The coast swung to the west, and the highway followed. They came to Pensacola but did not ask to inspect the great naval airbase—having with them a notorious Communist under indictment in New York. They came to Mobile, an old Southern city on a great bay, and they drove through streets lined by old houses with tall white pillars and double balconies, enclosed in gardens with walls covered by honeysuckle and trumpet vines. And presently it was the Mississippi Sound, a long shell road lined with stately old homes. They stopped in Biloxi, and in a Creole café they ate what was called a gumbo, a kind of fish chowder much like what Lanny had eaten in Marseille and known as bouillabaisse; it contained a variety of the edible creatures that swam in that sea, in addition to tomatoes, rice, okra, and peppers, and when you had eaten a large bowl of it you were through for the day.
They did not go on to New Orleans but westward to Baton Rouge. This was Louisiana, the stamping ground of Huey Long, who had promised to make every man a king and had made himself their emperor. He had built a political machine not so different from that of Hitler, but he had not gone to war. He had left himself an elaborate set of monuments in the shape of beautiful highways and steel bridges, everyone of them with his name on it. The tourists spent the night in a motor court outside the capital, and in the morning crossed the broad Mississippi on a ferry loaded with cars. They drove slowly up the Red River, full of mist, following its planless windings and turnings until they came to Texas.
Then they would drive four or five hundred miles straight westward with hardly a turn. First there were farms and then there were oilfields, black with derricks and crowded with traffic. After that were the endless grazing plains, hundreds of miles of them, with mesquite trees so big and so regular you could hardly persuade yourself it was not an orchard. But the only fruit was mistletoe—enough of it to have served for all the Christmas kissing of the ages.
It was monotonous driving, but Lanny never got tired of it. Hansi could sit in the back seat and compose his musical themes in his mind, and Laurel could read the stack of mail which she had got in Dallas. She telephoned every single day to make sure the precious little ones were getting all they needed; also to the office to make sure the speakers were keeping their engagements and everything going on schedule.
VI
So they came to El Paso, the Pass. They would have liked to have a glimpse of Mexico, but Wilbur Post had specified that Hansi was forbidden to leave United States territory. They crossed the Rio Grande where its course turned northward; the highway wound up through the pass, between mountains strangely white—not snow but rocks. From then it was all mountains, one range after another, with rocks piled in endless strange forms—towers, temples, fortresses, monuments; it was hard to believe that nature had made them. They were of every colour you could name—red, yellow, black, green, grey, and blue or purple in the distance. It was desert country; the streams ran madly in the spring and dried up in summer. There was agriculture only where dams had been built and the water was tamed.
First New Mexico, then Arizona. The days were hot and the nights were cold, but the cabins in the motels were air-conditioned and every comfort had been provided for the tourists. A century ago the emigrant trains of covered wagons had toiled through these passes, hauled by horses and oxen, and many of the venturesome had perished of thirst or had been killed by the fiercest of Indians. Now there was an endless ribbon of smooth concrete, and every few miles a filling station where you could get not merely petrol but cold soft drinks and candy bars. You could not drive for half an hour without coming upon a café with a quaint name or a hamburger stand labelled ‘Eats’. It was migration made easy, and people had found out about it; there were thousands of cars that went westward and didn’t come back. The population of California was growing at something like a quarter of a million a year.
Somewhere to the north in that wide state of New Mexico Budd-Erling had an airfield where it tested jet engines and planes; Lanny and Laurel had visited it twice during the war. Immediately after the war it had been closed down, but now it was starting up again. But the trio didn’t visit it; you just couldn’t take an indicted Red into such a place, and you couldn’t explain that he wasn’t what he was supposed to be. Not even to the president of the company could you explain it!
They went on across Arizona and down the valley of the dry Gila River to Yuma, the hottest place in the United States. They crossed the Colorado River and into a city where the temperature was something like a hundred and ten degrees. They got themselves an air-conditioned cabin and stayed in it until the sun went down, and then the steering wheel of the car was so hot that it burned Lanny’s hands and he held a newspaper in between.
