Hollywood (62 page)

“Rodolfo is essentially unspoiled, untouched by the Californian Curse, as I call it. The Evil Fairy that spoils everything, finally, for everyone who comes here in pursuit of fool’s gold …”

“But the gold’s actually pretty real,” said Tim, somewhat recovered from his first alarm at the sight of Elinor Glyn.

“But then so are the fools.” Caroline smiled radiantly, aware too that, as she did, her face had become a spider’s web of lines and so, thanks to this suicidal—tic?—she should not be appearing opposite Rodolfo in
Beyond the Rocks
.

“A tale of innocence meeting sophistication. Of young fresh trusting Theodora …”

If not the part of Theodora, then perhaps she could play her mother, thought Caroline wildly, allowing her smile to fade as quickly as was plausible.

“With Rodolfo as the world-weary Lord Bracondale …”

Glyn gave her a suspicious look. “The Lambtons are a lot darker than adorable Rodolfo.”

“Moors, they say—the Lambtons, that is. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s dark lady related to them?”

“That was before my time.” Wig held high, Elinor Glyn joined her table. No mention had been made of
Mary Queen of Scots
.

“Well, that decides it,” said Caroline. “The Californian Curse is upon me. I must flee.”

“Where to?”

“Washington? Where else?”

“I thought you were finished with newspapers.”

Caroline wondered if, perhaps, she was finished with everything; life, too.

“I could always retreat to France and become an old lady.”

Tim shook his head. “You would kill yourself first. Why don’t you take all this more seriously?”

“All what?”

“Movies. Why do you think I keep trying to make movies about real life?”

“Because you don’t know any better. This is not real life. This is … amusement.”

Tim shook his head. “No, there’s more to it than that. You remember your first picture.”

“I was incredibly noble. And I looked marvelous.”

Tim sighed. “Actresses. But don’t you know what you—what we did? The government wanted every American to hate every German, and we—you and I—pulled it off.”

“With some help from a thousand other movies, and the press, and George Creel, and the Germans …”

“That’s not the point. At a certain moment we made a … connection with the public, with the … the
Zeitgeist
. We were able to make everyone feel what we wanted them to.”

Caroline stared at Elinor Glyn, who was staring at her watch: Rodolfo was late. “You sound like Chaplin when he talks about movies as a Force for Good.”

“He’s right. Though I don’t know what he thinks is good. As it is, we are
now supplying the world with all sorts of dreams and ideas. Well, why don’t we shape those dreams, deliberately?

Caroline heard Tim at last, through the great velvety cloud of self-pity in which she had been encased. “You are ambitious,” she heard herself saying as she began to emerge from the cloud. “But I see what you mean. There is no country here … no real country anywhere, I suppose, except in dreams. But what do you want them to dream?”

Tim shrugged. “Eugene V. Debs?”

Caroline shook her head. “That’s just propaganda, and most people know how to ignore special pleading. A dream is something subtle—universal, unnoticeable at the time but then unforgettable. The way Richard Barthelmess walks in
Broken Blossoms
. But I don’t see how you—we—anyone—can calculate what will work.”

“Then don’t calculate. Simply do it. Show things the way they are but carefully angled, the way the camera is, to make the audience see what
you
want them to see …”

“Which is what?”

Tim laughed; and looked very young indeed. “If we knew the answer to that we would know everything and so die happy. Just do it.”

Caroline was beginning to get the range. “Up till now,” she began to improvise, “we’ve let the government tell us what to do and pretty much how to do it. So why not,” Caroline set her foot with great deliberation upon the road to Damascus, “reverse the procedure and make the government do—and be—what we want them to do and be?”

Tim was delighted. “Years of writing stupid capitalist editorials have trained you well.”

“I’m not so sure about the stupid part.” Caroline was serene. “But where Hearst invented the news about people, we can …” Involuntarily, she shuddered and did not know why.

“We can what?”

“I was going to say we can invent the people. Can we?”

