The war dwarfed their problems. What was a broken molar when the Germans were pushing through the Ardennes? He went to the dentist and Belgium fell. Luxembourg, the Netherlands. He thought of Gerald and Sara’s villa, and Sheilah’s brother in London. Ernest was probably there somewhere, filing hot copy.
They were on their way to the World’s Fair in San Francisco when the radio broadcast the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was a victory, saving the British army to fight again, but there was nothing to stop the Germans from taking Paris. He was there every day, on the Quai du Louvre with Scottie, as Cary Grant in the Ritz bar. Selfishly, he felt it was his city, his past they were taking from him—the gray, rainy streets and scabby sycamores and hennaed doyennes walking their little dogs in the Jardin des Plantes. He wondered if he would feel the same if the Japanese bombed Los Angeles.
At the fair, by chance, they ran into Bogie and Mayo, both sozzled and ready to fight the Germans there in the Frigidaire Hall of Progress.
“Fitzy!” Bogie said. “You make me feel young again, brother. You look like hell.”
“I had a little heart trouble,” Scott said, declining a pint.
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Sorry to hear what?” Mayo asked, because the pavilion echoed with ballyhoo.
“He’s got a bum ticker,” Bogie said.
“You don’t have to yell. I can hear just fine.”
“You don’t listen, that’s your problem.”
“That’s cause I have to listen to you all the time. Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah.”
“Is that what we sound like?” Scott asked Sheilah at the hotel.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what we sound like.”
He didn’t tell anyone for fear of being labeled a hypocrite, but he liked being back in Hollywood. Mornings with Françoise, whistling “La Marseillaise,” evenings with Sheilah, making love with the windows open. He knew this idyll was an illusion. Nightly the radio brought worse news. Convoys sank, cathedrals burned. The front page of the Times showed disastrous maps.
The day Paris fell he received a letter from Mrs. Sayre. Sara and I are deeply concerned about Zelda’s current frame of mind. Last night at supper she suffered some sort of toxic attack, possibly triggered by something she ate. She began talking gibberish and when I tried to help she was openly abusive to me and Melinda and broke several pieces of tableware as well as our large mantel clock, which you may remember. She has since calmed down and is making sense again, but for most of the evening she refused to leave her room and threatened to hurt Sara if she attempted to open the door. We have followed the doctor’s instructions religiously so I am at a loss as to what else we can do. Perhaps because she visited us for only short periods of time I didn’t realize how ill she really is.
Scottie was supposed to arrive there Friday. That morning Zelda cabled: CANT STAY HERE ANY LONGER. PLEASE WIRE BUS FARE ASAP. WILL SEE SCOTTIE IN ASHEVILLE. I TRIED.
And then, two hours later: DISREGARD LAST. FEEL FINE NOW. ANXIOUS TO SEE PIE.
Knowing her, none of it surprised him. He shook his head and went back to work.
She seems the same to me, Scottie wrote. Most of the time she’s fine, just a little vague around the edges. When she gets excited and starts going on about God and the cosmos, it’s obvious, but that’s not often. It’s when she runs out of gas and just sits there that you notice, and that happens regularly. I think Grandma’s afraid of her since she broke the door. She’s still walking five miles a day and rides a bike all over town. Everybody knows her, which is good. She has the church and the library. I don’t think she’s lonely. Is she better? No, but I think she’s happier.
Wise Pie, voting for compromise. She’d been too young to know the real Zelda and so didn’t hold out for the impossible. Part of him understood she was lost from the beginning. Another part would never accept it, just as he both admitted and denied that he was at least partly to blame. The truth was in the middle, hidden from him, too close to his own failings. He had loved her above all others, but not enough—not as much, his conscience insisted, as he loved himself.
Between the tragedy in Europe and Zelda’s struggles, he had the debilitating sense that his life was governed by forces beyond his control. As if to confirm the notion, his car was stolen again. He used it so rarely he didn’t know it was missing. The police found it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, out of gas. With Frances’s help he retrieved it, parking in the same numbered spot behind his building, checking the locks as if that would protect it.
“That’s why we got out,” Dottie said. “The neighborhood’s gone to hell.” She and Alan had moved to a chateau in Bel Air. They threw a dinner party for some Garden alumni, with Benchley and Don Stewart, Sid and Laura, Pep and his wife Eileen. They were overly solicitous, telling him how good he looked. Bogie must have told them. They could see he was on the wagon. “I feel a million percent better,” he said like a press agent, knowing they’d spread the news. They danced and played charades, and at the end of the night, by the wavering light of tiki torches, Dottie led them in “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” As they sang he realized it was the piece he needed, and in the morning wrote it into the script.
His producer sent a copy to Shirley Temple. “She’ll love it,” he assured Scott, without force.
