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the wall across from me. How I was brave enough I don't know but I ran
across to it and opened it and Father's secretary Birdy Peters tumbled out
stark naked-just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of
stifling, stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor with the one hand
still clutching some clothes and lay on the floor bathed in sweat-just as
Father came in from the bathroom. I could feel him standing behind me and
without turning I knew exactly how he looked, for I had surprised him
before.
"Cover her up," I said, covering her up myself with a rug from the
couch. "Cover her up!"
I left the office. Rosemary Schmiel saw my face as I came out and
responded with a terrified expression. I never saw her again or Birdy Peters
either. As Martha and I went out Martha asked "What's the matter dear?"-and
when I didn't say anything, "You did your best. Probably it was the wrong
time. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take you to see a very nice English
girl. Did you see the girl that Stahr danced with at our table the other
night?"
So at the price of a little immersion in the family drains I had what I
wanted.
I don't remember much about our call. She wasn't at home was one
reason. The screen door of her house was unlocked and Martha went in calling
"Kathleen" with bright familiarity. The room we saw was bare and formal as a
hotel; there were flowers about but they did not look like sent flowers.
Also Martha found a note on the table which said, "Leave the dress. Have
gone looking for a job. Will drop by tomorrow."
Martha read it twice but it didn't seem to be for Stahr, and we waited
five minutes. People's houses are very still when they are gone. Not that I
expect them to be jumping around but I leave the observation for what it's
worth. Very still. Prim almost with just a fly holding down the place and
paying no attention to you, and the corner of a curtain blowing.
"I wonder what kind of a job," said Martha. "Last Sunday she went
somewhere with Stahr. "
But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here- producer's
blood, I thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the
placid sunshine. It was no use-I felt just black and awful. I had always
been proud of my body-I had a way of thinking of it as geometric which made
everything it did seem all right and there was probably not any kind of
place, including churches and offices and shrines, where people had not
embraced-but no one had ever stuffed me naked into a hole in the wall in the
middle of a business day.
Episode 16, First Part
"If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription
filled-"
"You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked.
"If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a
prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-"
"-Very ill?" queried Boxley.
"Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window,
whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for
pictures."
"A murder outside the window, you mean."
"There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on
the pane."
"Of course-I see."
"I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not
for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders
on us."
"I might as well leave," said Boxley. "I'm no good to you. I've been
here three weeks and I've accomplished nothing. I make suggestions but no
one writes them down."
"I want you to stay. Something in you doesn't like pictures, doesn't
like telling a story this way-"
"It's such a damned bother," exploded Boxley. "You can't let yourself
go-"
He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time
for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow-that they were talking in the
always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an
open sea. Or else-it seemed at times-they were in a huge quarry where even
the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half obliterated
inscriptions of the past.
"I keep wishing you could start over," Boxley said. "It's this mass
production."
"That's the condition," said Stahr. "There's always some lousy
condition. We're making a life of Rubens-suppose I asked you to do portraits
of rich dopes like Pat Brady and me and Gary Cooper and Marcus when you
wanted to paint Jesus Christ! Wouldn't you feel you had a condition? Our
condition is that we have to take people's own favorite folklore and dress
it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won't you
give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?"
Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at
Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr
like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost
single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a
point where the content of the "A productions" was wider and richer than
that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only as Mr. Lincoln was a general,
perforce and as a layman.
"Come down to La Borwits' office with me," said Stahr. "They sure need
some sugar there."
In La Borwits' office two writers, a shorthand secretary and a
supervisor sat in a tense smokey stalemate where Stahr had left them three
hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La
Borwits spoke with awed reverence for his defeat.
"We've just got too many characters, Monroe." Stahr snorted affably.
"That's the principal idea of the picture." He took some change out of his
pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar which
clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a
quarter.
La Borwits watched miserably; he knew this was a favorite idea of
Stahr's and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone's back was
toward him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position
under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to
leave his wrists-and then he caught them neatly as they were descending.
After that he felt better. He was in control.
One of the writers had taken out some coins also and presently rules
were defined. "You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting
them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty."
They played for half an hour-all except Boxley who sat aside and dug
into the script, and the secretary who kept tally. She calculated the cost
of the four men's time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At
the end La Borwits was winner by $5.50 and a janitor brought in a
step-ladder to take the money out of the light.
Boxley spoke up suddenly.
"You have the stuffings of a tuhkey here," he said.
"What!"
"It's not pictures."
They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile.
"So we've got a real picture man here!" exclaimed La Borwits.
"A lot of beautiful speeches," said Boxley boldly. "But no situations.
After all, you know, it's not going to be a novel: and it's too long. I
can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me
cold."
He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr
turned away, watching the others out of he corner of his eye.
"We don't need less characters," said Boxley. "We need more. As I see
it that's the idea."
"That's the idea," said the writers.
"Yes-that's the idea," said La Borwits.
Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created.
"Let each character see himself in the other's place," he said. "The
policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually
has his face. I mean show it that way. You could almost call the thing 'Put
Yourself in My Place.' "
Suddenly they were at work again-taking up this new theme in turn like
hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out
again tomorrow but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had
done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere-never
consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like
and sometimes even looking like a small boy getting up a show.
He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing-a deliberate
accolade-he didn't want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an
hour.
Episode 16 (Part 2)
Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a colored man
with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie
detector. He stripped to the waist and the weekly examination began.
"How've you been feeling?"
"Oh-the usual," said Stahr.
"Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?"
"No-about five hours. If I go to bed early I just lie there."
"Take the sleeping pills."
"The yellow one gives me a hangover."
"Take two red ones then."
"That's a nightmare."
"Take one of each-the yellow first."
"All right-I'll try. How've you been?"
"Say-I take care of myself, Monroe. I save myself."
"The hell you do-you're up all night sometimes."
"Then I sleep all next day."
After ten minutes Baer said:
"Seems O.K. The blood pressure's up five points."
"Good," said Stahr. "That's good isn't it?"
"That's good. I'll develop the cardiograms tonight. When are you coming
away with me?"
