Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (152 page)

“We ought to let ‘em drift out to the waste pipe,” said Robby gallantly, “but De Mille needs that head next week.”

He wouldn’t have hurt a fly though and presently he was hip deep in the water fishing for them with a pole and succeeding only in spinning it in a dizzy circle. Help arrived and the impression quickly got around that one of them was very pretty and then that they were people of importance. But they were just strays and Robby waited disgustedly to give them hell while the thing was brought finally into control and beached.

“Put that head back!” he called up to them. “You think it’s a souvenir?”

One of the women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol and Robby caught and set her on solid ground; the other one hesitated and then followed. Robby turned to Stahr for judgement.

“What’ll we do with them, chief?”

Stahr did not answer. Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead, the smile lingered changed a little according to pattern, the lips parted — the same. An awful fear went over him and he wanted to cry aloud. Back from the still sour room, the muffled glide of the limousine hearse, the falling concealing flowers, from out there in the dark — here now warm and glowing. The river passed him in a rush, the great spotlights swooped and blinked — and then he heard another voice speak that was not Minna’s voice.

“We’re sorry,” said the voice. “We followed a truck in through a gate.”

A little crowd had gathered — electricians, grips, truckers — and Robby began to nip at them like a sheep dog.

“… get the big pumps on the tanks on Stage 4… put a cable around this head… raft it up on a couple of two-by-fours… get the water out of the Jungle first for Christ’s sake… that big A pipe lay it down, all that stuff is plastic….”

Stahr stood watching the two women as they threaded their way after a policeman toward an exit gate. Then he took a tentative step to see if the weakness had gone out of his knees. A loud tractor came bumping through the slush and men began streaming by him — every second one glancing at him smiling speaking Hello Monroe… Hello Mr. Stahr… wet night Mr. Stahr… Monroe… Monroe… Stahr… Stahr… Stahr.

He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking I suppose a little like the Emperor and the Old Guard. There is no world so but it has its heroes and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time — through the beginnings and the great upset when sound came and the three years of Depression he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyalties were trembling now — there were clay feet everywhere — but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went by.

Chapter 3

Episode 7

Between the night I got back and the quake I’d made many observations.

About Father, for example. I loved Father-in a sort of irregular graph with many low swoops — but I began to see that his strong will didn’t fill him out as a passable man. Most of what he accomplished boiled down to shrewd. He had acquired with luck and shrewdness a quarter interest in a booming circus — together with young Stahr. That was his life’s effort — all the rest was an instinct to hang on. Of course he talked that double talk to Wall Street about how mysterious it was to make a picture but Father didn’t know the ABC’s of dubbing or even cutting. Nor had he learned much about the feel of America as a bar boy in Ballyhegan nor have any more than a drummer’s sense of a story. On the other hand he didn’t have concealed paresis like —  — ; he came to the studio before noon, and with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle it was hard to put anything over on him.

Stahr had been his luck — and Stahr was something else again. He was a marker in industry like Edison and Lumiere and Griffith and Chaplin. He led pictures way up past the range and power of the theatre, reaching a sort of golden age before the censorship in 1933. Proof of his leadership was the spying that went on around him — not just for inside information or patented process secrets — but spying on his scent for a trend in taste, his guess as how things were going to be. Too much of his vitality was taken by the mere parrying of these attempts. It made his work secret in part, often devious, slow — and hard to describe as the plans of a general — where the psychological factors become too tenuous and we end by merely adding up the successes and failures. But I have determined to give you a glimpse of him functioning, which is my excuse for what follows. It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on “A Producer’s Day” and partly from my imagination. More often I have blocked in the ordinary events myself, while the stranger ones are true.

In the early morning after the flood, a man walked up to the outside balcony of the AdministrationBuilding. He lingered there some time according to an eyewitness, then mounted to the iron railing and dove head first to the pavement below. Breakage — one arm.

Miss Doolan, Stahr’s secretary, told him about it when he buzzed for her at nine. He had slept in his office without hearing the small commotion.

“Pete Zavras!” Stahr exclaimed, “- the camera man?”

“They took him to a doctor’s office. It won’t be in the paper.”

“Hell of a thing,” he said, “I knew he’d gone to pot — but I don’t know why. He was all right when we used him two years ago — why should he come here? How did he get in?”

“He bluffed it with his old studio pass,” said Catherine Doolan. She was a dry hawk, the wife of an assistant director. “Perhaps the quake had something to do with it.”

“He was the best camera man in town,” Stahr said. When he had heard of the thousands dead at Long Beach he was still haunted by the abortive suicide at dawn. He told Catherine Doolan to trace the matter down.