They made the trip through the California desert at night. Thousands of tons of dates were ripening in the great orchards, and there were miles and miles of melon vines which they could not see in the dark. It was the wonderful Coachella Valley. The highway ran almost straight for forty miles and then climbed up through a straight pass between mountains two miles high. Alongside the highway moved a line of freight cars that seemed to be half a mile long; two or three Diesel engines pulled it; and two more pushed it from behind, and up it went and up. Lanny could go faster, and they passed the whole line and came over the ridge, first into the cherry country and then down into the orange groves—a hundred miles or so of these.
VII
So they came to Hollywood, land of all the world’s dreams, with almost as many stars as the Milky Way. Lanny and Laurel wanted to stay here for a while and meet some friends. But Hansi had friends here too and certainly couldn’t go about without being recognised and getting into the newspapers. He said not to worry about him, he was perfectly comfortable in a little cabin and had some musical ideas that he wanted to get down on paper. He had been impressed by the landscape of America and by the people of the highway who had been so genial and courteous. He might some day shock the musical world by introducing a composition based on the folk tunes he had heard in Florida. Also, he had a couple of books to read, and he would get the news with the radio set; when he was hungry he would go to an obscure little grocery and buy what he needed.
The last time Lanny and Laurel had been here they had been seeing the world in a trailer and had parked it on the estate of their wealthy and fashionable friends, the De Lyle Armbrusters. These socially ambitious persons maintained a combination of salon and swimming pool for the Hollywood great, and so they were the front door to paradise. Lanny telephoned, and they exclaimed with delight and said to come right away. Lanny explained that they were taking a motor trip and had ‘no clothes’; but De Lyle said that didn’t matter a bit, his affairs were never formal, and besides there was a new style known as ‘California casual’. Men wore flannels and light blouses with huge tropical flowers on them, and no hats; presently they took off everything and put on trunks and lounged by the swimming pool and got tanned. ‘Come to lunch, come to dinner, come any time’. Then De Lyle added, ‘Genie is calling, she says come right now. Rose Pippin is here, and you will be crazy about her’.
Lanny said, ‘Okay’, and of his wife he asked, ‘Who is Rose Pippin?’ Since they had been busy saving the world from war they hadn’t paid much attention to Hollywood doings. Lanny knew of pippin as a kind of apple and wondered if any parents who had that name could be so unkind as to name a child Rose. But Laurel said it was probably a stage name. Hollywood characters who came from Brooklyn chose for themselves names that were supposed to be glamorous. Maybe Rose Pippin thought she would be called ‘a pippin’, and maybe she was.
The last time they had visited the Armbrusters, Laurel had been actively collecting material for stories and had made a bit of money out of her visit. She always hugged the idea that when she had completed the ending of wars she would go back to the writing game; and now the old impulse stirred in her blood. ‘Let’s go’, she said.
So they put on their most completely ‘casual’ costumes—really expensive, of course—and went up Benedict Canyon Drive un
til they came to an Italian Renaissance villa of twenty or so rooms built on the side of a mountain. It was in just such villas on the hills above Cannes and in a place called Californie above Nice that Lanny had first met the Armbrusters, who were spending their money and acquiring culture by entertaining all the celebrities they could get hold of. Later they had realised that most of the celebrities were assembling in Hollyweed, many of them driven there by the war. This was the only place left where genius could make ‘real’ money, so the couple had brought their millions to Beverly Hills.
Genie, short for Eugenia, came out with both hands extended. ‘Oh, how perfectly ducky! Where in the world have you dropped from?’ She kissed Laurel on both cheeks and hugged Lanny—she had known him since they were children, dancing together at parties.
She called both ‘Darling’—she called everybody that, and so did everybody else. She bubbled over with delight and said they must come and stay at the villa and they would have such such a lovely time ‘chewing the fat’. Then she asked quickly, ‘Have you read The Rabbit Race?’ When they looked blank she exclaimed, ‘Good heavens, haven’t you even heard of it? Where have you been keeping yourselves?’ She informed them that The Rabbit Race was the best-selling novel of the day. It had been selected by a book club, and besides that it had sold a quarter of a million copies. Hollywood had bought it for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was making it into the funniest movie ever heard of.