To their astonishment she did, and in pursuit of his bonus he had the novel pleasure of eating lunch with the star and her mother on their patio. While the child’s trademark curls and cheeks were the same that graced a thousand magazine covers, she was much older than he’d thought, taller, around twelve, with a pudgy suggestion of breasts. The mansion was tucked in a cul-de-sac behind Pickfair and backed up on Chaplin’s tennis courts, where Paulette Goddard was playing the man himself in a white bicycling cap. From time to time a ball came sailing over to land in the pampered grass, and Shirley jumped up and heaved it back like DiMaggio. While they pushed their tuna salad around, the mother did all the talking, saying how moving the story was, how beautifully written, to the point where he wondered if Shirley had even read the script, and then when they were finished eating, she turned her alert eyes on him and asked, “What kind of name is Honoria? It sounds English.”
“It’s the name of the daughter of some dear friends of mine.”
“Are they English?”
“They’re American.”
“We were talking before,” the mother said, “and we agreed. If the father is American, we think she should have an American name. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course.”
“The opening scene,” Shirley prompted.
“Right. The first time we see her playing in the gardens, we think she should be by herself, not with other children.”
He should have known—it wasn’t lunch, it was a story conference. They were giving him notes. He left with three pages of changes he dutifully inflicted on his script, only to receive, a month later, a second set, and though the producer claimed they were still interested, by then Cary Grant had passed, and Joseph Cotten, and Scott promised his agent never to write anything on spec again.
His next project was for Darryl Zanuck at Fox, The Light of Heart, a holiday weepie starring John Barrymore as a drunken department store Santa with a crippled daughter. Ten weeks at seven hundred. If all went well he’d have enough to finish Stahr. Mornings he got up early to work on his Esquire story, then drove to the studio. As a late heat wave settled over the city and the hills caught fire, he conjured his father in snowy St. Paul and came down with a fever. He couldn’t sleep, and woke Sheilah at odd hours, obsessively taking his temperature. Bogie was right: in the mirror he looked gray and drawn. Every week a nurse came to shoot him full of vitamin B, and still he was tired. A month in, he thought he wouldn’t mind if they killed the picture, but he’d never quit, and then was angry when Zanuck brought in Nunnally Johnson.
They bought him out,
an insult, giving him a free month. It was October, the weather finally cooling. He had no excuses.
Here were the days he’d paid for, too precious to waste. After so long away from the novel, and everything he’d learned in between, he was impatient with his old pages, and despaired of fixing them. The girl was wrong, the plane crash hackneyed. He’d have to tear it apart, start again. In the depths of the night, like a needy ghost, Stahr woke him. He put on his robe and sharpened his pencils while the kettle warmed. He opened his notebook and wrote: Stahr knows he’s going to die. That isn’t the tragedy. Hollywood is.
He tacked up maps and charts and timelines on the walls, signs of commitment. It would be like Gatsby, the action proceeding from mood and situation. All he needed to do was be true to the characters and their world. He knew them well enough. He wished he were stronger, but didn’t doubt himself. He already believed in Stahr.
He was best first thing in the morning. At lunch he had a Coke to keep going, and around three a Hershey bar. By five he was done, punchy with keeping it all in his head. It was then he wanted a drink to soothe his nerves. Some days he gave in, sneaking a sip from a half-pint hidden in the hatbox with Ginevra’s wedding invitation, savoring the taste before disguising it with Lavoris. Just one, as Budd might have said, never a second, and never after dark. He wanted to be fresh for tomorrow.
Frances ran to the library and Stanley Rose’s for books on Griffith and Ince and the early flicker parlors, and to the airport for schedules. He liked her to read Cecelia’s parts out loud, since she was of the same generation. Every day he asked for the first page to reacquaint himself.
“Repetez, s’il vous plait.”
“‘Though I’ve never been on the screen, I was brought up around pictures. Valentino came to my fifth birthday party, or so I’m told.’”
“In pictures. Repetez, s’il vous plait.”
A born bookkeeper, she wasn’t bored. Having typed up his notes, she knew the story almost as well as he did, recalling lost details with the pedantry of the young. She was good with dialogue, all right with plot, and happy as teacher’s pet when he took one of her suggestions. He could tell how well he was doing by how eager she was to reach a scene, and when he skimped or made a wrong turn he could hear the disappointment in her voice. Stahr meeting Kathleen at the screenwriters’ ball had to be perfect, all the rest depended on it. He watched her face as she read, knitted with worry, softening toward the end, her lips parting to release a held breath. She looked up at him, plaintive, like a girl waiting to be kissed.
“It’s beautiful.”
“You think so?”
“It’s like Cinderella.”
“Too much?”
“No.” Then a shrug. “Maybe a little.”
Honest Françoise, the tailor’s sharp-eyed daughter.
In the midst of this delicate construction, Ernest sent him his new one, For Whom the Bell Tolls, with an affectionate inscription. The tale of a lone, heroic American vainly trying to save Spain, it was the Book of the Month for November, and had sold to Paramount for a hundred thousand. To Scott it seemed adolescent and thin, probably because Stahr was with him all the time now. He carried him inside him to the Troc and Ciro’s and the Hollywood Bowl like a third eye, transforming the city. At the Coliseum and Malibu Pier he gathered ornaments for his story, attuned to Stahr’s thoughts, stealing from the real world to furnish his universe. Lying beside Sheilah, he walked Kathleen to her door and chastely kissed her goodnight. In his Rolls, its lights dimmed, his faithful chauffeur waited.