“Why not? They’re waiting to be invented, to be told who and what they are.”

Caroline suddenly realized that she—and everyone else—had been approaching this new game from the wrong direction. Movies were not there simply to reflect life or tell stories but to exist in their own autonomous way and to look, as it were, back at those who made them and watched them. They had used the movies successfully to demonize national enemies. Now
why not use them to alter the viewer’s perception of himself and the world? Thus, she would be able to outdo Hearst at last. Self-pity was now replaced by megalomania of the most agreeable sort. She even fell in love with Tim, yet again. What work they could do together now that they knew what the work was! Then, as if blessings could not cease to flow, it was quite clear to her and to Elinor Glyn that Rudolph Valentino had stood her up, while the comedians at the next table made more and more noise until one of them, a very fat man who had been a plumber before stardom, made a trip to the toilet, imitating, as he walked, Elinor Glyn, to all the room’s delight save the inventrix of passion, who scowled. Caroline laughed a care-free laugh. Under the table, Tim, unexpectedly, held her hand.

B
urden nodded, and shivered. Plainly, he was never going to go back to what he had been before the flu. He would simply go forward to the end. Glumly, he stared at the flag-draped pine-wood box that contained the remains of “the unknown soldier,” a current fetish all round the world as the world’s leaders interred the odd set of unidentified bones, thus honoring, as they liked to put it, the anonymous multitudes that they had sacrificed for nothing at all. The coffin had been placed on a bier hidden by floral wreaths. Burden wondered who—or what—was inside the box.

On the stage at the center of the amphitheater, the world’s leaders or their military representatives were solemnly arranging themselves. They had been summoned to Washington for the Arms Limitation Conference. Harding had appropriated Borah’s original notion; then he had subtly maneuvered the entire American political establishment into accepting some sort of disarmament. Whether or not Harding and Hughes had brought round the foreign leaders would be apparent the next day when the conference began its work. Meanwhile, this celebration of the unknown soldier
was carefully calculated to influence the public everywhere: never again would there be such a slaughter.

Of the foreign dignitaries, the highest-ranking was Aristide Briand, the French prime minister, all in black, a contrast to the bemedalled military men that crowded the platform. Even the former British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, had found a gaudy uniform to wear. How the English enjoyed dressing up! thought Burden sourly. But then his mood was generally bad these days. Life was moving too fast for him or he too slow for it. He gazed without interest at Marshal Foch and Admiral Beatty, at Chinese and Japanese war-lords, their gold and silver braid glistening in the cold morning sun. Earlier, they had all paraded past the White House, and then, having hopelessly tied up traffic, the foreign contingent had somehow got across the Potomac to the cemetery, losing, according to Borah, the President in the process. “His car was last seen,” said the Lion of Idaho, with quiet satisfaction, “driving off the road and into the cemetery, a shortcut, you might say, to immortality.”

Borah now sat next to Kitty, Mrs. Borah beside Burden. “Did you see poor Mr. Wilson?” Mrs. Borah had the look of an alert sheep.

Burden nodded; and Kitty answered. The uses of a wife in politics were manifold. “He looked so shattered, sitting there in his car, with Edith, who looked so well. She’s taken off pounds, I’d say.”

“Do you ever go see them?” asked Borah.

“No.” Burden did not feel as guilty as he should. He had been the former President’s political ally, not friend. “I don’t think they particularly want visitors. He has his court.”

“I wouldn’t go out in public if I was in such bad shape.” Borah was stern. Certainly the image of the frail half-paralyzed Wilson was an arresting one as he drove past the west end of the White House in the endless train of the unknown soldier. When Harding saw his predecessor pass before him in review, like a ghost of war, he had bowed low, and Wilson had raised a long white hand in response, past to present. Who was future?

Borah was muttering discontentedly. “I don’t like the look of all this.”

“We merely honor the dead.” Burden was pious.