Genie, lowering her voice as if to conceal the fact of their ignorance, told them that Rose Pippin—that was her real name—had been born and raised on a ranch in a little place called Le Mesa down near San Diego, and the family had lived, or almost failed to live, by raising rabbits. ‘You know how rabbits multiply’, she said. ‘She has made the most hilarious fun out of the habits of rabbits, and, of course, all the neighbours and their habits too. Everyone has been laughing their heads off over it’.
‘Will her feelings be hurt because we haven’t read it’? asked Laurel.
‘Heavens, no! She will make jokes about you. She’s the gayest thing you ever met, and the fact that she has made several fortunes hasn’t spoiled her a bit’.
VIII
So they went into Genie’s large and sumptuous drawing room—the first time Lanny had been in it he had counted fifty Hollywood ‘personalities’, or so he averred. At present there were only two persons in the room, one being De Lyle and the other a women of thirty or so, rather tall, solidly built, obviously an outdoor person. When she gave you her hand you perceived that it was a hand of honest toil, and her feet were firmly planted on De Lyle’s enormous Khotan rug with its ‘five blossoms’ pattern. When you looked into her eyes you discovered their sparkle; the fun bubbled up in her like the water in the mudpots of the Coachella Valley. When she laughed at her own fun she shook like the little earthquakes of that same region.
She had grown up on a ranch on the outskirts of La Mesa and had never been anywhere else. A ranch in the Far West, as she explained in the book, could be anything from a couple of town lots to a couple of million acres. This had been a small family ranch and had been planted to alfalfa, which had to be cut by hand and fed to rabbits. When you had a thousand rabbits in pens it was absolutely incredible how much green stuff they would eat and how heavy it was for a small child to carry.
The phrase Genie had used, ‘the habits of rabbits’, was one of the chapter titles of the book. The habits of rabbits, Rose explained, were three: first they nibbled, second they cohabited, and third they produced litters. After the multiplication of rabbits came the subtraction, when the buyer carried away the mature males. There was never any addition, and no division, said Rose, because when all the children of the family had been fed there was nothing left. ‘We were so poor’, she said, ‘we lived on cornmeal and the milk from one cow, and we worried for months where the money was coming from for the taxes’.
‘Genie has been telling me about the wonderful life you two have been having’, she said. ‘Me, I have never been outside of Southern California. So you see what an ignoramus I am. I had never even heard of your Peace Programme’.
‘We hadn’t heard of your book’, said Laurel, ‘so we can be honest with each other’.
‘What a relief!’ said Rose. ‘I am so tired of people who tell me they have read it, and I find out they haven’t; or if they have read it they say the same things I’ve heard and heard’.
‘And’, put in De Lyle, ‘she doesn’t like Hollywood!’ De Lyle himself adored the place and thrived in it; he had added a couple of inches to his waistline since Lanny and Laurel had last seen him. His round, rosy cheeks beamed satisfaction with the social success he was having. He possessed the private telephone number of practically everybody of importance in ‘the industry’, and when he invited them to a party they came. The reason was they knew they would meet everybody else who was important. He was the steward of a country club that had no dues or charges of any sort.
‘Why don’t you like Hollywood, Miss Pippin?’ inquired Laurel, pursuing her literary purpose.
‘At home on the ranch I had the wild idea of writing a book. I wrote it with a stubby pencil on any old scraps of paper I could find. I wrote it exactly the way I wanted it, and I thought it was fun. Then, to my surprise, other people thought it was fun too. Now Hollywood has bought it and brought me up here and is paying me five thousand dollars a week to pretend to be a script writer. There are three other writers, all of them anxious to get something into the picture so as to justify their salaries. There is a director, a producer, a supervisor, a head of the production department—a whole hierarchy. They all sit in conferences and discuss every scene and every line of dialogue. Their test of whether a thing will go over is whether it has gone over before, and whether that was long enough ago for the public to have forgotten it. My book has only one virtue, that it is different; and the picture is going to have only one virtue, that it isn’t different from anything’.