Congratulations on the grand success of your big book, he wrote Ernest. No one could have written it but you.
HARD ON IT, he wired Max. MAKING EXC PROGRESS. EXPECT DRAFT BY JAN 15. PLS DONT DISCUSS WITH OBER.
He felt better when he wrote well, as if he were fulfilling his duty. To help him think, he smoked more than he should have, and every day drank three or four Cokes, but his lungs were clear and the doctor was happy with his cardiograms. Now that the weather was cooler he was walking for exercise. He took his digitalis, and he and Sheilah were careful, mostly. After months of looking washed-out he’d gotten back some of his color. From all evidence he was nearly recovered, so he was unprepared when, one night after Thanksgiving, he hopped down to Schwab’s for a pack of Raleighs and was standing at the register when he felt a familiar twinge in his chest.
He’d done nothing strenuous, yet his arm throbbed. He rubbed it as if that might get rid of the ache, opened and closed one hand experimentally. A dull pang like heartburn made him wince and grit his teeth.
“Blast it,” he said, and groped his way to a stool.
The darkness held off. In minutes he was fine, just clammy, blotting his brow with his handkerchief. He could stand, walk.
“Mister,” the clerk stopped him. “Your cigarettes.”
The doctor called it a spasm, not an actual attack. He upped his dosage to the limit and told him he needed to quit smoking. No sex, no stairs. The most important thing was rest. He shouldn’t work more than a few hours a day.
Sheilah didn’t think he should be alone and moved him into her spare bedroom.
“All it took was a heart attack,” he joked.
He didn’t feel weak but, like Stahr, distrusted his heart, knowing it was faulty. He stuck the unopened pack in a drawer, stopped drinking his Cokes. He couldn’t send Frances to rescue the half-pint and for the first time in his life became a bona fide teetotaler. His only vices now were Mildred’s pies and poring over yesterday’s pages when he couldn’t sleep.
The voice was right. The novel was solid. He should have worried yet he was madly happy. He wasn’t mistaken. Three hours a day wasn’t enough. The room was too small. There was no desk, there was barely room for a chair. Frances sat by his head like a nurse, taking dictation in shorthand. At noon she ran the new pages around the corner to his place and came back with fresh typescript. His schedule slipped to February, March at the latest. Max didn’t care. He’d already missed his deadline by three years.
It was just a mild episode, not an attack, and I’m feeling much better, he wrote Scottie. I want your mother to have a good Christmas, so while you’re down there please don’t mention it. Be especially patient with her and with your grandmother. They’ve had a trying year.
For several weeks he didn’t leave the apartment, and then, Friday the thirteenth, he and Sheilah trekked over the pass to Pep and Eileen’s in North Hollywood for a dinner party. The weather was warm, and they sat in the backyard around a trestle table while on a great stone barbecue Pep roasted woodcock he’d shot, telling them it was pigeon from Pershing Square. The talk was of London, three months into the Blitz. Sections of the East End had been leveled. To give them a sense of the destruction, Sheilah used Los Angeles as a stand-in.
“Imagine all of Hollywood and half of Beverly Hills gone.”
“With pleasure,” Dottie said.
Scott couldn’t dance, and after dinner sat out with her, watching Alan and Sheilah and Bogie and Mayo swaying beneath the night sky. Dottie had been drinking scotch since they’d arrived and had reached a scowling, foul-mouthed state. He wasn’t used to being the sober one and was ready to go home. On his lap desk today’s pages waited.
“What a cunt,” she said.
“Stop.”
“Alan, I mean. Did I tell you, they cut my insides out. Snip snip.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They were all rotted anyway. Now he doesn’t have to worry about having kids, the bugger. What about you?”
“What?”
“Kids.” She waggled a hand at Sheilah. “She’s got all the right parts.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You should. Everyone should have kids.”
“I don’t know if she wants them.”
“She’s crazy. They’d be beautiful. You were beautif
ul.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You were too.”
“We should’ve had kids. To our beautiful children.” Byooful.
She crashed her tumbler into his, spilling whiskey on the tablecloth. She dabbed her fingers in the wet spot and flicked droplets over her shoulder for luck.
“Look at him,” she said. “If I ever kill him, you’ll know why.”
On the ride home he told Sheilah a bowdlerized version.
“I think I knew about the surgery.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
“It’s also going around that he’s seeing another woman.”
“A woman.”
“Believe it or not.”
“No wonder she’s angry.” He watched the shadows from the streetlights slide across her face. “She asked if we’re going to have children.”
“Did she?”
“She did.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I didn’t know if you wanted them.”
“I do,” she said, glancing at him, her smile a dare.
“She’ll be happy to hear it.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said.
It was the last week before Christmas, and she needed her tree. He was still forbidden to lift anything, so Frances helped her get it in the stand. It stood a little crooked, topped with a gold star made in Japan. With a pair of pinking shears she pruned away the ragged branches until she was pleased with its shape. She’d listened to his boyhood tales and set bayberry candles on the mantel, nestled in the fresh-smelling boughs. At dusk she lit the wicks and the apartment might have been his Grandmother McQuillan’s parlor, a dry snow falling outside.
West of Sunset Page 30