“No, not that. This conference. It’s not what I asked for. It’s not what I wanted, not at all. Disarm, yes. All of us. But this is going to turn itself into another League of Nations. If it does, I stand opposed. I warned Harding.”

Plainly Borah was distressed that the President would get the credit for what he took to be uniquely his own idea.

Whatever adventures the Hardings might have had getting through the
traffic, they were now on the stage of the amphitheater. The President was as nobly handsome as ever, in a Chesterfield, and carrying a hat while Mrs. Harding was suitably veiled in black.

The Marine band played the national anthem. A chaplain exhorted God in a most ecumenical way. Then, at exactly noon, a single bugler played taps, and the tears came to Burden’s eyes. What was better than to die in youth for one’s own kind and country? What was worse than to live on into middle age, a peripheral man of state? The soprano, Rosa Ponselle, sang “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” and Burden’s sadness remained elevated and pure. Then the band played “America,” a resolutely tinny anthem calculated to stifle all elevated feeling in Burden or anyone else. He dried his eyes as the Secretary of War came out onto the stage, where a microphone on a metal stick was transmitting by telephone the proceedings to Madison Square Garden in New York and to San Francisco’s Auditorium as well as to local crowds in Washington itself. This would be the largest audience in history for any public occasion, thanks to the perfecting of radio.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

Everyone rose, as Harding, without his coat, stepped forward to the microphone. He made a deprecating gesture to the audience; they were to be seated. He had, as the press liked to say of presidents in their second year, “grown” in office. The somewhat coarse senator—“a character out of a low-life Dreiser novel,” Lodge had called him—was now the silver-haired embodiment of all that was good and sane and normal in his country.

Harding struck—as who did not on such occasions?—the Lincoln note. “Standing today on hallowed ground, conscious that all America has halted to share in the tribute of the heart, and mind, and soul to this fellow American, and knowing that the world is noting this expression of the republic’s mindfulness, it is fitting to say that his sacrifice, and that of the millions dead, shall not be in vain.” The resonant voice almost convinced. But Burden knew, as they all knew, British admirals of the fleet and marshals of France, that life was all that the poor set of bones in the box had had—and lost so that boundaries might be redrawn by shady men of state and profits made by the busy.

“There must be, there shall be the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare …” Burden wondered how many times after similar wars Capitoline geese had honked the same fervent message in the wake of some awful blood-letting. But all that it took was a generation to forget war’s horrors in order to hunger, yet again, for war’s thrills and
profits. How stupid the human race was, thought Burden, staring at a bemedalled Japanese prince, who was known to be plotting war in the Pacific. Little did the Japanese suspect that now that the gentle polyglot republic of North America had got the taste of blood in its mouth there would be no stopping it. War was money earned. War was the ultimate expression of that racial pride with which the white Caucasian tribe had been so overly endowed. It would have been much more suitable for Harding to do a war-dance, with tomahawk and feathered war-bonnet, borrowed from the Indian chief who stood, most incongruously, at the edge of the bemedalled war-lords. To the beat of tom-toms, they would all shout “Blood!” and the wars would continue, each more destructive than the last until no one on earth was left alive.

“As we return this poor clay to its native soil, garlanded by love and covered with the decorations that only nations can bestow, I can sense the prayers of our people, of all peoples, that this Armistice Day shall mark the beginning of a new and lasting era of peace on earth, good will among men. Let me join in that prayer.” The President then said the Lord’s Prayer and all those around Burden said it along with him. Senatorial and ambassadorial faces were streaked with tears. Burden was exalted now by his own disdain for so much generalized hypocrisy. Taps and a single set of bones could trigger in him a sense of his own mortality, and of his likeness to all others. But monkish prayers chilled him and a quartet from the Metropolitan Opera singing “The Supreme Sacrifice” reminded him of how cold he was as the President pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor onto the flag that draped the box. He was followed by the other war-lords. While each was adding a medal to the constellation, Burden turned to Borah. “When shall we have our next war?”