"Oh, some time," said Stahr lightly. "In about six weeks things'll ease
up."
Baer looked at him with a genuine looking that had grown over three
years.
"You got better in thirty-three when you laid up," he said. "Even for
three weeks."
"I will again."
No he wouldn't, Baer thought. With Minna's help he had enforced a few
short rests years ago and lately he had hinted around trying to find who
Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him
away. It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now.
Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing
the cardiograms? You couldn't persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down
and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said
differently but what it added up to was the definite urge toward total
exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a
poison and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from
working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he
had seen before but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He
had cured a man or so-a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell.
"You hold your own," he said.
They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know
when-he did not know how soon now.
"If I hold my own I can't ask more," said Stahr.
The colored man had finished packing the apparatus.
"Next week same time?"
"O. K., Bill," said Stahr. "Good bye."
As the door closed Stahr switched open the Dictograph. Miss Doolan's
voice came through immediately.
"Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?"
"What do you mean?" he asked startled.
"A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call."
"Well, my God!" he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It
had been five days-this would never do at all.
"She's on now?"
"Yes."
"Well, all right then."
In a moment he heard the voice up close to him.
"Are you married?" he asked, low and surly.
"No, not yet."
His memory blocked out her face and form-as he sat down she seemed to
lean down to his desk keeping level with his eyes.
"What's on your mind?" he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to
talk that way.
"You did find the letter?" she asked.
"Yes. It turned up that night."
ill
"That's what I want to speak to you about."
He found an attitude at length-he was outraged.
"What is there to talk about?" he demanded.
"I tried to write you another letter but it wouldn't write."
"I know that too."
There was a pause.
"Oh cheer up!" she said surprisingly. "This doesn't sound like you. It
is Stahr, isn't it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?"
"I feel a little outraged," he said almost pompously. "I don't see the
use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you."
"I don't believe it's you," she said. "Next thing you'll wish me luck."
Suddenly she laughed. "Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it
gets when you plan to say anything-"
"I never expected to hear from you again," he said with dignity; but it
was no use, she laughed again-a woman's laugh that is like a child's, just
one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight.
"Do you know how you make me feel?" she demanded. "Like one day in
London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my
mouth."
"I'm sorry."
"Oh please wake up," she begged. "I want to see you. I can't explain
things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand."
"I'm very busy. There's a sneak preview in Glendale tonight."
"Is that an invitation?"
"George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me." He surprised
himself. "Do you want to come along?"
"How could we talk?"
She considered. "Why don't you call for me afterwards," she suggested.
"We could ride around."
Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting
director-the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and
called "wait" impatiently into the machine.
"About eleven?" Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of "Riding
around" seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to
refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the
caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day,
at least, was complete. It had an evening-a beginning, a middle and an end.
He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood
waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn
mower-a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that
Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and
rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a
midsummer restlessness abroad-early August with imprudent loves and
impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously
to live in the present-or, if there was no present, to invent one.
She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit
with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a
brave gay, stimulating reckless air of "Tighten up your belt, baby. Let's
get going-to any pole." Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur,
and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the
dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made
was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of
the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.
She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a
while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting
and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. "This
Man" was the one she had loved and lived with. "This American" was the one
who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.
"Who is he-the American?"
Oh, names-what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich.
He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be
a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce-not just on account of
her-but that was the delay.
"But the first man?" asked Stahr. "How did you get into that?"
Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing
was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one
shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the
stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and
she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into
the streets. London can be harsh-oh quite.
Was there nobody?
There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup
kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had
a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not
telling his wife.
"Couldn't you work?" Stahr asked.
"I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car."
"But couldn't you get a regular job?"
"It's hard-it's different. There was a feeling that people like me
forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job
as chambermaid in a hotel."
"But you were presented at Court?"
"That was my stepmother who did that-on an off chance. I was nobody. My
father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He
wrote a book called 'Last Blessing.' Did you ever read it?"
"I don't read."
"I wish you'd buy it for the movies. It's a good little book. I still
get a royalty from it-ten shillings a year."
Then she met "The Man" and they travelled the world around. She had
been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose
names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping
with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all
tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should
cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They
brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so
finally she ran away.
"You should have run away before."
"Well, you see it was difficult." She hesitated, and plunged. "You see
I ran away from a king."
His moralities somehow collapsed-she had managed to top him. A
confusion of thoughts raced through his head-one of them a faint old credo
that all royalty was diseased.
"It wasn't the King of England," she said. "My king was out of job as
he used to say. There are lots of kings in London." She laughed-then added
almost defiantly, "He was very attractive until he began drinking and
raising hell."
"What was he king of?"
She told him-and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels.
"He was a very learned man," she said. "He could have taught all sorts
of subjects. But he wasn't much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None
of them were."
This time Stahr laughed.
"They were the standard article," he said.
"You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried
so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with
things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a
couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the
semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times."
They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of
Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs
of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just
the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in
to his arms saying, "Oh you're so nice. I do like to be with you." But her
mind was divided-this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been
his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her
own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she
had saved up for The American.
"How long have you known The American?" he asked.
"Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each
other. He used to say 'It looks like a cinch from now on.'"
"Then why did you call me up?"
She hesitated.
"I wanted to see you once more. Then too-he was supposed to arrive
today but last night he wired that he'd be another week. I wanted to talk to
a friend-after all you are my friend."
He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept
saying: she wants to see if I'm in love with her, if I want to marry her.
Then she'd consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won't
consider it till I've committed myself. "Are you in love with The American?"
he asked. "Oh yes. It's absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason.
He's moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that."
"But are you in love with him?" "Oh yes, I'm in love with him."
The "Oh yes" told him she was not-told him to speak for himself-that
she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the
mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.
"Not tonight," she whispered.
"All right."
They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.
"I know what it is," she said, "but how stupid. English people don't
kill themselves when they don't get what they want."
They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was
a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke
for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the
pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen.
There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and
bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange
brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left
for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in
the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.
