacal singlemindedness with his own, sleeping in his spare time and dreaming of the characters, carrying the novel around like a bible. He knew better than anyone how to live in an imaginary world.

  He was tired. Once he’d been a night owl, a prowler of back alleys, brimming with cash and passwords. Now the late hours made him dull. Like Selznick, the studio never rested. While the stars slept safely behind the monogrammed gates of their Bel Air mansions, the elves of third shift mended their costumes and pieced together their scenes, added music and sound effects and titles. To revive himself, Scott took the elevator down and walked outside past the cutting rooms and scoring stages to the commissary for a piece of cherry pie à la mode or a square of fudge, wondering at the odd carpenters and painters playing cards where during the day the famous kibitzed, as if they might be actors as well. At three in the morning the lot took on a fantastic aspect, the moonlight imbuing the false fronts with a pregnant solidity, and as he walked back to the office he imagined his producer unable to sleep and haunting the empty streets. He would meet his girl here as if she were a figment born of his separateness. The question was how.

  He had a week left on his contract when Selznick summoned him for their first conference of the night and there at his place at the table sat another writer with another secretary.

  “John Van Druten,” Selznick said, as if Scott should know who he was.

  While he understood it was inevitable, he was still jealous. He shook the man’s hand and took the chair opposite him, recalling Paramore.

  They weren’t collaborating. He was off the project. As with Madame Curie, he was to hand over everything to his successor. He’d be paid for his remaining days. He’d done good work. Selznick would be happy to give him a recommendation. All h
e had to do was call Carolyn and she’d arrange it.

  For this, Scott thanked him.

  At midnight he found himself outside the gate, suddenly unemployed, his briefcase weighted with unopened Cokes. In the oil fields beyond the lot, plumes of fire spouted geyserlike above the derricks, burning off impurities. He called Sheilah from a chop suey parlor on Crenshaw and she told him to come over. He still had to drive across town. After she’d done her best to comfort him, she slept, soughing, while he lay there wide awake, leafing through scenes like Selznick, second-guessing himself.

  His pass was good for another week. Rather than waste this last opportunity, each morning he reported to the Iron Lung, sending Eddie pitch memos with ideas for Joan Crawford and Garbo. His entire time at Metro he’d been assigned to women’s pictures, but with war imminent, spy thrillers were big. Why not combine the two? With the shamelessness of a carpetbagger he cobbled together a scenario in which a happily married wife discovers her husband is secretly a Bund member. In another he made it a mother and son, a mother and daughter, two best friends, a next-door neighbor, the parish priest. He worked out his plots in detail, each of them taking place around a submarine base, or sometimes a shipyard. The secretary’s eyes went dead when she saw him coming, and the memos were full of typos. Treachery was everywhere.