The first Dictograph messages blew in through the warm morning. While he shaved and had coffee he talked and listened. Robby had left a message: “If Mr. Stahr wants me tell him to hell with it I’m in bed.” An actor was sick or thought so; the Governor of California was bringing a party out; a supervisor had beaten up his wife for the prints and must be “reduced to a writer” — these three affairs were Father’s job — unless the actor was under personal contract to Stahr. There was early snow on a location in Canada with the company already there — Stahr raced over the possibilities of salvage reviewing the story of the picture. Nothing. Stahr called Catherine Doolan.

“I want to speak to the cop who put two women off the back lot last night. I think his name’s Malone.”

“Yes, Mr. Stahr. I’ve got Joe Wyman — about the trousers.”

“Hello Joe,” said Stahr. “Listen — two people at the sneak preview complained that Morgan’s fly was open for half the picture… of course they’re exaggerating but even if it’s only ten feet… no, we can’t find the people but I want that picture run over and over until you find that footage. Get a lot of people in the projection room — somebody’ll spot it.”

Tout passe. — L’art robuste
Seul a l’eternite.

“And there’s the Prince from Denmark,” said Catherine Doolan. “He’s very handsome.” She was impelled to add pointlessly “ — for a tall man.”

“Thanks,” Stahr said. “Thank you, Catherine, I appreciate it that I am now the handsomest small man on the lot. Send the Prince out on the sets and tell him we’ll lunch at one.”

“And Mr. George Boxley — looking very angry in a British way.”

“I’ll see him for ten minutes.”

As she went out he asked:

“Did Robby phone in?”

“No.”

“Call Sound and if he’s been heard from call him and ask him this. Ask him this — did he hear that woman’s name last night. Either of those women. Or anything so they could be traced.”

“Anything else?”

“No, but tell him it’s important while he still remembers. What were they? I mean what kind of people — ask him that too. I mean were they -”

She waited, scratching his words on her pad without looking.

“- oh, were they — questionable? Were they theatrical? Never mind — skip that. Just ask if he knows how they can be traced.”

The policeman, Malone, had known nothing. Two dames and he had hustled ‘em you betcha. One of them was sore. Which one? One of them. They had a car, a Chewy, he thought of taking the license. Was it — the good looker who was sore? It was one of them.

Not which one — he had noticed nothing. Even on the lot here Minna was forgotten. In three years. So much for that then.

Episode 8

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it — finally emerging as what it was, a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired but always there, toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously.

“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”

The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.

“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal but with a faint two — edged deference.

“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say but they spoil it — they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”

“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.

“I have. I sent you some.”

“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”

Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said:

“I don’t think you people read things. The men are dueling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.”

He barked again and subsided.

“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”

“What? Naturally not.”

“You’d consider it too cheap.”

“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley hedging.

“Do you ever go to them?”

“No — almost never.”

“Isn’t it because people are always dueling and falling down wells?”

“Yes — and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.”

“Skip the dialogue for a minute,” said Stahr. “Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write — that’s why we brought you out here. But let’s imagine something that isn’t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?”

“I think it has,” said Boxley stiffly, “- but I never use it.”

“Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting duels or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring — dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her — idly. She doesn’t see you though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table -”

Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.

“She has two dimes and a nickle — and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickle on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window — but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello — listens — and says deliberately into the phone ‘I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.’ She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes -”

Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.

“Go on,” said Boxley smiling. “What happens?”

“I don’t know,” said Stahr. “I was just making pictures.”

Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong.

“It’s just melodrama,” he said.

“Not necessarily,” said Stahr. “In any case nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested.”

“What was the nickle for?” asked Boxley evasively.

“I don’t know,” said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed, “Oh yes — the nickle was for the movies.”

The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed.

“What in hell do you pay me for?” he demanded. “I don’t understand the damn stuff.”

“You will,” said Stahr grinning. “Or you wouldn’t have asked about the nickle.”

A dark saucer-eyed man was waiting in the outer office as they came out.

“Mr. Boxley, this is Mr. Mike Van Dyke,” Stahr said. “What is it, Mike?”

“Nothing,” Mike said. “I just came up to see if you were real.”

“Why don’t you go to work?” Stahr said. “I haven’t had a laugh in the rushes for days.”

“I’m afraid of a nervous breakdown.”

“You ought to keep in form,” Stahr said. “Let’s see you peddle your stuff.” He turned to Boxley. “Mike’s a gag man — he was out here when I was in the cradle. Mike, show Mr. Boxley a double wing, clutch, kick and scram.”