They looked at each other and her eyes asked "Shall I marry The
American?" He did not answer. After a while he said:
"Let's go somewhere for the week-end."
She considered.
"Are you talking about tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid I am."
"Well, I'll tell you tomorrow," she said.
"Tell me tonight. I'd be afraid-"
"-find a note in the car?" she laughed. "No there's no note in the car.
You know almost everything now."
"Almost everything."
"Yes-almost. A few little things."
He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He
doubted-or he wanted to doubt-if there had been a maze of philandering-a
fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of
a highly anomalous position-one foot in the Palace and one in the
background. "You had to laugh a lot," she said. "I learned to laugh a lot."
"He could have married you-like Mrs. Simpson," Stahr said in protest.
"Oh, he was married. And he wasn't a romantic." She stopped herself.
"Am I?"
"Yes," she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. "Part
of you is. You're three or four different men but each of them out in the
open. Like all Americans."
"Don't start trusting Americans too implicitly," he said, smiling.
"They may be out in the open but they change very fast."
She looked concerned.
"Do they?"
"Very fast and all at once," he said. "And nothing ever changes them
back."
"You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with
Americans."
She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.
"Where will we go tomorrow?" he said. "Maybe up in the mountains. I've
got everything to do tomorrow but I won't do any of it. We can start at four
and get there by afternoon."
"I'm not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn't seem to be
quite the girl who came out to California for a new life."
He could have said it then, said "It is a new life" for he knew it was,
he knew he could not let her go now, but something else said to sleep on it
as an adult, no romantic. And tell her tomorrow. Still she was looking at
him her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and
then up and down once more with that odd slowly waving motion of her head.
... It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl.
She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking
after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now-tell her and take
her away. Neither of you knows it but far away over the night The American
has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through
Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the
morning he will be here.
... The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen's house. It seemed
warm even in darkness-wherever he had been near her was by way of being
enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine-the rising house at the beach, the
very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The
hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that
struck his soul alert with delight.
As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her,
even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that
madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was
a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged
him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house
now-and say "This is forever."
Kathleen waited, irresolute herself-pink and silver frost waiting to
melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there
was a fierce self-respect that would only let her go so far. She had no
illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.
"We'll go to the mountains tomorrow," said Stahr. Many thousands of
people depended on his balanced judgement-you can suddenly blunt a quality
you have lived by for twenty years.
He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o'clock when he
came from luncheon there was a stack of telegrams-a company ship was lost in
the Arctic, a star was in disgrace, a writer was sueing for one million
dollars, Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared
up at him:
I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE, and on a sticker attached Send
your answer by Western Union Telegram.
Episode 17
I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise and when I
came back didn't go near the studio. I think I would have started East in
mid-August-if Stahr hadn't called me up one day at home.
"I want you to arrange something, Cecelia-I want to meet a Communist
Party member."
"Which one?" I asked, somewhat startled.
"Any one."
"Haven't you got plenty out there?"
"I mean one of their organizers-from New York."
The summer before I had been all politics-I could probably have
arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto
accident after I went back to college and I was out of touch with such
things. I had heard there was a man from "The New Masses" around somewhere.
"Will you promise him immunity?" I asked, joking.
"Oh yes," Stahr answered seriously. "I won't hurt him. Get one that can
talk-tell him to bring one of his books along."
He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the "I AM" cult.
"Do you want a blonde, or a brunette?"
"Oh, get a man," he said hastily.
Hearing Stahr's voice cheered me up-since I barged in on Father it had
all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about
it-changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air. He was like
a brazier out of doors on a cool night.
"I don't think your father ought to know," he said. "Can we pretend the
man is a Bulgarian musician or something?"
"Oh, they don't dress up any more," I said.
It was harder to arrange than I thought-Stahr's negotiations with the
Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end.
Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr's
"proposition" was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting
by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film
library at home. He also ran off "Doctor Caligari" and Salvador Dali's "Un
Chien Andalou," possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter.
He had been startled by the Russian Films back in the twenties and on Wylie
White's suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page
"treatment" of the "Communist Manifesto."
But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did
his own reasoning without benefit of books-and he had just managed to climb
out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could
not bear to see it melt away-he cherished the parvenu's passionate loyalty
to an imaginary past.
The meeting took place in what I called the "processed leather room"-it
was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane's years ago, and the
term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator's room-an angora wool
carpet the color of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable-you hardly dared
walk on it; and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures
and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard
in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the
windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze.
It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlor that used to be closed
except on Sunday. But it was exactly the room for the occasion and I hoped
that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part
of our house.
Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled -except for
his voice which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a
brave personal quality in the way he would meet you-he would walk right up
to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all
over as if he couldn't help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took
him into the processed leather room.
"When do you go back to college?" he asked.
We had been over this fascinating ground before.
"Would you like me if I were a little shorter?" I asked. "I could wear
low heels and plaster down my hair."
"Let's have dinner tonight," he suggested. "People will think I'm your
father but I don't mind."
"I love old men," I assured him. "Unless the man has a crutch I feel
it's just a boy and girl affair."
"Have you had many of those?"
"Enough."
"People fall in and out of love all the time, don't they."
"Every three years so Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper."
"I wonder how they manage it," he said. "I know it's true because I see
them. But they look so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don't
look convinced. But they get convinced all over."
"You've been making too many movies."
"I wonder if they're as convinced the second time or the third time or
the fourth time," he persisted.
"More each time," I said. "Most of all the last time."
He thought this over and seemed to agree.
"I suppose so. Most of all the last time."
I didn't like the way he said this and I suddenly saw that under the
surface he was miserable.
"It's a great nuisance," he said. "It'll be better when it's over."
"Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands."
Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced and going to meet him I slid
over to the door on one of those gossamer throw-rugs and practically into
his arms.
He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer-a little on the order of
Spencer Tracy but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions
written up in it. I couldn't help thinking as he and Stahr smiled and shook
hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever
seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately-both as polite to
me as you please but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when
they turned in my direction.
"What are you people trying to do?" demanded Stahr. "You've got my
young men all upset."