‘And aren’t you enjoying Hollywood society?’ It was still Laurel, hot on a trail.
‘Enjoying it, Mrs Budd? Enjoyment is for those who see the pictures, not for those who make them. What I’m going to do is to go home and write another book, this time about the habits of Hollywood, and it won’t be so funny. Hollywood is a lot of people clinging to a raft in a storm, all trying to avoid being pulled off by somebody else; a lot of people worrying themselves sick about prestige and measuring it in money. I could tell you funny stories about Hollywood, but you are a writer too, and I have to save them for my book.’
‘And what are you going to do with all your money, Miss Pippin?’
‘I’m tucking it away in my stocking, and I’m going back home and buy me a women-size ranch, a tractor to drive, and a horse to ride, and maybe a couple of hired men that I’ll manage’.
‘And a husband?’…
‘No, indeed. I’ve watched the rabbits too long!’
IX
They chatted for a while about Hollywood pictures and their costs and Hollywood personalities and their salaries. Rose told funny stories—it didn’t mean a thing that she had said she wouldn’t; the impulse to share them was compelling. Laurel must have liked her, for presently she asked, ‘Do you care for music, Miss Pippin?’
The answer was that the family had got a radio set, but the little brothers and sisters made too much noise. (There had been multiplication of Pippins as well as of rabbits, it appeared.) Then she added, ‘The first thing I did when I sold a story to a magazine was to go to San Diego to hear several concerts—the first really good music I ever heard’.
Laurel said, ‘The reason I ask is that we have a friend with us, a very extraordinary violinist. He is a refugee from Rumania and hasn’t yet been introduced in America, so you probably never heard his name—Moishe Zinsenheimer’.
Rose said she hadn’t heard it and was pleased when Laurel suggested that she might like to meet this man of genius. Laurel said, ‘To sit in the room and hear him play is quite an
overwhelming experience’, and the reply was, ‘Oh, don’t let me miss it!’ She gave Laurel her telephone number—a secret celebrities quickly learn to guard.
Driving home, Lanny said, ‘Well, what do you think of her?’
‘She’s a sensible woman and very good company, but I’m afraid she wouldn’t appeal to Hansi’.
‘Why not?’
‘She’s not very feminine, and she’s too positive’.
‘Bess was positive’.
‘Yes, indeed—and their marriage is breaking up’.
‘Hansi gets his head up into the clouds’, Lanny said. ‘He needs a woman whose feet are firmly planted on the earth’.
‘Well, she can qualify in that respect. Did you notice the size of her feet?’
‘I noticed she had on sensible shoes, the kind you advocate, so you oughtn’t be too mean to her. A husband and wife ought to be different, otherwise the marriage adds nothing to either of them’.
‘Yes, but not too different’, was the answer. ‘Anyhow, we’ll let them meet and see’.
They were taking a copy of The Rabbit Race along with them. It had been presented by De Lyle and autographed by the author. Most persons when they know they are to receive a visit from a celebrity are satisfied to get one copy of the new book and place it on the centre table in the drawing room. But De Lyle’s middle name was sumptuous, and his idea was to order a dozen copies from his bookseller and have them autographed and then distribute them to his friends; in that way the whole world would know that he had snared another lioness.
They read some of the book aloud that evening. Mr Zinsenheimer—who was staying in another motel for security reasons—came over and listened. They had a good time, for it was really a humorous book. The habits of rabbits served merely as a theme song, a pretext for a study of the habits of humans. The determination of rabbits to perpetuate their race was entirely shared by humans and was equally alarming in both, for neither would have left any standing room upon the earth if they had had their way. Likewise the humans would eat all day if they could, and many of them did, with disastrous consequences. The book was a study of the misadventures of a large ranch family and its neighbours, their morals or the lack of them, their quirks, their delusions, their comical misadventures. The humour was earthy and explicit; that was perhaps why it had delighted Hollywood—and also why the picture would have to be different.
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 42