"That keeps them awake, doesn't it?" said Brimmer.
"First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant," said Stahr. "As a
model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that
makes it a model plant."
"The unity?" Brimmer repeated. "Do you mean what's known as the company
spirit?"
"Oh, not that," said Stahr, impatiently. "It seems to be me you're
after. Last week a writer came into my office-a drunk-a man who's been
floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse-and began
telling me my business."
Brimmer smiled.
"You don't look to me like a man who could be told his business, Mr.
Stahr."
They would both have tea. When I came back Stahr was telling a story
about the Warner brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him.
"I'll tell you another one," Stahr said. "Balanchine the Russian dancer
had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers. He didn't know which ones he was
training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying 'I
cannot train those Warner Brothers to dance.' "
It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers
didn't back the Anti-Nazi League.
"Because of you people," said Stahr. "It's your way of getting at the
writers. In the long view you're wasting your time. Writers are
children-even in normal times they can't keep their minds on their work."
"They're the farmers in this business," said Brimmer pleasantly. "They
grow the grain but they're not in at the feast. Their feeling toward the
producer is like the farmers' resentment of the city fellow."
I was wondering about Stahr's girl-whether it was all over between
them. Later when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain
in a wretched road called Goldwyn Terrace, I figured out that this must have
been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn't help the telegram.
The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office
without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in
the morning and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned
in how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say
"Listen I forgot to tell you but I met a man." But this track had been laid
down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief that
when it came along suddenly cutting across the other she found herself on it
like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking
directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn't read upside
down....
When my mind came back into the room they had destroyed the poor
writers-Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were "unstable."
"They are not equipped for authority," said Stahr. "There is no
substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it
at all."
"I've had that experience."
"You have to say 'It's got to be like this-no other way'-even if you're
not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is
no real reason for anything. You pretend there is."
"All leaders have felt that," said Brimmer. "Labor leaders, and
certainly military leaders."
"So I've had to take an attitude in this Guild matter. It looks to me
like a try for power and all I am going to give the writers is money."
"You give some of them very little money. Thirty dollars a week."
"Who gets that?" asked Stahr surprised.
"The ones who are commodities and easy to replace."
"Not on my lot," said Stahr.
"Oh yes," said Brimmer. "Two men in your shorts department get thirty
dollars a week."
"Who?"
"Man named Ransome-man named O'Brien."
Stahr and I smiled together.
"Those are not writers," said Stahr. "Those are cousins of Cecelia's
father."
"There are some in other studios," said Brimmer.
Stahr took his teaspoon and poured himself some medicine from a little
bottle.
"What's a fink?" he asked suddenly.
"A fink? That's a strike breaker or a Company Tec."
"I thought so," said Stahr. "I've got a fifteen hundred dollar writer
that every time he walks through the commissary keeps saying 'Fink!' behind
other writers' chairs. If he didn't scare hell out of them it'd be funny."
Brimmer laughed.
"I'd like to see that," he said.
"You wouldn't like to spend a day with me over there?" suggested Stahr.
Brimmer laughed with genuine amusement.
"No, Mr. Stahr. But I don't doubt but that I'd be impressed. I've heard
you're one of the hardest working and most efficient men in the entire West.
It'd be a privilege to watch you but I'm afraid I'll have to deny myself."
Stahr looked at me.
"I like your friend," he said. "He's crazy but I like him." He looked
closely at Brimmer. "Born on this side?"
"Oh yes. Several generations."
"Many of them like you?"
"My father was a Baptist minister."
"I mean are many of the Reds. I'd like to meet this big Jew that tried
to blow over the Ford factory. What's his name-"
"Frankensteen? "
"That's the man. I guess some of you believe in it."
"Quite a few," said Brimmer dryly.
"Not you," said Stahr.
A shade of annoyance floated across Brimmer's face.
"Oh yes," he said.
"Oh no," said Stahr. "Maybe you did once."
Brimmer shrugged his shoulders.
"Perhaps the boot's on the other foot," he said. "At the bottom of your
heart, Mr. Stahr, you know I'm right."
"No," said Stahr, "I think it's a bunch of tripe."
"-you think to yourself 'He's right' but you think the system will last
out your time."
"You don't really think you're going to overthrow the government."
"No, Mr. Stahr. But we think perhaps you are."
They were nicking at each other-little pricking strokes like men do
sometimes. Women do it too but it is a joined battle then with no quarter,
but it is not pleasant to watch men do it because you never know what's
next. Certainly it wasn't improving the tonal associations of the room for
me and I moved them out the French window into our golden-yellow California
garden.
It was midsummer but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the
lawn glitter like spring. I could see Brimmer look at it with a sigh in his
glance-a way they have. He opened up big outside-inches taller than I
thought and broad-shouldered. He reminded me a little of Superman when he
takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who
don't really care about women as such. We played a round robin game of
ping-pong and he handled his bat well. I heard Father come into the house
singing that damn "Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day" and then breaking off
as if he remembered we weren't speaking any more. It was half past six-my
car was standing in the drive and I suggested we go down to the Trocadero
for dinner.
Brimmer had that look that Father O'Ney had that time in New York when
he turned his collar around and went with Father and me to the Russian
Ballet. He hadn't quite ought to be here. When Bernie the photographer, who
was waiting there for some big game or other, came up to our table he looked
trapped-Stahr made Bernie go away, and I would like to have had the picture.
Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails one after the
other.
"Now I know you've been disappointed in love," I said.
"What makes you think that, Cecelia?"
"Cocktails."
"Oh, I never drink, Cecelia. I get dyspepsia-I never have been tight."
I counted them. "-two-three."
"I didn't realize. I couldn't taste them. I thought there was something
the matter."
A silly glassy look darted into his eye-then passed away.
"This is my first drink in a week," said Brimmer. "I did my drinking in
the navy."
The look was back in Stahr's eye-he winked it fatuously at me and said:
"This soapbox son-of-a-bitch has been working on the navy."
Brimmer didn't know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to
include it with the evening for he smiled faintly and I saw Stahr was
across to it and opened it and Father's secretary Birdy Peters tumbled out
stark naked-just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of
stifling, stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor with the one hand
still clutching some clothes and lay on the floor bathed in sweat-just as
Father came in from the bathroom. I could feel him standing behind me and
without turning I knew exactly how he looked, for I had surprised him
before.
"Cover her up," I said, covering her up myself with a rug from the
couch. "Cover her up!"
I left the office. Rosemary Schmiel saw my face as I came out and
responded with a terrified expression. I never saw her again or Birdy Peters
either. As Martha and I went out Martha asked "What's the matter dear?"-and
when I didn't say anything, "You did your best. Probably it was the wrong
time. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take you to see a very nice English
girl. Did you see the girl that Stahr danced with at our table the other
night?"
So at the price of a little immersion in the family drains I had what I
wanted.
I don't remember much about our call. She wasn't at home was one
reason. The screen door of her house was unlocked and Martha went in calling
"Kathleen" with bright familiarity. The room we saw was bare and formal as a
hotel; there were flowers about but they did not look like sent flowers.
Also Martha found a note on the table which said, "Leave the dress. Have
gone looking for a job. Will drop by tomorrow."
Martha read it twice but it didn't seem to be for Stahr, and we waited
five minutes. People's houses are very still when they are gone. Not that I
expect them to be jumping around but I leave the observation for what it's
worth. Very still. Prim almost with just a fly holding down the place and
paying no attention to you, and the corner of a curtain blowing.
"I wonder what kind of a job," said Martha. "Last Sunday she went
somewhere with Stahr. "
But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here- producer's
blood, I thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the
placid sunshine. It was no use-I felt just black and awful. I had always
been proud of my body-I had a way of thinking of it as geometric which made
everything it did seem all right and there was probably not any kind of
place, including churches and offices and shrines, where people had not
embraced-but no one had ever stuffed me naked into a hole in the wall in the
middle of a business day.
Episode 16, First Part
"If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription
filled-"
"You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked.
"If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a
prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-"
"-Very ill?" queried Boxley.
"Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window,
whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for
pictures."
"A murder outside the window, you mean."
"There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on
the pane."
"Of course-I see."
"I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not
for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders
on us."
"I might as well leave," said Boxley. "I'm no good to you. I've been
here three weeks and I've accomplished nothing. I make suggestions but no
one writes them down."
"I want you to stay. Something in you doesn't like pictures, doesn't
like telling a story this way-"
"It's such a damned bother," exploded Boxley. "You can't let yourself
go-"
He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time
for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow-that they were talking in the
always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an
open sea. Or else-it seemed at times-they were in a huge quarry where even
the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half obliterated
inscriptions of the past.
"I keep wishing you could start over," Boxley said. "It's this mass
production."
"That's the condition," said Stahr. "There's always some lousy
condition. We're making a life of Rubens-suppose I asked you to do portraits
of rich dopes like Pat Brady and me and Gary Cooper and Marcus when you
wanted to paint Jesus Christ! Wouldn't you feel you had a condition? Our
condition is that we have to take people's own favorite folklore and dress
it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won't you
give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?"
Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at
Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr
like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost
single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a
point where the content of the "A productions" was wider and richer than
that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only as Mr. Lincoln was a general,
perforce and as a layman.
"Come down to La Borwits' office with me," said Stahr. "They sure need
some sugar there."
In La Borwits' office two writers, a shorthand secretary and a
supervisor sat in a tense smokey stalemate where Stahr had left them three
hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La
Borwits spoke with awed reverence for his defeat.
"We've just got too many characters, Monroe." Stahr snorted affably.
"That's the principal idea of the picture." He took some change out of his
pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar which
clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a
quarter.
La Borwits watched miserably; he knew this was a favorite idea of
Stahr's and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone's back was
toward him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position
under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to
leave his wrists-and then he caught them neatly as they were descending.
After that he felt better. He was in control.
One of the writers had taken out some coins also and presently rules
were defined. "You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting
them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty."
They played for half an hour-all except Boxley who sat aside and dug
into the script, and the secretary who kept tally. She calculated the cost
of the four men's time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At
the end La Borwits was winner by $5.50 and a janitor brought in a
step-ladder to take the money out of the light.
Boxley spoke up suddenly.
"You have the stuffings of a tuhkey here," he said.
"What!"
"It's not pictures."
They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile.
"So we've got a real picture man here!" exclaimed La Borwits.
"A lot of beautiful speeches," said Boxley boldly. "But no situations.
After all, you know, it's not going to be a novel: and it's too long. I
can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me
cold."
He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr
turned away, watching the others out of he corner of his eye.
"We don't need less characters," said Boxley. "We need more. As I see
it that's the idea."
"That's the idea," said the writers.
"Yes-that's the idea," said La Borwits.
Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created.
"Let each character see himself in the other's place," he said. "The
policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually
has his face. I mean show it that way. You could almost call the thing 'Put
Yourself in My Place.' "
Suddenly they were at work again-taking up this new theme in turn like
hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out
again tomorrow but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had
done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere-never
consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like
and sometimes even looking like a small boy getting up a show.
He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing-a deliberate
accolade-he didn't want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an
hour.
Episode 16 (Part 2)
Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a colored man
with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie
detector. He stripped to the waist and the weekly examination began.
"How've you been feeling?"
"Oh-the usual," said Stahr.
"Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?"
"No-about five hours. If I go to bed early I just lie there."
"Take the sleeping pills."
"The yellow one gives me a hangover."
"Take two red ones then."
"That's a nightmare."
"Take one of each-the yellow first."
"All right-I'll try. How've you been?"
"Say-I take care of myself, Monroe. I save myself."
"The hell you do-you're up all night sometimes."
"Then I sleep all next day."
After ten minutes Baer said:
"Seems O.K. The blood pressure's up five points."
"Good," said Stahr. "That's good isn't it?"
"That's good. I'll develop the cardiograms tonight. When are you coming
away with me?"
"Oh, some time," said Stahr lightly. "In about six weeks things'll ease
up."
Baer looked at him with a genuine looking that had grown over three
years.
"You got better in thirty-three when you laid up," he said. "Even for
three weeks."
"I will again."
No he wouldn't, Baer thought. With Minna's help he had enforced a few
short rests years ago and lately he had hinted around trying to find who
Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him
away. It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now.
Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing
the cardiograms? You couldn't persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down
and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said
differently but what it added up to was the definite urge toward total
exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a
poison and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from
working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he
had seen before but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He
had cured a man or so-a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell.
"You hold your own," he said.
They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know
when-he did not know how soon now.
"If I hold my own I can't ask more," said Stahr.
The colored man had finished packing the apparatus.
"Next week same time?"
"O. K., Bill," said Stahr. "Good bye."
As the door closed Stahr switched open the Dictograph. Miss Doolan's
voice came through immediately.
"Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?"
"What do you mean?" he asked startled.
"A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call."
"Well, my God!" he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It
had been five days-this would never do at all.
"She's on now?"
"Yes."
"Well, all right then."
In a moment he heard the voice up close to him.
"Are you married?" he asked, low and surly.
"No, not yet."
His memory blocked out her face and form-as he sat down she seemed to
lean down to his desk keeping level with his eyes.
"What's on your mind?" he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to
talk that way.
"You did find the letter?" she asked.
"Yes. It turned up that night."
ill
"That's what I want to speak to you about."
He found an attitude at length-he was outraged.
"What is there to talk about?" he demanded.
"I tried to write you another letter but it wouldn't write."
"I know that too."
There was a pause.
"Oh cheer up!" she said surprisingly. "This doesn't sound like you. It
is Stahr, isn't it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?"
"I feel a little outraged," he said almost pompously. "I don't see the
use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you."
"I don't believe it's you," she said. "Next thing you'll wish me luck."
Suddenly she laughed. "Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it
gets when you plan to say anything-"
"I never expected to hear from you again," he said with dignity; but it
was no use, she laughed again-a woman's laugh that is like a child's, just
one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight.
"Do you know how you make me feel?" she demanded. "Like one day in
London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my
mouth."
"I'm sorry."
"Oh please wake up," she begged. "I want to see you. I can't explain
things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand."
"I'm very busy. There's a sneak preview in Glendale tonight."
"Is that an invitation?"
"George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me." He surprised
himself. "Do you want to come along?"
"How could we talk?"
She considered. "Why don't you call for me afterwards," she suggested.
"We could ride around."
Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting
director-the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and
called "wait" impatiently into the machine.
"About eleven?" Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of "Riding
around" seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to
refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the
caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day,
at least, was complete. It had an evening-a beginning, a middle and an end.
He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood
waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn
mower-a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that
Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and
rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a
midsummer restlessness abroad-early August with imprudent loves and
impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously
to live in the present-or, if there was no present, to invent one.
She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit
with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a
brave gay, stimulating reckless air of "Tighten up your belt, baby. Let's
get going-to any pole." Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur,
and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the
dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made
was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of
the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.
She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a
while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting
and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. "This
Man" was the one she had loved and lived with. "This American" was the one
who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.
"Who is he-the American?"
Oh, names-what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich.
He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be
a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce-not just on account of
her-but that was the delay.
"But the first man?" asked Stahr. "How did you get into that?"
Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing
was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one
shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the
stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and
she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into
the streets. London can be harsh-oh quite.
Was there nobody?
There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup
kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had
a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not
telling his wife.
"Couldn't you work?" Stahr asked.
"I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car."
"But couldn't you get a regular job?"
"It's hard-it's different. There was a feeling that people like me
forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job
as chambermaid in a hotel."
"But you were presented at Court?"
"That was my stepmother who did that-on an off chance. I was nobody. My
father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He
wrote a book called 'Last Blessing.' Did you ever read it?"
"I don't read."
"I wish you'd buy it for the movies. It's a good little book. I still
get a royalty from it-ten shillings a year."
Then she met "The Man" and they travelled the world around. She had
been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose
names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping
with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all
tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should
cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They
brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so
finally she ran away.
"You should have run away before."
"Well, you see it was difficult." She hesitated, and plunged. "You see
I ran away from a king."
His moralities somehow collapsed-she had managed to top him. A
confusion of thoughts raced through his head-one of them a faint old credo
that all royalty was diseased.
"It wasn't the King of England," she said. "My king was out of job as
he used to say. There are lots of kings in London." She laughed-then added
almost defiantly, "He was very attractive until he began drinking and
raising hell."
"What was he king of?"
She told him-and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels.
"He was a very learned man," she said. "He could have taught all sorts
of subjects. But he wasn't much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None
of them were."
This time Stahr laughed.
"They were the standard article," he said.
"You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried
so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with
things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a
couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the
semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times."
They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of
Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs
of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just
the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in
to his arms saying, "Oh you're so nice. I do like to be with you." But her
mind was divided-this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been
his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her
own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she
had saved up for The American.
"How long have you known The American?" he asked.
"Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each
other. He used to say 'It looks like a cinch from now on.'"
"Then why did you call me up?"
She hesitated.
"I wanted to see you once more. Then too-he was supposed to arrive
today but last night he wired that he'd be another week. I wanted to talk to
a friend-after all you are my friend."
He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept
saying: she wants to see if I'm in love with her, if I want to marry her.
Then she'd consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won't
consider it till I've committed myself. "Are you in love with The American?"
he asked. "Oh yes. It's absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason.
He's moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that."
"But are you in love with him?" "Oh yes, I'm in love with him."
The "Oh yes" told him she was not-told him to speak for himself-that
she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the
mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.
"Not tonight," she whispered.
"All right."
They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.
"I know what it is," she said, "but how stupid. English people don't
kill themselves when they don't get what they want."
They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was
a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke
for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the
pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen.
There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and
bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange
brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left
for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in
the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.
They looked at each other and her eyes asked "Shall I marry The
American?" He did not answer. After a while he said:
"Let's go somewhere for the week-end."
She considered.
"Are you talking about tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid I am."
"Well, I'll tell you tomorrow," she said.
"Tell me tonight. I'd be afraid-"
"-find a note in the car?" she laughed. "No there's no note in the car.
You know almost everything now."
"Almost everything."
"Yes-almost. A few little things."
He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He
doubted-or he wanted to doubt-if there had been a maze of philandering-a
fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of
a highly anomalous position-one foot in the Palace and one in the
background. "You had to laugh a lot," she said. "I learned to laugh a lot."
"He could have married you-like Mrs. Simpson," Stahr said in protest.
"Oh, he was married. And he wasn't a romantic." She stopped herself.
"Am I?"
"Yes," she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. "Part
of you is. You're three or four different men but each of them out in the
open. Like all Americans."
"Don't start trusting Americans too implicitly," he said, smiling.
"They may be out in the open but they change very fast."
She looked concerned.
"Do they?"
"Very fast and all at once," he said. "And nothing ever changes them
back."
"You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with
Americans."
She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.
"Where will we go tomorrow?" he said. "Maybe up in the mountains. I've
got everything to do tomorrow but I won't do any of it. We can start at four
and get there by afternoon."
"I'm not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn't seem to be
quite the girl who came out to California for a new life."
He could have said it then, said "It is a new life" for he knew it was,
he knew he could not let her go now, but something else said to sleep on it
as an adult, no romantic. And tell her tomorrow. Still she was looking at
him her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and
then up and down once more with that odd slowly waving motion of her head.
... It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl.
She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking
after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now-tell her and take
her away. Neither of you knows it but far away over the night The American
has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through
Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the
morning he will be here.
... The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen's house. It seemed
warm even in darkness-wherever he had been near her was by way of being
enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine-the rising house at the beach, the
very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The
hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that
struck his soul alert with delight.
As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her,
even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that
madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was
a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged
him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house
now-and say "This is forever."
Kathleen waited, irresolute herself-pink and silver frost waiting to
melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there
was a fierce self-respect that would only let her go so far. She had no
illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.
"We'll go to the mountains tomorrow," said Stahr. Many thousands of
people depended on his balanced judgement-you can suddenly blunt a quality
you have lived by for twenty years.
He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o'clock when he
came from luncheon there was a stack of telegrams-a company ship was lost in
the Arctic, a star was in disgrace, a writer was sueing for one million
dollars, Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared
up at him:
I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE, and on a sticker attached Send
your answer by Western Union Telegram.
Episode 17
I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise and when I
came back didn't go near the studio. I think I would have started East in
mid-August-if Stahr hadn't called me up one day at home.
"I want you to arrange something, Cecelia-I want to meet a Communist
Party member."
"Which one?" I asked, somewhat startled.
"Any one."
"Haven't you got plenty out there?"
"I mean one of their organizers-from New York."
The summer before I had been all politics-I could probably have
arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto
accident after I went back to college and I was out of touch with such
things. I had heard there was a man from "The New Masses" around somewhere.
"Will you promise him immunity?" I asked, joking.
"Oh yes," Stahr answered seriously. "I won't hurt him. Get one that can
talk-tell him to bring one of his books along."
He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the "I AM" cult.
"Do you want a blonde, or a brunette?"
"Oh, get a man," he said hastily.
Hearing Stahr's voice cheered me up-since I barged in on Father it had
all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about
it-changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air. He was like
a brazier out of doors on a cool night.
"I don't think your father ought to know," he said. "Can we pretend the
man is a Bulgarian musician or something?"
"Oh, they don't dress up any more," I said.
It was harder to arrange than I thought-Stahr's negotiations with the
Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end.
Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr's
"proposition" was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting
by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film
library at home. He also ran off "Doctor Caligari" and Salvador Dali's "Un
Chien Andalou," possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter.
He had been startled by the Russian Films back in the twenties and on Wylie
White's suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page
"treatment" of the "Communist Manifesto."
But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did
his own reasoning without benefit of books-and he had just managed to climb
out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could
not bear to see it melt away-he cherished the parvenu's passionate loyalty
to an imaginary past.
The meeting took place in what I called the "processed leather room"-it
was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane's years ago, and the
term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator's room-an angora wool
carpet the color of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable-you hardly dared
walk on it; and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures
and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard
in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the
windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze.
It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlor that used to be closed
except on Sunday. But it was exactly the room for the occasion and I hoped
that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part
of our house.
Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled -except for
his voice which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a
brave personal quality in the way he would meet you-he would walk right up
to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all
over as if he couldn't help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took
him into the processed leather room.
"When do you go back to college?" he asked.
We had been over this fascinating ground before.
"Would you like me if I were a little shorter?" I asked. "I could wear
low heels and plaster down my hair."
"Let's have dinner tonight," he suggested. "People will think I'm your
father but I don't mind."
"I love old men," I assured him. "Unless the man has a crutch I feel
it's just a boy and girl affair."
"Have you had many of those?"
"Enough."
"People fall in and out of love all the time, don't they."
"Every three years so Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper."
"I wonder how they manage it," he said. "I know it's true because I see
them. But they look so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don't
look convinced. But they get convinced all over."
"You've been making too many movies."
"I wonder if they're as convinced the second time or the third time or
the fourth time," he persisted.
"More each time," I said. "Most of all the last time."
He thought this over and seemed to agree.
"I suppose so. Most of all the last time."
I didn't like the way he said this and I suddenly saw that under the
surface he was miserable.
"It's a great nuisance," he said. "It'll be better when it's over."
"Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands."
Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced and going to meet him I slid
over to the door on one of those gossamer throw-rugs and practically into
his arms.
He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer-a little on the order of
Spencer Tracy but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions
written up in it. I couldn't help thinking as he and Stahr smiled and shook
hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever
seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately-both as polite to
me as you please but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when
they turned in my direction.
"What are you people trying to do?" demanded Stahr. "You've got my
young men all upset."
"That keeps them awake, doesn't it?" said Brimmer.
"First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant," said Stahr. "As a
model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that
makes it a model plant."
"The unity?" Brimmer repeated. "Do you mean what's known as the company
spirit?"
"Oh, not that," said Stahr, impatiently. "It seems to be me you're
after. Last week a writer came into my office-a drunk-a man who's been
floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse-and began
telling me my business."
Brimmer smiled.
"You don't look to me like a man who could be told his business, Mr.
Stahr."
They would both have tea. When I came back Stahr was telling a story
about the Warner brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him.
"I'll tell you another one," Stahr said. "Balanchine the Russian dancer
had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers. He didn't know which ones he was
training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying 'I
cannot train those Warner Brothers to dance.' "
It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers
didn't back the Anti-Nazi League.
"Because of you people," said Stahr. "It's your way of getting at the
writers. In the long view you're wasting your time. Writers are
children-even in normal times they can't keep their minds on their work."
"They're the farmers in this business," said Brimmer pleasantly. "They
grow the grain but they're not in at the feast. Their feeling toward the
producer is like the farmers' resentment of the city fellow."
I was wondering about Stahr's girl-whether it was all over between
them. Later when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain
in a wretched road called Goldwyn Terrace, I figured out that this must have
been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn't help the telegram.
The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office
without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in
the morning and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned
in how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say
"Listen I forgot to tell you but I met a man." But this track had been laid
down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief that
when it came along suddenly cutting across the other she found herself on it
like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking
directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn't read upside
down....
When my mind came back into the room they had destroyed the poor
writers-Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were "unstable."
"They are not equipped for authority," said Stahr. "There is no
substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it
at all."
"I've had that experience."
"You have to say 'It's got to be like this-no other way'-even if you're
not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is
no real reason for anything. You pretend there is."
"All leaders have felt that," said Brimmer. "Labor leaders, and
certainly military leaders."
"So I've had to take an attitude in this Guild matter. It looks to me
like a try for power and all I am going to give the writers is money."
"You give some of them very little money. Thirty dollars a week."
"Who gets that?" asked Stahr surprised.
"The ones who are commodities and easy to replace."
"Not on my lot," said Stahr.
"Oh yes," said Brimmer. "Two men in your shorts department get thirty
dollars a week."
"Who?"
"Man named Ransome-man named O'Brien."
Stahr and I smiled together.
"Those are not writers," said Stahr. "Those are cousins of Cecelia's
father."
"There are some in other studios," said Brimmer.
Stahr took his teaspoon and poured himself some medicine from a little
bottle.
"What's a fink?" he asked suddenly.
"A fink? That's a strike breaker or a Company Tec."
"I thought so," said Stahr. "I've got a fifteen hundred dollar writer
that every time he walks through the commissary keeps saying 'Fink!' behind
other writers' chairs. If he didn't scare hell out of them it'd be funny."
Brimmer laughed.
"I'd like to see that," he said.
"You wouldn't like to spend a day with me over there?" suggested Stahr.
Brimmer laughed with genuine amusement.
"No, Mr. Stahr. But I don't doubt but that I'd be impressed. I've heard
you're one of the hardest working and most efficient men in the entire West.
It'd be a privilege to watch you but I'm afraid I'll have to deny myself."
Stahr looked at me.
"I like your friend," he said. "He's crazy but I like him." He looked
closely at Brimmer. "Born on this side?"
"Oh yes. Several generations."
"Many of them like you?"
"My father was a Baptist minister."
"I mean are many of the Reds. I'd like to meet this big Jew that tried
to blow over the Ford factory. What's his name-"
"Frankensteen? "
"That's the man. I guess some of you believe in it."
"Quite a few," said Brimmer dryly.
"Not you," said Stahr.
A shade of annoyance floated across Brimmer's face.
"Oh yes," he said.
"Oh no," said Stahr. "Maybe you did once."
Brimmer shrugged his shoulders.
"Perhaps the boot's on the other foot," he said. "At the bottom of your
heart, Mr. Stahr, you know I'm right."
"No," said Stahr, "I think it's a bunch of tripe."
"-you think to yourself 'He's right' but you think the system will last
out your time."
"You don't really think you're going to overthrow the government."
"No, Mr. Stahr. But we think perhaps you are."
They were nicking at each other-little pricking strokes like men do
sometimes. Women do it too but it is a joined battle then with no quarter,
but it is not pleasant to watch men do it because you never know what's
next. Certainly it wasn't improving the tonal associations of the room for
me and I moved them out the French window into our golden-yellow California
garden.
It was midsummer but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the
lawn glitter like spring. I could see Brimmer look at it with a sigh in his
glance-a way they have. He opened up big outside-inches taller than I
thought and broad-shouldered. He reminded me a little of Superman when he
takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who
don't really care about women as such. We played a round robin game of
ping-pong and he handled his bat well. I heard Father come into the house
singing that damn "Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day" and then breaking off
as if he remembered we weren't speaking any more. It was half past six-my
car was standing in the drive and I suggested we go down to the Trocadero
for dinner.
Brimmer had that look that Father O'Ney had that time in New York when
he turned his collar around and went with Father and me to the Russian
Ballet. He hadn't quite ought to be here. When Bernie the photographer, who
was waiting there for some big game or other, came up to our table he looked
trapped-Stahr made Bernie go away, and I would like to have had the picture.
Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails one after the
other.
"Now I know you've been disappointed in love," I said.
"What makes you think that, Cecelia?"
"Cocktails."
"Oh, I never drink, Cecelia. I get dyspepsia-I never have been tight."
I counted them. "-two-three."
"I didn't realize. I couldn't taste them. I thought there was something
the matter."
A silly glassy look darted into his eye-then passed away.
"This is my first drink in a week," said Brimmer. "I did my drinking in
the navy."
The look was back in Stahr's eye-he winked it fatuously at me and said:
"This soapbox son-of-a-bitch has been working on the navy."
Brimmer didn't know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to
include it with the evening for he smiled faintly and I saw Stahr was